A bias in this field, which is often an American one, is to claim the universality of findings based on a small sample within a specific context. To take but one example, the renowned Warren Bennis, one of the Masters in this book, after studying two groups of leaders—the young geeks and the old geezers, but both American—discovered that all those leaders share four basic qualities. He and his co-author then asserted: “We are now convinced that these four qualities mark all exemplary leaders, whatever their age, era, gender, ethnicity, or race.”¹

This kind of confidence might only reflect a rhetorical art, but it might also reveal a profound belief, and probably a well-grounded one. As in other human activities, there is timeless and borderless wisdom in leadership. A sage in ancient China said, “There are sages in the East. There are sages in the West. The mind is the same. The reasoning is the same. If these are not the same, they are not sages.” Therefore it is justifiable to have this universality bias, from which I couldn’t exempt myself when I endeavored to present the Eight Disciplines of Leadership.

As with many other human activities, however, leadership is culture-specific. The leader, the community the leader is leading, the purpose for which the leader is leading, and the context in which the leader is leading, are all intertwined, and all can have cultural implications that are significant to activities of leadership. Even if the four qualities that Warren Bennis found or the eight disciplines that I summarized are universal—and I believe they are to a certain extent—people in different cultures certainly prioritize them in different hierarchies, interpret them with different meanings, and implement them in different ways. Thus cultural sensitivity, or cultural intelligence, is essential in leadership. One of my favorite books is Riding the Waves of Culture by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner, in which the two European authors, following the tradition of the cross-cultural management guru Geert Hofstede (another European), eloquently argue that there is no one best way of management, or leadership.

If we embrace the view that leadership is culture-specific, then we face three challenges, for which there are no easy solutions.

The first of these challenges is to find your own best way, the one that suits your cultural context. Peter Drucker, my favorite management writer, clearly didn’t subscribe to the one-best-way-of-leadership school of thought when he wrote the following words in the 1980s:

The second challenge is to lead in a cross-cultural context, an undertaking more demanding than ever due to the integration of the global economy, the advancement of communications and transportation, and other factors that contribute to the popular phrase “the world is flat.” This task falls in the domain of cross-cultural management, where scholars like Hofstede and Trompenaars have provided a great number of insights.

The third challenge I would like to stress here is to make a cultural “paradigm shift” in leadership. This will entail that we absorb leadership wisdom from other cultures and integrate it into our own. In particular, it means that the American model of leadership, which has dominated the world both as a school of thought and a guide for practice for the past several decades, should upgrade itself by learning from other cultures.

The fact that the recent financial meltdown originated in the United States is just one striking piece of evidence for the malfunctioning of the American leadership model. Many observers in the United States have sensed it too. For example, the Harvard Business School dean Jay Light wrote in November 2008: “Who bears responsibility for the collapse of 2008? It is a collective failure, not only of financial safeguards and institutions, but of leadership at many levels. This was true in corporate executive offices, in government, and yes—in business schools too.”³ Yet Jay Light still had the view of an insider, which perhaps prevented him from taking the next logical step and saying “It is a failure of leadership—of the American model.”

To recapitulate the gist of such a model exceeds both the capacity of this Afterword and the capability of its author. Instead I will just make two points.

My first point is that in such a model, people usually justify great actions in terms of great consequences. They do things because they expect good results. Based on his observations of such a model, James March, another of the Masters in this book, suggests that leaders learn from Don Quixote, who replaces the logic of consequence with the logic of identity, or who acts according to “who I am” rather than “what I can get.” In cultural terms, such a model is more achievement-oriented than the ascription-oriented model common in Eastern cultures.

My second point is that in such a model, people tend to confront nature and try to take advantage of it, rather than to live harmoniously with it, or to see humanity and nature as an integrated whole as many Eastern cultures do. Peter Senge, another of the Masters in this book and one of the few influential Western management gurus with a deep understanding of Eastern wisdom traditions, quotes Zhang Zai, a Confucian scholar who lived nearly a millennium ago:

Reading this, Senge says,

While Peter Senge was rightly pushing Easterners to awaken to their wisdom traditions and blend these with those of the West, I would like to propose here that Westerners awaken to Eastern wisdom traditions and blend these with their own. It is a challenge beyond the scope of this book. Nevertheless I hope it can be a starting point. In the beginning of this book, I invited you to join in those conversations and act on those leadership disciplines. Now, I extend another invitation to a new intellectual and developmental journey, an exploration of culturally integrated “leadership for the world.” Join me.