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In a recent article in The New Yorker, historian Jill Lepore criticized the January 6^th Report (issued by the House January 6^th Committee) for making it seem as if “Donald Trump acted alone and came out of nowhere.” As if “the rest of the country doesn’t even exist.”

My complaint precisely. Blame for the ridiculous reductionism lies, of course, not just at the doorstep of the January 6^th Committee. It also rests with commentators, even experts, who typically find it comforting and convenient to blame a particular single individual for whatever went wrong during his four years in the White House.

This ahistoricism came to mind again this week when it came out – no surprise, of course – that everyone who was anyone at Fox News knew they were lying when they insisted for months and then years on end that the 2020 presidential election had been won not by Joe Biden but by Trump. (Their bald-faced lies became hard evidence this week through a suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News.)

Why did Fox persist in its fabrications? Essentially for two reasons. Those at the network did not want to end on Donald Trump’s enemies list.  And they did not want to alienate their viewers, who happened to be one and the same as Trump’s base. Put differently, the leading players at Fox, both those on the air and in C-suites, lied and lied and then lied some more primarily for money. They were voraciously greedy.

In my book The Enablers I made clear that what happened during the Trump presidency was just not his doing. It was in consequence of many different players, followers, some of whom were so slavishly loyal to the president they were enablers. These included the folks at Fox about whom I wrote: “The relationship between Donald Trump and Fox News was as it had always been – symbiotic. Or reciprocal, or transactional, take your pick…. President Trump stood to gain politically from his access to Fox News. Fox News stood to gain financially from its access to Donald Trump.”   

So, this week’s big news about Fox was old news. It confirmed what we already knew – that the folks at Fox, the followers at Fox, were in Trump’s hip pocket to further line their own.

About twenty years ago, at the Harvard Kennedy School, Warren Bennis, David Gergen, and I co-taught a course titled “Leadership and Art.” Though for various reasons we offered it only once, I recall it as a wonderful experiment, equally enjoyed by faculty and students.

The course came to mind again yesterday when I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see a current exhibit, “Lives of the Gods: Divinity in Maya Art.” It reminded me again – if I needed reminding, which I did not – of how leadership and art are frequently, deeply, entwined. For so much art – visual, literary, auditory; from film to fiction; historical or contemporaneous – mirrors our own infinitely more mundane obsession with power.    

The Maya art now on display at the Met was crafted (A.D. 250-900) by master artists who, presumably, were ordered to depict the power of power. Their work weaves together the sacred and the secular in visualizations that, most memorably, are horrifying. In fact, this exhibit was an intellectual as well as visceral reminder of how “bad leadership,” in this case leadership intended to intimidate, is as old as the human condition.

Maya artists seemed to fixate on and excel at depicting gods and goddesses who had aggressive, warlike personalities. To be sure, the beautiful and benevolent are also in evidence, especially as they relate to fertility and fecundity. Moreover, sometimes the younger and weaker, followers, overcome the older and stronger, leaders.

But in the main, this Met show is a superbly imagined advertisement for the exercise of unabashed, unmitigated power. Power, if necessary, through the exercise of force. Power, if necessary, through human sacrifice: “ritualistic, dominion-fortifying public torture and killing, usually of political prisoners.”*

Lest this all seem dated, relevant to the distant past but not to the immediate present, it is not. It was only yesterday that Vice President Kamala Harris publicly accused Russia of committing “crimes against humanity” in Ukraine. So much for art, including ancient art, consigned to the side.  

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Within a few hours of me posting my previous piece, “Women Leaders Leaving,” Susan Wojcicki, announced that she was stepping down as chief executive officer of Youtube, a job she’s held for nine years.  

Of itself this would not be especially worthy of comment. But given the announcement of her retirement was in the immediate wake of Nicola Sturgeon’s, and given women leaders are being depleted in Silicon Valley, it’s worth noting.    

Even setting aside the special case of Elizabeth Holmes, the onetime CEO of the onetime Theranos, who crashed in a crash of her own making, in recent years, among others Sheryl Sandberg left her top role at Meta; Meg Whitman left hers at Hewlett-Packard; and Ginni Rometty hers at IBM. As the New York Times summarized it, in the recent past the tech industry “has lost a raft of women leaders who broke barriers, with few obvious female successors in sight.” Which again raises the question: given all the efforts made to change the equation, to fix the situation, why. Why are women leaders so stubbornly few in number?

