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I have no way of proving this. But to me at least it’s clear that the president of the United States finally decided to take up arms against ISIS because of recent videos showing the beheadings of two American journalists. We know about Barack Obama that both his campaign for the presidency and his more than six years in the White House were predicated on getting us out of foreign conflicts, not in. We also know that earlier this year he dismissed ISIS as insignificant, not a threat, certainly not to the security interests of the U. S. Similarly we know that the majority of the American people and the majority of the Congress more or less supported the administration’s foreign policy, specifically its aversion to foreign entanglements. In fact for years now, while the brutal and miserably costly civil war in Syria has dragged on, the U. S. has been content to stay on the sidelines, a bystander, not a participant.  But once James Foley and Steven Sotloff were decapitated, and once their decapitations were posted on line, things changed.

If these same two journalists had been shot – even in cold blood in a public square – America’s foreign policy would not have turned on a dime as it did. The American people would not have gone from being near-isolationists to near-interventionists, and the American Congress would not have supported the strategy of getting directly involved. Most importantly, the American president would not have delivered a televised speech from the White House in prime time (a rarity for this president) to announce to the world that he was assembling a coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

So what is it about a beheading that is so gut-wrenching? What was it about these two beheadings in particular that was so overwhelming they turned a ship of state? Two things: first the barbarism of the deed itself, a knife wielded by one to sever the head of another, close by, bound and kneeling in abject subjugation. Second, the videos. As David Carr pointed out in the New York Times, these videos are by no means crude or one-dimensional. Instead they make evident a “sophisticated production unit, with good cameras, technically proficient operators and editors who have access to all the best tools.” Of course the irony is this 21^st century technology is being used to 12^th century ends. YouTube is being used to depict the ultimate regression: an atrocious even sadistic murder committed in a public square.

Exactly what ISIS hoped to gain by filming its defilements is not clear. What is clear is that its action triggered America’s reaction – which is another way of saying that its tail wagged our dog.

 

*Invitation to a Beheading is the title of a novel by Vladimir Nabokov

 

In the over two years that I have been writing an occasional column titled “Putin Patrol,” never has the man been riding higher than he is now.  It’s not that his domestic policy has been a particular success (though he has managed to squelch his political opposition). Internally Russia continues to suffer from a range of problems – including a limited, lagging economy – that over the long term will haunt it. But externally, in the short term, Putin has got nearly everything he wanted. From his agreement with Obama on Syria’s chemical weapons to a putative deal over Ukraine, Putin’s foreign policy accomplishments have been so demonstrably self-evident that his standing among the Russian people is sky high.

Let be clear here. Let’s not mince words. Whatever the long term outcome in Ukraine, as of this writing this much is true:

• Putin has changed the map of Europe by seizing Crimea, and now presuming it part of Russia. He has further changed what until this year was the post-Cold War European order.
• Putin has secured de facto if not de jure control over parts of Eastern Ukraine. The cease-fire deal that two days ago was agreed on by him and Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko locks in place any and all gains made by Russian forces since their invasion – not “incursion”! –  of Ukraine began. This includes protection of regional – read Eastern – autonomy.
•  Putin has insured that Ukraine not move even a millimeter closer to the West, in particular the European Union, without paying a potentially high price. This is – again, let’s call it what it is – a severe restriction on Ukraine’s ostensible right to decide its own political future.

To be sure, there are in this case as in every other one mitigating or at least explicating circumstances. Realist political scientist John Mearsheimer writes in Foreign Affairs (September/October 2014) that the West’s “triple package of policies – NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion – added fuel to a fire [Putin was] waiting to ignite.” Moreover there is all this one saving grace: in the wake of the Ukrainian invasion NATO members finally decided to establish a rapid-reaction force, essentially to stop Putin, Russia, from going beyond Ukraine to interfere in other countries such as the Baltic Republics. But if 2014 were a geopolitical chess game between Putin on the one hand and Western democracies on the other, the former would be the obvious winner and the latter the obvious loser.

The word “leader” gets bandied around so much these days it’s been diminished. Like a currency that’s lost a lot of its value, the word “leader” is applied with such abandon it’s become almost meaningless. This makes it the more startling when, every now and then, the word regains its value – as in the case of the late, lamented comic, Joan Rivers.

Rivers the leader was not of recent vintage. Rather Rivers the leader was the Rivers of the 1960s, ‘70s and early ‘80s, when she broke every rule in the book, shocking her audiences as they, most of them anyway, convulsed in fits of laughter. Words used to describe her since her death a day ago make the point. Rivers was a “pioneer.” Rivers was a “pathbreaker.” Rivers was a “trailblazer.” Rivers was “the first.” Rivers “paved the way.”

