Blog

Vice-President of the United States under George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, has long loomed large on the American stage. In fact, he looms even larger now, in retrospect, than he did before, than he did while he was in office.

Either credited or blamed with fashioning U.S. foreign and military policy, especially during Bush’s first term in the White House, Cheney is widely judged the most powerful vice-president in American history. In an article in the New York Review titled, “He Remade Our World,” Mark Danner claims that Cheney is responsible for no less than a “transformation” in the American disposition – a transformation that is “truly breathtaking.” Danner writes that the “revolutionary changes in our government’s policies toward holding prisoners, toward waging war, and toward surveilling its citizens could never have been effected without the imagination, experience, and audacity of Dick Cheney.” (April 3, 2014.)

Curiously, one of the most interesting things about this most interesting man is, of all things, his wife. In another life, in another time, Lynne Cheney would be a standout, one of the most well-known and well-respected women in America. Ambitious and powerful long before it became oh-so-fashionable for women to be ambitious and powerful, Lynne Cheney has had an extraordinary professional as well as personal life. It is, however, a life that has been largely overshadowed by her husband’s larger-than-life hold on the American imagination. And it is also a life that has been all but obscured by the media’s liberal bias, for like her husband, Lynne Cheney is an ardent conservative.

I will not list here her remarkable string of accomplishments. A quick check with Wikipedia will provide the curious reader with a handy-dandy chronicle of Lynne Cheney’s various careers as a much-published author, highly-placed administrator, and well-known political activist. What really impressed me though was the review in the New York Times this past Sunday (May 4, 2014) of her most recent book, James Madison: A Life Reconsidered.

The review was written by none other than Gordon S. Wood, long considered one of the most eminent and esteemed of American historians. And it was, by and large, excellent. That is, while Wood’s essay on Cheney’s book did not claim that it was perfect – she tended, he wrote, “to flatten out her narrative line” – it did claim that it was first rate. It would appear, in other words, that the women who is the wife of Dick Cheney has written one of the most important biographies ever of one of the most important Americans ever. Wood concludes his review as follows: “Cheney’s biography is lucidly written… and she clearly brings to life the character and personality of Madison. Apart from Ralph Louis Ketcham’s 1971 life, this is probably the best single-volume biography of Madison that we now have.”

Not too shabby for a Second Lady.

As I define the antonym of leader – which is follower – it is a person without apparent power, authority, or influence. In this sense the three women named above all were followers. They were, to all appearances, ordinary undergraduates at three different, as it happens illustrious, undergraduate institutions, respectively Amherst, Harvard, and Columbia.

However according to what became their public testimony, they shared a searing experience: they were raped on campus. Angie Epifano went public in 2012, in the Amherst student newspaper, where she published an extended account not only of having been “raped by an acquaintance” in one of the college dorms, but also of the traumatic aftermath. Emma Sulkowicz became “the talk of Columbia” this past winter, when an article, also in a student magazine, described in detail her sexual assault at school and the events subsequent, which were enraging to the point of being emboldening. Madeleine Smith, who was raped at Harvard, stood alongside Vice President Joe Biden this past week at an event at the White House, intended to to draw fresh attention to the problem of sexual assault on college campuses.

The problem is obviously not a simple one – it’s not as if college officials have turned a blind eye to a common casualty of campus life. But it’s safe to say that until recently – until women undergraduates started speaking out and organizing on their own behalf – the problem was hidden. It was infrequently articulated, less infrequently publicized, and only rarely successfully addressed and adjudicated.

There are two main reasons for the recent shift: as usual they are changes in culture and changes in technology. First, victims of sexual assault are not so willing any longer to stay silent, or to be permanently stigmatized by what happened to them when they were in school. Moreover more than before they are ready, willing, and even eager to fight the good fight – in their own name. Second, one of the ways they have become empowered is through social media, which enable them to gain information about other women in similar situations; to connect one with another to provide everything from emotional support to legal advice; and to organize to compound their clout through the power of numbers.

The problem of sexual assault in the American military is by now well known, in considerable part because of leadership on this issue by New York Senator Kristin Gillibrand. But though according to the National Institute of Justice one in five women is sexually assaulted while in an American college, this particular placement has so far been immune to the sort of public scrutiny with which the military is by now familiar. Thanks largely to the efforts of undergraduates across the country who are willing now to go public – women such as Epifano, Smith, and Sulkowicz among them – the problem of one college student sexually assaulting another college student has finally been exposed. It is now where it should be – out in the open.

