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On February 2^nd, Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, resigned from his post. More accurately, he was fired. Fired by his superior, Jason Kilar, CEO of CNN’s parent company, TimeWarner.

Ostensibly Zucker was dismissed for what was deemed an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate. Speculation though is that he was canned not because of his romantic relationship, but rather because of his professional relationship with Chris Cuomo. Cuomo is the former CNN anchor who himself was finally fired because he was entangled in the scandal involving his brother, then Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo.

Then again, maybe Zucker was fired for a different reason altogether. Maybe he was pushed out not because of his relationship with Allison Gollust, or because of his relationship with Chris Cuomo. Maybe it was because WarnerMedia is set to merge with Discovery, and Zucker is somehow inconvenient as the nuptials are soon to take place. Or, maybe it was because Kilar was – at another time in another place – subordinate to Zucker and this was Jason getting even with Jeff. Or, here’s another theory: it was Gollust who was mainly at fault, for being too amenable to the demands of Governor Cuomo, for whom, oh by the way, she had previously worked.

But, counterintuitively, this post about bad leadership at CNN is not primarily about Zucker. It’s primarily about Kilar. It’s about what Kilar has done, and not done in the immediate wake of Zucker’s departure.

Right now, CNN is rudderless. It’s been rudderless since Zucker left. This has already had three bad outcomes. First, several of the company’s leading lights, specifically star anchors such Jake Tapper, have let it publicly be known they are furious at Zucker’s departure. Second, the all-important launch of CNN’s new streaming service, CNN+, is supposed to happen in the next month. This means that even if it has not been derailed, inevitably it has been disrupted. Third, since Zucker was temporarily replaced by three nonentities – Michael Bass, Amy Entelis, and Ken Jautz – CNN is, at this critical moment, effectively without a proven leader at the helm.

Nothing against Bass, Entelis, or Jautz. Rather it is to say that if Kilar was going to fire Zucker from one moment to the next, he should have prepared. He should have prepared by being ready to replace him with a single individual demonstrably capable of calming the roiling waters, shoring up the sagging troops, putting on a happy face, and shepherding the company to the next, critical, stage of its development.

Since this involves both a major merger and a major launch, CNN’s leadership vacuum is painful every which way. Whatever Zucker did or did not do, blame for this unfortunate interregnum falls squarely on Kilar’s shoulders.  

In the years I’ve been blogging, now six or seven or more, I’ve not, as I recall, repeated any titles. To this rule there is one exception.

The first in a series, many moons ago, was called, “Putin Patrol.” Since then, have been countless subsequent posts titled, “Putin Patrol… Continued….” – and now here’s another. The old KGB operative has not lost his touch. He still knows how to control a room.

For about a month now much of the world has pivoted on Putin’s axis. He has led; the rest, especially the West, has followed. The West has had no choice but to respond to Putin’s aggression, leaving it, us, in the uncomfortable position of playing the subordinate to Putin’s superior. Sure, the U.S. and NATO have strode and strutted, posed, and postured, to make us seem strong. But let’s be clear. Russia has been the actor, the West, including, ironically, Ukraine, has been the reactor.

Here though is the question. Up to now Putin has been the leader, and Biden and company the followers. But can the Russian count on his dominance to persist? Seems to me the answer is no. Seems to me the status quo can last only so long. And, seems to me once it gives way, so does Putin’s capacity to control.

President Vladimir Putin is virtually solely responsible for the recent crisis on the European continent. He has been the lead actor. But the situation he created cannot indefinitely endure. The risk for him is that when the earth moves, his power, authority, and influence will not be expanded but diminished.   

Richard Haass, president of the Council of Foreign Relations, was asked this weekend if he thinks Putin is a rational actor. Or is he crazy? Haass replied, “I don’t know.”

This week was an excellent example of the role reversal that I’ve I’ve been talking (and writing) about for years – the one where leaders follow and followers lead. It hardly ever happens in autocracies. But it does in democracies, all the time.

