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The relationship between leader and follower is sometimes entirely benign. And, sometimes, it is not. It is entirely benign when both leader and follower benefit from the relationship and when the interaction between them is pleasant. It is not entirely benign when one or the other, the leader or the follower, does not benefit from the relationship and, or when the interaction between them is unpleasant. 

In relationships between leaders and followers that are not entirely benign, fear can and often does play an important part. Typically, fear matters when the follower wants to do something or not do something that the leader demands, wants or expects. In which case the leader threatens to harm the follower, either explicitly or implicitly, unless the follower is compliant.

Atypically but not so infrequently it’s the other way around. The follower threatens to in some way hurt the leader unless they do what the follower demands, wants or expects. I recently posted a piece in this space – titled “The Tail That Wags the Dog” – about how American voters (followers) can and often do control their elected officials (leaders) to the point where the latter are afraid of the former. Afraid that they won’t reelect them to office.      

Fear induced in followers by leaders with more power and authority than they can range from being mortal to being mild. A follower can be deathly afraid of their leader or only slightly afraid. In the workplace a superior can threaten – again, explicitly or implicitly – to fire someone or to deny them a raise. In the commons a superior can threaten to kill a follower who refuses to follow as, for example, Adolf Hitler did during the Nazi era.  Or a superior can threaten to slander a follower as, for example, Donald Trump does, including Republicans running for office who are not a thousand percent loyal.

Trump, it should be added, is sui generis. Never in America’s political history has the fear factor been as important to the leader-follower dynamic as it is now. Specifically, the fear of if, and how, and to what extent Trump will retaliate if a designated target does not do what the president demands, wants or expects. Fear has become so important a factor in American politics – up and down the ladder of power – it has been normalized.

Political violence in America has escalated and politicians routinely report receiving death threats. After Trump called former Republican House member Marjorie Taylor Greene a “traitor,” she reported receiving a “pipe bomb threat on my house” and “several death threats on my son.” Less drastically but still, university presidents worry that the administration will impose on their institution draconian cuts in funding. Chief executive officers kowtow to the president because they are scared that their company will pay if they do not. And cabinet members fawn as relentlessly as cravenly over Trump, intimidated by what he might do to them if they are other than worshipful acolytes.

The Financial Times’s Edward Luce reports that most of his sources have come to insist on anonymity. Why? Because of their “fear of jail, bankruptcy, or professional reprisal.”  Because of their fear that Trump will take “revenge” should their names become known. Similarly, the New York Times’s Noam Scheiber asked why, “leaders in the media, law, and finance [were] failing to stand up more forcefully to what many inside these industries say are abuses of presidential power?” He went on, “Fear is the most obvious answer. They are scared that the president will do more damage if they try to resist, scared that he may even target them personally.”

Many of Trump’s relationships testify to how fear can factor into the dynamic between those who have more power and authority and those who have less. But the point is a broader one. Which is that while Trump is an outlier among American presidents, he is not an outlier more generally. Fear frequently plays a part in the leader-follower dynamic – personally and professionally as well as politically. Most of us were occasionally afraid of what our parents might do if we did not do what they told us to do. Most of us were occasionally afraid of what our teachers might do if in some way we misbehaved. And even as adults most of us are occasionally afraid of what our managers might do if we disappoint them or frustrate them or in some other way displease them.

So, while it’s heartening to be told that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, truth is that fear is intrinsic to the human condition. Intrinsic to the dynamic between those who are more powerful and those who are less. 

As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by making a case so convincingly that people would feel compelled to act.

The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.

Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Thomas Paine. Paine was born in England – but he was among the fiercest and certainly most articulate defenders of American independence from the British crown. His revolutionary tract, Common Sense, was so widely read, and so incendiary, that it was called “the match that lit the revolution.”

Context always matters. So, no surprise that Common Sense was published in just the right place at just the right time – in Philadelphia, in 1776. Most Americans still had to be persuaded that the fight for American independence from Great Britain was worth the cost. After all, as I wrote in the above-mentioned book, “their ties to England were close and long-standing, their future as a separate state was uncertain at best, and they did not hunger for war against His Majesty’s troops.”

Paine though had no doubt. He was fervent and fiery in his conviction that England was rapacious and that the colonists would be far, far better off on their own. If they declared their independence from the British crown.

