Review of 'Leading Like a Libertarian'

I was so excited when I saw the title 'Leading Like a Libertarian: Running an organization based on the principles of liberty' by Patrick Dixon. That's exactly the topic that I'm exploring here in this blog. But unfortunately, the subtitle is misleading. It's not a book about running 'an organization,' it's more about running the Libertarian Party chapter. 

The book is quite short--only 50 pages--so I decided to give it a try anyway. It consists of 30 short chapters. And most of them hardly would be relevant for people who do not run a state or country party in the US. The topics cover things like how to support party candidates, how candidates need to align their views with the party platform while answering the questions from media, how to choose a treasurer, or how to talk to your political opponents.

But still for me, it was a useful read because it helped me to refine some of my thinking. For example, the author makes some points about taking responsibility vs complaining, or about setting goals, or about delegation. All are good leadership practices but as I think about them in the context of my research here's what comes up for me. There are certain things like traits, skills, models, or tools that are the natural continuation of libertarian principles. There are some that are contradictory to libertarian principles. And there are some that are peripheral to them. They could either be good or bad practices but they are not related to libertarian principles per se. You can think of them using a two-by-two matrix.

So the underlying question here might be: what is to lead well as a libertarian as opposed to leading well in general?

And to wrap it up, even though the author draws the line between volunteers and paid employees, I think the advice related to volunteers is also relevant for paid employees. Because at the end of the day, every employee will have the option to leave your company and find a comparable position elsewhere.

Forcing an unwilling volunteer into a centrally controlled, top down command structure does not work.  Let people try their own thing and see what works.

So in general, this book could be interesting to those who plan to have a leadership role in the Libertarian Party in the US, but probably not that much to anyone else.