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There’s a new book out about former British Prime Minister Theresa May* She is described as a dutiful and devoted public servant. But the book’s main argument is that as a leader she was a disaster. “She lacked the strategy, political acumen, communication skills and negotiating abilities demanded of a prime minister, particularly one called upon to deliver Brexit.”**

The depiction of her tenure as an abject failure recalls the three women who, since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, have became symbols of dismal leadership on many of America’s college campuses. They are: 1) Elizabeth Magill, former president of the University of Pennsylvania who in effect was forced to resign her presidency last December; 2) Claudine Gay, former president of Harvard University who in effect was forced to resign her presidency last January; and 3) Nemat Shafik, president of Columbia University who, while still in office, has become emblematic of a leader in higher education unable to control her followers. Columbia is the epicenter of the student protests to which we currently bear witness.

Which raises the question: Is it sheer coincidence that the three leaders who are synonymous with choas on campus are all women? Maybe, maybe not. Whatever the answer, the following points are relevant.

First, women leaders more than men generally feel a need to be ingratiating. They want to be because they believe it’s in their interest to be, liked. Their experience is that confrontation works less well for them than accommodation. Shafik exemplified this phenomenon when a day after she became president, she told a campus publication that she preferred to lead from behind. “Most of the time,” she said, “you can allow your colleagues … to take things where they need to go.”

Second, women leaders who are confrontational are quicker than men to be labeled by others, by their followers, as aggressive. Hence, they are more disposed than men to negotiate – to try to find a middle ground – than to hang tough.

Third, students and faculty are much less familiar with women leaders than they are with men. The history of leadership on American campuses – is dominated by men. It is they who historically have been in positions of power and authority. When Claudine Gay become president of Harvard, she had exactly one female predecessor, Drew Gilpin Faust. Otherwise, in the long history of Harvard – the school was founded in 1636 – was not a single woman at the top.

Fourth, in part because higher education has changed only in the recent past – with many more women deans, provosts, and presidents now than even a decade ago – women at the top tend to be new in their posts. This certainly applies to Magill, Gay, and Shafik, each of whom was inexperienced at being president. Magill was quite new even to the Penn campus, having moved there from the University of Virginia, when she became president, just 18 months before she resigned. Gay had been president of Harvard for only six months when she resigned. And as of this writing Shafik has been president of Columbia for all of ten months.

Finally, there is the larger context, the larger context that is the United States of America in the third decade of the 21^st century. Americans are still unfamiliar with women in top posts. We still have never had a woman president. We still have only ten percent of Fortune 500 companies whose chief executive officers are females. And out of 50 governors only 12 are women.

No wonder female presidents of colleges and universities might be more vulnerable to activist followers than their male counterparts. No wonder women find it hard to navigate between being sufficiently proactive and seen as excessively assertive, even aggressive. No wonder Magill and Gay were so quickly on the chopping block. No wonder Shafik has been so rapidly besieged.

Could this all be happenstance? A coincidence that these three presidents, these three women, were so personally, politically, and professionally endangered in such short order? Of course, it could. But is it?

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*Tim Shipman, No Way Out: Brexit, from the Backstop to Boris.  

**The quote is from a review by Nick Pearce in the Financial Times.

In my previous post on leading on college campuses I suggested that – given the recent turmoil at Columbia University – the president of the university, Nemat Shafik, was likely to have only two choices. One of these was to quit, to resign from her post as president. Just 48 hours later this option was being openly discussed. Yesterday morning, the New York Times informed its readers that “the university faced a swirl of doubts over the future of its president.” And yesterday, no less than the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, visited the Columbia campus and called for Shafik to resign unless she could “immediately bring order to this chaos.”

This is not to say that President Shafik will resign or should. It is, however, to point out how remarkably quickly her position became strikingly, humiliatingly, tenuous. It is also to stress how vulnerable campus leaders are to their followers. Ten days ago, the president of Columbia University seemed reasonably secure in her post. Now her power has been greatly diminished, her authority has been reduced to near vanishing, and her influence is no greater than that of many other Columbia stakeholders who a couple of weeks ago would’ve been expected simply to follow where she led.