It’s said of Joan Rivers that she broke ground for female comics. That’s true and not true, simultaneously. Sure, her coarse comedy made it possible for someone like Sarah Silverman to be socially acceptable, sort of. But the fact is that the Sarah Silvermans are few and far between – it’s not as if since Rivers we’ve had a raft of women who are famous for being funny.

Rather it is that Rivers the comic caught the culture of the changing times. It’s no accident that her break-through moment was in the 1960s, when the old order was being torn down and when button-down gave way to unzipped. Rivers was a leader all right, but her importance was less in comedy than in America more generally. Today’s outpouring of admiration and affection for Rivers is not so much because she made us laugh, but because she dared us to laugh in public at what previously was kept private. To be sure, she, like a handful of others – Lenny Bruce comes to mind – broke the comic mold. But what’s much more striking is that where she led America followed.

Our fixation on leadership is as strong as ever.

• The private sector:  In the latest such deal, the Bank of America (BOA) and the Justice Department agreed to a nearly $17 billion settlement relating to charges that the bank had duped investors into buying toxic mortgage securities. The deal does not do what outraged critics wanted it to do: it does not punish individuals for wrongdoing. Leaders in other words, those who led and managed the banks in question, have generally been getting off Scott-free. (An exception to this rule may be Angelo Mozilo, former CEO of Countrywide Financial, which was acquired by BOA.) I do not denigrate this position: punishing institutions is hardly the same as punishing individuals. This is not, however, to say that no blame is being allocated. The BOA deal is the largest government settlement by any company in American history. So, much as some of us would like to see some previously in charge behind bars, to say that everyone is being held blameless is plain wrong.

• The public sector: Of all the observations that one might make about the recent events in Ferguson, MO, for a student of leadership none was as striking as the stunning lack of it. It was, if you will, a field day for followers, for leaders were nowhere in evidence. In short order, some of the old guard, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton among them, parachuted in to town – to little or no obvious effect. Government officials in turn, local, county, and state, including the governor and the mayor, all sent conflicting signals, with no single political leader emerging to take charge. Nor did either the white community or the black one have in place a person or persons who clearly was a spokesperson. If anyone at all was, is, leader-like in style and substance, it was Captain Ronald Johnson, the black Missouri State Highway Patrol official who finally was designated responsible for security. Unlike nearly everyone else, Johnson was able to calm tensions, and he was equally able to engage blacks and whites in civilized discourse. But Johnson’s success in his unaccustomed role was a reflection not only of his leadership skills, but of the paucity of same among those from whom it legitimately was presumed.

• At home: Headline on the front page of the New York Times: “As World Boils, Fingers Point Obama’s Way” (8/16/14). ISIS is turning out what even administration officials now concede is a threat “beyond any we have seen.” The question that only history will decide is whether President Barack Obama has been in any way, to any degree responsible for the situation in which the United States of America, and for that matter the rest of the Western world, now finds itself. We are a declared target of a terrorist group that has morphed into something akin to a country. Our tendency, not surprisingly, is as it has always been: to blame the person in charge for what happened. Whether this is fair or not is almost beside the point. The point is that ISIS materialized on Obama’s watch and that, rightly or wrongly, it is he who will be held to account for how this turns out.

• Abroad: What’s perhaps most remarkable about ISIS is that until recently it was unknown and unheard of. Until this summer nearly no American even knew the name ISIS, because even to those in the know it seemed not much more than yet another group of Middle Eastern terrorists, similar to those already  familiar. But overnight or so it seemed this band of near unknowns became something else entirely: they became leaders who were able able through various means – political, military, and financial – to force the United States to respond to them in kind, by force. What’s obvious even now is that in the 21^st century the old rules of the game no longer apply. Instead a very small knot of very dangerous people can compel a global superpower to engage in a military mission – in spite of its best laid plans.

 

Note:   I’ll be hitting the road for several weeks…. So this is my last post for the duration.

The violence in Ferguson, MO – which continues to spew sporadically in the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager – raises the question of whether it is at all useful. Does violence of this sort yield benefits to those who stoke it? Or are the authorities, from the President on down, right to try, day in day out, to quell it? Just yesterday Obama weighed in again, saying that while he understood the “passions and anger” in Ferguson, they served only to “raise tensions and stir chaos.” They undermined, he said, rather than advanced justice.

Be that as it may, let’s be clear: there is a long tradition of threatening, advocating, and defending violence when peaceful methods of protest, or for that matter no protests at all, seem inadequate to the task of creating change. To illustrate the point I quote from a single source, Nelson Mandela. The following words are his, excerpts from a far longer speech delivered in 1964, from a dock in a courtroom in Pretoria, South Africa.

