The Ice-Bucket Challenge – Leadership for Sissies?

I’ve been watching all the celebrities getting involved in the ice-bucket challenge. It’s quite a sight. And you can’t gainsay the fact that so far it’s raised over $40 million for the fight against Lou Gehrig’s disease. That’s genuinely impressive. But isn’t the thinking behind it less so?

The idea is that someone pours ice cold water over themselves in a show of strength and self-discipline, to show that they can stand the pain and discomfort caused by the icy cold. Kind of like a modern version of self-flagellation. It shows that the subject is able to take the pain and discomfort, maybe just like people who actually get the disease.

You get it. Ten short seconds of icy water, a 30 minute hot shower, pull on the Lululemons, savor a strawberry Frappuccino. Back to that viral YouTube video. Hmmm.

The ice-bucket challenge looks more to me like a metaphor of much of modern life; ways to show that you are undergoing pain through symbols rather than the real thing.

For an alternative I like to look at an organization such as MSF (Medecins sans Frontieres – Doctors without Borders in English). Its doctors are still there in West Africa, a lone bulwark against the Ebola epidemic there. They are staying on despite the real threat that they will die. And in fact many of them have actually died.

The MSF guys are the real thing. They are actually fighting the good fight. But they don’t have the benefit of something like an ice-bucket challenge probably because they are too busy actually fighting.

And even in the US military it’s the same thing. US women and men have been going off to war to fight bad guys, and many of them have paid the price, either through death or long-term disability. I count that as a real sacrifice too, just like the MSF people. No doubt if the US goes after ISIS there will more sacrifices too.

And there are other real sacrifices out there. Community organizers in Ferguson, Missouri. Catholic nuns standing up to the Catholic hierarchy, and paying the price. Human rights activists in numerous countries. There’s a lot of unsung heroes out there.

Ice-bucket challenge entrants are the sung heroes. They are raising money that’s true and it’s all helps roll the log of ALS potential cures. But in my book it’s not in the same leagues as the unsung heroes I mentioned above.

My worry is that modern leadership approaches teach us the easy ways to do things rather than the heard ways that involve real sacrifice and effort. It’s all very well to talk about empathy and team building, but that doesn’t butter any parsnips in the real world with some of the most intractable problems we face in social, political and military areas.

It’s very easy to intellectualize and to brand approaches to solving problems when you don’t actually have to do the dirty work yourself. It’s easy to write books and articles which suggest solutions to others when you yourself don’t have to participate on the front-lines.

Much of what happens in solving social, economic and political problems occurs on the front-lines. But once you get an MBA and get into the general staff or into general management, you lose the front-line perspective. It’s much easier to raise the money and hustle others into the front-line positions rather than do it yourself because that could screw up your career path.

Ice-bucket challenges appear to me to be a general staff solution to a front-line problem. They look to me like a way of avoiding the real pain and the experience that comes from it.

The ice-bucket challenge seems to me to be a dispiriting metaphor for much of modern leadership.

Maybe that’s a jaundiced and uncharitable view of something that has been so successful that has raised so much money so far. But I wonder how much genuine participation and sympathy it has really raised? Is this the future of leadership?