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It was the leadership sun around which the other planets pivoted. It was the crown jewel of centers of leadership learning. And it was the crown on the head of the king of America’s corporate leaders, Jack Welch. Welch, who in his time was the iconic chief executive of what in its time was arguably America’s most iconic company, General Electric.

The “it” to which I refer was Crotonville, a campus consisting of approximately 60 leafy acres not far from New York City, where for generations GE trained its managers or, if you prefer, developed its leaders. Both the up and coming, and the already arrived and anointed were rewarded for their promise and performance by being among the chosen few. The few who were chosen to spend time at Crotonville where they would be given the keys to the kingdom. The keys were tools for learning how to lead such as new-manager starter kits, training and problem-solving sessions, trouble-shooting guides, and lectures by among others the king himself, Welch, who was proud of nothing so much as his presumed prowess at growing leaders.

Now though Crotonville is no longer. More precisely it is no longer a leadership learning center. This week General Electric finally sold the site, tacitly if not explicitly acknowledging it had long since outlived its purpose.

Why did GE wait so long to dispose of a property that was under used, outdated, and a bit of an embarrassment? I have no idea. As I wrote in 2019, in a piece titled “Learning to Lead – Fiasco at General Electric,” years ago Crotonville was exposed as a learning center not good at teaching even the basics.*   

Jack Welch’s handpicked successor, Jeff Immelt, failed every which way effectively to run the company. During Immelt’s long tenure at the top, GE’s trajectory was straight down. The value of its stock price and assets plummeted, and the company was humiliated by, among its embarrassments, being booted from the Dow. Moreover, in embarrassingly short order the board dumped the man, John Flannery, it had chosen to take over from Immelt, replacing him, finally, with Larry Culp.  Given Culp was the first outsider to lead GE in its 126-year history, his selection was itself an unarticulated rebuke to its center of leadership learning – Crotonville.

In the five years since, it’s become clear that Culp was able to accomplish what the Crotonville crowd was not. He saved General Electric from its hidebound self, most importantly by splitting what had become a disastrously unwieldy, ultimately tottering corporate behemoth into three independent parts. Just this month, each of the three officially became separately traded companies: one in aerospace, one in healthcare, and one in energy.

None of this is to say that the experience of being at Crotonville was a total waste. It was not. But it was never what it was cracked up to be – a place where people learned to lead wisely and well. Instead Crotonville was a temple to a charismatic leader – Jack Welch. The fact that he could not teach how to lead even to his hand-picked successor is, though, less of a reflection on him than it is on the fantasy that leaders will grow smart and strong if put on a five-day diet of a secret sauce.            

Learning to Lead – Fiasco at General Electric

…. and also

Jack Welch. A Leader – But Not for All Seasons

We all make “the leader attribution error.” First, we attribute to leaders events whose geneses lie elsewhere. Second, we credit leaders for outcomes that are positive. Third, we blame leaders for outcomes that are negative.

Sonja Hunt, a psychologist who years ago wrote a chapter for a book I edited titled, Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, described the role of leadership in our construction of reality. “The emphasis on leadership may derive from a desire to believe in the effectiveness and importance of individual action, which is potentially more controllable and understandable than complex contextual variables.” In other words, we make the leader attribution error because leaders help us to make sense of a world that otherwise is disturbingly, distressingly, complex.

The phenomenon came to mind again recently as I read a long article in the Financial Times about “How Google Lost Ground on AI.” The focus of the piece was nearly entirely on Google (Alphabet) CEO, Sundar Pichai. Further, Pichai was compared, always unfavorably, to the man who is often seen as his major rival, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella.

We tend to place them side by side, to compare them. Both are Indian in origin; both are at the forefront of American technology; both are leaders of one of the most iconic companies in America; and both are now, along with a handful of others, such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, running an all-out race to see who can first, and best, master AI.

