Jonathan Gosling

Scarpino:      As I said when the recorder was off, I’m going to start by reading a statement and then we’ll move into the interview. Today is Thursday, November 7, 2024. My name is Philip Scarpino, Professor Emeritus of History at Indiana University, Indianapolis, and Director of Oral History for the Tobias Leadership Center also at IU Indianapolis. Today I have the privilege to be interviewing Jonathan Gosling at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association, which is taking place in the Hilton Hotel located in downtown, Chicago, Illinois.  This interview is a joint venture undertaken by the Tobias Leadership Center and the International Leadership Association.

In the interest of full disclosure, I note that as part of my background research, I talked to three of Jonathan Gosling’s professional colleagues:  Miriam Gage, Paul Regan, and Danica Purg. 

Jonathan Gosling holds an MBA from the University of London, UK, 1989. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, with a diploma in 1984. He has a BA with Honors in Developmental Studies from the University of East Anglia, UK, 1981.

His biography on the University of Exeter website explains that he was trained as an anthropologist and that he “worked for several years as a mediator in neighbourhood conflicts in London, founded the UK‘s first community mediation service and was the founding Secretary of the European Conference on Peacemaking and Conflict Resolution.”

After earning his MBA in 1989, he moved into a management education position at Lancaster University, UK.  He directed the MBA and ran various programs for British Airways and other major companies.

Areas of expertise include international and cross-cultural aspects of business management and leadership.

He is the author or coauthor of 9 books.  Most recently, Exploring Leadership:  Individual, Organizational, and Societal Perspectives, 2^nd Edition, Oxford Press, 2023, and also the author or co-author of 21 book chapters and more than 30 journal articles.

According to Research Gate, his 111 publications have been cited 3,996 times.

He has earned numerous awards and recognitions for his scholarship, a few of which include:

Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London, 2017-present

Academy of Management Learning and Education, Outstanding Paper, 2016

Fellow International Academy of Management, 2013

The recognition that brings us here today is the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the International Leadership Association.

                     With that brief introduction, I’m going to ask your permission to do several things. I’m going to ask your permission to record this interview, transcribe this interview, deposit the recording and the transcription in the IU Indianapolis Special Collections and Archives where they may be used by patrons including posting all or part of the recording and the transcription to the website of the IU Special Collections and Archives, also to deposit the recording and the transcription with the International Leadership Association and the Tobias Center where they may be used by patrons with the understanding that all or part may be posted to those organizations’ websites. Do I have your permission to record, transcribe, and deposit?  

Gosling:        You do. 

Scarpino:      Alright, I’m going to start by explaining for you and for anyone who uses this interview that I’m going to ask you some basic demographic questions and then some bigger picture questions about leadership. And then we’ll work our way more or less chronically through your career.

                     The Tobias Center has some standard leadership questions that help provide continuity over the years and among individuals, and I will ask you some of those questions. But I’ll add that part of the fun of doing interviews is that we know where we’re going to start, but we really don’t know where we’re going to end up. I’m going to ask you just basic demographic questions so we establish who you are. When and where were you born?

Gosling:        I was born in London in 1958. 

Scarpino:      Where did you grow up?

Gosling:        I grew up in northwest London, in Hampstead. 

Scarpino:      Do you have any brothers and sisters?

Gosling:        I’m the oldest of five siblings. I’ve got one sister and three brothers. 

Scarpino:      I want to ask you about your parents. What did your father do? What was his name and what did he do?

Gosling:        My father was Robert Gosling and he was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of cabinet makers who had become owners of a firm, a small business of cabinet makers. And he’d aspired, I think, or been expected to take on that firm, but in fact he won a series of scholarships to various -- well, eventually to medical school, became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst eventually. At the end of his career, he was what was then called Chairman of the Professional Committee of the Tavistock Clinic, which is probably the leading psychiatric clinic in the UK. 

Scarpino:      We’re going to talk about Tavistock later on. And your mom?

Gosling:        My mother became Veronica Gosling. She was born Veronica Henriques. She was a novelist, a journalist first, then a novelist. She published, I think, seven novels and, I think, one or two before she was married, and the rest she managed to write while she was raising five kids and looking after a very busy husband. 

Scarpino:      She should have gotten an award or combat pay or something.

Gosling:        I think she got several awards. She then, in later life, when he retired, she threw her energies into being an artist, a sculptor, which she still does in her 90s. 

Scarpino:      Still sculpting in her 90s, that’s a lot of work with the hands.

Gosling:        She’s given up her welding machine, but otherwise… 

Scarpino:      Can you say a few words about the impact that your parents had on raising the adult that you became? When you look back, what do you think about?

Gosling:        Yes, well I had a very privileged upbringing in many respects, most respects really, that they were -- my parents we a couple sort of united in the postwar enthusiasm for what might be done in a rebuilding of society, postwar society, the first really sort of reforming postwar labour government which introduced the National Health Service to which my father was very committed, and part of a generation that accepted that they would make sacrifices for their own privilege for the benefit of the whole and consider that itself something worth doing and proud to be involved with. And he was for his life very proud of that and the accomplishments of the Health Service. I think that sense of doing something valuable and worthwhile, not only for himself and pleasurable, interesting, and financially rewarding for himself and the family but also primarily sort of socially useful. So I think that was big. Another big part of my upbringing I think important in the adult I’ve become was because they had the five children --there were three of us, then a bit of a gap and another two. So at a critical time in my puberty and teens, my father was very, very busy, at the pinnacle of his career really, and my mother was really busy with the two much smaller brothers. They were babies, toddlers. So myself and my other two siblings were pretty much left to ourselves. On one hand, perhaps some sense of abandonment but also huge freedom to do what we wanted, to explore and explore ourselves as growing citizens in the marvelous opportunities of London. I think though that there are some other features. My mother had five children and published seven books and made countless sculptures and paintings because she’s a very restless soul. If she’s not busy making, doing, creating something from herself, she is a bit lost. And I think I sort of inherited, and perhaps as her first son, a sense that is inbuilt and a semiconscious feeling, really, that it’s my job to look after her, to keep her right when she falls in between her busyness. And this I think has had a big impact on perhaps the way I see and relate to women, particularly perhaps older women in my earlier life, and certainly it countered the sense of freedom I had in the world. As I said before, I do have a sense that I need to get home to check on Mum. And also, I think my father’s sense of duty came from a Nonconformist -- I suppose in America you would call it Presbyterian -- kind of background, but basically a sort of religiosity that highly values an ascetic, self-disciplined, self-aware kind of way of being in the world. At its best, it’s self-awareness and it’s a kind of stoic realism, but I think that perhaps growing up it struck me as a bit judgmental. And I think I’ve internalized a sense of authority figures, in some ways, as needing to be impressed or needing to be – they’re judgmental. My perception of them as potentially making judgments, which of course leaders have to do, somehow gets in the way of me being able to relate as an equal, in some ways, with authority figures since that incites in me always a kind of immature sort of oedipal frustration and rage which I have sometimes been better at managing than others.

Scarpino:      Probably better most times.

Gosling:        Well…

Scarpino:      As you look at your youth growing up in London, were there any other individuals that stand out as shaping your character?

Gosling:        Yeah, as a boy, I had some very close friends, other boys at school, at early school. It’s not right to name them here, but I can think of particularly three boys who were very close friends, very influential on what I did with my time. One was big and strong and physically very capable, more so than me, but he and I became an orienteering team and we won various championships.

Scarpino:      That’s sort of the cross-country with a map and all that?

Gosling:        Cross-country with a map.

Scarpino:      Compass and…

Gosling:        Reading the map and trying to figure out, you know, going through mud and over trees and whatever.

Scarpino:      I’ve done some of that.

Gosling:        Have you? Yeah, yeah. And that was a great relationship and friendship, and we’re still in touch. And a couple of others; one who came from a similar family, quite local, in the arts world, and I think I’ve always felt that he was a sort of internalized twin in some ways, that what I was feeling he would feel, and what he was feeling I would feel. Although we’ve lost touch pretty much the last -- not entirely -- several years. And someone else who was also Jewish. My mother is Jewish and comes from an Anglo-Jewish family, although it was never really an important identification except when sort of confronted with having to acknowledge it by antisemitism or something like that. But he was from a more sort of overt and probably practicing Jewish family, I think. But certainly he was a victim of really horrible antisemitic bullying at our primary school, and he and I were the only two Jews in the school. And we used to have to sit up in the balcony above the school hall while Christian prayers were going on. The head teacher, headmaster, every time he mentioned the terrible things that Jews had done to their beloved Jesus, they would point, you know, or I felt anyway, the finger and the gaze coming at us sitting up there. And although I somehow I think escaped the worst of the retribution for the sins of our forefathers, I think my other friend took that, and I always felt very powerless to help him in any way other than put my arms around his shoulders afterwards.

Scarpino:      Talking about your education, and keeping in mind that even though it’s the International Leadership Association, a lot of the users are Americans. You earned a BA with Honors in Developmental Studies, University of East Anglia in 1981. I note that that university was founded in 1963 as a public university. It’s located in Norwich, England, about 100 miles or 160 kilometers northeast of London. What is developmental studies?

Gosling:        When I was finishing up my high school or, as we call it, secondary school in the UK -- I think it’s a little different from the US system -- you have to select three subjects to do at A level. So you have to specialize quite early on, and it tends to be science or arts or some uncomfortable mix thereof; and I took biology, English, and history. And the biology I did, I think partly I did enjoy the systematic physical aspect of getting things onto a microscope slide and looking and drawing and counting and so on and seeing what would happen, but also I had a crush on the biology teacher. And so when I came to applying for university, I didn’t quite want to commit fully to biology, but I wanted something scientific, and biology was part of that. So I chose a degree that had an option for the three parts; economics, anthropology, and natural resource management. Between that and going to university, I went off and spent a year and a half -- worked first and earned some money and then spent a year and a half wandering around India and Pakistan and Nepal and so on, and Indonesia and Australia, and then came back. By then, when I came back to the university, I was much more interested in the human interaction and relationship and possibilities than whatever could be put under a microscope. So I did not pursue the natural environmental science part of that course and really stuck to the economics and anthropology, and gradually dropped the economics and focused on the anthropology.

Scarpino:      You went to India, Pakistan, Nepal; what do you remember about that experience? It must have been lifechanging for a young man from the UK.

Gosling:        Yes, I had a friend in school who was Pakistani and his family was from Pakistan, although I don’t think he’d spent much time there. He was brought up in London. But he went back to family in Karachi, in southern Pakistan, and really that was a sort of starting point for me. I thought ‘oh I’ll go visit him.’ So when I had earned enough money for my Pakistan International Airways flight, I went there. And then I kind of followed my nose from there. I went up to northern Pakistan. In those days, you could get up to Peshawar and to Swat, Chitral and places like that in the northwest frontier which are not really open to visitors now. And then I went across into India for a bit and then came and flew on from Karachi via -- visited friends of family friends I think in (inaudible) and then on to Australia where another school friend and my girlfriend at the time was, and was there I think for the maximum visa time you could have, earning a bit of money and visiting and traveling. And then came back via Indonesia. My girlfriend and I hitched a ride on a yacht. Somebody had built his boat and now he was sailing partly around Australia and then he wanted to go across to Japan, and we thought we’d go with him. But we found on the way that I think we weren’t suited to be hooked up in a cramped space on a boat, and he wasn’t really suited to having other people on his boat. So when we got to the Malaccan Islands, which is just across the Malaccan Sea, north of Darwin, we jumped ship. But there was a part of the world at that time and it was quite cut off because they -- and still now -- actually the Indonesian government was waging a sort of war of occupation in Irian Jaya, West Irian.

Scarpino:      Is it Wisteria?

Gosling:        Irian, West Irian.

Scarpino:      Irian, yeah.

Gosling:        Irian Jaya. It’s northern half of Papua, New Guinea.

Scarpino:      I’m thinking of the person who is going to transcribe this.

Gosling:        Oh, I’m sorry.

Scarpino:      So actually, with that in mind, you named some places in what you called the northwest frontier.

Gosling:        Yes.

Scarpino:      Could you name them again?

Gosling:        Yes. Swat Valley, S-W-A-T. And Chitral, C-H-I-T-R-A-L.

Scarpino:      Alright, the transcriber will be blessing you for that.

Gosling:        Yeah, and the cities of Peshawar and Lahore, which are significant. But yeah, so we stayed there. We were really taken in and looked after by a network of Catholic priests on those islands who had come to evangelize and was missionaries to there after the second World War. Many of them had been sort of in the Hitler Youth and caught up in all those terrible events and I think had found a place away from all of that to reconcile in some ways. Very interesting, very, very interesting bunch of people. One of them was Dutch, really took us in and helped us find a way to contribute to the local schools’ education. We taught English. In fact, I learned sufficient Bahasa Indonesia, the lingua franca for the Indonesian Islands, not the local Malacca dialect. I translated some parts of I think Romeo and Juliet into Bahasa and we…

Scarpino:      And the name again is Bahasa?

Gosling:        B-A-H-A-S-A.

Scarpino:      Thank you.

Gosling:        That’s the language they speak in Indonesia, Bahasa. It’s roughly Indonesian and Malaysian at the same, so it’s just referred to as Bahasa, but it is slightly different. And yeah, so we were three months there, and that was a big experience. But by that time, I’d missed the chance to come back to university for my deferred entry. So I had to defer another year, which was all done by airmail letters in those days. Very tenuous communication. So, anyway, I took another six months to get back and various other adventures.

Scarpino:      It sounds like a great adventure.

Gosling:        It was a great adventure, yeah.

Scarpino:      You have a diploma from the Royal Society of Arts, London. Can you explain what the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturing, and Commerce is?

Gosling:        Well, in this context, it’s an accreditation body that pays attention to training in practical and artistic aesthetic skills. The Royal Society of Arts is in fact also a fellowship of people who take a sort of active role in civic life. One part of their operations -- I’m not sure it’s still really part of the same organization anymore – was to accredit these various things. And I did that qualification in adult literacy education. When I finished my degree, I went off sailing for a bit and wondered what to do with my life, came back with the girl I met who later became my wife and we brought up our children together, I was really not sure at all what I wanted to do at that time, and managed to get a job in adult literacy, which I loved.

Scarpino:      And you are a sailor.

Gosling:        And I am a sailor. I kept with the sailing, yeah.

Scarpino:      I’ve been to the Wooden Boat School.

Gosling:        Have you?

Scarpino:      My wife taught there, my ex-wife. I went there as a hanger-on, but we did a lot of sailing.

Gosling:        Yeah, wow.

Scarpino:      Although nobody would trust me alone with a boat, and they shouldn’t. So, you earned your B.A. in 1981 and then you moved to London. Why did you decide to move to London?

Gosling:        I got the B.A., then with a bunch of pals bought an old boat. We repaired it, sailed down to Spain, this, that, and the other, and had various other adventures there. And at some point, I’d kind of run out of steam from wandering, but also I received a letter from my father being curious. I think probably he was being curious about how life is living on a boat with not much to do other than boat and constantly repairing it, of course, and so on, and didn’t I want to do something with all those ideas I’d been so excited about while at university? But I read it as a sort of admonition, and I thought ‘oh I’d better go back and get on with something.’ So we came back. That was the context in which I came back, got involved in adult literacy and adult education.

                     Should I just carry on answering the question before you ask the next question, or shall I carry on with a narrative?

Scarpino:      Go ahead.

