Leadership

http://lea.sagepub.com Leading Questions: Developing What? An Anthropological Look at the Leadership Development Process Across Cultures
Andrew Jones Leadership 2006; 2; 481 DOI: 10.1177/1742715006068935 The online version of this article can be found at: http://lea.sagepub.com

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Leadership

Developing What? An Anthropological Look at the Leadership Development Process Across Cultures
Andrew Jones, Lancaster University, UK

Introduction
In his recent book, The Ten Faces of Innovation (2005), IDEOs Tom Kelley discusses the notion of vuja de, which he denes as the opposite of dj vu: Vuja de is . . . a sense of seeing something for the rst time, even if you have actually witnessed it many times (p. 18). His reections on the importance of vuja de at IDEO, one of the worlds leading industrial design rms, appears in a chapter where he discusses the importance of anthropological thinking in the design process at the rm: Applying the principle of Vuja De, anthropologists have the ability to see whats always been there, but has gone unnoticed what others have failed to see or comprehend because they stopped looking too soon (p. 18). That is, seeing something that is familiar as strange is a distinctly anthropological way of ordering and rendering meaning in the social world. Making the familiar strange is precisely my objective in this Leading Questions article. Particularly, I want to look anew at the leadership development process (and the leadership development programmes LDPs that constitute it) through the inquisitive lens of cultural anthropology. A search for strangeness is not a goal in itself, but is rather a way to see what else is there, what else is going on in what otherwise can be seen as a simple and straightforward aspect of organizational life. Who or what is being developed in the larger corporate investment in top performers to have them transformed into even more effective leaders? How is increased leadership effectiveness measured? Can it be? What do various attempts at measurement tell us about the societies in which these measurement systems are produced and enacted? A convenient jumping off point for this article is a (re)consideration of the ctional case study in the May 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review. In the article, Leadership Development: Perk or Priority? Idalene Kesner (2003: 29) presents the case of Karen Barton, senior vice-president of human resources at Zendal Pharmaceuticals. Early in the case, Barton learns that her annual budget for executive education has been reduced by 75 per cent, and her complaints are quickly shrugged off as unrealistic. The dilemma of the case is the question: How can Barton make the

Copyright 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 2(4): 481498 DOI: 10.1177/1742715006068935 www.sagepublications.com
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business case for the importance of leadership development programmes both on site and off site to the companys bottom line? The expert commentary offered by Noel Tichy at the end of the case is where I want to focus the discussion. Tichy provides an interesting, and from an anthropological perspective, symbolically loaded, formula that Burton might consider to convince her boss that her original budget should be restored. He suggests that she should frame the return on investment (ROI) for the CEO in the following way: Investment
I I I I I

Tuition Salary Travel and living costs Lost opportunity cost of not being on the job (best estimate) Total cost (per participant).

Return
I I I I

Net present value of improved leadership capability over two years Net present value of improved team skills over two years Net present value of new business acumen over two years Total nancial return of the project (each participants portion) (Tichy, in Kesner, 2003: 36).

Exactly how does an organization measure the net present value of improved leadership capability, or team skills, or new business acumen over two years? In a division or team that does not directly sell into a consumer market, and whose work is more back-end in the organization, is it possible to make a direct correlation between an LDP intervention and that teams improved performance? Is this just an effort by a professor of the soft stuff of management (i.e. HR, leadership, etc.) to make the soft appear hard by wrapping it in the tough language of nance? Such questions are not easy to answer. It should be made clear here that I am not arguing against the use of LDPs in the growth and transformation of rms. There are likely numerous immeasurable (and perhaps measurable) ways in which the LDP process benets both individuals and rms. However, as I suggest throughout this piece, some of the value of leadership development offerings might in fact be hidden or entirely invisible to organizations. At the outset here, an important caveat needs to be made. In their recent article, Iles and Preece (2006) make a critical distinction between leader development and leadership development, a distinction that in many ways is borne out in the crosscultural analysis I engage in here. They suggest that leader development implies a focus on individuals and their individual, intra-personal interactions in the context of their work and their development (p. 325). Leadership development, on the other hand, is a more collective developmental process, wherein the relationships and social capital of the interaction dynamic are thought of as being developed together (p. 325). In some respects, this distinction underscores some fundamental differences between the development process in the USA, on the one hand, and in other parts of

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the world, on the other. To the extent that most (if not all) providers of development programmes refer to their work as leadership development, the phrase leadership development will be used throughout the article.