Still, the degree to which the article focused on Pichai’s shortcomings – in contrast to Nadella’s lack thereof – was striking. It was especially striking because even in the recent past Pichai was highly esteemed, and because even the near future cannot possibly be predicted with certainty. This is not to say that Pichai is blameless for what appears to be Google’s recent sluggish performance. The buck does after all stop with him. It is, however, to say that blaming one individual for whatever has gone wrong is simplistic, reductionist.    

According to “multiple interviews” conducted by the FT, Google suffers from 1) “simmering tensions between rival factions”; 2) a “lack of clear leadership”; 3) “struggles to adapt from its position as the search market’s dominant incumbent”; 4) the absence of “wartime leadership,” that is, of a leader who can execute “under pressure”; 5) a leader who had to admit he was “caught by surprise” by the suddenness with which AI burst on the national scene; 6) “cultural and organizational problems” that “loom large”; 6) a lack of “clear leadership, particularly in the wake of recent rounds of lay-offs that have left staff rattled”; and 7) a “low key leadership style that may not be suited to a time when Google needs decisive change to close the AI gap with Microsoft and OpenAI”.

The contrast between Pichai and Nadella is implicit throughout the FT article – and sometimes explicit. As here: “Pichai’s incremental approach stands in contrast to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, who has made a series of bold bets on AI, including investing about 12 billion dollars into an alliance with OpenAI, a smaller investment in a French startup, Mistral, and rolling out AI in Microsoft products widely.”

The authors of the FT article took the easy way out. First, they assumed that something had already gone badly wrong at Google. Second, they assumed that blame for whatever went wrong rests solely with the leader of Google. If you believe the first, and you own Alphabet stock, I suggest that you sell it. If you believe the second, I’ve a bridge to sell you and I suggest that you buy it.

Presidents of the United States necessarily lead. Because decisions must be made, they have no choice. But once they are no longer president, they do have a choice. Especially if they are reasonably healthy, they can choose to be active in public life or entirely to withdraw. To have a different sort of life, one that avoids a leadership role of any kind.  

Barack Obama has chosen the latter. Though he was still relatively young when he left the White House – not yet 55 – in the eight years since he has been a purely private citizen. A citizen so private that you’re unlikely to know what he’s been doing all this time unless you look it up.

Obviously, this is his right. During his two terms in the White House the former president appeared to devote himself fully to being a public servant. But Obama’s near total disappearance from the political scene does raise the question of whether someone like him – a political rock star – owes the American people anything during what is widely perceived a time of national crisis. A time when democracy as the United States has known it for almost 250 years is in peril because the nominee of one of the two major parties has repeatedly made clear, in countless ways on countless occasions, his intention to destroy it. We the American people must take him at his word: believe Donald Trump when he says that if wins reelection to the White House in November he will seek to change the Constitution, engage in “retribution,” and radically alter America at home and its role abroad.

Trump is a threat to the nation’s well-being even if he loses the election. Our only hope of avoiding domestic chaos in the weeks and months after Election Day is not only to have Joe Biden win reelection but to win so decisively as to delegitimize, in so far as possible, the claim that the election was rigged.

There are signs that Obama gets the threat. Last week he visited the White House and last night he participated in a major Biden fundraiser. But these sorts of pro forma gestures are not nearly, not nearly, enough. This time around Barack Obama must, in contrast to last time Joe Biden ran for the White House, play a more active part. A part that lasts not weeks but months, that is as consistent as persistent, that is as lucid, unambiguous, and forceful.

Obama is obligated to do no less. Not legally, obviously. But because the American people not once but twice bestowed on him the honor of electing him president, he owes it to them, to us, to the United States of America, to do everything he reasonably can to reelect Joe Biden. To reelect as president the man who for eight years was his competent and constant vice president.     

It now appears this will be a close election. Biden’s approval ratings are middling at best; he still comes across as too old for the office; some of his domestic policies are demonstrably contentious; and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are continuing to rage. It equally appears that Biden is weak with traditional Democratic constituencies such as African Americans, Latinos, young people, and progressives. Which is precisely where, and why, Obama must step up. He must remind those who would constitute his target audiences that not only do he and the incumbent president now have a close political relationship that goes back many years, but that they share a world view, including on the economy and on key policies such as health care and reproductive rights.

