The Delphic injunction Know Thyself—gnothi seauton—was never an invitation to self-comforting introspection. It was a metaphysical provocation: recognise the limits of mortality, orient your life toward what transcends you, and measure yourself against a standard higher than desire. The ancient Greeks understood what modern leadership keeps forgetting: the self is not a destination—it is a responsibility.

Most leaders today stand before a distorted mirror and ask: Am I bigger than you? Am I winning? Am I ahead of my targets? This produces leaders who are tactically brilliant but morally hollow—addicted to competitive advantage and indifferent to collective purpose. Relative superiority becomes the only benchmark, confusing outperforming others with genuine excellence. As MacIntyre warned: when internal virtue collapses into external gratification, professional practice degenerates into a Turkish Bazaar of competing egos—noisy, derivative, perpetually for sale.

But there is a second mirror—rarely consulted, riskier and far more challenging. It asks: Am I becoming who I am called to be? Am I actualising my highest good? Am I lifting the system toward a greater potential? This is the grammar of virtue: excellence not as superiority but as self-surpassing; character as a developmental trajectory, not a competitive metric. The only valid opponent is yesterday’s version of yourself, not the transactional logic of competition.

This distinction matters because our organisational life runs on two incompatible logics of competition:

Friendly competition is teleological: it orients us toward shared flourishing. Think of Olympic athletes who compete not simply to defeat each other but to reveal the heights of human possibility. The Olympic creed captures this perfectly: the essence of the Games is not to win but to take part— “the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle”. Victory is merely incidental to excellence.

Positional competition is metaphysically empty—a rat race with no higher end, no deeper meaning, no intrinsic value. It turns leadership into a zero-sum game where self-worth depends on someone else’s diminution. It rewards domination, breeds insecurity, and corrodes our judgment.

Most organisations never pause long enough to tell the difference. They mistake being better than others for becoming worthy of leading them, collapsing moral development into performance management —and then wonder why their leaders inspire nothing beyond compliance breaches and battles over CEO compensation.

Leadership without telos degenerates into vanity; organisations without telos drift toward mediocrity; societies without a telos become marketplaces of narcissism; and our economies learn to optimise for vice as efficiently as virtue.

The deeper danger is this: the “Invisible Hand” crystallises who we are, not who we pretend to be. If leaders serve no purpose beyond self-interest, and if business practices pursue no substantive value, then no market mechanism will distinguish excellence from market share. Positional competition will never converge on socially productive ends—it simply becomes an arms race in which all boats sink together, only more efficiently.

So, the leadership test is simple: it is not whether you’re winning—it’s whether the person slowly emerging in the glass is more worthy than the one who stands before it. If the mirror flatters who you are instead of calling you toward who you must become—look again.

Citius, Altius, Fortius.

#Leadership #KnowThyself #Excellence #VirtueEthics #Zamagni