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Comment by korijn | Hacker News Reader

Are you implying leadership is not a skill that can be honed? Is being a leader not a profession?

Edit: instead of responding to individual comments, I will just edit this comment.

I am just a little bit sad about the emotional responses here on this thread, just echoing a sentiment, without much critical discourse.

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No, being a leader is not a profession any more than being a thinker or a talker or a worker is.

I would say my cousin, who is a Major in the army would disagree with you. If you're not a good leader when trying to lead several hundred soldiers in a situation where they might be maimed or killed, you're not going to last very long in that job.

Being a leader is absolutely a huge part or the main part of many professions, and the truth is that the more people you are responsible for, the greater the importance of your leadership skills. That is, to be the CEO of a company requires you to be an exceptional leader as that is one of your primary responsibilities.

I think you made a huge leap from military leadership to "leadership" what the article is about. I would argue that military leadership has a good component of meritocracy, while business leadership has a good component of the opposite virtues. Like nepotism, networking, ruthlessness and inflated egos. A company with a terrible ceo can function just fine for a while if they have enough customers. I can't say the same for military in a war.

So leadership is a skill, not a job.

>Are you implying leadership is not a skill So just like GP asked

I also have been to ex military talks at my non military job, as motivational speeches. Nothing about military operations translates to civilian jobs. It's all cool how "we were under enemy fire and I had to get our team to the chopper", but no one is shooting at us, so we can just sit in our own excrements all day and the next day.

I think your cousin might agree with me that their profession is "military officer", not "leader". I agree that leadership is a valuable skill for many professions.

It's a profession that depends on others actually following you. You can't just decide you're going to lead.

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