I disagree, Captain Picard was a role model for me as a young boy and really helped me understand what a good leader, a good man, and what wisdom looks like. My dad died when I was young and this character very much helped me. Books, movies etc can inspire people including on leadership principles.

People seem to forget that stories and acting were the primary way of passing along critical lessons for surviving and building civilisation and human best practices befoee we came up with self help books and entertainment

That's actually a major function of fiction. Remember, it's written by real people.

I’ve often wondered if The Office inadvertently trained people to be bad managers.

People tend to follow examples they’ve seen before, even if they know it was a bad one. When faced with a new situation, they might just parrot the bad behavior because it’s the only example they know.

It's hard to imagine anyone not understanding the value of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory but here we are I guess.

Would you have said the same thing in Shakespeare's time?

The fault with taking lessons from fictions is the writer can make any outcome seem plausible.

A far better method of learning leadership is by studying actual leaders, both good and bad ones. For example, if you want to know why Rommel was able to lead a small group of men to victory after victory, read a biography of him.

Studying a fantasy whose entire purpose is to make money entertaining people? You're wasting your time.

Are any of the script writers of Star Trek successful leaders of men? If not, what credibility do their "lessons" have?

I disagree. I'm not a Trekkie, but the character was imbued with sufficient depth, by the writers as well as Stewart's performance, that I think the article works.

I completely agree, and I'm willing to bet that most people here would agree. The only reason you're getting pushback in this case is because HN is filled with Trekkies who're unable to separate their love of Picard from your statement. If you wrote this same comment about an article that focused on Don Draper from Mad Men, you'd probably be upvoted.

The Americans elected a sub-par actor as their leader

Twice

I agree, but the counterpoint is that many people are influenced by fiction, so we should praise fiction that reinforces positive social values.

Stories are like thought experiments. I agree that blindly trusting you should “be like this” is silly, but the story works through the preconditions and consequences with you.

Yes it's much more important to look at real figures making impact today. Such as... um... wait a second, I'm sure there has to be a few...

I get my thought leadership from my LinkedIn feed.

Where do you prefer to look instead?

I mean, some of the richest most influential people of our time are operating from a handful of science fiction books. Star trek is at least tonally more humanitarian than Snow Crash.

Good fiction instils children with rolemodels. Then they can try to live up to those rolemodels as adults while the whole world runs on cynical and self-serving rules.

Why? To do so is to deny the power that fiction has in society.

An interesting question to ask: Is the world a better place because of the existence of Star Trek and the influences that it has on society?

How can we improve society with fiction?

Imagine this was an issue you were neutral on and someone proposed to you that culture is somehow isolated in a bubble, not interrelated with the rest of society. You'd laugh off that idea immediately. You'd go to bed still thinking about the guy who, faced with an idea he didn't like, pretended that culture in general should go away.

Yeah, we should look to Shakespeare for thought leadership, since he's not popular.

Patrick Stewart as Macbeth ("Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84

  Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
  And then is heard no more. It is a tale
  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
  Signifying nothing.

Sci fi is not for "thought leadership".

In this case it's like a what if: what if humans were the best they could be.

And that couldn't be less silly.

It seems a more honest place to source your fictional characters to admire than the news or non-fiction, though. Makes it clearer that the character is fictional than when you try to pretend you're talking about a real person rather than the idea of one.

Or to put it bluntly: all paragons are made-up fictions, some just use real persons as framing devices, but that doesn't mean they're any more "real".