Paine was, as was the previous writer-as-leader in this series, Mary Wollstonecraft, a figure of the Enlightenment. He, though, was an in-your-face radical. A rabid revolutionist who used his pen to trigger fear and loathing in his readers, fear and loathing so overwhelming that they would be ready if not eager to overturn the old order and build an entirely new one.

Paine’s pen was so fluid and persuasive he was the envy of his contemporaries. Benjamin Franklin believed that the impact of Common Sense had been “prodigious.” Benjamin Rush declared that the treatise seemed to have “burst from the press with an effect which has rarely been produced.” John Adams was envious, complaining to Thomas Jefferson that history would “ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.” And Jefferson, no slouch with a pen himself, effectively conceded the point. “No writer has exceeded Paine,” Jefferson admitted, “in ease and familiarity of style, in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language.”

Excerpts from Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776,

• I have heard it asserted by some that as America has flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness…. Nothing could be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty.

• But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young nor make war upon their families.… This new World hath been the asylum for persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from EVERY PART of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home pursues their descendants still.”

I know. A good number of our political leaders are Black. And a good number of them are prominent. Reasonably well known not only to America’s political class but to Americans generally. Former Democratic nominee for President, Kamala Harris; House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries; Maryland Governor Wes Moore; Georgia’s Senator Raphael Warnock, South Carolina’s longtime House member James Clyburn – they and then some are Black leaders who have made it to the highest rungs of American politics.

But perhaps because they are so firmly entrenched in the political establishment not one among them is known by the wider public as a fighter fighting the good fight with the benefit of widespread support. Fighting the administration of President Donald Trump with millions in tow as it diminishes African Americans, neglects them and tries to hobble them by reversing voting rights secured more than a half century ago during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

What Black Americans lack is not so much a political leader as a sociopolitical leader. A leader of a movement that cuts across every dimension: color and gender; state and city; county and class. What Black Americans lack is a leader like the exalted Martin Luther King, Jr. – and like Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, John Lewis and others who were able to cut through the usual divides to form a strong, largely unified and nationally grounded movement on behalf of a cause fervently believed to be worthy. It might be argued that the Reverend Al Sharpton has tried to fill the gap. But whatever his achievements he has not secured the support required to forge a sociopolitical movement that is cross-cutting. That is large, wide, powerful and sustained enough to make a difference.

Among the most massive protests in American history were in 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Under the banner of Black Lives Matter it was estimated that between 15 and 26 million people participated in massive demonstrations not just against police brutality but for equal rights more generally. Interestingly, they were largely spontaneous. Which is to say that they were largely leaderless. No single leader or cluster of leaders was seen then or has been seen since as organizing the protests, as leading or even managing them. Which goes a long way toward explaining why they did not so much fizzle out as simply subside, diminish and then vanish. For all their gargantuan size the palpable anger at Floyd’s murder did not translate into anything further than limited, and all too often short-lived, attempts to curtail police brutality.

So here we are now, one year into Trump’s second term, with evidence mounting that he is out to curb “the other” however “the other” is defined. So far as Black Americans are concerned the greatest impact is likely to be on their right to vote and to have their vote count equally. Here a few lines from a recent piece in The New Yorker by Jelani Cobb: “What seems clear is that striking down Section 2 of [the Voting Rights Act] will almost certainly result in a landscape in which minority voters, particularly African Americans in the South, wield less political power than they have at any point since 1965.”* (Italics mine.)

Trump will not be stopped from shaping the nation as he sees fit either by the Congress or the Courts. It’s possible he will be slowed by the results of the 2026 midterm election. Possible. But meantime it’s probable that to African Americans especially, to their civil rights, to their voting rights, damage will be done. Wherever they have gone then – Black leaders – past time to find them. To identify them – and to call on them to identify themselves – lest we all fall down a rabbit hole from which it will be difficult to climb out.

*Civil Wrongs” in The New Yorker, November 10, 2025.       

Israeli journalist and author Ari Shavit describes a “dangerous bacteria.” A bacterium so malign that it infects virtually every Israeli – hobbling Israeli politics, even threatening the Israeli state. Shavit calls it “Bibisis.” It refers to Israelis’ obsession with one person. With their longtime leader and Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, widely known as Bibi.

