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I’ve written about the high rate of leader turnover before. (See, for example, my two posts linked below.) It’s not a phenomenon limited to one sector or another, it’s across the board. Or to be more precise, in democracies it’s across the board. In autocracies, the tenure of political leaders, of strongmen, is as long as its ever been. To wit in Egypt, Turkey, and Hungary and, of course, in Iran, Russia, and China.  

Democracies are different. In recent years British prime ministers have turned over at an almost embarrassingly rapid rate. In Germany Olaf Scholz, the chancellor before the current one, Friedrich Merz, lasted less than four years. His immediate predecessor, in contrast, Anglela Merkel, served for more than sixteen years. Even in the United States has been churn. Bill Clinton was president for eight years. His successor, George W. Bush, was president for eight years. And his successor, Barack Obama was also president for eight years. But his successor, Donald Trump, was voted out by the American electorate after four years. As was his successor, Joe Biden. Turnover in Congress, heading into the 2026 election, is also high, with over 10% of members not seeking reelection. Which represents a “significant, accelerated transition.”

In the private sector the churn has been even greater, and it has been faster. “Turnover in CEOs is Most in Over a Decade” ran a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. The reasons why? Given my insistence that leadership is a system not a person – a system that has three parts, the leader, the followers and the context – I find the explanations the Journal provides necessary but not sufficient. The Journal claims the reasons for the high rate of turnover at the top are contextual. Changes in the context that include, “the swift rise of artificial intelligence, the unraveling of long-established trade practices, and an unsettled economy and geopolitical order.”

All true. Each of these pertains. But context is not the only reason for the change. The other reason is the third cog in the system – the followers. Who more precisely am I talking about? Who needs to follow CEOs for CEOs to get their jobs done? Who needs to fall into line not just literally but rhetorically? To, in other words, go along with the leader without incessant bitching and moaning, without incessant belittling and complaining?

The list is not long, but usually it’s large. The list is especially large when we are talking about CEOs of large publicly held companies. In which case the list of those who must follow the leader for the leader to do their work includes boards of directors, C-suite executives, rank and file employees, stockholders, clients and customers, and supply chain providers. Again, not a long list but a list that could consist of followers numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands, even in the millions and tens of millions. Most of whom must acquiesce to CEOs – or at least not resist them – for them to do what they were hired to do.

But what if some or, worse, many among this long list of people refuse to follow? Or, what if they follow but they do so only grudgingly and reluctantly, while carping and criticizing whoever their leader? Not a pretty picture. Not a circumstance calculated to satisfy or gratify the leader or to make their position tenable for long.     

Which is precisely what’s happening. The reasons for the high rates of leader turnover are not then just about context. They are also about followers who are bolder and ruder than they used to be; less patient and quicker to pull the trigger; armed with more information, and with ample outlets, especially social media, for registering their complaints and airing their grievances.   

For leaders – leaders in every sector – times are tough. While their financial compensation is often outsized and sometimes outrageous, their other compensations tend to be fewer and further between.  

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Leaders are Leaving – in Droves

Turnover at the Top

Hardly a day passes when Artificial Intelligence does not in some way make news.  Make news by describing or predicting its impact on our work and play. On our safety and sanity. On our present and future. Make news by emphasizing the warp speed with which it is evolving. And by sketching the scary scenarios that AI inevitably suggests.     

Maybe AI technology and automation will turn out like others that we, we humans, have experienced. But maybe they will not. Maybe AI really is something new and different. Maybe it really is better by a wide margin than it was even six months ago. Maybe it really will, as AI expert Matt Shumer predicts, replace not just specific skills but constitute a “substitute for cognitive work.” And maybe it really will eliminate the notion of retraining because whatever we might train for will rapidly be supplanted by it.

Given the speed with which AI is evolving, and the radical uncertainties associated with it, what’s a leader to do? Any leader. Any leader of any group or organization in the private, public, or nonprofit sectors; any leader anywhere in the world. What’s a leader to do when the staid Financial Times has a headline like this one, that seems nothing so much as a cry for help. “Are Anthropic’ s New AI Work Tools Game-Changing for Professionals?” (2/16/26)

As always, the specific answers to the general questions depend on the situation. But as leadership experts have thought about how to respond to AI, they have come up with answers intended to apply across the board.