Leadership development as ritual process

A central theme of this article is the idea that, in addition to the work of developing individual leaders to make their sponsoring organizations more effective, the leadership development process also serves an important role as a context for organizations and cultures to confront and (attempt to) resolve social and economic conicts affecting the larger society as well. In this sense, and borrowing language from symbolic anthropologists such as Victor Turner (1987), Richard Schechner (1987), Clifford Geertz (1973), and Marshall Sahlins (1976, 1999), LDPs are interpreted as sites of ritual process wherein the larger cultural, historical and national conicts that confront human societies are confronted and redressed as they manifest themselves in the particular organizations and individual lives of programme participants. This perspective on LDPs extends even further the broader context suggested by Iles and Preece (2006), to include national and macro-historical factors and inuences. What do I mean here by ritual process? In order to make sense of this notion as it relates to the leadership development process, it is necessary to place the analysis within a culturalhistorical (Slotkin, 1973) model of interpreting social reality. The movement of events, symbols and their interpretations, as they are negotiated by different cultural constituents through time, is of more interest to me here than is the conventional, psychological interpretation of self-improvement and leadership development. Particularly in the American context, there is an obsession with the science of the self when it comes to the leadership development concept. This idea is expressed most clearly in the Our Philosophy statement on the website of the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL; http://www.ccl.org), one of the most successful and highly ranked leadership institutions in the world: We believe that self-knowledge is the single most important factor in the practice of leadership. Becoming more acutely aware of ones strengths and weaknesses is a type of unfreezing which leads to setting goals and taking action to improve . . . Center programmes provide leaders with the time, tools and environment needed to gain a comprehensive, accurate view of themselves, and to set personal development goals and begin working toward them . . . We combine 360-degree feedback, individual assessment, personalized attention in a safe, condential environment designed to encourage candor, self-examination and experimentation with new behaviours vital to development. (CCL website, 2006) This sentiment echoes the voices of leadership-common sense provided by such scholars as Kotter (1999), Bennis (1989) and OToole (1995), so there is really nothing new here. However, it does contrast with the culturalhistorical model I am keen on developing here.

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The necessity of crisis

A cultural analysis of leadership development programmes focuses on the total process in which programme participants are involved, from their pre-programme working routines at the ofce, to their travelling off campus to attend the programme, to their integration back into their work following the programme, to the various and changing relationships and statuses (with family, peers, direct reports, etc.). In ritual processes considered ethnographically across cultures, ritual and social dramas are enacted in periods of perceived social or cultural crisis and conict, when a given cosmological sense of order and control is upset. The elemental ritual process, dened anthropologically by Turner (1969) and others (e.g. Van Gennep, 1960), entails three fundamental stages, or passages: separation, liminality, reaggregation. As they relate specically to LDPs, the ritual process speaks more to social rituals than it does to the more commonly considered religious rituals. In this context, the process can be considered in the following way. Being chosen as a participant by the sponsoring rm/organization begins a kind of separation process, which becomes real when participants leave their rms for a week or so and relocate to an off-site programme. During a week-long programme, participants enter a stage of liminality, or a betwixt and between stage, when they are no longer their former (working) selves but not yet their future (working) selves. And nally, after the programme concludes they return to work and reaggregate as (transformed) members of their organizations (Turner, 1969). Key here is the notion, whether or not the programme is effective in the way it promises, that there is a change of status experienced by participants. As scholars of rituals (Deem, 1991; Schechner, 1987; Turner, 1974, 1987) point out, ritual processes often provide their greatest meaning and identity reaggregation during periods of sustained crisis that call for ritualized redressive action. Redressive action mediates the cultural conict and enables groups and individuals to cope with and process social change. That is, crises of one sort or another precipitate the need for a change of social/identity status in organizations and individuals from one state to another. As I suggest here, the mission/purpose of LDPs like CCL in the USA lies in their ability to deal with and help soothe (though not solve) the perceived crisis in moral values and ethical leadership that hangs over the corporate landscape today. Many of the research articles and studies published by CCL, for example, are often premised on a language of crisis and the need for redressive action (Drath, 2003; HernezBroom & Hughes, 2004; Leslie et al., 2004). For example, CCLs John Fleenor (2003) begins an article in President & CEO magazine by saying that during these tough economic times, companies are under increasing pressure to improve their bottom-line performance through downsizings, reorganizations, redeployments and other organizational transitions. Yet todays leaders are struggling to use leadership styles that will successfully lead their organizations through these transitions. (p. 36) Various cultural crises, which change over time, create the need for organizations, through certain chosen individuals, to step out of the immediacy of the ofce, and reect on how to right the organizations place in that changing world. As mentioned earlier, the language of CCL programme offerings is overtly celebratory in its

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commitment to self-knowledge, reexivity, and self-improvement. Whatever the particular crisis of the moment, from yesterdays accounting scandals to the more current vilication/contrition of CEOs when announcing massive layoffs (see GMs Rick Wagoner), there is a need for ritual spaces out of place and time for corporate leaders to address conicts and sort things out.

