Transformational Leadership

Newcastle & Hunter Junior Chamber of Commerce May Dinner Forum, Noahs on the Beach, 25 May 2006

Speech by Kellie Tranter

It is my very great pleasure to be with you this evening and I thank President Holly McHattan, Vice President Lauren Goodall and the Board members for inviting me to join what I understand to be some of the best young minds in Newcastle and the Hunter.

I understand that I am to speak to you about my commitment and passion for people and how this is my ethos, driving me both in business and in life. Perhaps it is better for me to be perfectly frank with you from the beginning by confessing that my commitment and passion doesn’t lie with people. Rather, it is my commitment to honesty and responsibility, and a passion for rationality, reason and commonsense which has given me a better appreciation of people, injustice, politics, leadership, selfishness, greed and more importantly, the planet and our role on it. Unfortunately, the more you dig the more you discover you need to dig more.

We live singularly selfish lives in quite peculiar times. A time when the actions of many are motivated by selfishness and most of our relationships with other people are commercially arbitrated; lives where we listen intently yet hardly hear a word of what is said because we are too busy thinking about what we can say next; lives where we probably can't even guess at the ambitions and dreams of the person sitting right next to us.

The We Are What We Do campaigners give this disturbing account:

More communications devices than ever before can connect us, yet more people live alone. We want to belong to communities but our cities can be very lonely places.

We buy things—more and more things—with more and more money; but they don’t make us happy—life satisfaction was higher during post-war rationing in the 1940s.

The rich are getting richer, but nearly 10% of Australians are shockingly poor. The other 90% experience other kinds of poverty: most of us feel that our lives are missing something. Perhaps it is the scale of the problems which induces the state of paralysis. We think we have to leave change to governments or big business even though we also know that we elect governments and that our spending is what creates big business.

So how did things end up this way? Let history be our guide.

Let’s turn back the clock to the period 1530-1563. Etienne De La Boetie, an influential but little-known founder of modern political philosophy, was a young Frenchman in law school when he wrote his brief Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.

La Boetie asked, why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement?

"I should like to merely understand how it happens. In childhood, presumably because the rational faculties are not yet developed, we obey our parents; but when grown, we should follow our own reason, as free individuals." He says "if we lead our lives according to the ways intended by nature and the lessons taught by her, we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody. Reason is our guide to the facts and laws of nature and to humanity’s proper path, and each of us has in our souls some native seed of reason, which, if nourished by good counsel and training, flowers into virtue, but which, on the other hand, if unable to resist the vices surrounding it, is stifled and blighted."

He adds, "reason shows us that nature, among other things, granted us the common gift of voice and speech. All rule rests on the consent of the subject masses, and the great value of natural liberty. For if tyranny really rests on mass consent, then the obvious means for its overthrow is simply by mass withdrawal of that consent. Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement."

Why do people continue to give their consent?

La Boetie concludes that ‘custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude.' People will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think that they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way. Consent is also actively encouraged and engineered by the rulers; and this is another major reason for the persistence of civil obedience. One method is by providing the masses with circuses, with entertaining diversions:

Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price or their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at big picture books.

Duping the masses into believing that the tyrannical ruler is wise, just and benevolent. For they never undertake an unjust policy, even one of some importance, without prefacing it with some pretty speech concerning public welfare and common good.

Duping people into believing that they benefit from tyrannical rule. They do not realise that they are in fact only receiving a small proportion of the wealth already filched from them by their rulers.

This leads to the permanent and continuing purchase, of a hierarchy of subordinate allies, a loyal band of retainers, praetorians and bureaucrats. Here is a large sector of society which is not merely duped with occasional and negligible handouts from the State; here are individuals who make a handsome and permanent living out of the proceeds of despotism. In short, when the point is reached, through big favours or little ones, that large profits or small are obtained under a tyrant, there are found almost as many people to whom tyranny seems advantageous as those to whom liberty would seem desirable….all those who are corrupted by burning ambition or extraordinary avarice, these gather around the ruler and support him in order to have a share in the booty and to constitute themselves petty chiefs under the big tyrant.

How is tyranny concretely to be overthrown, if it is cemented upon society by habit, privilege and propaganda?

La Boetie affirms that "not all of the people will be deluded or sink into habitual submission. There is always a more percipient elite who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off. These are the people who, in contrast to "the brutish mass," possess clear and far sighted minds, and have further trained them by study and learning. These people never quite disappear from the world: even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. Because of the danger these educated people represent, tyrants often attempt to suppress education in their realms, and in that way those who have preserved their love of freedom, still remain ineffective because, however numerous they may be, they are not known to one another; under the tyrant they have lost freedom of action, of speech, and almost of thought; they are alone in their aspiration. But there is hope; for still the elite exists, and culling examples once again from antiquity. Heroic leaders can arise who will not fail to deliver their country from evil hands when they set about their task with a firm, whole hearted and sincere intention. Through a process of educating the public to the truth, they will give back to the people knowledge of the blessings of liberty and of the myths and illusions fostered by the State."