As the Washington Post’s Jason Reid points out, it took a while for NBA players finally to protest Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Though many among them were aware of his racist views for some time, they did nothing when, for example, in a 2002 housing discrimination case, Sterling said that African Americans “smell and aren’t clean.”

This time though the players chose not to avoid the issue. For a constellation of reasons – including the scandalous publicity surrounding these latest of Sterling’s comments; the fact they were directed at one of their own, Magic Johnson; and that it’s 2014 and not, say, 2002 (times do change, American attitudes do evolve) – this time the players took action. This time they made clear in no uncertain terms that if the NBA under Commissioner Adam Silver did not respond strongly and swiftly to punish Sterling for his transgression, they would act accordingly. They would refuse to play ball.

Their various gestures – players for the Heat, Bobcats, Spurs and Mavericks all took part in the public protest – were in evidence for everyone to see. They were made on the court, they involved various articles of clothing, and they signaled solidarity in a way that threatened an imminent league-wide boycott in the event the NBA, Silver in particular, dared to disappoint.

NBA players were not the only ones to protest Sterling’s remarks. A series of sponsors also took their leave in the wake of the negative publicity, including State Farm, Virgin America, and Kia Motors. Moreover the widely-praised Silver does deserve credit for his speedy, sturdy response. But the players were key here. They framed the shot and they insisted on an immediate response. Show me the money? They are the money. They hold the keys to the kingdom – which is why great athletes across America, including undergraduates, increasingly are demanding what they believe they are owed.

Since the so-called Arab Spring people with power and authority intent on obliterating their opposition have learned a lesson: there is one way – only one way – reliably to do it. Crush it. Squelch it. If need be wipe it – wipe your opponents – off the face of the earth.

• Do I need to remind that after more than two months of protests against Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro more than 40 people have died and countless others have been wounded?
• Do I need to remind that the second of the recent Ukrainian revolutions, which led to the ouster this winter of President Victor Yanukovych, resulted in a power grab by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the consequences of which increasingly threaten the stability of the European continent?
• Do I need to remind that the attempt to destabilize the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has had consequences that are direr, more destructive and deadly, than anyone a couple of years ago could even have begun to imagine?
• Do I need to remind that just this week in Egypt – the cradle of the Arab Spring – more than 680 members of the opposition were sentenced to death? You read that right – in one swoop nearly 700 opponents (mostly but not only Islamists) of the current government were condemned by the judiciary to die. Though it’s not yet clear the sentence will be carried out, it’s mind-bending nevertheless.

There is more to be said about all this – much, much, much more. And in the fullness of time I will. Suffice it for now to point out that in many places around the world the reaction to people power, to follower-power, has been leader-power. Leaders hell bent on holding on to what they have use whatever the tools at their disposal to eliminate, literally if necessary, their political opponents. Followers, meanwhile, ordinary people, have in many if not most cases yet to discover how to use their newly empowered selves to the best of their own advantage.

• I wrote Bad Leadership (published in 2004) because I never did understand why we focus laser-like on developing good leaders – and ignore altogether the perennial problem of stopping or at least slowing bad leaders. For all our recent interest in leadership studies and leadership development, the question of how good people can rid themselves of bad leaders remains unaddressed. The problem pertains across the board – in each of the different sectors, everywhere in the world.

  This will be my last blog for at least one month. While I hate to end even for a time on a sour note, in light of the latest news it’s impossible not to speak to Syria, and to Russia, and to the nexus between them and the West.

  Three bullet points will suffice to make my argument.

