98 Fun Facts About Leadership

Who wrote 'The Servant as Leader', the 1970 essay that popularised the phrase 'servant leadership'?

Robert K. Greenleaf. A retired AT&T executive, he took the idea from Hermann Hesse's novel Journey to the East, in which the travellers' humble servant, Leo, turns out to be the head of their order.

According to the Peter principle, employees in a hierarchy tend to be promoted until they reach what?

Their level of incompetence. A study of sales staff at more than a hundred firms found the joke holds: the best sellers were the likeliest to be promoted, and then the likeliest to do poorly as managers.

Parkinson's law, first published in The Economist in 1955, states that work expands to fill what?

The time available for it. Parkinson backed the joke with Royal Navy figures: between 1914 and 1928 the fleet lost two-thirds of its capital ships, while the Admiralty's officials grew by 78 percent.

Which MIT management professor contrasted Theory X bosses, who assume workers are lazy, with trusting Theory Y bosses?

Douglas McGregor. His 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise carried Abraham Maslow's psychology into business schools, arguing that a manager's view of human nature decides how he manages.

Bruce Tuckman's 1965 model of team development runs forming, storming, norming and then which stage?

Performing. Tuckman drew the stages from fifty published studies; when he revisited the model in 1977 only one of 22 newer studies had set out to test it, and he added a fifth stage, adjourning.

James MacGregor Burns, who set 'transforming' leaders against 'transactional' ones in 1978, was also a prize-winning biographer of whom?

US presidents. His Franklin Roosevelt biography won a Pulitzer, but when the Kennedys cooperated on a 1960 life hoping for a flattering portrait, Burns called John F. Kennedy 'casual as a cash register'.

Which Scottish essayist behind the 'great man theory' wrote that history is 'but the biography of great men'?

Thomas Carlyle. He made the case in six public lectures in 1840; Herbert Spencer later answered that great men are products of their societies: 'Before he can remake his society, his society must make him.'

Which now-common business term is management thinker Peter Drucker credited with coining?

Knowledge worker. Drucker foresaw an economy in which brains would trump brawn, and in 1999 he was still calling the productivity of such workers the biggest challenge facing management.

In Abraham Maslow's 1943 hierarchy of needs, which need sits at the very top?

Self-actualization. Maslow never drew the famous pyramid: it first appeared in a 1960 business-journal article by consulting psychologist Charles McDermid, and management textbooks spread it from there.

The subtitle of Daniel Goleman's 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence says it can matter more than what?

IQ. Psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer had framed the idea in a 1990 paper; Goleman's book made it famous, and he went on to tell executives that it is the sine qua non of leadership.

In Stephen Covey's 1989 bestseller The 7 Habits, what is the first habit?

Be proactive. Covey put it first because every other habit rests on it: drawing on psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, he argued that between what happens to us and how we respond lies the freedom to choose.

Whose public-speaking course became the 1936 bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People?

Dale Carnegie. A Simon & Schuster man who took the 14-week course had a stenographer type up the lectures to talk him into a book, which has since sold more than 30 million copies.

Jim Collins's Good to Great names its focus-on-one-thing concept after which animal?

Hedgehog. Collins took it from Isaiah Berlin's essay on the ancient saying that the fox knows many things but the hedgehog one big thing; he found his great companies were led by hedgehogs, their rivals by foxes.

In Simon Sinek's 'golden circle' from Start with Why, 'Why' comes ahead of which two words?

How and What. Sinek drew the three as rings with Why at the centre, and argued that Apple and Martin Luther King Jr. won their followings by starting there, with a sense of purpose, before saying how or what.

Psychologist Kurt Lewin described three leadership climates: authoritarian, democratic and which third?

Laissez-faire. French for 'let them do', it leaves every decision to the group with no part played by the leader; a 2004 review pooling 87 studies found such hands-off leadership went with worse results.

Who wrote Team of Rivals (2005), a study of Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet?

Doris Kearns Goodwin. Her title refers to Lincoln handing cabinet posts to William Seward, Salmon Chase and Edward Bates, all of whom he had just beaten for the 1860 Republican nomination.

On which island did Nelson Mandela spend 18 of his 27 years in prison?

Robben Island. Put to hard labour in a lime quarry there, he secretly wrote the first draft of his memoir Long Walk to Freedom and had it smuggled out; he walked free from Victor Verster Prison in 1990.

To which island did Ernest Shackleton sail a lifeboat from Elephant Island to fetch help for his stranded crew?

South Georgia. The boat landed on the uninhabited side, so Shackleton and two companions crossed its unmapped mountains on foot to a whaling station, and all 28 men of the Endurance were saved.