Having leaders so easily and frequently undermined is a recipe for disorder. But guess what. People don’t like disorder. We might briefly be interested and even amused by it, but in short order disorder wears thin. It wears thin even on college campuses where issues such as free speech have suddenly become fraught.

It’s no accident that even as some American colleges and universities have been unsettled by unrest, most have not. Most campuses are quiet despite what is happening in Gaza, with administrators, faculty, and students each playing their designated parts. They are quiet not because their leaders are so remarkably effective – though some are – but because in the main disorder is distasteful, especially if it is prolonged or threatens to turn violent. So, overwhelmingly, campuses are peopled by administrators who want to administrate, by instructors who want to instruct, and by students who want to study at least enough to graduate.

If there is a single wise man in higher education, it’s Derek Bok. He was president of Harvard University from 1971 to 1991 and again, on an interim basis, from 2006 to 2007. Now 94 years old, he is widely respected by those who know him, and know of him. Therefore, in the wake of the abrupt resignations of the presidents of Penn and Harvard, late last year and early this one, he wrote an essay that was published twice.* It explored the “public shaming” of several university leaders, and the tide of antagonism toward some of America’s best schools, with Bok suggesting how some of the problems might be alleviated.   

He acknowledged that “changes in the larger society” played a role in what was happening. Specifically, elite universities became “more vulnerable to public opinion and government intervention,” making them liable to attacks from “both ends of the political spectrum.” He also pointed out that for years trust in all American institutions has been steadily declining. Hence his question, “Why aren’t elite leaders doing more to protect themselves?” He muses that perhaps they think that their “institutions are too valuable to suffer much harm.” Or perhaps they believe that the “danger will pass before real damage is done.”

Whatever the answer to his question – which now anyway is moot; we know for a fact that President Shafik, for example, has been sensitive for months to the political climate both on her campus and in Washington – Bok had some suggestions on how “elite leaders” might respond to the challenges they faced. These included: immediately correcting mistaken impressions, hiring conservative faculty to correct for the liberal bias of current faculty, identifying instructors who try to indoctrinate their students, providing students with a civic education, and helping them to become proficient in moral reasoning.

Impossible to quarrel with any of the wise man’s wise ideas, several of which would, however, take years to have an effect. Moreover, implementing each might be necessary, but whether they would be sufficient to address the problems he himself idenifies is another matter.

Of course, Bok is hardly the only one to address the question of how campus leaders should lead. Steven Brint, for instance, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California, Riverside, pointed out that in the old days college and university presidents were expected to be superior scholars and competent administrators. Now, though, they must, absolutely must, be good communicators. They must be able to “provide the public with straight talk and with concrete examples illustrating why their institutions make a difference and are worthy of public support.”

Because context matters, leaders with predecessors who were pushed out are given a period of grace. Case in point: Harvard’s interim president Alan Garber, who succeeded Claudine Gay after her sudden resignation in January. Garber served as Harvard’s provost for many years, so he is deeply familiar with the university he now heads. Still, he has his work cut out for him, including on issues of extreme contentiousness such as free speech, institutional neutrality, and antisemitism. But at least for the time being, most, not all, but most, of Harvard’s stakeholders – the majority of faculty and students among others – have had enough. Tired of constant tensions, and leery of persistent disruptions, they are likely to bestow on their interim leader time to help their campus heal. Which does not of course – as President Shafik would be the first to testify – obviate the larger issue of how to lead on campus in the third decade of the 21^st century.  

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*Bok’s essay first appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education and then in Harvard Magazine.

Within a day of my posting Part I of this series about leadership in higher education, which focused on Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia University, the situation over which she presided went from bad to worse. In just in the last 24 hours tensions at Columbia escalated considerably. Largely pro-Palestinian students continued to refuse to back down. In person classes were suspended for at least the Passover holiday. All students who did not live on campus were told not to come in. And Jewish students were advised by a resident rabbi to go home and stay there until things cooled down. The campus was so roiled that the White House felt compelled to comment that “blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous,” and to warn that “silence is complicity.”

