SHAPING THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL LEADERSHIP

A physician and researcher focuses on the need and means to create global leaders of moral integrity in this ambitious book.

According to Khan, the world is spiraling into poverty and war and the principal culprit is a failure of global leadership. The crux of this problem is moral in character—without the direction provided by “transcendent principles,” leaders are inclined to “selfishness, cruelty, egoism, and hysteria.” The moral order of the cosmos is guaranteed by a “universal organizing principle,” which one can, as the author does, refer to as God. Khan proposes that moral integrity could be spread through a program that identifies potential leaders in their youth and subjects them to a training regimen. This would require the establishment of a kind of global accreditation agency to compose the standards and oversee their implementation, an Independent Global Leadership Organization. Khan’s discussion is characteristically vague—he doesn’t provide a lot of actionable details regarding the nature of the selection of leaders or their training. In addition, he doesn’t examine the challenges of any test for leadership being globally accepted or enforced given thorny issues like political diversity and sovereignty. Even his understanding of a leader’s essential characteristics is unhelpfully broad—patience, open-mindedness, and compassion are inarguably good traits, but surely leadership requires much more than these attributes. The author is admirably open about his own religious commitments—he’s a practicing Muslim—and tries to articulate a message that could be generally palatable to theists of all stripes. Moreover, he writes in consistently clear prose unencumbered by technical jargon. But his suggestions are not only indeterminate, but also a bit naïve—the creation of moral leaders is not a simple matter of technocratic training. Ultimately, this is a peculiarly apolitical book given that the author’s mission is to improve the messy political world.

A lucid but overly general discussion of leadership that lacks practical details.