This brings me to our desperate need for real leadership.

Unfortunately, countries throughout the world and most of our lives are now run by transactional leaders. They get the business done, but their principles are questionable, their interests often selfish; they are not motivated by the common good but by the exchange of things like money, favours, jobs and votes. And how have they survived for so long? Perhaps La Boetie was right… perhaps it is because they control your motivations by appealing to your own self-interest.

What we need now more than ever is inspirational or transformational leadership. People need to see and to believe that leaders and followers can raise each other to higher levels of motivation and morality.

One cannot speak of heroic leadership without speaking about the most articulated value in Greek culture, that being arete. Translated as "virtue", the word actually means something closer to "being the best you can be," or "reaching your highest human potential." The term is not gender specific. Arete is frequently associated with bravery, but more often, with effectiveness; a person with it uses all their faculties -- strength, bravery, wit and so on -- to achieve real results. It involves all of a human's abilities and all of a human's potentials. It is explicitly linked with human knowledge: the highest human potential is knowledge and all other human abilities are derived from this central capacity. It is a person having virtue, excellence and goodness.

The sad reality is that 99% of the people in this room right now (and that includes me) don’t have what it takes to be a heroic leader. Most of us have fallen into the trap of standing on the middle ground because it is conventional and feels comfortable; we are constrained in the way we articulate our thoughts and feelings for fear of ridicule or of being labelled as something outside the norm; really, we have become just so insipid and so accepting of our own parlous state. One example -- and sadly, there are many -- is the evidence at the AWB inquiry showing that the country is being run by self-confessed amnesics! A cynic might say that waiting for an inspirational leader nowadays is like waiting for Godot.

So if you happen to be in that 1%, if you are the man or woman who has the ability to move us, to inspire us to change the way we think and act every day, here’s what may be in store:

You must understand where everyone sits, both in terms of their frames of reference and on the timeline. The issues consuming the heart and mind of a person in Africa who queues for 6 hours for one bucket of water will not be of any concern to someone in Australia who wants a business promotion or a pay rise.
You must look far into the distance -- covering every front -- to identify the destination and work out the way forward, and you must inspire people that your way is the right way. At the same time you will have to hurdle local, state, national and international rules, regulations, treaties and agreements, not to mention widely varying cultural and religious beliefs.
You have to listen critically to what is said and, by asking searching questions, mine your way down to the essence of what people are saying.
You must squarely face people who argue in generalisations, wide ranging general assertions, pregnant with opinions and value judgments, but seldom based on stated factual foundations and seldom disclosing any logical process through which they have been derived.
You must persuade people that they must jealously protect the rights of individuals and the Rule of Law; that they must stand against and fight against injustice. The fight against injustice for one person is a fight for justice for all.
You must be able to show people that although the material things that we fill our lives with may make the ride more comfortable, they are not a destination.
You must see that humankind is only one small sub-set of nature. Nature has its own existence, with or without us. Nature does not exist just to provide humans with goods and services, but it is precisely this arrogance which has led humankind to the doorway of the current environmental crisis. Deadly as it may be, when we pass the climate change threshold there may be nothing perceptible to mark this crucial step, nothing to warn that there is no returning. It has been described by Professor Lovestock as being much the same as an astronaut entering a black hole.
Even if you gain popular support (with the assistance of the media or otherwise) you will have a long and difficult struggle. As Bob Dylan sang, "everybody must get stoned". You are no exception. Make no mistake that people with vested interests will ridicule you and criticise what you say; they will marshall the forces of mass media to do that relentlessly; they will brand you a greeny, a lunatic, an extremist fundamentalist or, nowadays, a terrorist; they may incarcerate you to silence you or even kill you. And I am not overdramatising when I say this: if you look at the history over the last 50 years of a country like the United States you will see a graphic illustration of what I am saying, and unfortunately I think Australia is not far behind.

You may think that I have painted a bleak picture of leadership and of the future you face. But the picture I am trying to paint is realistic, not pessimistic. We--and by "we" I mean all people in all parts of the world--need people just like you: young people of intelligence and drive who have not been corrupted by institutionalised selfishness, people who are honest and responsible, who have the capacity to deal with issues of all kinds with fairness, commonsense and rationality and who actually do so. In the hands of people like that--of people like you--there is hope for all individuals, for all groups of people and for the planet as a whole.

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