President Shafik was of course the lightning rod, she got it from all sides. Predictably, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik – who appears hellbent on being the bane of women leaders, specifically those of large Ivy League institutions – demanded that Shafik resign immediately, charging that she had “clearly lost control of the campus.” Protesters in turn thought just the opposite – that Shafik had not been too weak in response to their continuing disruptions but too strong.

Their view was most remarkably expressed not by them but by a group of untenured faculty who sided, unequivocally, with the protesters.  In a letter to the student newspaper, The Columbia Spectator, they wrote: “The behavior of university administrators that has created this atmosphere of fear is not normal or acceptable. We are working to overturn the student suspensions that have been issued and ensure that administrators are not allowed to summon [the New York City] police on a whim.”

To say that Shafik is caught between a rock and a hard place doesn’t quite capture it. On the assumption that other campus leaders – other presidents, deans, and trustees – don’t want to fall into the same trap, is there anything to be learned from this case?

I will have more to say about this in a future post. For now, just five quick leadership lessons. 1) Take a clear, unambiguous position early on and stick to it. Flexibility in a prestigious post is not generally a strength. 2) Ground your positions in both morality and legality – simultaneously, not sequentially. 3) Keep your allies close and your close allies even closer. Keep your enemies at a distance. 4) Never allow anything or anyone bad to persist. If left to fester bad has a malevolent habit of getting worse. 5) If you reach a point where too many followers refuse to follow, and neither their numbers nor their levels of resistance show signs of abating, recalibrate. Consider your options, which likely are only three. The first is somehow to restore order before the spring semester ends. The second is to do little or nothing until the spring semester ends – which is soon. The third is to resign.

For over a decade I’ve been writing about how leadership has become more difficult to exercise. Specifically in liberal democracies and especially in the United States. Not by chance the titles of two of my books – The End of Leadership (2012) and Hard Times: Leadership in America (2015) – make just this point.

Relations between leaders and followers have become more strained because our ideologies have changed, and so have our technologies, and our culture. These changes cut across the board, impacting leadership and followership everywhere: in politics and business, religion and education, the media, and the military. In recent months college and university campuses have been among the most visible of the relevant battle grounds, with tensions between leaders and others who, for leaders to lead, must follow. Usually, the leaders are presidents and deans of institutions of higher education. Usually, their followers include 1) students; 2) faculty; 3) staff; 4) alumni; 5) parents; 6) donors; 7) federal, state, and local officials; 8) interest groups; 9) lobbyists; and 10) the public.

In December and January, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard were pushed from their posts on account of fallout from the war in Gaza. Last week the president of Columbia University, Dr. Nemat Shafik had her turn on the hot seat. In testimony before Congress, she conceded that Columbia had initially been stunned, even overwhelmed both by the virulence of campus protests in response to the crisis in the Middle East and, relatedly, by repeated incidents of antisemitism.

In her appearance before Congress, Dr. Shafik seemed to feel she had no choice but to respond to events on Columbia’s campus as strongly as publicly. She and Claire Shipman, co-chair of the school’s board of trustees, admitted they had a “moral crisis” on their hands, and they vowed that any violation of university policy would “have consequences.” One day later Shafik called in the New York City Police to arrest over 100 student protestors and tear down their encampment.  

But if she thought the furies would be mollified or at least chastened, she was wrong. For her troubles she was loudly and soundly attacked by those who virulently disagreed with what they considered her too conservative views. The campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors announced that it had “lost confidence in our president and our administration.” A pro-Palestinian coalition of faculty and staff called on faculty to boycott not just graduation but all academic events. A columnist writing for the New York Times, Lydia Polgreen, asked, “If universities can’t protect free speech, what hope is there for other institutions?” And, most problematically, there was no sign that protesters at Columbia were acquiescing to the administration’s demands. The Times reported that even after the arrests, students remained “defiant” and activists “showed little signs of losing steam.”  

To be clear, President Shafik had her defenders. An eminent professor of law at Columbia, Vincent Blasi, an expert on civil liberties, said the university had articulated a “reasonable” policy to govern protests and that it had the right to punish students who violated it. Still, no question that Columbia’s president had been caught in the cross hairs – damned if she did and damned if she did not.