A note on gender, pedagogy, and culture

Despite the fact that more women are attending university and MBA programmes than ever before, female representation in senior leadership positions remains statistically very low. For example, while 46.4 per cent of the workforce in the USA is female, there are only eight women CEOs in the Fortune 500. Only 13.6 per cent sit on boards of directors, and 15.7 per cent hold ofcer-level positions (Catalyst Research, 2006: 1). Signicant change at the organizational top seems very far away. Many institutions, such as CCL, offer programmes specically for women, which, if anything, only highlights the corrective action that is still needed. This underscores precisely what Sinclair (1995) discusses in her article, Sex and the MBA, which outlines the intensely gendered/masculine nature of administration, management, control and corporate power generally. Similarly, in the leader/leadership development space within management education, development itself is as much about inuence, power and control as it is about self-knowledge and self-reection. In these ways, LDPs, despite increasing female participation, are, like their MBA counterparts, almost by denition gendered environments. A brief consideration of cultural differences in pedagogy between programmes in the USA, Europe, and China is both illuminating and disquieting. Indeed, while there continue to be qualitative differences between the cultural contexts in which leadership programmes in China, Europe and the USA are delivered, there is an intense pressure on these various contexts (outside of the USA) to shift from, as Iles and Preece (2006) might suggest, leadership development to leader development. For example, CCL uses business simulations as a core learning tool for its participants. While seemingly straightforward enough, simulations are, in effect, pregured with rational decisions made by rational actors with whom participants must interact. Such normative assumptions are not culturally neutral; rather, they are distinctly western in their assumptions about human behaviour and the psychological backdrop of decision making in the business context. To the extent that these simulations are used at CCL campuses in Europe and Asia, it is interesting to speculate on the (potential) long-term cultural levelling effect they may have. The few European and Chinese programmes considered here, to the contrary, are not premised on realistic business simulations, per se. They are more broadly reective in terms of the spiritual and introspective dimensions of self-development in the programmes. Again, for the few programmes I consider here that do differ somewhat from the American approach, there are likely just as many that are crafted to be just like the American leader development programmes. This speaks to the larger conversation about cultural convergence and divergence in the global economy, one that is beyond the scope of this article. However, it is safe to say that one of the sites where this conversation is being held is in the LDP space.

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The science of the self and CCL

In the American context there exists a fascination with the topic/study of leadership. This reflects and contributes to the larger American commitment to a narrowly defined individualism, cut off from other organic forms of community and social identification (Solomon, 2004). European observers recognize this clearly, though in the USA a lack of critical and reflexive perspectives (in both business schools and in mainstream business) makes such an observation mildly subversive. In a chapter on Leadership and Organizational Culture, Alvesson (2002) suggests that US researchers dominate leadership research in parts of Europe it is a less significant topic (p. 94). Alvesson continues, saying that with the risk of overgeneralizing too much, it is a common impression that while North Americans seem to rate leadership favourably, many Europeans may be mildly less enthusiastic. US society seems to favour an ideology of celebrating individualistic, strong masculine characters that can lead (p. 94). Such a straightforward comparative look at leadership (studies) in the USA and Europe is helpful as I go forward here. In a similar argument, Bjerke (1999), in a chapter on The Leader as a HeroPerson, suggests that many books and articles have been written about the founders and developers of business empires. Many of these books have also become best sellers. Most of them are American, though an increasing number come from other parts of the world as well (p. 58). In pointing to these observations, I am not suggesting that great leadership itself is American, obviously. Over many millennia various types of historical figures have led societies and institutions across time and space in human history. What is American is the projection of cultural and organizational accomplishment onto individuals who are then elevated and imbued with the aura and mythology of those accomplishments. American history is full of mythical individual heroes, from the hunter-trapper to the Indian fighter, from the cowboy to the business entrepreneur, from John Wayne to several US presidents. In contrast, in the European context, a more socialcultural (vs. individual psychological) assessment of accomplishment and responsibility still prevails as a cultural value. Perhaps, as Parker (2000) suggests, this is because in the USA there is considerably more disembeddedness from traditional (Giddens, 1991) or organic (Solomon, 2004) forms of community, and therefore workplace/synthetic organizations and identities have taken on greater signicance in American culture than in European cultures. Similar to the predominance of American authors and researchers in the eld of leadership studies, Parker (2000) comments on the prevalence of US authors in the study of organizational and managerial culturalism: Thomas (1985) suggests that this may be because the United States is a more polyglot or fragmented society than many European ones. He argues that nonwork traditions and afliations are stronger in Europe than in the USA, partly because of a longer and more complex history. In this sense, Tom Peters et al. [Peters & Waterman, 1982] may have articulated a form of corporate Gemeinschaft (community) that tells us rather a lot about the myths of North American capitalism, but rather less about what the term organizational culture might do for an understanding of organizations. (p. 17, emphasis added)

