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I’ve been posting under the headline “Putin Patrol” on and off for over ten years. I’ve come to think of him as the gift that keeps on giving – if, that is, your interest is in leadership, especially bad leadership.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is a prototypical example of a leader who during his tenure – beginning in 2000 – has gone from bad to worse.* Moreover last week he announced that he would run for reelection. This means that failing a black swan event, he will win a fifth term. If he serves it in full his rule will extend to 2030, making him Russia’s longest serving leader since Catherine the Great.

Putin’s War – Russia’s attack on Ukraine – was launched in February 2022. While his leadership during this nearly two-year period has been unethical – even evil – in the last twelve months it has been effective, arguably very effective.

To a liberal Democrat, his badness, his malevolence, is self-evident. But how has Putin been good – how, specifically, has he been effective?

• His popularity at home remains high. This despite levels of domestic repression far greater than a few years ago. And far, far, greater than they were during the early years of Putin’s reign.
• His stature abroad remains high, or at least high enough. He and China’s president Xi Jinping remain best buds. India’s prime minister Narendra Modi tends to his ties to Putin with care. And just last week Putin sauntered around the Middle East, shoring up his relationships with Arab leaders. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did no less than tell Putin he had “lit up Riyadh with his presence.”
• Despite dire early projections, and strenuous efforts on the part of the West, Russia’s wartime economy has remained stable. It has adapted to Western sanctions, kept in harness its key trading partners, and used its oil revenues to keep full the country’s coffers.    
• Russia’s performance on the battlefield has gone from dismal to solid. Putin’s military has shored up its defenses and prevented Ukraine from making its much-anticipated breakthrough. Many in the West now see the war as a stalemate, neither side likely certainly in the near term to achieve a breakthrough. Further, Western support for the war effort is waning.
• Putin has disappeared his archnemesis, Alexi Navalny – so far without a trace. For several days, Navalny has been missing from the wretched prison to which he was confined by Putin, with no one in the West claiming to know where he is.

An hour or so ago Putin’s completed one of his rare press conferences. Not only did he exude self-confidence generally, but he also stuck to his guns on Ukraine specifically. “There will be peace when we achieve our goals,” he stated unequivocally. “They have not changed. I’ll remind you of what we talked about then: the denazification of Ukraine, its demilitarization, its neutral status. As for demilitarization, if they don’t want to come to an agreement, then we are forced to take other measures, including military ones.”   

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown – supposedly. But not so now with Putin. To the contrary. After a post-pandemic rough patch, he’s riding high. Looking good and, to all appearances, feeling fine.

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*Barbara Kellerman, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers (Oxford University Press, March 2024).

The Ivy League is a group of eight American colleges and universities – Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale – that are among the most prestigious institutions of higher education in the world. Until the late 20^th century – Judith Rodin was named president of the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 – not one had ever been led by a woman. In recent years however this demographic has changed dramatically. Six of the eight Ivies are currently led by women.

While this percentage is misleading – at the national level by far the most college presidents are still white men – symbolism counts for something. It matters that in the top tier of American higher education women presidents are now the norm not the exception.

Which brings me to the unsettling fiasco of the past week. The fiasco that was the highly contentious congressional hearing on antisemitism. Since the October 7^th attack by Hamas on Israel has been a surge in antisemitic and anti-Arab hate crimes on some American campuses. This explains the appearance on Capitol Hill of the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay; the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill; and the president of M.I.T., Sally Kornbluth. They were there to testify generally about antisemitism on their campuses, and specifically about their responses to recent events.  

What they did, and did not, say ended for them, especially for Gay and Magill, in a political and public relations disaster. Moreover, the acrimony has not only not subsided, but since the hearing on Tuesday it has escalated. The women were attacked by the White House and by lawmakers in both parties. Some of their most generous donors turned away in disappointment and disgust. And, despite their expressions of remorse and regret, all three now face an investigation into antisemitism on their campuses by a Republican-led House committee.

Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth are not, of course, the only leaders in higher education obliged to address similar situations. But for now, they have become, no doubt to their great regret, indicators of what many perceive as a failure adequately to respond to an ancient hatred.   

This raises – for me, I have not seen them raised elsewhere – two questions. First, were their answers to the questions posed during the hearing different because they were women? Would men have responded in the same way?  

Second, has the fallout from their answers – the fierce backlash against them – been different because they were females? Would three male leaders have been attacked, and now continue to be attacked in the same way?

To these questions are of course no satisfactory answers. They are counterfactuals – which means we can never know. Still, we might hazard a few guesses, maybe even educated guesses, based on the literature on women and leadership.

Regarding what Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth said – and how they carried themselves – it’s worth recalling the research that indicates that in general women lead somewhat differently than men. In their important book, Through the Labyrinth, Alice Eagly and Linda Cary wrote that “some sex differences have been detected.” Specifically, women more than men “have a democratic, participative, collaborative [leadership] style.” As important is that other people expect women with power to downplay their power, to be, or at least to appear to be, more collaborative and less authoritative. This puts the burden on women to straddle the line between being sufficiently leader-like, that is, directive, but not so directive that they are perceived to be aggressive.

Does this matter in this instance? Were, for example, Gay’s responses to the questions posed by members of congress shaped at all by who she is – not just by what she believes? Gay is a woman, a black woman. Does it make sense that her being a woman, an African American woman, has no impact whatsoever on her leadership style? Not to me. All three women were taken to task for their extreme caution, for their overly “lawyerly” responses. Famed Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe chided Gay specifically for her “hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers.” I can only speculate that like the other women on the panel Gay’s reluctance to be more forceful, clearer, and more ringing in her responses was shaped by her identity.

And… by the role in which Gay and her colleagues found themselves. The most aggressive by far of their interlocutors was none other than Republican Representative Elise Stefanik – also obviously a woman. Why was it that Stefanik had no trouble whatsoever being dominant, agentic, directive? Recall her role. Her role was effectively that of prosecutor. She was free to be her most aggressive self because she was perfectly playing the part that she was assigned. Unfortunately for them, Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth were in this instance assigned a different part – a part more akin to that of a defendant. Of a follower – not of a leader.

But even here gender might matter. Her part as prosecuter notwithstanding, it’s plausible that had Stefanik been questioning three men not three women she would’ve felt less free “to be her most aggressive self” – lest she come off as a shrew, a harpie.

Which brings us to where we are now. Has the backlash against them been fiercer because they are women? Would three male presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT have been attacked – and would they continue to be attacked – in the same way?

Again, impossible to know. Still, it matters that while they were testifying all three of these ostensibly towering figures seemed curiously small, vulnerable even. That while they were testifying all three of these ostensibly formidable intellects seemed curiously unable to craft smart answers to simple questions. That while they were testifying all three of these ostensibly forceful females seemed curiously stymied by none other than one of their kind.  

What we have then is a bad mix. Stupendously successful people. Stupendously successful people who are women. Stupendously successful people who are women who are leaders. Stupendously successful people who are women who are leaders who tried to strike the right balance between being directive and demure and failed.

In a post of October 14, I quoted David Grossman. He is one of Israel’s most eminent authors who has been, lifelong, a member of Israel’s liberal left. So, his antagonism to Israel’s right-wing governing coalition, especially to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, comes as no surprise. Still, I’m citing his views again because not only do they coincide with my own, but as I noted earlier, the words Grossman uses are the same as those in the title of my forthcoming book.

The book – to be published in March by Oxford University Press – is Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers. Similarly, in an essay that appeared in the Financial Times not long after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, Grossman wrote that, “What is happening now is the concrete price Israel is paying for having been seduced for years by a corrupt leadership which drove it downhill from bad to worse; which eroded its institutions of law and justice, its military, its education systems; which was willing to place it in existential danger in order to keep its prime minister out of prison.” (Italics mine.)