Other colleges and universities have of course fared better. Either their campuses have not been so stressed, or the stress has been better managed. Moreover, this is hardly the first time that American students have taken on their elders. But it is the first time that leaders of colleges and universities have been challenged by so many different followers – different stakeholders, constituents, interest groups, parties and players – each of them convinced they are right, each of them convinced they have a right to have a say, and each of them with access to technologies that enable them not only to communicate but to connect.

In the old days, leaders, including those in higher education, were easily envied. For their power and perks, for their authority and influence. Now not so much. Whatever else can be said about President Shafik it cannot be claimed her last week was either easy or enviable.

It was the leadership sun around which the other planets pivoted. It was the crown jewel of centers of leadership learning. And it was the crown on the head of the king of America’s corporate leaders, Jack Welch. Welch, who in his time was the iconic chief executive of what in its time was arguably America’s most iconic company, General Electric.

The “it” to which I refer was Crotonville, a campus consisting of approximately 60 leafy acres not far from New York City, where for generations GE trained its managers or, if you prefer, developed its leaders. Both the up and coming, and the already arrived and anointed were rewarded for their promise and performance by being among the chosen few. The few who were chosen to spend time at Crotonville where they would be given the keys to the kingdom. The keys were tools for learning how to lead such as new-manager starter kits, training and problem-solving sessions, trouble-shooting guides, and lectures by among others the king himself, Welch, who was proud of nothing so much as his presumed prowess at growing leaders.

Now though Crotonville is no longer. More precisely it is no longer a leadership learning center. This week General Electric finally sold the site, tacitly if not explicitly acknowledging it had long since outlived its purpose.

Why did GE wait so long to dispose of a property that was under used, outdated, and a bit of an embarrassment? I have no idea. As I wrote in 2019, in a piece titled “Learning to Lead – Fiasco at General Electric,” years ago Crotonville was exposed as a learning center not good at teaching even the basics.*   

Jack Welch’s handpicked successor, Jeff Immelt, failed every which way effectively to run the company. During Immelt’s long tenure at the top, GE’s trajectory was straight down. The value of its stock price and assets plummeted, and the company was humiliated by, among its embarrassments, being booted from the Dow. Moreover, in embarrassingly short order the board dumped the man, John Flannery, it had chosen to take over from Immelt, replacing him, finally, with Larry Culp.  Given Culp was the first outsider to lead GE in its 126-year history, his selection was itself an unarticulated rebuke to its center of leadership learning – Crotonville.

In the five years since, it’s become clear that Culp was able to accomplish what the Crotonville crowd was not. He saved General Electric from its hidebound self, most importantly by splitting what had become a disastrously unwieldy, ultimately tottering corporate behemoth into three independent parts. Just this month, each of the three officially became separately traded companies: one in aerospace, one in healthcare, and one in energy.

None of this is to say that the experience of being at Crotonville was a total waste. It was not. But it was never what it was cracked up to be – a place where people learned to lead wisely and well. Instead Crotonville was a temple to a charismatic leader – Jack Welch. The fact that he could not teach how to lead even to his hand-picked successor is, though, less of a reflection on him than it is on the fantasy that leaders will grow smart and strong if put on a five-day diet of a secret sauce.            

Learning to Lead – Fiasco at General Electric

…. and also

Jack Welch. A Leader – But Not for All Seasons

We all make “the leader attribution error.” First, we attribute to leaders events whose geneses lie elsewhere. Second, we credit leaders for outcomes that are positive. Third, we blame leaders for outcomes that are negative.

Sonja Hunt, a psychologist who years ago wrote a chapter for a book I edited titled, Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, described the role of leadership in our construction of reality. “The emphasis on leadership may derive from a desire to believe in the effectiveness and importance of individual action, which is potentially more controllable and understandable than complex contextual variables.” In other words, we make the leader attribution error because leaders help us to make sense of a world that otherwise is disturbingly, distressingly, complex.

The phenomenon came to mind again recently as I read a long article in the Financial Times about “How Google Lost Ground on AI.” The focus of the piece was nearly entirely on Google (Alphabet) CEO, Sundar Pichai. Further, Pichai was compared, always unfavorably, to the man who is often seen as his major rival, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella.