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Parker touches on a couple of important points here. First, he is recognizing the importance of history and historical complexity in the emergence and expression of culture and cultural difference. And second, he focuses on the mythical and mythological foundation of cultural identity, something that is constantly remembered, enacted, and dramatized so that it can provide continuity and comfort in times of cultural change. In this view, a socio-cultural crisis emerges when the iconic/idealized American leader (increasingly a multimillionaire corporate celebrity) fails the public trust and undermines the deeply held and shared cultural commitment to individualism. The resulting crisis, and perceived need for redressive action (in the form of increased self-knowledge, self-understanding and self-improvement) is then internalized by rms throughout the USA, who try to make things right in their own particular organizational universes. It is in this way that rms, in partnership with high prole LDP vendors such as CCL, engage in the culture work of American society on behalf of the whole society.

Center for Creative Leadership

The success of the CCL (Center for Creative Leadership, based in Greensboro, North Carolina) goes back over 30 years, long before the current fads and fashions in leadership development, to a time when leadership studies centred largely on the identication of the leadership traits that made for effective leaders (Stogdill, 1974). Founded in 1970, CCL is now one of the premier leadership development institutions in the world. In its 2003 annual rankings of executive education programmes, BusinessWeek ranked CCL rst in the world in the category of Leadership, ahead of Harvard, Wharton, IMD, and INSEAD, in that order (Merritt, 2003: 88). In their ranking of open-enrolment executive education programmes, CCL came in fourth, and in terms of customized corporate programmes they were ranked seventh, ahead of Northwesterns Kellogg School of Management, Dartmouths Tuck School of Management, and NYUs Stern School of Management (p. 90). For scal year 20032004, CCL faculty taught over 20,000 corporate students representing over 3000 organizations (including over two-thirds of the Fortune 100), and reported operating revenue of US$60.7 million. For the scal year 2005, the Center posted revenues of US$66 million, and was again ranked rst in Leadership Education in Business Weeks rankings of global executive education programmes. CCLs client list reads like a Whos Who in the global economy: ABM AMRO, American Express, Amgen, AT&T, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, Citigroup, DaimlerChrysler, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Maytag, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Pzer, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Prudential Financial, Random House, State Farm Insurance, Unilever, US Air Force, US Navy, US Army, Whirlpool, and Zerox, among others. Among management consulting rms CCL is now seen as a erce competitor, having parlayed their non-prot status (with a mission to advance the understanding, practice and development of leadership for the benet of society worldwide) into a unique and economically powerful organization in American society. To attend a CCL programme, at any of its ve campuses, has become a badge of honor and symbol of career progress in corporate America. In the past 10 years the Center has expanded into Asia and Europe, with an increasingly strong showing at its European campus in Brussels.

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CCL in Europe
Only about 10 per cent of CCLs operating revenue is earned at their European campus in Brussels. However, relative to other universities executive education offerings, this is a signicant penetration by an organization that does not possess a long-standing academic reputation like some of Americas older universities. As a sampling of how the Centers programmes resonate in the European context, a recent CCL study suggests what programme participants are getting out of the programmes. In the CCL study, LDP Europe Impact Study, some of the results are interesting. Based on a study of 132 participants who took part in the LDP at the Centers European campus in Brussels in 2002, the responses are revealing. When asked in what areas their greatest learning took place, 75 per cent said that they learned more about themselves than anything else (Ascalon et al., 2004: 4). Only 1 per cent said that they learned how to better inuence others. Interestingly, in follow-up questions over 30-day and 120-day periods, responses concerning the extent to which their experience impacted their companies bottom lines were telling. Over a 30-day period 0 per cent suggested that they could see a positive impact. Over a 120-day period, 5 per cent said that they could see an impact on their companys bottom line (p. 10). Contrast these gures with follow-up questions after 120 days concerning the degree of self-improvement, and 53 per cent said that their selves were improved. Investing in the link between self-development and increased organizational effectiveness is obviously not solely an American process. Many of the leading providers of leadership development programmes in Britain and Europe encourage extensive self-examination and reection as part of the development process. In the next section of the article, I consider two different European LDP offerings: London Business Schools Proteus programme, and INSEADs Leading Your Self programme.

