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In the 2010 film “The King’s Speech,” Colin Firth plays the future King George VI, who recognizes he must try to gain control over his lifelong stammer. Though he knew he would not be required to speak often – British royalty speaks publicly only infrequently – he understood how important it would be for him, as the king of England, to speak with authority during the national crisis that was Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, in 1939.  

American presidents have long understood their political system, in which power is divided among the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, requires they have the capacity to persuade. Theodore Roosevelt famously spoke of the “bully pulpit” – he knew the office of the presidency provided him with best possible perch for propagating his policies. Moreover now, in the third decade of the 21^st century – given the American people are especially fractious and contentious; and given the fierce competition among information, misinformation, and disinformation – the president’s ability to use his post to sell himself and his program is more important than ever.

Like all leaders, presidents can exercise influence in different ways. However, none are nearly as important as the capacity to communicate. In the case of the American president this communication is generally in the form of speech. Leaders speak. Ideally, followers listen. Not for nothing was Ronald Reagan called “the great communicator.” He was especially skilled at connecting with his audiences, informally and in prepared speeches, on television and in person. When it came to the spoken word, Reagan in his prime was pointed and adroit, sometimes spontaneous, usually charming, often funny.

For those among us who dread the idea of Republicans regaining control of Congress in 2022, not to speak of the White House in 2024, the fact that President Joe Biden is the opposite of the great communicator – he is instead a reluctant and poor communicator – is, or should be, of utmost concern. Biden virtually never faces a roomful of reporters, and he rarely even gives one-on-one interviews. Moreover, when he speaks, he usually reads from a script previously prepared.

What’s going on here? Why is this once famously loquacious leader now reduced to shying away from the people and the press except in the most rigidly controlled circumstances?  I don’t rightly know. But I assume he avoids public speaking because he and his aides are afraid. Afraid he will make a verbal gaffe, or factual error from which he will find it difficult if not impossible to recover.

I get it. Joe Biden is diminished in recent years. Since the death of his son Beau in 2015, he is not what he was once – a happy warrior. Still, the president must be more willing than he has been to take a rhetorical risk. Like George VI he must do what it takes to prepare himself, train himself if necessary, for speaking in public when the occasion demands. Which it often does. For Biden’s failure to use the bully pulpit to better effect will, I fear, cost him, and the American people, dearly.  

There is another, broader lesson here. In the third decade of the 21st century leaders in liberal democracies don’t have many arrows in their quiver. Those they do have must, then, be employed to maximum effect.

     

The leader who controls the narrative controls the country – or the company, or community, or the context or the culture. What is exactly is the narrative? In this case it’s the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Of course, being it’s a story it can change. Over time stories change. Over time stories change because we change them. More precisely, they get changed by leaders – or, sometimes, followers – with the power and/or influence to rewrite history.

We study history on the assumption it is written in stone, based on facts impossible to refute. But not only is a lot of history based not on facts but on fictions, a lot of history is vulnerable to being reframed, or reshaped. Reframed or reshaped sometimes to achieve greater accuracy – and sometime to achieve greater control.

In the last year the American narrative was twice over heavily pressured to change. First, former president Donald Trump has tried repeatedly to persuade the American people that what happened in the 2020 election is not that he lost, and Biden won, but that he won, and Biden lost. All Trump is doing is trying to control the narrative – which in this case would require rejecting the facts, denying the truth.

Second, is the recent but already impactful “1619 Project,” which demands the American people reframe history, so it starts not at the usual, traditional time, the year 1776, but instead in the year 1619. Since 1619 is when the first enslaved Africans landed in the English colony of Virginia, beginning the historical narrative then as opposed to 150 years later means weaving the consequences of slavery, and racism throughout the entirety of American history, of the American story.

The importance of controlling the narrative is not usually lost on clever leaders, especially not if they are persuaded that to control the present, they must control the past. Russia’s Vladimir Putin falls into this category. Just this week it became even clearer than before that his longing for the good old days, the days when Stalin ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist, has turned into a hunger. Apparently the Russian government is determined permanently to shut down the country’s most prominent human rights organization, Memorial International. Notably, the Memorial is specifically dedicated to preserving the archives of, the memories of, those who were persecuted by, tortured by, and liquidated by the totalitarian regime that ruled the Soviet Union from the late 1920s to the early 1950s.   

