» Leadership, “genius” and creativity In Harmonium: Being in the main the musings of a Symbolic Anthropologist
What, then, does this say about societies (and occupations / professions) that concentrate on the material and external, on “training” rather than “education”?
Nathaniel finishes his post with a plea for “creativity” as a core quality of military genius; “creativity” in the sense of not being controlled by past actions, but being able to improvise as the current situation demands. I have to agree with him and, further, extend this out to leadership in general.
Over the years, I have worked with a number of people who claimed to be leaders – most of them were leaders only in the sense of seeing which way the mob was running, pushing to the front and yelling “Follow me!” True leaders are much rarer in my experience, but of the ones I have encountered, they all had a core quality of “creativity” guided, but not throttled, by their training.
The other common quality I have noticed about them is that they all use the term “discipline” in its 19th century sense – a technology or collection of techniques that allows you to focus on a problem set. Furthermore, they all consider that mastery of a discipline is crucial to get you to the point where you can “improvise” well.