Grossman makes clear that Hamas is entirely to blame for the terrible terrorist attack. Still, he points out that in the months before, Israel was deeply, even agonizingly divided. Repeatedly millions of Israelis took to the streets to protest the government and the man at its head. Meanwhile Netanyahu demeaned and discredited his opponents – depicting them as traitors. Moreover, he boasted throughout about how powerful was the state of Israel, how perfectly fortified it was against any outside threat.

Since Grossman penned his piece, we’ve learned that not only was the leader of Israel deliberately sundering his country, but he was also failing the while to protect it. We now know that the Israeli government, the Israeli military, and the Israeli intelligence establishment ultimately dismissed as insignificant early warnings that Israel was not only not perfectly fortified against threats, but it was vulnerable to an attack by Hamas that was, literally, already being planned.  

I do not want to rehash the past but to question the present. Israel is now conducting a brutal war against Hamas which is having devasting effects on Palestinian civilians. Given these effects are immediately apparent everywhere in the world, the world, including many in the United States, is turning against the Jewish state. Yesterday French President Emannuel Macron warned Israel that “the total destruction of Hamas” would mean ten years of war. As a result, he concluded, efforts to achieve a lasting ceasefire between the warring parties must be stepped up. 

To say it’s not so easy is grossly to understate it. Among the reasons a ceasefire is proving elusive is that Hamas remains hellbent on nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state.

But it is simultaneously true that the Israelis are in a terrible predicament. Their wartime leader is corrupt and sclerotic, and guilty of malfeasance. He is not only widely acknowledged to be miserably unethical but now also miserably ineffective. The usual admonition not to change horses in midstream – not to change leaders in wartime – does not then apply in this case. It does not apply when your horse is in every way incapable of doing the job. When your horse might be the very thing that brings you down.

Truth is that Netanyahu – and others in Israel’s current government – have a personal and professional interest in continuing the war. For virtually as soon as Israel ceases hostilities their political lives will be over forever. Netanyahu will, moreover,  be in immediate legal peril.

I am not alone in pointing out how calamitous is Netanyahu’s leadership. Israeli political scientist Dani Attlas notes that Israelis have “good reason to believe that Netanyahu isn’t always making decisions based on [their] shared interests.” Bernard Avishai, another Israeli professor and well-known commentator has remarked that his country is “completely underestimating what a liability this government and this prime minister are internationally – especially in America.”

This last point is not only true but critical. Israel needs the United States like it needs its right arm. But there is growing evidence that, for reasons both at home and abroad, President Biden is increasingly leery of giving Israel a blank check – especially as it pertains to the tactics it is using in Gaza.

The Israeli people are on the horns of a leadership dilemma. They remain horribly traumatized and terribly humiliated. And, understandably, they seek revenge. But as the weeks after the attack become months, they seem increasingly to understand that their prime minister and his government are dangerously lacking. The most recent polls show that Netanyahu’s approval ratings have dropped to 27% while those of his most obvious opponent – Benny Gantz, a retired general who since October 12 has agreed to serve in government on an emergency basis – have climbed to 52%.      

Getting rid of Benjamin Netanyahu along with the worst of his cronies would not be easy. But it is not impossible. Nor should any nation suffer a leader who stands himself to benefit from a war that ends later not sooner.

The headline in the Wall Street Journal read, “Departure Plans Surge in Congress.” In the New York Times it read, “Backing Away from Congress by the Dozens.” The point of both pieces was not that members of the House of Representatives were heading for the exits. It was that so many of them were doing so at the same time.

In the month of November twelve lawmakers – six Republicans and six Democrats – announced that they would not continue to serve in the Congress. Nor were the numbers of quitters limited to these twelve alone. They were part of a larger group that now numbered at least three dozen members of Congress who said this year that they would not seek reelection.

Their plans differed, of course. Some were hanging up their hats altogether, others were planning to run for another elective office, and still others were headed for what they thought greener pastures. Their message though was the same: Serving in the House was no longer sufficient or even satisfying. In fact, in many cases it was so unsatisfying as to be downright infuriating. Said one lawmaker who had served six-terms: “The last few years have been among the most difficult and frustrating times in my professional career.”

