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In my recent book, Leadership from Bad to Worse, I wrote that “Bad leadership and followership are not static. They develop over time: they go from bad to worse. But they go from bad to worse only if we allow it. If in contrast, bad leaders and followers are checked before they corrupt, at least before they corrupt completely, the outcome can be different.”

Seems the apparently bad Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, has just been stopped. He’s certainly been stopped in his tracks.

Click on the link below and you’ll see my piece about Hizzoner the Mayor. I wrote it a couple of weeks ago when it started to seem clear that he was other than pure as the driven snow. And now this headline sprawled across the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, “ADAMS CHARGED WITH BRIBERY AND FRAUD”!

Specifically, he has been charged with bribery conspiracy, fraud, and soliciting illegal foreign campaign contributions. The sums involved are not – certainly not by today’s exorbitant standards – great. But the picture the indictments paint is a sordid one, with corruption apparently endemic to large swaths of the Adams administration. Moreover, in at least one case – involving a fire inspection – were potentially dangerous consequences.

Like everyone else Adams is innocent until proven guilty. But until this drama plays out it is his constituents, and the great city they inhabit, who will pay the price for what is at a minimum, his carelessness and incompetence. Still, it’s much, much better than the alternative – an alternative in which bad would have been permitted to persist.

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When Donald Trump wants to stick Kamala Harris somewhere between dangerous and treacherous, he’ll call her a “communist.” No matter that Trump couldn’t distinguish between a communist and a socialist or name who coauthored the Communist Manifesto. In his lexicon a “communist” is the worst of the worst.  

Far be it from me to defend communism – under the banner of communism have been some of the most repressive and indeed murderous regimes in history. Still, it’s worth dissecting Trump’s insult because it comes at a moment in history when the differences between communism and capitalism are starker than they have been in decades.

The Soviet Union was a communist country. Russia is not. Communism in Russia was formally dismantled when the Soviet Union crumbled. Since then, China has replaced Russia as by far the most powerful Communist country in the world – hence America’s most formidable ideological as well as political, economic, and military competitor.

The degree to which the United States is capitalist waxes and wanes over the years – depending in the 20^th and 21^st centuries on whether Democrats or Republicans control the levers of power. Similarly, the degree to which China is communist waxes and wanes. This explains the title of this post, for in the last several years the difference between being a leader in the United States and being one in China – a leader in any sector – has grown greater.

In America corporate leaders who strike it rich are rewarded and admired in the extreme. They thrive on becoming rich and then richer, and most love to strut their stuff. Jeff Bezos famously sports the world’s largest sailing yacht. Ken Griffin ostentatiously just added a $90 million pad in St. Tropez to his already humungous real estate empire. And while Warren Buffet is conspicuously inconspicuous when it comes to possessions he cannot resist even as a nonagenarian adding to his mountain of money – he is now worth $144 billion. Additionally, notwithstanding our moaning and groaning about income disparity, the differences between them and us continue to grow. America’s CEOs now make about 200 times more money than their average employee. Moreover, although the stock market has been hovering at all time highs not everyone stands to gain. Well over a third of Americans have not a nickel in the market, and the top 1% of all Americans hold 50% of all stocks.

In China things are dramatically different. While in the US capitalism has grown starker and more extreme in recent years, in China the opposite has been true. It is communism that has grown starker and more extreme. In my last book, Leadership from Bad to Worse, I document how in the last five years especially President Xi Jinping has taken an increasingly hard line. He has become a much more rigidly ideological Communist, which has had implications for every aspect of Chinese life, effectively from the cradle to the grave.   

For Americans Xi’s now relentlessly tight grip is probably most obvious in the private sector. After years of being bullish on China, we now shy from investing in China. And leaders in American business have become trepidatious about dealing with their Chinese counterparts. For good reason. While America’s corporate leaders are gadding about and flying high, China’s corporate leaders are hunkering down, playing down their wealth rather than showing it off. No accident because, not being fools, they are acutely aware of the national mood. A mood that is a direct reflection of Xi’s metamorphosis from a leader who tolerated some signs of a market economy to one who does not; to one who is, instead, cracking down on what the regime deems signs of excessive wealth.