Which American carmaker made Mary Barra its chief executive in January 2014?

General Motors. She joined its Pontiac division in 1980 as an 18-year-old co-op student and never left, rising over three decades to become the first woman to lead a major carmaker.

Alexander the Great was tutored by which philosopher until the age of 16?

Aristotle. His fee was a city: Philip II rebuilt the philosopher's hometown of Stageira, which he had destroyed, and Plutarch says Alexander later slept with Aristotle's edition of the Iliad under his pillow.

UCLA coach John Wooden, who won ten NCAA titles in 12 years, taught players his 'Pyramid of' what?

Success. Wooden defined it not as winning but as the peace of mind of knowing you made the effort to be the best you could, and called the pyramid 'the only truly original thing I have ever done'.

Which NBA coach, nicknamed the 'Zen Master', won 11 championships as a head coach?

Phil Jackson. The nickname came from a coaching style steeped in Eastern philosophy and Native American practice; it brought six titles with the Chicago Bulls and five with the Lakers, after two as a Knicks player.

Which English club did Sir Alex Ferguson manage for 26 years, winning 13 Premier League titles?

Manchester United. The club had gone 26 years without a league title when he delivered his first in 1993, his seventh season in the job; he retired in 2013 with 38 trophies.

Which political treatise, written in 1513 but published posthumously, argues it is safer to be feared than loved?

The Prince. Machiavelli wrote it months after the returning Medici had him jailed and tortured, then dedicated it to a Medici in the hope of winning back a post; it was printed five years after he died.

Sun Tzu's The Art of War ranks what above winning every battle?

Bloodless victory. The treatise calls breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting the supreme excellence, treats combat as what is left when other plans fail, and calls besieging walled cities the worst policy of all.

Which Roman emperor wrote Meditations in Greek rather than Latin?

Marcus Aurelius. He kept the Meditations as a private notebook, written partly on campaign in central Europe, and probably never meant anyone else to read it.

The Roman hero Cincinnatus is celebrated for winning a war as dictator and then immediately doing what?

Returning to his farm. In Livy's telling, envoys found him at the plough when they came to offer him supreme power; a society of Continental Army officers took his name, and the city of Cincinnati took theirs.

What was Angela Merkel's profession before she entered politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Scientist. With a doctorate behind her, she worked at an East Berlin research academy until 1989, was an East German government spokeswoman within months, and 16 years later became Germany's first female chancellor.

Before Jacinda Ardern in 2018, who was the only elected head of government to give birth in office?

Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan's prime minister had her daughter Bakhtawar in January 1990 and, by her own account, was back signing files a day later; Ardern's baby arrived on 21 June, Bhutto's own birthday.

The Super Bowl trophy is named after which coach, winner of the first two with Green Bay?

Vince Lombardi. He took over a Packers team that had won a single game the season before and made it champion five times in nine years; the trophy was renamed for him after he died of cancer in 1970.

Which tech executive co-wrote the 2013 bestseller Lean In?

Sheryl Sandberg. Then Facebook's chief operating officer, she had first made the case in a 2010 TED talk on why so few women reach the top of their professions, and wrote the book with Nell Scovell.

Whom did Satya Nadella succeed as Microsoft CEO in 2014?

Steve Ballmer. On the day Nadella took over, Bill Gates also gave up the chairman's seat to become his technology adviser; Nadella had joined in 1992 and led the company's move to the cloud.

Indra Nooyi was CEO of which company from 2006 to 2018?

PepsiCo. Before taking the top job she had driven the deals that brought it Tropicana and Gatorade, and as chief executive she moved the snack and soda maker's spending toward healthier products.

Alan Mulally, who turned Ford around without a bailout, joined it in 2006 from which company?

Boeing. An aircraft engineer by training, he mortgaged almost everything Ford owned within months of arriving, and that borrowed cash carried it through the 2008 crash while both Detroit rivals went bankrupt.

Steve Jobs bought Pixar in 1986, but which computer company had he founded a year earlier after leaving Apple?

NeXT. Tim Berners-Lee built the world's first web server on one of its computers at CERN, and when Apple bought the company in 1997 Jobs came back with it, soon to run Apple again.

The business philosophy of kaizen takes its name from a Japanese word meaning what?

Improvement. The workplace method grew out of American wartime training programmes, which the post-war occupation authorities brought to Japan to help rebuild its industry.

Which co-creator of the situational leadership model also co-wrote the bestseller The One Minute Manager?