Shavit describes Netanyahu as a leader who is, and has been for years the axis around which everything in Israel turns. And who is, and has been for years the individual around whom everyone in Israel pivots. Every Israeli has a fiercely held view – either they are for Bibi or they are against him, either they are forever Bibi or never Bibi.

To Americans the symptoms of Bibisis are familiar. Since 2015, when Donald Trump first declared his intent to run for president, we suffer from a similar syndrome. We have been as obsessed with Trump as Israelis have been with Netanyahu. For a decade now near everything in American politics has been seen through the prism of Trump. He has dominated the American political landscape, and opinions about him are fiercely held. Either for Trump or against Trump, either forever Trump or never Trump.

For all the similarities among most liberal democracies – such as the sharp swing to the right in virtually every country in Europe as well as in the United States – among their leaders are enormous differences. While Netanyahu and Trump are similar – they share traits and characteristics of standard strongmen – they have little in common with most of their European counterparts. Leaders like Britain’s stolid Prime Minister Keir Starmer, or France’s elitist President Emannuel Macron, or Germany’s colorless Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The Brits, for example, are no more consumed by Starmer than Americans were with Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.

No less a connoisseur of consciousness than Sigmund Freud was baffled by our capacity to become obsessed with a single individual, a single leader. “How is it possible,” Freud asked in his final book, Moses and Monotheism, “that one man can develop such extraordinary effectiveness… can stamp [his] people with [their] definite character and determine [their] fate for millennia to come?”

Bibisis might then be unhealthy, even dangerous. But it is not an anomaly. Anymore than what Americans call “Trump derangement syndrome.” The syndrome is not an official medical diagnosis. But the term does get its own Wikipedia entry, and it does describe an obsession of sorts. A negatively held view of Trump that is so strong, and so persistent, that the person who holds it is seen by some, especially those who don’t share it, as deranged.

Which it is not. Instead, Trump derangement syndrome is like its approximate Israeli counterpart, Bibisis. Both testify to our capacity to be in thrall to our leaders. To the capacity of some leaders to dominate and subordinate their followers beyond what seems to those not similarly disposed to be sensible or maybe even sane.

For fifteen years I have written about – and stressed the importance of – followers. I have never claimed that they are more important than leaders. I have claimed that they are as important as leaders. I have claimed that you cannot think intelligently about leaders without thinking about followers. And I have claimed that you cannot be an effective leader without taking followers into account at virtually every turn.  

What’s been happening in American politics in recent weeks merits my follower-fixation. Followers have been the tail that’s been wagging the dog – which makes leaders the dog. For followers have been driving the action while the ostensible leaders – notably Republicans in the House and Senate – have been scurrying to catch up.    

First some semantics. As it is used here the word “leader” refers to a person who is in a position of authority. As it is used here the word “follower” refers to a person who is not in a position of authority. Ergo, as these words are used here, leaders are Congressional Republicans, and followers are their constituents.  

So, what’s the chain of command?

At the top would appear Republican President Donald Trump. Immediately below would appear Republicans who serve in the House and Senate. But appearances can be deceiving. Increasingly Congressional Republicans are distancing themselves from the President. Increasingly they are taking issue with what he says and does. And increasingly they are defying his orders or just exiting his orbit.

Disputes between Republicans in Congress and the MAGA Man in the White House are multiplying. Tariffs, redistricting, the Epstein files, Ukraine, boat strikes in the Caribbean, and status of the Secretary of Defense (or War), are emblematic of the larger point. That growing numbers of prominent Republicans are refusing to march, like automatons, in lockstep behind the chief executive.

How did this happen? Who’s driving the action? Who really is leading and who really is following? The answers are simple. The electorate is leading; the elected are following. While it’s true that American voters are without authority – they are, so to speak, ordinary people – they are not without power and nor are they without influence. In fact, they have both. American voters have the power to reward their elected officials – and the power to punish them. American voters can decide to reelect members of Congress – or they can decide not to reelect them. Moreover, American voters have influence. They can for example influence their peers, other voters, to vote one way or another. They can give money to their preferred candidates and causes. And they can, and do organize, they can marshal their numbers to affect changes in policies and politicians.

