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A week ago, most people did not know the name Bashar al-Assad. Since then, the man who was president of Syria for almost a quarter century is known to almost everyone everywhere who follows the news. The overthrow of him and his regime, which had ruled Syria with unmitigated brutality, has been cause for cautious celebration both at home and wherever else in the world repression is reviled. Among other sins against Syrians, Assad tortured tens of thousands in brutal prisons and used poison gas as punishment for going against him. He was, as I wrote in an earlier post, “the worst of the worst.” A totalitarian tyrant. 

This brings me to my present point – which is that the leadership industry ignores nearly entirely the Assads of the world. Nearly all leadership courses and programs, centers and institutes, books and videos, focus on developing good leaders. Nearly no leadership courses and programs, centers and institutes, books and videos, focus on precluding bad leaders. On coming to understand how bad leaders happen – Assad was able to subjugate more than 23 million people – so that we can learn how to stop or at least slow them.*

I have been studying bad leadership – and bad followership – for over a quarter century. My most recent book, published earlier this year, is titled, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers. This year I also published an article in a journal, Leadership, titled as is this post, “Bad Leadership – Why We Steer Clear.” Anyone curious to know why the leadership industry has for the entirety of its approximately 50-year history avoided the dark side, should click on the link below.

*The fact that Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, ruled Syria for almost thirty years is relevant to the reign of his son, though not to the point of this post.

President-elect Donald Trump has more malleable a mind than he prefers to project. On the surface he seems certain of every syllable he speaks, persuaded by the truth of his every word. But in fact, he is not. He changes his views or adapts his stance as circumstances dictate. On abortion, for example, over the years Trump has been consistently inconsistent.  

To this general rule there is, however, an exception. An exception that amounts to an idee fixe – an idea so firmly fixed over so long a period it has become a conviction, even an obsession. Whether this obsession conforms to the truth or not no longer matters. To Trump it feels true, so now it is true.

The idee fixe to which I refer is the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s truth is that four years ago he, not Joe Biden, won. Anything that threatens this truth, and anyone who questions it, is anathema. It, they, drive Trump nuts. They threaten his identity which is that though he might be many bad things – an inveterate fraudster, a chronic liar, even a convicted criminal – the one thing he is not now and never was, is “a loser.” Trump cannot bear the idea that he would ever lose any competition, including an election, to anyone.

His psychological vulnerability on this issue was in full view again this past weekend, during his “Meet the Press” interview with Kristin Welker. He was calm and measured on the subjects of, for example, tariffs, immigration, and Ukraine. He was neither calm nor measured on any subject relating to the 2020 election. This included the congressional committee tasked with investigating the January 6^th attack on the U.S. Capitol. In discussing the committee Trump became animated and his face furious. He especially attacked committee leaders Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, saying that both did something “inexcusable,” saying that both “lied,” and that both should “go to jail.” As to the rest of the committee, all were “political thugs,” all were “creeps.”

Should we care that Trump has an idee fixe? That on this one subject, the outcome of the 2020 election, his ego remains frighteningly fragile? Yes. For if ever the second Trump administration does engage in retribution, it will be in this one area, on this one subject. It will be against anyone who dared to challenge his conviction that he won against Joe Biden. And against anyone who dared to question anything he said, or did, between Election Day November 2020 and Inauguration Day January 2021.

Americans are accustomed to violence. But this particular murder was a shock. It was a street crime all right, but an unfamiliar one. This one seems a targeted killing and this time seems the target was a leader. A leader of national repute, the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest healthcare insurers. The dead man’s name was Brian Thompson, he was 50 years old, a husband and the father of two.

Several things distinguish Thompson’s death from that of other murder victims. I’ll name three. First, his assassination, in front of New York City’s Hilton Hotel, led to a nationwide manhunt that still has not been resolved. Second, his prominence has meant his murder made and continues to make national news. And third, his violent death led to feelings of sadness and dismay – and to ones of fury and frustration. Fury especially not at the killer but at his victim.

