IF THERE IS one thing anyone with a job and a pulse needs to learn, it is how to lead. That, at least, is the message from the tsunami of books, courses, videos and podcasts on the topic. Business schools offer all kinds of leadership training. Authors pump out books instructing you to eat last, be daring and take leaps—which risks stomach ache if nothing else. Gurus tell you how to lead without actually being a leader; you might be on the reception desk, but you’re really in charge. Missing in all this is an inconvenient fact. Most people in the workforce are not leaders and pretty much everyone reports to someone else. The most useful skill to have in your current job may well be how to be a good follower. That leaders depend on followers might seem blindingly obvious, but the way that people lower down the ladder interact with those above them gets much less attention than the reverse. A corner of the management literature is devoted to “followership”, but it remains small, for several reasons. The first is that you don’t need any advice to achieve the position of follower; you will never be more of one than on the very first day of your very first job. The second reason is that, although some people have little desire to be in a position of authority, very few aspire to follow. The word itself conjures up a self-abnegating passivity, more ovine than human, more bleater than leader. In an experiment conducted by Colette Hoption of Seattle University and her co-authors, people who were randomly assigned to the role of followers felt unhappier and were less willing to do work at the weekends and early in the morning than those given the label of leaders. Plenty of companies encourage even their lowliest employees to show initiative at work, but almost none use the language of being a “good follower”. “We behave like owners,” is how Moderna, a biotech company, urges staff to see themselves as more than cogs in a machine. NerdWallet, a consumer-finance firm, also counts ownership as one of its values. The third reason why the art of following gets little attention is that most subordinates have much less agency than the people above them. There is often no choice in whom you report to: senior people are appointed by even more senior people, not given their positions by acclamation. Leaders, not followers, set the tone: even if bosses are not old-school command-and-control types, they mould how everyone beneath them behaves. The language of rank and responsibility is hard to avoid; the most independent-minded people will still sometimes shrug and say “That’s above my pay grade.”

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FOR QUITE a while, Nigeria has been talking up its desire to end its reliance on oil money and earn more from other sources, especially farming. Its population of around 213m, the biggest in Africa, has some 37m hectares of fertile land. But it grows too little on it. Worse, some of its produce isn’t healthy. Food exported to Europe and America has been rejected because of its excessive residue of pesticide. To feed Nigeria’s own people, let alone markets abroad, farmers will have to cut back on their use of some chemicals. That will not be easy, since Nigeria is one of the continent’s leaders at splurging on pesticides, importing some $384m-worth in 2018 alone to kill bugs and weeds. Yet 58% of the pesticides registered for use in Nigeria are banned in Europe because of their toxicity. Sometimes the chemicals are so strong that they don’t only wipe out pests and other crop-predators; they can kill people. In 2020 some 270 people in a village in Benue state died after fishermen using chemicals to catch fish had dumped some of them into the community’s main water source. Scientists at several Nigerian universities argue that dangerous pesticides and other agrochemicals are contributing to rising rates of cancer, which kills as many as 79,000 Nigerians a year. A recent study found that roughly 80% of the pesticides most commonly used by small-scale farmers are highly hazardous. “Farmers use what’s available and recommended to them,” taking advice from marketers and traders, says Jochen Luckscheiter of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, an NGO tied to Germany’s Green party. “If you want to stop them, you have to stop the supply—and make alternative products available.” In August environmental activists and politicians gathered in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, to review the current laws on importing and using pesticides—and discovered that hardly any exist. Instead, they lamented that two bills going through parliament will make it easier for foreign firms to sell dangerous wares. Boosting Nigeria’s farm output is no simple task. Farmers need seeds that produce higher yields, affordable fertiliser and better access to markets. They also need security. Thousands have fled their homes and fields because of jihadists in the north and to escape fighting over land between herders and farmers. By contrast with these challenges, it ought to be easy to regulate pesticides so they do not poison people.

ANYONE KEEN to view from on high the sprawling cityscapes of Guangdong, a bustling province in southern China, may soon be able to do so from the cabin of a flying taxi. On October 13th the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) awarded a “type certificate”, a crucial piece of aviation paperwork, to the world’s first electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) taxi. And in case that does not sound futuristic enough, the small two-seater, called the EH216-S, was also cleared to fly without a pilot on board. The EH216-S is made by EHang, a company based in Guangdong. It resembles a scaled-up consumer drone with a passenger bubble mounted on top. Propulsion is provided by 16 small rotors, mounted on the tips of eight arms that fold away when the vehicle is not in use, allowing it to park in small spaces. EHang has already set up a factory to produce the aircraft at scale. The firm hopes sightseeing flights in Guangdong could begin before the end of the year. There is interest from elsewhere, too. On October 18th the city government of Hefei, in Anhui province, announced a $100m deal with EHang to provide tourist flights and other services such as deliveries and emergency response, using 100 of the machines. The company believes its eVTOLs will one day be able to offer taxi rides at a similar price to terrestrial cabs. Scores of eVTOLs are being developed around the world. These have already attracted more than $30bn in orders, says Robin Riedel, co-lead of the Centre for Future Mobility, a part of McKinsey. Being the first to certify one could allow China, which is keen to promote the industry, to gain valuable operating experience. The CAAC gave its approval after EHang had conducted more than 40,000 test flights, including with volunteer passengers in 18 cities across China. It also subjected the EH216-S to structural analysis and crash tests, and checked its ability to keep flying if one of its rotors fails. Regulators also inspected the wireless network which EHang uses to link its flying taxis to a control centre on the ground. That allows backup pilots to land an aircraft by remote control if there is a problem. EHang says its pilotless eVTOLS will be quieter than helicopters, their closest cousins, and much cheaper to operate, thanks in part to the ability to swap out an expensive pilot for a second paying passenger. Performance, though, will be limited, at least at first. The EH216-S has a range of about 30km, and a speed of up to 130kph. EHang is developing a second version, the VT30, with 300km of range—though it will require separate certification. The firm thinks that doing away with pilots will make things safer too, in the same way that enthusiasts argue that self-driving cars, if they are ever widely deployed, could prove safer than human-driven ones. A computer’s attention never wavers, and its reflexes operate at the speed of silicon. And flying is, in many ways, much easier to automate than driving, for there are fewer obstacles and unexpected situations to navigate.

