Almost everyone who reads this site will have some form of leadership role either in business or outside it, so it is worth considering the nature of leadership, and how it can be improved by understanding the memetic nature of organisations.
As John Kotter of Harvard Business School has pointed out (see Kotter 1996), ‘management is about coping with complexity...leadership, in contrast, is about coping with change.’ I’m not interested in steady-as-she-goes leadership - I want to look at how to lead when things are unsteady, or where they are steadily getting worse.
We established in the articles on organisations that absolutely everything about a business is based on memes, and one of the aims of this site is to show how that understanding can be used to manage change more effectively.
But most organisations, like religions and political systems, are complex sets of interlocking memes and I believe a key role of a leader is to prune away the bad ideas and leave a simpler, but still consistent, set. It’s been said that a leader has to be insightful, smart, charismatic, trustworthy, credible and a good communicator.
That is all still true: what I intend to do is to give you, the leader, a new tool to work with: what you are is unchanged, but how you act can be very different indeed. One of the roles of a leader is to manage the memes of his team (and, if possible, his customers). He can do this by introducing new memes, by changing the immune system and by retaining the memes he espouses.