Ironically, the information is at our fingertips. If you ask AI how leaders should lead in the age of AI you get some perfectly reasonable responses. Leaders should “shift from fear to adoption.” Leaders should focus on augmenting “human capabilities.” Leaders should develop a “culture of experimentation.” Leaders should “invest in upskilling.” And leaders should “focus on human centric skills” such as empathy, judgement, and strategic thinking.

Hard to quarrel with any of these. But none respond in depth or with any originality to the “radical uncertainty” to which I refer.

What then can leaders learn that would be new and different? That would better prepare them for changes as unanticipated as unprecedented. Further, what can leaders do for their followers? How can leaders equip their followers for AI that is “game-changing”? For technologies that threaten truths that feel familiar because they are familiar. They are all that we know.  

To these questions I have no simple answer. I will, though, propose this. That we go back to basics. That we go back to the building blocks that for centuries – for many centuries – were considered the foundation of a good education.   

What were they? Before all they were the humanities. The word derives of course from the word human – humanities are academic disciplines that center on what it means to be human. As opposed to being, for example, a bat or a table or a machine or a robot. What are the disciplines that constitute the humanities? The building blocks to which I refer? They are language and literature, history and philosophy, religion, rhetoric and art, among a few others.

Those familiar with my work know that I advocate that leaders learn their craft in three steps or stages.* First, leaders should be educated (in leadership generally); second leaders should be trained (in their area specifically) ; finally, leaders should be developed (lifelong). In this post, I am taking education a step further: I am suggesting that in the age of AI leaders prepare to lead by being educated in, or at least exposed to, the humanities.

AI has already raised the ultimate question – what does it mean to be human? Will artificial intelligence supplant human intelligence as we understand it? Will the distinctions between humans and robots remain real and important, or will they dimmish and finally recede altogether? Will robots read the Bible, Shakespeare, and Faulkner for pleasure? Will they make art like Rembrandt, Rubens, and Rauschenberg? Will they be Christians or Muslims or Jews or Buddhists? Will they craft speeches as eloquent as those of Demosthenes, Lincoln and King?    

We cannot now know – any more than we can know exactly how leaders should prepare for leading in the time of AI. But what we can know is this. Leaders should play to their strength – which is that they are human. Leaders are human and their followers are human. Hence the virtues of the humanities. They are intellectual and, importantly, visceral reminders of our shared humanity. Reminders that we share things – feelings, longings – that robots do not. At least not yet.

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*See my book, Professionalizing Leadership (Oxford University Press, 2018).

China’s President Xi Jinping is one of the leads in my book, Leadership from Bad to Worse. “Bad” and “worse” are though in the eye of the beholder. They mean different things to different people. Xi, for example, has been in many ways a good leader, in many ways remarkably effective. Above all he has continued, even accelerated the transformation of China from global backwater to global powerhouse. But from the perspective of a democrat, he has been a bad leader. Specifically, over the decade plus that Xi has been president, he has become increasingly oppressive and repressive both inside mainland China and now, crucially, additionally, Hong Kong. As well, he has become increasingly assertive outside China, not least repeatedly reaffirming his close and enduring ties to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Xi is an autocrat, a strong man, maybe even, depending on the definition, a tyrant or a dictator.  He has refashioned the Chinese Communist Party in his own image. He has purged his perceived political enemies and suppressed domestic dissent. In keeping with communist orthodoxy, he has aggressively reinserted the state into the economy. He has clamped down on the professional military. And in keeping with tyrannical tradition, he has encouraged a cult of personality. For example, beginning in primary school and through university students are taught “Xi Jinping Thought.”  

Xi is 72 years old and he seems to like his job. This means that barring the unforeseen he will remain president at least until 2032, when his next term is over. But the man is no fool. Xi knows that barring the unforeseen is impossible – which is why he continues to do what he has done throughout his tenure. Which is to purge his enemies real and imagined. Leaders like Xi believe that only continuous purges can preclude other leaders, and other power centers, from challenging their dominance.

It’s hard to describe how dysfunctional this is especially when, as is often the case, real or imagined enemies are in the highest ranks of the military. And when sustaining and conveying military might is one of your top priorities not just abroad but at home.

China will present the United States with formidable competitive challenges for decades to come. Top of the list is militarily. But when Xi eliminates his high command, he eliminates his most experienced and expert military leaders. Western observers were stunned last month to see Xi purge China’s top general, General Zhang Youxia. It was as described by the New York Times, “the most stunning escalation yet” in Xi’s purge of the military elite. It was nothing less than “total annihilation of the high command.”

