Across the world, one encounters the idea that an important goal for postgraduate education is the training of the “next generation of leaders”. When academic and research centers list their goals, one will almost always find the training of “leadership” among them. As with just about every instance where an organization needs to justify its existence, or its consumption of resources, we encounter empty buzzwords, and leadership is absolutely one of them.
The focus on “leadership” is particularly strong in the area where I grew up and started my career, on the borders of Silicon Valley in the U.S. In Silicon Valley, people are surrounded with success stories of entrepreneurs who became suddenly rich on a few years of hard work and entrepreneurial “leadership”. I certainly encountered a lot of these stories myself, but the real absurdity of the Valley is that just about everybody seems to have unrealistic entrepreneurial dreams. Companies are filled with frustrated employees who see themselves as leaders, bitter at not becoming instantly rich, despite lacking much of any self-direction themselves. It was difficult to imagine these people as leaders. Regardless, I saw many of them quit the company where we worked to form their own companies as CEOs (with themselves as the only employee, or maybe bring in their friends as partners). Since most of these dreamers had no real ideas, they would typically fail to get any venture funding. Even among those that somehow succeed to get some startup funding, only a rare few reached commercial success. While these few achievers are widely presumed to be the most skilled leaders, they invariably downplay the luck they experienced in getting there. The “leadership skills” of the most successful are fruitlessly analyzed in detail, since everyone wants to know the secret of becoming successful.
The startup scene, in which startup company executives are often invited to entrepreneurial meetings to receive advice on how to proceed and trade ideas with “experts”. Many of the people who attend these meetings are in fact failed CEOs of prior startup companies, who will be glad to corner you and give their advice on what you are doing wrong, and how their own failure was due to extenuating circumstances and not to any failures of their own. Speakers at these events enthusiastically explain their latest idea of the secret sauce for success, ready to remember with some nice slogan — “Fail often, fail fast”, “Stay hungry, stay foolish”, “Chase the vision, not the money”, “Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once”. Working at a startup myself (as an employee, not an executive), I recall the CEO and CTO returning from conferences spouting each new slogan and explaining how they were going to change how the company was run to take advantage of their new insight. As one could expect, in each case, nothing much happened. And as far as I can see, this process seems to be what many people see as training people to be leaders: give them slogans and a selection of examples to illustrate their meaning in an idealized setting, and distract them from the real tasks of managing a company. This is followship not leadership. Indeed, all around us we can see the same mistaken conception of what being a leader means.
Politicians are often confronted with the complaint that they have no ideas of their own — that they simply parrot the ideas of their constituents or perhaps of some experts that the politician trusts. However, this approach feels more like real leadership to me. A leader is not an “ideas man” but a manager of people — someone who can gather together a group of skilled people and help them to work together as a group toward a goal. While a manager is perceived as being less prestigious than an innovator, it is a role that is just as important for organizational success. Creative innovators are rarely skilled managers, just as skilled managers rarely have much capacity for new ideas, despite what the stories say.
In the world of scientific and engineering research, we see the people touted as the leaders in their fields going around saying more or less the same thing about the recent fads. These days, in my own field, it is all about the potential that A.I., meta-optics, and quantum computing have for transforming the scientific world. In an attempt to make these statements plausible, they use attractive but unrealistic predictions of how each fad can change our lives. This is a common sleight-of-hand technique that is widely used among magicians, who use some flashy or attractive sight to distract the eyes of their audience away from the switch they are about to make. (Indeed, contemporary research grant applications follow these basic techniques closely: the writer is expected to focus on what is “exciting” about the proposed research work and to belittle or ignore apparent weaknesses.) It is a general perception that a research leader is simply a person who succeeds in gathering a lot of research money, and is good at making motivational speeches. For someone skilled with words, it is not so difficult to give the impression of innovation without the actual thing. Again, this doesn’t feel much like scientific leadership to me.
Program managers who are put in charge of research grant agencies are in much the same situation. They are given responsibility for disbursing funds responsibly, and so they need to be able to show credible proof that they have done so. However, it is an obvious truth that no-one truly knows which research directions are most fruitful and which or not. If we knew that, then the disbursement would be easy. But not knowing what is best, then typically choice that program managers inevitably must fall back on is to follow the general trend of what is perceived as exciting at the time, even if this approach has performed poorly in the past. (In their defense, we have little data on how bad any other approach would have done.) Again, this general approach feels more like followship than leadership to me.
So, what, then, would scientific leadership look like? Before I answer that, I suppose I should admit that my own perspective on the problem is strongly biased by the fact that I’ve always been something of an anti-leader. While I have had managers whose skills as leaders I respect, I have always had a strong emotional bias against people considered to be leaders. Some leaders that I have met in person have succeeded in overcoming my bias and earned my respect, but this would be difficult for anyone that I have not met in person. But getting back to what a scientific leader is, I would first separate the concepts of idea creation from personnel management. Discussions of historical figures in modern physics often imply that Robert Oppenheimer would be regarded as a great manager but a poor scientific innovator, while Einstein would be regarded as a great innovator but a poor manager. So the idea that there is a separation between the two is not unknown among scientists, but outside of such historical examples people generally seem to conflate the two roles. For me, then, the answer to the posited question would clearly be “a scientific leader should be a skilled manager”, whereas almost everyone else, it seems, would instead say that the answer would be “a scientific leader should be a skilled innovator”. Clearly, with my own bias, one can understand why I would place leaders with managers rather than innovators, especially since I consider myself to be a very poor manager (borderline incompetent).