One could reasonably argue that in the long run the truth will emerge – or emerge again. But leaders hellbent on completely controlling the narrative don’t give a damn about the long run. It’s short run they care about – their time at the top, the longer the better.

“The Day the Music Died” is Don’s McLean’s phrase. He used it in his fabled 1971 song, “American Pie,” to refer to the sudden death, in 1959, in a plane crash, of three great American musicians, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and “The Big Bopper.”

The music died again, in a different way, four years later, on November 22, 1963. This was the day that President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. Though we could not know it then, his death signaled the end of the Age of American Innocence.

When John F. Kennedy was elected, in 1960, more than 73% of Americans said they trusted their government most or all the time. Since then, this figure has continued to decline, so that now only about 25% of Americans say they trust their government most or all the time. Moreover, we now have a sharp partisan divide, depending on who controls the presidency. This year more than 35% of Democrats said they trusted the government; among Republicans the figure was only 9%.   

What happened in the interim is impossible to explain only by looking at leaders. But leaders do matter – at least some of the time. So when leaders in the highest of places are lost, or for some reason ignominiously defeated, their followers, in this case the American people, are unsettled. When the loss is repeated, over and over again, they become unmoored.

• President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963.
• The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in April 1968.
• Presidential candidate, and brother of the slain president, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in June 1968.
• President Lyndon B. Johnson decided against running for a second full term in 1968. (Because he thought he would lose.)
• President Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974. (Because of the Watergate scandal.)
• President Gerald Ford was unable to win the White House in his own right in the election of 1976.
• President Jimmy Carter was unable to secure a second term in the election of 1980.

Had the two Kennedys and King not been murdered, things might’ve been different. Had Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter not had presidencies that in critical ways failed, things might’ve been different. We’ll never know. What we do know though is that for many years American’s most prominent political leaders were on a losing streak – however defined. No wonder while the music died once in 1959 and then again in 1963, it took well over a decade to declare it not only dead but buried. Buried for what turned out the indefinite future.    

Since at least the late 19^th century historians have argued about the role of the “Great Man” in history. More specifically, they have argued about the impact of single individuals, leaders, on the tide of human affairs.

On the one hand have been those who think history is shaped entirely by leaders, by men and, recently, occasionally, women who stand out. And on the other hand, have been those who think leaders are like everyone else – mere pawns in game of what happens.

But every now and then comes along a leader who wants desperately to shape the historical narrative. Who wants not only in this life to be all-powerful, but who wants forever to be remembered as a Great Man. Such a leader is China’s president, and chair of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping.

For Xi, as for others of his ilk, persuading his followers that he is a Great Man has two distinct virtues. First, it enables him in the here and now more easily to exercise power, authority, and influence. And second, it secures his place in history. Clearly Xi is planning not only to ensure his place for all eternity, but to enshrine it.      

To refer to Xi as having created a “cult of personality” is not to capture his accomplishment. Better to imagine him etching his name in the tablet of Chinese history. So long as there is a China, so long will he now be remembered, along with Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, as one of the greatest of China’s leaders ever.  

In the recently completed plenum of the CCP, not only was Xi himself elevated, but so, arguably more importantly, was his thought. His is now the “Marxism of contemporary China and for the 21^st century.” This means that until this maxim is undone, if it ever is, to attack him is to attack China’s national identity.

The CCP just issued its newest official history. More than a quarter of its over five hundred pages is devoted to Xi’s nine years in power. This is as clear a signal as any that for the indefinite future Xi will be at the center of Chinese political life, Chinese political thought, Chinese political education, and Chinese political culture. It also means that Xi is virtually immune from criticism, In one of the official accounts of the plenum it was stated that government officials must show “absolute loyalty to the core, resolutely defend the core, closely and constantly follow the core.” Finally, it means that so long as Xi wants to hold on to power, he will. At the Communist Party congress to take place next year, recent tradition will almost certainly be upended. Xi will be handed a third five-year term as party leader.  

The 18^th century historian and philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, was the most eloquent, and ardent, of the proponents of the Great Man Theory of History. “Universal History,” he wrote, “the history of what men have accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” Xi would agree.