First the governors. Several announced this week they would eliminate most indoor mask mandate requirements, in some states beginning immediately. As New York Governor Kathy Hochul put it, the number of Covid cases was down and it was “time to adapt.” It’s worth pointing out the governors who lifted the mandates were flying in the face of the continuing recommendation of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, which still says masks should be worn indoors, period.    

Why then did these governors decide this week that enough was enough – that it was time in so far as possible to get back to normal? The most obvious reason, and the reason they claimed, was the science, which testified the number of Covid cases was down, and the Omicron variant less severe than first feared.

The less obvious but more important reason is political: the governors knew full well that people were getting fed up. That their constituents were getting so sick and tired of mask wearing they were beginning in growing numbers to flout the rules, to refuse to wear masks even when they were supposed to. In other words, the leaders did not lead, they followed.

Meantime a renegade group of hundreds of Canadian truckers was leading. Making their their leaders’ lives miserable by completely clogging the streets of Ottawa, Canada’s capital. Why the demonstrations? Because the truckers hated the vaccine mandate – “Freedom” was their rallying cry – and insisted it be lifted, immediately.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was caught flat-footed, initially claiming the protesters were merely a “small fringe minority,” whose demonstrations were “unacceptable.” Ottawa’s mayor was beside himself, virtually begging for mercy as he called the truckers’ protests “the most serious emergency our city has ever faced.” Nor were Canadian leaders the only ones scrambling. The protests were contagious – leading to similar such resistance in France, Australia, and New Zealand, for example. And they were impactful. Because the truckers had completely blocked key choke points, most obviously between Canada and the United States, they had an almost immediate impact on business and industry, especially carmakers, some of whom were forced in short order to slow down or even shut down.

Will the truckers be brought to heel by Trudeau? Not bloody likely. To get the former to fall into line the latter will have to give them some sort of significant benefit – or threaten some sort of significant punishment. The truckers will not simply cave. Trudeau can not simply cave.

When Viktor Frankenstein created the monster, “Frankenstein,” Viktor thought he was doing good. Creating something new and exciting that would accrue not just to his benefit but to that of science. What even this most learned of men did not understand was that his humanoid would soon become an independent agent with his own mind. Who could and would do what he wanted when he wanted.  It was not long before Frankenstein could not be controlled by anyone – not even by the man who created him.

Think of Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell as 21^st century Viktor Frankensteins. They are not the only ones, but they are typical of the breed. A breed that in my book, The Enablers, I call ”enablers.” For the monster Pence, McConnell, and others of their ilk created is every bit as uncontrollable as the original Frankenstein. His name of course is Donald Trump.

In The Enablers I wrote that once Pence signed on with Trump, he had no choice. Pence had to accept without even a murmur Trump’s complete supremacy. Though it might have seemed unseemly – especially since he wanted one day to run for president himself – for Pence to play the perennial lapdog, the abject underling, so long as he was vice president, he was boxed in. “Trump’s demand for, need for, fealty was absolute, so before all else it was Pence’s fulltime job to fall into line.” If there was an organizing theme to Pence’s vice presidency, it was that he must never give offense to a man whose “emotional antennae quiver at every slight.” Pence was an enabler – a follower who allowed or even encouraged a leader, in this case an American president, to engage in and persist in behaviors that were destructive.

One might argue that for Pence it came with the territory. Vice presidents are supposed to be subordinate to presidents. Not so though senators. They are members of another branch of American government, the legislative branch, and their term of office is six years. So, ostensibly, not only are they are separate from the executive their long term in office protects them from the prevailing political wind.  

No matter. Though he had long been a power player in his own right, and though his personal disdain for Trump had long been an open secret, McConnell nevertheless enabled Trump throughout virtually the entirety of his presidency. Writing in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer called the senator Trump’s “enabler in chief.” I noted there was a moment at which McConnell’s support for Trump was pivotal. More than anyone else it was he, then majority leader, who protected the president from political harm during the first of his two impeachment trials. So zealous an enabler was McConnell that he precluded even a single witness from testifying at Trump’s impeachment trial, thereby effectively ensuring the president would serve out his term unimpeded.