The temptation is to assume that the wave of retirements is only on account of the dysfunction in Washington. And it’s true. It’s extreme, exemplified vividly by the recent spectacle of Republicans unable for weeks to agree on a House Speaker, but, perhaps more tellingly, by lawmakers’ inability to pass legislation even on which most Americans agee. Taxation is an example. Most Americans want the rich to pay more. But Congress continues to balk. Similarly with gun control. Most Americans want stricter controls over purchasing firearms. But Congress continues to balk.

But the truth is not so simple. The fact is that leaders everywhere are finding that being a leader in the present is less satisfying than it was in the past. The evidence is clear. Leader tenure is shorter and leader turnover is faster.

• It appears that more American CEOs headed for the exits in 2023 than in any year previous.
• It appears that the average tenure of American CEOs is dropping.
• It appears that more American college presidents are quitting at faster rates than in any years previous.
• It appears that the average tenure of American college presidents is dropping.   
• It appears that the attrition rate of public-school principals is higher now than it was five years ago.
• It appears that more than one third of American pastors are considering quitting their posts.

In each case I write “it appears” because the data is short of conclusive. But the trends are unmistakable. The demands on leaders are higher and the satisfactions are lower. As G. David Gearhart, an expert on leadership in higher education, put it, being a college or university president has become “very difficult to do in the right way. There are so many groups out there that a college president has to try to appease, that it’s almost impossible to do.”

I have and will continue to discuss the reasons why the change, especially in the last decade. Suffice it here to say that good governance – especially in democratic systems – requires good leaders. If we continue to beat them up and beat them down it will not serve us well.   

In the first book I ever wrote, All the President’s Kin, I typed Rosalynn Carter an “Alter Ego.”* Alter Egos are one of seven different types of presidential kin that also include, for example, Decorations, Humanizers, and Helpmeets. Each of these – including spouses and siblings, parents, and children – was beginning at the time to emerge from behind the scenes. They were taking on public roles of visible importance. Not all these roles were substantively significant. But in different ways they all were, and are, politically significant.  

Rosalynn Carter was one of two people I typed “Alter Egos.” (The other was Robert Kennedy.) I defined Alter Egos this way:

Alter Egos are those rarest of relatives: people to whom we are so close, on so many levels, that they and we are one. The interaction is in every area. It is constant. I would claim that when a president has an Alter Ego, he or she is the second most powerful political figure in America. And the benefit to a president lucky enough to have one is considerable.

Rosalynn Carter died yesterday at the age of 96. She was, in her own right, a leader. A path breaker in mental health. And a pathbreaker in claiming for the role of First Lady the right to make a political difference. Carter was not, of course, the first First Lady to have a major impact on American politics. Most famously Eleanor Roosevelt preceded her. But Carter can rightly be said to have picked up where Roosevelt left off. And she can similarly be said to have further paved the way for her least retiring successor, Hillary Clinton.   

But it was her relationship to her husband, President Jimmy Carter, that stood out. It was so close and even then, of such long duration, that effectively they were one.  In the book I wrote:

The power that Rosalynn Carter wielded was derived from … the nature of her finely tuned relationship with her husband. She had developed, over the course of a highly successful thirty-four-year marriage, a way of dealing with Jimmy Carter, of influencing him to see things her way, that was unrivaled by anyone else. Indeed, no one else even came close. The thirty-ninth president was a loner. He did not socialize easily, either with old pals from Plains or with new ones from Washington. He was most comfortable with family, and when he was not called on to do otherwise, he shared [himself] mainly with Rosalynn. She was his wife and the mother of his children. But she was also his best friend and closest, most constant counselor. It was through this [most intimate of] connections that she gained exceptional political power.  

All the Presidents Kin was published in 1981. I cannot now paint her picture any better than I did then.