Gosling:        Yeah, we came back to England and I tried various ways of making a living, selling bits and pieces that I was importing from India in local markets and things like that, and then at some point went back to London during the Notting Hill Carnival, which is a long-established sort of festival mainly dominated by West Indian and Caribbean culture and music. And it was so exciting and enlivening. I thought ‘oh I’ve got to come back to London,’ and so we did that. So that’s when I got that job. And then I met with up with – I think introduced by my father probably to some former colleagues of his who were running an organization called OPUS, which stands for an Organization for Promoting Understanding in Society, O-P-U-S. They were devising a way of using a psychoanalytic stance in relation to the social experience, the communal experience of people living in society, reflecting on that experience, talking about it in a rather open associative free-flowing way in specifically convened events they called listening posts. And I went to some of those and found it so a kind of rounded, fulfilling experience to be in one of these listening posts where parts of my experience that I didn’t really notice that I had been experiencing them, but when I found them, picked up or somehow linked to maybe not in any direct mechanistic way, but some associative connection with other people’s experience, I would think my goodness there are things going on, there are things going on in society that we’re picking up on that are not reducible to a formulation. And I found I think that the kind of way of thinking I’d developed through the anthropology studies, through my traveling and perhaps through sitting on the boat and watching the stars and sort of sensing the waves and the wind, all that sort of way of being seemed to come together in a way that felt self-evidently valuable in itself. And after a few months – I don’t know how long it was now – one of the people convening it, Eric Miller, who at that point was director of the group relations training program at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, had been invited by Paul Regan, who you spoke to, to consult to a new initiative they were taking.

Scarpino:      He’s a Methodist minister.

Gosling:        He’s a Methodist minister, yeah, and an Anglican minister in the London Borough of Newham -- had heard about something going on in parts of the US where people would bring the resolution of community conflicts into the community. They found mechanisms for these to be addressed there rather than being over to the courts or to the police or external authorities. But a sense that our conflicts are about us, about how we work together; and although we may want to resort to a kind of dependent attitude to the system, the state, to bring justice, more often than not these conflicts we’re talking about are actually expressing frustration with poor housing, poor insulation with racial injustices, and sort of abandonment by the state and public transportation and various other things that gets expressed in fights with each other because your neighbors are the closest to fight with. So they invited me to initially coordinate some listening posts or something similar to try and see if there was enough interest in the community around about to invent something. And I think one of the great things that Eric Miller did was to say, “Well, we’ve seen some of these projects and schemes happening in the US, which are adapted for this, this gives us a hint that something could be done. But we’re our own place so we’re not going to bring a solution from anywhere else and impose it here. Let’s take this as a clue that something can be understood and made new, but let’s do it for ourselves.” And then we – he designed, really, and Paul Regan and Steven (inaudible) devised a way of listening, involving and just kind of doing various sort of group relationship type events, where we would see where people’s allegiances and alliances were, what people’s assumptions were about themselves and their own authority they had to take positions on different parts of their lives and where -- what we would now call intersections of solidarity that wove in different ways to the more obvious matters of gender or race and so on, and age and ethnicity. And so as we evolved that, I was just learning hugely about the amazing totality of these very subtle ways of working. It was very exciting, a very exciting time.

Scarpino:      Ways of working with community organizations and groups?

Gosling:        Yeah, community organizations and individuals and groups of people who are activists or animated by a sense of the injustice they were suffering or the possibilities they could envision or whatever it was, a huge range of motives that people had for being involved. We started off thinking this would be called a mediation scheme because we thought we would be providing a center hub for a service, a mediation service. But we shifted quite quickly toward saying no what we’re really interested in and what we want to focus on is conflict. And the aspect we’re about is how conflicts can be released into constructive change. So we called the thing the Conflict and Change project. Paul Regan was the founding chairman, chairman for many years, and I was the coordinator.

Scarpino:      The Conflict and Change project, was that your idea?

Gosling:        It was, well, it grew out of all that work. I think it was really Paul Regan’s initial intuition that something could be done, Eric Miller’s understanding of a method, and my youthful energy and the hard work of convening people and finding places to meet.

Scarpino:      Youthful energy matters, doesn’t it?

Gosling:        Youthful energy matters, yeah. And it grew. It grew from initially a couple of days for a few weeks, and then three days a week, and then full time and my whole life for several years.

Scarpino:      We’re going to talk in a few minutes about how pioneering and cutting edge that was. But you moved to London, or you lived in London. You mentioned the part of London that you lived in. What was the demographic makeup?

Gosling:        Hampstead, London NW 3, which is a part of the postcode, what you call a ZIP code. NW3, northwest 3.

Scarpino:      I want to ask you a question just to get oriented. I know where Parliament is in London. So if I was standing…

Gosling:        Pretty much due north.

Scarpino:      Due north of there, okay, alright, thank you.

Gosling:        So if go north from there, you venture up (inaudible) Road, you come into Camden and Camden Town, you keep going north and you come to Belsize Park and Hampstead. Hampstead Heath is up there.

Scarpino:      Thank you.

Gosling:        So it was just around the corner from the house inhabited -- where John Keats lived. It’s still called Keats House, where he supposedly wrote much of his most famous poem.

Scarpino:      And what I was asking you is what was the demographic makeup there?

Gosling:        What we would call in Britain at that time middle class, definitely. There were mostly white sort of fine houses, not grand. There were some ground houses. There were quite a lot of large, probably early 20^th century tenement buildings, apartment blocks in various parts of it. And we lived on a street that had mainly Georgian terraced houses which was very lovely.

Scarpino:      And these are real Georgian, not what we call Georgian in the United States.

Gosling:        They were built during the reign of King George III, yeah.

Scarpino:      Right. So how about the racial makeup, or ethnic makeup?

Gosling:        Well, definitely Caucasian, mostly Caucasian. Increasingly through the 1960s and ‘70s, more people were coming from India and from the West Indies. There was also quite a large Jewish population. Again, it was not a center of Hasidic Judaism but of Anglo -- Sigmund Freud settled just up the hill, and the Freud Museum was there. And the Tavistock Clinic moved there when they moved out of Tavistock Square and settled in Swiss Cottage, which is just over the hill. And of course, that kind of European Jewish, it imports to development of psychoanalysis invention. This was important, and so a lot of that happened there.

Scarpino:      You talked about the fact that you moved to London and you explained why. When you finally decided to do that, what did you hope to accomplish? Or what did you expect you would accomplish?

Gosling:        Well, I think I was very intrigued and, yes, hopeful. I think that’s a good word, what I hoped. I was very hopeful that we could find ways to address matters that would erupt into conflict but to do other things with that energy. And sometimes I think we were successful in helping that happen. So things like -- and through the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and it was the time when there was a very tangible reduction in expenditure on public services, public goods, and a reduction -- a deregulation in terms of labor laws and so on; much freer for capitalist people who owned capital shares and things to increase their share of the surplus value created by work, and a much more tenuous, intentionally tenuous and precarious kind of life for working people and people who had nothing, just (inaudible) labor. And so at that time, the sense of sort of social solidarity was under attack really by these changes, and it was very destructive of community because people more and more were expected to just suddenly get up and go and look for a job somewhere else. So communities that had a sense of being able to look after each other, that went. Also, the earlier postwar waves of immigration from Europe -- people who had come and settled into the East End of London -- moved out into that area. Some of the former white working class, many of whose houses had been destroyed in the war, and those communities had been reconstituted, didn’t really solidify, and the old world was destroyed. It was heavily bombed.

Scarpino:      Your parents lived through the Blitz?

Gosling:        Well, they didn’t. They were out in other places. They weren’t in London at that time. But that area had been destroyed. And so it was, in any case, a place with a sort of memory, and pockets of tremendous long-lasting solidarity, pockets of new immigrants coming with a great energy and drive to make something of this opportunity, but really rather little that would hold it all together. And this -- Paul Regan, who started this thing up, his name sort of core project was something called the Newham Community Renewal Project which had sponsored a whole raft of activities.

Scarpino:      The Newman Community?

Gosling:        Newham.

Scarpino:      Newham, okay.

Gosling:        The Newham, it was the London Borough of Newham. They were very active with refugees, Asian refugees from Uganda who were being horribly oppressed by Idi Amin’s regime. And again, (inaudible) because they had rights to come to Britain as a former…

Scarpino:      He was systematically abusing and driving Asians of Uganda.

Gosling:        Yes, he was.

Scarpino:      That’s for the benefit of the recording.

Gosling:        Systematically, unequivocally, intentionally, yeah.

Scarpino:      He was an awful man.

Gosling:        He was terrible.

Scarpino:      It’s not a hard call to make.

Gosling:        No. You want to get out of that. And Paul and the renewal program really put a lot of effort into trying to make a welcoming place, running English language classes and helping people get established in all sorts of ways. So that was part of the context. So I was hopeful of, enthusiastic about finding ways to reconstitute a sense of community in something new that was emerging, being formed, and to be part of that. I think I was sometimes very enthusiastic about the possibility of the sort of techniques that we developed, the techniques of holding a process through which people would be listened to and responded to by us as the staff and volunteers of Conflict and Change, but also by the people they felt were a great enemy towards or thought that they were out to get them or something. So it was the possibility of listening and hearing and understanding. And I think we did develop techniques that have actually been integral to almost all the management leadership development work I’ve done since then, probably.

Scarpino:      As you look back, are you surprised that listening, hearing and understanding appeared to be in short supply until you and your colleague, Paul Regan, were on the ground there working in the community?

Gosling:        What a great question. I think that there were a number of places and opportunities at which people could be heard. But I think Paul and his colleagues had been active in several of them. There was a strong interfaith movement where people of faith would go to each other’s temples, gurudwaras, mosques, churches, chapels and so forth and experience each other’s spirituality, and in that context became very good at listening and being heard. But that, of course, was not open to everybody, or you had to sort of hold some goodwill toward others to do it or to invite them into your place. And people who got in – you know, the person on the other side of that war is without doubt maliciously intending to do the worst they can to me in every move they make. The only place to go had felt to be somewhere that would escalate it or something that would be taken to the law or whatever, or to my brothers or the mob who is on my side or whatever. So I don’t think there was anywhere else that didn’t have an ulterior motive in the conflict rather than the resolution.

Scarpino:      You mentioned Margaret Thatcher a minute ago. For the benefit of the people who look at this who are not from the UK, I’m going to put a little bit of information in here, knowing full well that you know this better than I do. When you went to London in 1981, in 1979 the British government had began about 18 years of rule by the Conservative Party. In 1979 to 1990, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Conservative Party, replaced the Labour Party’s James Callaghan. In 1990, John Major, also a leader in the Conservative Party, replaced Margaret Thatcher and served as prime minister from 1990 to 1997. And I’ll add that there’s a bit of a parallel with the US where we had a Republican, Ronald Reagan, who served as US president from 1981 to 1989, and then followed by George H. W. Bush, who was there from 1989 to 1993. For the benefit of anybody who listens to this or reads the transcript who is not British, could you briefly say what the Conservative Party was about in the 1990s, realizing that that could be somebody’s dissertation, but just a quick intro.

Gosling:        Yes, well, I think the 1980s is really when it – under Thatcher. When she came in, she was determined, for all kinds of good reasons and bad, to break an existing sort of set of assumptions about how industry, industrial policy, economics, and political, public policy would be made, which is that it would be made by consensus through the organizations representing labor, the trade unions, the Trade Unions Congress and those representing employers. And this really was a consensus that had been part of what had developed the National Health Service, the welfare state and so on, but it had become sclerotic and unable to cope with changes in technology and industrial development and so on. So she came with a very clear sense that the state cannot guide and plan the economy, that the market must be given free reign, that entrepreneurs are the main engine and driver of innovation and eventually wealth creation, that the infrastructure that previously had been thought to be absolutely inherent to the state’s fulfilling its responsibility to citizens, like provision of water, railways, electricity and so on, should be privatized and would thereby become more efficient, would generate capital that would be reinvested and so on. She also wanted to remove trade barriers as far as she could. She was a great advocate of the European Union joining the Common Market, particularly the Common Market, not so much the governmental side, and so freed up the movement of capital which until then had been quite regulated. So I think probably an assumption of the day is that all these piles of money, particularly coming from the Middle East generated from some of the oil, would pour into the country and fund all this enterprise that was going to take place. I think probably they were surprised by how much of that money instead went into land, property, which was unproductive; and how much of the Britain money went out into the emerging dynamic markets in Southeast Asia, in particular. And when foreign money came in, it was often buying these infrastructures, the electricity, water, railway and so on, and was not really driving innovation in the country but was extracting rents at the highest rate you could and running those facilities into the ground. She also felt that a key engine of -- and this was widely felt I think in the Conservative Party -- key engine of sort of social energy and drive, but also responsibility was not a shared community but property ownership, that a person or family that owned their own home would be responsible for their home. They might be in competition with others, but that competition would sum up to a general progress. And she and her government mandated the sale of publicly-owned social housing on very favorable terms to the current residents, which became in due course a kind of market, they were sold on to landlords. It really was a dramatic turnaround. Many of those people who had been renting social housing all their lives, sometimes second generation, became property owners. Many of them now, sort of my generation and a bit older, are now dying, moving on, and their children are in line to inherit. Although, in fact, because the rundown in the public sector has been so severe from then onwards, the inheritance taxes are going up so the state is clawing it back again by other means.

Scarpino:      Based on your understanding of leaders, how do you rate Margaret Thatcher as a leader?

Gosling:        Oh, well, in some ways, she was really outstanding. She was the first woman to be a leader of a major political party in the UK, first woman prime minister. She really articulated and brought discipline into a party that was really very associated with landed wealth into a focus on capitalist enterprise, innovation and entrepreneurship. The ideal that she generated of the enterprising mindset was really something -- well, I wouldn’t say it was new in a sense; it was brought back from the mid 19^th century which is what dominated actually the Whig party more than the Tories in the 19^th century. And she brought discipline to the party. She brought a sense of enthusiasm and a newly articulated position and rationale. So often where there’s sort of political ideologies, simplistic, just couldn’t hold up in the long term because the world is more complicated than that. People don’t all fall into line and so on. But she was definitely a powerful and significant force in the emergence of what’s become modern Britain.

Scarpino:      You make a distinction between leader and leadership. How did 18 years of conservative rule in the UK impact leadership?

Gosling:        That long stretch in the ‘80s and ‘90s, you mean?

Scarpino:      Yes.

Gosling:        Well, first of all, we had a taste of a charismatic, sort of potent leader in Margaret Thatcher, which we then -- As the complexities and the impossibility of really holding together (inaudible) responding to nationwide challenges without the wherewithal of the social infrastructure and mindset of the money began to fall apart and she was removed by other people in her party. And as you mentioned, the other prime ministers who came afterwards, who were not so stringently Thatcherite in a way, were more ameliorative, I guess, more compromising in many of those ways. And I think that, although less dramatic, in some ways more humane, more sagacious, more negotiated.

Scarpino:      You’re talking about John Major?

Gosling:        John Major in particular, yes. And James Callaghan. He was on the Labour side. We then had a group of people who went back to something less strident and less monomaniacal. So perhaps what one might say looking back is during the Thatcherite years, the focus on the leader became much stronger than it was later on in the subsequent 10 years. It returned with Tony Blair and then less so, actually came back again under Boris Johnson more recently.

Scarpino:      Tony Blair was a Labour Party?

Gosling:        He was a Labour Party, yeah, who succeeded a long run of conservative government. But I think what I’m not saying is it’s not that we had leaders and then we had leadership; it’s that leadership was exercised more through the prominent position of a charismatic leader with a sort of ideology, and also a kind of desire in the population for that simplicity because things had gotten complicated and stuck before her.

Scarpino:      We’re seeing that now, aren’t we?

Gosling:        Indeed we are.

Scarpino:      We talked some about your early career, early employment in London, 1982 to ’88. And again, I talked to Paul Regan who was kind enough to share information with me. You served as coordinator of the Conflict and Change project. As I understand the situation, the increasing use of larger and larger oceangoing freighters made it impossible for these ships to go as far up the Thames as freighters had formerly gone, which meant that the docks and dock workers and all that were suddenly out of business or out of work, and that this situation was compounded by a rising level of immigration. Is that a fair short summary?

Gosling:        It is.

Scarpino:      So you’re working in this Conflict and Change project. I asked you if you were the primary creator of that, and I think you agreed that you were. I mean, certainly you had lots of help and there were other people involved. And we talked about the purpose of Conflict and Change, but do you want to add anything to that, the purpose of the Conflict and Change project?

