"Search and Destroy" and the Impossibility of Authentic Leadership
“I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm”
This is a ridiculous sentence to open with. Ludicrous. It is not so much “camp” as “horizon-spanning Bedouin tent city”. And yet this is how Iggy Pop chooses to announce himself on the greatest rock ‘n’ roll song of all time. It’s a line that shouldn’t work but does because you believe Iggy. He’s not being arch. He genuinely believes himself to be an urban African feline with a vital internal organ saturated with petrochemicals. His physical performances demonstrate a total commitment to being a rock ‘n’ roll animal. He hurls himself bodily into the oncoming tsunami of his band’s music and his audience’s cracked adoration.
Meanwhile, The Stooges lurch around the pop landscape of the previous 20 years from 60s garage punk to 50s Cochrane. The track skates to very edge of collapse with an Olympian daring. Rock bands love covering Search and Destroy and every other version (with one exception) of the track is a miserable failure. Either you sound safe and boring in comparison or you end up unlistenable. There is no middle ground because The Stooges already occupy that boundary. This is a band committed to their sound. To being their sound.
Iggy Pop is not performing rock ‘n’ roll. He is rock ‘n’ roll. The Stooges are not so much playing as embodying. They are, to use the jargon of our day, “authentic”. But often authenticity is treated as something that you can shrug on and off like an organic wool coat. Not so Iggy Pop and The Stooges. Authenticity is not something you say, it is something you are. It is A Way Of Life. But you pay a price for being authentically rock 'n' roll - in this case: drug addiction, hospitalisation, broken relationships, death.
It is worth comparing Iggy to his great friend David Bowie. Bowie was a consummate performer who donned identities throughout the 70s. The Thin White Duke, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, etc. As entertaining as Bowie was, he was never just David Bowie. I suspect that part of Bowie’s attraction to Iggy was a fascination with someone who was never anyone else. A polar opposite of himself. Someone who had something that Bowie could never pretend into being. Bowie was wonderfully inauthentic and that was his truth. A lifelong commitment to the ephemeral.
What of people who are not Iggy Pop and David Bowie? David Runciman writes in the book Political Hypocrisy:
In these circumstances, we need politicians who are sincere, but that does not mean we should wish them to be sincere believers in everything they do. Instead, we need them to be sincere about the system of power in which they find themselves, and sincere in their desire to maintain the stability and durability of that system... Their individual hypocrisy— that is, their hypocrisy judged as individuals— does not matter. Indeed, some personal hypocrisy will be inevitable for any democratic politician. What matters is whether they can be truthful, with themselves and with others, about that.
Jeffrey Pfeffer writes:
Leaders need to be pragmatic—to say and do what is required to obtain and hold onto power and to accomplish their objectives... Simply put, authenticity places too much value on being true to yourself. Leaders need to be true less to themselves than to what others and the situation requires of them in the moment.
So what has all this to do with “authentic leadership”? First of all, what is authentic leadership. Noted scholar Wikipedia says that:
Authentic leadership is an approach to leadership that emphasizes building the leader's legitimacy through honest relationships with followers which value their input and are built on an ethical foundation.
This is good as far as it goes. We don't want inauthentic or unethical or dishonest leaders do we? Well, many of our leaders turn out to be unethical or dishonest so may be we do. May be we say we want one thing and then act as though we want something completely different. So which of us is right? The "us" that speaks or the "us" that chooses? I suspect that it is more the "us" that chooses leaders who act unethically or dishonestly. I think that we can do better, that we should be more like the "us" that speaks. But as you cannot have a leader without followers, this is more about those of us who follow rather than those of us who lead. It also provides a warning for would-be leaders. People say they want you to be authentic but will they follow you when you are? That's not always a given. You could end up being an authentic loner. And can the acts that you need to commit to get to where you need to go be reconciled with openness and sincerity? I would like to believe that this is true but I do not think that it is true.
I don’t believe that it is possible for organisational leaders to be “authentic” in the Iggy Pop sense. Such a stance is simply too risky. What happens if you’re actually a bit of a selfish a-hole? Simon Sinek tells us that Leaders Eat Last but who am I supposed to believe – him or that empty plate and my lyin’ eyes? Most leadership requires acts of honesty, circumlocution and sometimes outright deceit. And to deny this fact suggests either a dangerous ignorance or a cunning that negates it. Instead, leaders should seek to be more like Bowie – to be productively inauthentic. To own and inhabit their own inauthenticity. To commit to it.
Which kind of hypocrite do you want to be?