Though we continue to refuse to acknowledge it, the answer seems to me to be clear. It’s not for lack of trying – trying to remedy the imbalance by doing everything from deliberately mentoring and sponsoring to deliberately socializing, modifying, and diversifying. Rather it’s because the higher women climb on the leadership ladder the more apparent become the physiological and psychological differences between them and men. Unless and until these differences are acknowledged and addressed, there will be progress, more women leaders than there were before. But progress will continue painfully, and puzzlingly, slow.        

I have long maintained that women and men are physiologically and psychologically different. And that these differences necessarily have an impact on why so few women are still, even now, at the top of the leadership ladder.

This is not to say the more conventional explanations, such as explicit or implicit bias, are irrelevant or unimportant. It is to point out that if women are in important ways irretrievably different from men, it’s inconceivable the distinctions have no implications.

This came to mind again yesterday, when Nicola Sturgeon announced that she would resign as First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party. The speech in which she announced her decision bore strong resemblance to Jacinda Ardern’s when she made a similarly surprising announcement only a month ago. In Ardern’s case she said that within weeks she intended to resign as Prime Minister of New Zealand.    

Both women are embedded in complex political situations which clearly influenced their decision to get out of politics, at least for now. Still, there is a more telling similarity between them – the freeness and frankness with which they spoke of the personal price paid by political leaders.

Ardern (in part):

I’m leaving because with such a privileged role comes responsibility – the responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and when you are not. I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple.   

Sturgeon (in part):

Only very recently, I think, have I started to comprehend, let along process, the physical and mental impact of [this job] on me…. If the question is, can I give this job everything it demands and deserves for another year, let alone for the remainder of this parliamentary term – give it every ounce of energy that it needs, in the way that I have strived to do every day for the past eight years, the answer, honestly, is [no].  

The numbers of variables here are high. So direct comparisons between the two women, and between the two women and two men similarly highly placed, are impossible. Still – whether for reasons of nature or nurture – both Ardern and Sturgeon had no qualms about saying that leading was utterly exhausting. And that they were, therefore, completely depleted. Their surprisingly similar admissons/conclusions could just be coincidence. But I am presuming not. I am presuming it’s related to why, after all these years of working the problem, the number of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, while higher than ever, remains still at a paltry, puny, ten percent.  

Postscript on an opposite note: This week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, age 89, finally announced her retirement (in two years, at the end of her term) from the Senate. Feinstein, a woman leader who was a path breaker, should have left in a blaze of glory. Instead, because she clung to her post too long, into her dotage, and into senility, her departure will simply be sad.        

Followers as I define them have little or no power, authority, or influence. This in contrast to leaders who have visibly more power, authority and, or, influence.

This definition of “follower” has several advantages, one of which is to make apparent that while people with no power, authority, or influence usually follow their leaders, they do not always follow their leaders. Sometimes followers defy their leaders, refusing to go along with what they want and intend. It’s why followers matter. They matter because leaders cannot count on them, always, automatically, to follow.

Examples of what I mean: The first is of followers who are following their leader. The second is of followers who are not following their leader – they are refusing to go along.

Follower Fodder  

I use the term “follower fodder” quite literally – for these followers are cannon fodder. They are Putin’s soldiers, men who by all accounts are being used by the Russian military as “storm troops.” As targets deliberately intended to draw fire to identify where the enemy, Ukrainian soldiers, is located. In other words, on the orders of their superiors these troops are throwing themselves deliberately and directly into harm’s way.

Given Russia lacks the hardware necessary to guarantee a victory over Ukraine, Putin is relying on overwhelming manpower to accomplish his war aims. Most of Russia’s conscripts are inexperienced, poorly trained, and ill equipped. Many are former convicts, sprung from prisons and recruited from penal colonies. It is their numbers, though, their sheer numbers, that tell the story. Russia has already deployed about 320,000 soldiers in Ukraine. Moreover, an additional 150,000 men are preparing to enter battle, and there are another half million waiting, ready if necessary to join the offensive. Already some 200,000 Russians have been killed or wounded in the war – a number likely to escalate exponentially.      