This past week Pence finally declared that Trump was “wrong” to insist that he, Pence, had the right to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And, this past week, McConnell finally declared Republican attacks on two of their own, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both fierce critics of Trump, were inappropriate and wrongheaded.    

Too little too late? Well, better late than never. But let’s be clear.

• Frankenstein came close to devouring the American body politic.
• It was types like Pence and McConnell that gave him license to do so.  

Did your eyes well up when you saw that handshake? You know which one. The one we witnessed yesterday – Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping shaking hands like the oldest and dearest of friends. I don’t know about you. But their declaration of affection near melted my heart. Two dictators finding common cause. Lovely.

On January 5 I wrote the “leaders of the year,” last year, were autocrats. It was the autocrats who had a banner 2021 while their democratic counterparts struggled. The pattern continues. It cannot be good for the United States – or for that matter any democratic country anywhere in the world – when sworn enemies of democracy make common cause.

A joint statement issued this week by Russia and China accused the U.S. of stoking the earlier protests in Hong Kong – and now of destabilizing Ukraine. What else is new? Autocrats ganging up on democrats to protect their interests, this time Russia in Europe, especially in East Europe. This time China in Asia, not so much anymore Hong Kong, already under its thumb, but Taiwan, presumably next in line for a Chinese takeover.

The newly cozy relationship between the leaders of Russia and China is being set in an historical context, with the focus on Putin who thought it good idea to place 100,000 Russian troops along the Ukrainian border. This is being seen as his attempt to turn back the clock, to the heyday of the Soviet empire, when one of the Soviet Socialist Republics was Ukraine.  

But there’s another historical context that’s far more pertinent, much more relevant. It goes back to the time of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, both arch communists who bonded over what for a time they perceived as their shared interests. While Mao was in the wilderness, a Chinese Communist fighting the Chinese nationalists, Stalin was his role model. A revolutionary leader who was the quintessential communist – and who had triumphed over impossible odds to, along with his earlier comrades, Lenin foremost among them, transform Russia. So when Mao finally came to power in China in 1949, having defeated his enemies after a long and difficult struggle, he was only too happy to ally himself with Stalin.

In 1950 the two leaders signed a pact between their two countries: the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance. But, the good will between the two men, Mao, and Stalin, did not last long. Within a decade their relationship deteriorated – as did their alliance.

The marriage between Putin and Xi is exactly like the one between Stalin and Mao. Born not out of affection but out of convenience. Still, so long as it lasts, the tie between Moscow and Beijing will be nettlesome and, potentially, dangerous. If Americans care at all about their place in the world they, we, will have no choice but to keep a close eye on the happy couple.  

This will be my last post on bad leadership – for the moment. I will use it to pose ten critical questions that remain, however, to be answered. I have long lamented the fact that by and large the leadership industry avoids the subject of bad leadership. It is so focused on the promise of leadership development – on the promise of growing good leaders – that bad leadership, bad leaders, are effectively sidelined.

This is not to say that bad leadership is a subject more generally avoided. It is not. We hear and read stories about bad leadership all the time. There are, moreover, countless books and articles about bad leadership and, yes, films and plays about bad leadership. But nearly without exception they tackle the subject on a case-by- case basis. Articles here about how bad a leader is Mark Zuckerberg. Articles there about how bad a leader is Boris Johnson. Books here about how bad a leader was Kenneth Lay. Books there about how bad a leader was Joseph Stalin.  

This though is different from looking at bad leadership generically, as a thing to be explored and addressed of itself. There are numberless lists of what it takes to be a good leader. Which traits? Which skills? Which dispositions? Which behaviors? There is no equivalent for bad leaders. Other than my own typology – see my previous post – there is very little on bad leadership qua bad leadership.*

Which brings me finally to questions that linger. This list is not, obviously, complete. It is intended only to indicate how long and tortuous the path still ahead. Still, notwithstanding “long,” and notwithstanding “tortuous, ” it is a path that remains, in my view, to be taken.