Ken Blanchard. He and Paul Hersey launched the model in 1969 as the 'life cycle theory of leadership', then built rival versions of it; his 1982 management fable with Spencer Johnson became his best-known book.

The 1964 Blake–Mouton grid rates managers on 'concern for production' and concern for what?

People. Care about them and nothing else and the grid brands you a 'country club' manager; care only about output and you are 'produce or perish'; a 'team' manager scores high on both.

Between D-Day and the White House, Dwight Eisenhower was president of which university?

Columbia. He took the job in 1948 and kept the title until 1953, but from 1950 he was back in uniform at President Truman's request, commanding NATO's new forces in Europe, and then running for president.

Which wartime leader won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature for his histories and speeches?

Winston Churchill. The Swedish Academy cited his 'brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values'; he did not travel to Stockholm, so his wife Clementine collected the prize and read out his speech.

Catherine the Great became Empress of Russia in 1762 after a coup against whom?

Her husband, Peter III. He had reigned only six months when she and her lover Grigory Orlov turned the army against him; he abdicated, died in custody days later, and her own part in that death has never been clear.

Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire, was born under what name?

Temüjin. In the earliest tradition his father named him after a Tatar captive taken in battle; after the father was poisoned the family was abandoned on the steppe, and he took the title Genghis Khan only in 1206.

Margaret Thatcher's nickname 'the Iron Lady' came from a newspaper in which country?

The Soviet Union. Its army newspaper, Red Star, called her that in 1976 after she attacked Soviet ambitions in a speech, and a week later she was using it of herself in front of her own constituency party.

Lee Kuan Yew served as the first prime minister of which country, from 1959 to 1990?

Singapore. He had fought for union with Malaysia, so its expulsion from the federation in 1965 forced on him the independence he is remembered for; he stayed in its cabinet until 2011.

In Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which dysfunction sits at the base of the pyramid?

Absence of trust. Lencioni means teammates afraid to show weakness to one another; the layer above it is fear of conflict, where the team keeps an artificial harmony when it ought to be arguing things out.

At which company did venture capitalist John Doerr learn the OKR goal-setting system he later took to Google?

Intel. Andy Grove taught the system there, in a course Doerr sat through as a young salesman; in 1999 Doerr pitched it to Google's founders, and it became central to how that company runs.

Jack Welch made Six Sigma famous at General Electric, but which electronics company had devised it in the 1980s?

Motorola. Its engineer Bill Smith is known as the father of the method, which aims at no more than 3.4 defects per million chances; GE took it up only in 1995, when Welch put it at the centre of his strategy.

At his 1804 coronation, with Pope Pius VII looking on, whom did Napoleon crown first?

Himself. Pius VII had come from Rome to officiate, yet Napoleon set the crown on his own head and then crowned Joséphine, the scene Jacques-Louis David turned into a painting that now hangs in the Louvre.

Who was the first Black American to serve as US Secretary of State, from 2001 to 2005?

Colin Powell. The son of Jamaican immigrants, raised in the South Bronx, he entered the Army through an officer-training course at City College and was confirmed by the Senate without a vote against.

Elizabeth I's 'heart and stomach of a king' speech rallied troops against which invaders?

The Spanish. She spoke at Tilbury more than a week after her navy had driven the Armada from the Channel, while a Spanish army waiting across the water under the Duke of Parma was still feared.

Which carmaker's just-in-time production system was inspired by the way American supermarkets restock their shelves?

Toyota. Engineer Taiichi Ohno saw that a supermarket refills a shelf only after shoppers empty it, and had each workstation 'buy' parts from the one before in the same way, so nothing was made until it was needed.

Which Chinese doctrine held that subjects could rightly overthrow an unjust emperor?

The Mandate of Heaven. The Zhou kings first used it to justify overthrowing the Shang dynasty, and floods and famines were later read as signs that heaven had withdrawn its favour from whoever was on the throne.

Which half-cousin of Charles Darwin argued in Hereditary Genius (1869) that eminence runs in families?

Francis Galton. Darwin wrote to him fifty pages in: 'You have made a convert of an opponent', having always held that, fools aside, men differed little in intellect and only in zeal and hard work.

Lewin, Lippitt and White's landmark 1939 study of leadership styles observed groups of what?

Boys' hobby clubs. The boys worked on craft projects while their club leaders swapped styles, and under a bossy leader one club turned aggressive while the others went listless.

The Ohio State leadership studies, begun in 1945, narrowed leader behaviour to 'consideration' and which other dimension?

Initiating structure. The surprise was that the two are separate scales, not opposite ends of one, so a leader can be strong on organising the work and on looking after the team at once.

Besides the task itself, what does Fiedler's contingency model say a leader may prioritise?