Gosling:        Well, just to say that as we were developing the services that this was providing -- the mediation, the conflict resolution services of various kinds -- we also developed a service to consult to corporations and public services who often dealt with conflict; so, housing services, social services, legal advice and so on. So we developed a sort of consulting to the institutions on how these organizations might provide the kind of context in which their management and their staff could more creatively and productively respond to all the emotions that go with conflict and the presentation of a problem as if it had never been conflictual and how they might reframe it. And we also developed another side of that, which is training in skills, techniques, methods. And these two operations never really took off as businesses in a sort of commercial way that we had hoped they might. But I learned a lot from trying to think how might we engage in this activity with a different kind of business model, rather than one that would be funded by philanthropists and local government; something that could have customers who would pay for this advice or this training. And that was really where I felt I was just not up to the job of managing all those people and activities, but also I think managing two very different business models, probably three different models, within the same little head of mine. That was one of the things that really was what led me to go on and do an MBA after that, hoping to solve the problem.

Scarpino:      The different business models were what?

Gosling:        The Conflict and Change project was funded by the local authority, local government, and various philanthropic organizations who valued and wanted to contribute to community building. And that was really the focus and the rationale for people giving us their money, that by addressing conflicts in these ways we would be reconstituting and rebuilding, strengthening the community. The consultancy service was helping institutions think about how they manage themselves in ways that would be more conflict-aware and more creative and constructive in the way they respond to conflict, was an advisory service. So that was charged on a day rate for people with significant expertise to help at an institutional or organizational development level respond to that. And the training service was training people in skills for holding meetings, listening carefully, enabling other people to listen to each other, and processes.

Scarpino:      These are the people living in the community?

Gosling:        People living in the community, yes. So these are all people who had been working with us, some of them had been clients, as it were, through the mediation service and had got interested and skillful and engaged in these issues. So part of it was that it would also provide employment, that this growing expertise would be an avenue to employment for people and creating jobs, and that we would also be able to sustain the whole thing, a little bit less dependent on outside philanthropy.

Scarpino:      Who made up the main constituency of Conflict and Change?

Gosling:        We had a staff, a small secretariate. It varied in size, I can’t remember now, somewhere between six and 12 people I suppose most of the time. But we also had at least 40, sometimes more, people who were volunteers, who were contracted some days a week and some who were paid sessionally to do various of these things. So the only external people from outside the area were those; Eric Miller and two or three other consultants working through the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations who over the years continued to help us think about what we were doing.

Scarpino:      Who was Eric Miller?

Gosling:        Eric Miller had been an anthropologist in Berma during the war, became very involved in the group relations movement, which is a longer story to recount, but worked at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and was directing an annual conference called the Leicester Conference, a working conference, which is where he had met the aforementioned Paul Regan.

Scarpino:      Right. Paul Regan told me that what you were doing there with Conflict and Change was the first community mediation scheme in the UK.

Gosling:        It was.

Scarpino:      Is that accurate?

Gosling:        It is, yes.

Scarpino:      At the time that you were doing this, did you realize that you were on the frontier, so to speak?

Gosling:        Yes, we did. Well, we knew there wasn’t anybody else doing it, and we managed to generate interest in some other London boroughs where people tried to do things. But again, we were supportive of them, not just doing what we did, but figuring out what was their own process for their areas, because these places are quite different in a lot of ways. And somebody in the Home Office got interested in this. They were really interested in this as it might be a way to divert time-wasting domestic or neighbor disputes from the courts into some other kind of alternative dispute resolution process. And the Home Office is a government department concerned with policing, law, internal policy and so forth. That person really took it on as more than a sort of policy question and became a great and very effective advocate of community mediation throughout UK and set up an organization called Mediation UK. He was subcommitteed  from the Home Office to run it for the first few years and it was very important and effective, became very widespread throughout the UK. And even still now there are community mediation services that derived from that initiative. But also, we came to the States. We were given some money, and myself and one of the volunteers from Newham, we toured around various community mediation alternative dispute resolution services, particularly in New York. I think we came to Chicago. We also went to Cleveland where there was very interesting work. We went to San Francisco community boards and a number of places and learned a lot from it.

Scarpino:      Again, when I talked to Paul Regan, he talked to me about rising conflict and violence in the areas of London in which you were working.

Gosling:        Yeah.

Scarpino:      Is that an assessment that you agree with?

Gosling:        Yes.

Scarpino:      What was going on to precipitate this rising conflict and violence?

Gosling:        Well, I think I’ve mentioned some of the dynamics that were taking place in the community in the sense of fragility of people’s lives and circumstances that made it very difficult for them to sort of stomach some of the changes and felt under threat. The feeling of threat was very prevalent. Also, I think police services were not really prepared for new incoming forms of organized crime and of youths, new gangs, new kinds of gangs moving into the area, and they didn’t have same existing relationships with inroads in to. So policing became much harder, more sort of distant, policing the other rather than people much like them, often their own similar kinds of backgrounds. Also, the overt and covert insipient racism in some police, probably most police services, but also in many other aspects of institutional life.

Scarpino:      So police were largely white?

Gosling:        Police were largely white.

Scarpino:      And the constituency was transitioning away from that.

Gosling:        Was changing, was transitioning. And there were a number of instances, there new laws brought in that gave the police the rights to stop and search people if the police were suspicious. And they seemed to often feel much more suspicious of young black men than they did of young white men, and of Asian origin and so on. By Asian in the UK, we usually mean South Asia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. And so the sense of being singled out as victims. Also, access to higher education, universities, jobs, I think I’m right saying that in the ‘80s something like only 14% of school leaders, of people who did high school would go on to university in the UK.

Scarpino:      Gee.

Gosling:        It was a very sort of exclusive kind of thing. And one of the major reforms coming from the Labour government in the 1990s was a huge expansion of higher education. I mean, people went to colleges, they did forms of education that were effective in all sorts of ways, but they were lower in status and in terms of lifelong earnings potential, much lower. It’s true that life chances were worse if you were not part of the established elites.

Scarpino:      We talked about how you went about carrying out community-based work in that increasingly difficult environment. As you move forwarded with your life and your career - you went on for an MBA and we’ll talk about that – how did the experience doing that kind of community-engaged work influence the rest of your life and career?

Gosling:        I think it’s been absolutely formative. I learned a lot about myself, but I learned also about ways of working, but from a level of basic skills. Very often when I’m running leadership development work, I integrate into it exercises, activities that I learned in that setting because in the end it’s really about listening, understanding, appreciating and getting to a place where people involved can really have an internal sense that they are mobilizing their own internal authority, their authorship, their voice, their creativity into this next action I’m going to take. They may feel, of course, their options are limited and so on, but nonetheless, this is what I’m doing. Or if I’m going to resist something, I understand, I don’t think this is right to do that. So that ability to see within one’s self rather than sort of acting out, out of fear, anxiety, all the other things. So that sense of finding one’s self and finding the ability to mobilize one’s own authority is central to my understanding of leadership.

Scarpino:      Do you think that one of the measures of successful community-engaged work is figuring out how to mobilize that sense of authority and engagement?

Gosling:        Yes, I do. So that’s the kind of internal orientation and one’s own knowledge that you have the power to choose to do this, these things.

Scarpino:      And part of what you were doing was showing people that they had that power to choose.

Gosling:        Yes, and it’s part of what I’m still doing, is reminding people.

Scarpino:      Absolutely true.

Gosling:        And also, then finding ways to give or to construct the narrative, the storyline that we’re part of together, which we each -- what makes an ‘us’ out of doing this. One of the things that I became quite caught up with in doing this mediation thing is that when we were running a mediation service, we were being a service, someone would come ring up or turn up on the doorstep and say, “I’m in conflict with my neighbor,” or “Our group, our football group, we keep getting moved on by the police. We can’t take it anymore,” or whatever. The police would come and say, “We’ve got this bunch of louts who hang around and say they’re playing football but they’re not; they’re taking drugs and abusing people,” or whatever. Whatever it was, people would come and tell their story, and our response would be, “Okay, thank you very much. Let me get out my case form and fill in – so what is it you’re saying?” So I say, “Right now, let’s go see who is the other side and have a word with them and see what they make of all this.” In some instances the ideal model would be, well, let’s all eventually get together in a room and say, “What’s your side of the story? What’s your side? What happened and what didn’t happen? And now how do we want to move on from this?” And I began to realize that this whole orchestration of events, from our point of view, this was the whole thing. This was the mediation. This is what we were there to do. But from the point of the parties, this was just one of many, many things going on in their lives. Probably particularly an example of a group of young men and the police, this is only one of their many interactions. So I framed this, I wrote a little piece about it at the time, with the help actually of a chap from Pennsylvania, Paul Wahrhaftig, who was a great mediator and peacemaker, Quaker, and sort of a supporter in all this. And he realized that the kind of narrative that we were telling ourselves on the project was sort of something like a sort of rom-com, a sort of romantic comedy or something in which we would figure out the rising tension. There are these two characters. There’s the Montagues and the Capulets who are locked in age-long generational conflict and now we’re going to run this amazing event and there will be a sort of climactic mediation event following which things would all settle down and there would be a new peace after that, and the case closed, done. That’s what we want to be evaluated on.

Scarpino:      It didn’t work that way, did it?

Gosling:        Life isn’t like that. It’s like that within the framework of a romantic comedy or action movie, a James Bond kind of thing. And it made us feel good when it happened, but it very seldom worked like that. So I began to see that the whole thing is really much more like a soap opera in which people are involved, there are multiple plot lines going on, and people interact in all sorts of ways, and there are subplots. Okay, so this conflict is a subplot of all the life going on they’re involved in. And there may be some climactic moments. But while we’re having our mediation session, likely as not, some of those lads are out there leaking something from the police car or whatever. You know, so much for peace.

Scarpino:      I want to ask you a question that popped into my head while you were talking about rising levels of immigration. I’m going to give this some context by saying that my ancestors are from Italy. I visited several times. And one of the things that I remember seeing in Italian towns were black males from Africa. They had come to Italy with the hope of a better life, but they didn’t speak the language and they couldn’t work so they were hanging out in the parks and stuff. When I hear you talk about immigration in London, I’m seeing that in my head, that people are coming in from various parts of Asia, they don’t speak English and the young men can’t find work. So they turn to getting in trouble or whatever they’re going to do. Is that kind of what’s going on?

Gosling:        Well, I think that’s part of it. It was a bit different. There were so many different groups of people coming with rather different expectations. Quite a lot of people coming from the West Indies were coming with very good English and professional trained nurses, doctors, teachers and so on, who had come expecting to move into those kinds of jobs here but were excluded from them because of racism basically, because the existing white institutions couldn’t think of putting a black person in front of their class, or something like that. And so they came initially not feeling lost; they were actually invited because there was a labor shortage. They were invited to come, but then when they arrived here found that the population, or many in the population, wouldn’t make space for them and didn’t want them. And their children then grew up with a different kind of accommodation for how to find a place in this society that has been so awful to our parents. And then there are other people coming from… It really is refugees from places like Uganda from the African war in Nigeria, from Bangladesh, the various wars that split east and west Pakistan and then within Bangladesh. So there were waves of people who were really coming as refugees, they’d lost everything. And many of them had been through an English language education school, education, based on a British model. And although particularly at that early stage a lot of people came with English, particularly the men. There were a lot of women who in those countries had not been able to get access to education. But also coming from the wars, there were many more rural people who hadn’t had the education, so that brought a different kind of problem. So I think that the experiences were varied in that sense. And of course the Ugandan Asians, refugees from Idi Amin’s regime, many of them were very successful businesspeople and had been running international trading businesses. One of the reasons there was so much resentment to them was that they often filled the middleman role merchants, and the primary producers in an agricultural and mining economy felt that too much of the profit was going to the middlemen and to the merchants. And so that sort of was used to feed the resentment. Some of them came with money, but of course there were lots who didn’t, so it was varied.

Scarpino:      When you were doing this work in London, did you think of yourself as a leader?

Gosling:        No, I didn’t think of myself as a leader. I thought of myself as coordinator. We had a discussion at some point about where my title should be director of the project. I was keen on it at some level, a sort of sense of authority and being sort of chief, chiefness, being the chief, but I couldn’t really think what is it I’m directing. But I thought coordinator was actually a more accurate description of what I’m doing. I definitely thought of myself as being part of a small group of people who were at the forefront of this way of thinking and providing these sort of activities and services in the UK. Certainly, when the Home Office got involved, I think probably I was seen as, in some senses, representing this initiation. I think if I was to say who was the leader in it, I would look to Paul Regan because I think it was his vision, his sense that there’s something to be done here. Also, as chair of the board, he really took a lot of the risk, legal risk.

Scarpino:      Chair of the board of…?

Gosling:        The Conflict and Change project.

Scarpino:      I’m going to ask you some direct leadership-related questions. None of these are intended to insult your intelligence. How do you define or explain leadership?

Gosling:        Well, they are two different things, defining and explaining.

Scarpino:      Let’s do them one at a time. I know, I really asked you two questions. How do you define leadership?

Gosling:        Well, I find it quite difficult to define. Of course, this is the thing; the more you study something, the more difficult it becomes to say what it is you’re studying because it sort of evaporates in front of you.

Scarpino:      I understand.

Gosling:        I could easily define history. You’d probably find it quite difficult.

Scarpino:      Well, you know, I’ve got the elevator definition that everybody has for what they do.

Gosling:        Yeah, yeah. Okay, so in the book we did, we kind of said the key aspect of leadership is influence. It’s about influencing other people, their thoughts, their beliefs, their priorities, where they direct their energy. It’s about influencing public mood, about influencing the way markets are going, the way thinking and action is shifting in all kinds of ways. But of course to say it’s a social process of influencing, which is how I think we ended up defining it in the book, is really unsatisfactory because there are so many other social processes of influencing. So what sets leading and leadership apart from other social processes by which influence is exerted on the way things turn out? And I think what sets it apart are a number of things. One of them is, as I referred to before, this aspect of taking authority, taking one’s authority to say “make it thus.” You’ll know, as a sailor and navigator, that this is the traditional phrase when navigating by dead reckoning before GPS came in and you’d have to work out…

Scarpino:      There was a world before GPS, wasn’t there?

Gosling:        … how far have we gone, how much do you think we’re slipped sideways, what do we think the current is doing here, if that star we glimpsed between the clouds is what we think it is, we’re probably there, we’re somewhere within that circle. Then at some point, the navigator says, “Right, make it thus. Let’s say we’re there.” It might not be, but… and I think that is a leadership role; you have to say, “We don’t know where we are very accurately, but this is going to help us make sense of where we are and where we’re going, make it thus.”

Scarpino:      So leadership really is -- part of it is helping people make sense of their circumstances.

Gosling:        It’s making sense of their circumstances and it’s making a strong claim on sometimes rather weak evidence about the nature of the problem we’re in or the predicament we’re in and being able to carry that claim through into an articulated argument to a shared perception and agreement that, yes, we will make it thus.

Scarpino:      That’s hard.

Gosling:        That’s hard, yeah.

Scarpino:      I asked you about leadership. How do you explain leader, because you make a distinction in your work.

Gosling:        Yeah, well, I think that social process can be done at a more negotiated, emerging interpersonal group-based collaborative way. It can come from backroom chats. It can come from formal meetings and agreements and treaties. It can come from all kinds of places; email, text messaging going on behind the back of the chair. All of those things contribute to leadership in a sense of, okay, we make it thus. But in some other circumstances, a person emerges or asserts themself and says, “I’m going to take a lead on this.” And there are some situations in which that is more self-evidently helpful than others. And sometimes it’s done partly because of the person, but sometimes it’s done because the anxiety about these emerging processes becomes so high that there’s a sort of flight to dependency, and various other things which we might come back to when we talk more about examples of leaders. So now, I posited leader as where the social side becomes attenuated for all sort of reasons, and much more focused is that personal sense of taking authority and articulating it and representing it, and representing then what others begin to feel is salient in identifying themselves as one of us. So that’s a Social Identity Theory.

Scarpino:      The way you’re doing this is you’re basically saying that the leader emerges from the group.