We tend to place them side by side, to compare them. Both are Indian in origin; both are at the forefront of American technology; both are leaders of one of the most iconic companies in America; and both are now, along with a handful of others, such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, running an all-out race to see who can first, and best, master AI.

Still, the degree to which the article focused on Pichai’s shortcomings – in contrast to Nadella’s lack thereof – was striking. It was especially striking because even in the recent past Pichai was highly esteemed, and because even the near future cannot possibly be predicted with certainty. This is not to say that Pichai is blameless for what appears to be Google’s recent sluggish performance. The buck does after all stop with him. It is, however, to say that blaming one individual for whatever has gone wrong is simplistic, reductionist.    

According to “multiple interviews” conducted by the FT, Google suffers from 1) “simmering tensions between rival factions”; 2) a “lack of clear leadership”; 3) “struggles to adapt from its position as the search market’s dominant incumbent”; 4) the absence of “wartime leadership,” that is, of a leader who can execute “under pressure”; 5) a leader who had to admit he was “caught by surprise” by the suddenness with which AI burst on the national scene; 6) “cultural and organizational problems” that “loom large”; 6) a lack of “clear leadership, particularly in the wake of recent rounds of lay-offs that have left staff rattled”; and 7) a “low key leadership style that may not be suited to a time when Google needs decisive change to close the AI gap with Microsoft and OpenAI”.

The contrast between Pichai and Nadella is implicit throughout the FT article – and sometimes explicit. As here: “Pichai’s incremental approach stands in contrast to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, who has made a series of bold bets on AI, including investing about 12 billion dollars into an alliance with OpenAI, a smaller investment in a French startup, Mistral, and rolling out AI in Microsoft products widely.”

The authors of the FT article took the easy way out. First, they assumed that something had already gone badly wrong at Google. Second, they assumed that blame for whatever went wrong rests solely with the leader of Google. If you believe the first, and you own Alphabet stock, I suggest that you sell it. If you believe the second, I’ve a bridge to sell you and I suggest that you buy it.

Presidents of the United States necessarily lead. Because decisions must be made, they have no choice. But once they are no longer president, they do have a choice. Especially if they are reasonably healthy, they can choose to be active in public life or entirely to withdraw. To have a different sort of life, one that avoids a leadership role of any kind.  

Barack Obama has chosen the latter. Though he was still relatively young when he left the White House – not yet 55 – in the eight years since he has been a purely private citizen. A citizen so private that you’re unlikely to know what he’s been doing all this time unless you look it up.

Obviously, this is his right. During his two terms in the White House the former president appeared to devote himself fully to being a public servant. But Obama’s near total disappearance from the political scene does raise the question of whether someone like him – a political rock star – owes the American people anything during what is widely perceived a time of national crisis. A time when democracy as the United States has known it for almost 250 years is in peril because the nominee of one of the two major parties has repeatedly made clear, in countless ways on countless occasions, his intention to destroy it. We the American people must take him at his word: believe Donald Trump when he says that if wins reelection to the White House in November he will seek to change the Constitution, engage in “retribution,” and radically alter America at home and its role abroad.

Trump is a threat to the nation’s well-being even if he loses the election. Our only hope of avoiding domestic chaos in the weeks and months after Election Day is not only to have Joe Biden win reelection but to win so decisively as to delegitimize, in so far as possible, the claim that the election was rigged.

There are signs that Obama gets the threat. Last week he visited the White House and last night he participated in a major Biden fundraiser. But these sorts of pro forma gestures are not nearly, not nearly, enough. This time around Barack Obama must, in contrast to last time Joe Biden ran for the White House, play a more active part. A part that lasts not weeks but months, that is as consistent as persistent, that is as lucid, unambiguous, and forceful.

Obama is obligated to do no less. Not legally, obviously. But because the American people not once but twice bestowed on him the honor of electing him president, he owes it to them, to us, to the United States of America, to do everything he reasonably can to reelect Joe Biden. To reelect as president the man who for eight years was his competent and constant vice president.     