When Barack Obama twice took the presidential oath of office, he swore to the best of his ability to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” It was a solemn promise that did not expire when he retired.   

A final note: I seem to recall that during Barack Obama’s two term presidency Michelle Obama was First Lady. I further seem to recall that she was enormously popular with the American people, an influencer if ever there was one. Wouldn’t hurt then for her to get out on the stump. For her between now and November similarly to make clear that Trump is a threat. Unless, of course, she thinks otherwise – prefers that Biden loses and Trump wins.

Whistleblowers are usually relatively powerless employees who disclose damaging information about their relatively powerful employers. Such as, for example, workplace practices that are unsafe, illicit, or fraudulent. Think of whistleblowers as Davids going up against Goliaths – which is why, in the United States, they have legal protections which tend, however, to be insufficient.

Robert Barnett was a whistleblower. After having worked at The Boeing Company for 32 years, in 2017 he left. Two years later he blew the whistle against his former employer. He charged that the once iconic company was regularly engaging in shoddy practices that were compromising the safety of the airliners it was making and then selling worldwide. Five years after that – earlier this month – according to the coroner’s report Barnett shot himself dead in the head. He died a week after having given a formal deposition against Boeing, and on a day that he was scheduled to undergo further questioning.

We can never know why Barnett killed himself or even for certain if he killed himself. Conspiracy theories being rampant these days, no surprise there are rumors that instead of his gunshot wound being self-inflicted he was shot by someone else. What we do know though is that within days after Barnett died, the CEO of Boeing, David Calhoun, announced that before this year was out, he was out. He was leaving the company. Same with Larry Kellner, chair of Boeing’s board who similarly announced his pending departure.

Neither Calhoun nor Kellner can be said to have retired voluntarily. At least indirectly they were pressured to do so by airlines and regulators on account of a series of events that instead of salvaging Boeing’s already tenuous reputation, under their leadership it was damaged further. In his resignation statement Calhoun admitted as much, referring to the now infamous incident on January 5 when a door plug blew off an Air Alaska Boeing 737 Max, which left the aircraft, while it was still aloft, with a gaping hole. Amazingly no one was seriously hurt in the incident. But it was yet another in a recent series of Boeing close calls including multiple malfunctions and fuel leaks. In his resignation statement Calhoun wrote, “As you all know, the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 accident was a watershed moment for Boeing. We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. We must also inculcate a total commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company.”

Though presumably unintended, Calhoun’s statement was a supreme irony. Because just four years earlier he was hired as chief executive to do just that: to inculcate at Boeing “a total commitment to safety and quality at every level.”

When Calhoun came on board, in January 2020, the pressure on the company to up its game could not have been greater. For his immediate predecessor, now former CEO Dennis Muilenburg, had presided over a period during which the company had endured not one but two catastrophes, and not one but two crises.

Boeing is not the focus of my new book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers. But I do briefly describe what happened to the company in 2018 and 2019. First were two deadly crashes of its 737 Max airliner: one, in October 2018, off the coast of Indonesia in which everyone on board, 189 passengers and crew, died; the other just a few months later, in March 2019, in Ethiopia, in which everyone on board, 157 people, also died.

Crisis number one was, then, a crisis of performance, of Boeing’s performance as a manufacturer of aircraft that were supposed to be of the highest quality and unimpeachable safety. And crisis number two was one of public relations. While the company was enduring a PR nightmare it became evident that its chief executive, Muilenburg, was miserably ineffective at calming the waters. In December 2019 there was for instance this headline in the New York Times: “At Boeing, C.E.O. Stumbles Deepen a Crisis.” I wrote in Leadership from Bad to Worse that, “By then the 737 Max had been grounded, but Muilenburg’s leadership during this period was in every way also badly lacking.” Moreover, his expressions of regret seemed not to make things better but worse. They were described as “clumsy” and “only prolonging Boeing’s reputational pain.”