• How should bad leadership be defined?
• Does “bad” refer to being unethical, or ineffective? Or, does it necessarily refer to both? Is it possible to have a leader who is good along one of the two all-important axes (effective/ineffective), and bad along the other (ethical unethical)?
• What do we do with our differences of opinion – with the fact that my bad leader might be your good leader?
• What about bad leadership do we most need to know? What should be at the top of our research and teaching agendas?
• What are the roles of country, culture, and context in understanding bad leadership? Are conceptions of bad leadership in China fundamentally different from those in the United States?
• Similarly, do our conceptions of bad leadership change over time? Do we think of bad leadership differently now from how we did at the turn of the last century? How about the turn of the century before that?
• What about bad followership? How important is bad followership to bad leadership? Does the answer to this question depend on the situation? Or is there an absolute rule that applies to the relationship between leaders and followers, in particular when the leader is bad?
• If followers do matter, should we try as hard to develop good followers as good leaders?
• Does bad leadership happen suddenly, effectively overnight? Or is the process sometimes, or even often, slow, insidious precisely because it is incremental?
• If leaders are not angels, how do we stop them from getting to the point of being bad?
• If leaders already are bad, how do we stop them from getting worse?

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*To this rule there are handful of exceptions. See especially Jean Lipman-Blumen’s book, The Allure of Toxic Leadership (Oxford, 2005), and, a more recent volume edited by Anders Ortenblad, titled Debating Bad Leadership (Palgrave, 2021). It should also be noted that in the extensive literature on Nazi Germany are some important books on bad leaders – and bad followers.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place to control itself.

                                                                James Madison, #51 in The Federalist Papers

The Federalist Papers were written and published in 1787 and 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. Their purpose was to urge New Yorkers to ratify the proposed U.S. Constitution. They are considered one of the great political treatises of all time, men trying to wrestle theory into practice, trying to establish a government free from tyranny but nevertheless functional, able to “control the governed.”

If The Federalist Papers have a single line that defines them – that summarizes the fundamental assumption on which they are based – it is this one. “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” For it lays bare in the starkest possible terms that Hamilton, Jay, and Madison did not think men angels, did not they could be trusted, did not think they could be counted on to be good leaders, or followers, without checks and balances and the rule of law to control them. Without checks and balances to minimize the likelihood that too much power would be in the hands of one man, or one branch of government. And without the law to threaten punishment lest the checks and balances fail.

This phrase alone – “if men were angels” – is the most powerful possible evidence that how we think about leadership and followership is, or it should be, dictated by how we think about the nature of man, of humankind. If we believe that humans are fundamentally good, this would suggest either that no government of any kind is necessary, or that government can be loose to the point of being largely laissez-faire. If, conversely, we believe that most people cannot be trusted, are not angels, this would suggest something else entirely. It would suggest that constraints and controls of some sort must be established lest the disarray end in despotism. In The Prince Machiavelli made plain he thought men by nature were “ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly and covetous.” No wonder he advised the prince it was better to be feared than loved!   

If men and now women are not angels, leaders are not angels. Not leaders in government, nor leaders in business, nor leaders anywhere else. This is not to say that leaders necessarily are bad. Rather it is to say that we cannot count on them to be good.

This returns us to the question of what do we do with what we know. I raised it in an earlier post on bad leadership (January 31), in which I compared it to climate change. That is, we know it exists, we know that bad leadership, like climate change, is real. But we seem unable to do anything much about it. Which does not make the questions about bad leadership any the less urgent. Above all these two: If we cannot count on leaders to be good, how do we stop them from getting to the point of being bad? And, if they are already at the point of being bad, how do we stop them from getting worse?

I will return to these questions in a later post. Here I will simply say that task one is to come to grips with, to begin to understand, just what it is we’re talking about when we say, “bad leadership.” Setting aside the semantic arguments about words like “leader” and “leadership,” there are the differences in how “bad” is defined. In many cases you and I are likely to agree that a leader is bad; in many other cases you and I are likely to disagree. For “bad” is often in the eye of the beholder, vulnerable to be subjectively felt as opposed to being objectively right and good and true.  

