Eclectic Leadership Is the Maths You Already Passed at Nine

I passed calculus with forty four out of a hundred. My tutor, the one who taught me everything I knew, failed the exact same paper.

Strange story to open with, I know. But it's the reason I think most leadership advice skips a step. It hands you outcomes, the vision, the strategy, the culture deck, without ever teaching the order things need to happen in.

Protect first. Understand power and where things come from second. Choose plurality over division third. Make the most of what you've already got fourth. Stay open before you take anything away. That order isn't new. You learned it in Year 5 maths and forgot you had. It's called BODMAS, and it's the whole of what I mean by Eclectic Leadership.

Let me take you back a bit. When I left school in Bangladesh and started my undergrad in India, I met calculus for the first time in my life. Everyone else in that room had grown up with it. I hadn't seen a single equation of it back home, not one. My friend Siddharth had, though, and he spent that entire semester giving me private tuition, handing over whatever he'd learned in his own high school years so I'd stand a chance. I scraped through with forty four out of a hundred. Not a mark above the minimum, mind you, but a pass is a pass.

The bit that still makes me smile is that Siddharth, the one teaching me, failed that same paper that semester. He didn't clear it himself for another four years. So there I was, passing on knowledge he'd handed me for free, while he stumbled on the very subject he was tutoring me in. I'm still grateful to him for that, and I always will be.

I've forgotten the calculus itself, if I'm honest. But the lesson underneath it never left me. Get the fundamentals right early, properly, without shortcuts, and they lodge themselves into your operating system whether you notice it happening or not. Neither of us had heard the phrase “leadership development” back then. We were just two students getting through a semester. But we'd already lived the exact principle Eclectic Leadership spends its time trying to teach fully grown adults. Get the basics right early, or spend the rest of your life patching around the gap.

So let me take you somewhere even more basic than calculus. Something taught before you're even ten years old, and dismissed so quickly that most leaders never think about it again. BODMAS.

What Is the BODMAS Framework in Eclectic Leadership?

Here's a thought for you. Every leadership framework you've paid a consultant for over the last decade already existed in your Year 5 maths textbook. Brackets, orders, division, multiplication, addition, subtraction. You memorised that order to pass an exam and then, without realising it, spent the next thirty years hunting for a model that did the exact same job with better branding and a much higher invoice.

Take the arithmetic out of BODMAS and what you're left with is a sequencing logic. A strict order for what gets sorted first, what waits its turn, and what only gets touched once everything ahead of it is settled. That sequence, I'd argue, is Eclectic Leadership. Not a new framework built to plug a gap. The order that was there all along, just waiting for someone to name it properly.

Brackets in Leadership: Why Protecting the Vulnerable Comes First

In maths, whatever's inside the brackets gets sorted first, no matter what's going on around it. Everything else waits its turn.

Now bring that into leadership and ask yourself something blunt. Who or what in your organisation, your community, your family, gets that same non-negotiable priority? Not a values statement stuck on a wall somewhere. An actual first move.

I'm talking about the child with additional needs whose classroom gets built around them, not squeezed in as an afterthought. The colleague with a disability whose access isn't a retrofit someone gets around to eventually. The environment that doesn't get told to wait for “better economic conditions.” The heritage site belonging to a faith the majority around it doesn't even practise, still standing because somebody decided its history mattered more than the road that was meant to cut through it. Brackets first means exactly that. The vulnerable, the at risk, the historically overlooked, get sorted before you touch anything else in the equation. Everything downstream depends on that decision being made properly.

Orders in Leadership: Understanding Power and Roots

Orders in BODMAS covers powers and roots. And funnily enough, leadership has its own version of both, and most leaders would honestly rather talk about anything else.

Power, when you actually sit with it, isn't a dirty word. It's a distribution question. Who's got it, who's been denied it, and whether gender, geography, or geopolitics are quietly deciding who gets heard in the room. If you can't name where power actually sits in your own organisation, you're leading blind, however sharp you sound in the all hands meeting.

Roots ask you something different, closer to anthropology than org charts. Where did this actually come from? Not the tidy origin story someone put in the pitch deck. The real one. The village, the language, the tradition someone carried with them long before they grew a trunk or bore fruit somewhere else entirely. Roots don't vanish because someone moved. They travel with the tree, wherever it ends up.

Division vs Multiplication in Leadership: Why Diversity Is Not Division

Now here's where the maths gets genuinely useful. BODMAS says division and multiplication carry equal weight. Whichever one shows up first, left to right, gets solved first. Neither automatically outranks the other.

