Steven Sample: On the Supertexts

Make a list of all the texts in the whole world which are four hundred years old or more and are still widely read today. The first five are easy: the Judeo-Christian Bible, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Pali Canon of Buddhism, and the analects of Confucious.

Then, in rapid sucession, nearly everyone agrees to include:

• Plato's Republic
• Aristotle's Politics
• the plays of Shakespeare
• the plays of Sophocles
• Dante's Divine Comedy
• Homer's Illiad and Odyssey
• Montaigne's Essays
• Cervantes's Don Quixote
• Machiavelli's The Prince.

After that, consensus becoes more difficult to achieve. . .The point is not whether the list contains twelve or twenty-four or even fifty entries; rather, the point is that the list is extremely short. Think of it: of all the hundreds of thousands of books, essays, poems, letters, plays and histories that were composed four hundred years ago or more, only a dozen or two are still widely read today. . .these supertexts have had, and continue to have, an enormous influence on every part of our culture. . .

In these tempestuous times it often appears that everything is changing, and changing at an increasingly rapid rate. In such an environment a leader can gain a tremendous competitive advantage by being able to discern the few things that are not changing at all, or changing only slowly and slightly. And nothing can help him do that better than developing a close relationship with a few of the supertexts. . .

The key contribution of the supertexts is not a set of timeless truths about leadership, but rather some timeless truths about human nature. One of the great fallacies of our age (and perhaps of any age) is the belief that we are fundamentally different from our ancient forebears, that we have somehow outgrown the barbaric and benighted practices of centuries and millennia past. What nonsense! We are every bit as human, and no more human than the characters in the Old Testament or the people of sixteenth-century Florence. i'm not suggesting that we are constrained to act or talk or even think the same way as those who came before us, but I am saying that our basic natures - our human potentialities, if you will - are identical to theirs. . .

Contrarian leaders read and reread the supertexts as frequently as possible and limit their daily intake of newspapers."

The following excerpt was taken from Steven Sample: The Contrarians Guide to Leadership, Chapter 4 - You Are What You Read. Dr. Sample was most recently the President of the University of Southern California.