So, while in America there is scant serious interest in leveling the playing field, in China there is deadly serious interest. Xi wants to return to his country’s communist roots, which means his interest is in a “common prosperity,” not in one in which a few individuals prosper in the extreme.

One could lament – and I do – that both American and Chinese leaders are unwilling to move closer to a happy medium. Where wealth is somewhat more evenly distributed in the United States than it is now; where relentless repression as in China has no place.

Meantime we need to be clear: whenever leaders are at opposite ends of whatever the spectrum, connecting, communicating, the one with the other, is difficult. So if, as in this case, American leaders relentlessly reflect capitalism while Chinese leaders relentlessly reflect communism, the language they speak is radically different in more ways than one.

Headlines like this one – in last Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal – drive me nuts: “A Decade After ‘Lean in,’ Progress for Women Still Lags.”

Oh really?! Surprise, surprise!

Are we supposed to be astonished that according to a just concluded 10-year study of the “roles and promotion rates of millions of women and men at major North American companies,” women’s climb to the top of the organizational ladder remains seriously slow?

To be sure, the numbers of women in the highest ranks rose. But … women still comprise less than one third of those in the top tiers of management. They, we, still lag badly behind men on crucial early promotions. And they, we, have dropped even further back on rates of pay. Moreover, the number of employers who say that gender diversity is a high priority has fallen in recent years, from 87% in 2019 to 78% this year.    

As I said, surprise, surprise.

Want to know why what’s happening is happening and why what’s not happening is not happening? Read this and get a clue.

For those among us who think a second White House term for Donald Trump would be, shall we say, a disaster, one recent headline was especially alarming. It read, “Debate Night Barely Moved Needle in the Polls.” It was concerning not because most presidential debates do move the needle but because Kamala Harris won by so decisive a margin. In the immediate wake of the debate 67% of likely US voters said she did well in comparison with only 40% who said the same about him. So, Harris not only beat Trump in the debate she walloped him.

American voters are still relatively unfamiliar with her. Safe to say then that had Harris performed poorly on the debate stage her numbers would have suffered. Still, given her strong showing yielded no advantage, and given who is her opponent, one has to wonder, what’s going on here? Why isn’t Kamala Harris doing better than she is? In the wake of the Democratic Convention was exhilaration. Joe Biden was out of the picture, she looked good and sounded good, and Democrats were all fired up for what they hoped would be a great campaign. But a few weeks later, the presidential race looks more like a slog than a sprint.

Harris plays down her identity. But could be that it’s more important than she’s willing to admit, even to herself. She does not usually self-identify as a Black American (her father), or an Indian American (her mother), or a female American. But each of these identities matter, if not to her than to the American electorate. Consciously or unconsciously, it matters to voters that she would be, for example, the first American president who is a woman.

In my last post, “Male Leaders,” I wrote about the glaring difference between male leaders and female leaders as it relates to levels of aggression. “Male leaders and their followers are much more often and much more overtly aggressive than their female counterparts.” This certainly pertains to candidate Trump who almost invariably appears angry and combative, and whose followers skew more male than female. In a recent national poll women favored Harris over Trump by 21 points. If this figure stays approximately the same, on Election Day the gender gap will break all previous records.

However, this gap cuts both ways. Harris is more popular than Trump with women, but she is less popular than he is with men. Which raises the question, can Harris reel in more men? I would argue that she must try. That she must try to be less agreeable and more assertive. That she must try to be less feminine and more masculine. That she must try to be less general and more specific. That she must try to speak less about abortion and more about inflation. That she must try to smile less, to speak in a forceful cadence, and to appear stronger and even fiercer. She shouldn’t dump “the politics of joy” – it comes naturally to her. But instead of relentlessly playing joy up she should begin to play joy down.

Harris is in battle. Her opponent is prone to violence. It will not suffice for her to be, or to seem to be too ladylike, too female. She must be more androgynous, better at threading the needle between being a woman and being a man. We are, after all, in the land of the great apes, in which overwhelmingly it has been and still is males who rule the roost. This has implications for Harris – and for the American electorate.