Whatever the complexities, in my first major work on this topic – a book published in 2004, titled Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters – I developed a typology that still works well. I divided bad leadership into seven different types, with which some readers of this post will already be familiar. They are:

1. Incompetent Leadership – The leader and at least some followers lack the will or skill (or both) to sustain effective action. Regarding at least one important leadership challenge, they do not create positive change.
2. Rigid Leadership – The leader and at least some followers are stiff and unyielding. Although they may be competent, they are unable or unwilling to adapt to new ideas, new information, or changing times.
3. Intemperate Leadership – The leader lacks self-control and is aided and abetted by followers who are unwilling or unable effectively to intervene.
4. Callous Leadership – The leader and at least some followers are uncaring or unkind. Ignored or discounted are the needs, wants, and wishes of most members of the group or organization, especially subordinates.
5. Corrupt Leadership – The leader and at least some followers lie, cheat, and, or steal. To a degree that exceeds the norm, they put self-interest ahead of the public interest.
6. Insular Leadership – The leader and at least some followers minimize or disregard the health and welfare of “the other” – that is, those outside the group or organization for which they are directly responsible.
7. Evil Leadership – The leader and at least some followers commit atrocities. They use pain as an instrument of power. The harm done to men, women, and children is severe rather than slight. The harm can be physical, or psychological, or both.

These seven types of bad leadership are not of course etched in stone. Nevertheless, they are intuitively as well as empirically indicative. Indicative of the fact that leaders are not angels – which is precisely why the devil in them, in us, must be grist for our mill.

Perhaps it’s coincidence, perhaps not. Either way it was noteworthy when two recent columns in two prominent papers took on the same subject at the same time: bad leadership. Bad leadership not in the political realm but in the corporate one. Both columns were about leaders who were good at leading in business but bad at leading more generally. At assuming significant or even modest responsibility for society at large.*

The underlying questions are not new: Have capitalism – and, concomitantly, the masters of the universe – run amuck? Have they in the last half century led us to a place of such inequity in wealth – a handful at the top unimaginably rich and the rest of us far, far less rich, or maybe not at all rich, or maybe even poor – that it, capitalism, and they, corporate leaders, can no longer be defended? Further, can it reasonably be claimed that market inefficiencies and inequities – the rampant unfairness – are in good part to blame for the dangerous tribulations of liberal democracies?

What distinguishes the articles to which I refer is that the questions they raise pertain particularly to leaders.  The first is by Peter S. Goodman, whose piece for the New York Times is titled, “C.E.O.s Were Our Heroes… At Least According to Them.” The leader he especially takes on is Salesforce’s Marc Benioff who, as Goodman correctly observes, has long depicted himself as a leader who is singularly enlightened. Indeed, Benioff claims a special place in heaven for business leaders generally, describing them, apparently with a straight face, as the guardians of human progress. “In the pandemic, it was C.E.O.s in many, many cases all over the world who were the heroes,” Benioff said. “They’re the ones who stepped forward with their financial resources, their corporate resources, their employees, their factories, and pivoted rapidly – not for profit but to save the world.”

To Benioff’s assertion there is some truth. Still, it is equally true he seems oblivious to how much he personally has benefited from public goods and services, and to how little he and others of his ilk have had to sacrifice. The fact that leaders like Benioff pay so little (or even nothing), certainly relatively, in taxes, means they effectively starve governments at the federal, state, and local levels of the resources they need even to begin to level the playing field.  Benioff then, far from being socially enlightened, a force for good in the world, is instead, Goodman charges, “an enabler, a beneficiary and a custodian of the world as it is.” In this Benioff is like other rich-as-Croesus corporate leaders: In theory, in his head, enlightened. In practice, in the real world, not so much. Or not at all.

The second article calls on leaders to refrain from refraining from politics. This one, titled “Business Leaders Have to Play a Better Political Role,” is by Martin Wolf, a regular columnist for the Financial Times. Unlike Goodman, Wolf does not single out anyone. Instead, he takes on corporate leaders as a class that should no longer, can no longer afford to stay on the sidelines of democratic discourse.