The murder was a stunner – and so has been the response. The Wall Street Journal said the “online jubilation” over Thompson’s death was a “new low” in social-media culture. The New York Times headline claimed the “rage and glee” in response to Thompson’s killing was “alarming.”  The Financial Times quoted a lecturer at Columbia University who tweeted, “Today we mourn the deaths of 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.” And experts in online threats were said to be “pretty disturbed” by the “glorification of the murder” of Brian Thompson and the “lionization of the shooter.”

What are we to make of this? So far, the explanation for the “rage and glee” at Thompson’s death has been attributed solely to the glaring deficits in America’s healthcare system – exemplified and personified by the nation’s healthcare insurers. Thompson was an industry leader who is presumed to have been assassinated by a furious follower. A follower furious at UnitedHealthcare for denying his claim and ruining his life.

Maybe. But maybe not. Unless and until the killer is caught, we can only speculate, we cannot know. And even then, can we trust the killer to tell us what motivated him? Can any man know what makes him a murderer?

Meantime, large numbers of ordinary people are so angry at what’s gone wrong that for them the murder of a leader is a source of satisfaction. Seems to me though that the anger is less specific than it is general. That the anger is less about the healthcare system than it is about the system generally. About a system in which the few who are very, very, very rich are forever getting richer while many of the rest are struggling to stay afloat. The likelihood is that Brian Thompson was murdered not because of what he did but because of what he stood for.             

No, I am not an oracle. I did not know three days ago, when I posted the piece of the above title, that in a flash would be pushed from his post Syria’s longtime tyrant, Bashar El-Assad.

I was though signaling the Zeitgeist, the mood of the moment when people in positions of power best watch their backs lest they get stabbed in the back. Not literally, of course, Though just last week was shot in the back – literally – the CEO of Unted Healthcare, Brian Thompson. But stabbed in the back metaphorically – as just last week was for example Pat Gelsinger. Gelsinger is the once widely admired CEO of Intel who, after a disappointing performance, was sacked so far as we can tell as suddenly as unceremoniously.

But, back to Bashar. No need for me here to describe him in detail. Suffice it to write he was among the worst of the worst. He was not among the cast of characters in my most recent book, Leadership from Bad to Worse. But heaven knows he qualified.

Furious followers are a force to be reckoned with.

• Lesson learned by South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol.
• Lesson learned by Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze.
• Lesson learned by United States President Donald Trump?

For suddenly declaring martial law in a country recently grown accustomed to democracy, Yoon was faced with riots in the streets and in the National Assembly.  Moreover, within hours his own People Power Party voted unanimously to strike down his infuriating imposition of martial law. Now Yoon is hearing calls, loud calls, for his impeachment. The rapidity with which he was forced to pay the piper was as if his followers had read Leadership from Bad to Worse. As I write in the book, the sooner bad leadership is stopped not only the better to do, but the easier to do.

For his draconian crackdown Kobakhidze plunged his country into chaos. The flash point was his government’s decision to delay any attempt to join the European Union. But the real issue is a far larger one – the tension between autocracy and democracy. Georgia’s scant acquaintance with the latter makes it hard to resist the former, promulgated by its neighbor, Powerhouse Putin. But Kobakhidze’s Putinesque tactics will continue to face resistance – which will continue to require he use force to shut his followers up.

For some of his outrageous nominees to Cabinet posts and other top jobs, Donald Trump is facing blowback. Polite blowback. Cautious blowback. Blowback behind closed doors. But blowback, even resistance, nevertheless. Trump has become accustomed to getting his way. Specifically, with members of his Republican Party who have been nearly entirely supine for nearly a decade. Almost without exception they have been willing to do his bidding. But if I were him, I would not assume that past is prologue. If I were him, I would watch my back and clutch my crown.

Added note: Silly me. I did not foresee – this happened just a few hours ago – that in keeping with the point of this post, France’s Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, would be ousted from his post barely three months after taking office.

A few months ago, there was a piece in the Financial Times titled, “Political Leaders Must Push Back Against Tech Bullies.” Written by Marietje Schaake, a director at Stanford University’s Cyber Policy Center, she pointed out that tech executives have “increasingly resorted to threatening officials and governments over democratically legitimate proposals that don’t suit their business models.” Her advice to political leaders was to get tough! Push back hard against threats made by “tech bullies” to withhold investments or pull out of markets. She warned government leaders that their “independence and authority” were at stake.

