`Ten of the world's foremost business and thought leaders, futurists and authors of change will be speaking their minds at the O'Reilly Hall, UCD," according to the cover of a widely-circulated brochure. The gig, "organised by Lalor International Holdings in association with The Marketing Institute and in co-operation with Fortune magazine", is scheduled for Wednesday, November 15th and costs £400 a ticket. Foremost thought leaders? We need to think about this.
First and foremost, however, it's important to understand that this commercial gig is aimed at leaders and wannabe leaders. It has an eerily Huxleyan title: Fifth Annual Worldwide Lessons In Leadership Seminar - The Brave New Workplace: Strategies to Excel in a World of Change. The brochure cover further advises that "if you feel empowered to influence your future and those around you, you should be there".
Strange advice that.
Surely if you already feel "empowered" - even if the empowering agent were nothing more than blind ambition or delusions of grandeur - you would have little need to fork out £400 to hear the spoken minds of business and thought leaders, futurists and authors of change. After all, if you have the empowering certainty that you are, indeed, Napoleon, what more could you need? Perhaps "entitled" might be, in the context, a more accurate word.
Then again, I suppose "empowered" has a fashionable business-ese buzz, and conspicuously avoids the connotation of presumption which "feeling entitled" unavoidably suggests.
Sure, it's easy to be snide and to quibble about the language of a brochure (and, in fairness, the Leadership Seminar one, at least, has an attractive and lively design). But really, you've got to hope that the thoughts of ten of the world's foremost business and thought leaders don't produce economic inflation to match the inflation of the language advertising them. Should this happen, we could soon end up paying £400 for a pint or a packet of fags.
The brochure, like so much advertising material, practically throbs with puff guff. If our leaders and wannabe leaders see nothing alarming in describing Richard Branson, Steve Case, Ted Turner, Jack Welch and Herb Kelleher as "five world leaders" or even "legendary" business leaders, where might it all lead? And anyway, what, when they are at home or being "uplinked live" by satellite from Texas to an "earth station downlink" in UCD (brochure, page 2), are "thought leaders"? It sounds like Orwellian language to complement the Huxleyan title.
In fact, given that the business and thought leaders will appear on "a giant nine by 12 foot screen" and that "state-of-the-art projection will present" them "with more impact than if they were actually present in the O'Reilly Hall" (page 2 again), the "seminar" sounds more like a stadium gig. More ominously, such Big Brother imagery raises genuine Orwellian alarms about the similarities and distinctions between thought leadership and thought control.
This is a big gig - a very, very big gig. Run by Wyncom, Inc., described (still page 2) as a "Kentucky-based education and professional development organisation", it will go out to "a global delegate audience of over 120,000 in 150 venues in the US and in approximately 50 countries worldwide". If every delegate/punter forks out £400, we're looking at a total haul of about £48 million. Lucrative thoughts, eh?
Just to savour its scale, it's probably best to try to digest the digits of that: £48,000,000. It certainly puts even the stadium gigs of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin or U2 in perspective, especially when you consider that the US "business training industry" hauls in more than $60 billion (OK: $60,000,000,000) annually. Think about why this is so and see where it leads you.
The bash in UCD is actually a globalised seminar, or even more pertinently, a seminar for globalisers. It's unlikely that managers in Chad, for instance, will be using an earth station downlink to tune into the giant images from Texas. It's equally unlikely that the thought leaders will devote much thought to such exclusions. Fair enough, the gig will include five minutes from Nelson Mandela (the only black person, true "world leader" or truly "legendary" figure in the brochure). But his inclusion looks suspiciously like a case of the organisers appropriating the real deal to sell the would-be messianic business agenda of the US.
Described in the brochure (page 3) as "South African statesman (and President from 1994 to 1999)", the blurb further informs us that "Nelson Mandela's life has been referred to by the Washington Post Book World as "one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century". Well, thank you Washington Post Book World, we'd never have known. If the "insights" (brochure, most pages) of the foremost thought leaders promised for the seminar maintain such a standard . . . well, the intellectual energy fomented in the O'Reilly Hall will obviously leave that of the Italian Renaissance looking like nothing more than the results of the most basic FAS course in interior decorating.
