Leadership Then and Now – Hegel and Transformation by Dr Richard Claydon.

In 1806, Napoleon waws camped outside the town of Jena, poised to win the battle that would cement his dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and transform Europe into a radical new form.

Inside the town of Jena, a then unknown philosopher wrote the following note to his friend. “I saw the Emperor – this soul of the world – go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it.”

The unknown philosopher was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The text that he had just sent to be published was the one that would make him famous – The Phenomenology of Geist.

Hegel’s reflections on the radical transformation of Napoleonic Europe should be required reading for modern-day Chief Transformation Officers and their corps of change managers. It’s arguably the first modern leadership text.

It’s certainly the first modern change one, calling for radical and necessary social change through new methodologies – reason, spirit and community rather than harmful and destructive coercion.

This still matters. A lot.

In this DD, we are going to interpret Hegel’s thinking, and critiques of it, into modern organisational language, and see how well it fits.

We will explore:

• How Hegel’s theory of social change plots and predicts organisational conditions, ranging across resistance, resilience, anxiety, emergence, failure and success
• How Hegel’s model of successful change provides contemporary leaders with a method for inspiring the hearts, minds and bodies of those entangled in the change
• How a leader might cope with stepping into the unknown and leading change without a step-based roadmap

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Dr Richard Claydon is the co-founder of EQ Lab, and the designer of the Future of Leadership module at Macquarie Business School’s Global MBA Program (ranked #6 globally by CEO Magazine).

He was awarded the highest achievable marks for a Ph.D in behavioural science. A Harvard Top-200 Management expert and business columnists for the Guardian newspaper have described this research as “a touchstone for the future work in management and organisation”, “outstanding in daring imagination” and “at the forefront of modern discussion and debate.”

Richard is a tier one tennis player, have coached tennis professionally, and also designed the tactics creator for the multi award-winning and world-leading management simulation, Football Manager.