Gosling:        Well, a leader can also insert themselves into a group or impose themselves upon a group if the group is receptive to that. And sometimes groups are just longing to be imposed upon. Sometimes the whole population, or at least 74 million of them, are longing to be imposed upon. But there’s another way in which leader is spoken about, which I think is interesting and provocative. One might say, for example, Einstein is seen by many as a leader, a leader of the way that physics, of computer sciences, therefore of technology of 21^st century life has emerged, you know, it derives from -- I don’t think Einstein, he wasn’t a leader in the sense of leading an organization or institution, but his formulation, his ideas, the example of his way of thinking has really -- I’ll put it another way; so many people and developments follow from it. So, if they’re following, surely he was the leader. Well, that was the leader. And we use the term ‘brand leader.’ There are some kinds of leading brands, which is this a misuse of the term or is there some sense in which these have indeed captured the imagination and become central characters in the narrative of toothbrushing, some brand of toothpaste becomes central.

Scarpino:      Well, in the United States, people say that they want a Kleenex, when they want a piece of tissue to blow their nose. Well, that’s a brand name. It’s not the generic name for the thing.

Gosling:        Exactly. And the other side is that there are millions of people who would say they are followers of Jesus of Nazareth or they’re followers of the prophet Muhammad or they’re followers of Marx and Engels, of Lenin or a sort of conglomerate of Lenin or Trotsky, Marx. And these people are dead, if they even existed in the way that we think of them. So it’s hard to say that even though people are following them, they’re not really leading because they’re not here to lead.

Scarpino:      But they’re really followers of a body of ideas.

Gosling:        A follower of a body of ideas or an ideal or something. So if we were going to say really what are the most influential leaders, well a lot of them are ideas, in terms of they are not people.

Scarpino:      So ideas can lead as well as human beings.

Gosling:        I think mainly it’s ideas. I think the way it works ultimately is that I think we all really long for the good, and we long for truth and beauty and for unity, and this is what we see and respond to when a person emerges as a leader or a policy or a story or a director or something. But I think these ideas, these profound philosophical, spiritual ideas really represent and we recognize in them something that’s transcendentally good for which we long.

Scarpino:      But we can fight almost to the death over truth and beauty and unity, what they mean, who gets to say.

Gosling:        Yeah, but in that sense, it’s not the thing itself. I’m not really focusing on what is true or what is good, the thing that is good. What I’m focusing on is the idea or, in a more platonic sense, the ideal.

Scarpino:      How do you understand the relationship between leader and leadership?

Gosling:        Well, I think, in that sense, leader, leaders are special characters within wider accounts of leadership.

Scarpino:      I admit, I have not read everything you wrote, but I read a lot. One of the pieces that I read dealt with the topic of leadership and management. Before I go there, how do you see the differences and similarities between leadership and management?

Gosling:        Well, I think it’s helpful to have a kind of common sense, a certain view that’s -- well-established is a word in the leadership management literature, which is a sense that management is about taking care of things and people and objects, and leadership is about taking care of direction and sort of spiritual aspects, the sense of meaning and purpose and so on. It’s almost easier to see the difference by looking at the absence of one or the other. To be in an organization or in a project that is well managed, well coordinated, organized, we know where we are and what we’re doing, but where leadership is absent becomes dull, a bit gray, maybe safe, not too unstable, but it’s definitely not exciting. And after a while, if it comes up to threats or change, it’s very, very difficult to adapt. On the other hand, an organization which is full of idea and purpose and mission but hopeless at keeping track of expenses or doing the budgeting or managing the inventory or getting stuff out to customers is utterly exhausting and abusive of one’s time and energy and goodwill. So an absence of management is draining in one way, and an absence of leadership is draining in another. And they’re not quite the same thing. But ideally what we hope for -- and I think most organizations and movements that survive are managed somehow, they cope, they’re able to generate enough of both.

Scarpino:      Now, I read a piece that you cowrote with Henry Mintzberg. It was in the Harvard Business Review a while ago, November 2003, and it’s called “The Five Minds of a Manager.” I’m sure you haven’t read it recently, so I’ll prompt you. The two of you talked in there about most of us have become so enamored of leadership that management has been pushed into the background. Nobody aspires to be a good manager anymore; everybody wants to be a great leader. But the separation of management from leadership is dangerous. So, why is the separation of management from leadership dangerous?

Gosling:        Well, it’s very unpleasant and abusive for the reasons I explained before. And it’s dangerous because leadership without management, without attention to the resource implications, is existentially dangerous. Not only does it abuse, it drains dry the resources, the resourcefulness of people and of the environment, of countries, of populations of people. Because of the need to generate a sense of unity and combined action only through ideas, not through actions and production of real goods and services and outcomes, instead it becomes a generation of self-fulfilling ideas which are largely very often to do with in-group/out-group dynamics. So it’s the generation of the problem is them. In the end, we exist only to get rid of them. And they are out to get us, so we’re going to get them first. And so generating a shared sense of community or organization or combined effort becomes oriented really just around being us, being an us, not doing some useful work. So leadership without management becomes xenophobic, tyrannical, fanatical, abusive and ultimately destructive.

Scarpino:      You and Professor Mintzberg went on to say we talk a great deal about networks these days as well as teams, taskforces, alliances, and knowledge work. Yet we still picture managers on top. Well, then, picture yourself on top of a network looking down on it. That puts you out of it. How can you possibly manage its relationships that way? To be a collaborative mindset means to be inside, involved, to manage throughout. But it has a more profound meaning, too—to get management beyond managers, to distribute it so that responsibility flows naturally to whoever can take the initiative and pull things together. Think of self-managing teams of skunk works; indeed, think of who manages the World Wide Web. And then I’m going to pull a quote out of there. You said, “…to get management beyond managers, to distribute it so that responsibility flows naturally to whoever can take the initiative and pull things out.”

                     How would you see this process becoming part of a modern corporate or nonprofit organization? How do you take it from the page to the institution?

Gosling:        Yes, well, what we argue in that paper and what we exemplify in a number of programs we ran together, the International Masters in Practising Management in particular, is a development of all five mindsets. So, you quoted from the section on the collaborative mindset, which is one of five. And this really is talking about collaboration not only, as it were, the arrangement and the processes by which we negotiate the outcomes, but it’s about a perception of the kind of world we’re in, what work consists of. Work consists of, in a collaborative mindset, flow. It consists of flows of energy, of resources, of money and trust, reciprocity and so forth. So it’s an orientation to a sort of dynamic world which is not really the priority, or not really visible in some of the other mindsets. So the other mindsets, to remind myself and you and to inform our listeners are, the reflective mindset by which one both reflects on experience you’ve had but also begins to look and think forward in the sense of, well, what are the assumptions I have about the future? And what is my place in it? What might be our place? What are our competencies? How might we fit in to it? Very integral to most strategic thinking and particularly having to do with competence-based, resource-based strategies and, of course, to self-awareness and all the other things we’ve talked about earlier. But reflectiveness on its own just simply becomes, through contemplation and meditation, it’s sort of something that -- what we’re doing now, or men like us do it. It’s not something you do when you’re running things where action is necessary. So the second mindset is really this, what Tom Peters called a bias to action, in terms of let’s get something done, let’s move it. And that sort of forward leaning, so far forward leaning all the time that you’ve got to do it, you know, get on and make things happen. And that urge, that drive, that sense of that’s what we’re doing here, we’re making things happen is of course crucial to any kind of enterprise. And if you want to be a manager, you’ve got to have a bias for action; otherwise you’re managing or fulfilling some other very important functions. Not everything is about leading and managing, but when we’re talking about managing, you need to reflect on this and you need an action orientation. But what that action is, of course, changes in different roles. At very senior levels it’s much more about providing the circumstances, the incentives to keep action but also to keep thoughts and so on. So it’s what we call creating the temporary architectures through which new realities might emerge. It’s more or less of design a whole new building, the structures, rather than the act of doing in a more obvious sense. One of the other mindsets, which is very predominant in a lot of university training for management, is the analytic mindset which is the ability and the interest in, the excitement in, sort of taking apart what appears to be a coherent set of numbers, some actual reports or operational reports or logistics or inventory, thinking about what’s really going on here, how are these constituted, what’s going on? Analysis in Greek is “loosen up.” Loosen up the apparent coherence and see how is this constructed? What’s being hidden by the way we’re doing this? Analysis is critical to any kind of management, obviously, in an organization, but tends to take a central role in a lot of university-based management training to the cost of the other mindsets. And the next one is a worldly mindset, and that’s a sense of worldliness, how things really work in the world, so that’s got instinct. It’s valuing that. Got it in the sense of getting what Sumantra Ghoshal called the smell of the place, you know, being able to make sense of it.

Scarpino:      And the name is?

Gosling:        Sumantra Ghoshal who talked about organizational culture. And you know organizational culture is not really from a tick-box or something like that; you just get a sense of it. When you’ve been around a while and some people are really good at reading it. You know what’s going to work and what’s going to fit or not. Also, you’re sort of wise to the ways of the world, to the ways deals get done, who to trust and not, and also have different ideas in different places, that the things you take for granted in one place; and you go somewhere else and the priorities, the things people care about, what matters to them is so different. And if you don’t go to those places and you don’t somehow allow yourself to enter into another person’s perspective, you just can’t really develop a worldly mindset. And without a worldly mindset – Look, it even works within one organization, you know, how difficult it is for sales people to understand what marketing people are like, let alone operations. So worldliness is very important. And then the collaborative, as we talked about before. So these five mindsets we posited back in 2003 and a bit before then -- these are the things to be developed when we’re talking about management development. We want to develop people’s familiarity with, comfort with, appreciation of all five of those mindsets, recognizing that some people will be more at ease in some than others. But all five of them are necessary in managerial work. You know, your original question was:  How do we develop that? I guess that’s another question, and more specific is:  How do you design a curriculum, how do you design engagements, learning activities to develop all five of those mindsets? And how are they different in different countries, different cultures, different industries, different degrees of experience, levels of seniority and so on?

Scarpino:      I’m going to actually, later on, talk to you about culture and leadership, but just a quick question. How did you meet Henry Mintzberg, become his colleague?

Gosling:        I much admired his writing when I did my MBA, but I didn’t really have a sense of him as a person; he was just a name. But he had written a lot of stuff about MBAs. He’d looked at MBAs as taught in the North American tradition, which has primarily been an MBA is a degree you take immediately after your first degree as a sort of training in business, business administration and it was, of course, very analytical. In the UK things have developed a bit differently. Not all, but a lot of MBAs were courses that people did after, as I did myself, maybe seven, eight, nine, ten, maybe more, years of work experience and were taking this in order to facilitate perhaps a career change from one sector to another or into more senior levels, or from a technical specialist in which they were competent in and had approval into a managerial thing. So there’s more of a sense that an MBA would always have to deal with people who have quite a lot of experience of their own, possibly more experience than the professors who are teaching them, of different work environments. But Henry’s criticisms were leveled against the US model. Because of the accreditation systems and people trainings and teaching I think, a lot of British MBA classes, and across Europe, were based on a US, particularly US and Canadian, curricula. So what people would be taught when came to the MBA from an American textbook, they’d be taught the basics of business analysis and administration as if they had no experience of working in organizations. That’s how the textbooks would read, and that’s how the cases were written. And the classrooms were set up so that the professor at the front could hold the scene, hold the stage and questions were to go to him. People weren’t encouraged to talk to each other, apart from very limited amount, to discover that, “Well, it wasn’t like that in my company,” or whatever. And so it was very much sort of people held in the palm of their hand these great performing professors. So, Henry came and he gave a speech. It was something he was doing a lot of at that point, having written an article that got a lot of attention saying that MBAs, referring to the North American model, teach the wrong people the wrong things at the wrong time of their life in the wrong way. At that time, it just so happened that I was working as the deputy director as a tutor on a program for British Airways. British Airways was being privatized. The chief executive at the time, John King, had decided that all senior managers should all have business training, but he didn’t want to send them on that kind of junior style MBA. He wanted something designed specifically that would take account of their experience and authority, and also would allow them to work on actual projects, different challenges in converting what had been a public asset, a publicly-owned company, into a privately owned business, international business. I would say privately-owned, publicly-quoted company. So we had developed at the University of Lancaster, where I worked, an MBA program that was designed specifically for British Airways people from across all different disciplines. And they would go and take classes with people around the world. Being an airline, they could fly anywhere. So we went to what were thought to be the best people to teach each of these modules and several of us then worked with, in smaller tutorial groups, small groups of people, to work on how they would apply the learning from each module in their own jobs. Anyway, Henry had said in this talk, he must have heard something about it, he said, “I think some of the things you’re doing in the UK might be a bit better than theirs, but I think a British Airways MBA is just going too far.” So I went up to him afterwards, after this great speech he had done, I was very junior but I said, “You really don’t know what you’re talking about here.”

Scarpino:      Did you say it just like that?

Gosling:        I really did, yeah.

Scarpino:      (Laughing)  Sorry, I shouldn’t be laughing when the recorder is on. I met Henry Mintzberg and I’m not sure I’d say that to him, but…

Gosling:        It’s not the last time I said it. And he said it to me often enough, too. He was at that time living half his time and working half time at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, in France. You know, good for him, he said, “Well, come and show me.” So, I managed to persuade my little tutorial group I was working with, five or six of them, and I said, “Well, let’s have our next tutorial meeting at INSEAD and Henry Mintzberg will join us.” They had not done the strategy module yet. I think they probably didn’t know who Henry Mintzberg was and really didn’t share my sense of admiration for him and his work and his way of seeing and thinking. Nor did it really matter to them whether he was persuaded or not. But they were generous enough to make the trip there.

Scarpino:      So you took your group across the Channel to INSEAD to…

Gosling:        For a tutorial group meeting. We usually met for a day twice in between modules, two one-day meetings. And we had a meeting there. We went through each of the challenges. I can’t remember, but I think it was operations module challenges they were doing. One of them was a marketing guy, but he was leading the project to complete terminal 4 at Heathrow, which was the British Airways dedicated terminal at the time. Another was purchasing and supply. He was negotiating the purchase of teaspoons, of which vast numbers are consumed and disappear in the global refilling network, from new supplies I think in Vietnam and a whole host of different things. Henry absolutely adored it. We had a lovely day. He and I both loved it. These people wrote such interesting challenges, where the purchase of teaspoons is not just about signing a contract. There’s a huge amount about trying to think about, of course, cost and quality and all the relationships as far as would it be better to have one or many suppliers? How will it go down in the press if British Airways is buying Vietnamese spoons? A whole host of things that are practicalities of managing; and production management, operations management is not the same as operations research at all. So, in a sense, it proved the point to him, but it also proved my point that there’s a lot more going on in the MBA world. So, after that, we thought ‘come on, let’s get together.’ There’s a longer story in this. I think it taught it a bit in his interview with you. We developed that program.

Scarpino:      Yes. Again, talking about leadership, do you think leadership is a cultural construction, that is that leaders grow out of a cultural context of which they’re a part?

Gosling:        I think often, but not always. I mean, yes, of course, we all grow out of the culture.

Scarpino:      No, I mean…

Gosling:        Yes, we all do. But in terms of, as you know, I think in some circumstances the otherness, it’s the otherness that is so attractive about leading in some circumstances. And of course, some people impose themselves as an outsider by virtue of conquest, invasion, and they are de facto leader of perhaps a country or a colony or whatever, not because of any accession other than brute force and control of arms. But also, there are ways in which people somehow come back to their place from an experience of otherness and bring with them the possibility of seeing and doing things differently. There’s something about the sort of prophetic possibilities.

Scarpino:      Do you think there are certain qualities of effective leaders that transcend culture? Qualities you’d expect to find associated with successful leaders, no matter where they live and work?