Enter in early 2020 the man ostensibly on a white horse, the leader who would save Boeing from its badly injured self, Calhoun. But instead of saving Boeing, under Calhoun questions of quality control, of “shortcuts”, of workers with insufficient experience and expertise persisted. Which makes his somewhat ignominious departure painful not only for those within Boeing but for those without. For Boeing is one of just two plane makers – it shares a duopoly with Europe’s Airbus – that produces and sells large commercial jets to airlines.

In recent years Boeing has by every measure and wide agreement lost ground to Airbus. Which raises key questions: Can Boeing be restored to its previous place at the pinnacle of performance excellence? Can the company recover from what has become an onslaught of damage to its once vaunted reputation? What kind of leadership team is required to enable Boeing to fulfill its ostensible mission, to commit totally to “safety and quality at every level”? How to get everyone in the company on board, to persuade every Boeing employee that they are integral, critical to finding enduring solutions to enduring problems?

Last Thursday, United Airlines flight 990 was on its way from San Francisco to Paris. But because the crew reported a problem with an engine the plane was diverted to Denver. 273 passengers and 12 crew members got safely off the plane and the flight was simply cancelled. A scare? Perhaps. An inconvenience? Absolutely. But why was the incident newsworthy? Because the aircraft was made by Boeing. And because it was made by Boeing was serious concern about the performance of its product.

Boeing must persuade both the experts and the flying public that its planes are as safe as any now flying the skies. Until it does, Barnett’s ghost will continue to haunt the company’s corridors. For whatever the truth of what happened before he blew the whistle, and after, his warnings about Boeing proved prophetic.

When will they ever learn that leading isn’t what it used to be? That leading in 2024 is not like it was in 2014 not to speak of 2004 or a decade or more before. In 2024 leaders in America risk being upended if their followers are strongly, not to speak of virulently opposed. This applies to all leaders – especially to those with followers who themselves are prominent and powerful.  

Six days ago, NBC News announced that it had hired Ronna McDaniel as an on-air contributor. McDaniel had recently stepped down from her post as chair of the Republican National Committee. She was to provide the network, including its left leaning cable outlet, MSNBC, with commentary that would be reliably conservative.

McDaniel did not, though, come to the network as a conventional political operator. Because to survive in the Time of Trump she had to be his lacky, his toady, her appointment to the ranks at NBC could have been predicted to raise eyebrows – and trigger anger.

Which it did – and then some. People, enough people, at NBC/MSNBC were outraged that now among their colleagues was a woman who had associated herself with the most outrageous, and dangerous of former President Trump’s numberless lies – that the 2020 election was rigged. That it was Donald Trump who ought rightly to be sitting in the Oval Office not Joe Biden.

Within 48 hours of the announcement that McDaniel had been hired by their superiors, subordinates at the network lashed out. NBC’s leaders were taken to task by their followers – in public. These though were not ordinary followers. They were network stars with high visibility, and with voices certain to be heard loud and clear.  

The revolt started with longtime NBC anchor Chuck Todd. 48 hours after McDaniel was hired Todd went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” bitterly to charge that she was completely untrustworthy. A day later Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski opened their popular show, “Morning Joe,” with a similar verbal fuselage. They referred to McDaniel as “an anti-democracy election denier” and made clear their strong objection to NBC’s decision to hire her. Similarly, another network anchor, this one a former Republican operative herself, Nicolle Wallace. She accused her bosses of having signaled to election deniers that they could now go about spreading falsehoods “as one of us, as badge-carrying employees of NBC News, as paid contributors to our sacred airwaves.”

No one spoke out more forcefully and at greater length than MSNBC superstar Rachel Maddow. She used nearly all of the first half of her hour-long Monday night prime time show to talk about what happened. “The fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News to me is inexplicable,” Maddow said. She went on to charge that her bosses had put on the payroll “someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government. Someone who is still trying to convince Americans that this election stuff doesn’t really work. That this last election wasn’t a real result. That American elections are fraudulent.”       