In January 2019 I posted a piece about General Electric. As you can see if you click on the link, the point of the piece was the irony: the company that louder and longer than any other in the world had touted the virtues of leadership training and development, had been hoisted by its own petard. GE’s own leadership cadre was so feeble and feckless it led the company straight downhill.

Learning to Lead – Fiasco at General Electric

Now the final act: three days ago GE announced it will split into three different companies. This means that GE as we have known it, as it has been known worldwide for decades, is history.  

The Wall Street Journal covered the story extensively. It ran several pieces about GE’s descent, including one titled, “The Fall of the Colossus.” The article referenced the irony to which I refer – that GE had been led by leaders who were woefully deficient, notwithstanding its enormous investment in learning to lead.

But while financial journalist Jason Zweig acknowledged that “GE’s corporate culture prided itself on elevating management to a kind of science,” he never looked under the hood. He left unanswered the question of how it happened that a corporate culture so deeply dedicated to leadership development failed to develop good leaders. Leaders who, at least, were good enough to keep the ship afloat. In fact, Zweig’s phrase, the one that intimates that management might be a “kind of science,” is curious. Does he think that GE was simply misguided when it elevated management to a kind of science? Meaning that management is a kind of science – but one that GE managers never learned to master? Or is Zweig suggesting that the very idea of management as anything approximating a science is mistaken?

Questions like these matter because they have been asked for eons – but never been answered. And they matter because the leadership industry continues handsomely to profit from the proposition that it knows what it’s doing, and why it’s doing it.  

Once upon a time, though not so long ago and not so far away, when older leaders told younger followers what to do, they did it. Maybe not happily or even willingly, but by and large the young followed the lead of the old. Now, not so much. Now juniors have far fewer compunctions telling their seniors where to get off, telling them they’re mistaken or misguided, or stupid or maybe just obtuse.

Two examples:

First, the scene last week in Glasgow, at the major meeting on climate change. The week began with some 130 presidents and prime ministers posing for a group photo. Fewer than ten of them were women – and their median age was over 60. Small wonder the week ended very differently. It ended with boisterous protests, some 100,000 people, many women and girls, overwhelmingly young, taking to the streets to demonstrate against their seniors, their leaders, arguing loudly and energetically they were not acting smart enough or fast enough to slow global warming.

Second, what’s happening now at the office. Apart from the issue of who’s working from home and who from the office, there is this: a new and younger cohort of subordinates who question the antiquated ways of their often only slightly older superiors, especially their willingness to tow the company line and spend long hours on the job. Here a few points pulled from an article in the New York Times titled, “The 23-Year-Olds Want to Run Things.”

The generational fault line “crisscrosses industries and issues.” At a retail business in New York, managers were distressed to find young employees who wanted paid time off when coping with period cramps. At a supplement company a Gen Z worker questioned why she would be expected to clock-in for a standard eight-hour day if she was done with her to-do list by mid-afternoon. And across sectors and start-ups, the youngest members of the work force are demanding a shift from what was standard corporate neutrality to more pointed expressions of corporate values.  

On the one hand none of this is new. Younger people naturally resist older ones. Moreover, the shifting balance between leaders and followers, in favor of the latter over the former, has been going on for years. (See my 2012 book, The End of Leadership.) On the other hand, the impact of the pandemic has accelerated the trend. When those who want to “run things” – want to be leaders – are 23 years old, “The Times They Are A-Changin” even faster than when Dylan himself was a stripling.   

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All well and good for Dr. Deborah Birx to tell us now that Donald Trump’s White House had “gotten somewhat complacent” in 2020 – as the pandemic went from bad to worse. That had the Trump administration not been so “distracted,” more than 130,000 lives could have been saved.  

So testified Birx two weeks ago before a House subcommittee. But where was the good doctor when we most needed her? Needed her as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Trump to speak the truth as she saw it? Surely, she understood then as she does now that he could easily have done a few simple things to lessen the impact of the pandemic. But while Birx served under Trump, she remained mute, certainly in public. She did not share with the American people what she really thought.