Which leader? Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

First, Nadella now rivals Apple’s CEO Tim Cook in the race for which CEO has proven himself most able brilliantly to succeed a legendary founder. In Cook’s case Steve Jobs. In Nadella’s case Bill Gates.

Second, taking advantage of the seismic shakeup that I wrote about two days ago, Nadella seized the day. He lost not a nanosecond adding to Microsoft already formidable team OpenAI’s cofounders, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman.

To be clear it’s all rather incestuous. Microsoft was one of OpenAI’s original backers and it retains a good chunk of the company. Still, while the two companies are related, they’re not one and the same. Altman and Brockman now owe their primary allegiance not to OpenAI but to Microsoft. Suffice to point out the former’s loss is the latter’s gain.   

There has been no recent event on Planet Leadership as seismic as the sudden, startling sacking of Sam Altman.

Altman was more than the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI – the company at the forefront of artificial intelligence development. Altman personified AI. Altman was the ambassador of AI. Worldwide people – including people in positions of great power – depended on Altman to level with them. To tell them the truth about where in the big picture AI was, and where it was likely, at least in the near term, to go. Altman was King of AI – he embodied the technological development that is as potentially potent as any in our lifetimes.

And now he’s gone. Well, not gone really. Impossible to believe that he won’t resurface. But he was, so far as we know, pushed from his perch from one moment to the next by the board of the company that he appeared absolutely to lead.

What happened is unclear. A post on OpenAI’s website said only that the board “no longer has confidence” in Altman’s leadership because he was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” What is clear is that the internal turmoil will have an external effect. Altman was so singular a captain of his domain that inevitably his domain will be impacted by his shocking departure.  

Leaders in America were damned if they did. And they were damned if they didn’t. If they did speak out about the war in the Middle East – made any statement at all – they were bound to be attacked by some or another of their constituents. And if they didn’t speak out about the war in the Middle East they were bound to be attacked by some or another of their constituents.

Let’s review the context:

• Leadership in America has always been difficult. Our history was, after all, revolutionary. The American Revolution birthed a political culture in which resistance to authority was admired, not despised.
• Leadership in America has always been difficult. Our ideology is, after all, in strong support of followers, not leaders. It gives ammunition to ordinary people for whom ideals such as freedom and democracy buttress their claim to have a say.    
• Leadership in America has always been difficult. And, our constitution and our system of government were, after all, deliberately crafted to preclude any single individual or branch of government from accumulating too much power. Hence … “checks and balances.”
• Leadership in America is even more difficult now than it was before. The rights revolutions of the 19^th, 20^th and even into the 21^st centuries expanded our conceptions of who was entitled, legally as well as morally, to have a say.
• Leadership in America is even more difficult now than it was before. Social media give everyone a voice -many ominous and downright dangerous. Leaders are especially vulnerable to followers consumed by hatred and rage.

Let’s review the situation:

• An unprecedented and unanticipated war in the Middle East, between Israel and Hamas, triggered by a bloody attack.
• A war in an area of the world beset by ancient hatreds.
• A war in which the warring parties evoked impassioned responses not only in the region but around the world.
• A war which in the United States is home to people who strongly support both sides.  
• A war with potentially enormous geopolitical consequences – political, economic, and military.

Let’s review the followers – the American people:

• Most don’t care much, if at all, about the war in the Middle East.
• But some care a lot. Some on the right care a lot and so do some on the left, even some in middle. Moreover, some if not most Jews care, and some if not most Muslims do the same.
•  Of those that do care a lot about the war in the Middle East, there is not necessarily agreement. For example, some American Jews strongly support Israel doing whatever it deems necessary to defend itself. Others condemn Israel for putting in harm’s way many civilians.
• Americans who have done something as opposed to nothing have done different things: written letters to editors; vented on social media; spoken out at meetings or other gatherings; put up signs or posters supporting or denigrating one or another side; attended a march, protest or rally; donated money to their cause; or withheld money from an organization or institution they concluded had violated principles in which they deeply believed.
• Americans are divided on the war on the Middle East. But an overwhelming majority – 84% – are either very or somewhat concerned that the United States will be drawn into what at this writing remains still a confined conflict.