I cite them not, obviously, to promote violence. Nor do I intend to suggest that South Africa in the early 1960s is analogous to America in the early 2000s. But Mandela’s defense of his own use of violence serves to remind that it has played a critical role in human history – including, I might add, in American history. Needless to say that the argument in support of resorting to violence has rarely been so carefully considered or so eloquently made. And, needless to say that from a distance what in Ferguson distinguishes criminality from strategy is impossible to say. Still, the point remains the same: under certain circumstances violence can be considered a political means necessary to achieve a political end.

Nelson Mandela, from his his three-hour speech, “I Am Prepared To Die.”

“Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism …. Second, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy….

It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle…. We did so not because we desired such a course, but solely because the Government had left us with no other choice…. I can only say that I felt morally obliged to do what I did….”

 

Does Jeff Bezos give a damn that over 1,000 writers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have now joined with over 900 authors from the United States to protest Amazon’s business practices? Does Jeff Bezos give a damn that over 1,000 writers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have now similarly signed a letter that claims that Amazon “manipulates recommendation lists”?  Does Jeff Bezos give a damn that over 1,000 writers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have now charged Amazon with making false statements about books put out by Bonnier, a publisher which, like Hachette, is taking on Bezos’s behemoth over e-book prices?

If he doesn’t, he should. First, you never want to get into a pissing match with large numbers of your suppliers. Second, you never want to get embroiled in a battle that blackens your name – over and over and over again. And third Bezos should know better than anyone else that in 2014 complaints are contagious – if they’re legit they go viral. The likelihood, in short, that Bezos can crush these now nearly 2,000 authors without getting his hands even a little bit bloody is small.

Followers Refusing to Follow

 

It was an arresting sight – to those of us who still read the papers on paper. Last Sunday two full pages of the New York Times were filled with names. Some 900 names, so the print was small. But there they were, some of them famous, some not, all of them belonging to authors lining up, signing up to protest one of the most visionary of American leaders, the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.

Like other tech titans approximately of his generation, Bezos has been an American darling, not only because of his technological genius but because of his acumen as a businessman. In relatively short order, Bezos built Amazon into one of the greatest operations on the planet. So for years he was untouchable: we watched in amazement and admiration as he grew his company beyond anyone’s wildest early imaginings.

Now however the worm has turned, at least slightly. First, the size of Amazon’s losses (some $800 million this quarter alone) has raised eyebrows, questions about whether, as the Times put it, “Amazon’s money-losing ways are finally catching up with it.” Second, one major publisher, Hachette, has had the nerve publicly to take on Amazon, to challenge in no uncertain terms some of its most onerous practices. And third… this. This spectacle of many of America’s best known writers – Stephen King, Donna Tartt, Robert Caro, Malcolm Gladwell, and Michael Lewis among them – standing alongside many of their lesser known counterparts to pressure Bezos to settle its pricing battle with Hachette. to “stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business.”

By definition writers are a lonely lot. Or, at least, they do not work in groups and they do not travel in packs. This though is an exception to the general rule. This is an example of an assemblage that normally is disparate and disorganized joining forces and getting organized. For the purposes of this protest they have grown a leader – Douglas Preston, who publishes with Hachette – and they have become a group that has a name, Authors United. But the 909 people who signed the letter to lobby Bezos have no common cause – except this one. The fact that they became a collective to oppose the very man on whom they depend for sales of their wares sends a signal  that Bezos would do well to heed.

Emily Rafferty, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced last week that she was stepping down after ten years as head. Ms. Rafferty got it right – after some time as a leader this time ought to be brought to a close.  There’s no clock to signal the moment is right to get out; there’s no chime to sound the end has come. But ten years – a decade as a leader – likely is as good a span as any for most leaders in most situations to call it quits.

Some years ago I wrote a book titled Bad Leadership. As I was writing the book I realized how relatively frequently people begin as good leaders but, after some extended period of time, become bad leaders. Juan Antonio Samaranch, former head of the International Olympic Committee, was such a leader. And so was William Aramony, former head of the United Way of America. As I wrote about both men, I realized that during their prolonged periods of maximum power and authority something went wrong. Both men had led their organizations for some 20 years, roughly the first half as good leaders and the second as bad leaders.

The reasons for going bad vary, of course. Moreover none of this is to say that leaders necessarily deteriorate after some number of years. But it is to suggest that the frequency of such a trajectory is unsettling. And it is to suggest that in the second decade of the 21^st century, when the world is changing at a famously rapid clip, consideration should always be given to how long a leader should lead.

