VIEWPOINTS : BREAKING AWAY : All progress depends upon ‘unreasonable’ leaders who are not afraid to reject the stifling conventions of the status quo.

At last summer’s General Synod of the Church of England, the major topic of concern was the controversial proposition that women be admitted to the priesthood. After a good deal of debate and uproar, a speaker from the floor of the chamber spoke with passion: “In this matter, as in so much else in our great country, why cannot the status quo be the way forward?”

That was the heartfelt plea not only of church traditionalists but also of those in power anywhere throughout the world. Nineteenth-Century America was probably an exception, for it was notable for its adventurers and its writers--the titans who made the industrial revolution, the explorers who opened up the West, the writers who defined us as a nation and a people.

Twentieth-Century America started to build on the promise of their accomplishments, but something went wrong. Since World War II, the United States has been notable for its institutions with its bureaucrats and managers, its organization men and consensus builders, and for the people who believe in the status quo.

What’s wrong with the status quo, with order, tradition, homogeneity, shared values and goals? It’s simply not the way the world works today--if it ever did--and to assume that it does will produce at best stagnation, economic and otherwise. The writer George Bernard Shaw once said: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

As we come to the close of the 20th Century, it seems that there are not many unreasonable men anymore. The great business and political leaders are gone and with them, our dreams. Management expert Peter Drucker recently said: “The flagships of the last 40 years, institutions like General Motors, ITT and Du Pont, have basically outlived their usefulness. . . . In a society with institutions of only one size--and it’s a large size--in a time of transition and change, you lack something vital: the ability to experiment, the ability to fail without disastrous consequences.”

How have we buried leadership?

- By emphasizing management instead of pioneering. Many U.S. companies are very well managed but poorly led. Managers may handle routine tasks well, but no one bothers to ask whether “this” should be done at all? Routine work smothers creativity and change, but because routine work is easier to deal with, there’s an unconscious conspiracy to immerse ourselves in routine and avoid the tough questions.

- By insisting on harmony and pseudo-agreement. The cohesiveness of most organizations depends on a commonly held set of values. Anyone who does not share the common culture is an outsider, at angle to the conventional (and often misguided) wisdom. But unanimity leads to stagnation. The individual who sees things differently is the company’s vital link to change and adaptation. Every leader, like King Lear, needs at least one Fool to challenge what is sacred and to herald the advent of cosmic shifts.

- By rewarding destructive achievers. Our whole attitude toward leaders is tainted by the likes of Gary Hart, Ivan F. Boesky and Oliver North. They have in common two of the three qualities that every leader needs: ambition and expertise. They lack the third: integrity.

To break through the barriers to strong leadership, companies must look for top executives with rare qualities. Here are some principles:

- Ability to articulate a vision. Leaders must create a compelling vision that takes people to a new place and then translate that vision into reality. SAS Airline’s chief executive, Jan Carlson, is exemplary in this respect. His vision is to make SAS one of the few air carriers that will still exist in the year 2000. To accomplish this, he developed two goals: to make SAS 1% better than its competitors in 100 different ways and to create a market niche.

He chose the business traveler. To attract them, he broke away from the traditional pyramid-shaped organization and created small, autonomous work groups. He put in profit sharing plans and charged groups with making every single interaction with customers a meaningful “moment of truth.”

- Ability to embrace error. Failure, error and mistakes all require explanation. Moreover, the ability to embrace error is an important component in creating an atmosphere in which risk taking is encouraged. As successful film director Sydney Pollack tells his people, the only mistake is to do nothing.

- Ability to encourage “reflective back talk.” Real leaders know the importance of having someone around who will tell the truth. Lee A. Iacocca encourages what he calls “contrarians.” One of the most intriguing discoveries that I made in my research on chief executives is that almost all were still married to their first spouse. The reason may be that the spouse is the one person they can totally trust. The back talk from the spouse, the trusted one, is reflective because it allows the leader to learn, to find out more about himself or herself. Plato had it right as usual: All learning, he said, is basically a form of recovery and reflection.

By and large, a leader’s effectiveness can be gauged by asking these questions:

Do workers feel significant? When a leader is truly leading, people feel that what they do has meaning.

Is the work felt to be exciting? Leaders will “pull” not “push” workers toward a goal. They do so by making the work stimulating, challenging, even fun. This “pull” style of influence attracts and energizes people, motivating them to achieve by identification. In the long run, it’s far more effective than motivating them through coercion.

Does the leader embody the organization’s ethics and values? If the unofficial norms of a corporation differ markedly from either the formal code of ethics or the chief executive’s personal behavior, then there’s bound to be trouble. Sending mixed messages to employees on ethical issues, more than anything else, is one of the most destructive things a leader can do.

Ghandi once said: “We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” The status quo will not help us march ahead; that I can guarantee.