Self and society in Europe

In 1927, US President Calvin Coolidge made the now famous statement that the business of the American people is Business. This cannot be said of either mainland Europe or Britain. British economist, John Kay, thoughtfully suggests that in the wake of the Cold War the American Business Model (ABM) has assumed an ideological currency (similar to former political ideologies) that has now transformed the way that many nations think about economics, development, democracy, and so on (cited in Dearlove, 2003). Referred to as the capture of the commanding heights by Yergin and Stanlislaw (1998), or as the rise of the market state by Bobbitt (cited in Kleiner, 2004), privatization, increasing corporatization, the penetration of capital markets, and mobile labour markets have signicantly challenged the cultural assumptions that for generations nurtured a belief in social democracies, strong public sectors, strong social safety nets, and related forms of government work. For many former social democracies in Europe, the process by which market centricity has become common sense has produced a cultural crisis with which many countries continue to struggle (such as France and Germany). In this respect, Britains eager embrace of the ABM as well as its currency independence speak to

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its unique status in between Europe and the USA. For parts of Europe, though, the cultural crisis is marked in time by a number of very important and interesting social and educational trends and transformations over the past 20 years. Among these have been the rise and growing prominence of a signicant entrepreneurial class, the explosive growth in management education and the proliferation of MBA and executive education programmes (including leadership development programmes), and the increasing cultural acceptability of business in society generally. A generation ago, business and management were less common as university courses than they are today, as they were seen as more vocational, low brow, or even vulgar by university standards. Some of the core assumptions that many European nations hold about civil society, about the place of the individual with respect to society, have come under assault in the context of the importation of the ABM and related colonial ventures such as management and leadership education. Given its distinct cultural history, the specic ways in which management and leadership education are being incorporated in Europe are different, though, and this suggests that the leadership development process in Europe, despite the best efforts at colonization by American programmes such as CCL, is evolving its own distinctive approach that appears to be somewhat different than the American approach. On the one hand, the rapid growth of management education in Britain and Europe over the past 20 years suggests that the various imports that constitute the ABM might potentially homogenize efforts at management education in Europe. As I discuss here, the unique and innovative approaches to leadership development in Europe are suggesting that this is not the case. Culture, as Marshall Sahlins (1999) suggests, is not easily overrun by external forces, but is rather an active agent in the transformation of exogenous inuences, into something new, according to endogenous schema. This is what Sahlins refers to as the surprising paradox of our time: that localization develops apace with globalization, differentiation with integration; that just when the forms of life around the world are becoming homogeneous, the peoples are asserting their cultural distinctiveness . . . Problem is, the people are not usually resisting the technologies and conveniences of modernization, nor are they particularly shy of the capitalist relations needed to acquire them. Rather, what they are after is the indigenization of modernity, their own cultural space in the global scheme of things. (p. 411) Incorporating Sahlinss perspective into my analysis of European leadership development programmes, it would seem that European institutions universities, business schools, consultancies are actively indigenizing the ABM according to their own cultural schema. Whether or not this evolves into something that could be called a European Business Model is unclear. For example, in the 2005 FT rankings of MBA programmes, 9 of the top 25 programmes are based outside of the USA, many of them surpassing long-established programmes at prestigious American universities. Two of these programmes are considered here.

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A different self? LDPs at INSEAD and London Business School

In this section of the article I discuss two innovative leadership development programmes INSEADs Leading Your Self programme and London Business Schools Proteus programme and consider how they provide the opportunity for participants to undergo a separation from their regular work routines in such a way that they are able to reect on and deal with the larger leadership crisisas it is dened culturally in the British and European contexts. At the structural level these programmes mirror the off-site programmes offered in the USA and Europe by CCL, but a close cultural reading illustrates that they are also different in some interesting ways. INSEADs Leading Your Self (LYS) programme The LYS programme at INSEAD provides an interesting and instructive example of how an intensive focus on the self can differ from the approach used by CCL. While CCL uses structured peer feedback sessions, 360-degree feedback systems, certied CCL feedback coaches, real-time diagnostic tools, and patented business simulations (Looking Glass Inc.), LYS invites participants on a broader, more expansive and intellectual learning journey. A three-day, 5500 /person programme, LYS provides participants the opportunity to step outside of their organizational and family contexts (separation), and then challenges them to learn about themselves through new ways of thinking about self, society, career, work/life balance, and so on. The LYS brochure frames the purpose of the programme in a way that clearly differentiates it from other more normative and scientic types of programmes: To succeed fully in your working life and achieve a balance in your private life, now is the moment to take a little time to discover more about the inner you: your self and cultivate the ability for repositioning yourself in the dynamics of the life cycle (LYS Online Brochure, 2004: 2). The language used here is clearly marketing language, but the message communicated is interesting. While CCL endorses the universality of managerial roles (Leslie et al., 2004: 12) and the general promise of behavioural psychology, INSEADs LYS programme starts with a different set of assumptions. Rather than proposing a singular, western cultural conception of management and leadership to its participants, as CCL implicitly does, LYS attempts to integrate and synthesize different cultural traditions into a holistic and global denition of both self-discovery and leadership. Leading Your Self consists of conceptual as well as experiential elements drawn from contemporary and emerging thinking in the elds of management, neuro-sciences, psychology and the eastern disciplines. It offers a practical synthesis and balance between the rational, pragmatic and scientic temper of the western world and the deeper, perennial, metaphysical wisdom of the east. (LYS Online Brochure, 2004: 3) During the three-day programme, participants are encouraged (not required) to attend executive yoga sessions before breakfast, and executive meditation sessions in the evenings after dinner. Merely listing these types of activities does not necessarily make them effective (CCL offers meditation classes as well), though it does indicate that the intent of the programme is to inculcate a sense of liminality, or a betwixt and between state of experience, in which participants are encouraged to step out of