Anyway, leadership. It's true that societies always have needed, and presumably always will need, leaders. In turn, of course, leaders need the led. This represents, what in thought-leadership speak is called a "synergistic" (brochure page 3) relationship. It's strange too, how, despite the obvious lessons of history, "leadership qualities" are so glibly spoken of as necessarily desirable. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler showed undeniable leadership qualities - indeed they remain truly legendary leaders - but they are dubious role models for even the most eager and ambitious line manager.
Imagine if the Leadership Seminar proved to be as efficient and effective as, through its egregious brochure, it intimates it can make its delegates/punters. Total success could result in a world with 120,000 Richard Bransons or 120,000 Ted Turners. Even the gigantic, if idiotically back-to-front-named Stadium Australia couldn't accommodate them. There would also, of course, be the problem of finding sufficient followers for all of these leaders, for follower-deficient leaders don't quite cut the mustard, do they?
STILL, whatever the reasons, leadership does appear to be greatly desired. But, like style, for instance, surely leadership is a matter of intrinsic quality or character rather than a matter of mere strategy? It's hard to believe that leadership can be learned by aping, say, Richard Branson. There's got to be a distinction between being a boss and being a leader, insofar as a boss has power but a leader has authority, which implies not just a resigned acceptance of rank but a willing acceptance on behalf of the governed.
Henry Miller suggested that "the real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way". Seems about right. Encouraging delegates/punters to "take part in a unique survey on Irish leadership", page four of the brochure wonders if there are "qualities that are strikingly repetitive in the Irish leader profile - qualities we can all emulate?". Forget that "Irish leader profile" (there's no point!) and think of the strikingly repetitive qualities of Irish leaders which the tribunals have illuminated.
Look, legitimate ambition - so long as it's broadly matched with ability - is admirable. Without it, life would be duller and progress would be impossible. If people wish to become entrepreneurs or rise in institutional management, good luck to them. But fundamentally, this UCD gig is about exporting, for huge profits, the deregulated American way of business.
Leaders and wannabe leaders are entitled (whatever about "empowered") to pursue such aims. But most working people who, sanely, don't see work and life as utterly synonymous, would be well advised to watch where they are being led.
Mind you, the brochure, for all (in fact, because of) its distorted language, is an unusually pure artefact of the spirit of our times. In championing people who may well be innovators in business thinking, with the aggrandisingly generic term "thought leaders", it shows a lot. In the past, people such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein were, for better and for worse, among humanity's leading thinkers. Now, it appears, adept salespeople flogging soundbite strategies to maximise profits are being exalted as the cutting edge. That's some critique of what it means to live in the year 2000.
THAT the gig will take place in UCD is also telling. Across the US, universities are being colonised by what advocates of the trend call "the entrepreneurial spirit". In its use of sophisticated communications technology to "globalise" its message; in its patronising (as well as puffed-up) language - in which workers are called "subordinates" (rule 4 of a competition for a trip to New York); and in its almost religiously intense conviction of the values it espouses, the Leadership Seminar is deeply dispiriting.
What it shows is that the people who would make our world are making their own language. The marketplace which deems people such as students, social welfare recipients and hospital patients "customers", calls genuine customers "delegates". And what, for instance, should we make of the following (brochure page 2): "Attendance is not as much defined by size of organisation or title of delegate, as a passion to be a more effective and dynamic leader in this world of rapid change." What does "attendance defined by a passion" mean?
Albert Einstein, who would obviously never make the grade among these "thought leaders", argued that "whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with the important matters". Yet people who want to be our leaders - perhaps ultimately, even our "thought leaders" - are expected to respond to gibberish about attendance being defined by a passion. It's hard to follow - in every sense of the word.
Then again, the US, for all its thought leaders, risks thinking itself into illiteracy amid material abundance. Well, that's America's business.
But it's our business when a hall in Ireland's biggest university is booked as an absorption centre for a commercial version of American televangelism masquerading as critical knowledge. The thoughts of the thought leaders have implications for our taught leaders and, by extension, for us all.
Time was when wannabe leaders read Machiavelli and learned about the required ruthlessness of leadership. The behaviour he advocated was less than moral but at least it could be understood and adopted or rejected. Not so in the Brave New Workplace - wherever that might exist outside the minds of our millionaire "thought leaders" and the imaginations of their followers, who want to be leaders too.