In less than a week, it became clear that NBC’s leaders’ fate was sealed. That they had no choice but to surrender to their followers, most prominently those within the network but, as messaging on social media made clear, also those without. Said Cesar Conde, Chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, “After listening to the concerns of many of you, I have decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor.” He added, “I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down.”

What brought about this debacle is as plain as the nose on Mr. Conde’s face. He and other members of his management team thought they could do what they wanted to do when they wanted to do it. But those days are dead and gone. In the here and now leaders who ignore their followers, whether wittingly or unwittingly, do so at their peril.

My most recent book – Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers – was just published by Oxford University Press.

The book has a simple message simply stated. Bad leaders and their bad followers – you cannot have the former without the latter – do not stay the same. Over time they change. They go from bad to worse. Bad gradually digs in, digs in deep and then deeper unless it is somehow, by someone or something, stopped or at least slowed.

As the book describes, the progression, which unfolds in four phases, is invariable, inexorable. Unless, again, there is an intervention. Unless, again, the bad leader is somehow stopped from going from Phase 1 (“Onward and Upward”); to Phase 2 “(Followers Join In”); to Phase 3 (“Leaders Dig In”); and finally, to Phase 4 (“From Bad to Worse”).

As I write in the book: “The process of going from bad to worse tends to be steady, not sudden or hasty.” But once bad has burrowed in, once it has been permitted to progress, it becomes “finally very difficult to extract or excise. In other words, once the system is close to being completely corrupted, it’s late, maybe even too late. By then bad leaders and their follower are so entrenched that they control the system itself, which is why at this point the only way to totally get rid of bad is to totally get rid of everyone involved.”

This truism, the inevitable progression from bad to worse, applies across the board. To leaders in every sector, in every context and culture. It’s the nature of the human condition – which raises the key question. Who, or what is “bad”? Clearly who I consider a bad leader might be, or it might not be, who you consider a bad leader. In the book I make at least some of my biases clear. For example, that I write from the vantage point of a liberal democrat. Which means that in my view a leader like Vladimir Putin – and, yes, Donald Trump -is “bad.” Similarly, because I take integrity seriously, I label a leader “bad” if he or she is demonstrably and frequently fraudulent, such as Sam Bankman-Fried.

Because our conceptions of good and bad can be as elusive as contentious, there is a chapter in the book on “Making Meaning of Being Bad.” I argue however that just because a subject is fraught does not mean we should steer clear. Given bad leadership is as ubiquitous as pernicious, the leadership industry has an obligation to tackle it as it pertains to both theory and practice. We should be as dedicated to stopping bad leaders as to growing good ones.

Moreover, because if it is not stopped or at least slowed bad leadership invariably gets worse, we should not be even a smidgen surprised when worse occurs. In 2020 President Xi Jinping decided to impose on Hong Kong a national security law that gave the government a powerful tool to silence its critics. They could be and mostly were rounded up and threatened with arrest. It was entirely predictable then that a few years later (in 2024), another law was passed that further enhanced and expanded the government’s control. It was, or it should have been foreseen that in time most of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists and lawmakers would be either in prison or self-imposed exile.

Similarly, should we be in the least surprised that Russia recently ratcheted up its online censorship?  The Russian regime is doing nothing different from what it has been doing for years. It is increasing the level of its suppression and oppression. The New York Times reported that “Internet censorship has grown in Russia for more than a decade, but the scale and effectiveness of the most recent blocks have surprised even experts.” Why? Why was any Russian expert “surprised” in the slightest? The trajectory was entirely predictable. So long as Putin was in charge there was, there is, no question: censorship in Russia will go from bad to worse.    

The syndrome – leadership from bad to worse – is not just of theoretical interest. It is of practical importance. Pay attention and act if you can or you too could be screwed.

