Leadership and Innovation: a Biographical Perspective on Entrepreneurs in Government.

• Author: Reed, Leonard

Leadership and Innovation: A Biographical Perspective on Entrepreneurs in Government.

James W. Doig, Erwin C. Hargrove, eds. Johns Hopkins University Press, $39.50. Does it make any difference who heads government agencies? Was Ralph Waldo Emerson just whistlin' Dixie when he said, "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man?"

Doig and Hargrove take the cautious view that under optimally favorable circumstances, individuals with entrepreneurial moxie can greatly influence the course of events.

To make their point, they present biographies of 13 government leaders who have had such an impact. Their checklist for effectiveness includes the extent to which the executives identified new programs for their agencies, and developed both external and internal constituencies to support their goal.

The answers are somewhat blurred by the biographies. David Lilienthal successfully made the Tennessee Valley Authority a reality. He roused the people of the valley with soapbox speeches while fighting off lawsuits brought by private utilities. "I'm a fighter," he said. "I enjoyed the controversy . . . conflict is about the only thing that really produces creativity." But in his battles at the TVA, he had the crucial support of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Later, as head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lilienthal was generally regarded as ineffective.

Gifford Pinchot was the founding director of the U.S. Forest Service. He too knew the value of publicity: he cultivated magazine editors and tirelessly made speeches to any group that would have him. But it was tough going until his old friend and fellow conservationist, Theodore Roosevelt, became president. Then the Forest Service took off. But when William Howard Taft became president, conflicts developed and Pinchot was fired.

James Forrestal's career abounded in irony: as a forceful secretary of the navy, he opposed unification of the armed forces; then, as the first secretary of defense, he was unable to control the interservice rivalries that he had helped to create because of the weakness he had succeeded in having written into the secretary of defense's role.

The figure whose life and career makes the strongest case for how an iron will can prevail over institutional inertia is Hyman Rickover. Eugene Lewis, who wrote the book's Rickover biography, makes this distinction between entre-preneurs and managers: "Entrepreneurs tend to see opportunity in structural confusion...