Leadership Lessons from Science Fiction

The books that most shaped how I lead weren't management classics—they were science fiction novels I read in my youth.

I’ve read the standard leadership literature. Stephen Covey, Malcolm Gladwell, David Maister, and many others. But when a former team member, newly promoted at his new company, asked me which books had most influenced my leadership style, my honest answer surprised even me.

Let me share some of the principles that form the backbone of how I lead:

• Praise in public, correct in private
• Accept responsibility for team failure: “the buck stops here”
• Assign credit for team success to the individuals who made the difference
• Loyalty from the team is earned by loyalty given to the team
• Be willing to change my mind: I rarely end up wrong, but I often start out wrong

There are more, but those are foundational. Having written them down, they seem obvious. That might indicate how thoroughly I’ve internalized them—or they’re just obvious.

In my leadership reading, these principles appear repeatedly. But they’ve always felt familiar, as though I encountered them somewhere before the business books confirmed them. When I traced back to where I first absorbed these ideas, the answer wasn’t Harvard Business Review or a management seminar.

It was science fiction.

Captain Phule’s Leadership Curriculum

Willard Phule was a billionaire’s son with a disgraced military career in the Space Legion—the least desirable branch of the galactic armed forces. He was assigned to lead a company of misfits with the clear expectation that he would fail and be dismissed from the Legion.

Captain Phule turned “Phule’s Company” into the Space Legion’s most effective unit.

That’s the basic plot of the first in Robert Asprin’s series, and I apologize for the obvious spoiler. What I didn’t realize until recently was how many of my bedrock leadership principles trace directly to those books.

Phule leads from the front. He pushes himself harder than he pushes those he leads. He is unfailingly loyal to his team, even when—especially when—defending them requires personal cost. He studies his people as individuals, identifying their specific strengths and deploying them where they’ll succeed. He treats failure as information about what to try differently, not evidence of insufficient effort.

He’s the type of leader I strive to be.

The Fictional Role Models

Captain Phule isn’t the only example I found in what I now realize was a less-misspent youth than I thought.

Duke Leto Atreides demonstrated that earning loyalty through real care for your people creates bonds stronger than any contract or threat could produce. His leadership of House Atreides wasn’t built on the fear that often characterized the politics of the Landsraad. It was built on respect, freely given and actually earned.

Cletus Grahame, from Gordon Dickson’s novels, showed that understanding systems—really understanding them—allows you to achieve outcomes that appear impossible to those who see only the surface structure. Strategic thinking isn’t about being smarter than your opponents. It’s about seeing the actual constraints and opportunities that others miss because they’re focused on the conventional rules.

These characters provided examples of leadership grounded in principle. Not the kind of principle that sounds good in a mission statement. The kind that costs something to maintain.

The Shelf That Deserves Prominence

My personal library has sections, if I’m being honest about the informal hierarchy. There are the books I’m not embarrassed to display. The reference works I need for consulting. The volumes I return to regularly.

And then, way down at the bottom, there are the relics of a youthful fascination with Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, Gemmell, Dickson, and Card. I’m just reading the authors’ names from what I can see from my desk.

On reflection, maybe those books deserve a more prominent position on the shelf. The management literature confirmed and systematized principles I’d already absorbed. The science fiction embedded them in the first place—through story, through characters I wanted to emulate, through worlds where the consequences of leadership choices played out in ways I could understand even as a teenager.

The explicitly didactic books taught me the vocabulary. The science fiction taught me why it mattered.

The Point

I’m not suggesting that everyone should derive their leadership philosophy from speculative fiction. But I am suggesting that the sources of real influence are often not the sources we’d identify on a professional development plan.

The books that shaped how I lead weren’t the ones I read because I thought I should. They were the ones I read because I wanted to. And that’s worth considering when thinking about how leadership is actually learned—not through frameworks imposed from outside, but through examples that resonate deeply enough to become part of how you see the world.

Captain Phule didn’t teach me leadership. But he showed me what it could look like. The management books came later and gave me the language to describe what I’d already come to value.

Maybe those dog-eared paperbacks at the bottom of my shelf have earned a better spot after all.