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The jokes posted near offices' water fountains often provide honest warnings about employee morale. When an opening arose for a new city editor at a daily newspaper where I worked in the 1980s, an office wag posted a cartoon of several men lined up on their hands and knees, each burying his face in the posterior in front of him. The anonymous jokester added a hand-scrawled caption—"City editor applicants"—that prompted widespread chuckles. Butt-kissing was not part of the written job description, of course, but many of my colleagues agreed that independent thinking was not an essential trait in the next city editor.
When I first went to work at that newspaper, as a lowly newsroom typist, becoming a full-time reporter was my life's goal. I could not imagine anything more glamorous or rewarding. Twenty years later, that company is my gold standard of occupational misery, the measure of just how terrible a job can become, even in my cherished field of journalism. The executive editor was a vulgar bully and bitter atheist whose idea of humor was to walk through the newsroom and hiss, "Faster, faster." I feared this man, but could never fabricate any respect for him.
Apart from his rage, he had few tools for leading his staff. His sense of office etiquette favored image over substance: he insisted that men wear ties to the job, but he sexually exploited a succession of women editors and reporters. He haunted my nightmares a few times each year until his recent death.
I think back to my newspaper days because they provided such a vivid sense of what I do not seek in a leader. Because I'm an introvert, a Christian, a Southerner, and the son of a Cajun who yelled with some frequency during my early childhood, I usually respect authority figures, unless they are venal or cowardly. My few attempts at being a manager have been so disastrous that I could write a series of essays on how not to hire or supervise anyone. But from where I work, as a writer who is happier being led than trying to lead, I think I know good leadership when I see it. At least I know what inspires me to do my best work.
A first glance at a book like George Barna's A Fish Out of Water could leave the cynical among us thinking that leadership is the latest flavor of the month in the self-help genre. That the publishing houses of the evangelical subculture would be part of this trend is no surprise. Evangelical publishers have shown an unhampered enthusiasm for self-help themes for a few decades now, and if a theme can be used to convey the gospel to readers, so much the better. How else might we reach the hordes of middle managers who devour Who Moved My Cheese? as if it were holy writ and who display Successories posters without a trace of irony?
The formats of both A Fish Out of Water and Katherine Harris's Center of the Storm may leave readers expecting thin gruel. Some publishers assume that readers will not persist through a few hundred pages of text without what journalists refer to as callouts or pull quotes: passages from an article that designers use to break up an otherwise gray page. We use callouts frequently in journalism, but they work best when bearing some resemblance to what the author has written. In these two books, callouts serve mostly as fillers, and sometimes non sequitur fillers at that. So, for instance, a callout from Florence Nightingale appears in the middle of Harris's reflections on the heroism of Jan Hus and Martin Luther. Barna offers callouts from a broad array of quotable figures—George Bernard Shaw, Garry Wills, Dale Carnegie, Richard Nixon ("If an individual wants to be a leader and isn't controversial, that means he never stood for anything"), and Steve Case ("A vision without the ability to execute it is a hallucination"), among others. Just in case readers are left bored or overly challenged even by a page with a callout, Barna's publishers repeatedly include the cover image of what seems to be a large-mouth bass. It's enough to give readers nightmares of being devoured by one of those animated Big Mouth Billy Bass wall plaques that sing "Don't Worry, Be Happy."
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