Leadership, the Professor and Hollywood's The Magnificent Seven

One little phrase, one big movie … How The Magnificent Seven and a leadership professor can solve climate change, Black Lives Matter, and even the looming recession … or not

Everyone’s talking leadership. Trump, Johnson, Putin, Xi, Ardern, Morrison … Thunberg, Attenborough, Mullins (he’s the Australian firefighting veteran and co-founder of Emergency Leaders for Climate Action) and Cullors (co-founder of Black Lives Matter).

And everyone’s got the answer. I typed “best leadership solutions” into Google and was offered about 850 million results in 0.79 of a second.

Your shock jock’s got one, your academic’s got one, your HR manager’s got one and your sports coach’s got one. Your teenage activist and grizzled naturalist have got one. My university has one and there is a growing list of others, which goes to show that the answer IS out there somewhere.

What’s a little less known outside the enthusiastic inner circles of leadership gurus is that there are many kinds of leadership and they’re not the same.

There is the space-race kind that says: “We must get there first.”

There’s the kind that leads people to “follow the leader”, and the kind that leads people to “make a change and improve things”.

I suspect some of those names at the top of this story are in the first group and others are in the second or third group … but they’re all competing for our attention.

Probably the one thing that makes them different from each other is their use, or not, of a familiar phrase from the media, and in the writings of a famous Harvard University professor, John Kotter PhD.

The phrase is “now is not the time”.

Everyone has heard this phrase. Dip into the Factiva database of news and magazines and you’ll discover at least 88,000 publications of that phrase in the database’s “all dates” search searching “all publications”. Over just the past five years it’s 29,392.

Now add a couple of extra variables to search the metadata: the phrases “climate change” OR “novel coronavirus” OR “wildfires”. Unfortunately for international readers, the US-based Factiva doesn’t offer a subject key word for “bushfires”.

For all dates, the search of “all publications” returns 5847. And for the past five years, it’s 5435. “Now is not the time” is very, very current. Perhaps you have heard it in relation to “indigenous voice to parliament”?

Let the statisticians play with that while we head off to the writings of Professor Kotter.

In common with many universities that teach leadership in their Master of Business Administration courses, CQUniversity’s MBA (Leadership) uses an eight-step method Professor Kotter devised to help leaders “lead change”.

He made it the name of his most famous book and audiobook, Leading Change, and no matter who you consult (bookshops, publishers, his biog, the Harvard Business School, his website) he’s sold a bazillion.

Google Scholar has clocked up more than 15,000 citations of this book alone: he’s influential.

Step 1 in his 8-step process “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail” is simply “Establish a sense of urgency”. Now you can see where this is going, right?

As part of step 1, he advises the change leader to “convince at least 75 per cent of your managers that the status quo is more dangerous than the unknown”.

What we’re seeing on the world stage, when politicians or company bosses say “now is not the time” is them actively trying to convince at least 75 per cent of people that the unknown is more dangerous than the status quo.

Kotter’s 8-Step plan advises people how to succeed in leading change but he also sets out “Why Transformation Efforts Fail” and if you’re cunning you can see a playbook for successful conservatism emerging (although that was clearly not Kotter’s intention).

For instance, error 1 in “why transformation efforts fail” is that the people seeking change don’t establish “a great enough sense of urgency”.

Let’s think about that and the words “now is not the time”.

These words effectively torpedo urgency. Some people (in some political parties) think that’s useful!

Error 2 is “not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition”. Seems obvious but forming a coalition of the willing (to quote George Bush) is the first step to leading people and groups. And if it’s not “strong enough” … it’s a truism that it won’t succeed.

So how does Kotter think you make it strong enough? “Assemble a group with shared commitment and enough power to lead the change effort (and) encourage them to work as a team outside the normal hierarchy”.

No matter how much commitment we see in Thunberg and Attenborough and the school strikers and the Green movements around the world, the firefighting Mullins and his colleagues, the indigenous leader Anderson and the “Statement from the Heart” mob and the Black Lives Matter people, they don’t have enough shared power yet and they’re not working all together as a team yet … not enough, not yet.

I think Kotter might advise them – especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – to get MORE powerful people into the team and to gather all the change interests together “as one team” to make a difference. He might even advise them to join forces.

The fly in the ointment right now is that the politically powerful and the super-rich are not on our team. The challenge is to find team members who will join. Bill Gates is one but only one right now.

Imagine a strong coalition of Indigenous and Deaths in Custody leaders, Climate Change reform leaders and even renewable energy leaders … would they all focus on the same thing, “successful change”?

(Later edit October 7, 2020: After reading this article, Greg Mullins messaged me that he was doing exactly that, joining forces with other groups. He wrote: "I'm a bit of a Kotter devotee, and indeed, I've been working to try to increase our reach and "build the coalition", here and internationally. In June and July (2020) we (ELCA) held a virtual national bushfire and climate summit, and we now have strong links with organisations such as ACOSS, the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, Jesuit Social Services just to name a few. We've also assisted other organisations to set themselves up, such as Chief Veterinarians for Climate Action. ELCA has also grown from 23 to 34 members, representing every fire service in Australia, most SES agencies, some forestry, national parks, and also two former Directors General of Emergency Management Australia. Small steps, but we're getting there. A lot of international media interest with several documentaries in the pipeline including a major one from Amazon Prime, one from the UK, and a couple from Australia. Craig Roucassel's new 3 part series, "Big Weather" goes to air on 13 October at 8:30pm on ABC channel 2. The episode on 20 October looks at what ELCA has been doing." Then he signed off: "Thanks for mentioning me alongside Greta and Sir David!")

To save us repeating the next five steps or errors here, let’s switch to how Kotter’s 8-Step theory was effectively previewed on the silver screen in the 1960 Hollywood western movie The Magnificent Seven.

It’s well known that this movie was based on Japanese filmmaker Kurosawa’s 1954 Seven Samurai and they both contain enough homespun wisdom to support Kotter’s later theorising. It’s not known whether either of these movies influenced the professor!

(Another more recent edit: Professor Kotter later emailed me with a little-known link between his "Leading Change" and the Magnificent Seven characters. He wrote: "When a colleague of mine and I decided to turn Leading Change into a fable (Our Iceberg is Melting, New York Times, Wall Street Journal bestseller, #1 business book in Germany for a year), we included colorful illustrations of the emperor penguins. For the picture of the 5-person penguin guiding coalition, my co-author and I told the illustrator “make them look like The Magnificent Seven”, and he did! Now is this a small world or what?")

The table below is an infographic to show how the screenplay (mainly by Walter Newman and William Roberts but with several other credits) matches up with Kotter’s much-later 8-step plan for ‘leading change’* (see end note).

Watch all the way to the end of the movie … or read this infographic for a scene-by-scene call of the leadership action … and you’ll get the picture. Now is definitely the time to re-watch this classic and revisit your leadership style.