Blog

Stresses between leaders and followers are everywhere in evidence. Nearly no place on the planet is exempt from the changes in culture and technology that have altered forever relations between those who ostensibly lead and those who ostensibly follow.

However, what has happened in China in the last couple of years, and what has happened in Russia, is similar in ways best explained by turning back the clock – by looking to the past to shed light on the present.

Both Chinese and Russian authorities have clamped down on dissent. Fearful of the political restiveness that characterizes much of the rest of the world, political leaders in China and Russia have increasingly sought to stifle, even suppress, their domestic opposition. And both have similarly sought to strengthen their positions at home by adventurism abroad. China’s President Hi Jinping has stirred the pot in the South and East China Seas. And Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has seized Crimea and wreaked havoc in Eastern Ukraine.

To see how deep the imprint of authoritarianism both in China and Russia it’s instructive to read two recent pieces – in, of all places, “The Arts” section of the New York Times. (Links below.) Of course controlling dissent by controlling creativity is nothing new. Hitler’s bonfire of the books, the burning in 1933 of some 25,000 “un-German” volumes, is the most infamous example of this type of political hooliganism. Still, it’s worth being reminded that the life of the mind remains at risk.

A new opera, titled “Dr. Sun Yat-sen,” about the founding of the Chinese Republic, had its American premiere last week in Santa Fe. It did not, however, make its debut as originally intended, in Beijing. Instead it was forced first to be performed in Hong Kong – a Chinese outpost. Moreover its star, the tenor Warren Mok, who was supposed to perform in Santa Fe, went missing, withdrawing in the last minute, near certainly because of political pressure. Along similar lines was a recent performance in New York City of Russia’s fabled Bolshoi Ballet. Here is an excerpt from the review by Alastair Macaulay, who obviously was aghast at the regressive display. “It was hard not to think of politics when watching the Bolshoi’s repertory – which was entirely pre-glasnost….  What on earth does the company’s artistic director, Sergei Filin, make of this artistic recession? … What lies ahead for this whole company, so richly talented, yet now tumbling back into a pre-1989 [Soviet] nightmare?”

To understand this crass, clumsy intrusion into arts (among many other things), we need to return to China and Russia in the not-distant past. Both were totalitarian states – they had political and economic systems in which the government had complete control. Both were led – China from 1949 to 1976; Russia from 1924 to 1953 – by totalitarian dictators, Mao Zedong and Stalin respectively, who would as soon eliminate their followers as surrender to them a speck of  power. And both were Communist states at a time in which Communism and totalitarianism were nearly always one and the same. In fact, the legacy of Communism lingers as does that of totalitarianism. Hi Jinping is not only President of China, he is, simultaneously, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. Vladimir Putin is not only President of Russia in the present, he is the self-same Vladmiir Putin who for fully sixteen years, until it disbanded, was part of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s notorious security agency. Moreover the two men share something else – nostalgia for the good old days. Beijing has invested heavily in glorifying its Communist heritage, which explains why Chinese tourists increasingly are visiting sites that extol Mao. And Moscow has similarly revived the dream of restoring to Russia at least some of the empire it enjoyed during the Soviet era. Not for nothing did Putin describe the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy” of the 20^th century.

Totalitarian leadership begets totalitarian followership – by that I mean followers who go along to get along. Let me clear here. This certainly does not mean that there has been no Chinese or Russian dissent in the past, and it certainly does not mean that there is no Chinese or Russian dissent in the present. But what it does mean is that neither country has a long history or a clear ideology in support of the idea of democratic rule.  To the contrary. History makes clear why change from below in both China and Russia has been – and will continue to be – inordinately difficult to implement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/arts/music/dr-sun-yat-sen-in-the-american-premiere-at-santa-fe-opera.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/arts/dance/bolshoi-ballet-turns-back-the-clock-in-its-new-york-season.html

Of the 298 people who died when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine, 193 were Dutch nationals. But while grief in the Netherlands has been palpable, the Dutch have not so far taken the lead in responding to what happened. To the contrary. Given that the Netherlands’ loss on the occasion was roughly analogous to America’s loss on 9/11, it’s rather remarkable that the Dutch have been so restrained.

The Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, has repeatedly expressed his sadness and anger over the tragic incident. The country’s new king, Willem-Alexander, has dutifully played his symbolic role. And the Dutch themselves have manifestly been affected by their grievous loss, publicly mourning their dead. Moreover yesterday it was announced that the Dutch Safety Board would be in charge of the international investigation into who exactly attacked the civilian airliner and with what military hardware.

