At the moment, I am working my way through Reuel Khoza's magnus opus Attuned Leadership which lays out his view that leadership should be a normative concept and that this requires leaders to be attuned with their followers. This does not always mean they should give their followers what they want, but that they should understand their followers and be able to direct their energies to the greater good.
Let me start with what I like about the book:
- Khoza balances criticism of "misleadership" in Africa with an appreciation of African philosophy. I like this because it is logically flawed to say that because leaders in Africa have to a large extent done great damage to their people, Africans have nothing meaningful to say about leaders. And also, it is flawed to feel the need to defend African leaders in order to defend concepts like ubuntu.
- His chapter where he argues against the Cartesian premise for humanity "I think therefore I am" and for a relational definition of humanity based on "I am because you are, you are because we are". This chapter is the most cogently argued of all that I've come across in the book. I do still think his conception of ubuntu can be aligned with concepts of enlightened self-interest, though he would disagree.
What I don't like:
- While Khoza has read a lot of philosophy, he doesn't seem to really understand the principles of logic and argument construction. He has premises that are not necessary for his conclusions and sometimes jumps from conclusion to conclusion without filling in the gaps.
- For instance, the bulk of his argument seems to lie on his relational definition of humanity. However, he keeps re-iterating the premise that a God exists and we continue into the after-life as ancestors. Nowhere does his argument seem to rely on this premise, making it redundant. Also, it works against his agenda of proposing his concepts as a basis for common life. In a pluralistic society, assertions of either deities or ancestor worship is not something that will be accepted by everyone. For myself, I believe in God and not ancestors and there are plenty of people who believe in both or neither. While these beliefs may be important to Khoza's personal ethics, I don't believe they serves the purposes of his argument, in terms of either its construction or its acceptance.
- Also, he constantly talks about morality and need for the leader to serve the common good, but never really pins down what that means. He alludes to his admiration to Aristotle's virtue ethics, but not much beyond this. He assumes that leaders like Hitler mis-use their power (who would disagree?) but he doesn't really spell out what seeking the common good is. He talks about empowering people, but for what?
- He focuses too much on Corporate Social Responsibility as the way in which firms serve the greater community. However, my view is that the most important area where companies should demonstrate this kind of commitment should be in their core activities. For instance, take a bank - what would it matter how much CSR Lehman Brothers had done while continuing their activities in the sub-prime market that de-stabilised the world? Also, it has been my observation that CSR practitioners are often "do-gooders" with only the vaguest understanding of the dynamics at play where poverty, inequality and development are concerned. Without properly understanding these dynamics, a company can easily do more harm than good. The heart can be in the right place, but if the head doesn't know what it's doing... (a perfect example of this is in the early days of development economics where African men were taught how to grow cash crops, thereby reducing the relative status of African women who had traditionally controlled agriculture).
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