Once the honeymoon is over every American president tends to lose popularity. But some lose it more dramatically and precipitously than others. Trump is an example. As The Economist summarized it, “No recent president has fallen so low so quickly as Donald Trump.” The most recent Gallup Poll confirms the point – it has the president’s approval rating at 36% and his disapproval rating at 60%.

Is it any wonder that Republicans in Congress are starting to wake from their Rip Van Winkel-like nap? Is it any wonder that they are starting to play the dog to their constituents’ tail?   

As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

Today’s classic is the first entry in Part II of the book, titled, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership initially seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this part of the book themselves was a leader. A leader who sought to create change by so persuasively making a case that people would feel compelled to act. The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably, they did – they changed the world. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.

Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Mary Wollstonecraft. She is the first of three women in this section, each of whom were compelled to lead women to a different place. A place in which they were not just permitted to be but encouraged to be stronger and more independent than they were at the time of writing.  

All writers must be read in the context of their time – Wollstonecraft arguably more than most because above all she was a figure of The Enlightenment. Which is to say that she like her luminous contemporaries – such as writer and revolutionist Thomas Paine – was the product of a period during which absolute power was moving away from those at the top and toward those in the middle and even at the bottom.

For most women the world that Wollstonecraft knew was exceedingly difficult. Children, for example, belonged to their father not their mother. Since divorce was impossible, this meant that if a woman had the temerity to leave the man to whom she was married, she had no choice but to leave her children behind. Marital rape was moreover legal – though in 1782 a law was passed that required husbands who beat their wives to use a stick no wider than a thumb.

Wollstonecraft was nothing if not ladylike. She wrote with delicacy – though her style should not be misunderstood. Beneath what might seem to the contemporary reader language that was formal and sometimes even flowery, was a message of fierce urgency. All women, Wollstonecraft warned, especially young women, should take care not to be misled by the flatteries of men. All women should be schooled. They should understand that only by being educated could they protect themselves against the danger of being discarded by a man. For men would deny them strength “both of mind and body.” Men would flatter them at first, but then, later, discard them as carelessly as they would a faded flower. To be clear: Wollstonecraft was not a man-hater. Rather she was clear-eyed about the plight of women and hellbent on doing what she could to lessen it.

From “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792.

• The conduct and manners of women, in fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade, disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived at maturity.

• My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone., I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists – I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

As I define it, the leadership industry is about a half century old. Before about 1980 the interest in leadership was strong – to wit Confucius’s sage, Plato’s philosopher-king, Machiavelli prince, Locke’s legislator, Lenin’s revolutionary, and Arendt’s totalitarian. But it was sporadic. Only since about 1980 has there been an industry built on the supposition that leadership can constitute a pedagogy. Specifically, that leadership can be taught and learned not on a small scale but on a large one. That leadership can be taught to and learned by many different people in many different places in many different ways by many different types of instructors.

Leadership has become, in short, a vast money-making enterprise. “Leadership Industry” is then no more than, though also no less than, my catchall term for the now countless leadership centers, institutes, programs, courses, seminars, workshops, experiences, books, blogs, articles, websites, webinars, videos, conferences, coaches and consultants claiming to teach people how to lead – usually for money and sometimes for a lot of money.*

In recent years the leadership industry has not slowed. To the contrary, it has continued to grow, notably in the private sector where “executive education has evolved from a small cadre of on-campus leadership seminars into a multi-billion-dollar global industry” that ostensibly “equips senior managers, entrepreneurs, and high potential talent with the insight and agility demanded by today’s volatile marketplace.” It is projected that by 2029 the annual investment in global executive education will exceed $74 billion.**  

Hard for me here to convey how deep or widespread is the apparent belief – I write “apparent” because I cannot say how deeply held is this belief or even if it is genuine – at least in the private sector that leadership programs pay off. For notwithstanding the level of the investment, are statistics that would seem to question the supposition. For example, “only 10% of people are natural leaders” and only another 20% “show potential with proper training.” And “trust in managers dropped from 46% to 29% in just two years (2033-2024).  And despite the humungous sums of money that have been poured into leadership development over the last several decades, some “77% of organizations [still] lack sufficient leadership depth at all levels.”***  

For the sake of this discussion, I am not, however, taking issue with the proposition that business investment in leadership development pays off. Here I raise another matter. Specifically, if we’re so good at developing leaders in the private sector – or, at least, sufficiently good to merit enormous investment in their improvement – why does the same not apply in the public sector?  