She’s right. In theory it’s important that democracies ensure that government controls business, not the other way around. Trouble is the problem is not in theory; it’s in practice. How is a top political leader supposed to manage a top tech company leader if the former has no idea what the latter is doing? No idea of how the cloud works. Hardly any idea of what a data center is or even an algorithm. Only a weak idea of what artificial intelligence can do today – and not the slightest conception of what AI will be capable of tomorrow.

No wonder that tech leaders have been bullying political leaders or trying to for years. In addition to their knowledge-power, tech leaders have money-power. Lots of it. Elon Musk’s financial support for the candidacy of former president Donald Trump was only the most visible recent example of the role that American tech titans now play in American politics, freely using their money in addition to their expertise to sway voters’ preferences and shape political outcomes.

Musk is also the most visible example of how easily America’s government can slide into dependency on America’s tech companies. Musk is the mastermind behind Starlink, a powerful satellite internet network. And he is the mastermind behind Space X, a powerful space technology company. Both companies already have their tentacles deep into the U. S. government, including the Defense Department.

Nowhere, though, is it written that public sector leaders must bow before their private sector counterparts. The European Union has long been ahead of the United States in using the law to set boundaries on behemoths such as Alphabet, Amazon, and Apple, forcing them to comply with rules on, for example, data privacy and content regulation. Just recently the EU’s highest court went further than it did previously, dealing a major blow to Apple among others, forcing it to pay billions of dollars in unpaid back taxes. In France, a few months ago, the government even saw fit to arrest a leading tech executive, Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, who is facing charges that include complicity in child exploitation.

Perhaps Europe’s jurists explain why America’s jurists are somewhat bolder now than before. In Pennsylvania, a federal court recently ruled that TikTok can potentially be held liable for harm caused by its algorithms. Similarly, a Federal District Court ruled that Google is illegally maintaining a monopoly over internet search. But so far – indicative of the complexity of a problem seeking a solution – the remedy to the monopoly remains elusive. Forcing the company to sell Chrome – Google’s very, very widely used internet browser – which recently was proposed by the Justice Department, could be a cure worse than the disease.

The issue of tech dominance and, therefore, the dominance of leaders of America’s most powerful and advanced tech companies, is so large it’s hard to wrap our heads around it. Just this month Australia became the first country in the world to ban the use of social media for those under the age of 16 – a significant step toward controlling a bad situation that up to now has been uncontrolled. Notwithstanding successes like these, challenges brought on by the new technologies are so many in number, and so complicated, that most mere mortals can barely understand them.

Last week, a little-known extreme right-winger scored a significant, shocking, success in a Romanian election. How did this ultranationalist catapult himself to center stage? He went viral on TikTok. After the fact, Romanian regulators requested that TikTok be suspended – they requested the barn door be shut after the horse got out.

It’s possible we’re at a tipping point. That leaders in the public sector will increasingly be emboldened to take on their private sector counterparts, specifically those at the top of America’s top tech companies. But count me a skeptic. Those who have drawn parallels between 20^th century regulatory efforts and those we should and could see in the 21^st, seem to me to imagine that the present resembles the past. But it does not. Regulating anyone or anything in the Internet Age – and now the age of AI – is not like regulating anyone or anything in the Gilded Age.

America’s Wild West tech landscape is one of the reasons why America’s tech industry has been exceptionally successful. Unfettered capitalism. But the problems associated with the lack of meaningful regulation are bad and they are getting worse. In large part this is because corporate leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, and Satya Nadella – and oh, yes, Mr. Musk – continue for the most part to roam freely.

Which still leaves open the question of whether leaders in government and jurisprudence will take on the tech bullies. Will the tail continue to wag the dog – or will the dog finally wag its tail?

I have made this point before – see, for example, the two posts linked below – and I will continue to repeat it until it no longer pertains.* Until women and men approximate equity in top leadership posts.

I will especially repeat it when there is new information that underscores my overarching point. Which is that one of the reasons the number of women at the top remains everywhere so low is that the bodies of women are different from those of men. Moreover, unless and until these differences are accommodated, women will continue to be disadvantaged.