I had occasion recently to be struck again by the difference between male leaders and female leaders – especially as it pertains to aggression. Neither the information nor the insight is new. It’s all over the relevant literature, including that on primates. Male leaders and their followers are much more often and much more overtly aggressive than their female counterparts – despite the distinction being one to which it appears we’re inured.

Among the reasons we forget it exists is the nature of work has changed. In large parts of the world the advantages male humans used to have of physical strength have diminished or even vanished. If you’re leading a company or a university, for example, physical strength plays little or no role in how you perform. Even if you’re leading a country, it plays no part or, more precisely, not one that is obvious. Joe Biden was not elected president of the United States in 2020 because of his physical strength or warrior-like personality. And it’s conceivable that though Kamala Harris is far smaller than Donald Trump, and cannot possibly replicate his inveterate swagger, she will defeat him in the November election.

But national leaders differ from other sorts of leaders in that they have proxies who are warriors. They have at their disposal militaries, and intelligence services, and weapons, many deadly. So, it is males leaders at the national level who are most likely to emulate their great ape analogues: males who are prone to aggression either because they want more sex or because they want more territory.

In both current wars in which the United States is most directly engaged – one between Ukraine and Russia and the other between Israel and Hamas – the leading actors are all male. Moreover, their primary prompt is for more territory. President Vladimir Putin’s original intention was to swallow Ukraine whole, to effectively annex it to Russia. And in response to the October 7^th attack on Israel by Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been determined to if not take over then rule over Gaza. 

In Sudan the civil war in which millions are being displaced and more are going hungry, males predictably are the protagonists. And the Democratic Republic of Congo – which for two decades has endured brutal civil strife – has the awful distinction of being known as “rape capital of the world,” with on average 48 women raped every hour, all by men determined to dominate them.      

This is not to suggest that female leaders are never aggressive. Sometimes they are, certainly when it comes to defending their young. Nor is it to imply that at the national level female leaders are weak or that they are pacifists. While their sample size is extremely small, women leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir remind us that gender is not, or at least not necessarily, a determinant.  

But it is to remind us of what we know. That among great apes – of which humans are one – males are more aggressive than females and that they are much more prone to violence. American politics is a current case in point. This is chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, Peter Baker, writing in yesterday’s paper.

“At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump….He has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threating to shoot looters and undocumented immigrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker, and suggested that a general he deemed disloyal be executed…. He even suggested that the mob [on January 6^th, 2021] might be right to hang his vice president and has since embraced the attackers as patriots whom he may pardon if elected again.”

In his landmark book On Human Nature the preeminent sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson wrote that “males are characteristically aggressive, especially toward one another,” and that the “physical and temperamental differences between men and women have been amplified by culture into universal male dominance.” Wilson’s book was written some fifty years ago, which means that some of what he wrote has been supplanted by different experts with different findings. But if there is evidence that his conclusion has been disproven, I’ve not seen it. Either in print or on the world stage.     

Germany’s Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is having a hard time of it. It is not that he is personally disliked and disrespected. He is not. Rather it is that he is politically disliked and disrespected. Friend and foe alike now think him an ineffective leader, incapable of leading Germans to where they need to go.

It is impossible to understand what has happened in Germany during the almost three years that Scholz has been chancellor by looking only at him. As always, to grasp the situation – to explain why fully 77% of the German people think him a “weak leader” – we must look at the system, at the leadership system. That is, we must look at 1) the leader; 2) his followers; and 3) the contexts within which the leader and his followers are situated.

The Leader

Let’s begin at the beginning. At the moment in December 2021 when Scholz took office. It was his bad luck to succeed a leader who was legendary. Her name was (is) Angela Merkel, a woman no less who had led Germany for 16 years. In retrospect Merkel made some serious mistakes – trusting Vladimir Putin highest on the list. But overall, she was highly admired, and she still is. Merkel would have been for the best of men a hard act to follow. But Scholz is not the best of men, certainly not the best political leader in a time when nearly all political leaders in Western democracies are having a hard time of it. He is smart but he is the antithesis of charismatic. He makes plans but then waffles when it comes to implementing them. He is out of his league when it comes to managing those who purportedly are his political partners.   

