Leadership from the Soil, Leadership of the Soul

Shehzaad Shams
May 13
7 min read

Updated: May 16

How one organisation in Pakistan has been nurturing

Eclectic Leaders for fourteen years & counting.

There is a peculiar arrogance baked into most leadership development.

It assumes that the people who most need to be studied are in boardrooms. On stages. In Harvard case studies. It assumes that the wisdom worth transmitting was born somewhere between Silicon Valley and the business schools of the Anglo-American world, refined over a few decades of industrial capitalism, and then helpfully packaged into frameworks with snappy acronyms.

It also assumes, quietly and without much argument, that everywhere else is catching up.

I have been building the Eclectic Leadership Movement on a fundamentally different premise. The premise is simple: chaos, confusion, and conflict are not solved by more of the same thinking. They are solved by going wider. Deeper. More honest about where wisdom actually lives.

And that is exactly why an organisation like the Indus River Valley Institute (IRVI), led by our adviser Mr. Zain Mustafa, matters so profoundly to this movement.

Listen to the synopsis if you prefer listening to reading.

When the Evidence Moves Across Deserts

IRVI has been doing something quietly extraordinary for fourteen years.

They have been moving across Pakistan. Through deserts, river deltas, mountain passes, ancient forts, and crowded bazaars. Watching people. Listening to them. Documenting them. And arriving, slowly and rigorously, at a conclusion that is, as they put it, both uncomfortable and liberating: the people we have been told are leaders are very rarely the most remarkable ones in the room.

That is not a provocative statement for its own sake. It is the output of fourteen years of field research, across more than fifty heritage sites, producing a body of evidence that most leadership institutions would not know what to do with. A linguist in the valleys of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, singing a dying language back into the mouths of children. A ceramicist from Kashgar whose hands carry five hundred years of craft memory. A Sufi historian who locates the leadership of an entire civilisation in its music, its poetry, and its devotional practice.

None of these people have LinkedIn profiles. Few have institutional titles. But each of them embodies something that the Eclectic Leadership Movement has always argued: that leadership is not a credential. It is a way of being.

Eight Qualities That Business Schools Cannot Manufacture

IRVI did not set out to build a leadership profile. It built itself, person by person, site by site, story by story. But across fourteen years and hundreds of encounters, eight qualities kept returning with such consistency that they could no longer be ignored.

Rooted in Place. Their wisdom is inseparable from the land, the language, the ecology, and the memory of the people they belong to. The Mohanna fisherfolk of Manchar Lake have governed one of Asia's most complex freshwater ecosystems for generations. That knowledge is not in a manual. It is in their bodies, their seasons, their nets, their silences.
Leading from Knowledge, Not Authority. Their influence comes from what they carry, not what they command. Nizam Torwali, a singer working in the mountains of Swat, dedicated his life to the Torwali language, an endangered tongue spoken by fewer than 100,000 people in the upper Swat valley. People listen to him because he has spent his life inside that language. His authority is the authority of depth.
Translator Across Time. They hold ancestral knowledge and make it alive and generative in the present. They do not museumify the past. They metabolise it.
No Permission Needed. They do not wait for institutional validation to lead. They begin from within. Yasmeen Baloch, fifteen years old, from Nushki in Balochistan, taught herself to play the benju in secret, despite community pressure, despite her father never imagining a woman would touch the instrument he built. Leadership without permission. IRVI called it a perfect story. I would call it a perfect example of what the Eclectic Leadership Movement means when we say leadership should not be owned by the few.
Leads Through Making. Their leadership is expressed through craft, music, food, story, and building, not through strategy documents or vision statements. Making is thinking. Making is arguing. Making is leading.
Steward, Not Owner. They hold traditions in trust for the people who came before and those who will come after. A steward knows that what they hold is not theirs. Their work is to pass it on, intact and living.
Embodied Intelligence. The Brahui and Powindah peoples who follow the land's seasonal rhythm navigate not by GPS but by centuries of reading sky, soil, wind, and animal behaviour. This is intelligence of the highest order. It simply cannot be written on a slide.
Language as Leadership. IRVI believes, and I agree, that every endangered language is an endangered leadership epistemology. Revive the language, and you revive the leaders it made possible.

These eight qualities are not soft. They are, in IRVI's own words, the hardest kind of leadership to sustain. They cannot be taught from a curriculum. They can only be grown.

What Makes IRVI an Eclectic Organisation

Here is the thing I want people to understand about the alliance behind the Eclectic Leadership Movement.

It is not just an alliance of people who agree with our ideas. It is an alliance of organisations that are themselves living proof of those ideas. IRVI is not an organisation that talks about indigenous wisdom. It is an organisation built from it. Its methodology is eclectic in the truest sense: drawing from archaeology, architecture, linguistics, music, craft, ecology, and oral history simultaneously, refusing to let any single discipline own the story.