Still, there has been no national outcry of anger and outrage. And there has been no national effort to exercise leadership on an issue – Russian aggression – that is threatening the European order.

I know the reasons for the Netherlands’ reticence. They include its extensive trade with Russia, its heavy dependence on Russian energy exports, Royal Dutch Shell’s huge investments in Russia, and cities and towns such as Rotterdam, which imports huge quantities of Russian oil, and then proceeds to refine and sell it. In other words, the Netherlands’ reluctance to antagonize Russia is based largely if not entirely on economic considerations – as opposed to political ones.

I should also note that the Netherlands is a small country – under 17 million people – which presumably figures in Dutch calculations. If Germany is a large country which all the world expects to play a leadership role, the Netherlands’ small size seems almost to exempt it, even to excuse it, from having to act boldly and bravely.

The Netherlands’ distant past is fabulous and fabled. There was the time when the Dutch ruled Manhattan Island. And there was the time when the Dutch Enlightenment trumped other European Enlightenments – and it was Amsterdam that was at the center of European culture and civilization. But, the Netherlands recent past is far less fabulous, and if it is fabled at all, it is for all the wrong reasons. I refer particularly to the dismal, dreadful record of the Netherlands during World War II as it pertains to Dutch Jews.

Though it is not well known, more than 70% of the Dutch-Jewish population perished during the war. This figure far exceeds that of nearly all other European countries including Germany (25%), Belgium (44%), France (22%), and Italy (17%). The reasons for this wretched discrepancy are, of course, complex. It should be pointed out, though, that another small country, Denmark, managed to save nearly all of its Jews, in spite of its being similarly occupied for most of the war by the Nazis.

Given this history, one might think that the Dutch would be first up to stand up to a dictator with overweening territorial ambitions. But, no such luck. In keeping with past patterns, they are choosing again to go along to get along. Too bad. For in the wake of those 193 Dutch deaths, they would have had the high ground, had they chosen to take it.

The above-named book by the above-named man is often described as the wellspring of the study of leadership. But leadership has, of course, been at the center of our attention for hundreds, even thousands of years – think Confucius, Plato, and Machiavelli. Nevertheless it is also true that during the last forty years leadership – both as a subject of study and as a skill that is taught – has exploded. It’s taken off. It’s the rage. It’s in fashion. Leadership has, in short, become an industry – I call it the “leadership industry” – a transformation for which Burns generally gets a good deal of credit.

No doubt Leadership is a seminal book. Even today, decades after its original publication in 1978, it is unrivaled as a contribution to the field. It’s that dense, that learned, that wise. It’s that inclusive, not only of leaders, but of followers, and of the context within which they are situated.

But Leadership is by no means perfect. I, for one, never did agree with Burns’s claim that men such as Hitler and Stalin were somehow a different species. They were “power holders” or “power wielders” he insisted – not leaders. Nor for that matter did I ever grasp why the idea of “transforming leadership” got such a strong hold on so many. After all, transforming leadership – which “occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality” – is more of an ideal to be imagined than a goal frequently achieved.

Still, Leadership was not only in its own right a significant achievement, a contemporary classic. It was also the right book at the right time. Its impact cannot, in other words, be divorced from the context within which it first appeared. Leadership was published when America was entering what Burns himself later came to call a leadership “crisis,” when the American people began for the first time in years to question their capacity to be led wisely and well.

During the Second World War and the two decades immediately succeeding, America was on a roll.  We had triumphed in war, and we, the white majority anyway, were prospering in peace. No wonder we believed that our leaders knew best. But this sense of serenity was shattered in the 1960s, first by the assassinations in relatively quick succession of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy; next by the Vietnam War and various rights revolutions that were, in effect, simultaneous; and finally by the succession of failed or partially failed presidencies, particularly Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s, but extending also to Gerald Ford’s and Jimmy Carter’s, neither of whom was able in his own right to earn another term.

Nor was the private sector immune from what was happening in the public one. In 1970, for example, Robert Townsend, a highly successful businessman with impeccable credentials, wrote a book that broke the mold. Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits turned the gray flannel suit inside out. The book was short and punchy, cynical and castigating, witty and irreverent, pedantic and pointed. Above all it was anti-authority, arguing well before it became fashionable to do so that the traditional organizational hierarchy was dated; that most organizations were cumbersome and inefficient; and that most CEOs were stuck, clinging to their old managerial ways even though they no longer worked as well as they did before Japan had turned formidable global competitor.