It now appears this will be a close election. Biden’s approval ratings are middling at best; he still comes across as too old for the office; some of his domestic policies are demonstrably contentious; and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are continuing to rage. It equally appears that Biden is weak with traditional Democratic constituencies such as African Americans, Latinos, young people, and progressives. Which is precisely where, and why, Obama must step up. He must remind those who would constitute his target audiences that not only do he and the incumbent president now have a close political relationship that goes back many years, but that they share a world view, including on the economy and on key policies such as health care and reproductive rights.

When Barack Obama twice took the presidential oath of office, he swore to the best of his ability to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” It was a solemn promise that did not expire when he retired.   

A final note: I seem to recall that during Barack Obama’s two term presidency Michelle Obama was First Lady. I further seem to recall that she was enormously popular with the American people, an influencer if ever there was one. Wouldn’t hurt then for her to get out on the stump. For her between now and November similarly to make clear that Trump is a threat. Unless, of course, she thinks otherwise – prefers that Biden loses and Trump wins.

Whistleblowers are usually relatively powerless employees who disclose damaging information about their relatively powerful employers. Such as, for example, workplace practices that are unsafe, illicit, or fraudulent. Think of whistleblowers as Davids going up against Goliaths – which is why, in the United States, they have legal protections which tend, however, to be insufficient.

Robert Barnett was a whistleblower. After having worked at The Boeing Company for 32 years, in 2017 he left. Two years later he blew the whistle against his former employer. He charged that the once iconic company was regularly engaging in shoddy practices that were compromising the safety of the airliners it was making and then selling worldwide. Five years after that – earlier this month – according to the coroner’s report Barnett shot himself dead in the head. He died a week after having given a formal deposition against Boeing, and on a day that he was scheduled to undergo further questioning.

We can never know why Barnett killed himself or even for certain if he killed himself. Conspiracy theories being rampant these days, no surprise there are rumors that instead of his gunshot wound being self-inflicted he was shot by someone else. What we do know though is that within days after Barnett died, the CEO of Boeing, David Calhoun, announced that before this year was out, he was out. He was leaving the company. Same with Larry Kellner, chair of Boeing’s board who similarly announced his pending departure.

Neither Calhoun nor Kellner can be said to have retired voluntarily. At least indirectly they were pressured to do so by airlines and regulators on account of a series of events that instead of salvaging Boeing’s already tenuous reputation, under their leadership it was damaged further. In his resignation statement Calhoun admitted as much, referring to the now infamous incident on January 5 when a door plug blew off an Air Alaska Boeing 737 Max, which left the aircraft, while it was still aloft, with a gaping hole. Amazingly no one was seriously hurt in the incident. But it was yet another in a recent series of Boeing close calls including multiple malfunctions and fuel leaks. In his resignation statement Calhoun wrote, “As you all know, the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 accident was a watershed moment for Boeing. We must continue to respond to this accident with humility and complete transparency. We must also inculcate a total commitment to safety and quality at every level of our company.”

Though presumably unintended, Calhoun’s statement was a supreme irony. Because just four years earlier he was hired as chief executive to do just that: to inculcate at Boeing “a total commitment to safety and quality at every level.”

When Calhoun came on board, in January 2020, the pressure on the company to up its game could not have been greater. For his immediate predecessor, now former CEO Dennis Muilenburg, had presided over a period during which the company had endured not one but two catastrophes, and not one but two crises.

Boeing is not the focus of my new book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers. But I do briefly describe what happened to the company in 2018 and 2019. First were two deadly crashes of its 737 Max airliner: one, in October 2018, off the coast of Indonesia in which everyone on board, 189 passengers and crew, died; the other just a few months later, in March 2019, in Ethiopia, in which everyone on board, 157 people, also died.

