General Charles de Gaulle famously wrote that the real school of leadership is general culture. That’s quite a bold statement and the idea that general culture, or general knowledge, is one of the essential foundations of leadership may not be immediately clear to you.
I wrote myself, many years ago, that you’re no leader if you don’t care about the people you lead. That statement reflects the fact that good leadership requires a fundamentally benevolent disposition towards the people that you are entrusted with leading. Benevolence and other dispositions that form one’s character clearly matter to good leadership. But good dispositions alone are not enough. Whether people like to hear it or not, knowledge also matters. But what kind of knowledge?
Most people will probably agree that knowing something about your specific field of work is essential in order to do a good job at it. Lawyers need to know about the law, medical doctors need to know about the human body and how to treat it, and it would be a poor electrician who didn’t know how to lay down a safe and effective electrical network.
Though some readers may find the whole idea off-putting, my contention in this article is that leadership requires something more than just specific or technical knowledge pertaining to a specific field. It requires good generalknowledge. Or to put it differently, it requires broad-based knowledge about many things and how they work, in many different fields such as history, biology, psychology, physics, philosophy, sociology, literature, and more (specific interests, of course, will vary from one person to another).
Through general culture, De Gaulle wrote, “the mind learns to act in orderly fashion, to distinguish the essential from the trivial, to recognize developments and causes of interference, in short, to educate itself to a level where the whole can be appreciated without prejudice to the shades of difference within it.” (De Gaulle, 1941)
In other words, you cannot think well – and therefore lead well – without a broad and sound foundation of knowledge.
It is generally accepted that curiosity is an important attribute of good leaders, and broad general knowledge is a good indication of a curious mind. Armed with a curious mind, you can develop your general culture by following your curiosity in innumerable directions: see a play, visit a museum, watch a documentary, take a course, talk with an expert, and – of course – read a book.
“I don’t really have time to read”, I often hear, and I find that very sad. Librairies, after all, are monuments to thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and wisdom – our species’ intellectual heritage. But in case that’s a little too dry for your taste and you prefer learning of the social kind, I would point to Lorraine Smith Pangle’s idea that books allow us to connect and learn from splendid souls in other times and places, people who offered the very best of themselves to true but unmet kindred souls: you and me, perhaps. (Smith Pangle, 2003, p. 33) Intellectual friendship through space and time. What a beautiful thought.
“There has been no illustrious captain”, De Gaulle wrote, “who did not possess taste and a feeling for the heritage of the human mind. At the root of Alexander’s victories one will always find Aristotle.” (De Gaulle, 1941)
Whatever it is that you personally wish to conquer, including yourself, there are surely much worst things you could do than unleash your curiosity towards building the broadest foundation of knowledge that you can muster.
Where will you start?
References
Charles De Gaulle, The Army of the Future. J. B. Lippincott Company, 1941, 179 pages, p. 171.
Lorraine Smith Pangle, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 255 pages.