It recently became known that one of the effects of menopause is musculoskeletal. The effect is not rare – it impacts more than half of all menopausal women – and it can be debilitating. The “musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause” is characterized by symptoms including joint pain, loss of muscle mass and bone density, and worsening osteoarthritis.

Women can try to prevent the syndrome and, when it occurs, to remediate its symptoms. But if body aches characteristic of menopause are widespread and some of the time difficult to deal with, they will impact the capacity of women to compete with men for top leadership posts.

Additionally, the timing could not be worse. Symptoms of menopause occur just when career trajectories for women and men alike peak – between the ages of approximately 45 to 55.

To suggest that this and other physical and psychological differences between women and men are irrelevant to the leadership gap strikes me now as it did before. As ridiculous.  

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*Also see my chapter titled, “Our Bodies, Ourselves” in Randal Thompson et al, Women Embodied Leaders (Emerald, 20024).

Remember what leadership used to look like? No, I don’t mean in the old days. The good old days when we were young, or when America supposedly was great, as in “Make America Great Again.” I don’t even mean when the United States of America was a fledgling. I mean long before that, before there even was such a thing as a nation state. I mean do you remember what leadership used to look like centuries ago – millennia ago?

You don’t? OK, some reminders.

• Leadership used to be tribal. People lived mostly in groups that had little or nothing to do with other groups. Other groups that were assumed usually to be competitors if not actually enemies.
• Leadership used to be the province of single individuals who were the strongest and most assertive, if not even the most aggressive. They demanded total loyalty; they brooked no dissent.
• Leadership used to be limited to males. Females were excluded from the top ranks.
• Leadership used not to be shared. Ideas such as democratic leadership or distributed leadership or participatory leadership did not exist.
• Leadership used to be permanent, indefinite. The only way a leader would surrender his post was if he was weak, ill. Or by force – if those lower ranked than he would push him out, forcibly, and replace him with someone else.    
• Leadership used to be instinctual, intuitive. There were no people to whom leaders could turn for information and expertise, and there was no body of knowledge such as medicine.    

More recently, as the centuries, the millennia passed, humankind became more sophisticated. For example, we evolved from having single leaders who were the strongest and most assertive, if not even the most aggressive, to having single leaders whose rank, often inherited, bestowed privilege. Such as kings (and occasionally queens), tsars, emperors, khans, chiefs, sultans, pharaohs, and sheiks.

Even more recently were the ideas of the Enlightenment – especially the idea that power should never be the province of any single individual with an automatic right to rule. But that, instead, it should be shared. In time what came to be known as liberal democracy had implications that overturned nearly everything about leadership that previously was convention.

• Leadership became less tribal, one group less walled off from other groups. Moreover, groups regularly interacted with other groups, as did individuals who often moved freely from one group to another.    
• Leadership became less likely to be bestowed only on those whose main qualification was thier strength, or their genes. It was more likely to be bestowed on those with experience and expertise.    
• Leadership was no longer limited only to males. Sometimes it happened – not often but sometimes – that women rose to the top.
• Leadership came to be shared. In fact, divisions of power such as checks and balances became mainstays of democratic leadership.
• Leadership in democratic systems was not a privilege that was permanent. It was intended to be limited, turnover at the top assumed without question.  
• Leadership became less reliant on instinct and intuition and more on hard information – and hard science.

Now though we are about to get a rare treat. We are about to experience the pleasures of nostalgia. Nostalgia not just for the past or even for the distant past. But for the very distant past.

• We Americans will be more walled off than we used to be. Not just from our enemies but from our friends.
• We Americans will be led by a president who is a strongman.
• We Americans will lead by a man who regularly surrounds himself with other men.
• We Americans will be given a much-needed rest by a president who prefers to control everyone and everything. Our passivity will be preferred.
• We Americans might not have to think about who will succeed our next president. To ensure he will forever escape the law, could be our next president will arrange to succeed himself.
• We Americans need not worry any longer about our health and wellbeing. We are in the able hands of men like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dr. Oz who will wish away everything from cancer to cavities.   

Nothing like a trip down memory lane – perfect for Thanksgiving!