To be clear, trust in leaders in the private sector is low. We do not find them models of rectitude. In fact, the most obvious indicator of their professional success – money – is also an indicator of their personal greed. But at least we can admire how high they can climb.

Not so leaders in the public sector – for them there is scant admiration of any kind. Not only do many leaders in the public sector seem to us to be unethical. Many leaders in the public sector seem to us to be ineffective. They fixate on raising money for their own campaign coffers; they quarrel with each other, endlessly; they cling to their posts for years on end, well past their sell-by date; and they are seen as not especially interested in serving the public good, if not even corrupt. To summarize findings from two years ago by the Pew Research Center: “Elected officials are widely viewed as self-serving and ineffective.” In short, Americans of all stripes despair of a political leadership class that for decades now has proven itself miserably poor at getting things done and equally poor at persuading their constituents that well-intentioned public service is other than largely dead and gone.

None of this is of course to say that the leadership industry is to blame for leadership cohorts that are little admired and less respected. The dislike, disrespect, and distrust of political leaders that we see in the United States is widespread, evident in most other democracies as well as in ours. It is however to ask yet again why the leadership industry continues to be indifferent to its lack of adequate impact. There are of course some successes to which it can point. But let’s get real – they are a drop in the proverbial bucket. If we leadership experts and educators did things right, we could have and would have a far, far greater positive impact than we do now – and have had over the last fifty years. As it stands we make a difference only at the margins, more’s the pity.

I have written about the disappointments of the leadership industry for years. Equally I have written about how to start making what’s wrong right. It’s not rocket science. The template for how to get better at what we do is out there. But we’ve not had the will to lead the way.  

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*For more on my take on the leadership industry see two of my books: The End of Leadership (HarperCollins, 2012) and Professionalizing Leadership (Oxford University Press, 2018).

** From “100 Interesting Facts and Figures about Executive Education 2025,”

*** From Sean Linehan, “29 Eye-Opening Leadership Development Statistics 2025” in Exec.

You got a candidate for the title? There are lots of them out there – lots of leaders in lots of situations who are stretched to the max.  

But I challenge you to beat my nominee for winner of the dubious honor. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Since Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, the pressure on Zelensky has been extreme and without letup. Moreover, while it has been unrelenting from day one, it has never been greater than at this moment.   

A quick look at the dynamic from a systemic point of view – specifically at the leader, at the followers, and at the situation.

The Leader

Zelensky, previously a comedian and entertainer, has not had much to laugh about and not much to entertain him for nearly four years. Navigating the war within Ukraine and outside it, especially in Europe and vis a vis the United States, has been a Herculean if not Sisyphean task. If Zelensky has had any respite from the pressure I haven’t heard about it. His level of stress must be sky high. His level of fatigue, mental and physical, must be off the charts. He must be at the point or past it of burnout. Zelensky is not an old man, he is 47 years old. But I wonder how long he can take the pressure – and how long he should take the pressure? Will it be it time in the coming months for him to step back – to let another leader lead the charge?

The Followers

Think of it. President Zelensky has to manage his own team. He has to be symbolic and substantive leader of the Ukrainian people. He has to marshal leaders in Europe such as Germany’s Friedrich Merz, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Poland’s Donald Tusk, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. And effectively every moment of every day he has to placate the elephant in the room, the wildly unpredictable rogue elephant, Donald Trump. You try it. You try leading any of these individuals or groups and see how far you get. Even Zelensky’s most proximate constituents, his own people, have needs, wants, and wishes impossible at this time to satisfy. They are exhausted from the war; depleted from having to meet its incessant demands; and deeply affected by the toll it has taken. And now they are beset by another scandal, another corruption scandal that is contributing still further to the drain on what is left of their resources.