Gosling:        Well, yes. I would say that this capacity to generate one’s own sense of authority, internal sense of authority, and to mobilize that is universal when we’re talking about leaders and leadership. That’s there. Again, I think in all circumstances, leaders and leadership are intrinsic to the articulation of some shared common stories, narratives, ideas, hopes and so on. I’m not completely sure of what I’m going to say now, but it’s a sort of hypothesis that I think you have to find some things pleasurable if you’re going to take a lead or stand out as a leader or want to be part of the leaders. One of the pleasures you have to be able to enjoy, be inclined to enjoy, is particularly in early career, is what I call the pleasure of identity, of ‘oh I know I am something by hearing my voice, by seeing my ideas progress, by being recognized as someone to listen to, someone to follow,’ and to find that pleasurable. Not everybody is inclined to find that sort of thing pleasurable. But if you don’t find it pleasurable, it’s not a good idea to aspire to leadership. And then I think for many people, as they grow up and become more mature and more experienced and more secure in their identity, the pleasures of identity reaffirming that ‘I am’ in the eyes of others. Some people get really hooked on it, and that’s a sort of narcissistic trait, but for many people they move on from that and find that it’s not so much about being recognized, but I like to see the influence, I like to see my ideas and my values and things I think are precious being taken up. But I don’t have to be the person who’s championing it anymore or seen to be championing it. It’s nice to see the agenda item. And I think the pleasures of influence mobilize people in a lot of situations, and they can be something shared also in a campaign group or a movement or a junior group project team. It’s not only about identity; it’s also about influence. And then there’s another sort of sphere of pleasure, which I think is about pleasure in interacting, sort of swimming in the sea of power, you know, where power, influence, status, all these things are in the air and that’s how things are getting done. And at very senior and political environments and boardroom politics and on boards and things, people who do that work I think you have to be able to find pleasure by being in amongst power. And I think all three of those, pleasures of identity, of influence, and of interaction are all – I’ve called these in an article I wrote the pleasures of power. They’re not the only way power works, definitely not the only way power works. Leadership is not only about those things. But I think if you can’t find pleasure in those things then you’re probably not going to want to be leading or in leadership.

Scarpino:      Two questions, then we can wrap up for lunch. We talked a great deal about leaders and leadership. How do your ideas play out on those two topics, leaders and leadership, in a hierarchical institution like the military?

Gosling:        Well, it’s very interesting, isn’t it, is how things appear at front in the military. I think, of course, there are different kinds of military situations, but let’s take a sort of formal military army or navy.

Scarpino:      Something like the British army, the American army.

Gosling:        Yeah. And clearly, the formal authority is vested in rank but also to some extent in expertise and experience. Do you have American noncommissioned officers?

Scarpino:      Yes.

Gosling:        Where the people who have authority and status and rank, well, authority, status and power without rank in the same ways, and others who can have quite a lot of rank without all that much expertise.

Scarpino:      That’s also true. A lot of frighteningly inexperienced second lieutenants running around.

Gosling:        Indeed. But also, that dynamic is known and understood and expected as a development. That’s why militaries are so focused on leadership development, more than anywhere else really. It is so critical to the mode of operating in those kinds of formal standing armies. And of course, armies have to cope with existential anxieties in a way that most professions don’t because you know that your commander might send you to your death, and might do so knowingly. And that’s part of the contract between you, and that’s unusual in most circumstances.

Scarpino:      Last question before we wrap up. As your career has developed, who inspired you?

Gosling:        Well, Henry Mintzberg, definitely in a big way. There were a couple of people who were my mentors when I went to Lancaster. In particular, I would say Julia Davis, who became director of that MBA program. I was a deputy. And she inspired me in many ways. And there’s quite a few other people at Lancaster University when I became an academic, entered the academic world, Rick Croney, John Mackness, Dave Ashton amongst them. I’ve been inspired by a number of writers in the field, quite a few people who have been writers not explicitly in the organization field but who seem to have a sort of handle on the ideas that I think have proved rather interesting. And so they’re not necessarily people I’ve met; and whether or not I would feel so despite if I did meet them because often people (inaudible) is another matter, but I find their ideas and their books inspiring.

Scarpino:      A couple of examples?

Gosling:        Well, I think Jonathan Lear, who wrote a book called Radical Hope, published a while back now, 2016 maybe, maybe 2009, I can’t remember. I thought it was a very interesting and provocative book, very helpful book. I think Jem Bendell’s recent book Breaking Together is a very courageous piece of work though I also have criticisms about it, but nonetheless very thought-provoking and is very inspiring, sort of stay with the difficulty of the predicament that modernity is giving to us. And on that topic, more recently, also Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti, whose book Hospicing Modernity…

Scarpino:      I’m going to ask you to repeat her name.

Gosling:        I’m going to have to check to see that I get it all right, but it’s basically Vanessa Andreotti. Andreotti you will know, and Vanessa you will know.

Scarpino:      Yes.

Gosling:        And the middle names I will find for you.

Scarpino:      Well, with that much we can look it up.

Gosling:        And the book Hospicing Modernity is a very – I found it a very profound, firm, incisive and sort of caring but not coddling challenge to the ideas that we might get control of things, that we might save the planet or save the rest of society and bodies of knowledge and expertise. It’s really challenging and heartfelt. (Inaudible) such a serious book with such humanity. Anyway, a very important book. Of course, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had a massive impact on my work. The clarity, the determination to think through fundamental relationships is a bit like the people we often talk about -- Elon Musk as being determined always to get back to first principles and things and thinking through challenges he sets himself. And I think Marx and Engels did the same for the relationships between ideas, beliefs, thoughts, values and the way we work and the relationships we work. Yeah, I’m sure there are lots more.

Scarpino:      Okay, with that said, I’m going to say thank you for sitting with me this morning, and we have a session this afternoon. I’m going to reach over here and turn the recorders off.

Scarpino:      Both of the recorders are on. Today is November 7, 2024. This is the second recording session with Jonathan Gosling. We’re both at the annual meeting of the International Leadership Association in Chicago, Illinois. When we left off, I had been asking you some of the leadership questions we ask people over the years. Where I left off, and I think I got this right, I had asked you if people had helped you along the way, but what I didn’t ask you is:  Have you mentored others? Do you consider yourself a mentor?

Gosling:        Well, in fact, I’ve more recently sort of formalized that relationship in some extent with people in various different settings. I’m working formally, acknowledged as a mentor, with a colleague who runs a leadership development consulting firm in the Netherlands. We work on sometimes the specifics of his client work but more often on how he is thinking about his company and running it, developing it, and managing the quality of life that he wants from it and so on. There have been others along the way although much less formally contracted in this way. I can think of several people whose – I think, as a mentor, I’ve helped them sort of navigate parts of their career through various different transitions. And then there are perhaps some who I haven’t quite known – well, I definitely haven’t known – but they tell me that something I’ve said or done or am involved in doing has been instrumental and particularly significant for them. And I think that actually one often doesn’t really know quite what it is. If I think of the people who I mentioned before, like Julia Davis for example, I don’t know if she would recognize – I think she would recognize herself as having been my mentor because it was so many years, but the specific things; there were some particular conversations we had that for me sort of affirmed her position in my firmament. 

Scarpino:      Sometimes it is hard to know, isn’t it, the impact particularly that you have on others.

Gosling:        Yeah.

Scarpino:      Alright, so we talked some about networks this morning, but so we get it in one place and so I give you a chance to say anything else that you might want to say, do networks play a role in successful leadership?

Gosling:        We did some research a while ago, a colleague of mine at Exeter, Richard Bolden, and I, we did a series of projects on university leadership. The first one was a sort of all inclusive thing about leadership and management of universities. One of the things that was really common at all levels of university life and decision making is the importance of people’s networks. Some of these were very informal. Some of the natural scientists assume that other natural scientists would think the same about things as they would, and that would be very different to what the social scientists would think about. And the (inaudible) were totally incomprehensible. And those networks were partly imagined, and people were in them kind of tactically, because privately they often had a view that well, in fact, I don’t really think like the rest of my science colleagues, but we are a block in some way. And then the other thing that was common in all those institutions was the email list or the whatsapp list, whatsapp group, which is how a lot of stuff got done or prevented from being done. At least not how, but the venue for that. And of course the other thing in universities was that because most academics feel themselves to be part of their academic discipline in their identity, probably at least as much, sometimes more than they do a part of the institution that employs them, and yet they hold formal roles in the employing institution and certainly nothing remunerated and not very long lasting in their professional associations. So there’s a sort of inverse relationship between where they have actual authority and power and control of resources and influence is somewhere where they don’t really feel as identified with or committed as in the other thing. So those other networks have – The second piece of research we did, we looked at how specifically academics think about – conceive of leadership. We asked a very structured questionnaire for one part of this research. At one point, we asked them to list down two or three or four people who really they look to, they think of as leaders. We didn’t say anything much more than that; write those names down. And every now and then we came back and said, “Thinking back to the names you put there, what kind of role…?” We also asked them then in some other part of the questionnaire about their relationship with the people who are the head of their school or faculty, head of research, and the head of teaching. Those are the three core roles. We compared who had really the biggest influence in five aspects of their leadership, that is leadership conceived as giving a sense of direction, structuring your work, inspiring you to do something, prioritizing – there were five things. And in all five categories including a decision about structuring your work, those three or four other leaders who were leaders, none of whom had formal managerial roles, were considered more influential than the people with the formal managerial roles. So who are those other people who academics actually look to in their mind when they make decisions about what’s my priority? Why shall I give real attention to? And those other people are often in different institutions. They’re the luminaries in their own profession. Very often they were their PhD supervisors, who’ve probably been dead for a while or certainly retired. So a sense of who’s people’s internal – they’re internally following when they make key decisions is separate. I think academics are very peculiar like that. I’ve shown these data in law firms and software companies, and people say they recognize that. I don’t know, I haven’t done systematic research on it.

Scarpino:      Academics resist being led.

Gosling:        They do.

Scarpino:      Again, we hit on the subject this morning, but can you recommend a few publications that you think are must reads for people who are interested in leadership or leaders?

Gosling:        Well, Goffee and Jones, Who Would Want to be Led By You? (SIC) or Would Anybody Want to be Led By You? (SIC)

                     [Why Should Anyone Be Led by You? – correct title]

                     I think that’s a great article.

Scarpino:      The authors are?

Gosling:        Goffee and Jones.

Scarpino:      Okay. Would Anybody Want to Be Led by You? (SIC)

Gosling:        Would Anybody Want to Be Led by You? (SIC)

Scarpino:      That’s good.

Gosling:        And then there’s a whole series of HBR articles.

Scarpino:      Harvard Business Review?

Gosling:        Harvard Business Review articles from the 1990s probably, some might be earlier, which I think in my jetlagged adult brain I can’t quite put my finger on them now. There’s a collection, Harvard Business Review classic articles on leadership, and they are classic articles. I think they’re very good. And I think there’s a book that was not exclusively about organization studies by Gareth Morgan called Images of Organization. I believe there were three editions, certainly at least two. And it’s very, very helpful in getting one to be aware of how you preempt what you see by the language and metaphors that you mobilize in order to look at an organization and understand power and authority, responsibility and those things. What else? I think there are some people’s lives that are really worth looking at and thinking about. Some of the obvious ones; Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandi, Martin Luther King. And I think there are more sort of problematic people who have been in and out of power, who have been forces for good and for evil, people like Winston Churchill who was in the political world. And I think looking back in history, I don’t know if it’s the case for everybody or if it’s the case for you, but my childhood hero was Admiral Nelson, the late 18^th century naval captain and admiral.

Scarpino:      My childhood heroes were a little more pedantic than that.

Gosling:        Oh really?

Scarpino:      Baseball players and – it’s when I was really a kid, seven, eight, nine years old.

Gosling:        I think Nelson became my hero because his ship HMS Victory is in Portsmouth, which is very near where my great aunt, my mother’s favorite aunt, lived. We used to go and stay with her and I think, as I say, my mother had all these children, big family, and we would go and stay with Aunt Isme (sp??). I think they would take us down to the ship and let us run riot on it while they sat in a café. And my mom got a bit of support and help and encouragement, sympathy from her aunt and probably felt better afterwards and was nicer to us all. So I think probably I internalized that Nelson makes the world better or something through that. But I don’t know, I suppose listeners to this and readers of this will have their own heroes. But I do think that thinking about who were your childhood heroes, imaginary or real, is helpful to understand what you might be searching for later on. Those things don’t leave us even if we become more sophisticated, more critical and so on.

Scarpino:      There are people who write about leadership who have argued that if an individual is doing things that are not good, that is not socially beneficial, not good for humankind, that it’s not really leadership; that leadership has to be good. My question is, there are people who are dictators, there are people who are exploiters of their own citizens; are those kind of people, like Idi Amin, who we already talked about who ruled Uganda from 1971 to ’79, or Augusto Pinochet, Chile 1973 to ’90, Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary from 1998 to 2002 and again since 2015, in your mind, are these types of individuals leaders?

Gosling:        Yes, I think by the definition I’ve given in terms of social influence, taking authority, setting direction, all those things, I think you have to say they are and recognize that leadership is in itself not intrinsically a moral good. It’s a social function.

Scarpino:      How do you teach that in a business school?

Gosling:        Well, kind of like that, really.

Scarpino:      I mean I think of leadership often in business schools, but of course it’s not the only place.

Gosling:        It’s not the only place, no. I wrote a book with a colleague, it was really her project and I helped with it, on Nelson for the bicentennial of the Battle of Trafalgar in which he was killed. The battle was 1805 and we published the book in 2005. She was such a fan of Nelson that she wouldn’t drink French wine because…

Scarpino:      (Laughs) That seems awfully self-abusive, but…

Gosling:        She thought it would be disloyal somehow to drink wine from the country of the man who shot Nelson. She was a naval historian actually, PhD in 18^th century merchant marine. But I thought that, well, we really ought to honor that kind of academic enterprise by doing a book on Napoleon for the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, so that came out in 2015, and we did a book on Napoleon as well. That was interesting because what I told you about Nelson being my childhood hero, I had no trouble in thinking of him as a leader worth looking at. When it came to Napoleon, you know, I’ve been so socialized into thinking much more problematically about him. And of course he was a much more complex character politically, and as an Englishman writing about Napoleon is itself a kind of political act. But I did enjoy doing it. And since doing it, thinking back over Napoleon, I’ve actually recently reframed that book and put it out for free on the internet as a study in tactics of power. I think that in a way that kind of makes – it’s surprising that there’s been very little, or at least in the business studies world, maybe there has been in history, that has looked at leadership as the exercise of tactical deployment of means for power. If you look at that and you try and see, well, how did Napoleon engage with and make use of power? What were his sort of signature competencies in tactical styles, stylistically? It’s actually quite an interesting way to look at things and that removes…

Scarpino:      For example?

Gosling:        For example, well, his early life – the way we did the book was sort of chronologically of his life, looking at how in parts of his life he’s exemplified different tactics of power, but one of them is the use of patronage. You talked about mentoring. You asked me about mentoring before. And patronage was hugely significant in Napoleon’s life. He was the beneficiary of patronage to get to school, get out, get off Corsica in the first place. He was beneficiary of a kind of Sicilian network of patronage, sort of Corsican patronage that got him his first military post in the siege of Toulon. And then later on, of course, he ran his own senior office through, again, an increasingly actually clumsy mode of patronage. It got less task focused and opportunity focused, much more to do with favors and loyalties and so on. Another particular mode that he was very successful at and is perhaps relevant to this week in November 2024, is he made use of elections, (inaudible) and elections, the voice of the public to reach over the elites who were concerned to establish and maintain a rule of civil law and due process and consultation and so on. And he generated in the general population a kind of hatred of the complexity that these people brought to it, trying to see things from all sides and trying to think about long-term interests into a future that you can’t predict. And what about action? And generated their desire and hunger for action, and made use of the means of election. In that case, of course there was nothing for granted, there was nothing that said there will be an election every four years, but he introduced twice in his career the tactic of populism, the popular vote.

Scarpino:      He was a really interesting guy who in the end kind of undid himself.

Gosling:        Yes, I mean it was a close-run thing. I mean he did it unto himself, but it was mainly Russia. And also, he got to a point where his whole momentum was militarily oriented. Although he had been a hugely effective administrative consul and convener, but in the end – And I think that’s often what happens with populists, and that’s what one ought to be concerned about in the contemporary world too.

Scarpino:      Then there’s that. We just had an election. I’ll be careful what I comment on with these things running, but it was quite an occasion.

Gosling:        Yeah.

Scarpino:      I’m going to shift away from the questions we ask everybody after this next one, but when you look at leadership, how do you as a scholar or as a human being assess the impact of leadership?