Do soldiers such as these – followers such as these – have a choice? A choice other than to do what they are told to do? Other than to obey orders given by their superiors?

This post is not intended to address questions like these. It is intended only to point out that some followers follow to the death. Including their own.

Follower Power  

Other followers refuse to follow. To be clear: I am not for a second equating the well over one hundred thousand Israelis who just took to the streets to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to revamp the Israeli judiciary with Russian soldiers. The overarching context is entirely different, as are the specific situations within which these two sets of followers find themselves. The former, Russian soldiers, are by no stretch of the imagination free agents. The latter, Israelis in opposition to the current government, are.

Still, the mass opposition rally in Israel earlier this week was composed of those who can broadly be described as ordinary people. They had been organized by a coalition of civil society groups, and heartened by prominent individuals at home and abroad who have spoken out forcefully against what the government was intending to do to the courts. Finally, Israel is still a democracy, so it still matters that public opinion is clearly against Netanyahu and his allies in parliament.

Given the extreme differences between Putin’s Russia and Netanyahu’s Israel, why even discuss Putin’s pliable, pitiable soldiers and Netanyahu’s resistant, recalcitrant protesters in a single post? Because it is precisely these contextual or situational differences that remind us of the similarities.

• History always matters.
• Ideology always matters.
• Technology always matters.
• Culture always matters.
• Education always matters.
• Organization always matters.
• Socialization always matters.
• Connection always matters.

The history of the Holocaust is stamped onto the fabric of Israeli society. Many Jews – not only in Israel but the world over – equate the famous phrase “Never Again” with never again allowing anyone anywhere to push them around. Ergo, they are quick to protest, strongly and unremittingly, against an idea, an individual, or an institution they believe is wrong.

Russians have no analogous history. In this sense, they are the opposite of Israelis. In their DNA is obedience to authority – whether in Tsarist Russia, Stalin’s Soviet Union or, now, Putin’s Russia. Russians have no significant experience with democracy, no relevant ideology, and no political culture to encourage anyone anywhere in the country to stand up and speak out. Moreover those that dare to do so – Alexei Navalny is the most famous and certainly among the most tragic examples – are severely punished. This explains the obvious: soldiers as follower fodder. It also explains the less obvious: why while many Russians have fled their country in the last year, the overwhelming majority have accommodated themselves to an unjust, unnecessary war that their president started and is hellbent on continuing. Notwithstanding the copious amounts of blood already shed on what he claims is his soil.

Last July l posted this piece about Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan:

Since then, while Turkey’s economy had been in decline, not much of significance was different. Erdogan remained the same chameleon-like leader I earlier described – neither at home nor abroad was he changing his now autocratic ways. He had been, after all, leader of Turkey for two decades. So why should he mess with what long had been an inconsistent but nevertheless proven formula for political success – notwithstanding an uncertain presidential election upcoming in May?

Then things changed. Not everything changed. Not the leader, Erdogan. Not his followers, much if not most of the Turkish electorate. It was the context that changed. The context within which the leader and his followers were situated changed in an instant – from being one thing to being something else entirely. To being a nation stricken. There can be no more vivid example of the importance of context than Turkey now. Turkey’s political climate and economic prospects are entirely different six days after the earthquake – in which some 25,000 Turks died and another tens of thousands were injured – than they were before tragedy struck.*

Erdogan was likely to win reelection in May, though it was not certain. After all his years in power, whatever was once his halo had long ago faded and his political enemies were purportedly intent on joining forces finally to defeat him. But Erdogan is a tough, seasoned autocrat – he would have been hard to unseat.   

Now, though, anger against Erdogan for what seems his dereliction of duty continues to mount – anger that by May will be difficult though not impossible to mute. There are three charges against him. First, that in the quake’s immediate aftermath help was slow to come and woefully inadequate. Second, that for many years preparations for another seismic event – which, given Turkey’s multiple quake hot spots, had long been predicted – were poor to nonexistent. And third, related to the second, was corruption. That much of the money allocated to quake mitigation went not into enforcing and re-enforcing Turkey’s building codes and infrastructure, but into lining the pockets of corrupt officials.    