There are more women leaders and upper-level managers in the United States now than fifty or even twenty years ago. But over a half century after the start of the modern women’s movement, progress toward equity at or even near the top of the professional ladder remains slow.  

Only about ten percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are women. Women constitute slightly under a quarter of equity law partners, about a quarter of U. S. Governors and Senators, and just over a quarter of members of the House of Representatives. Never has a woman been president of the United States. Moreover, in the last two decades the gender pay gap has scarcely budged. Women still earn only 82 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Of course, in many parts of the word the professional plight of women is far worse. In China for example is only one woman among the 25-member Politburo, the leadership body of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the CCP’s standing committee has no women on it at all. Similarly, because women in South Korea usually feel they must choose either between family or career, the country has the lowest fertility rate in the world.

But the United States is not China, nor is it South Korea. In America have been considerable changes to promote and accommodate women – in the law; in public policies; in workplace accommodations; in teachings and trainings promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion; and in attitudes and behaviors considered professionally acceptable. Which raises the question of why, after many years of considerable, perceptible, change, has the number of women leaders and managers remained stubbornly low?

To this question is one answer that remains largely undiscussed and therefore unaddressed. It’s that men and women are different. There are enormous physical and psychological differences between being a woman and being a man.

We pretend that the distinctions between the genders either do not exist or do not pertain. But they do. Women’s minds, and their bodies impact what they, we, want to do and can do, our entire professional lives.

To be clear, not all of us are the same. Not every woman has menstrual cramps; or gets pregnant; or is exhausted or nauseous while pregnant; or chooses to breast-feed her baby; or feels more responsible for her child than her partner; or has symptoms of menopause. But many or even most women do. To pretend, then, that being in the body of a woman has nothing whatsoever to do with being in the world of work –with both the level of our ambition and, yes, sometimes with our capacity to perform – is to be in denial.

We women openly discuss how having to care for our children affects our work. We do not, however, openly discuss, certainly not with our leaders and managers, the effects on us of dysmenorrhea and hormonal changes; of baby blues and postpartum depression; of swollen breasts and nipple discharges; of night sweats, weight gains, and mood swings.

Menstruation is an illustration. The average woman menstruates about once a month, for about five days, for about forty years. Over ninety percent of women report they have some premenstrual symptoms such as headaches or bloating. More than half of women have menstrual cramps; and some of the time monthly bleeding is heavy and unpredictable. Additionally, somewhere between five to fifteen percent of women report having menstrual pain so intense it interferes with their daily activities.

Does it make sense then to assume that menstruation has no impact at all on women at work or on women’s promotion to positions of leadership and management? Similarly with menopause, a transition that can last between four and ten years and that begins on average at age 47. About 80 percent of women report having symptoms associated with menopause, which is experienced in the prime of their professional lives. Is our physical and psychological well-being entirely irrelevant to our professional status and performance?

Given the gender differences, hybrid work seems on the surface a boon to women. But is it an asset to women ambitious to lead or manage? Not necessarily. Some are reluctant to work from home for fear of being branded a slacker. Others want to set an example – “Do as I do, come into the office.” Still others feel they cannot lead or manage from home as well as from the office.

There are reasons why women as well as men choose even now to ignore the enormous gender differences. They relate to religion and tradition; to feelings of embarrassment and shame; to perceptions of delicacy, fragility, and weakness; and now, to concerns about political correctness. It’s why women usually decide it’s best for professional purposes to pretend they never have a menstrual camp. To pretend they are not drained and depressed by in vitro fertilization. To pretend they do not vomit while they are pregnant. To pretend pumping is fine even when their breasts hurt, and they are obliged to pump in a small room set aside for this purpose. To pretend they do not have menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats; headaches and sleeplessness; anxiety and palpitations.

Granted times are changing. Lactation, menopause, and even menstruation is slowly being destigmatized. Moreover, some companies are trying to accommodate what women particularly want and need. But the changes fall far short. So long as any aspect of women’s health and well-being remains a subject that’s taboo, so long will it impact negatively especially on their rising through the ranks.

