But Why Should It Be? Playing The Devil's Advocate

 

A Message on Leadership Which We See Often

The idea that leadership is about “seeing the best in people,” giving them opportunities, and helping them become the best versions of themselves sounds noble. It is also remarkably comfortable, perhaps too comfortable. It assumes a world in which organisations have the time, resources, and incentives to nurture human potential for its own sake.

In that environment, leadership is not necessarily about discovering diamonds in the rough and patiently polishing them. Increasingly, it is about finding the diamond that already fits the job.

The emerging gig economy makes this even more obvious. Why spend years developing someone when the market allows you to search globally for precisely the skill you need, purchase it for precisely the duration you need it, and move on when the transaction is over? The economic logic is brutally simple, fit beats potential, speed beats development, and replaceability beats loyalty.

So perhaps the romantic conception of leadership, “I see something extraordinary in you, and I will help you become it”, belongs to a different economic era.

The harder question is whether leadership should even be expected to serve such an existential purpose.

Capitalism does not inherently exist to make people better versions of themselves. It exists to allocate resources, generate exchange, accumulate capital, and reproduce the system through further production and consumption. Whatever human development occurs within that machinery may be valuable, but it is not necessarily the machinery's primary objective.

And that is where the old philosophers become uncomfortable again.

Perhaps Hobbes understood something we prefer not to acknowledge, beneath our civilised institutions lies competition, insecurity, self-interest, and the struggle for survival.

And perhaps Marx understood something equally uncomfortable, that economic structures don't merely determine what we produce but they profoundly shape how we understand ourselves, our relationships, our labour, and even what we consider a meaningful life.

“Be the best version of yourself” can therefore sound less like liberation and more like another product being sold to us, one more individualised solution to problems produced by the system itself.

The brutal reality may be that modern commerce does not always need leaders who cultivate people. It needs people who can perform.

And when performance becomes the organising principle, the question changes from,

“How do I help this person become extraordinary?”

To,

“Who is already capable of doing what I need, and how quickly can I find them?”

That is not necessarily cynical. It is simply the logic of a system that has learned to optimise.

The uncomfortable question, then, is not whether this version of leadership sounds inspiring.

It is whether human beings can still afford to expect leadership to be inspiring when the economic system increasingly rewards it for being efficient.

Cheers,

Coming Up Next : The Tyranny of Becoming.

ravivarmmankkanniappan@1004220920263.1319° N, 101.6284° E

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