Media

Everyone knows what good leadership is in the abstract and the ideal. But there is no leadership in the abstract and the ideal. There is only what you do when you show up at work which will never be ideal. So if you are a leader you are always a work in progress making it up as you go along with your colleagues and hoping that previous experience will count for something.

There is nothing inevitable and linear about human progress, as we might infer from listening to the evening news. Sometimes, as the sociologist Norbert Elias observed, we go through a decivilizing process, periods where human behaviour regresses and explicit conflict becomes more visible and destructive. He made sense of the regression to barbarism in Germany in his work The Germans, a subject of particular interest to a German Jewish citizen forced to flee as a refugee to the UK.