During her time in the White House Dr. Birx was an enabler. Enablers are subordinates who allow or even encourage their superiors to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that are destructive. As I wrote in my recent book, The Enablers, they are accomplices. Superiors cannot go wrong or do wrong without the support, active or passive, of some of their subordinates.

Dr. Birx was not alone in her enablement. Donald Trump has had enablers lifelong, especially during his political career. It’s that the year 2020 was no exception. While the plague raged, Trump benefited from others being complicit, including medical professionals in addition to Birx; elected officials; cabinet members; White House aides; media luminaries; and family members.

But physicians going along to get along is especially disturbing and disheartening.  Not that this is new. History has taught us that medical professionals are not immune to the attractions of power. Still, because history repeats itself costs were incurred. Dr. Birx herself testified that tens of thousands of lives were lost to the coronavirus because Trump was “complacent.” What she did not say was that it would have been impossible for the president to do what he did – and to not do what he did not – without support from some in the medical establishment.

The president was aided and abetted by physicians in addition to Birx, including, for example, Dr. Robert Redfield, who between 2018 and 2021 was Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redfield was meek and mild while Trump tinkered and tampered with his agency, precluding it from performing optimally during a national health crisis. Even the highly praised and widely admired Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, shares blame. Though as time went on, he spoke out more, invariably he did so carefully and cautiously, presumably at the time to protect his relationship with the president.    

To be fair, physicians such as Birx, Redfield, and Fauci were in a difficult position. On the one hand, they were professionally obliged to do no harm. But, on the other hand, they were saddled with a superior who was interested not in the public welfare but in his own.  

What should they have done, these presumably well-intentioned medical professionals in government service?  They should have spoken up and spoken out. Done so loudly and clearly then and there, ideally early on and in tandem, as one. Never should they have been compliant for so long. Never should Dr. Deborah Birx have sat in near silence as President Donald Trump suggested to her at a White House coronavirus task force press briefing in April 2020, “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous – whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light – and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it…. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves, that we are underlings. Nowhere was it written that President Donald Trump’s enablers were destined to do what they did. They could have done differently, decided not to enable, decided not to be, because they did not have to be, underlings. In which case the American experience of the pandemic – and everything that was subsequent – would have been different. For history is made not by institutions, but by individuals. This includes Birx and numberless others too timid or craven to speak truth to power.         

It’s not often that the president of a country is credibly accused of homicide. It’s even less often that a sitting president of a country is credibly accused of homicide. And it’s even less often than that that a sitting president of one of largest countries in the world is credibly accused of homicide.

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world in both area and population. Its incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, is an exception to the above-mentioned rules. After an extended and painstaking investigation, a Brazilian congressional panel just released its report on how the government handled the Covid-19 crisis. It was damning. It charged that Bolsonaro “actively helped to spread the virus.” That his stewardship of the country throughout the pandemic was, is, “catastrophic.” And that had his leadership in the last year and a half been modestly better than it was, “400,000 Brazilians would still be alive.”* The panel recommended the president be charged with nine crimes, ranging from irregular use of public funds all the way to crimes against humanity.   

Which inevitably raises the question of “now what?” Alas, the likely answer is now nothing. Like so many other bad, even atrocious leaders the world over, Bolsonaro is likely largely, even entirely to escape the long arm of the law. In this case the president of Brazil is protected by friends in high places, including the prosecutor general.

However, Brazil is a functioning if flawed democracy. So even if Bolsonaro escapes a legal accounting, he is likely to pay a political price. Recent polls confirm his approval ratings have badly sagged. In one such poll taken a month ago, 59% of Brazilians said they would never again vote for him under any circumstance.

Still, it’s an outrage when leaders who are criminals are not held legally responsible. In this case, Bolsonaro continues even now to undermine commonsense measures against Covid-19 such as masking, social distancing, and mass testing. Moreover, he still promotes ineffective drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, and insists, at least publicly, that he will never get vaccinated.    

It’s not always a sadness that we remain so ill-equipped to take on bad leaders. Sometimes it’s a tragedy.    

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The quotes are from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/bolsonaro-brazil-report.html

Followers can be defined by their rank – followers are subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than do their superiors.

Followers can also be defined by their behavior – followers go along with what their leaders want and intend.