Even paranoids have real enemies. Which is to say two things at the same time. Leaders who are dictators are usually paranoid. And leaders who are dictators usually have real enemies. President Xi seems to have concluded that China’s top military ranks are or at least they might be riddled with his political opponents. And that, though the short-term costs would surely be high, he had no long-term choice but to dispose of those who conceivably could challenge his authority. General Youxia was charged with “grave violations of discipline and the law.” But no one in the West believed that purging Youxia was about graft. Everyone in the West believed that it was about eliminating possible presidential competition.

China’s leadership culture is the antithesis of America’s leadership culture. The United States is less than three hundred years old, and it has a political culture that is anti-authority. China is more than three thousand years old, and it has a political culture that is pro-authority. A political culture that is strictly hierarchical and in which those in the middle and at the bottom are expected without question to defer to those at the top.

Similarly, in situations in which American followers might opt to resist, Chinese followers would be highly unlikely to do the same. No matter what they think or feel, Chinese followers are far, far more likely to fall into line than American followers. And the Chinese people are far, far less likely than the American people to protest in the street or for that matter anywhere else. Since its inception the United States has been riddled with resisters. China has never in its exceedingly long history, been the same.  Which leaves Xi largely free to purge his putative opponents as he deems necessary and desirable.

Jeffrey Epstein has been described in different ways. As a pedophile and a grifter. As a fraudster and a trafficker. As a serial rapist and a sociopath. He has not, however, been described as a leader. Which he was – Epstein was a leader. The most mesmerizing thing about him – the reason why years after he came to our attention he remains a national obsession – was his singular ability to get so many of the highest and mightiest of men to follow where he led.  

Epstein was not a “leader” as this word is usually understood – because this word is usually misunderstood. Usually we associate “leader” with a person in a position of authority. Such as a president or a principal, a general or a chief executive. People like this are leaders, they are formal leaders. But as we know when we think about it some people are informal leaders. They do not hold positions of authority, but they are able nevertheless to get other people to do what they want them to do.

How exactly? How exactly was Epstein able to do what he did? To get other men, many of whom were leaders themselves, to follow where he led? Epstein had no formal authority. But rather early on he began to accumulate power and gain influence. By “power” I refer to Epstein’s ability to reward men if they did what he wanted them to do. And to his ability to punish them, or credibly to threaten to punish them, if they did not do what he wanted them to do. By “influence” I refer to Epstein’s ability to persuade men to do what he wanted them to do of their own volition.   

One of the rewards that Epstein provided was sex. He provided men who wanted sex with young women with sex with young women. But to see Epstein only or even primarily as a pedophile or a trafficker misses the point. The reason Epstein has resonated for so long and the reason his tentacles have reached so far is because he also had influence. He pulled people into his orbit by beguiling them with his homes as well as his harems; his wealth as well as his women; his persuasiveness as well as his purse; his connections and associations, his intuitiveness and intelligence, his charm and his chutzpah. Epstein did not, in other words, peddle only young women. He was also a banker and a broker, a financer, a flatterer, and a convener whose attractions included money and information; fabulous homes featuring excellent food and better guests; and a large network of powerful players in government and business; finance, technology and philanthropy; entertainment; academia; the media and the law – as well as occasional royals from Europe and the Middle East. All these before – and a decade after – he had been indicted, convicted and imprisoned in Florida for procuring a child for prostitution,

To read some of the e mails between Epstein and his followers is to understand his hold over them. He had tangible assets with which he could reward them. And he had hard information with which he could destroy them. But… Epstein was also described, repeatedly, as being exceptionally good company and an exceptionally good host. Woody Allen was a dinner guest at Epstein’s house. But so was Allen’s wife, Soon-Yi Allen, who in one recently released email thanks Epstein for hosting the them for dinner the night before. To understand why so many powerful people – people who themselves were leaders in their respective fields – followed where Epstein led must be to understand that many of them seemed genuinely to enjoy his company in addition to valuing the benefits that he bestowed.

The voluminous correspondences show that Epstein was associated not just with sex but more generally with the good things in life. These included the pleasures of the largest privately owned home in Manhattan, a private plane, a private island in the Caribbean, good food, good company, and a good time. Just one example: Epstein offered right wing activist and media executive Steve Bannon, with whom he exchanged thousands of texts, the use of an apartment in Paris, a home in Palm Beach, and his private plane. Epstein also gifted Bannon with among other things an Apple watch for Christmas, and he promised to help Bannon raise money for his political activities. But if Epstein procured sex for Bannon there is, so far, no evidence for it.

