“There are many ways to lead,” writes former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in his new book Leadership. Giuliani mentions the diverse styles of Franklin Roosevelt, Joe DiMaggio, Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan, who led — so he claims — by stirring speeches, example, brave oratory and character, respectively.

Is it too far-fetched to hope to find some hints for understanding scientific leadership from Giuliani? Today’s scientific communities, after all, are city-like enterprises, full of potentially conflicting “ethnicities”. These include research scientists of various disciplines, as well as engineers, technicians, administrators, inspectors and other assorted support personnel.

The directors of large projects and labs have to manage hundreds or thousands of staff and need to handle budgets worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Some scientific leaders — at CERN, the European Space Agency and the ITER fusion project, for example — even have to carry along governments of many different nations.

Until recently, however, the leaders who have attracted most attention have either been the glamorous ones — famous for their own discoveries — or frontier leaders who have overseen the construction of new facilities. But as a set of recent articles by historians about leadership reveals, there is no single key to science leadership, just as there is none for political leadership.

Frontier leaders

J Robert Oppenheimer ranks on any list of great scientific leaders. Under him, the scientists and engineers at the Los Alamos laboratory succeeded at their seemingly impossible wartime mission — of constructing the first deployable atomic bomb — in an astounding 20 month period.

But that was a unique community. After the war, Oppenheimer was less successful as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he inherited a community with pre-existing tensions and a less focused goal. He was deeply disappointed by his inability to bring disciplines together — he could not even get the mathematicians and historians to join each other’s tables for lunch.

In an article from his recently reissued book The Advancement of Science and its Burdens (1998 Harvard University Press), the historian Gerald Holton astutely observes that “the various fragments of Oppenheimer’s soul” required “a magnetic field that would line them up”. The urgency of the bomb project in all-out war provided such a field, while the institute environment did not.

Meanwhile, in a recent article in Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (2002 32 369-407), Catherine Westfall discusses a different kind of leadership. This was the model established by Ernest Lawrence, who founded the Berkeley laboratory. It was carried on in successive generations by Robert Wilson — Fermilab’s first director — and by Hermann Grunder, founding director of the Jefferson Laboratory.

These “Lawrence-like leaders” were “energetic, driven, charismatic, and domineering”. They usually met challenges by shunning the reasonable and ratcheting up their ambitions. As Wilson said: “I learned from Lawrence to define what you want and then, damn, make it come out that way.”

Scientists who worked for Lawrence-like leaders were driven hard and were often anxious of the huge gambles that were being taken. Still, they were handsomely rewarded. As one of Grunder’s aides wrote: “All our plans could go down in flames, but I kept thinking: how often in life do you have the opportunity to get this kind of excitement?”

Symbolic and pragmatic leaders

Another recent article looks at symbolic leadership, where prestige matters as much as ability (2002 Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci. 32 57-69). In the article, John Krige studies Felix Bloch and Philip Morse, who were the first directors of CERN and the Brookhaven National Laboratory respectively. The founders of both institutions fully appreciated the dangers of creating a laboratory from scratch, and, says Krige, urgently sought an eminent person — in the form of Bloch and Morse — whose symbolic capital would provide instant credibility for the lab.

Other articles published in the same issue of Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences discuss the leadership style of Reimar Lüst, who was the first director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, and leadership issues in the now-defunct Superconducting Super Collider project. Meanwhile, in the next issue of Physics in Perspective and elsewhere, the historians Lillian Hoddeson and Adrienne Kolb address yet another leadership situation — that of the second leader of a new institution. That role is exemplified by Leon Lederman, who succeeded Wilson as Fermilab’s director, and by Norris Bradbury, who followed Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos. The second leaders faced a significantly different leadership challenge. They had to reformulate the mission of these labs, transforming them into lasting institutions with”a more stable scientific, cultural and funding environment”.

The critical point

Leadership is most conspicuous by its absence. When present, it is all but transparent, allowing groups of people to keep their energies kindled and their attention focused, reducing rivalries and conflicts generated from within, and minimizing distractions and impositions generated from without. But because most of the attention goes to glamour and frontier leaders, it is an understudied field.

In The Visible Hand — a book, cited by Hoddeson and Kolb, about modern business structures — management guru Alfred Chandler laments the attention lavished on entrepreneurs and financiers. He also bemoans the lack of attention given to those managers who “concern themselves with integration, co-ordination, efficient administration, and reorganization to create stability for the long term”. A good way of rectifying the same deficit in science leadership would be to heed those historians who have shown how different communities, circumstances and tasks call for different temperaments and skills.

These might even provide important lessons for big-city mayors.