DD60 – The Journey to the East
I first came across Hermann Hesse’s short story, The Journey to the East, reading a book by Robert Greenleaf. At the time Greenleaf was yet to establish the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, a centre he developed on the basis of his essay on The Servant as Leader, which he had written in 1970. It embodied his view that “The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.” He adds:
“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”
Greenleaf goes on to explain that a servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of other people and the communities to which they belong. If traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by someone at the ‘top of the pyramid,’ the servant-leader takes a quite different approach, and shares power. Most important in Greenleaf’s perspective, a servant leader “puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible”.
It’s a powerful and, I believe, a critical insight into good leadership. While the concept of servant leadership should be a key element in leadership studies everywhere, the Center has doggedly remained an independent body. As result, the approach is not as well known, let alone as successful, as it should or could be. The concept draws on Greenleaf’s reflections on the nature of power in relationships, and he was right to be concerned that many leaders start from the assumption they should be in control, commanding the service of others. This is especially the case in formal organisations, where many managers are described as exemplifying ‘good leadership’ because they focus on their role as principally concerned with control, goal setting, and ensuring the alignment of people, people who they view as mere resources the organisation needs to control in order to achieve results.
Robert Greenleaf explained at the beginning of his essay that his rather different concept of leadership starting with the desire to serve came from reading Hermann Hesse short book, Journey to the East. His summary explains that it concerns a band of men (members of the ‘League’) undertaking what turns out to be a mythical journey, (Greenleaf suggests it might also represent something of Hesse’s own journey).
Greenleaf goes on to explain that the central figure of the story is a character named Leo, who accompanies the men as the group’s servant, responsible for looking after their daily requirements, as well as also entertains them with “his spirit and his song”. Greenleaf continues: “He is a person of extraordinary presence.” All goes well until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator is one of the members of the original group and, after some years of wandering, finds Leo and is taken to visit the League, the Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo, “whom he had known first as servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader.”
When I first read about the Center, I was quite taken with Greenleaf, his program, and the essay on servant leadership. Indeed, it was an approach I would often encourage managers on development programs to understand and use. I suspect that my desire to make use of the servant leadership approach was that it was both personally satisfying and one that was welcomed by at least some participants on management development courses. However, it was to be years later that I actually turned to the Hesse book and read his account. As is often the case, the original was far more complex than Greenleaf’s brief overview had suggested.
To start with, The Journey to the East is short. I suspect it can be no more than 20,000 words long. Also, we learn that this is an account by a member of the Leaguee concerning what is called a “unique journey, the wonder of which blazed like a meteor and afterwards sank into oblivion, – even falling into disrepute”, and which is now being recalled by the un-named narrator who has fallen ill, has lost all the material he once had on this journey, and is suffering from poor recall of the details of what took place. This lack of details is further exacerbated by a requirement, set by the League, which only allowed personal recollections to be told, but nothing to be revealed about the League itself. All this is explained in the first two pages of Hesse’s book, which also warns the reader that other stories about the League and the narrator’s journey to the East all have nothing to do with what really happened.
The account of this journey begins just after the First World War had concluded. We are told it was a time of an “extraordinary state of unreality”, when discoveries and travels were “only allowed to people of our time and zone”, largely inexplicable to the reader as a result of that requirement to keep the League and its activities secret. An oddly limiting explanation which, unsurprisingly, makes the reader want to know more, simply because it is forbidden to do so. The narrator suggests that this is true of much of history, where journeys and events that once have a massive impact of thousands are suppressed and forgotten, allowing records to “efface what the previous generation considered most important”. We’ve just reached the fifth page of the book (number page 9 in my Picador edition), and my desire to know more is now growing towards a crescendo!
The narrator tells us that, after a probationary year, the aim of the Journey to the East was revealed to him. It soon becomes apparent that the journey is like a pilgrimage, and that those chosen to go on this adventure would, in groups of ten people, take part in an expedition towards “an ineffable destination, the Home of Light”, the participants resembling pilgrims. At the same time, it also becomes obvious that this journey is supernatural, the various places described only existing in fiction or in some other universe, and the people met by the groups on their journey are fabulous, sometimes people from great stories from the past, others new but equally amazing individuals. By now the travellers are meeting such characters as Louis the Terrible, Jup the magician, and Princess Fatima, who had been rescued from the Moors.
It is now, some one fifth of our way into the story, that the narrator first tells us about Leo, who is introduced as one of the servants accompanying the group as it travels on. His role was to carry baggage, while assisting the leader known as the Speaker, and entertaining the group through singing and whistling. Leo supported the group as it travelled, its journey taking the members through both through space and time, always moving towards the East but also travelling in the Middle Ages and the Golden Age, and even meeting key figures from the past, together with seeing Noah’s Ark at one point! The narrator describes an extraordinary stay in Bremgarten, a castle where the travelers meet with Puss in Boots, mermaids, Don Quixote and a variety of contemporary historians, poets and writers.
Suddenly, we reach a key point in this account, when the narrator is talking to Leo, puzzled as to why some of these famous figures, writers and artists, seem only half-alive, while their creations are ‘irrefutably alive’. And so we are introduced, by Leo, into the law of service: “He who wishes to live long must serve, but he who wishes to rule does not live long.”
