These really are perplexing questions. I am against pragmatism and managerialism both, because they are both fallacious philosophies in my opinion. Leadership is antithetical to both, because leadership requires vision and courage, and these ‘realistic’ philsophies eschew both. Steve Jobs is being paraphrased to death these days, but the difference between him and an ordinary manager could not be more clear. He had the ‘vision thing’ in spades. I think all corporations should start using a CO/XO kind of management team like the military, because that way you can combine leadership and management into an effective team–not very many people can do both. Good managers are often bad leaders, and good leaders bad managers.
Pragmatism is an anti-capitalist fantasy even more than managerialism. Both presuppose that human beings have the ability to understand how to reorganize gigantic systems with ease, when in reality no human being can even understand, much less ‘fix’ almost any problem. Pragmatism always tends towards statism, because the easiest way to ‘fix’ things is to by negative laws or regulation, i.e. forbidding things, whether it be drugs or 3.5-gallon toilets. Pragmatists is what liberals THINK they are; conservatives may call it pie-in-the-sky but they call themselves the ‘reality-based coalition.’
Leadership, on the other hand, rarely requires the force of law. Example and creating new traditions work instead. George Washington gave up the presidency to John Adams and set the precedent. He created the Order of Cincinatus and with it a tradition in our military that has prevented us from ever suffering a military coup or dictatorship, unlike nearly every other republic in history. He set the standards for others to follow, and even those who despised his politics, like Jefferson and Madison, followed in his footsteps.
The fact that Romney has a background in management troubles me greatly. The question is whether his education in a fallacious philosophy at Harvard will be counteracted by the Mormon tradition of leadership over management. (BTW Hugh Nibley gave an excellent speech on it in the 70s, if you care to hunt it up.) His time at Bain doesn’t feel managerial to me, but I can’t really say for sure. Indeed, success in that arena is more likely the result of leadership than management, as it is in many parts of corporate America (like Apple). Daring, risk, and endeavor mark the leader, and young corporations are usually led to greatness and then managed into bankruptcy or merger. His experience at Bain includes both old and young, and he was a founder of the particular division, not a usual place for a go-along-to-get-along manager.
For me the jury is still out; I’m a Mormon too and I hope that our religious traditions will defeat the spurious philosophies of hubris in Romney’s (possible) presidency. But every time I see Harry Reid’s face I wonder whether it’ll be enough…