Relationships with the group. Fiedler sorted leaders with an odd test, asking them to rate the colleague they least liked working with: those who were kind about that person counted as relationship-minded.

Robert House's path-goal theory of leadership was built on whose expectancy theory?

Victor Vroom. His expectancy theory says employees try hard when they expect effort to bring a reward they value, so House cast the leader as the one who clears their path to it.

Which pair wrote that managers 'do things right' and leaders 'do the right thing'?

Bennis and Nanus. The line comes from their 1985 book Leaders, a study of 90 leaders that found they all pulled others along with a clear vision of where to go.

Deaf quarterback Paul Hubbard is credited with starting which football ritual at Gallaudet in the 1890s?

The huddle hid his hands: Hubbard feared rival deaf schools were reading Gallaudet's plays from his open signing, so he drew his teammates into a tight circle.

Jeff Bezos's rule for keeping Amazon teams small says a team should be fed by just two of what?

Pizzas cap a team at roughly six to eight members, and Bezos applies the same two-pie test to the guest list of his meetings.

The image of an 'alpha wolf' fighting to lead the pack came from studies of wolves living where?

In captivity, unrelated wolves penned together fought over rank; wild packs are simply families, with the two parents in charge of their own young.

Shift supervisor Luis Urzúa kept 33 trapped miners organised until their rescue 69 days later in which country?

Chile's 33 voted on everything underground, with 16 plus one making a majority, and stretched two or three days of emergency food to last two weeks.

Ad executive Alex Osborn, the 'O' in the agency BBDO, popularised which team technique for generating ideas?

Brainstorming came with Osborn's rule that criticism waits until later, on the theory that a big pile of wild ideas will hide a few good ones.

The agile teamwork method Scrum borrows its name from a tight formation of players in which sport?

Rugby inspired a 1986 paper by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, who pictured a product team moving upfield together, passing the ball back and forth.

Which everyday commodity did Mahatma Gandhi walk 240 miles to the sea to make illegally in 1930?

Salt was a taxed British monopoly, so when Gandhi boiled a lump of salty mud at Dandi after 24 days on the road, millions of Indians copied the crime.

The 'devil's advocate' who argues against the room began as an official role in which institution?

The Catholic Church set up the office in 1587 to argue against making a candidate a saint, probing for character flaws and shaky evidence.

The word 'mentor' comes from a character who advises young Telemachus in which ancient Greek epic?

The Odyssey has Mentor left in charge of the palace while Odysseus is away at war, and the goddess Athena later borrows his shape to guide the king's son.

Which American leader kept a desk sign, made in an Oklahoma federal reformatory, saying the buck stopped with him?

Harry Truman's sign carried a second line on the back, a reminder that he came from Missouri, and Jimmy Carter later borrowed it for his own Oval Office desk.

Irving Janis made the Bay of Pigs invasion his prime case study of which failure in team decision-making?

Groupthink echoes the 'doublethink' of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Janis argued the same hunger for consensus left Pearl Harbor unprepared in 1941.

French engineer Maximilien Ringelmann found individuals slack off in bigger groups while doing which task?

Pulling a rope alongside others, each member gave less than when hauling alone, and later tests found the slacking persists even when the 'teammates' only pretend to pull.

In Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats method, which colour hat opens and closes every meeting?

Blue is the chair's hat: the group wears it at the start to agree how it will think, and again at the end to judge what the thinking produced.

In the SMART goals acronym, introduced by George Doran in 1981, what does the M stand for?

Measurable meant picking an indicator of progress; Doran's original list also had an A for 'assignable', spelling out who would do the job.

The Eisenhower matrix, a time-management grid, sorts tasks by importance and which other quality?

Urgency is the trap in the grid: jobs that are pressing but unimportant get delegated, while important ones with no deadline are given a date and done personally.

The 80/20 rule that managers use to set priorities is named after which Italian economist?

Vilfredo Pareto had noted that about a fifth of Italians owned four-fifths of the land; engineer Joseph Juran later turned the pattern into a quality-control rule.

The Myers–Briggs test, a staple of team-building days, grew out of which psychiatrist's 1921 book?

Carl Jung's Psychological Types inspired a mother and daughter, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers, to build the first version of the questionnaire during World War II.

Carol Dweck's bestseller Mindset contrasts a 'fixed' mindset with which other kind?

Growth mindset holders believe ability can be developed, so they embrace the challenges that those with a fixed view avoid for fear of exposing their limits.

Angela Duckworth's bestseller Grit defines the quality as passion combined with what?