Shortly after this, when the group has “boldly crossed half Europe and a portion of the Middle Ages” Leo decides to leave. The group searches for him, believing that he had been in an accident , or, perhaps had run away, but their searches prove to be unsuccessful. However, with his disappearance the journey starts to fall apart. Items disappear from the groups’ luggage, some apparently important yet on reappearing then to be seen as unimportant, other items to be lost irretrievably. The situation begins to become increasingly fraught, and the group begins to fall apart. The great journey is over.
If the story was somewhat puzzling before, now it becomes even more extraordinary. What was this ‘League’, and what had been its purpose? Why are time and space confused? The narrator sees Leo many years later, and decides to follow him , although doing so without understanding these issues or what has happened to him. By now it seems the narrator has fallen into a strange reverie and is driven by pursuing a strange passion, both wanting to understand what had happened by questioning his former servant, but especially make sense of why his own life had lost a sense of purpose and direction. Finally Leo reveals that the League, which the narrator had thought had disappeared, was still in place, and that the Leo was to follow the narrator in order to appear before the High Throne.
At this point in the story the narrator meets with officials of the League, and, after confessing he had written a kind of history of that had happened – poorly understood and confusing – he is allowed to visit the League’s archives, where he finds material about his journey, the group he was with, the places they visited. He has the opportunity to meet with the President of the League, a key point on Hesse’s story, only to discover the President is no other than Leo. The former servant is the leader of the whole organisation! The story continues with the narrator being tested on his honesty and willingness to learn, and being offered a chance to read from the archives its account of his own story.
If Hesse’s story has become extraordinary by this point, the ending is even more so. The narrator finds himself alone and alongside Leo, and being drawn into him. “I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo’s, nourishing and strengthening it. It seems that, in time, all the substance from one image would flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear”.
In drawing on the story of The Journey to the East, Greenleaf wants to suggest that this is a parable, an account of how a servant became a leader, and that true leadership must be built on a willingness to serve. While this is one way to make sense of Hess’s story, it is an impoverished one. It is true that the former servant, Leo, is the President of this movement, the League. It is also evident that the narrator’s feeble attempts to be a leader are a contrast with Leo’s life and practice. However, Hesse has much more to say than that.
At one level, Greenleaf has been an important advocate of an approach to leadership which puts the desire to enable others as the first tasks for any aspiring leader. He is right to make it clear that the choice is simple: to want to serve first, and earn the right to lead, or to assume the mantle of leadership from the beginning. That message is tellingly simple. We are surrounded by leaders who put themselves first, who serve only their own interests, and who expect others to commit to the tasks and outcomes the leader is pursuing. These are the leaders who approach their tasks from the perspective of pursuing self-interest, and whose commitment to wider goals and aspirations are secondary to the achievement of their own success. They work towards the accomplishment of the organisation’s achievements only to the point that are a means to ensuring their own recognition. They put themselves first.
However, a few careful studies of organisations have shown there are some – often senior – staff who are respected because they do help others. They are the individuals staff turn to for advice, for help and for understanding. They act as mentors, not wanting to be rewarded for their own efforts, but are keen to ensure that those around them do well, and through that approach, also help the organisation perform more effectively. They are well supported by those studies that compare the formal organisation chart for a company with the complex pattern of real connections, charts where, often, we see that many senior people have relatively few important links with others, but below them some key staff have multiple connections, acting as supporters and sources of help to others but often stymied in terms of their own careers by the lack of organisational willingness to promote such people to more senior and ‘important positions’. These are the servant leaders of the modern corporation.
However, Hesse wasn’t writing a textbook in organisational behaviour. He was interested in power and influence, not in offering a ‘how to’ guide to get to the top. Hesse was writing about a leader who was a servant, but not as a model of Greenleaf’s servant leadership. The Journey to the East is a framework on which Hesse can ruminate on how people can involve and draw on others. Far from a benign model, it is rather dark. As Leo examines the narrator’s behaviour and his failings over the course to their expedition, he reminds him that, were it not for Leo’s efforts while he was with them, the group would have fallen apart earlier. It was no more than a loose collection of people with neither shared interests nor or agreed aspirations. Each member was selfish, self-centred or greedy in one way or another: they had remained together only as long as they received some rewards and a belief their own expectations would be met. No Leo, no support.
It is a dark view, because Hesse isn’t offering nostrums about ‘shared commitment’, ‘working together’, or the like. His view of human motivation is that in almost every case, people are unable to set aside their personal desires and needs, and will only collaborate when it is convenient to do so. Perhaps we would have liked Hesse to suggest that we can change and learn to support one another, setting aside our personal preferences, but he doesn’t. Instead, the only way forward to is to give in entirely, to allow the other person to control and absorb us. In many ways The Journey to the East is a story about dictatorship, not the crass kind where the dictator rules by terror and threats, but rather one where the dictator is subtle, playing on each person’s individual motivations to persuade them that he (it’s usually a he) can help them get what they want, by agreeing to support and follow what the leader wants. A nice precursor to the emergence of Naziism, albeit offered in a subtle and gentle fashion. It seems Hesse and Greenleaf were going on rather different journeys.
