What do you see when you look around the world? Here's what I see: a startling lack of leadership. There's a leadership vacuum in this age — especially of the kind we need, at this crucial juncture in history, beset by crisis. So what does it take to be a leader in the 21st century?

I'm going to briefly discuss five qualities I think are important. And they're in stark contrast to the idea of leadership as it's come to be known — which elicits eye-rolls. That's because "leadership" in this sense, the old sense, today's sense — it means something like being cunning, shrewd. Being able to take advantage of people and situations. Extracting the most, and giving the least. Horse-trading and negotiating for a better angle — and not leaving anything on the table.

Today, this age needs what are known as transformational leaders — and even a step beyond that. Because, of course, we now face the greatest set of transformations in human history. Everything must change now — economies, polities, social contracts, infrastructure, basic systems. We can't go on the old way — or did you miss the message of our First Extinction Summer?

So what are my five qualities? We're going to discuss three in this little essay, and two in the next one — because they're a little more complicated.

The first is empathy.

I don't mean that in a cliched way, a pop psychology way. I mean deep, abiding, resonant, heart-stopping empathy. Think about the greatest existential threat we face — climate change. What motivates someone to…do something about it? Money? Power? A grand title? Of course not. Empathy. Based on a kind of profound grief — for all that we're losing. From all the noble and beautiful creatures on earth, to forests, to oceans teeming with life. Empathy on that scale — for all life itself. Spiritual level empathy — not just "step into the shoes of the customer."

This is profoundly different than yesterday's idea of leadership. That was about "step into the shoes of the customer" kind of thinking — and it still is. That's what they'll teach you in leadership courses and in management courses. What they won't teach you is deep empathy, for life, futurity, for being and existence itself. To get there? You'll need to…do a lot of things. Meditate, maybe. Reflect. Contemplate. Read — great minds like Heidegger and Sartre and Camus and beyond.

This isn't about stepping into the shoes of the customer, the user, the consumer — it's so far beyond that it's in another galaxy. And if you don't have this — why would you change much of anything? It's much easier to sleepwalk into apocalypse. This level of empathy about looking with the eyes of history, futurity, life, death, dust, time…so that your purpose is unshakeable and unbreakable.

That brings me to my next quality — deep purpose.

It's another overused term, "purpose." It's so watered down that again, we think of it in terms of "customers" or "consumers" or "users." But now, to be a leader — it takes having a purpose on another scale, and of another scope, entirely.

Let me ask you a question. How many organizations are going to be around in a century? Any of them? Think about the world even a few decades from now. If things keep going the way they are — global warming becoming global boiling, fanaticism on the rise, economies stagnating, societies fracturing — how much worse do things get, and how fast? Most organizations today could care less about this question: are we going to be around a hundred years from now. They're interested in — forced to be, by financial systems — the next nanosecond's profits. That's not a deep purpose. It's not much of a purpose at all.

So. If you're going to be around in a hundred years, as an organization — how? What are you going to do stop the world from…falling apart…at light speed…like it is right now? It's not enough to say something like, well, I'm going to monopolize a society's water supplies! Good luck with that — maybe for a decade or two, and then what?

You can think about in a personal way, too. These days, everyone's switching up careers, because, well, our economies are a mess. And the question arises: what should I do next? The answer — the better one — comes from a sense of deep purpose. All these existential threats facing us. What are you doing to…help…change…alter…fix…transform them? How do you leave the world a better place than you found it, goes one way of thinking about this, and it's not a bad one — but in this kind of age, that's a harder and harder thing to do, because, well, it takes…deep purpose.

If heartbreak-level empathy ignites deep purpose — where do you go with it?

You develop a sense of grace.

That's my third quality, and again, I mean it on a deep level. One way to think about this — the old way — is the way we do now, in organizations, and how we're taught, again, as old-school leaders. "Customer gratitude" or "rewards" or "loyalty" or so on. LOL — that's not exactly real, deep, fierce, abiding, world-shaking grace.

Let me give you an example. Think about the world. There are the trees. They give us air to breathe…and don't ask for anything in return. There are the creatures, great and small and some are even predators — but they're not stockpiling billions they'll never use. Nature depends on grace. Interconnectedness, cooperation, each giving to the next. We become dust and from the soil life rises.

Deep grace. What does it mean? What are you giving? To the world? To the future? To history? Take, I don't know, Ron DeSantis: he's giving….hate, ignorance, regression, and system failure. That's the opposite of deep grace — self-destruction, a death drive, if you like, Freud's Thanatos.

Let's do another example — the writers' strike in Hollywood. There are the CEOs — practicing a serious lack of new-world leadership. They're trying to extract maximum advantage, every last penny, infamously reputed to have said things like, let them lose their houses, that's when they'll learn. Grace. Ecosystems without sustenance die. Hollywood without creativity is an empty shell.

Our challenge isn't really just repairing and protecting natural ecoystems in this day and age, but also social and economic ones. Think of how little wealth is spread and shared throughout society — how high our levels of inequality are. Think of how people feel devalued and even abused at work, like what they do is meaningless, empty, futile, pointless. Think of how the average person's incredibly pessimistic today. That's because institutions and organizations have no grace. They give nothing back. Or at least not nearly enough. We have grace, gratitude, at the level of loyalty points and rewards cards — but not at the level of sustaining our natural, social, and economic ecosystems, and so they're all crashing and burning.

To be a leader now means developing a sense of deep grace — how do you nurture ecosystems that don't crash and burn? From natural to economic to social? Because they're undernourished — and that can mean a lot of things, from financially to socially to culturally to spiritually? Sure, we can all play the game of extracting the most, being shrewd and cunning, and walking away laughing — but here's a secret, in an Age of Scarcity, that game's going to get more and more costly, risky, and dangerous.

The better attitude, and approach, is to design, develop, think, feel, imbue deep grace, right into systems and institutions from the beginning.

That's abstract, but you can think of things like Universal Basic Income, perhaps. Or the opposite, too — think of the way that systems like streaming have left musicians bereft of income. That's not healthy — it's deeply damaging. You can think of the climate finance gap — fossil subsidies are ten times climate change investment: our civilization hasn't developed deep grace in this biggest of ways yet, or at least its systems and institutions haven't: they are extracting far, far more than they are investing.

That's a little beginning. Just a beginning. Reflect, think, comment, talk. What do you think the qualities of leadership are now — in this age we're entering, so unstable and precarious and different? One thing's for sure: we need leaders worthy of this age. And so far? There aren't many around.

Umair August 2023