Leadership needs that exact same discipline applied to two words people confuse constantly, even though they're not really opposites at all. Diversity is not division. One brings different perspectives into a shared room and lets the friction produce something better. The other splinters the room until nobody's really in it together anymore. Mix the two up and you get well meaning leaders defending sameness as “unity” and dismissing genuine plurality as “trouble.” I've watched it happen more times than I can count.

Multiplication, meanwhile, asks a sharper question than most strategy decks bother with. It's not “what do we need that we don't have.” It's “what have we already got that we're failing to make the most of.” The resources sitting idle. The institutional knowledge nobody's bothered to pass on. The heritage that's been flattened into a mission statement instead of lived as an operating principle. Multiplication, at its heart, is about getting an exponential return on what you've already got, rather than constantly chasing what you don't.

Division splinters a room. Diversity fills it. Confusing the two is how leaders end up protecting sameness and calling it stability.

Addition in Leadership: Why Staying Open Is a Discipline, Not a Default

Addition sounds gentle next to everything before it, and it is, but don't mistake gentle for easy. It means holding what you already know loosely enough that someone else's way of doing things can actually get added to it, rather than politely nodded at and quietly shelved.

Most leaders will tell you they want this. Fewer are willing to build the humility it actually takes. Admitting the framework you've leaned on for fifteen years might need a paragraph added by someone who's never even read your book, that's a harder ask than it sounds.

Subtraction in Leadership: Knowing What to Let Go, and When

Subtraction comes last in BODMAS for a reason, and it comes last in leadership for the same one. You don't remove anything until you've protected the vulnerable, understood power and roots, chosen diversity over division, and made the most of what you've got. Only then do you get to ask what's stopped earning its place.

And that's the harder question, because subtraction in an organisation rarely shows up as a neat line in a spreadsheet. It's the process nobody's questioned in a decade. The hierarchy that made sense back in 2010 and now just slows everyone down. The belief, sometimes about your own capability, that quietly stopped being true five or ten years ago and nobody's said so out loud. Subtracting on purpose, over a five, fifteen, or fifty year horizon, is not the same thing as cutting in a panic. One's strategy. The other's just panic wearing a strategy's clothes.

Can Leadership Even Be Taught This Young?

Now, let me be fair to the other side of this, because there's a reasonable objection here and it deserves proper airtime, not a quick brush off. Leadership, some would say, isn't really a subject you can teach. It's forged in rooms nobody plans for. The redundancy conversation, the failed launch, the decision made at midnight with half the information you actually needed. Hand a fifteen year old a syllabus and what you get isn't judgement, because judgement is what's left over after consequence, and you can't simulate consequence in a classroom. Teach the theory too early and you risk raising confident quoters of frameworks who've never actually been tested by anything real.

And you know what, that objection is largely fair. But it's not an argument against starting early. It's an argument for starting with the right thing. Nobody's handing a twelve year old a redundancy conversation and calling it Eclectic Education. What you teach early is the order, not the outcomes. I saw that same distinction play out in my own calculus paper. Passing with forty four didn't make me a mathematician. Siddharth failing didn't make him any less capable of teaching me what he knew. What actually mattered wasn't mastery. It was whether the sequencing logic got installed before life came along and demanded I use it under pressure.

BODMAS was never wisdom. It was scaffolding. And scaffolding put up young holds weight for decades. That, to me, is the whole case for Eclectic Education starting in schools, rather than waiting for a coaching room somewhere in your forties.

Why Eclectic Education Should Start Before Leadership Ever Needs to Be Taught

Siddharth taught me calculus and failed the paper he taught me from. I passed on fundamentals he gave me for nothing, and I've never forgotten what that cost him to hand over. That's the order too, if you think about it. Someone protects you first, before anyone even mentions outcomes.

You did this maths at nine years old. So here's the uncomfortable question, and I mean this genuinely. It's not whether Eclectic Leadership works on grown adults trying to unlearn thirty years of the wrong order. It's why we wait until adulthood to teach the order at all.

Secondary schools and universities spend years building competency and almost no time building the sequencing logic underneath it, the actual order in which protection, power, plurality, making the most of what you have, staying open, and letting go are meant to be practised. That's exactly the gap Eclectic Education exists to close, early, rather than retrofitted later in an executive coaching room somewhere. Start young enough and you don't end up with leaders spending their forties relearning what they already passed at nine. You end up with leaders who never forgot it in the first place.

Eclectically yours,

Shehzaad

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Explore Eclectic Education at eclecticleadership.online/the-fountain-education and see what it could mean for your school, your university, and the leaders you haven't taught yet.