I have ploughed my way through Teena Lyons’ recent book, On Leadership.

Leadership in commerce is increasingly confused with presentational skills. The chief executive who can manage internal and external expectations, who can bat away criticism effortlessly, is somehow viewed as a great leader. There is more to it, I think. And Lyons gets behind the presentational façade.

On Leadership has an understandable bias towards extensive interviews with the ex-Mars/Asda cabal and the words of Justin King struck a chord. “The biggest test of my success at Sainsbury’s is whether, when I do move on, the business continues to be successful for many years,” he says.

“That will tell the world two things. The first is that I left behind a business running well with good momentum. The second is that I had in place a management team directly below me and below that layer too that can take the business forward.”

Sound words and, if he achieves that, he will have achieved more than some of his immediate predecessors. The importance of building a team of ambitious and capable cohorts is echoed by many other interviewees in the book. However, the point is that the outside world, beyond the realm of business biographies, rarely has the luxury of standing back and judging a career from such a distant perspective.

As we increasingly move to an era of quarterly reporting, careers are evaluated on much shorter time frames. It is rare to see chief executives walk this particular talk by leaving a substantial part of their equity in a business after they move on. Will King?

Leadership in the commercial world certainly requires heartfuls of moral courage, but since Carlos Criado-Perez stopped quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War to analysts, businessmen seem to have stopped borrowing much overtly from the experience of leadership in the military world.

Perhaps this is because of the wedge that the Government has driven between the self-supporting pyramid of state, people and armed forces. And also that few of this chief-executive generation have any military experience at all.

To put On Leadership in context, look at, for example, The Utility of Force by General Sir Rupert Smith, who has to be one of our foremost military intellects.

Discussion of leadership qualities is tangential to his main thesis. Nonetheless, it provides a window into the world of military decision-making that makes some of Lyons’ issues look like mere corner-shop trifles – in the military, the downside to a leader’s poor decisions is immeasurably greater.

Paul Smiddy, Head of retail research, HSBC

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