Zain Mustafa, the architect and educationist who founded IRVI and Cube EduTours, is himself a demonstration of the eclectic leader. His board of advisers includes a novelist who is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature, a psychiatrist who returned from the United States to build Pakistan's first Child and Adolescent Psychiatry fellowship, an actor and Fatima Jinnah Medal recipient, a lawyer-economist-polyglot, and a founding director of a national incubation centre. These are people who defy single-discipline categorisation, who lead from the edges and intersections of their fields. That is not incidental. That is intentional.

IRVI's Cube EduTours programme has taken students, researchers, architects, designers, and travellers to more than fifty heritage sites, from the 5,000-year-old ruins of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa to the living craft traditions of Multan, the Mughal gardens of Lahore, the Buddhist monasteries of Taxila, and the ancient Silk Road passes of Gilgit-Baltistan. Each tour is not a sightseeing exercise. It is a curriculum. The site is the classroom. The guide is the teacher. The student's task is not to photograph but to understand.

Leadership education by immersion. Not from a case study. From the ground.

Rejecting the Map That Was Never Ours

One of the most striking sections of IRVI's presentation to us is their refusal of the "Global South" framing.

The Indus Valley was one of the first great urban civilisations on earth. The Silk Road passed through this land not by accident but because it was rich with knowledge, craft, commerce, and cosmopolitan intelligence. The Gandhara Buddhist traditions produced enduring ethical frameworks. The Sufi traditions of Sindh and Punjab cultivated forms of spiritual leadership that sustained diverse communities through centuries of political change.

To call this the periphery of someone else's map is not just historically illiterate. It is a kind of leadership poverty. And that is exactly the poverty the Eclectic Leadership Movement exists to cure.

When I say that eclectic leadership draws on applied linguistics, psychology, political science, and the wisdom traditions of pan-cultural, indigenous, and principle-based sources, I mean it practically. I mean there are real places, real people, real communities, and real institutions that carry those traditions. IRVI is one of them. They have been doing the work for fourteen years, often without a broader framework to situate it in. The Eclectic Leadership Movement provides that context.

And IRVI, in turn, provides something we need just as urgently: proof.

The Alliance Is the Point

We are now across eighteen countries and counting, building towards our goal of developing 100,000 eclectic leaders by 2035.

That number is not a marketing target. It is a mandate. A mandate to take seriously the idea that the world's leadership crisis is at least partly a wisdom crisis, and that the solution is not more of the same thinking delivered faster and louder. It is a genuine expansion of the sources we draw from.

IRVI is not a partner organisation in some peripheral or symbolic sense. It is a catalyst. It is actively producing eclectic leaders: Nizam Torwali in the mountains of Swat, Ghulam Abbas Soomro preserving four thousand years of Ajrak block-printing tradition in Bhit Shah, Panah Baloch handwriting a 1,300-page multilingual dictionary across four scripts because no institution would do it, Nasreen Askari building Pakistan's first textile museum in her family home after a life that moved through Jamshoro, the V&A, Mohatta Palace, and beyond.

These are eclectic leaders. Not because they went on a programme. Because they lived it. And IRVI, as an organisation, has eclectic DNA in its structure, its culture, and its principles. It is not performing eclecticism. It is practising it.

What I Am Asking You to Notice

Most people reading this will have been trained to look for leadership in familiar places. The C-suite. The conference stage. The bestseller list.

I am asking you to look somewhere else. At the linguist reviving an endangered tongue. At the fifteen-year-old girl playing an instrument she was told was not for her. At the man who handwrote a dictionary across four scripts because the knowledge was worth saving.

I am asking you to notice that these are not inspiring human interest stories to be appreciated and then set aside. They are data. They are evidence of a different theory of what leadership is, where it comes from, and what it looks like when it is working.

The Eclectic Leadership Movement is an alliance of individuals and organisations who believe that theory. IRVI is one of the most compelling reasons to believe it.

Leadership from the soil. Leadership of the soul.

We have a lot to learn from it.

Shehzaad Shams

13 May 2026,

London, UK

The Eclectic Leadership Movement is a growing global community of practitioners, organisations, and institutions committed to developing 100,000 eclectic leaders by 2035. To find out more about joining the alliance, visit rononiti.org.

Shehzaad Shams is the Founder of the Eclectic Leadership Movement and Rononiti, an Eclectic Leadership Design Lab and Advisory.

Know more about Zain Mustafa.

Visit IRVI Website.

Download IRVI Presentation for the Eclectic Leadership Movement