ABSTRACT
Leadership is a major topic in public and business administration. Leadership is what we expect of presidents and CEOs. Leaders are accorded superior status, salary, and responsibility in all organizations. When an organization succeeds we attribute the success to the “quality of leadership.” When an organization fails, we typically engage in attributions focused on a “failure of leadership.” For example, a book on the economic troubles from which the International Business Machine Corporation (IBM) has only recently recovered, documents a failure in leadership at various levels of the corporation in explaining IBM’s economic slide. Specifically, IBM went from earnings in excess of $6 billion in profit to reported losses of five billion in less than three years. This represented an economic downturn of such magnitude that as of 1994 IBM had lost some $75 billion of stock market value, going from a position where its stock market value exceeded that of all the companies on the German stock exchange put together, to a “spot barely in the top ten companies in the U.S.” (Carroll, 1994, p. 4). Among the remarkable failures of leadership documented were the missed opportunity by IBM’s leadership to buy outright the MS-DOS operating system from Bill Gates. The failure of IBM’s leadership to buy, when offered, all or part of Intel and Microsoft. The failure of IBM’s leadership to take advantage of the reduced instruction set computing (RISC) microprocessor, which IBM itself invented in the 1970s, because it was perceived by IBM’s leadership to compete with its mainframe business; a decision that allowed competition in the PC market to take valuable market share from IBM. The final failure of leadership was the lack of vision of IBM’s executives, expressed in their consistent failure to understand and act upon the fact that the microcomputer and not the mainframe, was going to be the future of computing (Carroll, 1994). Clearly, leaders are awarded the accolades when the organization succeeds and given the blame for its failures. Harry Truman’s description of the presidency says it quite well “the buck stops here.”