Gosling:        Well, there are two questions; as a scholar and as a human being. So let me start with as a human being. I think I’ll never forget the thrill I felt when Tony Blair was elected as prime minister in the UK and coming in a Labour prime minister 1997 I think and was – or have I cut it short? Was in ’91? My mind is gone now. Anyway, it was a sense of youthfulness, drive and clarity and values, values above all else; that it was no longer going to be sort of muddling through from one crisis to another. It was going to be a cabinet and a regime led by values. And that feeling of excitement – I recognize when I see it in others and I really understand it. But I also have learned to be suspicious of it. Some years later, when I was at Exeter, we ran an annual forum where we invited people who were at the heart of things to come and talk to us about leadership. Somebody who had been a minister in his cabinet, in that very first government of his, on the first cabinet meeting, the first day when he sits down with his new team in the cabinet room, #10 Downing Street, and they go through the agenda, and one of the things they went through – it would have been 1997 I think, ’98 – and he was the – what to do about the Millennium Dome? The Millennium Dome was this great event venue that somehow had managed to get on the list of things that would be built to celebrate the millennium, the year 2000. It was hugely over budget. It was under (inaudible). It was going to be a sort of blip on the edge of London in Greenwich that seemed at the time to be not fitting the importance of the occasion and a rather sorry demonstration of British engineering or whatever it was meant to be. I don’t know really. But during the election and the manifesto it had been a point of contention. If he continues it, he’s just putting more money into something that failed from the previous government. If he doesn’t finish it, it’s just for spite, just out of spite from his predecessors and all that money that’s gone into it would have been wasted. So what will they do? He’d said, “We’re going to stop it. This is ridiculous. We can’t be doing this.” And so this person who had been in the cabinet meeting reported on this first meeting. And one thing she said was, “We went around and said, okay are we all agreed on this, that we’re going to scrap this thing as we said we would during the election campaign? We’re going to scrap the Millennium Dome. We’re going to save money and put it to something important. We’ll build a hospital or something for the NHS.” And everybody agreed, so then, “Okay, we’ll move on to the next thing.” And then just before the cabinet meeting ended, he had to leave. He had something to do, some official thing, he had to meet the queen or whatever, so he handed it over to his deputy and the meeting carried on. So they didn’t know what happened. So he went out, opened the door of #10, went out in the street and there were all the cameras waiting after he comes out of his first thing. And somebody stuck a microphone in his face and said, “Mr. Blair, Prime Minister, what are you going to do about the Millennium Dome? Are you going to scrap the Millennium Dome?”, was probably the question. He said, “No, we’re going to see it through. It’s a sign of…” At that moment, he couldn’t have the first words he was going to say to be, “We’re going to scrap something.” And that was his political sense at that time. He’s right, he could not say – If that had not been the first question, if that had been the second or third question it might have gone differently. But once he said that, also, once he’d done that, he had also set a tone for his cabinet, for his government henceforth, that whatever you agree with Tony (inaudible), it might be different when he gets in front of the cameras. The problem is evaluating. You know, how do you evaluate that? Somehow the question:  Is it good or is it bad, there is some of that, but it’s not about that; it’s more about studying it, looking at it, thinking about it, experiencing it takes you into deeper understanding. Really thinking about leadership, it’s not a matter of evaluating the leader or the leadership; it’s about evaluating your own understanding, your own appreciation and getting into thinking about these things that you think, “oh my goodness, I hadn’t seen that before. Now, oh I get it.”

Scarpino:      How do you understand the relationship between power and leadership? I’m not going to argue that they’re the same thing because I don’t think they are, but they are related.

Gosling:        They’re very related, yeah. Well, on the one hand, one could make a kind of mechanistic argument that leadership is the exercise of power. Of course, there’s some kind of power which has nothing to do with leadership, you know, there’s some kind of leadership which is only obliquely exercising power. But I don’t think that’s a really very satisfactory answer. I think in a way, when we talk about leader and leaders and leadership, we’re kind of talking in a slightly different register to when we’re talking about power. And the two intermingle with each other, but it’s not quite a mechanistic relationship. I don’t know quite if I could find a metaphor for this. But anyway, let me try and talk a bit more about that relationship. I think what one could do is say that if you were to do this unforgiveable thing and turn a noun into a verb and say rather than “power,” let’s say “powering”; one might say that leadership and leading is a form powering, of doing power, of enacting, embodying and enacting, manifesting power. If I go back to the example I was giving on Napoleon for whom power was always explicit and he was consciously hugely attracted. At some point he wrote a letter to his friend, (inaudible) Roederer, and he said, this is translated into English, he said, “Power is my mistress, and I could not for anything give her up.” It’s quite telling, isn’t it?

Scarpino:      And the name of his friend was?

Gosling:        Roederer. R-O-E-D-E-R-E-R.

Scarpino:      Okay, thank you.

Gosling:        And somewhere in the book there’s a full reference. So I think, well, you can talk about the issue without mentioning it, but I think you can’t – leading and leadership, even the most distributed, slowly emerging kind of leadership processes are infused with exercising and maneuvering of and around and with power. It’s intrinsic to it. And as I said earlier, I think that the capacity to enjoy power, to find pleasure in it even if one might also feel oppressed or crucified or guilty or something about it, but I think the capacity to find pleasure is necessary if one wants to lead.

Scarpino:      I read what I thought was an interesting piece that you did with Janinek.

Gosling:        Yes, and Sutherland.

Scarpino:      And Sutherland’s first name is?

Gosling:        Ian.

Scarpino:      And Janinek?

Gosling:        It’ll come back to me in a minute.

Scarpino:      I can look it up. The title of the article, for the benefit of anybody who’s looking at it, is ‘Aesthetics of power:  why teaching about power is easier than learning for power, and what business schools could do about it’. It’s in the Academy of Management Journal of Learning and Education, 2014, volume 14(4). There are several things that intrigued me about this piece when I read it, but one of them is the aesthetics of power. I have to admit that I’ve thought about power from time to time in doing this job, and I never thought about it in terms of aesthetics. What do you mean by the aesthetics of power?

Gosling:        We mean the affective influence and the design, the thoughtfulness, the inspiration, intuition that goes into the crafting of power and its manifestation, its embodiment, such that the affective impact on those who come across it or are drawn into it, affected by it, is potent, engaging, is moving them in some ways. In that piece, in particular, we were contrasting and concerned with aesthetics with a sort of rather dry resource-based perspective, that power is something you have that you distribute or power is a force that is associated with the way physical structures and organizational structures and cultural structures, thought structures (inaudible) so it’s rather mechanistic. We wanted to have a look at how the affect -- and to get at how the experience of power is a kind of knowing, brings with it a kind of knowing, kind of knowledge, which is as important as being able to stand apart and abstract from it and define, categorize. The knowledge of is as important as knowledge about power. And we gave as an example an activity that we had students engage in, which was to conduct a choir.

Scarpino:      That’d scare me more than being in the army.

Gosling:        Of course, not everybody will take part in it, but those who do really find – I mean, the first thing is you’ve got a group of singers, trained singers, who want to make some good music and they want to follow your direction so that they’re all trying to do the same thing in terms of pace, tone, volume, emphasis and mood. It’s a very unusual situation. You’ve got willing followers whose own performance and enjoyment is utterly dependent on following you, and they really want you to have all that power to influence them. And you can immediately see and hear the effect of it. It’s a very unusual experience. People who took up the sort of offer to have a go at conducting felt that experience themselves so directly. People would find it sort of revelatory, well, firstly that this can happen but also that they can enjoy so much, that it’s so pleasurable for most. So, we wrote about that. And then of course that relates to other forms of experiential learning where we refer to Barry (inaudible) work, which is a kind of Tavistock style simulation in which people take on roles in a hierarchy; top, middle and bottom, and some are observing and critiquing on how people -- and also feel in – how quickly people enact the power relations when there’s nothing to be powerful about, but yet this has become so captivating. So these formations, the architecture of the conductor and the choir, not only the structural (inaudible), it’s the embody, it’s a sense of desire within them. And similarly, the top, middle, bottom simulations, Barry (inaudible), gets, you know, sort of structures there, but it gave us the desire to know one’s place and to assert one’s place that just comes straight to the fore. It sounds sort of petty when described, but to be in it is so absolutely and utterly engaging. And that is a kind of learning. So that’s really what lay behind that piece. We really wanted to say that we do all have this kind of affective knowledge of power, we have knowledge of leadership from being in all kinds of situations where this is happening, and we have our own desires and fears and anxieties caught up with that all the time. So, can we bring that into the way we think and teach and learn, and what we think and teach and learn about?

Scarpino:      Speaking of that, you said when teaching about power, it’s easier than learning for power and what business schools can do about it. Easier than learning for power and what business schools can do about it; what did you mean by that?

Gosling:        I don’t know. What was the quote?

Scarpino:      Let me go back and get the whole thing. Yeah, it’s this piece that you wrote…

Gosling:        Okay, teaching about power, that’s right.

Scarpino:      You said teaching about power is easier – I’m paraphrasing and then quoting – than learning for power and what business schools can do about it.

Gosling:        Yeah, sorry, just working it out. Anyone can – you can ask ChatGPT to say:  What should I teach about power? I’ve got a half-hour lecture to do, or three hour lecture, can you write me what are the main – and it’ll tell you. And then you can teach it, or you can just say to people, “Hey, here are the questions, here are the problems, go and ask ChatGPT.” Okay, so you’ve got it. That’s teaching about power. But teaching for power, teaching for having power, I think, for being caught up in power imbued situations with any kind of organizational life, with any kind of connective performance; and that’s another matter. ChatGPT can’t do that for you.

Scarpino:      That’s right.

Gosling:        So, that’s the first part of the clause, the sentence. The second part of it is what business schools do about it is to get business schools to – as a faculty member, as a teacher in a business school, to engage in teaching and learning situations, simulations, exercises like I described with the choir, requires so much going against what the system is designed to do simply. So, if I’ve got to get a choir to come in and sing in order to do this, how long are they going to be here? Who’s going to pay for them? How are we going to set the room up when it’s lined with serried ranks of desks when we want them to sit in the proper formation for a choir? To do (inaudible) I need not just one classroom; I need three different rooms and a meeting room in the middle. I need no tables. You can’t move the table. I don’t want computers in the way. And the curriculum; how do I do the timetable to do this kind of work? I can’t do one part of it this week, two hours on Tuesday, and the next part next week. The whole point is the buildup of the tension. So, in the end, one fights as much as one can to generate energy to do these kinds of exercises that, by and large, you say to ChatGPT, “Just tell me (inaudible) teach them about it, and they’ll find out when they get there.”

Scarpino:      I can’t see myself do that. Maybe just because I’m too old. I need to set this next one up, assuming that people who listen to this or who look at the transcript aren’t going to be fully aware of what we’re about to talk about. Based on my reading of your scholarship, I learned that your understanding of leaders and leadership was at least in part impacted by your reading of works by individuals such as Max Weber, Georg Hegel, Karl Marx. I’m going to put a little bit of information in here, knowing full well that you know this. Max Weber, German born in 1864, died in 1920, sociologist, historian, political economist. Probably best known for the development of capitalism, powerfully influenced by Protestantism and so-called Protestant Ethic and that society evolved as a result of economic, social and political conflict. Hegel was born in 1770, died in 1831, German philosopher. Ideas or theories take shape through a process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The role of government is to secure the freedom of individuals, to protect the rights and freedoms of its citizens. Finally, Karl Marx, born in 1818, died in 1883, German philosopher. Authored the communist manifesto with Friedrich Engels in 1848. Communism would develop out of working-class struggle in industrialized nations such as England in the mid-1800s. You know all that, but what I wanted to get you to talk about is how the ideas of these people, Weber, Hegel, Marx, influenced your own understanding of leaders and leadership, or ways of thinking about society and power.

Gosling:        Yeah, well, I’m not sure whether we should take those…

Scarpino:      And I realize that you could write your dissertation and the next five books on this. So, in some ways, this isn’t a fair question.

Gosling:        Well, I think I said a bit about what I found sort of attractive about Marx and Engels, and the communist manifesto is just such a beautiful piece of literature. It’s so elegant and so humane and aspirational.

Scarpino:      And I have to tell my students if you read it, it doesn’t make you a communist.

Gosling:        Yeah. It’s just a wonderful piece of literature. All that is solid melts into there, and this is so prescient of what’s happened with internet technology, that this is what’s happening -- Anyway, but as I said, it’s the clarity and the humanity of the thinking and of the concerns and the priorities that were in there, but also the sort of ruthless realism of the influence between technology, ideas, culture, social relationships, friendships, love, all tied together with the making of the food and things we need and money and the generation of belief. All of that tied together is done with such clarity and simplicity. I’ve always found that that language and the way of thinking and the sort of rhetoric of it very attractive. Although the temporality of the predictions and political programs are, as it were, a matter of historical record, the intellectual endeavor and, as I say, the human endeavor, humanistic endeavor, I identify with and admire very much. Max Weber, well when I came back from the – when I went to university, when I turned up for university, then returning back from Indonesia and all that for my BA, in the first week one of the professors set us an assignment of going to the library, find a volume that we thought looked interesting, summarize it and tell us why it was interesting and write an essay on it. And I did, and I found Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I’d never heard of it before, and I sat down in the library and I read it, and I was blown away. I thought oh my goodness, this is a work, a sort of creative synthesis that is so exciting, and it touched me. It touched the experience of my family and my upbringing. It touched what I saw going on in the world. It made me think completely fresh about – it allowed me to think about both politics and religion as intertwined, which I realized yes, that’s how I experience it. It’s talking about the real world that I know. It was so exciting and I wrote a piece. I can’t remember if I was pleased with it, but anyway, handed it in and of course we never got any feedback from it because the whole point of this was to learn how to use the library. I never quite forgave my professor for that, for not telling us, but anyway it worked. I think also Weber’s work (inaudible) on all sorts of, on bureaucracy is probably still the most influentially important work on organization and, in that sense, it was modern society, productive work in modern society. And again, his study is very provocative. I don’t really agree with his conclusions on charisma, on routinization of authority. I think he’s asking the right questions and I share the questions, if not always his answers. And also, I think what Max Weber was doing was kind of taking some of the issues that Marx and Engels dealt with but treating them so differently and coming with such a different kind of inclusiveness. He wasn’t looking for a final all-encompassing principle that explains everything, which Marx and Engels were. It was, what are the languages, the terminologies that are relevant in describing the predicaments we’re in and how we think (inaudible). So it was in some ways the same and in some ways not the same to Marx. Hegel, of course, who Marx was overtly responding against, reacting to, who has this idea which is now in modern scientific post-Hegelian society very difficult to recover, but this intuition that the idea or, as it were, consciousness comes before manifestation. An idea precedes logically, and in some ways temporally, precedes the thing that the idea is about, and that’s really classical sort of (inaudible) Plato. And it’s such a kind of -- it can’t be right but I’m not ready to say it’s wrong, you know.

Scarpino:      When you were talking about Weber, you said that he asked the right questions. What are some of the right questions?

Gosling:        Oh, well I think the legitimacy of authority; how do we come to experience, to find, to conclude that some modes of – yeah, to accept authority as legitimate, and power. I think that’s a critical one. And that is very pertinent to this election. It’s really the big question on being American this week, is what makes authority legitimate and how does one accept it or not? When the rule of law and all that stuff and the manipulation of law or being above the law, what makes behavior admirable? But it’s not only what’s the answer to that question, but it’s what are the ways of answering? What are the different ways of answering that question? That’s what Weber did; it’s just:  Here are the different ways of answering this question.

Scarpino:      We have elected a convicted felon, among other things, as our president.

Gosling:        Yeah.

Scarpino:      I’m going to bring up one more piece that you cowrote on the topic of power. It’s you and S. Jones.

Gosling:        Stephanie Jones.

Scarpino:      Stephanie. Napoleonic Leadership:  A study in power. A number of things struck me about this, but one is that it’s been translated into Chinese. I assume you knew that.

Gosling:        Yeah.

Scarpino:      2016. What did you say, or what did you intend to say about leadership and power that would resonate globally in this piece? Somebody in China thought this was important enough to translate and they got it through the censors.

Gosling:        Well, I said a little bit about the book already, what we were arguing in that. We were really looking at Napoleon’s career and the politics of late 1830s, 19^th century France through a lens of power-seeking, the relishing of power and exercising it in different modes or tactics and trying to integrate the story of this very curious engaging sort of mercurial -- he was a sort of Musk of his day, really.