Crisis number one was, then, a crisis of performance, of Boeing’s performance as a manufacturer of aircraft that were supposed to be of the highest quality and unimpeachable safety. And crisis number two was one of public relations. While the company was enduring a PR nightmare it became evident that its chief executive, Muilenburg, was miserably ineffective at calming the waters. In December 2019 there was for instance this headline in the New York Times: “At Boeing, C.E.O. Stumbles Deepen a Crisis.” I wrote in Leadership from Bad to Worse that, “By then the 737 Max had been grounded, but Muilenburg’s leadership during this period was in every way also badly lacking.” Moreover, his expressions of regret seemed not to make things better but worse. They were described as “clumsy” and “only prolonging Boeing’s reputational pain.”

Enter in early 2020 the man ostensibly on a white horse, the leader who would save Boeing from its badly injured self, Calhoun. But instead of saving Boeing, under Calhoun questions of quality control, of “shortcuts”, of workers with insufficient experience and expertise persisted. Which makes his somewhat ignominious departure painful not only for those within Boeing but for those without. For Boeing is one of just two plane makers – it shares a duopoly with Europe’s Airbus – that produces and sells large commercial jets to airlines.

In recent years Boeing has by every measure and wide agreement lost ground to Airbus. Which raises key questions: Can Boeing be restored to its previous place at the pinnacle of performance excellence? Can the company recover from what has become an onslaught of damage to its once vaunted reputation? What kind of leadership team is required to enable Boeing to fulfill its ostensible mission, to commit totally to “safety and quality at every level”? How to get everyone in the company on board, to persuade every Boeing employee that they are integral, critical to finding enduring solutions to enduring problems?

Last Thursday, United Airlines flight 990 was on its way from San Francisco to Paris. But because the crew reported a problem with an engine the plane was diverted to Denver. 273 passengers and 12 crew members got safely off the plane and the flight was simply cancelled. A scare? Perhaps. An inconvenience? Absolutely. But why was the incident newsworthy? Because the aircraft was made by Boeing. And because it was made by Boeing was serious concern about the performance of its product.

Boeing must persuade both the experts and the flying public that its planes are as safe as any now flying the skies. Until it does, Barnett’s ghost will continue to haunt the company’s corridors. For whatever the truth of what happened before he blew the whistle, and after, his warnings about Boeing proved prophetic.

When will they ever learn that leading isn’t what it used to be? That leading in 2024 is not like it was in 2014 not to speak of 2004 or a decade or more before. In 2024 leaders in America risk being upended if their followers are strongly, not to speak of virulently opposed. This applies to all leaders – especially to those with followers who themselves are prominent and powerful.  

Six days ago, NBC News announced that it had hired Ronna McDaniel as an on-air contributor. McDaniel had recently stepped down from her post as chair of the Republican National Committee. She was to provide the network, including its left leaning cable outlet, MSNBC, with commentary that would be reliably conservative.

McDaniel did not, though, come to the network as a conventional political operator. Because to survive in the Time of Trump she had to be his lacky, his toady, her appointment to the ranks at NBC could have been predicted to raise eyebrows – and trigger anger.

Which it did – and then some. People, enough people, at NBC/MSNBC were outraged that now among their colleagues was a woman who had associated herself with the most outrageous, and dangerous of former President Trump’s numberless lies – that the 2020 election was rigged. That it was Donald Trump who ought rightly to be sitting in the Oval Office not Joe Biden.

Within 48 hours of the announcement that McDaniel had been hired by their superiors, subordinates at the network lashed out. NBC’s leaders were taken to task by their followers – in public. These though were not ordinary followers. They were network stars with high visibility, and with voices certain to be heard loud and clear.  

The revolt started with longtime NBC anchor Chuck Todd. 48 hours after McDaniel was hired Todd went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” bitterly to charge that she was completely untrustworthy. A day later Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski opened their popular show, “Morning Joe,” with a similar verbal fuselage. They referred to McDaniel as “an anti-democracy election denier” and made clear their strong objection to NBC’s decision to hire her. Similarly, another network anchor, this one a former Republican operative herself, Nicolle Wallace. She accused her bosses of having signaled to election deniers that they could now go about spreading falsehoods “as one of us, as badge-carrying employees of NBC News, as paid contributors to our sacred airwaves.”