Wolf makes the critical connection between capitalism and democracy. Essentially, he argues that if we permit the former to run amuck, it will have devastating consequences for the latter.  Wolf points out that business leaders are highly influential in setting public policy in areas such as company and competition law, financial and environmental regulation, and, of course, in taxation. But their influence is not objectively grounded, it is subjectively driven. Driven not necessarily entirely but largely by self-interest, their own interests and those of the companies they lead. The result of this imbalance of power and influence is a highly unequal distribution of rewards and, at the same time, a shift of risks onto the backs of ordinary people.   

Wolf is a capitalist. He believes in capitalism and makes clear he considers it superior to other economic systems. At the same time, he now sees capitalism, especially but certainly not exclusively in the U.S., as badly in need of repair. Again, his column was written with private sector leaders in mind – leaders who should ask themselves these questions:

• What am I as in influential individual, business leader and member of business organizations doing to increase the capacity of my country and the world to make sensible decisions in the interest of all?
• Am I mainly lobbying for special tax and regulatory treatment for our own benefit or am I supporting political action and activities that will bring the people of my divided country together?
• Am I prepared to pay the taxes that our success makes justifiable, or am I exploiting every loophole that allows me to assign profits to tax havens that have contributed nothing to our success?
• What am I, my business, and the organizations I am part of doing to discourage online harms, corruption, money laundering and other forms of dangerous and indeed criminal activity?
• What am I doing to support laws that will bring accountability to rogue business organizations and their leaders? What, above all, am I doing to strengthen the political systems on which successful collective action depends?

Far be it from me to lay blame for everything that has gone wrong with capitalism and democracy entirely at the feet of leaders. This is a systemic issue, with blame, or responsibility, to go around. I include in the mix followers, ordinary people, and changes in the context, especially in technology, that make sustaining healthy capitalism and viable democracy newly difficult.  

Still, leaders, all leaders, must be held accountable. Ideally governments, political leaders, should be fixing what ails us. They should be addressing the harm that capitalism as currently constituted inflicts on democracy. But, alas, they are not, certainly not in the United States, up to the task. In fact, in good part it is they who are responsible for why we are where we are. Moreover, they give us no reason to expect they will, they can, perform better in the near future than they did in the recent past.

Which brings us back full circle – to business leaders. Especially those with outsized power and influence. Am I, along with Wolf, being naïve in believing they can change? Is it too much to expect they will assume greater responsibility for society, for a healthy democracy and a balanced economy, than they have up to now?

This much is in any case sure. If corporate leaders remain on the sidelines, content to dabble in being responsible – their newfound proclivity for substituting the word “stakeholder” for “shareholder” does not quite cut it – Houston, we have a problem. It’s one thing to have bad leadership in one realm. It’s another to have it across the board.  

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*The link to Peter Goodman’s article is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/business/davos-man-marc-benioff-book.html  The link to Martin Wolf’s column is here: https://www.ft.com/content/4b844f8b-4906-46b4-81e5-059a4d8d4eb6 .The italicized questions are quoted from Wolf’s column.

Is it just me or is there a similarity between bad leadership and climate change? By this I mean in both cases is widespread agreement they exist, are real. But, in both cases our capacity to address the problem, the threat they pose, is so limited that meaningful change has been, continues to be, impossible.

Climate change is at least being discussed. It’s on the agenda, a matter of public policy in many if not most countries around the world. Still, our individual and collective capacity meaningfully to take it on so far has been too little and too late. Human nature is such that climate change remains – and is likely to continue to remain – a frightening problem with no solution.

I now think of bad leadership in the same way. It’s not as if we’re in denial. Though our definitions of what constitutes bad leadership differ – a problem of itself – people do not disagree it exists, and they do not disagree it is, or at least it can be, a threat to the general welfare. In fact, ironically, we’re obsessed with bad leadership, be it who we see as our bad boss or our bad president. Still, for all the bitching and moaning about bad leadership our ability to take it on usually is no match for the task at hand. We have a hard time coming to grips with bad leadership – and an even harder time doing something about it.