I use the first definition. In my lexicon followers are subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than do their superiors and who therefore usually, but not invariably, fall into line.

Here’s another definition – this one of a whistleblower. Whistleblowers are followers who try to stop their leaders from being bad by publicly exposing their noxious – as in illegal, or abusive, or unsafe – behaviors.  

Blowing the whistle is risky business. Often the stakes are high, and the deck is stacked against the far weaker follower in favor of the far stronger leader. Moreover, when whistleblowers fail, when their leaders survive their assault, the former usually pay a high price. They suffer not only professionally but personally, and, frequently, financially.

However, when a whistleblower does succeed in focusing widespread attention on a leader’s wrongdoing, thereby damaging, sometimes badly, his or her reputation, the outcome can be different. Very different.

Frances Haugen, the woman who testified before the U.S. Congress against Facebook, and against its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg – and who is doing the same today before members of the British Parliament – is such a whistleblower. Even now she has succeeded in doing what she wanted and intended. Which explains why, even now, still early in the process, she has transformed from powerless follower into a powerful leader.

What enabled her to succeed where others typically fail? A brief systemic analysis provides some answers to this question. Recall, the leadership system has three parts: 1) the leader; 2) the followers; and 3) the contexts.

Facebook’s founder and leader has been Mark Zuckerberg. But in some ways – certainly in terms of his public reputation – his time has come and gone. Once greatly admired as one of the boy geniuses of Silicon Valley, he is now widely viewed as not only rapacious but malicious. As a man who, by his own testimony, puts his company ahead of his country.

The follower in this case is Haugen herself. Professionally well credentialed, before going public she made certain also to be exceedingly well-armed. She accrued a large trove of previously secret Facebook documents that made her case even before she made her case. She did nevertheless testify before Congress, for long stretches, responding to questions with superlative precision and poise.

Finally, there is the context. The moment for Haugen’s attack on Facebook was right. In fact, it was ripe for such an assault. Worldwide the public’s patience with Facebook has been wearing thin, especially given recent revelations about the damage Facebook has inflicted on everything from the health and well-being of teenaged girls to the health and wellbeing of liberal democracies.

Whistleblowing is risky business. Nothing Haugen has accomplished changes this. What she has however done is to remind us that when the stars are aligned the weak can successfully take on the strong. For whatever the ultimate outcome of what she has done, it is she, Haugen, who for the moment is in the lead, and it is he, Zuckerberg, who for the moment is forced to follow.   

I am as guilty as the next pundit. An American so preoccupied with leadership in America – especially since the advent of Trump – that I am prone to ignore what’s happening in the rest of the world.

Big mistake, for several reasons. Among them is that what happens elsewhere, especially in the West, sometimes foreshadows a more general trend. So it’s worth noting the events of recent weeks in two small European countries. The first is the Czech Republic (population 10.7 million); the second is Austria (population 8.9 million). In both places was a political earthquake. In both places the nation’s top political leaders were dealt a body blow.

In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis lost a parliamentary election. Though as I write the long-term implications of his loss are unclear, no question the surprising development badly weakened him, and no question it could spell the end of his hold on political power.

Babis lost shortly after the release of the Pandora Papers – that treasure trove of documents detailing corruption in high places worldwide – which revealed he had used shell companies to purchase a $22 million French chateau. But he might have lost anyway, since this electoral cycle his political opponents set aside their differences to challenge the populist prime minister who happened, by the way, also to be a billionaire. As one insider put it, a Czech political analyst, “The two opposition groups were formed because they wanted to be sure that liberal democracy would not be under the same attack as in Hungary and Poland.”

In Austria the boy wonder of European politics, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, was toppled. He was forced to resign after a scandal indicating the heart of the Austrian government was riddled with corruption – and that he personally was guilty of using taxpayer money to fund his rise to power.

Just a few years before Kurz was king of the hill. When he was first elected chancellor, in 2017, he was the youngest head of government in the world, and the youngest chancellor in Austrian history. But his fall was as swift as certain, here too his opponents joined to dispose of him with dispatch. To be clear, Kurz remains the head of his political party, and he is still just 35 years old. But his fall has been as ignominious as precipitous, a vivid, almost visceral reminder that uneasy ought to be any head that wears any crown.