The curtain of decorum does not excuse anyone’s silence – including our own – on this obvious but still obviously discomfiting issue. High time then we claim our bodies, ourselves. Given we are physically and psychologically radically different from men we must speak openly, honestly, and yes, loudly about what we need and want when we need and want it.

I get that women who are forthright are at personal and professional risk. At risk of being labeled pushy or demanding, or, heaven forefend, aggressive. But if we don’t speak truth to power, who will?

There’s a new film out, “The Teachers’ Lounge.” For anyone with an interest in leadership and followership I strongly recommend it.

The film is German and on the surface it’s about a teacher who loses control not just of her classroom, but of most of her sixth-grade students. A series of events turns traditional conceptions of power and authority on their head, essentially leaving inmates running the asylum. At one point the teacher, Carla Nowak, runs literally as well as metaphorically away from her students.

It matters that the film is German because until after the Second World War, no Western country was more closely identified with authoritarian leadership, with leaders (including teachers) who ruled with an iron fist than Germany. Obviously, those days are long gone. Still, it’s weird for a person of a certain age – in this case me! – to see a German classroom become bedlam. Whatever Ms. Nowak’s good intentions, whatever her efforts to teach, later to tame her students, there came a point in the film when all hell broke loose.

It’s no stretch to suggest that “The Teachers’ Lounge” is not just about keeping a modicum of order in the classroom. It’s a metaphor for keeping a modicum of order in society more generally, especially in societies that are liberal democracies.

Good democratic governance is hard to affect these days precisely because there’s a resemblance between the students in the film and the public at large – all of whom ostensibly are followers expected to follow those who ostensibly are leaders. This applies whether these leaders are teachers, ministers or managers, presidents, prime ministers, or chancellors.

But instead of following, of going along, we resist. We resist in the United States, and we resist in Germany. Too many of us lean too far right; vent our testiness and nastiness online; carp and complain even amidst abundance; resist and resent contributing to the commonweal; knowingly spread misinformation and disinformation; and remain seemingly deliberately uninterested and willfully uninformed.

Democracy is always good in theory and sometimes good in practice. But when communitarianism is sacrificed at the altar of individualism it leads straight to The Teachers’ Lounge.

Mitch McConnell was on his way to becoming not only the longest serving Senate Republican Leader in American history – a record he can still claim – but one of the most successful. In an alternate universe he would’ve announced his retirement this week with mixed pleasure but immense pride.

Instead, this once enormously powerful legislative leader veritably slunk off the political stage (though formally not until November), admitting that the ground had shifted under his feet. That the Republican Party “at this particular moment in time” not only had changed nearly beyond his recognition but was inhospitable to someone of his moderate temperament.

To be clear, McConnell was a right-wing politician who did what he could to shape American politics in his image. For example, he is credited with shaping the Supreme Court in a way that will drive the left and most of the center crazy for years if not decades. But in his temperament, he is and always was moderate. Soft spoken, tending to taciturn and courtly in his manner; willing, sometimes, to compromise, to work across the aisle; and an internationalist; he was always far, very far, from being a right-wing nut job.

One measure of McConnell’s moderate temper was his well-concealed loathing of the man who finally swallowed him whole, Donald Trump. But notwithstanding how McConnell felt about Trump in private, for reasons of his own the senator did what he could to enable the president. First to escort Trump into the White House, and then to keep him there. Until the January 6^th insurrection, McConnell was so supportive of Trump that he was labeled by Jane Mayer, in an April 2020 article in The New Yorker, “Enabler in Chief.”

McConnell – whose wife, Elaine Chao, was, not incidentally, a member of Trump’s cabinet – plays a similarly important part in my 2021 book, The Enablers. In the book I wrote that McConnell “personally and politically protected Trump during the first impeachment trial.” It was McConnell then who “made it possible for the president to finish his term without the proceedings upending or even significantly impairing him.” Further, as Mayer pointed out, McConnell stayed “largely silent about the president’s lies and inflammatory remarks,” and propped up the administration with legislative and judicial victories.