Consider the case of Lebanon. Beirut was once known as the “Paris of the Middle East.” In recent years, however, the city, the country, have been in free-fall. This past week the World Bank issued a report that described Lebanon as being in crisis, as being on the precipice of becoming a failed state. Key pillars of the political economy have disintegrated. Basic services have collapsed. The level of political discord has been debilitating. And there has been a massive brain drain, leaving the poor and middle class behind, victims of what happened.

Did this calamity come about of its own? It did not. It was in direct consequence of bad leadership. According to the World Bank Lebanon Economic Monitor: “Lebanon’s deliberate depression is orchestrated by the county’s elite that has long captured the state and lived off its economic rents. This capture persists despite the severity of the crisis – one of the top ten, possibly top three most severe economic collapses worldwide since the 1850s.”

It is not as if the Lebanese people have been passive in the face of the catastrophe.  As recently as October were massive protests, one of many in recent years, in this case leaving six dead. Still, public outrage has come to naught, the people too weak and divided effectively to challenge a leadership class riddled with corruption.   

There are exceptions to the general rule. Bad leaders – bad people in positions of authority – are sometimes held accountable. Recently, in a courtroom in Germany, two perpetrators of crimes against humanity from another Middle Eastern country, Syria, were found guilty. But verdicts like these are a drop in the proverbial bucket. In fact, in another grim irony of history, the chief Syrian culprit, the man mainly (though by no means solely) responsible for more than a half million Syrians dead since 2011, and more than half the country’s population displaced, President Bashir al-Assad, has not only been left personally unscathed he is being politically rehabilitated. As a scholar from Syria recently noted, writing in the New York Times, “In June, the World Health Organization appointed Syria to its executive board. Interpol readmitted Syria to its network in October. Algeria and Egypt have pushed to reinvite Syria to Arab League membership, and other Arab nations have gestured toward a rapprochement with Mr. al-Assad. And throughout, Mr. al-Assad’s relationship with Iran and Russia appears to have deepened.”

Is it that our memories are short? Is it that in time realpolitik supersedes the dictates of our conscience?  Or is it simply that all too often we are, or we feel we are, as helpless in the face of evil (bad leadership) as we are in the face of danger (climate change)?  

Clearly I refer not just to bad leaders in the Middle East but to bad leaders everywhere. In business as in government, in the United States as elsewhere in the world. Just yesterday former President Donald Trump flat out admitted that what he wanted after his defeat was for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election, which by all objective accounts was free and fair. Trump confessed, in other words, that his intention was to stage a successful coup. A successful coup against the U.S. government, a successful coup against the U.S. Constitution. In the history of the United States leadership has not been worse than that.    

This is not the first time I have lamented our collective inattention to bad leadership. For years I have charged the leadership industry specifically with benign neglect of precisely this sort. The question is at which point does the neglect become other than benign? At which point will we be individually and collectively responsible for our refusal to deal with the dark side?    

Brady has long been a leader, both on the football field and off it. He gets other people to follow not so much because of what he says, but because of what he does, what he is. How he lives his life as a person, as a player, and as a professional.

Similarly, Brady has long been a leader who lusted. Almost from the start of his singular career his lust for success – his unstoppable need to achieve – has been apparent. It explains what most mattered: his tireless willingness to sharpen his skills; his singular focus on playing the game; his fierce determination and endless ambition. Brady has been an exemplar of supreme athletic accomplishment for two reasons. First, he was naturally endowed with a great gift; second, he cherished his gift. He honed his natural talent, polishing, protecting, and nurturing it at every turn and with every fiber of his being.

Right now is rampant speculation about whether Brady is about to announce his retirement from the game. There is further speculation about why he would leave at this time, now as opposed to, say, a year from now. Most of this speculation settles on his wife and family – he is retiring because they, especially his wife Giselle, want him to retire.

But whenever Brady decides to hang it up will be not because of what someone else says or does. It will be because he has concluded his success on the field is no longer guaranteed or maybe even likely. Brady’s body has been an astonishment – but it is not immune to the diminishment and decline that inevitably accompany advancing age. Which is why when Brady feels his body can no longer be relied on – relied on to satisfy his unquenchable quest for success – he will quit playing football.