Elon Musk. By far.

A partial list of his assets:

• He is the richest man in the world.
• He has the ear of the world’s most powerful national leader.
• He has the ear of the world’s third most powerful national leader.
• He has a new, formal position in the American government. (As co-leader of the new Department of Government Efficiency.)  
• He has a new, informal position in the American government. (E. g….this week he met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, to explore the reduction of tensions between Iran and the U.S.)
• He is chief executive officer of Tesla, one of the world’s leading car companies.
• He controls X Corp (aka Twitter), one of the world’s leading social media sites.
• He is the founder and effectively in control of Neuralink, which develops brain-computer interfaces.
• Most importantly, he is the founder and CEO of SpaceX. SpaceX is described as “an American space technology company.” But this does not begin to capture its present performance or imagine its future feats. SpaceX already has its tentacles deep into space exploration, into America’s military-industrial complex, and into satellite constellation technology. Don’t you just love this line, from Wikipedia. “SpaceX, NASA, and the United States Armed Forces work closely together by means of government contracts”?  Says it all, straight faced!

But for all his tangible assets, Musk’s greatest strength is his indisputable and undiminished genius. Compare him to, for example, his new best bud, Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t know much about governance but likely he knows more than Musk. But Musk can run rings around Trump and most every other American leader on subjects that pertain to technology – which most subjects now do. Musk’s mastery of technology gives him a preternatural control of the country, the world, in which we now live.  

He is not my favorite person in the world. Far from it, very far from it. But give the man his due. The power of Musk’s presence is an astonishment.

In Part I of “Followers Refuse to Follow” – posted three days ago – I pointed out that though the results of the American presidential election were momentous, they were not atypical. Just the opposite: they were typical.

As I wrote in the post, “The incumbents in every single one of the ten major countries that held national elections in 2024 were ‘given a kicking’ by voters.” I added that never in 124 years of tracking had this happened, until now.  To frame the point slightly differently, for the first time since World War II, every governing party in a developed country that this year faced an election lost vote share.  Which is to say that this year in every developed country incumbent leaders were at the mercy of followers who were fed up.

To understand what happened in the American elections – especially Donald Trump’s thumping of Kamala Harris – it is essential therefore to consider not just one of the contexts within which they took place, but three. The first is the national context. The second is the international context. The third is the temporal context.

To illustrate my point, I will list the explanations for last week’s outcome and organize them accordingly.

National Explanations

• Harris was a weak candidate.
• Harris did not have enough time to mount a first-rate campaign.
• Harris made a mistake in her choice of a running mate.
• Harris never separated herself successfully from the unpopular administration of Joe Biden.
• Harris relied too heavily on celebrity surrogates.
• Harris was too cautious, for example turning down opportunities to reach unfamiliar audiences such as through monster podcaster, Joe Rogan.  
• Harris failed to repudiate some of her earlier, ultra progressive, positions.  
• Harris was a victim of racism.
• Harris was a victim of misogyny.
• Biden was weaker in every way – physically, mentally, politically – than the Democrats either understood or let on. Or both.
• Biden chose unwisely in the first place, when he selected Harris as his vice president. She was seen as so weak a successor to the incumbent that she effectively shielded him from calls to step aside earlier in the 2024 presidential campaign.
• Biden’s early assignments to Harris – especially his instruction that she address the “root causes” of immigration – were as absurd as unfair.
• Biden failed to do what he intimated he would do – to be a one term president.
• Biden took far too long to get out of the race.
• Biden made embarrassing gaffes even during the abortive campaign.  
• America’s messy and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan was a fiasco from which the Biden administration never fully recovered.
• Democrats fought constantly among themselves. They failed to unite around a coherent message.
• Democrats never understood the issues that mattered most to most voters. These were not freedom and abortion. They were inflation and immigration.
• Democrats never understood Americans’ objections to their tiresome focus on political correctness – on being adequately “woke.”
• Trump was a much more formidable candidate than the Democrats appreciated.
• Trump’s grievances echoed Americans’ grievances.
• Trump’s legal troubles seemed to confirm the picture he painted of himself: as a victim not a perpetrator.   
• Americans were willing to overlook what they knew were his flaws because they saw him as better at serving their interests than his opponent.
• Americans were attracted to the idea of a leader who was a strongman. 48 percent of Republicans thought the country needed a leader who was “willing to break some rules if that’s what it takes to set things right.”
• Americans were especially attracted to the idea of a leader who was a strongman given his opponent was widely perceived a weak woman. Kamala Harris was never seen as anything resembling an “Iron Lady” as was, for example, Britain’s longtime prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. (See my October 15^th post on this point titled, “The Alpha Female.”)      
• Americans were turned on rather than off by another strongman leader who took center stage toward the end of the presidential campaign. And who was in the end one of Trump’s staunchest and most generous allies – Elon Musk.