Finally let’s review the leaders. Here a sample:

• The President of the United States. You know you have a problem when your most immediate followers are among your most restive. This week more than 500 government officials representing some 40 government agencies signed a letter protesting the Biden administration’s Middle East policy.  Moreover public support for President Biden’s stance on the war is slipping, even among Democrats.   
• Other elected officials. Longtime, generally mild-mannered Senator Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, was booed at a vigil in Boston when he had the temerity to call for a “de-escalation of the current violence.”
• Appointed officials. None other than the relentlessly hard-working and publicly mild-mannered Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, faced dissent in his ranks. Some of his State Department underlings used the Department’s internal “dissent channel” to protest Blinken’s policy in the Middle East, which they viewed as too strongly pro-Israel.  He in turn felt the better part of valor was to assure his subordinates that, “we’re listening.”
• Presidents of colleges and universities. They’ve been on the frontlines since day one. Harvard’s newly minted president Claudine Gay is evidence. One of her predecessors, Larrry Summers, stated publicly that he was “sickened” by the university’s “silence.” Major Harvard funders Leslie and Abigail Wexner criticized Gay’s “tiptoeing” and “equivocating” on the war and announced they were cutting all ties to the University. Nor were students exempt – Harvard’s campus was sundered by student groups noisily, sometimes aggressively, attacking those who opposed them.
• CEO’s – if they said anything they usually were careful, very careful. Most statements coming out of corporate headquarters were anodyne – such as Microsoft’s, which condemned the “hatred and brutality;” Intel’s which said the company was taking steps to “safeguard and support” their workers; and JPMorgan’s, which called the war a “terrible tragedy.” There were exceptions – but by and large corporate leaders have become gun shy. For good reason. They know now that if they take a stance on anything that’s remotely political or controversial, they – and the companies they lead – will be vulnerable to attack.

Anyone say that leading in that America was hard?* In the past it was hard. In the present it is hard. And in the future it will be harder still.

Unless of course we elect a president who is a fascist – in which case no problem. Fascists don’t even bother to persuade us to do what they want us to do. They just force us to do it.

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*Barbara Kellerman, Hard Times: Leadership in America (Stanford University Press, 2015).

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There are none. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration. But it’s not hyperbole to say that among political leaders in China, women are now completely excluded from the top ranks.

The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and the Communist Party (CCP) that governs it has always been mostly male. From the founding of the PRC in 1949 under the leadership of Mao Zedong, through the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, then through the more stable and liberal decades of the 1980s and ‘90s, it was men who largely led China.

But in the last month, under the present president, Xi Jinping, China took another step back.  It eliminated all women from the next tier of power, the now 24-member Politburo.   

China is like the United States in that the higher up you go on any organizational or institutional pyramid the less likely you are to find a woman. But it is unlike the United States in that its patriarchal past and present is much, much more rigid than ours, its traditions much, much more deeply and tightly entrenched. Moreover, its cultural expectations are more demanding, women being disadvantaged at every turn, from early in their lives, straight through parenthood, and their mandatory, earlier-than-their-male counterparts, retirement.

Recently was a tableau that vividly depicted the subservience of Chinese women. The scene was the 13^th National Women’s Congress which took place last month in Beijing. At the close of the meeting, it was not a woman who spoke to the assembled, but a man. Mr. Xi. The president was nothing if not patronizing, telling the female delegates that what they should aspire to is not power, politics, and policy making, but cooking, cleaning, and baby making.

He did not of course put it so bluntly. But the president of China made clear that what China needed from women first and foremost was for them to get married and have a baby. To offset the growing demographic crisis – too many old people, too few young people to support them – he effectively told them it was their patriotic duty to find a husband and get pregnant.

Whatever the largely proforma previous support for women’s equality by China’s leaders, it was no more. It is the traditional values that are now being extolled, above all the benefits of family. This means that women deemed virtuous are expected to forgo their professional ambitions in order to provide a private service – a private service that is a public service.

