Though Drucker often expressed disappointment with government’s failures, time and again he held up individual political and military figures as models of effective leadership. He hoped that all organizations would learn from their example.
“Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, and Harry Truman were singularly effective leaders, yet none possessed any more charisma than a dead mackerel… No less charismatic personality could be imagined than Abe Lincoln of Illinois, the raw-boned, uncouth backwoodsman of 1860. And there was amazingly little charisma to the bitter, defeated, almost broken Churchill of the interwar years…
“Indeed, charisma does not by itself guarantee effectiveness as a leader… Nor are there any such things as ‘leadership qualities’ or a ‘leadership personality’…
“What then is leadership if it is not charisma and not a set of personality traits?... What distinguishes the leader from the misleader are his goals. Whether the compromise he makes with the constraints of reality—which may involve political, economic, financial or people problems—are compatible with his mission and goals or lead away from them determines whether he is an effective leader. And whether he holds fast to a few basic standards (exemplifying them in his own conduct), or whether ‘standards’ for him are what he can get away with, determines whether the leader has followers or only hypocritical time-servers…
“If Winston Churchill is an example of leadership through clearly defining mission and goals, Gen. George Marshall, America’s chief of staff in World War II, is an example of leadership through responsibility. Harry Truman’s folksy ‘The buck stops here’ is still as good a definition as any.”
— Peter F. Drucker, Managing for the Future


