Anyone foolish enough to contemplate writing a book on leadership (e.g. me at the moment), might like to know what they’re up against, competition-wise.
According to Google Scholar, last year there were 226,000 books, papers or articles published on the subject of leadership. A number I found difficult enough to compute inside my very small brain, that I was forced to look and see whether 2019 had just been a particularly bad year. Turns out that it wasn’t. Here’s what the scholarly output on leadership looks like for the last 25 years:
If you thought 2019 was bad, it turns out it was but a fraction of the ‘content’ published in 2010. A year in which an astonishing 812,000 pieces of leadership advice were flushed out of the minds of the leadership glitterati and into the corporate waste-bins of the world.
The curve made me think that leadership and people writing about leadership were somehow inversely proportional: the last time the world had any real leaders was probably in the 1960s. A time when people actually lead rather than taking the much safer route of writing about how to lead. By 2010 – in the wake of the GFC I imagine – the world had apparently no leaders at all, but rather lots of people carving a niche for themselves as leadership authorities. Not that I’m ever going to do the research, but I have a fairly strong instinct that the focus of many of the 812,000 leadership publications was ‘where have all the leaders gone?’ The answer to which, we can now see, was ‘writing papers about where all the leaders have gone’. And lo, the serpent began to eat its tail.
If this inverse correlation is in any way correct, the falling pattern since 2010 is probably a good sign. When people stop writing about leadership, maybe we might get some actual leadership back again? It would certainly fit with what happens in the sort of Crisis period most people on the planet now find ourselves in.
Meanwhile, before getting my hopes up too high, I thought I’d zoom in a little and restrict the analysis to leadership content that had been peer reviewed. In 1960, it turns out there were 2995 peer-reviewed research papers published about leadership. In 2017 the annual figure had jumped to 114,422. If my maths is correct, a 38x increase. In 2017, just to let you know they weren’t all writing about where all the leaders went, there were 31,339 papers published about leadership styles. This figure was up from 499 in 1960. A 62x increase in blind professors leading the blinder corporate flunkies.
When I plotted the trajectory of peer-reviewed papers against the total scholarly output, the two graphs look like this:
This data helped clarify another hypothesis. The peer-reviewed academia peak didn’t happen until 2016. Perhaps the most surprising conclusion that could be drawn here is that leadership ‘experts’ in academia are only six years behind the real world. If you’d asked me to guess, I would have gone for a higher number. Thirty years maybe? Forty? A hundred and fifty?
So, anyway, the upshot is, if both academia and the real world are on a downward trajectory, publication-wise, maybe those of us writing a book on leadership get to cling on to the hope that we end up writing the last book on leadership. That’s what’s keeping me going anyway. That plus the fact that by 2025 we might have some real leaders in our midst again. Ideally ones that received their Call to Action after reading the last book 😉
Game on.