Autocratic leaders hog credit when things go right. But their level of control is not total. So, when things go wrong, especially when they go horribly wrong, they cannot escape all blame.

But Erdogan is nothing if not wily – and he has friends or at least allies in high places, in the East and in the West.  Moreover, the presidential elections are not now. They are in May – or, at least, they were originally scheduled to be held in May. Who knows what will happen between now and then? Which is why, notwithstanding Turkey’s mood of the moment – full of anger, replete with grief – Erdogan’s political opponents still have their work cut out for them.       

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*The earthquake also struck areas of Syria. Those in affected areas are suffering especially cruelly, given the malevolent dispositions of their leader, Bashar al-Assad.  

When I was a graduate student at Yale University – in the prehistoric age, the 1970s – there was no such thing as leadership studies. In fact, the words “leader” and “leadership” were not even in my department’s lexicon. Business schools covered “executives” and “managers,” and “management” was one of their important areas of study. But my field, political science, abjured the idea that individuals could and sometimes did make a big difference.    

Even back then I wondered why this was the case, when it seemed obvious that from time to time at least were “great men” – I’m leaving the semantics aside – who had a great impact on how history was made. More specifically, they were as, or even more responsible for what happened than anyone else or anything else.

I write this as someone who has spent years focusing not only on the importance of leaders but of followers. And not only on the importance of leaders and followers but of the contexts within which they’re located. Still, our misguided and mistaken aversion to personalizing politics, specifically to ascribing to one individual the power to determine outcomes persists. It’s almost weird, as if to bestow such explanatory power on one person is unsettling.     

I was glad, therefore, to see that Robert Kagan, one of our shrewdest observers of the so-called world order, made the point in his recent piece in Foreign Affairs* He writes about how the world is periodically exploded by “the brutal realities of international existence” – as it was when Putin invaded Ukraine.  

Kagan:

Events have forced Americans to see the world for what it is, and it is not the neat and rational place that the theorists have posited. None of the great powers behave as the realists suggest, guided by rational judgments about maximum security. Like great powers in the past, they act out of beliefs and passions, angers, and resentments. There are no separate “state” interests, only the interests and beliefs of the people who inhabit and rule states.” (Bolding mine.)

It’s clearly hard for us to attribute to a few individuals – leaders – wretched behaviors that can wreck our lives. It’s so much easier, for example, to say that “Boeing” was responsible for two fatal crashes of its 737 MAX airliners (one in 2018 and one in 2019) than to hold accountable the CEO at the time (Dennis Muilenburg) along with some of his underlings.

“Boeing” though is an abstraction. It is company. Similarly, Russia is an abstraction. It is a country. But… abstractions don’t make decisions. Companies don’t make decisions. Countries don’t make decisions. People do. Leaders do. So let’s get real. Let’s name names. Not just some of the time. All the time.

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*In the January/February 2023 issue.

The Chinese spy balloon.

It is said of Donald Trump that even he – blusterous, ostensibly manly braggard that he is – hated telling people face to face they were being laid off. Fired. Canned. Sacked. Dismissed. Why? For several good and obvious reasons: delivering bad news is unpleasant; delivering bad news is unpredictable; delivering bad news is time consuming; and sometimes, ofttimes, delivering bad news reflects badly not particularly on the receiver but on the deliverer.

Easy enough then to understand why in recent months countless employers told countless employees – employees in the hundreds of thousands – that their services were no longer necessary not in person but by email. So much easier for a superior to deliver such rotten news to a subordinate not face-to-face but online. So much less messy!

But imagine that you’ve worked at a company, for a company, for twenty years – or for that matter twenty months – and you discover from one moment to the next, electronically as opposed to personally, that your life as you knew it was over. That your means of support and your professional identity had just been summarily terminated. Who do you talk to and when? Who do you question and when? Who do you rail against and when? Who do you cry in front of and when? The question of “who” is urgent now because so many people now work remotely. So when they get bad news by e mail it’s not just they don’t have their managers to talk to, they don’t have anyone to talk to, at least not face to face. For likely as not when they found out they were sacked they were alone.

