Bureaucratic entrepreneurs, on the other hand, take advantage of such opportunities to adjust and promote policies. The key moral question is whether, and at what point, their entrepreneurial activity exceed the bounds of policies set from the top. Since they lack the legitimate authority of elected or high-level appointed officials, bureaucratic entrepreneurs must remain cognizant of the need to balance initiative with loyalty.
Leaders should encourage such entrepreneurship among their followers as a means of increasing their effectiveness. After all, the key to successful leadership is to surround oneself with good people, empower them by delegating authority, and then claim credit for their accomplishments.
To make this formula work, however, requires a good deal of soft power. Without the soft power that produces attraction and loyalty to the leader’s goals, entrepreneurs run off in all directions and dissipate a group’s energies. With soft power, however, the energy of empowered followers strengthens leaders.
Leadership is broadly distributed throughout healthy democracies, and all citizens need to learn more about what makes good and bad leaders. Potential leaders, in turn, can learn more about the sources and limits of the soft-power skills of emotional IQ, vision, and communication, as well as hard-power political and organizational skills.
They must also better understand the nature of the contextual intelligence they will need to educate their hunches and sustain strategies of smart power. Most important, in today’s age of globalization, revolutionary information technology, and broadened participation, citizens in democracies must learn more about the nature and limits of the new demands on leadership.
Joseph Nye is University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University.
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