I’ve finished reading On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis. It was assigned for a class that I’m taking this semester called “Leadership, Citizenship, and Public Ethics.” It’s really a cool class. Joe Frank Harris has visited our class and will be coming in again to speak with us more on issues of leadership.

So, anyway…

OBL is a good book. I wouldn’t consider this book one of those self-help kinds of books. What Bennis does through his writing is try to examine what it takes to become a leader and how leaders act. His approach is at least semi-academic in that he pulls from many sources and uses many examples of particular leaders. Bennis’ primary point is to ask the question of whether leaders set out to be leader or to express themselves freely or fully. Bennis regards self-expression not as a key element of leadership, but as the primary reason why someone would become a leader. A leader has some vision, and — in carrying out the vision — fulfills that opportunity for self-expression.

One particular point that Bennis made in his book was to distinguish between training and education. While training may allow us to pick up a skill, it prevents us from learning the skill on our own. As the author states it, “By its very nature, teaching homogenizes both its subjects and its objects. Learning, on the other hand, liberates.”

Another point made was in regards to different kinds of learning. Maintenance learning is the kind where we simply learn how we deal with problems we already know how to deal with should they come up. Innovative learning is another way of learning, which Bennis introduces in his book as the style and manner in which leaders learn. The way of learning that caught my eye was shock learning. That’s not to say that shock learning is the preferable method, but it caught my eye because it’s so relevant to our situation today. Shock learning occurs when events overwhelm us and we allow events and crises to guide us. When we learn by shock, the crisis we experience shocks us to the point that we are unable to deal with the situation. We, therefore, defer to so-called experts to guide us and make us feel safe. Somehow, in reading about shock learning, I got goosebumps thinking of the parallels of the lesson with 9/11. In dealing with the shock of that day, we are still more inclined to defer to the President and his administration to tell us where the threats are and send off some of our own to eliminate those threats. Oh, and we’ll try to convince some others to go, too.