Leaders in business are by no means immune to this general rule. But leaders in government are even more vulnerable to abusing their office simply by clinging to it for too long. Robert Mugabe has been president of Zimbabwe for over 25 years. Hun Sen has been prime minister of Cambodia for nearly 30 years. Vladimir Putin has already been either President or Prime Minister of Russia for 14 years and is promising, threatening, to stay in place for many more years to come.

This tendency to become addicted to power is in evidence also in Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has “only” been in office 11 years. But he has started to clamp down on his opponents, harden his views, and hold on to his position with the rough equivalent of dear life. What’s especially interesting about Erdogan is how clearly he demonstrates, yet again, this tendency for leaders to deteriorate over long periods of time.

Pari Dukovic observes in The New Yorker that while Erdogan is now an autocrat, “it wasn’t so long ago” that he was a “different kind of politician.” Not so long ago he spoke of unity and tolerance, was a moderate Islamist, smashed corruption, and advanced free expression. But then, Dukovic writes, “the Prime Minister’s office began to transform Erdogan.” He became intolerant of dissent, cultivated a climate of fear, built patronage networks, attempted to dictate private habits, and developed a personal agenda to perpetuate his political power.

Sad to say the case of Erdogan is typical. Too much power held for too long a time tends to be unhealthy – tends to go bad. It’s why there ought to be a law – ten years in any position of power and you’re out.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/portfolio-ghosts-of-gezi

 

 

 

 

 

For three years I have argued that patterns of leadership and followership have changed, fundamentally and irrevocably. There is nothing new in this: patterns of leadership and followership have always changed, from one era to the next. But until new systems are in place, people struggle to make sense of what’s happening. They struggle to govern themselves in a manner reasonably orderly.

Change is now everywhere in evidence: nearly no region, no sector, no group or organization is immune to new and foreign forces. Moreover these forces are at every level: at the level of the small group and the large organization, at the national level and at the international level as well.

Consider the newly established Brics’ bank – the bank just set up by the Brics countries, Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa.  On the one hand nations such as Russia, China, and India are not exactly “followers.” But on the other hand they have been in many ways -including in international banking – lesser than, second class citizens in comparison with countries such as Germany and the United States. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example, is routinely led by a European, and the World Bank is routinely led by an American. Small wonder both have been slow to recognize that the world is changing, and that less developed countries are no longer so willing to wait for more developed countries to pay them adequate attention.

As David Pilling pointed out in the Financial Times, old, previously existing institutions such as the IMF and World Bank reflect the realities of a receding age. The spanking new Brics Bank is in stark contrast. It reflects the reality of a rapidly changing world – one in which poor countries gradually are closing in on richer ones, and the previously meek increasingly assert themselves against the obviously strong.

The Brics bank constitutes a creative response to the forces of change. Not necessarily so, of course, for example in Libya, the latest example of a state so badly failed, so dismally dangerous  that the U. S. has decided to all but evacuate its embassy in Tripoli.

Strange to say that events like these – global change of great magnitude, imprecisely foretold – reduce even the best and the brightest to platitudes. To wit, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who last week repeated yet again his lament about the lack of good leadership. He closed out his column on Wednesday as follows: “”Keeping Madagascar out of the world of disorder…requires good leadership, and good leaders today – anywhere – are the rarest species of all.” What Friedman fails to appreciate is that the good old days – when good leaders seemed in relative abundance, and good followers seemed glad to go along – are over. Instead, people the world over, no matter their station, are taking matters into their own hands.

 

 

 

It’s odd – though mostly deeply sad – that James MacGregor Burns and Warren Bennis both died late last month, within a couple of weeks of each other. The death of neither man was untimely, Burns was 95 and Bennis 89. But together they leave a hole so large, so downright gaping, it’s not clear that it can ever be filled.

The field of leadership is not exactly fertile.  To be more precise, over human history it has been wonderfully well endowed with great minds thinking great thoughts about how people should lead – and for that matter about how they should follow. Thinkers from Plato to Paine, from Machiavelli to Mill, from Locke to Lincoln, and from Freud to Fanon all spent the better part of their lives on leadership. But the last part of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st have not been rich or replete with first rate minds thinking first rate thoughts about how people organize themselves – about how they can be led, should be led, are led in a world characterized by change at a ferocious clip.

So to those of us who remain relentlessly engaged in the study of leadership, the near simultaneous loss of Burns and Bennis is particularly painful. They both loomed large over the field, known for their intelligence and integrity, for their voluminous productivity, for their grace and generosity, and, perhaps above all, for their shared concern over the human condition.

Withal, for all their expert tilling of a certain soil,  it’s likely that Bennis, like Burns, will be better remembered for what he was than for what he did. Bennis’s grin preceded him – his joy in life so inordinately infectious that no one was immune. Not a bad tribute – which is why he, like his approximate contemporary, is a loss as personal as professional.