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normal routines and experience new states of mind. For a busy executive, the process of stretching methodically and intently, and then sitting absolutely still for meditation, is probably physically and mentally difcult. Such time out (like yoga and meditation) provides the leadership student a time out of normal time, a time in which to consider what it does mean to reposition oneself in the dynamic life cycle. And nally, at the intellectual level, LYS challenges participants to think well outside of themselves, about social and organizational theory, about biology and evolutionary science, and about human cognition and symbolic logic. Again, covering subjects and exercises of this sort is rare if not completely absent from most American LDPs, underscoring a specic and critical difference in the way leadership learning is conceptualized, valued, and practised in the European context. This does not, ipso facto, make the programmes successful in terms of ROI. Perhaps these programmes provide participants the opportunity to come to terms with their place within the increasing privatization and corporatization of social and cultural life in Europe generally, and how this (seemingly inevitable) historical momentum impacts both cultural and individual identities. At the individual level participants have the chance to sort through what it means and how it feels to be a global (or local) manager in the global economy, and on whether or not organizational and cultural systems benet from this individual identity work when participants reaggregate into their work/life routines after the programme concludes. Considered as ritual journeys within the larger social drama of European cultural history, I would suggest that innovative leadership development programmes such as LYS (and LBSs Proteus) enable a kind of culture work similar to that enabled by CCL in the USA. Clearly, relatively very few individuals have the opportunity to attend these sorts of programmes, and so the types of generalizations I am making might appear to be grossly overdrawn. However, when one considers the types of organizations that send employees to these programmes, the organizations are important and powerful in their various national settings. In this sense, the programmes where Europes top leaders attend LDPs have a strange and disproportionately strong inuence. London Business Schools Proteus programme Proteus is one of the most creative and innovative leadership programmes in the world. A six-day, 8000 programme, Proteus provides a compelling learning opportunity for participants to separate from their everyday routines and enter an extended liminal period of learning and personal growth. Not only is the programme longer than others and therefore more structurally conducive to the ritual process, it also takes individuals well beyond themselves as a methodology of learning about themselves. In this respect, the programme differs even more so from the normative, behavioural science approach used by CCL and other similar programmes. The programme is framed as an extended process of discovery, beginning with the self and then travelling out into various dimensions of the contemporary world, and then culminating with the self. A cultural reading of Proteus suggests that, while leadership development programmes may be American in origin and may have a much longer history there, they have now been signicantly indigenized and are qualitatively (and culturally) unique at places like LBS. Proteus consists of ve encounters in the eld (Monday through Friday), following an orientation on Sunday night. The rst eld encounter is titled Human Design,

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and is an exploration of the principles of evolutionary psychology facilitated by a visit to the London Zoo. This encounter provides the opportunity for participants to consider, for perhaps the rst time, the place of the human species in nature and how our decisions impact the world and condition the future. The second eld encounter is called Global Development, and entails a trip to Londons East End where transnational and multicultural trade and interaction are on display daily. This helps participants understand that globalism is not a distant abstraction, but rather is an everyday reality in the here and now. The third encounter is called Scientic Discovery, and entails a visit to high-tech business incubators and/or pharmaceutical research facilities. This visit helps managers see rst-hand the relationship among science, technology, innovation and change. The fourth encounter is called The Creative Spirit, and includes a visit to art studio space where individual artists are at work. This exposes participants to the creative process in a pure form, something that many executives may not encounter on a regular basis. The fth and nal eld encounter is called The Leadership Legacy, and entails trips to both an art gallery and a public school. In these contexts participants have the opportunity to see a different type of leadership than they are used to in the corporate world. That is, seeing rst-hand the leadership legacy of those who are not in it for the money can be provocative. And nally, on Saturday, Proteus participants engage in an autobiography workshop, which is meant to build on the learning encounters of the week and how they relate to ones own lifeline, past and future. Proteus aims to help you to examine your own life journey and how it relates to your future development. This acts as the springboard for implementing your action plan post Proteus (Proteus Online Brochure, 2005: 3). About the programme, Richard Wilson, Partner with Ernst & Young, UK, says, I wanted to stretch my thinking and be challenged in a different way from the conventional avenues of training executives. Proteus certainly met my objective (Proteus Online Brochure 2005: 1). In another testimonial about the programme, Margaret Studer of Cargill Cerestar says, Proteus was a discovery and a very liberating experience there was a broad range of encounters crossing the boundaries of philosophy, science, art, drama, and creativity which gave me an excellent platform for discussing my role in connection with the future leadership of our organization (p. 1). At 8000 per person, measuring the ROI on Proteus would be difcult if not impossible. Particularly, it is hard to see how Tichys mathematical formula could be framed for the CEO. In purely mechanistic and mathematical terms, such expenditure would be difcult to measure at best.

