A Musing: On Leadership and Followership

MY FAVORITE definition of a leader? “A leader is just someone who goes first.”

Followership might not re-create leadership

I also have this idea that the so-called leaders of major followings weren’t “ists” of those followings. (Buddha probably wasn’t a Buddhist, for example.) That is, they weren’t preoccupied with themselves as personalities. They didn’t need to be—they were busy getting on with their day. And they were their own arbiters of reference points.

Those who came after were the ists.

However, in the sense of being a creator—that is, at the very, very least, acknowledging some modicum of ownership of one’s own perceptions—everyone is in fact “the leader."

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ON ANOTHER NOTE, relative to ists and isms, consider that paradoxical koan people used to parrot—“If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

Obviously, this rather violent directive isn’t meant to be taken literally. Rather, it’s a convenient little mnemonic whose very jarringness helps keep it front of mind.

Actually, the phrase may be better expressed by adding a couple of quote marks around the words Buddha and him: “If you see the ‘Buddha’ on the road, kill ‘him’.”

Adding the quote marks turns out to be the enlightenment part the koan purposely obscured. They take away the intended confusion by delivering a metalevel view—a larger context—meaning everything can stay the same, the new view’s just different and less complicated. (It’s somewhat like simplifying a complicated algebra equation with a nice little calculus formula.)

That is, if you’re in the land of concepts (labels, perceptual filters, words, etc.) and have forgotten your share of ownership in them, wielding the above koan is a way to “kill” their seeming concreteness. You simply recognize them for what they are and go on your way.