It is one of the most studied and still least understood of human vocations. There are journals, degree programs, courses and endowed chairs in “leadership studies,” not to mention the number of workshops, seminars and motivational tours that take place yearly. There is a complex science of leadership—and more than a few how- to guides. In his classic text, published in 1978, James MacGregor Burns noted that “the crisis of leadership today is the mediocrity or irresponsibility of so many of the men and women in power, but leadership rarely rises to the full need for it. The fundamental crisis underlying mediocrity is intellectual.” Recalling our earlier discussion in Chapter 3 of Eisenhower's place within an Aristotelian world of utility and virtue, it is important to extend that discussion to both the essence and the exercise of superior, rather than mediocre, leadership.

Students of leadership generally approach it from the inside out: what qualities make a good leader? How do leaders acquire and improve these qualities? How do they inspire and compel followers? We know less about the middle ground between the two realms of leadership: individual and collective, and, therefore, about the people Burns called “secondary” and “tertiary figures” who play significant roles. Mostly we know about followership and its capacity to be inspired. Burns has written that the gap in scholarship on leaders and followers—he called it a “bifurcation”—is “one of the most serious failures in the study of leadership.” But no leader is omnipotent. Even the best must depend on others and not just their followers. How do leaders find the people they need at the right moments and how do they learn to use and trust them?

The basic qualities have already been mentioned: inspiration, persuasion, management. These have as much to do with the roles leaders choose to play as the roles imposed upon them by followers, and by the environments in which they interact. There is a fourth quality that envelops all three: affection. How do leaders wield that? How do they earn it? What makes a follower willing to follow, even to die, for another person telling him or her what to do? What makes a follower want to follow a leader?

Some of the answers may be found in a reconceptualization of leadership to include important elements of character building and volition.