The Penalty of Leadership

One of the things I do as a result of my trivia habit is that I regularly visit web sites like “This Day in History,” which as you can guess is all about the things that have taken place on that date throughout history. A lot of times they will mine that site for potential questions for that night’s games.

So today I read a story about a fascinating man named Henry Leland. You may not recognize his name, but you know the companies he started. He was a businessman/engineer who was hired by Henry Ford Motor Co. to salvage what he could. Henry Ford had grown tired of investors telling him what to do, so he walked away to start Ford Motor Co. on his own. His investors at Henry Ford Motor Co. hired Leland to liquidate the factory. Instead, he convinced them to let him build cars there, and founded Cadillac on this day (August 22nd) in 1902. He was a demanding boss and insisted that his cars could not be just good enough, they had to excel. His cars were a huge success, such that the company was sold to GM, where he clashed with a board who did not share his vision of excellence. During this time he built the first water cooled V-8 engine, the one that powers most vehicles to this day.
He left GM when oddly enough they refused to help aid the US war effort in WWI (???). So he took over an aircraft engine plant right as the war was ending and turned to making luxury cars again, this time they were called Lincolns after his favorite president. Later an economic downturn forced him to sell out to Henry Ford. But here’s the interesting part.
During the internal debate at GM about whether or not to build his V-8 engine, Leland took out a full page ad in a January 1915 Saturday Evening Post called The Penalty of Leadership. It can stand as a manifesto for anybody who refuses to settle for good enough. But all I could think of reading it was that this is likely how Mitt Romney feels about his time at Bain Capital. This was written by a man who had scaled the summit and knew what it took to get there.


The Penalty of Leadership

In every field of human endeavor, he that is first must perpetually live in the white light of publicity. Whether the leadership be vested in a man or in a manufactured product, emulation and envy are ever at work. In art, in literature, in music, in industry, the reward and the punishment are always the same. The reward is widespread recognition; the punishment, fierce denial and detraction. When a man's work becomes a standard for the whole world, it also becomes a target for the shafts of the envious few. If his work be mediocre, he will be left severely alone -- if he achieves a masterpiece, it will set a million tongues a-wagging. Jealousy does not protrude its forked tongue at the artist who produces a commonplace painting. Whatsoever you write, or paint, or play, or sing, or build, no one will strive to surpass or to slander you unless your work be stamped with the seal of genius. Long, long after a great work or a good work has been done, those who are disappointed or envious, continue to cry out that it cannot be done. Spiteful little voices in the domain of art were raised against our own Whistler as a mountback, long after the big would had acclaimed him its greatest artistic genius. Multitudes flocked to Bayreuth to worship at the musical shrine of Wagner, while the little group of those whom he had dethroned and displaced argued angrily that he was no musician at all. The little world continued to protest that Fulton could never build a steamboat, while the big world flocked to the river banks to see his boat steam by. The leader is assailed because he is a leader, and the effort to equal him is merely added proof of that leadership. Failing to equal or to excel, the follower seeks to depreciate and to destroy -- but only confirms once more the superiority of that which he strives to supplant. There is nothing new in this. It is as old as the world and as old as human passions -- envy, fear, greed, ambition, and the desire to surpass. And it all avails nothing. If the leader truly leads, he remains -- the leader. Master-poet, master-painter, master-workman, each in his turn is assailed, and each holds his laurels through the ages. That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live -- lives.