  • The world has stood by and done effectively nothing while Syria has descended, for over three years now, into calamity and cruelty on an unimaginable scale. Unlike in times past, when the argument could be made that we did not know what was happening when it was happening, in this case we all know everything. Technology has rendered the excuse of ignorance obsolete. And yet the world has stood by, been a bystander to murder and torture; disease, death and destruction; and to a leader, Bashar al-Assad, who palpably, manifestly, is bad to the point of being evil.
  • The West – particularly the American President, but by no means only the American president – saw fit to try to work with the Russian president to try to constrain Assad. Specifically, despite ample evidence that the Russians were undermining American intentions not only in Syria but elsewhere in the world, the Americans saw fit to strike a deal with the Russians over ridding Assad of his chemical weapons.
  • What the West – particularly the American president, but by no means only the American president – did not recognize was that for Russia this was a strategic move, aimed over the long run not at weakening its client in the Middle East, Assad, but at strengthening him. And so it has come to pass. Assad is stronger now than he was when the deal over chemical weapons was struck. Moreover, there is ample evidence that Putin’s land grab in Ukraine has further emboldened the murderous Syrian tyrant, encouraging him to run, if you can believe it, for reelection notwithstanding his wretched reign.

  What can we conclude?

  Three more bullet points:

  • Good to be clear-eyed about bad leaders. They never morph into good unless they are forced by someone somehow to do so. This means that either that they must be compelled to behave in a way that to them is unnatural. Or that they must be deposed.
  • Good to be clear-eyed about what works and what does not. Bad tactic to break bread with leaders who support bad leaders. No good leader should ever support a leader who supports a bad leader.
  • Good to do something as opposed to doing nothing. History will not be kind to those who stood by and did nothing while Syria burned.

   

An article in the New York Times a few days ago had the following headline: “Wave of Sexual Abuse Allegations for Private Schools in Britain” (3/16/14). On one level it seemed not much new – more revelations of sexual molestations. Specifically, more cases in which older men in positions of authority preyed on young boys who had been placed in their charge.

This sort of scandal has become by now familiar. Best known of course is the series of similar stories that hit the Catholic Church at the start of the last decade. Once it came out, courtesy of the Boston Globe, that the archdiocese of Boston had long tolerated or at least not excluded to the point of exile predatory priests, the dam broke. To this day the Church has not fully recovered from the damage done by priestly misconduct if not criminal wrongdoing.

It turned out – no surprise – that the Catholic Church was by no means alone in concealing the problem. Schools were, are, another repository of similar behaviors. For example, a scandal starring “Prep-School Predators” tarnished the well-known and highly respected Horace Mann School in New York City which, it was recently was revealed, had “a secret history of sexual abuse” (New York Times, 6/6/12).

One of the things that makes these sort of stories mesmerizing to many is the question of why now? Why after many long years of silence is the truth coming to light at this moment in time? The article about child abuse in British schools makes clear that dozens of men are only now “breaking decades of silence.” Similarly, a former headmaster was only recently convicted molesting some of his students – over fifty years ago. What’s with the time lag?

A British lawyer involved in one of the cases gave the answer.  “You had deference,” he said. He went on to add that in the past when teachers were discovered abusing their charges they were moved on, quietly. Schools like churches would do anything they could to avoid public embarrassment and damage to their reputation. And parents like parishioners either did not know – or they too would do anything they could to avoid rattling the relevant cage.

Now though we’re bolder and braver. Now people in positions of authority cannot count on our deference. This significant difference holds true everywhere in the world – except where it does not. If leaders threaten their followers they, we, will tend now as then to shut up.

I have written as ardently as anyone about the impact of technology on patterns of power, authority, and influence. And I have written as ardently as anyone on how technology is changing relations between leaders and followers. In The End of Leadership I wrote that “in the last thirty, forty years changes in leadership and followership have been the result of two phenomena in particular: the first is cultural change and the second is technological change, advances in communications technologies that led to more information, greater self-expression, and expanded connection.”

But the current crisis in relations between the U. S. and Russia, between the West and Putin’s putatively resurgent Russian empire, amounts to a crash course in where technology falls short. Come to think of it, it doesn’t fall short, it fails us altogether. Technology is nowhere when it comes to managing human relations in ways that leaders can meaningfully use or practically apply, at least in world affairs.

For all the changes in science and technology, the American foreign policy establishment is back to reading tea leaves, to doing what it did during the Cold War when the best it could do was to practice Kremlinology. What exactly was Kremlinology? It was no more really than educated guesswork on what was transpiring in top Soviet circles, guesswork on what motivated the likes of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev, and on what they were likely to do from one week to the next. In fact, Kremlinology was so weak a field of study that it failed categorically accurately to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, which happened in the historical equivalent of the blink of an eye.