Like all bad leaders, Epstein did not act alone. He had a large band of enablers, of followers who made it possible for him to do what he did including committing countless crimes. Ghislaine Maxwell was only the most prominent of these, she was Epstein’s indispensable procurer and facilitator. But in addition to Maxwell was a large cast of characters – ranging from bankers and brokers to pilots and drivers to cooks and cleaners – who directly or indirectly enabled his wrongdoing. Followers who followed their leader though they knew or at least strongly suspected that what he was doing was wrong.

Epstein was a leader. He was a bad leader and he still is. He left behind a slew of women victims. And even as I write his hand is reaching from the grave to ruin the reputations, wreck the careers, and destroy the lives of those who chose to follow his lead.

I could be biased. Because I’ve been in higher education all my professional life, maybe it just seems like a microcosm of the world in which we live. Or maybe higher education really does reflect how, in the United States at least, the traditional roles of leader and follower are often reversed. Now leaders frequently follow, and followers frequently lead.

Decades ago, when I, the professor, walked into a classroom, I could assume certain truths. First, that students in the room would be somewhat deferential. Second, that my managers, for example my deans, would leave me largely alone. Would, if I conducted myself properly, give me the leeway to do my job as I saw fit. Third, that the presidents of my institutions would themselves be left alone to lead as they deemed best. That they were free to make decisions without relentless judgment or interference. Finally, I could assume that parents, politicians, and the public generally trusted colleges and universities to carry out their mission with reasonable intelligence and integrity.

 Now none of these apply. Or if they apply at all they do so only episodically and unpredictably. I recently retired from teaching in higher education. But by the time I did instead of students calling me “Professor Kellerman” or “Dr. Kellerman,” they called me “Barbara.” Not that I cared, but it reflected a broader pattern in which authority and expertise were being diminished. Further, instead of being left to teach what I deemed necessary and desirable, I felt obliged to be hypervigilant. I made as certain as I reasonably could that my curriculum and even my informal comments would not be judged by someone inside or outside the classroom inadequate, prejudicial, or politically incorrect.

We have long since got to the point where close, careful monitoring of leaders by followers reaches the top. Presidents of colleges and universities are now subject to incessant judgements, containments and criticisms by a large cast of characters most of whom lack both the experience and expertise to judge. Instead of higher education being exempted from our prying, jaundiced eyes, it too is suspect and it too is vulnerable. Notwithstanding an occasional exception, Americans’ trust in higher education has declined for a decade.

This week a headline in the New York Times read, “New Laws Subject Faculty to Increased Surveillance.” The article was about how college professors, who not long ago were essentially free from political interference, were now being “watched by state officials, senior administrators, and the students themselves.”

This week another Times headline read, “Talks on Harvard Deal Veer into Uncertainty After Trump’s Attack.” This piece describes how vulnerable the president of Harvard, Alan Garber, is to the whims, wants, and wishes of the president of the United States. Garber does, of course, have arrows in his quiver and within certain parameters he has resisted the Trump administration. Still, as it pertains to Harvard, he has no choice but somehow to respond to what Trump does and says, which, I should add, can be one thing on one day and another thing on another. For all of Garber’s authority then, Trump trumps him. This does not mean that Garber must do what Trump wants him to do. But it does mean that Trump pushes Garber into a corner who is then forced to figure out how to get out.

Nor is President Trump himself immune to the trend to which I allude. He sells himself as an American strongman. But especially in the United States, and especially in the third decade of the 21^st century, seeming to be a powerful leader and being one are not the same thing. American leaders are curiously, astonishingly, vulnerable to their followers. Don’t believe me? Ask Claudine Gay. She was Alan Garber’s immediate presidential predecessor. But her tenure at the top of Harvard’s hierarchy lasted all of six months and two days.

In the last year Americans have tended to attribute what happens not just at home but abroad to a single individual. To President Donald Trump. Love him or loathe him, he is seen as the piston that drives the engine.

Which is natural. It’s natural to make the “leadership attribution error” – which is to credit single individuals, whoever is at the top, with what goes right. And to blame single individuals, whoever is at the top, for what goes wrong.