Perseverance shares the book's subtitle with passion; Duckworth quit a consulting job at McKinsey to teach school maths before turning to psychology.

Brené Brown, author of Dare to Lead, found fame with a 2010 TEDx talk on the power of what?

Vulnerability became one of TED's most-watched subjects and lifted the Houston social-work professor's research on shame out of academic obscurity.

Before which 1805 sea battle did Horatio Nelson signal that England expected every man to do his duty?

Trafalgar's famous signal was edited on deck: Nelson asked for 'confides', but his signal officer swapped in 'expects' because it took fewer flags to send.

Aged about seventeen, Joan of Arc rode with a relief army to which besieged French city in 1429?

Orléans was free nine days after she arrived, and the run of wins that followed opened the road for Charles VII to be crowned with Joan at his side.

Malala Yousafzai was 17 when she won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize as an activist from which country?

Pakistan had given her its first National Youth Peace Prize three years earlier, after she blogged for the BBC at 11 about life under a Taliban ban on girls' schooling.

Greta Thunberg was 15 when her solo school strike outside which country's parliament inspired Fridays for Future?

Sweden's Riksdag saw her sit outside every school day for three weeks before the 2018 election; afterwards she kept striking, but only on Fridays.

Which Underground Railroad guide, nicknamed Moses, made some 13 missions to lead about 70 others out of slavery?

Harriet Tubman travelled by night and in extreme secrecy after her own escape, and later boasted that she never lost a passenger.

Martin Luther King Jr., a young minister new to town, was picked to lead a 1955 bus boycott in which city?

Montgomery's organisers wanted King precisely because he was new: the city fathers had not yet had time to intimidate him. The boycott held for more than a year.

Whose sled dogs and skis carried his Norwegian party to the pole five weeks ahead of Britain's Captain Scott?

Roald Amundsen ordered 100 Greenland sledge dogs for the journey and could not understand why British explorers were so wary of using them.

Jerry Harvey's paradox of a family agreeing to a drive nobody wants is named after which Texas city?

Abilene meant a hot, dusty 50-mile drive for a bad dinner; back home, it emerged that not one of the family had actually wanted to go.

The party 'whip' who keeps legislators in line takes the title from an assistant in which sport?

Fox hunting has a 'whipper-in', the huntsman's assistant who drives straying hounds back to the pack, and Parliament had borrowed the name by the 1770s.

Which NASA flight director, known for his homemade vests, led Mission Control's effort to save the Apollo 13 crew?

Gene Kranz wore waistcoats sewn by his wife, Marta, for his missions, and he also directed the first Moon landing, Apollo 11.

A 1907 experimental camp on Brownsea, in England's Poole Harbour, launched which worldwide youth movement?

Scouting grew from that camp's mix of woodcraft, observation and lifesaving, which was held to test ideas for a handbook published in instalments the following year.

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, authors of Extreme Ownership, are former officers of which elite US force?

Navy SEALs under Willink's command fought insurgents in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, and he later co-founded a management consultancy to teach firms what he learned there.

Which French chef organised restaurant kitchens into the military-style hierarchy known as the 'brigade'?

Auguste Escoffier drew on nearly seven years as an army cook, and the chain of command he devised became standard in many restaurant kitchens.

Robert's Rules of Order, the 1876 manual for running meetings, was written by a man in which profession?

Soldier and engineer Henry Martyn Robert adapted the procedures of Congress for ordinary societies, and his manual now governs meetings from school boards to homeowners' associations.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became Africa's first elected female head of state in 2006, leading which country?

Liberia re-elected her in 2011, the year she won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to bring women into peacemaking.

The Johari window, a 1955 feedback exercise used in team training, takes its name from what?

Its inventors' first names, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, were blended into 'Johari'; the grid sorts what you and others know about you into four quadrants.

Which British researcher watched business games at Henley to define team roles such as Plant and Shaper?

Meredith Belbin at first found eight roles; the ninth, the Specialist, was missed because his business-game exercise called for no expert know-how.

Which educator founded Gordonstoun school, co-founded Outward Bound and helped create the Duke of Edinburgh's Award?

Kurt Hahn left Germany after urging his Salem pupils and staff to choose between the school and Hitler, then rebuilt his ideas in Scotland.

Which author of The Fearless Organization pioneered research on psychological safety in work teams?

Amy Edmondson's field has a striking hospital finding: wards where staff feel safe admitting mistakes detect more errors, because slips get reported instead of hidden.

In the Tour de France, which French term describes a rider who works for a team's leader instead of trying to win?

Domestique is French for servant: these riders push out into the wind so that their leader can save energy sheltering in the slipstream behind.