The Followers

Scholz’s approval ratings are the lowest of any German chancellor in 35 years. Is this because he is so awful, so dreadfully incompetent or maybe deeply unethical? No. Rather it is because Germans are like Americans, and for that matter like electorates in other Western democracies. Specifically, most of us are quick to carp and criticize people in positions of authority; and we are restless and rude, much, much more likely to diminish and demean our leaders than to praise and appreciate them. Similarly, Scholz’s coalition partners, who are acting more like nasty kindergartners than as responsible allies. As the Financial Times recently affirmed, “Tensions between [Scholz’s] partners in government … have reached new heights.” This in a country with an infamously difficult, dark history in which, to boot, a far-right party (Alternative for Germany) has recently made alarmingly strong gains.

The Context

Let’s get real. Whatever Scholz’s shortcomings he is not primarily responsible for the pickle in which Germany currently finds itself. The country that for decades was Europe’s most powerful economic driver, is now, to quote from a recent International Monetary Fund report, “struggling.” The report points out that last year Germany was the only one among its large European peers in which the economy shrank as opposed to expanded, and that this year’s prospects look equally bleak. Some of Germany’s problems are easily explainable and some, maybe, relatively easily remediable. But others are not at all amenable to quick fixes. Its population is aging, and the German people have been spoiled with generous benefits that will be politically exceedingly difficult to modify. (Just ask the CEO of Volkswagen, who as I write has his hands full trying to downsize the company’s workforce.) And, at a time when issues of national security are at the forefront of every country in Europe – think Russia’s unprovoked attack on Germany’s near neighbor Ukraine – Germany is not only lagging in its national defense but still torn about how far to deviate from its postwar passion for demilitarization.

Poor Olaf. He is not God’s gift to the German chancellery. But nor does he deserve being Germany’s whipping boy.

Who might you wonder? Eric Adams, who, since January 2022, has been Mayor of New York, which, despite not because of Adams, remains one of the world’s great cities.

In my book, Bad Leadership: What It Is, Why It Happens, How It Matters, I identified seven different types of bad leadership. Adams checks several of the boxes.

Here, however, I’ll keep it simple. Essentially bad/good leadership runs along two axes: one a continuum from ethical to unethical; the other a continuum from competent to incompetent. Adams is both unethical and incompetent. He reflects badly on himself, on his followers, and on the city that, unfortunately, he still leads.

At the end of last year Eric Adams already had the lowest approval ratings of any mayor in New York City’s history. And that was then.

Now we know more about how bad he really is. Specifically, we’ve been aware for some time that he was incompetent. That with him at the helm the city has foundered on housing, on immigrants, and on post-covid recovery, among its other chronic problems. We’ve also read, repeatedly, about Adams’s unfortunate personal life, in which he seems much to prefer partying with unsavory cronies to other forms of recreation.

 But what we have only recently begun to understand is how deeply corrupt is apparently the administration of Mayor Adams. To be clear, so far no one, including the mayor himself, has been charged with a crime. But what we do know now is that on his team was a cadre of characters who are targets of four separate federal investigations. Just yesterday New York City’s Police Commissioner resigned, Edward Caban admitting that “the news around recent developments has created a distraction for our department.”

Never when a leader is bad is it a small thing. When a leader of a major metropolis is bad it’s a big thing – and a sad thing.  Which raises the question, again, of what to do when a leader is bad.

How is she a leader? Let me count the ways.