Burns would, I’m convinced, be the first to agree that however important was his own contribution, had Leadership been published even a decade earlier it would never have had the traction that it did. Leadership appeared at a time that, in retrospect, could be seen as the beginning of the American decline. Whatever our subsequent successes, the so-called leader of the free world, the U.S.A., has never been able to recapture the glow that it had before globalization changed the ways of production and distribution, and before scrutiny, skepticism, and scandal changed the way we view Washington.

He died this week, at age 95. Nearly fabled, certainly venerated among political scientists, historians, journalists and politicians for his contributions to our collective life, he was, it happened, singular.

But he was singular not so much for what he did, however splendid, as for what he was.

My own small story:

I was a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at Yale University in the early 1970s. I stood alone for two reasons. First, to my knowledge then and now, I was the first woman in the department with children, living off campus, who had the temerity to pursue a Ph.D. (One professor was so outrageous as to ask why I was even at Yale, why I was not home taking care of my children.)  Second, I became interested in leadership, but discovered to my astonishment that political science had no literature on political leadership and, more remarkably, no apparent involvement in it either. The closest the discipline came at the time was the study of “elites” – but elites and leaders are hardly one and the same.

Of course I had no idea how to proceed – or even if it was possible. I had no idea, that is, until I came upon a prize-winning biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt titled, The Lion and the Fox. The book was published in 1956, it had been penned by James MacGregor Burns. It was of course superb. However what struck me most was not actually the biography – but an appendage thereto. It was called “A Note on the Study of Political Leadership.”

I had found my holy grail! It was this extraordinary “Note” that, of itself, foreshadowed the contemporaneous consideration of leadership. It was this extraordinary “Note” that, of itself,  constituted proof positive that leadership was a serious subject fit for serious study by a serious person. For someone of low rank (me) to discover that someone of high rank (Burns) had determined that leadership per se was worthy of close consideration was all the affirmation I needed to decide that it, leadership, would be central to my professional life.

Let me be clear. This was not merely an abstraction, a matter of the printed page. After I read Burns’s “Note on the Study of Political Leadership” I wrote to him, at Williams College, and in time I came to meet him. At first he was my mentor, and I his mentee. But, as the years passed, I, like a number of others, transitioned from being Burns’s mentees to being Burns’s friends, his equals, or so he let us imagine ourselves. Even when, as inevitably it happened, we took issue with him, he was never critical. Disputatious yes, critical no. Argumentative yes, judgmental no.

Jim was one of America’s great 20^th century intellectuals. He was also fully, deeply engaged in public affairs. And he was founder and champion of what I believe he would be the first to admit is the still fledgling field of Leadership Studies. Above all though he was a great man. His first class character and, yes, his first class temperament will be forever remembered by those whose paths he came to cross.

Note: I am the James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.

He’s been victimized – victimized by the law of unanticipated consequences. Thinking himself in total control – as opposed to only partial control – Putin recently ramped up Russia’s investment in destabilizing Ukraine. He increased the number of Russian troops along Ukraine’s border to rather a massive 13,000, and he put new, more formidable military hardware into the hands of Ukraine’s pro-Russian separatists. The idea of course was to manage the situation from Moscow, while unsettling the government in Kiev.

But in the second decade of the 21^st century best laid plans get upended – even plans made by people in positions of power. Within Russia Putin has got his way. Through a wily combination of oppression and suppression, his political opposition has been more or less stifled.  Moreover without Russia he has also been riding high. Ever since Obama made Putin his partner in striking that Syrian chemical weapons deal, Putin has strode the world like a bit of a colossus, throwing his weight around so successfully that he calculated he could seize Crimea without firing a shot. And so he did.

What he has not always been able to accomplish, however, is to control the forces that he himself has unleashed. And so it is in Eastern Ukraine, where he has not been able always to contain pro-Russian separatists – even though it is he, of course, who since the beginning has been their enabler. Even this particular leader is not, in other words, in complete command of his followers. Ukraine’s pro-Russian separatists owe their existence to Putin, but not necessarily their allegiance.

It is impossible to know at this moment who exactly is to blame for the tragedy of Malaysian Airlines flight number 17.  What we do know is that it was shot out of the sky by a Russian made surface-to-air missile. What we do know is that some 298 people are dead as a result. And what we do know is that while Vladimir Putin might not be directly responsible, he is without doubt indirectly responsible.

Putin should have known that he cannot always count on controlling even his own people. But he did not – and so he has painted himself into a corner. He has at this moment only two choices. Either he endures an embarrassment and takes a step back. Or he ratchets up his risk by destabilizing Europe still further.

Whoopi was the name of my dog.

We had her since she was a pup – yesterday she died at the age of almost 17.