No one spoke out more forcefully and at greater length than MSNBC superstar Rachel Maddow. She used nearly all of the first half of her hour-long Monday night prime time show to talk about what happened. “The fact that Ms. McDaniel is on the payroll at NBC News to me is inexplicable,” Maddow said. She went on to charge that her bosses had put on the payroll “someone who is part of an ongoing project to get rid of our system of government. Someone who is still trying to convince Americans that this election stuff doesn’t really work. That this last election wasn’t a real result. That American elections are fraudulent.”       

In less than a week, it became clear that NBC’s leaders’ fate was sealed. That they had no choice but to surrender to their followers, most prominently those within the network but, as messaging on social media made clear, also those without. Said Cesar Conde, Chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, “After listening to the concerns of many of you, I have decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor.” He added, “I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down.”

What brought about this debacle is as plain as the nose on Mr. Conde’s face. He and other members of his management team thought they could do what they wanted to do when they wanted to do it. But those days are dead and gone. In the here and now leaders who ignore their followers, whether wittingly or unwittingly, do so at their peril.

My most recent book – Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers – was just published by Oxford University Press.

The book has a simple message simply stated. Bad leaders and their bad followers – you cannot have the former without the latter – do not stay the same. Over time they change. They go from bad to worse. Bad gradually digs in, digs in deep and then deeper unless it is somehow, by someone or something, stopped or at least slowed.

As the book describes, the progression, which unfolds in four phases, is invariable, inexorable. Unless, again, there is an intervention. Unless, again, the bad leader is somehow stopped from going from Phase 1 (“Onward and Upward”); to Phase 2 “(Followers Join In”); to Phase 3 (“Leaders Dig In”); and finally, to Phase 4 (“From Bad to Worse”).

As I write in the book: “The process of going from bad to worse tends to be steady, not sudden or hasty.” But once bad has burrowed in, once it has been permitted to progress, it becomes “finally very difficult to extract or excise. In other words, once the system is close to being completely corrupted, it’s late, maybe even too late. By then bad leaders and their follower are so entrenched that they control the system itself, which is why at this point the only way to totally get rid of bad is to totally get rid of everyone involved.”

This truism, the inevitable progression from bad to worse, applies across the board. To leaders in every sector, in every context and culture. It’s the nature of the human condition – which raises the key question. Who, or what is “bad”? Clearly who I consider a bad leader might be, or it might not be, who you consider a bad leader. In the book I make at least some of my biases clear. For example, that I write from the vantage point of a liberal democrat. Which means that in my view a leader like Vladimir Putin – and, yes, Donald Trump -is “bad.” Similarly, because I take integrity seriously, I label a leader “bad” if he or she is demonstrably and frequently fraudulent, such as Sam Bankman-Fried.

Because our conceptions of good and bad can be as elusive as contentious, there is a chapter in the book on “Making Meaning of Being Bad.” I argue however that just because a subject is fraught does not mean we should steer clear. Given bad leadership is as ubiquitous as pernicious, the leadership industry has an obligation to tackle it as it pertains to both theory and practice. We should be as dedicated to stopping bad leaders as to growing good ones.

Moreover, because if it is not stopped or at least slowed bad leadership invariably gets worse, we should not be even a smidgen surprised when worse occurs. In 2020 President Xi Jinping decided to impose on Hong Kong a national security law that gave the government a powerful tool to silence its critics. They could be and mostly were rounded up and threatened with arrest. It was entirely predictable then that a few years later (in 2024), another law was passed that further enhanced and expanded the government’s control. It was, or it should have been foreseen that in time most of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists and lawmakers would be either in prison or self-imposed exile.

Similarly, should we be in the least surprised that Russia recently ratcheted up its online censorship?  The Russian regime is doing nothing different from what it has been doing for years. It is increasing the level of its suppression and oppression. The New York Times reported that “Internet censorship has grown in Russia for more than a decade, but the scale and effectiveness of the most recent blocks have surprised even experts.” Why? Why was any Russian expert “surprised” in the slightest? The trajectory was entirely predictable. So long as Putin was in charge there was, there is, no question: censorship in Russia will go from bad to worse.    

The syndrome – leadership from bad to worse – is not just of theoretical interest. It is of practical importance. Pay attention and act if you can or you too could be screwed.