Scarpino:      That’s an interesting take.

Gosling:        Well, he was. He was so innovative and broke the rules and took huge risks and lost a lot and won some and so on, and could not stop. Absolutely impossible for him to have any way of being that wasn’t upping the ante and playing a game. And now, why China? I have a Visiting Chair at the University of Renmin in Beijing in the School of Philosophy. The School of Philosophy is not the business school. It’s in a 23-story high rise and the whole thing is philosophers. Somewhere in the middle, there a couple of floors which are the Philosophy of Management or the Philosophy of – the translation, I’m not sure if it’s Management or Organization, or something like that, but anyway, it’s that bit. Renmin University, I’m sure you know, is the People’s University and it’s really the government university where people go who want to look to a job in government in The Party. It’s where a lot of the professors are quite closely involved in government policy and research, as are many of the other universities, but it’s particularly associated with that, but exclusively. One of my host colleagues in the Philosophy Department, and she was quite involved with the government, thinking about governance at that point, in particular they were thinking about how to regulate some aspects of particularly the food industry because there can be so many scandals around processed food being improperly done and people dying and things. So they were thinking about the role of governance in major systems like the food system. But I don’t know quite why, I don’t know how well it’s selling, of course.

Scarpino:      Do you speak or read Chinese?

Gosling:        No, not well enough to know. She tells me it’s a good translation, but I don’t know.

Scarpino:      I’ve been there. I’ve taught there twice, but I don’t either. But they speak English.

Gosling:        Yeah.

Scarpino:      Kind of a scary world.

Gosling:        Yeah.

Scarpino:      You indirectly brought up, or directly but not elaborated upon, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, a British research and consulting organization that specializes in behavior in groups, I guess, and organizations. Two things; one, can you briefly explain what it is? And then I’m going to ask you how your work intersected with that institute.

Gosling:        The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, it grew out of but separate, it’s always been a separate entity. It’s an independent institution within what was a psychiatric clinic. And it was intended that it would be a vehicle for developing thinking and understanding about how unconscious life and the life of individual and collective unconscious impacts on and is in turn impacted by daily life and relationships, work, politics and so on. The institute established itself as the Institute of Human Relations. There were some other institutes that spun out of the clinic; the Institute of Marital Studies and various others. But in terms of the Institute of Human Relations, TIHR, is now completely separate and physically separate. It has its own building elsewhere in London and has nothing to do with the clinic. But at the time when I was there, it was still located in the same building, shared a building and some staff. That is, there were some people who were, for example, practicing psychoanalysts doing clinical one-to-one work in the traditional way some of the time and were also working as consulting to organizations on job design, on factory design, on process, on the encouragement of innovation, of new ideas, of workplace democracy or employee relations, a whole host of problems for which questions around relationships and people’s psychological connectedness were important. A very early example of this was the War Office Selection Boards which were developed in the second world war because so many officers were being killed. By and large officers in the British Army then were drawn from the private schools and education system, what we call public schools and had been to those. Some of them had, but not all of them, gone on to university. But the belief was they had been brought up and trained to lead by the education system, and so they were appointed to be officers. That job was done, as it were, though they were getting killed rather more quickly than anybody else because they were out front. So there’s a need to find who else has the capacity to lead, and this is not something you can do just by a test or by prodding and poking. So, you develop various kinds of selections. This is where the sort of selection – what do they call them now, the selection processes? – where assessment centers came from, which involved some case studies and some sort of in-box exercises but also sort of in-training exercises, but also leaderless group discussions, project groups, various ways of getting people to interact and see who is able to listen carefully, to be thoughtful, who’s seen by others as having some sort of natural charisma or something, and so on. So the War Office Selection Boards were very influential in Britain and then similarly in the US. Kurt Lewin and the T group method, which is a training group, that was very contemporaneous. And then they developed this thing called a Leicester Conference, which was the working conference. And the sort of basic outline is you say, well let’s establish – if we want to understand how authority works, how leadership works, how people get organized, how they cooperate or they don’t and so on, let’s make a temporary institution, temporary organization, whose job is to study that. Okay, so let’s form a temporary (inaudible) work group, project group, or something like that and they called it a conference. Well, a working conference because they’re going to work on the topic they’re studying rather than just report on previous work. Most academic conferences report on previous work. They pay no attention to the actual management of the conference itself even if they’re management scholars. But in this case, in the Tavistock working conference they said, “Okay, let’s come here, let’s study how we cooperate, how we organize ourselves, how we legitimate certain kinds of authority, how we behave together, who takes the lead, how we take the lead, how we manage ourselves. And we’ve got to have some management. Okay, we’re going to have a director of the conference. We’ve got somebody to be administrator. We’ve got various other staff acting in different roles as consultants who advise, whatever, facilitate, whatever you want to have. But the point is not to say well they’re outside doing the facilitation, no, that we’re going to study it. We’re going to study what they do and how we all react to each other. So, we’d better do that in different forms. So, let’s have some small groups and some perhaps very small groups and some large, let’s have a plenary where everybody is there. Okay, and let’s do some things where we try to get different things done. Well, what are we going to get done? Okay, let’s have an organization that decides what it is that needs to be done, we need to know about first. So, it becomes an intensely reflective process in which what emerges are all kinds of very familiar dynamics within groups that reveal themselves in the here and now, in the real moment, as being (inaudible), and they’re all shared by everybody who is there. So, there is no sense in which I’m reporting to you my findings from my research and you’re reporting your findings from your research. No, we’re both here now. What’s happening now? What’s going on? And of course this is usually – well, it can be 60 or 90 people and significant groups. That work has been going on now for probably 75 or 80 years. Every year there’s been a Leicester Conference. I think they missed one during COVID, but they went online very quickly and did that one, and are now replicated by similar institutions all around the world; in Bangladesh, India, Australia, various parts of Africa, Latin America, all over the place. But that’s the sort of mothership. I described earlier on how Eric Miller, who was for a while leading that whole thing, directing it, but also has contributed hugely to the literature, understanding and thinking about this kind of way of working and bringing it into organizational consulting. He was running it then. So, the work I was doing in Newham in the conflict-oriented work was very influenced by that. (Inaudible) come in, let’s try out our solution. And so I’d say, “It looks like conflict. What is it? What’s behind it? What’s going on?” You know, it’s not a group of outside researchers; we’re the people who were going it, were in it. And figure it out. And so you’ve got to decide how do we do that? What kind of method do we do that? We can’t just sit and think it because, in the end, all you’re doing is just (inaudible) people an essay, (inaudible) an essay. So let’s do it. Well, what do we do? What do we do to figure it out? Well, let’s live together for a week and make a community, maybe a sort of microcosm of the community. What happened? What are the conflicts that have mattered to us, we, as a microcosm of the community? And how do we respond? What’s sayable? What’s not sayable? Why? So, what are the conditions in which you can do that kind of work? Well, it always has to be very contained. You need clear boundaries. You need clear primary tasks. What is it? We’re here to understand the dynamics of conflict in this community. Okay, so if we’re not doing that, we’re avoiding work. So, if we’re avoiding the work we’ve agreed to come and do, why are we avoiding it? Is it too painful? Too difficult? Are we bored with it? If we’re bored with it, is it because – is a way of being bored with it a way of masking our rage and fury and anger at having to look at something that’s so difficult? You know, what is going on in our felt responses to things and thus might be masking something else? This is where the psychoanalytic understanding comes in. And it’s a hugely engaging, provocative, generative way of working. Very different to the social science research.

Scarpino:      Indeed.

Gosling:        I argue, and I’m certainly know Eric Miller did, it’s not, as it were, in the abstract better than other kinds of scientific approaches, but it’s more appropriate for that task. That’s why it’s good, is because it’s appropriate for that particular task. I didn’t know I was involved in, as it were, the Tavistock tradition when we were doing these things, but I learned. That was my sort of first real work. My first job was doing that work. And I’ve always brought that kind of curiosity about that and I suppose that kind of sort of idea of really interesting learning is that. And then I did later on work on the staff on a number of these working conferences in the UK and elsewhere, and various iterations and new applications, new designs and things, and take this kind of interest in the here and now and to try to understand what’s happening in a place, to make sense of what people are saying or why they’re saying it, or what’s not being said? Who is not speaking up? What’s going on? And is it relevant to the work we’re doing, or is it about something else? These are not things that there’s a sort of straight answer. But very often, if one can find a way to point to them, the Tavistock tradition has this concept of a working hypothesis in which one phrases a thing, like saying, “Well look, I’m just noticing that three out of twelve people haven’t said anything, and have actually moved their chairs back.” It may be that all three of them just happen to have something else going on, busy in their lives and they’re preoccupied. It may also be that they are holding some experience that’s really difficult, we don’t really quite know how to deal with in this group. And could it be that… such and such, such and such, which challenges – which is going to hold us up, challenge the solution we’re about to agree on or something. That would be too difficult to deal with. Or something like that. And I’ve just found that quite often the capacity and the interest to pursue that thinking while other stuff is going on turns out to be helpful. Turns out to be helpful for people and there’s a sort of sigh of relief, oh good, it can be named; oh that’s what it is.

Scarpino:      I’m going to switch subjects here a bit and talk about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The war went on there forever, but the part I’m talking about is 1992 to ’95. For the benefit of anybody using this in the future, it’s part of the former Republic of Yugoslavia, multiethnic population. There were Bosnians who were Bosnian Muslims. There were Serbs who were Christian/Eastern Orthodox. There were Croats who were Christian/Roman Catholic. Years of fighting involved these groups that I just mentioned. The Yugoslave army was caught up in the violence. It was a horribly brutal war rooted in ethnic conflict, murder, rape, ethnic cleansing, which basically means killing the members of the other ethnic group, a whole range of other war crimes. Western countries with backing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, imposed a final ceasefire negotiated at Dayton, Ohio, in the US in 1995. Bill Clinton, Democrat, was the US president in 1995, and John Major, Conservative, was the prime minister of the UK in 1995. Now, you became involved in Bosnia/Herzegovina after 1995…

Gosling:        Yeah, ’96.

Scarpino:      … and the end of the fighting. You went to the former war zone. You worked with groups trying to transition away from this really horrible situation. I want to start with what drew you to this situation at the end of the war? Of all the things you could have picked to do, you put yourself in what I assume was still a fairly dangerous former war zone.

Gosling:        Ahh, that’s an interesting question. You said you spoke to Danica Purg so you would have heard some of this from her. Well, I had been asked by a British defense manufacturing/engineering company at that time called British Aerospace, now called BAE Systems, to help them think through the leadership development consequences of, again, deregulation of their shareholding. The government was selling some of their holdings, was enabling other investors to come in, but also requiring them to raise money elsewhere other than from the public purse, and also seeking a peace dividend from 1989, the war, the Iron Curtain coming down and the Berlin Wall coming down and so on, and a sense that we no longer need so many tanks and cannon and so forth, which is what British Aerospace had been making, and fighter jets and so on. So, people were asking, “Could you make fridges instead or something?” Well, these people who were in these very sophisticated, huge, long-term, decades long project and a very masculine and macho culture. There were quite a lot of women working there in technical roles as well and in junior roles. But it was a sort of macho culture. I was at Lancaster University at the time. I did some research and interviewed a lot of people. And the then finance director, chief finance officer, Richard Lapthorne, summarized for me…

Scarpino:      Lapthorne?

Gosling:        Lapthorne.

Scarpino:      Okay.

Gosling:        And I talked to all the other executives and most of the board members and trying to figure out what is it they thought the predicament they were in was and how is this going to affect (inaudible). And he summed it up for me. He said, “Look, what we’ve got to do, we’ve got to be – you know, we corporally share a space. We’re going to be less British and less aerospace.” It was quite a good summary of the challenge. So it was something about how do we be us, but not be the us we have been and we know we are, or we know ourselves as? And that’s quite a challenge actually for any kind of organization.

Scarpino:      It is, yes.

Gosling:        So I devised, along with them, a program based on all the things I’ve been saying, actually, about engagement, about affective presence, about being able to look at here and now relationships within the executive committee and with their other top colleagues and what’s thinkable and what isn’t, and a whole host of things, and using this idea of five different mindsets. And we slightly shifted it. We included something called a competitive mindset because this was a company that had not had to compete. They were the British big defense manufacturer, and the British government all through the Cold War spent a lot of money on defense and the money went to British Aerospace. And now they had to compete for everything. So, we devised modules all around the world in different parts of the world that would engage them in different things. Just to give you an example, for the competitive mindset, we brought them to Washington D.C. where politics is all about competing for voice, competing for lobbyists’ helping people competing and the ears of the decision makers and getting your voice heard. And it’s different to the way it’s done in the UK where it’s much more sort of shadowy. And we went out to the west coast, and again this was the ‘90s, this was just as the internet was happening. I remember there was one venture capitalist there who said to them, who talked everything about his business plan, his model, what he was trying to do. And one of them asked him, “How do you work? You told us what your business plan is, how you’re going to make your money; aren’t you afraid we’re going to copy it?” He said, “By the time you’ve convened a committee and decided how you’re going to (inaudible) and got through your capital expenditure plans, I’ll have been out of this business for years already.” And we did various other things in different parts of the world. One of them, we came to a module on change. How are we going to get into a mindset about change where it’s not us planning long-term projects and perhaps changing or adjusting the projects, or maybe buying some new company to get new competence or technology or software, but it’s actually about being in the midst of change that we have to respond to. So, that’s where I thought Bosnia post Yugoslave, how everything in the Balkans had been swept along by what happened in 1989 and before the Iron Curtain, the apparent end of the Cold War. And suddenly all these countries that had been held together amazingly since 1945 were splitting apart and want to be on their own, the sudden rise of nationalism and ethnic identities. And what went with it were the markets. All these different companies that had had a secure market into other parts of the Balkans and into the Russian Empire, the Soviet Empire, were suddenly having to find another way to do things. I started working, I engaged to work with a colleague at INSEAD, Yves Doz, who is a very interesting strategist, strategy professor. We went to various places. He introduced me to Danica Purg who was at that point running a management training institute, part of the old Yugoslave, and she was determined to use this institute to help Slovenia, particularly Slovenia, but also Croatia and other businesses to develop their ability to compete in European markets and international markets. And she knew people, interesting people in Bosnia.

Scarpino:      Her name is?

Gosling:        Danica Purg. D-A-N-I-C-A, Purg; P-U-R-G. So, she and I hatched this plan that if we could bring these British Aerospace executives into that area, they would experience a place where change had really gotten out of hand, and the primarily objective of everybody now, as the peace had sort of held for six months, would be to say:  How can leadership help to create enough continuity, enough stability such that change is not totally overwhelming anymore, because change had been utterly overwhelming? So, we reversed the question from “how do you manage change?” to “how do you manage and create continuity in the midst of change?” So, I got involved in Bosnia not because of any invitation or any sense that I had any wisdom or knowledge or anything, which I don’t, about Balkan politics, but because I thought the conversation would be helpful for British Aerospace, and Danica thought it would be helpful for colleagues and friends in Bosnia, which it was. When we arrived there – I don’t know if she described the situation to you – when we arrived there…

Scarpino:      Actually, what happened is that her internet connection was atrocious and we got about 35 minutes, and it kept going out. I finally said to her, “This isn’t working.” And she said, “I’ll send you some stuff in a few days,” and she did. I really did not get a full opportunity to talk to her.

Gosling:        Okay, I see. She would have said this. So, what happened, in 1996, it was the first time the leaders of the Jewish community, the Bosniak Muslim community, the Serbian – the Republika Srpska – Serbian Christian community, Orthodox community, it’s the first time since the signing of the Accord six months earlier that they had sat down together to reflect on this shared history of war.

Scarpino:      That must have been an interesting…

Gosling:        First time they did it. And they did it in the company of the executives of one of Europe’s biggest arms manufacturers.

Scarpino:      And you were there.

Gosling:        And I was there. The whole thing was organized and facilitated by the Bosnian Red Cross and Red Crescent Society.

Scarpino:      Gee.