The Situation

It has been almost impossibly fraught since day one – since Russia violated every international norm by invading Ukraine. One could, however, make the case, and I do, that for President Zelensky the situation has never been as high stakes as it is at this moment. This is a leader trapped between the proverbial rock and hard place. Dammed if he does and damned if he does not. As David Ignatius wrote a few days ago in the Washington Post, Zelensky now “confronts the most agonizing choice of his presidency.” If he trades land for peace some number of Ukrainians will never forgive him. But if he does not the war will continue. Either way neither he nor his people will have any guarantee that the menace to the East – Vladimir Putin – will not strike again again.       

Leaders under great stress do not lack for advice. It is suggested, for example, that they prioritize self-care; delegate; reflect; take breaks; get exercise; and sufficient sleep. But … what’re the odds are that Zelensky routinely receives 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night?

As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

Today’s leadership literacy classic is the last entry in Part I of the book, About Leadership. The author’s name might be familiar as a philosopher, specifically for her work on totalitarianism which remains still of paramount importance. But Hannah Arendt’s most famous book, certainly the one that was her most controversial, was about notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.

Arendt’s study of Eichmann relates to the work I referenced last, on obedience to authority, by Stanley Milgram. The work of both Milgram and Arendt was influenced by what happened in Nazi Germany and across most of Europe during the Second World War. Both moreover sought to answer some of the same questions: How do good people become bad people? How do bad people become evil people? And what if anything can be done to prevent an event such as the Holocaust?

The focus of their attention was however different. Milgram homed in on followers generally. And Arendt focused on one man specifically, who, moreover, was both a leader and a follower simultaneously. Specifically, the man who was the subject of Arendt’s book was not the leader, Adolf Hitler, but Eichmann, one of Hitler’s top deputies. As a top Nazi bureaucrat Eichmann certainly was without question a leader. But when it came to defending himself against charges of war crimes, he claimed, with some justification, that he was only following orders.

Eichmann was one of the main organizers and implementers of the Final Solution, the Nazis’ attempt to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews. In the immediate postwar period, however, he managed to escape detention by the Allies and to flee eventually to Argentina. Eichmann was recaptured only in 1960 when he was finally tracked down by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, brought to Jerusalem to stand trial in an Israeli courtroom, and ultimately hung for his war crimes.

It was the trial to which Arendt was witness that motivated her to write the book from which I quote here. Her conclusion was that Eichmann was ,in the end, no more than “banal.” That he was an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. That he was not so much malevolent as callow, not so much a rabid anti-Semite as without any ideology at all. As Arendt described Eichmann, one of the most notorious of all Nazi war criminals, he was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”

The idea that evil could be banal was what got her into trouble. Arendt’s readers found it painful to read, and difficult to believe, that an atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust could possibly be the responsibility of someone who was not much different from you and me.  

Arendt never answered the question of how what came to pass came to pass. She could not. Like everything else written about the Holocaust, whatever her answer it was only in part.

• From Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)

And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody “Thou shalt not kill,” even though man’s natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody, “Thou shalt kill.”  

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it – the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably the overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder. Not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom… and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.

As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

Today’s leadership literacy classic is as before, still all About Leadership. The author’s name might well be familiar, though not as a writer, as a social scientist. Specifically, as a psychologist whose renown came from his having conducted what arguably is the most famous social science experiment of all time.

The man’s name was Stanley Milgram, and his experiment was on obedience to authority. Milgram was not primarily interested in leadership – his primary interest was in followership. This was in the early 1960s, not yet two decades after the end of the Second World War. So, what Milgram sought to find out was how it happened that so many Germans had been willing if not even eager to follow a leader like Adolf Hitler. What Milgram was interested in then was in how ordinary people could act so “callously and inhumanely.”  

During the 1950s most scholars of the war generally, and of the Holocaust specifically, focused on the Fuehrer, on Hitler. Milgram did the opposite. He understood that the calamities the war engendered were not the handiwork of one man acting alone but of millions acting in concert. Of multitudes of followers in addition to the single leader. Hence his interest in what have called “crimes of obedience” – in what he called “obedience to authority.”

Milgram’s original experiment was conducted at Yale University. It has since been replicated in many different places at many different times, sometimes with results that somewhat differed. Still, Milgram’s findings, and his overarching conclusions, pertain now as they did then and, likely, forever will.

The excerpt below is from Milgram’s book, which was written about ten years after his experiment was conducted.

• Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, 1974.

This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. A variety of inhibitions against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in [their] place.