Why bother?
For all the time, money, and business press devoted to high-ranking leadership development programmes (at CCL, INSEAD, LBS and elsewhere), the ROI linkage remains fuzzy. A recent study of 50 European rms conducted by The Danish Leadership Institute (Leadership Development in Europe: Challenges and Best Practices, 2004), suggests that European rms are more committed to investing in leadership development than ever before: Even during the early 2000s, when much of Europe was still recovering economically, the investment in leadership development remained strong 40%

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of companies experienced greater than 10% annual budget growth since the year 2000. As we look out over the next few years, we see a continued pattern of increasing investments in this area (38% forecast steady investments; 53% expect budget increases). (Saslow & Buss, 2005: 1) Yet, as I asked at the beginning of the article, precisely in what are the companies investing? About the DIEU study, Saslow says that Despite the high level of importance and investment in leadership development, companies examined in this survey are not measuring the return on impact of leadership as much as one might expect, especially given the importance it plays and the size of the investments they are making. Despite utilizing a variety of metrics to track the effectiveness of leadership development solutions, a full 63% reported that they never measure leadership development ROI. (p. 2) Contrast this with the mathematical formula proposed earlier by Tichy, who suggests that measuring ROI on leadership investment is not only possible, but that it is imperative. It is not just the issue of measurability that differs here, it is more importantly the content of the programmes that differs in interesting ways. These differences speak to the indegenization of management education in Europe that I addressed earlier, and to the outlines of what might (and I emphasize might) be called a European Business Model (EBM). To date, such a model is implicit and not explicit, but the very idea is presented to draw out the differences between leadership development in the USA generally, and leadership development in Britain and mainland Europe.

Self and other in China

The nal culturalhistorical context to which I want to relate the issue of leadership development is China. Much has been written in both the academic (Millington et al., 2006; Tjosvold et al., 2005) and popular (McGregor, 2005) press about the growing signicance of China in the global economy. This section of the article does not try to take in and make sense of that whole literature, but rather, my intention is to raise what are hopefully thoughtful and helpful questions going forward. The value of a culturalhistorical approach, particularly as it relates to China, is that is sees culture not as static, synchronic traits and behaviours (Hofstede, 1980; Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 2000, 2001), but rather as a more diffuse yet shared view of the world held by a certain group of people (at whatever scale). The various ways that a given group of people interpret and use (manipulate) the past in the present lies at the heart of the culturalhistorical model of societies and their organizations that I talk about here. As I discuss here, this is an important consideration with respect to the case of China. Many observers write in rather simplistic ways about the Confucian foundations of Chinese society, as well as about the Chinese pattern of guanxi (relationships/ connections) as a driving social force in business activity. Surely the inertia of history and organization in China has sustained some modied form of both Confucianism and guanxi, but that is not my focus here. I have not conducted ethnographic research

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in China, and therefore I hesitate to make or contribute (any more than I already have) to the generalizations and stereotypes that are commonly used to make sense of Chinas increasing growth and inuence in the global economy. Here I want to focus on the historical situatedness of China, vis vis the West, and on how that positioning effects the indigenization of management education in China today. For several centuries China has maintained a guarded and suspicious posture towards various western countries, notably the UK and the USA. To the extent that the various business models (the ABM and the EBM?) are being adopted and incorporated in both educational and business institutions in China, it is relatively safe to say that a signicant and even conditioning factor in the evolution of leadership development programmes in China will reside in relationships (cultural and historical) with outside organizations, nations, and institutions. This does not imply that, over time, the resulting types and styles of LDPs wont be distinctly Chinese. It is more likely that Chinese LDPs will be very distinct and culturally particular, though exactly what that means remains unclear. That is precisely the type of question that I am interested in here. To the extent that culture is more a process than anything else, change and transformation are denitional to understanding any culture (Clifford, 1988; Abu-Lughod, 1991). Therefore, it is questionable how predictable the Confucianization of leadership development in China will or will not be. What is clear, from both the historical patterns of Chinese interactions with the West and the current communist capitalism unfolding in the country, is that an overriding pragmatism drives Chinese business decisions in ways that are not readily available to management scholars. Businessmen and businesswomen who are currently involved in working with and negotiating with Chinese rms understand this better than we do in the academic sector. That having been said, a couple of interesting questions do present themselves for consideration. Given the historical emphasis in China on social stability, harmony, hierarchy, rote learning, saving face, and family honour (Fang, 1999; Fingarette, 1972; Hsu & Serrie, 1998), what will LDPs look like in China in 10 years? Currently, management schools in China such as CEIBs and the Cass Business Schools programme in Shanghai teach standard management curricula, but with relatively little specialized focus on individual leadership. Does this suggest that the historical tendencies towards the social, the familial and the collective will prevent the development of LDPs in China? What is the likelihood that an organization such as the CCL will nd a ready audience in Chinese rms? How might the CCLs science of the self square within a society that (at least ofcially) still speaks in terms of society rst and individuals a distant second? This underscores, among other things, differences between ofcial state proclamations, on the one hand, and actual consumer and employee behaviours, on the other. Over time, the argument for global cultural convergence rather than divergence (Carr & Pudelko, 2006; Myloni et al., 2004) would suggest that China, like other places in the world, might warm to and incorporate a CCL-type approach to managing the self in the business environment. What does this say, if anything, about the possible development of a CBM (a Chinese Business Model)? What, in addition to state-funded enterprise and low-cost manufacturing, might dene a CBM? What sorts of managerial or leadership innovation might emerge in the Chinese context? These are important questions, but questions to which we do not currently have answers.