McConnell though had a fatal flaw – that led to a fatal error. He was so hungry for power he could not see straight. He could not see that Trump would stop at nothing and no one to get his way and save his skin. Which meant that unless something or someone stopped him, Trump would inevitably, inexorably, go from bad to worse.  

And so it came to pass that the monster swallowed his creator.

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It’s well known that being president of the United States has quickly and visibly aged virtually all men – Ronald Reagan is an exception – who have occupied the Oval Office. This includes Joe Biden who looks and sounds perceptively older and frailer now than he did three years ago, when he was inaugurated.

But my point is not that being an American president is inordinately taxing. It’s that being any American leader of any enterprise of any size is the same. Being a leader in 2024 is, by every account and every measure, more demanding and draining than it was a generation ago.

• In 2023 more CEOs – nearly 2,000 – exited their posts than ever before.
• In a recent survey 37% of C-suite executives reported that avoiding professional burnout is a consistent, significant challenge.
• Nineteen chief executives died in office last year, the most in more than a decade.
• 65% of leaders experience symptoms of wear and tear such as stress and anxiety.
• According to a 2023 study conducted by Deloitte, 33% of leaders regularly have “feelings of being overwhelmed, lonely, or depressed.”

All of which raises the question of why. Why is being a leader evidently more difficult in the present than it was in the past?

Here four important reasons:

• Followers in the present are far more demanding now than they used to be. By “followers” I don’t just mean subordinates, such as employees. I mean stakeholders of every sort, all of whom leaders must keep in tow to get their work done. For example, presidents of universities have multiple followers, or stakeholders, or constituents – call them what you will – including students, faculty, staff, boards, parents, donors, the press, and the public. Each is more demanding, more clamorous, and contrary than they were in decades, even in years past.
• Leading, literally leading, is harder to do than it used to be. In the old days leaders could count on command-and-control. Superiors simply told their subordinates what they wanted them to do, and their subordinates did it – lest they be punished. Now it’s not so simple. Now most leaders are expected to use not their power or even their authority – such as it now is. Instead, they are expected to use their influence. To persuade others of what they want them to do rather than to order them, or even simply to tell them to do it.    
• Technology has reached the point of intimidating leaders. It makes them – for good reason – fearful of being caught on a smart phone behaving in a way that’s somehow untoward. It makes them – for good reason – fearful of being subjected to a viral attack. It makes them – for good reason – fearful that it, technology, will get ahead of them. That it – AI is the obvious example – will be cleverer than they and faster than they, and that it will evolve in ways that they cannot even begin to understand. That tech will control them rather than the other way around.
• Politics lurks – much as they might like to, even leaders other than political ones can no longer avoid at least sometimes weighing in. In the old days, only political leaders were expected to get embroiled in domestic or foreign politics, or in domestic or foreign policies. Leaders of other institutions or organizations could easily skirt controversy. They could even stick their heads in the sand, act as if differences among Americans either did not exist or did not pertain. Now pretending that politics is irrelevant is impossible. Leaders of different stripes are being pushed to weigh in on everything from identity politics to the culture wars, from sanctions to vaccines, from taxes to tariffs, from to Argentina to China. Worse, when they do, they usually end in a no-win situation because of how fragmented and fractious the American people.

None of this is of course to say that leaders are not well rewarded. They are. In the private sector especially, compensation has never been higher – those at the top of American business and finance are generally rich as Croesus. Moreover, leaders have levels of autonomy and control that the rest of us are usually denied.

Still, there are tradeoffs. Leading is more difficult than it used to be, less fun than it used to be, and more punishing than it used to be. Don’t believe me? Just ask Claudine Gay. Or Bob Iger. Or Mark Milley. Or Kevin McCarthy. Or for that matter Joe Biden.