1. Taylor Swift’s gazillion followers follow where she leads artistically.
2. Taylor Swift’s gazillion followers follow where she leads culturally.
3. Taylor Swift’s gazillion followers follow where she leads stylistically.
4. Taylor Swift’s gazillion followers follow where she leads socially.
5. Taylor Swift’s gazillion followers follow where she leads economically. (Nationally and internationally, they pay hefty sums to see her perform.)  
6. Taylor Swift’s gazillion followers follow where she leads financially. (She personally is now worth over a billion dollars.)
7. Taylor Swift’s gazillion followers follow where she leads geographically. (They want to see her perform in such enormous numbers that they impact the economies of the cities in which she appears – globally.)
8. Taylor Swift’s gazillion followers follow where she leads civically. (Within 15 hours after she posted voter registration information on Instagram the daily number seeking same went from an average of 40,000 to well over 300,000.)   
9. Taylor Swift’s gazillion followers follow where she leads politically. (Within hours after her endorsement of Kamala Harris for president her post received 9.5 million likes.)
10. Taylor Swift’s gazillion followers follow where she leads personally. (They constitute one of the largest and most devoted fan bases in American history. And once she registers her preference for anything or anyone, in countless cases it becomes their preference.)

Many Swifties – as her hardcore followers are known – are too young to have a direct impact. Many are, for example, too young to vote or to spend their own money. But given there are legions of them, and given their high levels of participation and even passion, we make a mistake if we underestimate the power of their contagion. Swift is not like other celebrities. Right now at least she exerts influence like no other. Moreover, there are many other Swifties who are by no means too young to do what they want when they want – including following where she leads.

Swift’s endorsement of Harris within minutes after the debate between her and Donald Trump was over testifies to Swift’s civic engagement: she seems determined to do what she can to get Americans first to register to vote and then to get them to vote for Harris. Which leaves us with this question: Can she get other leaders to follow her lead? Will her example prompt others in positions of power to dare to make public their political preference?

Like leadership gossip? Like inside stories about how leaders operate behind closed doors? Like seeing Big Boys act like little children? Like watching mud wrestling? Like journalism at its juicy best?

If the answer to all these questions is yes, do I have an article for you!

But be forewarned. First, the piece is quite long, it’s not a five-minute read. Second, the piece is not about two 800-pound gorillas. Rather it’s about one 800-pound gorilla wrestling to the ground another gorilla who, however, is half his size. The name of the first ape is Bob Iger. The name of the second is Bob Chapek. Finally, you should know before you go that Mickey would be mortified.

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Here’s the link to the New York Times piece. If the link doesn’t embed, search for “Palace Coup at the Magic Kingdom,” by James B. Stewart and Brooks Barnes.

In my most recent book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers, one of the leaders on whom I focused was Martin Winterkorn. Winterkorn was chief executive officer of Volkswagen between 2007 and 2015. He presided over the company during virtually the entirety of its emissions scandal – Volkswagen regularly installed in its vehicles a “cheat device,” deliberately intended to mislead regulators on the number of pollutants being spewed in the air – blackening his name forever and Volkswagen’s for years thereafter.   

Winterkorn was not, of course, alone to blame. Bad leaders cannot function without bad followers. As I wrote in the book, “All his followers followed his [lead]. And a number were complicit from start to finish, including in the coverup. What happened at Volkswagen was then a consequence of bad leadership and bad followership. Both evolved over the years, and congealed over the years, from bad to worse.”  

But the buck stops at the top. Winterkorn was primarily responsible for what happened, responsible for being not only a corrupt leader – year after year he tolerated and tacitly supported an illegal scheme – but a callous one. Throughout his tenure at the top Winterkorn was personally and professionally arrogant, dependably rude and highly controlling.

Withal, until now, he got away with a slap on the wrist. Until now, like nearly every other executive found guilty of wrongdoing, he was able largely to escape the long arm of the law. However, just this week the worm turned. Finally! Winterkorn was obliged to appear in a German courtroom after the judge rejected his umpteenth appeal to postpone the trial on the grounds of poor health.     

Once upon a time, what seems long, long ago, Martin Winterkorn was Germany’s best known and highest paid chief executive. He was hard charging, intensely ambitious, and driven, so to speak, to beat every last one of his competitors. That was then. Now he is facing criminal charges that include fraud, market manipulation, and making false statements.

Given that on Winterkorn’s watch Volkswagen and its various units sold some nine million cars outfitted with illegal, deliberately deceptive software, it seems only fair and entirely fitting that at long last he’s being held to account. Would we could say the same of all highfliers who are wrongdoers.