Xi did not mince words. He told the female leaders in the hall of the Congress that they should “tell good stories about family traditions and guide women to play their unique role in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation.”

My reaction? I support family, I support fertility, and I support domesticity. But when these are prioritized to the point of excluding other satisfactions – such as those found in gaining indepence, securing work, and earning money outside the home – it does not bode well for women with ambition.  

I make many mistakes. But I don’t make the mistake of thinking that leaders have more impact than they do. I don’t make “the leader attribution error.” To the contrary, I repeatedly emphasize the importance of understanding leadership as a system with three equal parts: the leader, the followers, and the contexts.

But, to every rule there are exceptions. Sometimes followers are more important than leaders. Sometimes contexts are more important than either leaders or followers. And sometimes it is leaders who stand out – leaders who are so exceptional that they do explain what happens!  

Such is the case with the president of the United Auto Workers union, Shawn Fain. He’s the real deal. A leader who has an outsized impact on everyone and everything around him.

By consensus, the deal that was reached this week by the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Big Three automakers – General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis – was a “huge” win for the union. And, by consensus, it was also a “big” win for the UAW’s president, Shawn Fain.

Fain won big because of his means – his negotiating strategy was innovative and bold. And he won big because of his ends – his goals were, and are, ambitious and far-reaching.

Fain’s means included:

• Keeping the carmakers consistently off balance. For example, instead of immediately striking big, each of the carmakers in a single stroke, he struck small and sporadically. The Big Three never knew when or where their workers would walk out.    
• Being pointedly pugnacious – drawing sharp distinctions between employers and employees. He took on the issue of exorbitant CEO pay as well as the system more generally. “Billionaires,” he said, “in my opinion don’t have a right to exist.”
• Bringing in experts to compensate for where he was inexpert. For instance, he hired a media-savvy assistant who enabled Fain to provide weekly livestream updates and ensure that coverage of the talks, by old media and new, was ubiquitous. Similarly, he brought in a labor lawyer who was instrumental in the UAW’s biggest strategic departure – holding talks with the big three automakers simultaneously instead of sequentially.   

Fain’s ends included:

• Snagging the best contract for the UAW since at least the 1960s.  
• Securing large pay gains – a 25% pay increase over the next four and a half years – and cost of living increases.
• Guaranteeing the reopening of a 1,350-worker factory in Illinois that Stellantis had shut down earlier this year.
• Reversing concessions the union made during previous downturns, such as lower wage tiers for newer workers.
• Expanding the scope and heft of the labor movement far beyond Detroit.

The last could turn out the most important. We cannot yet know Fain’s enduring impact – including his impact beyond Detroit. What we can know is that his ambitions seemingly have no bounds. Upon securing his record-breaking contract, Fain declared the UAW’s victory “stunning.” And he pointedly invited “unions around the country to align” themselves with his own. “Hey,” Fain said, “strikes work, solidarity works, we’re more unified now than before the strike. I think that’s a powerful argument that unions can take elsewhere.”

Somewhat similarly, experts dismayed by the relentless march of inequity in this country, thought it possible that Fain’s success would have a wider impact. Writing in the New York Times, Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman wrote that “maybe, just maybe, union victories in 2023” – of which the UAW’s was much the most notable – “will prove to be a milestone on the way back to a less unequal nation.”  

In achieving his striking success (pun intended), Fain’s followers mattered. They willingly and even eagerly followed a leader who they believed was good. So did the context matter, the larger context within which Fain operated. The UAW benefited from an America that had a tight labor market, inflationary pressure, and a profitable recent run for the auto companies.

But make no mistake about it. Fain proved himself a remarkable leader. Arguably the most outstanding labor leader in this country in decades – and a worthy successor to his eminent predecessor, Walter Reuther.  Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers in the 1950s and ‘60s, built the union into one of the most powerful and progressive in American history. While Fain has a long way to go before matching Reuter’s record, for now the incumbent can legitimately claim to be the real deal. A leader who matters.