The Tao of Leadership

Citation

Chu Chang, W. (2001), "The Tao of Leadership", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 22 No. 4, pp. 393-405. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijm.2001.22.4.393.1

Since Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, there has not been such fascination with the East as it is now. Bushido – the way of the warrior, made famous by John Clavelle’s enormously popular Shogun symbolizes the mystical paradox of the fiercest of power and the softest of beauty. I imagine that the modern Silicon Valley’s executives must fancy themselves as the modern Bushi, the conquerors of empires and the invaders of new territories, wielding a sword with one hand and arranging flowers with the other. I spent a year on sabbatical at the University of California of Berkeley, the site of 1960’s American soul searching and the resultant “flower power movement.” Every morning when I walked my eight‐block walk from my apartment in downtown Berkeley to the university campus, I would pass not one or two but five or six training or research institutes dedicated to the study and practice of one form or another of the Asian philosophies. The West’s fascination with the East has reached it apex here. It is therefore not surprising to see this book entitled: The Tao of Leadership, now in its fifth print since it was first published in Britain in 1986.

This is a delightful book, written in a lyrical way that, I assume, reflects the author’s attempt to capture the cryptic, poetic flow of the original text: Tao Te Jing, attributed to Laotzu, a legendary sage of somewhere around the third century before the birth of Christ. Laotzu, meaning the venerated master, was not his real name. There was no record of his personal history. True to his preaching, he was a man of few words, because according to Tao Te Jing: “The tao that can be labeled or expressed ceases to be Tao!” Tao Te Jing contains merely 5,000 Chinese characters, passed down orally from the venerated master. The text was recorded in a plain and simple language meant to be accessible by the ordinary as well as the élite of the Chinese. The messages contained in the text, a preaching for the simple, honest and good living, the latter means to form to nature’s way or Tao, was meant to be a philosophy of life for the average people. Unlike the now much celebrated Book of War attributed to Suntze of the Warring Kingdom period of China, Tao Te Jing was not meant to be a book for leaders. The peaceful, go with the flow attitude taken by the Taoist philosophers actually preaches abdicating fame, power and fortune in order to embrace the true essence of life – Tao, as in nature’s abundant splendor, to be discovered amidst the most humble and the most mundane of the normal everyday life. However the message has been later interpreted as the same message as a popular Christian teaching: “ The meek shall inherit the world!” By being cognizant of and conforming to the way of things, one will “win” – achieve, paradoxically, fame and fortune and more importantly, lasting happiness.

The way to the learning and the understanding of nature’s ways is to open oneself like an empty vessel. In order to open oneself like an empty vessel to be receptive to nature’s messages, one needs to renounce the ego or the self. John Heider has correctly interpreted this message in his book. As a matter of fact, having read many books in the similar genre, I consider Heider’s book one of the better ones. It is enormously readable; the passages are smooth and plainly accessible, the way that Laotzu would want to have his book read. Often times, when Western authors attempt to reproduce the mystic aura of the East, they make the messages obscure. Heider did not make that mistake. Heider believes that in teaching the Tao – a way of life, one can teach the leader skills that can be used in leading. Confucius certainly believed that as well, most of his teaching was to leaders and for the art of managing the state.

However, we are now living at a different time. The organizations now and certainly the organizations in the West are not organized around the same principles as the time of Confucius, a later contemporary of Laotzu, nor of the time of Laotzu himself. Today’s organizations are complex, the work pace fast and the people have much less of the sense of the community as their counterparts two and half millennia before. Can Taoist principles, the “doing little” and “appearing foolish” approaches, survive in today’s organizations? The paradoxical messages of “do nothing” then you win, and renounce then you gain, seem to suggest winning and gaining of a different kind. They are obviously not defined in the short‐term and concrete bottom lines of today’s business. Throughout the history of China, scholars seem to regard the “non‐interfering” small government with benevolent leaders as the more preferred mode of governing. However, they also recognized that the effectiveness of this Taoist governance was only evident in kingdoms where “the land is small and the people few!” This certainly does not describe the Microsofts of today. In this context, I would also like to add that Taoist ways might work only in a culture where there is a common understanding of the non‐assertive and non‐confrontational communication strategies. I think it would be an arduous, if not impossible task to operationalize these principles in societies where individual assertiveness is seen as healthy and “looking out for number one!” is the philosophy for most executives.

In conclusion, I like this book for its fluidity of presentation and its insightful interpretation of Taoism for the contemporary Western audience. I still think it is best read as a book for personal development rather than a manual for management.