Gosling:        I was also running the leadership development program with them, and they could see – the person running that there could see that this would be a very, very helpful intervention, but also it would bring something in the eyes -- some outsiders into the place. It wouldn’t be so cut off mostly to the UK. So, the first part of that then – we flew in corporate jets and we were probably one of the first civilian – I don’t know, anyway we arrived and immediately went off in a thousand different directions. The group I went with went off to a village where we had to be led through the minefield, a path that had been cleared through a minefield where the only two remaining citizens were. The place had been wrecked. Where people had been opposing sides, whose families had done awful things to each other, but they were two elderly people, ill, unable to move, no option. They had no relatives left. And it was just a shocking, shocking experience to be in the midst of that. I’ve had a little experience being in warzones, but for most of these people who were the executives, as I said, in an arms company, had never been in a warzone before. One of the other groups had an even more tough experience. But anyway, it was a situation where we had all those people together. We then also had a meeting with a number of people who had been prime minister and were in the running to be future prime ministers in the still-being-worked-out governance of Bosnia’s government. It was an absolutely extraordinary, nerve-wracking engagement. Everywhere you walked around Sarajevo there were pot-marked places where snipers had shot whoever. In the marketplace where a shell had landed and killed dozens of people, someone had upturned a can of red paint to show the place, and it was just shocking. It was just shocking and deeply disturbing. Deeply, deeply disturbing about what people will do to each other, but also what we, the Europeans, had allowed to happen on our own turf somehow, and in some ways encouraged. Yeah, it was really hard. Anyway, we then turned on that program, and it’s still running 20 years later. I had directed it for the first, I think, three rounds because then after the executive committee telling me then the next layer came down and then more and more. And then it became quite, I think, a regular event as peace gradually extended, but the convening of these people for this conversation to reflect on leadership in a task of creating and maintaining continuity in the midst of devastating change. I’m not the right person to talk about the long-term impact of that intervention. Danica and I wrote a working paper on it at some point. One of the things that’s stayed with me since then is that I’m very skeptical about (inaudible) change, that is leaders make change, managers just keep things going or something. I don’t think that’s right. I think if you look around and if you think about – anybody think about their own experience of leading, it’s mostly about continuity, enabling people to keep at it, to keep serving our customers, keep the cashflow running, keep investors engaged, keep the government on our side and so on, keep feeling it’s meaningful, it’s purposeful and meeting change, meeting tough competition, devastating and disruptive new technologies, takeovers, mergers. Okay, in spite of all of that, how do we keep going, and keep going in a way that is civil?

Scarpino:      That’s the question, isn’t it?

Gosling:        I think that’s one of the things that makes me most skeptical about much of the leadership literature is that it sort of bigs-up change and making change, when really that’s not necessarily such a great thing.

Scarpino:      Especially not change just for change’s sake.

Gosling:        Change for change’s sake or change that just is really an explosion of xenophobic in-group/out-group.

Scarpino:      I was going to ask you a question that dealt with Henry Mintzberg, but we’ve already covered that. So, I’m just going to say for the benefit of the transcriber that Henry Mintzberg was, and I’m not sure if he’s retired, the John Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Quebec, Canada. So, you took early retirement. I’m not sure how you define early. But it says in your bio that you took early retirement to help found Pelumbra Ltd, “Consultancy for World Thinkers.” What was the purpose of that organization?

Gosling:        It’s Pelumbra, P-E-L. Pel is an astronomical term for “point of eternal light” which is hypothesized to exist on the poles of the moon, or one of the poles of the moon and many other celestial orbs, at the point of the axis where it turns that there is always light there. Although there apparently is some doubt because it would leave only a very small bump or irregularity in the sphere to create a moment’s shadow there. But anyway, and umbra is of course Latin term for shade. I kind of like it that it combines light and shade. And I think that does describe what I’m interested in and how I think and feel about the world and organizational life and things, but also the idea of eternal light, the idea of it’s somehow important to hold onto in the intellectual enterprise, so that even if we can’t quite grasp it, if there’s a moment of shadow, it’s there! Understanding is there. Truth somehow is, even if we can’t quite see it yet.

Scarpino:      You formed this as a consulting company.

Gosling:        Yes. Anyway, that’s the name. I formed it as a consulting company. I closed my previous consulting company when I joined Exeter because it would have been a conflict of interest to be consulting and running those sorts of activities. But I reformed that, and I run it together with my daughter, Miriam.

Scarpino:      I will say for the record I spoke to her. Miriam Gage, right?

Gosling:        Miriam Gage. And we run that together, yeah. Yes, it’s been a vehicle for doing the sorts of things we’re interested in. It was (inaudible) time because that is officially the terms under which I left the university, and the UK system is not quite as open-ended as it is in North America, in the US anyway. So, there is a retirement age. And although one can sort of spin it out to some extent, there is a retirement age and (inaudible) plan away. If you’ve been a troublesome union official, they’re a sort of worthwhile institution facilitating your retirement.

Scarpino:      In 2024, you published a chapter in The Routledge Critical Companion to Leadership Studies, and it’s called “Leadership and Climate Change,” which in the interest of full disclosure, my doctoral degree is in environmental history. What drew you to leadership and climate change? I don’t find a lot of leadership scholars working in the area of climate change. And it may be that I just don’t know the literature.

Gosling:        There’s more and more, actually, yeah. What drew me to it? Well, for a very long time actually, I’ve been – I remember reading Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth.

Scarpino:      Oh yes, yes.

Gosling:        Do you remember that?

Scarpino:      I certainly do.

Gosling:        It was a long time ago. I think it must have been – what was it? I think it was ’87. I think before that. Must have been sometime in the 70s.

Scarpino:      Yeah, I read it in graduate school, and I got my PhD in 1983.

Gosling:        Yeah, it must have been the ‘70s.

Scarpino:      Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth. It’s a classic.

Gosling:        Yeah. And I remember being very concerned about it, and it’s always been sort of with me. I didn’t come to sustainability late, let’s say. It’s always been there in my thinking. And for one, I did some work with some people at WWF International on their attempts to develop some training for industry in sustainability-related things.

Scarpino:      Produced the One Planet MBA program?

Gosling:        With whom we worked sometimes creating a One Planet MBA at Exeter, exactly. I’ve been doing some writing. I wrote, co-edited with two people at WWF, a textbook called Sustainable Business:  A One Planet Approach, which was (inaudible) from that MBA program. So, I have for a long time been thinking, you know, what is the responsibility – what’s the responsibility particularly -- You see, as political leaders you’ve got to think about. As well as getting elected again, you’ve also got to think about what scientists are telling us about the effects of what we’re doing and what likely conditions for citizens in coming generations are going to be, and what’s our responsibility to do about it now? You can see how that is a proper question for political leaders.

Scarpino:      Yeah.

Gosling:        But why should business leaders think about it when their responsibility is to the shareholders and other investors and answering to their customers and local people? But anyway, here and now, this generation and in terms of shareholders this quarter and the dividend period. I’ve also long been thinking and arguing about the structure of governance, the governance of companies and regulation and government and business and all that stuff. And then, what was it that sparked it? I read – well, partly that book, Jonathan Lear’s book I mentioned before, Radical Hope, which is not really about sustainability overtly, you know, to some extent, but he’s asking the question:  How did peoples who’ve been colonized, whose whole way of life was wiped out, and how do they get through that? How do they respond to seeing the coming of particularly the Plains Indians in North America (inaudible), how did they respond to seeing everything being devastated and changed, being moved on, the end of…? And how did other communities and tribes and language groups and nations, how did other nations respond? Lots of different responses. So anyway, he talks in this about maintaining hope through sort of the defeat and everything, the ending of everything you know that is meaningful. It’s a very provocative book. And I coauthored a paper with Peter Case on that, applying it to, well, I should say, this may apply to all of us because our way of doing business, of creating wealth, and the people who we admire, the virtues we admire may come to mean nothing. Even if it’s a 5% chance of the whole lot collapsing, that probably means there’s a 35% chance of things getting really, really, really bad even if they don’t quite collapse, and possibly more than that, a higher chance than that. So, it’s worth considering and looking at. So, we did that book, and then I coedited a book of essays on leaders in fiction, and I reread Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and I wrote a paper on that, which is again a similar theme. It’s about a traditional society where people knew…

Scarpino:      And the author’s name is?

Gosling:        Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author. It’s the first of a trilogy. And again, I took the same theme of the things that were just taken for granted as being the way life is, the way the world is, the status of women, of men, of what’s admirable, what counts as wealth and not so much in money but in yams and in -- but in stories and musical ability. You know, these count as wealth. And then suddenly these white fellows turn up and just turn it all upside down, and it’s shocking and persuasive and very engaging, a wonderful book. Lots of people criticized it, critiqued, and is properly criticized in many ways, but it is a fantastic book. So, I wrote about that as having lessons for how we might prepare for the possible unsustainability of our way of going about life and our lifestyles, which of course that’s one thing, it might all fall apart, then what? Another thing is, okay, so what should leadership – what can leaders do? And is it really leadership – I think your question is:  Is it really to do with leadership? If so, what now? So (inaudible) that out. I’ve done a few encyclopedias and book entries and things like that. So, I think that ‘24 was the most recent one.

Scarpino:      I mean, climate change is one of those things that, on the one hand, leaders led us in. On the other hand, they’re going to have to lead us out. There will have to be leaders who step up and say…

Gosling:        I think so too. I think it’s debated. And there is a coherent argument that says there’s something about the way we do leadership, structure leadership, the way we look to the individual, to the leaders, that repeats the problem because it alienates the authorities by separating that voice of authority from oneself and investing it in the leader and that that’s part of the problem that’s gotten us into this situation. I’m not saying I necessarily agree with it wholeheartedly, but it’s contentious to say leaders have to get us out of it.

Scarpino:      Well, I didn’t say they have to get us out of it. I think there are going to have to be leaders who lead the way out. I mentioned at the beginning that you left a life of work, so to speak, and decided to pursue your MBA at the University of London. Why did you decide to do that? Why did you decide to go for the MBA?

Gosling:        I think I described it; I was trying to coordinate this community mediation service and develop and manage these two businesses, consulting and training businesses, and I was really feeling I was failing in all three, that it was too much, I couldn’t keep ahold of it. The finances were a problem. Managing people on performance, constantly appointing people, reviewing and so on, people coming and going, getting a bit of a delegating team, evaporating and so on. I was absolutely worn out by it. I thought well maybe if I go do an MBA, I’ll learn how to manage and then it’ll be alright. Very naïve.

Scarpino:      It did change the course of your career and probably your life.

Gosling:        Maybe. (Inaudible) oh I found a way I can do…

Scarpino:      You went to Lancaster University Management School 1989-2001. Then you spent 13 years at the Centre for Leadership Studies, University of Exeter, where you were both a professor and director of the program.

Gosling:        Yeah.

Scarpino:      I don’t know if it’s fair to ask the person who was in charge, but you spent 13 years at the University of Exeter. When you took that job, did you have goals for yourself?

Gosling:        I had some.

Scarpino:      I mean I don’t want to ask you, “Did you take it for a pay raise?” because that seems -- but I’m assuming taking a job like this, given your background, that you had something in mind.

Gosling:        Yes, well there were a number of factors. One of them was I’d been 12 years at Lancaster. I’d developed these various international programs and things like that, British Aerospace program I described before, and a number of others. I’d sort of run my course there. I was given a lot of leeway to develop interesting things. I involved other people, but it was never going to be institutionalized. It wasn’t going to be part of the institutional effort. It was a sort of entrepreneurial space I’d been able to play in and do things. And I played my part in teaching and in administration and so on, as one does, but it wasn’t going to be institutionalized. The university was doing other things like that. And also, my wife is a very keen gardener. And in the northwest where Lancaster is, the wind howls in across the Irish Sea and Morecambe Bay and devastates anything you planted, and she was pretty fed up with that. When a former Lancaster colleague who then had an appointment, chair, in Exeter approached me and said, “We’re looking for someone as a successor to the founder of the Centre for Leadership Studies,” and this was in Devon which is, for the benefit of listeners, 200 miles south. It’s warmer, it’s wetter, it’s lush, it’s green, things grow. You just sort of glance at it and it grows, blooms and grows, and my wife was very keen. Almost as soon as the inquiry came in, she was almost hugging him and saying, “He accepts the job.”

Scarpino:      Sign him up.

Gosling:        So that was a big pull. And also, there was a new vice chancellor coming and he wanted to try and make the appointment of the successor to the founder something that would be his and so on. There were a whole bunch of things that came into it. So, I had a view that we could design the program a bit differently. They’d already had something slightly offshore so, in a sense, a whole host of things that gave me some independence.

Scarpino:      I’m going to ask you a few wrap-up questions and I want to respect your time and we’ll be done when I said we would. What keeps you going? What keeps your intellectual fires burning?

Gosling:        Well, some of it is a sort of restlessness. I know that if I’m engaged, interested, if I’m committed to writing something or I’ve got to give a talk on it, then I think it through. I think again about, again, the rhetorical challenge of persuading other people that these thoughts are interesting and worthwhile. I suppose inside myself I’m still trying to sort of wave at my long-deceased father and saying, “Look Dad, I’m doing okay.” By being busy and caught up with these things, it sort of fills in what I suppose I feel might be a frightening gap or sense of loss of my youth, of some people I’ve loved who’ve died, and my own mortality, I suppose, and staving that off. And I think there’s a kind of drivenness which is partly towards things and partly away from other traditions.

Scarpino:      You got your MBA. You’ve been working in leadership and leadership studies for a long time now. What are some of the major changes that have taken place in leadership studies in the years you’ve been involved?

Gosling:        Well, the ILA has been formed, of course, and grown, flourished. And it has been a very important part of my professional life to be engaged, have conversations with people here, people coming from different areas and various other conferences in the community. There is a community of leadership scholars, which there was not before. This interest, concern about sustainability, the environmental situation, not only climate change but also our relationship with nature. How do we do power, control, organizing, management, all that stuff, and at the same time be harmonious with, responsive, listening quietly, attentive to nature and the ecosystem? How do we fit in without sort of controlling, dominating, exploiting? And I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I think they’re important. This has now become widespread; I think now the challenge is to liberal democracy and certainly the assumption I had, and I think share it with a lot of other people, was that somehow we’d arrived at a common understanding of the values of democracy, of the rule of law, a sort of pretty, I thought, shared notion of what counts as common decency. And I have thought a kind of comfort with that and a basis on which innovation and change are solving problems and addressing, anyway, problems around climate change and, you know, would be feasible. Now I think that’s not the case. I think probably we won’t solve climate change in the way that we might.

Scarpino:      Not in the next four years.

Gosling:        No. No, no. I think – anyway there we go. As I said in that chapter, I think there’s a pretty good chance that we won’t and that a lot of what we think of now as sort of established progress will fall apart.

Scarpino:      I don’t want this question to sound morbid, and I don’t mean it that way, but what would you like your legacy to be? What do you hope it would be?

Gosling:        Well, I think if leadership studies, whatever it becomes, stays able to hold the light and the shade. That’s not just down to me, but I think I’ve contributed to it.

Scarpino:      I always end with the same two questions. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t, keeping in mind that we didn’t have an eternity? Or anything that you’d like to say that I haven’t given you a chance to say?

Gosling:        I think I’ve had a fantastic opportunity to roam sort of associatively with the great questions you’ve asked, and I really appreciate how carefully you read and thought about some of the things I’ve said and been involved with. And you’ve allowed it to be sort of all about me, when you probably have much more interesting thoughts and ideas yourself, and it’s very generous of you.

Scarpino:      It is about you.

Gosling:        Anyway, that’s another thing. And I don’t know, I think there are some things, just to speculate and think about these questions around legitimacy, the legitimacy, changing legitimacy of authority, I think it’s a very important question. Again, it’s Max Weber’s question, and we probably could have explored that a bit more, but not your fault.

Scarpino:      No, no. I’ve been actually cutting a little here at the end to make sure that we were done in the amount of time I asked of you. Alright, so while these recorders are still running, I want to say thank you on behalf of myself, on behalf of the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association for being kind enough to sit with me all this time and talk to me. Appreciate it very much.

Gosling:        Well, so do I. Thank you very much.