By now it’s well known that in recent months many companies, especially but not exclusively in the tech industry, told large numbers of people they were being laid off by e mailing them. How efficient. How deficient. The word “inhumane” comes to mind – which might seem hyperbolic but you get my point. My point is that telling someone that by the time they finished reading their emails they already are out of a job is other than humane, which makes it inhumane.

In my book, Bad Leadership, I described a certain type of bad leader as callous. Callous leaders are “uncaring or unkind.” They ignore or discount “the needs, wants, and wishes” particularly of their subordinates. Leaders who fire by e mail fall into this category – they are callous. Not only are they dismissing someone, presumably permanently, they are doing so out of hand, easily and efficiently as opposed to carefully and considerately.   

What recourse do followers (employees) have for leaders (employers) who are callous? Acting alone is not the answer. Acting in tandem is.

Unions anyone?

For months if not years we’ve been obsessed with Elon Musk. Of all America’s corporate leaders, it’s this particular genius and narcissist on whom we fixate.

But, interestingly, ironically, the characters at Disney are far more compelling. There’s a gaggle of them. A gaggle of leaders as gladiators, each taking on the other in a years-long fight for supremacy at one of America’s most storied companies.

The Cast

• Bob Iger. By all accounts Iger is a genial man long known as one of America’s most respected and successful corporate executives. He was CEO of Disney from 2005 to 2020. But, instead of slipping quietly into permanent retirement, just a couple of years after he stepped down Iger was asked by the board to retake the reins. To which he immeidately if not eagerly replied yes. So, for now, Bob Iger is, again, chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Company.
• Bob Chapek. During his long tenure, Iger did almost everything right. One thing he did not however do right, or smart, was to select a successor. After months of uncertainty Bob Chapek finally took over from Iger in February 2020. To say that Chapek’s time at the top of Disney was troubled is to understate it. Chapek was a failure at public relations; he became embroiled in political controversy; and he was less than stellar at running the business. After less than three years as Disney’s chief executive officer, late last year, Disney’s board gave Chapek the boot.
• Ron DeSantis. DeSantis is governor of Florida. Florida is the state in which Disney has one of its most iconic holdings, Walt Disney World Resort. DeSantis, a top Republican presidential contender, decided it was in his political interest to take on Disney, specifically Chapek, especially but not exclusively in the culture wars over race, gender identity, and abortion. Chapek did not, shall we say, handle it well, and when Iger returned tensions between the governor and the company diminished. But make no mistake: DeSantis enjoys toying with Disney.
• Abigail Disney. Walt Disney was Abigail’s great uncle, and she remains a Disney shareholder. Of itself this means little. But she has parlayed her last name and her strong political passions into the role of corporate gadfly. She rose to prominence in 2019 when she publicly took on CEO Bob Iger’s $66 million pay package. Since then, she has continued to play the self-appointed but nevertheless intermittently effective role of left-leaning activist, who says things like, “corporate boards are populated by people who are CEOs or would like someday to be CEOs and are loyal to the class they … identify with.” At Disney, Abigail Disney has no formal power or authority. But she does have influence, not a lot, but some.
• Nelson Peltz. Disney shares plummeted last year. Add to that the fiasco at the top – Chapek dumped, Iger reinstalled – and you have a company ripe for the picking. Enter Peltz, one of America’s best known and most aggressive corporate activists, who last week embarked on a very public proxy fight with Disney’s management. Quickly it got ugly. Peltz insisted that he be given a seat on Disney’s board; Disney responded that Peltz has “no track record” with large media companies and no way merits the seat he publicly covets. Peltz reminded everyone who was anyone that shareholder value at Disney had tanked. Disney defended its past acquisitions and touted its future cost-cutting and succession planning.

Think of it! Bob Iger humiliated Bob Chapek. Bob Chapek fought with Ron DeSantis. Ron DeSantis ripped into Walt Disney. Abigail Disney assailed the lot at the top. And now Nelson Peltz is dragging Mickey and Minnie through the mud. Not a pretty picture. But if you’re interested in corporate America, and gripped by leaders as gladiators, it’s compelling viewing.