Everyone likes the idea of a role model for leadership.
Here is the candidate of the day for that honor: Odysseus.
There are thousands of books on How to be a Leader. Thousands. Yet, one of the best of them is also one of the oldest books in the world: Homer, The Odyssey.
(As always—if you don’t read Greek, get a good translation. Life is too short to read bad translations. I highly recommend Fagles.)
As a leadership text, Homer makes a fantastic starting place for a debate on what make a great leader. Odysseus is a Leader, with a capital L.
Why? His virtues, beautifully illustrated in his stops along the way home, all point in one direction—never get distracted from your goal. The man who succeeds is the man who avoids the temptations of the moment, always keeping a firm focus on the end goal.
And then, in the magnificent endgame, Odysseus goes out and takes what he wants. He schemes and acts decisively. Slaughter in the Hall. Blood everywhere. “How it would have thrilled your heart to see him—/splattered with bloody filth, a lion with his kill!” (23:51-52).
In the contest Odysseus vs (insert leader of your choice): who wins? Odysseus by a mile. The man is clever and silver-tongued and strong and brave. He takes what he wants and all good people rally around him because he is a Natural Born Leader.
The framing story amplifies the point. The book begins with Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, wondering if he is really good enough to follow in the footsteps of his long lost father. As the story develops, Telemachus grows into maturity and becomes every bit the man his father is. And then the book ends with a marvelous display of the passing of the heroic virtues from Laertes to his son Odysseus to his son Telemachus.
Homer asks the Muse to sing for our time too—and that is Homer’s challenge to us—are we good enough? Can we too rise up and lead like Odysseus? Or is our age so degenerate that we no longer recognize heroic leadership when we see it?
Homer would be utterly depressed by the classes I have taught using this book as a model for leadership.
I try really hard to convince my students that this is True Leadership, that simply rising up and acting is the best possible, if not the only, form of leadership. I try to convince them that the slaughter in the halls should be replicated at a college—a single slaughter of the noisy, lawless students breaking quiet hours during finals week in one of the dorms would be a magnificent act of leadership and bring untold benefits to the campus for years to come.
I fail at convincing my students of this. Every single time.
None of the students seem to think murdering their fellow students as a means of bringing order to the society is a good idea. (Shocking, I know.)
Indeed, they all seem to think this sort of action isn’t really leadership at all. They argue that true leadership really needs some sort of ethical core, that for example, Odysseus is sorely lacking in mercy. They want more conversation, less action.
While I never concede the point in class, the students are right. (Insert sighs of relief from the Reader who was hoping I don’t really think a slaughter in a dorm is a good idea.)
Yet, faced with the starkness of Homeric leadership, it really is hard to see what other type of leadership would merit the name. Odysseus, standing in the halls after the slaughter, is a magnificent image. One part recoils from the image, one part is attracted to it. Who wouldn’t want to follow Odysseus into battle?
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