Listening to the jungle AI can catalogue a forest’s inhabitants simply by listening THE RAINFORESTS are alive with the sound of animals. Besides the pleasure of the din, it is also useful to ecologists. If you want to measure the biodiversity of a piece of land, listening out for animal calls is mucher than grubbing about in the undergrowth looking for tracks or spoor. But such “bioacoustic analysis” is still time-consuming, and it requires an expert pair of ears. In a paper published on October 17th in Nature Communications, a group of researchers led by Jörg Müller, an ecologist at the University of Würzburg, describe a better way: have a computer do the job. Smartphone apps already exist that will identify birds, bats or mammals simply by listening to the sounds they make. Their idea was to apply the principle to conservation work. The researchers took recordings from across 43 sites in the Ecuadorean rainforest. Some sites were relatively pristine, old-growth forest. Others were areas that had recently been cleared for pasture or cacao planting. And some had been cleared but then abandoned, allowing the forest to regrow. Sound recordings were taken four times every hour, over two weeks. The various calls were identified manually by an expert, and then used to construct a list of the species present. As expected, the longer the land had been free from agricultural activity, the greater the biodiversity it hosted. Then it was the computer’s turn. The researchers fed their recordings to artificial-intelligence models that had been trained, using sound samples from elsewhere in Ecuador, to identify 75 bird species from their calls. “We found that the AI tools could identify the sounds as well as the experts,” says Dr Müller. Of course, not everything in a rainforest makes a noise. Dr Müller and his colleagues used light-traps to capture night-flying insects, and DNA analysis to identify them. Reassuringly, they found that the diversity of noisy animals was a reliable proxy for the diversity of the quieter ones, too. The results may have relevance outside ecology departments, too. Under pressure from their customers, firms such as L’Oreal, a make-up company, and Shell, an oil firm, have been spending money on forest restoration projects around the world. Dr Müller hopes that an automated approach to checking on the results could help monitor such efforts, and give a standardised way to measure whether they are working as well as their sponsors say.

英语渣边散步边读外刊 IF YOU WERE asked to imagine a manager, you might well conjure up someone comically boring, desk-bound and monotonal. Now do the same for a leader. You may well be picturing someone delivering a rousing speech. A horse may be involved. You almost certainly have different types in mind. There is indeed a distinction between managers and leaders, but it should not be overdone. Various attempts have been made to pin down the differences between the two, but they boil down to the same thing. Managers, according to an influential article by Abraham Zaleznik in the Harvard Business Review in 1977, value order; leaders are tolerant of chaos. A later article in the same publication, by John Kotter, described management as a problem-solving discipline, in which planning and budgeting creates predictability. Leadership, in contrast, is about the embrace of change and inspiring people to brave the unknown. Warren Bennis, an American academic who made leadership studies respectable, reckoned that a manager administers and a leader innovates. Some of these definitions might be a tad arbitrary but they can be useful nonetheless. Too many firms promote employees into management roles because that is the only way for them to get on in their careers. But some people are much more suited to the ethos of management. They are more focused on process; they like the idea of spreadsheets, orderliness and supporting others to do good work. Shopify, an e-commerce firm, has created separate career paths for managers and developers with these differences in motivation in mind. The difference between managing and leading is not just a matter of semantics. Research by Oriana Bandiera of the London School of Economics and her co-authors looked at the diaries of 1,114 CEOs in six countries, and categorised their behaviours into two types. On their definitions, “leaders” have more meetings with other C-suite executives, and more interactions with multiple people inside and outside the company. “Managers” spend more time with employees involved in operational activities and have more one-to-one meetings.Leaders communicate and co-ordinate; managers drill downwards and focus on individuals. The research suggested that firms that are run by leaders perform better than those run by managers. But pointing to the differences between managers and leaders can also be unhelpful, for two reasons. The first is that being a leader seems so much sexier than being a manager. That is partly because leadership qualities are associated with seniority. As people scale the corporate ladder, they go on leadership courses, join leadership teams and start sentences with phrases like “as a leader”. It is also because the two archetypes are not created equal. Would you rather be the person who likes to do budgeting or the one who holds others in thrall? The type that likes the status quo or the one that wants to change the world? “It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager,” wrote Zaleznik. No wonder there are feted programmes for young global leaders but not for young global managers.

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