So it is now with the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin – it’s back to guesswork. The best that the best and brightest can do is to estimate what motivates the man and what he is likely to do, in this case from one day to the next. In this game of guesswork, the remarkable, revolutionary advances in technology help not one whit. It’s why the best and the brightest cannot begin to agree either on what exactly is happening now or on what exactly should be our next steps. And it’s why politics is nothing so much as a reminder that the course of human affairs is determined by nothing so much as the human condition.

Anticipating by a few years the now ubiquitous apology culture, in 2006 Harvard Business Review published an article I wrote titled, “When Should a Leader Apologize – and When Not.” I noted then that for leaders to apologize is “a high stakes move” – for them, for their followers, and for the organizations they represent. “Refusal to apologize can be smart, or it can be suicidal. Conversely, readiness to apologize can be seen as a sign of strong character or as a sign of weakness. A successful apology can turn enmity into personal and organizational triumph – while an apology that is too little, too late, or too transparently tactical can bring on individual and institutional ruin.”

Since then for a leader to apologize has become a commonplace. So commonplace that on February 3 New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote “it seems that just about every day a chief executive, politician or other prominent figure is apologizing for something.” Sorkin, who along with Dov Seidman decided to institute an “apology watch,” went on to note, “The age of the apology is clearly upon us…. It has become de rigueur, an almost reflexive response among leaders to a mistake or, worse, a true crisis.”

As if to prove the point, in the last few weeks alone there have been apologies from a wide range of public figures, including Target’s chief executive Gregg W. Steinhafel, JP Morgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, General Motors chief executive Mary Barra, not to speak of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, venture capitalist Tom Perkins and, of all people, basketball superstar LeBron James (for using the word “retarded,” which he called a “bad habit”).

Nor is the apology culture confined to the U. S. To the contrary, it’s not far from being a global phenomenon. Just this week the Dutch financial giant ING felt obliged to apologize when it announced – in response to a public outcry – that it was retreating from a plan to serve ads to its customers based on their banking habits. In an open letter to all ING customers CEO Nich Jue wrote: “We have not been clear enough about the sensitive topic of customer data, causing an avalanche of worried response from our customers. These responses clearly demonstrate that there are a lot of questions and concerns about the protection of customer data, for which I sincerely apologize.”*

What then is the irony to which I refer? It is that those leaders who are apologizing are, at the least, responsive to the preferences of others. They are responsive to their stakeholders, to those who in some way are their followers or constituents. But there are other leaders – those ironically, paradoxically, who have the most to apologize for – who remain silent. Who never apologize, who never will apologize, who would rather die than be caught apologizing.

Any names come to mind?

*I am grateful to David Vermijs for pointing out to me the example of ING.

I never put all that much stock in the idea of the glass cliff. The suggestion that women leaders are more likely than their male counterparts to lead organizations that in some way are in trouble struck me as being somehow paranoid – as if women didn’t have enough on their hands getting to the top in the first place.     

The term “glass cliff” – a riff on the metaphor of the “glass ceiling” – was coined by Professors Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam of the University of Exeter in 2004. Their research led them to conclude that once women break through the glass ceiling to top leadership roles, they are anything but home free. To the contrary: they are more likely than men to be leaders in situations that for some reason are precarious – which means that they are more likely than men to fail at their appointed task.

I admit it: I could not help but think of the glass cliff when it became clear in recent weeks that General Motors was in trouble – in big trouble. If not necessarily with customers, certainly with regulators and safety advocates.

Mary Barra became CEO of G.M. only in January, when a big fuss was made over the fact that she is the first female CEO of a major American automobile company. However, what we did not know then and do know now is that G.M. was poised on the brink of a considerable crisis. We did not know then but do know now that not only has the car company been forced to undertake a major recall (some 1.6 million vehicles), but it might well be found ultimately liable for some 300 deaths resulting from a faulty ignition switch.  

This drama at G.M. will take years to play out. But this much is apparent even now. Instead of being able to focus on building the company, Mary Barra will instead be distracted if not derailed by what has already become a major institutional scandal. The chances are good that when she took the position of chief executive she knew what was in store. It’s hard to believe that she was completely blindsided by the impending crisis. Still, what should have been an exemplar of a woman in a position of leadership seems more evidently an exemplar of a woman precariously perched – on the edge of a glass cliff.