When I knew for sure that she would be gone in several hours, I lay down beside her on the floor and felt her fur.

That’s pretty much all I did until she passed.

After officially banning Hitler’s autobiographical screed Mein Kampf since the end of World II, Germany will finally, formally permit its publication in 2015. As reported in a piece by Peter Ross Range in yesterday’s New York Times, the book’s copyright expires next year, which means that from then on anyone in Germany can publish the book, whether quality publisher or a group of neo-Nazis.

Of course while for historical reasons Germany has banned the book, it has been freely available elsewhere. In fact I have assigned it, or parts of it, in one of my classes, specifically in a course I developed at the Harvard Kennedy School titled, “Leadership Literacy.”

The point of “Leadership Literacy” is to familiarize students with the great leadership literature – I mean the really great leadership literature. Literature that has stood the test of time and has come to be considered classic. Some of this literature is about leadership – for example, works by Confucius, Machiavelli, Shakespeare and, yes, Freud. Some of this literature is, itself, an act of leadership – for example, Paine’s Common Sense, Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, and Carson’s Silent Spring. Finally is the third major category, words penned by leaders, or spoken by leaders, that are so powerful, so memorable, that they will linger forever. Of course Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” is in this group, and so is Churchill’s “Adamant for Drift,” and so is King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Which returns us to Mein Kampf. For me there was never any question that Hitler’s infamous book, which ranks among the most persuasive pieces of propaganda of all time, belonged in the course. Is Mein Kampf great? The answer depends of course on how you define great.  What we can say in any case is this: in its own time, from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s, the book was a powerhouse. Even in our time the book remains fully alive, an object of continuing fascination.

Mein Kampf is best known for its virulent anti-Semitism. But if it were no more than that, no more than an anti-Semitic rant, I doubt it would it would have had the same original impact. And I similarly doubt it would be of any significant interest today. But it is more than a rant: Mein Kampf is of inherent interest for several reasons, among them Hitler’s discussion of the purposes of propaganda, and his exegesis on how to organize a political movement. I would argue in fact that anyone who wants to understand the man and his moment must take into account his manifesto.

Given my conviction that the great leadership literature should underpin all leadership learning, I edited a collection based on the canon, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence.  When I submitted my manuscript for publication I was told it was fine, excellent in fact – with one exception. The exception was the excerpt from Mein Kampf. The publisher did not want me to include it – and I reluctantly agreed to omit it. My mistake. Mein Kampf is widely available anyway, which is just as well. It’s the ultimate cautionary document – conclusive proof that words matter.

Poor Monica Lewinsky. I don’t mean to drag her into this, really. She has long paid a price for being foolish in the ways of the young, for being vulnerable to the attractions of a much older man who was not only, in her eyes, immensely attractive, but happened also to be president of the United States.

However… Ms. Lewinsky cannot help but forever be associated with a sea change in America’s political culture. Bill Clinton was hardly the first president to engage in a dalliance outside of his marriage. But never before in American history had a dalliance been so relentlessly chronicled; never before in American history had the American people been so completely privy to what previously was considered private. Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky amounted to a turning point: the office of the American presidency was so thoroughly debased, so completely reduced, it was impossible subsequently to restore it to what it was previously.

It was presumed until recently that the French were immune to this sort of scandal. In fact, they were so sophisticated, so cosmopolitan, that when they found out that their longest serving president ever (1981-1995), Francois Mitterand, had long had a mistress, with whom by the way he had a daughter they did not bat an eye.

That was then. Whatever the French were, they are no longer. In fact, the French people are rather like people in other Western democracies: they are willing no longer to tolerate obviously poor behavior by people in positions of power and authority. Ironically, recently, the French have been sorely tested, beset by a string of men in high places, all behaving badly.

First of the three most egregious examples was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, as well as presumed future candidate for French president, who in 2011 faced changes of sexually assaulting a hotel worker in New York City. Second was the incumbent president, Francois Hollande, who, in spite of his having the worst poll ratings of any president in the history of the Fifth Republic, or maybe because of them, saw fit earlier this year to leave his partner in the middle of the night, on a motor scooter no less, for an assignation with his secret lover, a young French actress. Finally, just this week was the particularly mortifying sight of Hollande’s immediate predecessor, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, being hauled into police custody on charges of corruption and influence-peddling. It’s all been a bit much – more even than the worldly French are willing to suck up.