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ABM, EBM, CBM?

Any speculation on the reality or constitution of a European Business Model or Chinese Business Model is necessarily premature. Despite the sheer size of the USA, there is nonetheless some uniformity there in terms of the core assumptions that many American businesses have regarding rm behaviour and the importance of business to society. Regional cultural differences do exist and are often rather pronounced, and these are important. However, these differences pale in comparison to the enormous cultural differences (linguistic, historical, literary, national, etc.) between member nations of the European Union, as well as in the vastly different regions of China. It is perhaps too soon to ascertain the outlines of what might become the Chinese Business Model (CBM), but tentative speculation on an emerging European Business Model (EBM) is perhaps more possible. First, in many different parts of Europe (the City in London notwithstanding), there seems to be a greater willingness to focus on long-term growth targets, unlike the current American xation with quarterly numbers and growth targets. Second, there continues to be a strong orientation in European business towards luxury goods and businesses, something that Americans have historically struggled with. Third, European countries continue to prioritize social spending and support (healthcare, education, labour, etc.) in ways that the ABM does not. Again, recent concessions by trade unions in Germany, as well as the increasing privatization of the NHS in Britain, would suggest that the ABM (or at least the social and economic values that it represents) remains disproportionately inuential in the global economy. How this plays out in terms of leader/leadership development programmes in the world will be interesting to watch in the years ahead.

Conclusion
In this article I have attempted to raise a number of anthropological questions about the nature and purpose of leadership development programmes across cultures. While I do not doubt that in certain cases and for certain rms and individuals the leadership development process is tangibly useful and effective, I have tried to suggest here that in addition to the more obvious goals of LDPs (regardless of their success or measurability), other culture work is at play as well. Cultural change, whether it is in the USA, Europe, China or elsewhere, is generally dened by crises, conict, drama and transformation, and by ongoing attempts to resolve those conicts through sense-making rituals of various types. In the USA, the ideology of heroic individualism is systematically undermined by the behaviour of the very individuals elevated as examples of American managerial excellence, which creates a cultural crisis of identity that necessitates redressive action. Similarly, in Europe the slow but gradual erosion of the ideals and principles of social democracy, via the articulation of an increasingly business-oriented set of social contracts, poses challenges in terms of crafting individual and cultural identities consistent with political and economic realities. And nally, in China, where certain collectivist social norms have endured over many centuries, corporatization and privatization are currently challenging notions of identity and will likely be played out in various educational contexts over the coming decades.

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Looking forward, it is interesting to speculate on how a vuja de perspective (Kelley, 2005) might be helpful in making sense of the (re)nationalization of the oil industries in Russia, Venezuela, and more recently Bolivia, and what the implications there are for management education, generally, and for leadership development more particularly. How does the science of the self t into the context of societies that advance a more social-democratic or collectivist vision of economic and social development? How does the self-improvement agenda of LDPs square with the socio-religious view of society in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, or even Israel? How do LDPs relate to the cultural dilemmas of different societies in such a way that both economic development and cultural continuity are nurtured? These are not comfortable or easy questions to ask. Rarely is anthropological questioning comfortable. Perhaps this is why anthropological questions are so important, and so rare.

References
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Andrew M. Jones is Lecturer in Leadership at Lancaster University Management School, UK. Recent research has focused on the cultural dimensions of leadership in both large public rms and privately held family rms. His current research is focused on design, design thinking, and its application in the leadership development process. [email: a.m.jones@lancaster.ac.uk]

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