International Explanations

• Leaders in the West are becoming generally weaker.
• Followers in the West are becoming generally stronger.
• Increasing distrust in the West both of leaders and institutions that have shaped their lives since the end of the Cold War.
• Civic values are only feebly taught and therefore only feebly learned. These include Western Enlightenment ideas and ideals such as democracy and equality, freedom and individualism.
• Civic information has been diminished and devalued. For example, less than half of all Americans can name the three branches of government. They have no conception therefore of checks and balances, or of how essential they are to precluding power corrupting.  
• Global misinformation and disinformation.
• Offshoots of the information age – for example, the addiction to smartphones producing feelings of isolation and anxiety.
• Siloed information exacerbated by the growing ubiquity of podcasts – some of which now reach exponentially larger audiences than do traditional media.  
• Siloed information keeping audiences in a state of heightened anger and permanent mobilization.  
• Largely unexamined but nevertheless real symptoms of Covid grief.
• Inflation, inflation, and inflation. Immigration, immigration and immigration. These issues hit home with voters everywhere in the Western world. As we have seen, the preservation of democracy, liberalism, and centrism does not.
• Choice of candidates. Too many resemble Joe Biden – that is, they are old school. They echo the 20^th century rather than epitomize the 21^st. I include in this category familiar figures such as Rishi Sunak and, yes, Kier Starmer; Emmanual Macron; and Olaf Scholz.
• The apparently widespread longing for an alpha leader. A leader who can fix what’s broke, or what feels like it’s broke.
• The apparent disenchantment with liberalism and centrism – leading to a shift to the right.
• The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East – both of which are unsettling and even upsetting. They give the impression that leaders who are incumbents in both the United States and Europe cannot keep the peace.
• Even worse, leaders who are incumbents cannot, apparently, guarantee prosperity. Voters are not dumb. They know damn well that income inequality is greater than ever. That the disparity between what they earn and what their bosses earn has never been greater. This reflects a failure not just of democracy but of capitalism.
• One global order is giving way to another global order, or disorder. Western hegemony is declining. Russian aggression will be rewarded. And America’s archenemies – Russia, China, North Korea and Iran – have formed a loose alliance.    

Temporal Explanations

• Like the rest of the world the United States of America is in the middle of the third decade of the 21^st century. This means that it, also like the rest of the world, is grappling with changes that are coming fast and loose, especially in culture and technology. People who live in democracies are being affected by these changes, as are people who live in autocracies, albeit in radically different ways.
• Cultural changes were amply in evidence during this most recent presidential campaign for voters chose as their chief executive a man who almost gleefully defies conventional norms such as truth telling and law abiding. Even one generation ago Trump as successful presidential candidate would have been not only impossible but inconceivable.
• Technological changes – to which the now ubiquitous presence of Musk testifies – were also amply in evidence during this presidential campaign. Whether communication or the distribution of information, changes in technologies and in who was able to employ them for which purposes, played a large part in how the campaign unfolded. Moreover, with each passing year the technologies associated with artificial intelligence will play a larger part in determining who wins and who loses personally and politically; in civilian life as in the miliary; at the level of the individual, the organization, and the state.

I return then as I always do – to the explanatory power of the leadership system. To understand what happened in last week’s presidential election, it’s imperative that we look at the flawed leaders, Trump and Harris; at the reluctant or even recalcitrant followers, American voters; and at the changing contexts, national, international, and temporal. Only this way can we know the United States of America in November 2024.