France has had rather a hard time of it in recent years, or, at least, the French have been beleaguered by a sense of decline, heightened by their badly diminished status as a world power, by a seriously sluggish economy, and by a malaise that has had a serious side effect: it has increased the appeal of the party of the far right, the Front National. Ironically, the FN is led by a women, Martine Le Pen, who might just decide herself to run for president in 2017.

I like the idea of France having a woman president. Why not? Several of the men who would constitute the opposition have not exactly distinguished themselves. But this woman? At this time? No! Le Pen is not a centrist; she is perilously close to being extremist. She is in any case an ultra-nationalist, a would-be candidate for the nation’s highest office who probably would tap into some of France’s least attractive, xenophobic impulses. It’s a timely if grim reminder of how in this day and age when a leader of national consequence behaves badly, he puts at risk not only himself, but his people.

It’s supposed to be a holiday week, the week of July 4^th, Independence Day, not much going on except barbeque and beach. But no such luck. There’s news, lots of it, domestic and foreign, no rest for the weary.

Given the time of year, and given the headlines, from Iraq imploding to soccer exploding, no surprise that an otherwise big story has received scant attention, at least in the U.S. But the deal that was reached a few days ago between not only Ukraine, but also Georgia and Moldova on the one hand, and the European Union (EU) on the other, is a landmark.  It represents not only a major turning point for Europe, it is also, unmistakably, a slap in the face of Vladimir Putin.

Sure, Putin seized Crimea without firing a shot, no mean feat. But the future of Europe is a long game, not a short one, and for the moment there’s no mistaking that Putin’s Russia has suffered a serious setback. Precisely because all three countries – Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova – are still considered by (most) Russians to be in their sphere of influence, this most recent expansion of the EU’s Eastern Partnership is a major blow.

It’s improbable of course that Putin will accept this defeat lying down. He does not relish being publicly humiliated and this is just that, a public humiliation and political repudiation. Moreover, he has many arrows in his quiver, many ways he can make miserable those living in the three former Soviet Socialist Republics, from political and military destabilization to economic retaliation. But at this moment at least greater Europe has the winning hand – which raises the question of what the West will  do to sustain its advantage.

When asked what should a leader do, or how should a leader lead, or what qualities should a leader exemplify, the word “culture” is not typically at the top of the list. A leader should have a vision, a leader should be able to communicate and mobilize and make decisions, and, of course, a leader is supposed to be open and honest. No mention is made of the importance of “culture” – of the culture of the group or organization – in part, I think, because what exactly is culture is so difficult to define.

However, the importance of culture is impossible to overestimate. This is not to say that the leader is responsible for the culture of a group or organization – no individual could possibly shoulder this burden, certainly not single-handedly. Among other reasons, culture is composed in good part of intangibles, including history and ideology and values. Still, the leader’s responsibility in the realm of culture is large, even if it consists of little more than sending the same message, over and over and over again.

The consequences of an organizational culture gone bad, or simply awry, happen just now to be in ample evidence. Two cases of egregious wrongdoing or, depending on how you look at it, egregious mismanagement, are making front page news on nearly a daily basis. And, in both cases the problem is being attributed to a word long considered somewhat out of fashion – “culture.”

“How do you change the culture?” asked the “Today” show’s Matt Lauer of Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors.  “How do you go about communicating to the people who have been part of the history of this company for years that things must change?” Of course Barra herself has been “part of the history of this company for years” – which of itself is an issue. Because of her long history at the company Barra must, in my view, go. But while deposing her is necessary, it is not sufficient. Even with a new leader, one who must be from outside the company, some form of Lauer’s question will linger: How do you change a corporate culture in which lack of transparency, lack of responsibility, and lack of accountability have been endemic?

Similarly with the VA, in particular the health care system that is now revealed as woefully inadequate. This is not a problem of a few rotten apples in a barrel. Rather the barrel is so full up with deficiencies: the problem is the whole, not the parts. Which is precisely why the word “culture” reappears here. Investigative reporters for the New York Times write that certainly in the nation’s military hospitals, “mistakes and a culture of secrecy persist.” Same with a report delivered to Barack Obama by Acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson. It also invoked the word “culture” – it concluded that the VA’s health care system was characterized by a “corrosive culture.” Gibson himself concurred, saying in a summary statement, “We know that unacceptable, systemic problems and cultural issues…prevent veterans from receiving timely care. We can and must solve these problems as we work to earn back the trust of veterans.”  (Italics all mine.)

Given the evidence which, while circumstantial, is persuasive nevertheless, that culture matters, the question for experts on leadership and, for that matter on followership, is can people be taught to change culture, and if so how? Of course before this question there is one other: What exactly is culture and how does it affect how we think and what we do?