It’s natural to make inferences about historical causation – and it’s natural to want to keep it simple. To keep it simple by persuading ourselves that there is only one explanation for why what is happening is happening – the leader. The leadership attribution error has the virtue of seeming to keep things simple while simultaneously seeming to order an otherwise disturbingly disordered world. The personification of social causation makes our world easier to understand than it would be if we had to account for several not to speak of countless contextual variables.

But if, as I have argued, leadership is not a person but a system, then all bets are off. Then those of us with an abiding interest in leadership – and especially in why what happens in fact happens – have no choice but to complicate our lives. To see leadership as a system with three parts, each of which is of equal importance. The leader. The followers. And the contexts.  

The reason I raise this now is because we, we Americans, are starting to look ahead to the next congressional election in November 2026, and to the next presidential election in November 2028.  This makes it the right time, the necessary time for anyone with a vested interest in American politics to stop fixating on Trump and to start widening their lens. To wean themselves from thinking that the American president is all powerful and to remind themselves that what the American people do and do not do in the coming months and years will matter. They will matter a lot. As will the larger national and international contexts within which American presidential politics is situated.

          It’s complicated. The world in which we live is complicated, which is why being obsessed with any single individual makes no sense. Even extremely powerful leaders do not act alone. They act in tandem with others – others to whom they are close and others at a greater or even a great remove.  Moreover, they, we, do not act in a vacuum. Our efforts are either enhanced by or constrained by the context(s) within which we are situated.

Freud believed that a biographer’s hopes of finding “coherence, motivation and causality were forlorn.” For lives, he thought, even the lives of strongmen, are dictated by “unpredictable instinctual impulse” and by “the caprice and the vicissitudes of circumstance.”* So, it’s important that we avoid the tempting trap of reductionism. The tempting trap of the leader-attribution error. The tempting trap of the blame game. That instead we force ourselves to see the world as it is. A world driven by leaders. And by a large cast of other characters that can include me and you. And by the “caprices and vicissitudes of circumstance.”

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*The quotes in this paragraph are from Stephen Downs, Gustav Mahler (Reaktion Books, 2025).  Freud, I might add, spent the last six years of his life (1933-1939) under the black cloud of Hitler.

Decades ago, I edited a volume titled Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. As the title makes clear, my purpose was to look at leadership through different disciplinary lenses. To get people to understand that knowing something about leadership requires knowing something about several disciplines, not just one. The book (still available on Amazon) includes chapters written by, among others, a psychologist, sociologist, and political scientist, an anthropologist, organizational behaviorist, and philosopher.

The Foreword was written by James MacGregor Burns, a historian and political scientist who was then and still is considered a preeminent expert on leadership. Burns was cautiously optimistic about leadership as a discipline. But as he admitted in his Foreword, the subject was singularly knotty, it was especially difficult to wrestle to the ground. “The problem,” he wrote, “is that no field of study calls for more difficult and daring crossing of interdisciplinary borders than does the study of leadership, and no field suffers from more narrow specialization.”  

The point pertains now as it did then. Now as then leadership is or it should be an interdisciplinary field of inquiry. But now as then rare is the scholar who undertakes an interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) inquiry if only because rare is the institution of higher education that rewards interdisciplinary (multidisciplinary) work.

The point came to mind again recently when I was made aware for the umpteenth time what an astonishment is the current American president. He is so far out of the previous presidential mainstream that we the American people were not merely unprepared for a leader like him. We were unequipped. As was, as is, the political system within which we used to operate. Nothing about America – not its laws or norms, not its history or ideology – prepared the American people for what we have now. A leader at the helm who threatens unilaterally to snatch Greenland and thereby single-handedly destroy NATO.

Trump in full is mind bending in the extreme. Which is precisely why leadership is or should be the stuff not just of the social sciences but also of the liberal arts. Trump’s presidency personifies – exemplifies – the large failure of our small imaginations. Which is why in that book I mentioned should have been a chapter on Shakespeare.

Experts on political leadership – including me – have warned for years that Donald Trump had the making of an authoritarian. Or that he was an authoritarian who, to lead like one, needed only followers who were compliant.

Which was to say that it takes two to tango. For authoritarianism to happen you need one authoritarian leader and one or more followers who are willing to follow the leader, even if reluctantly. Conversely, if followers refuse to follow a leader who would be an authoritarian, the leader cannot be one. The leader cannot lead like one because their followers are not following. Though they have less or even no power or authority, by not following followers stop or at least slow their leader from doing what they want to do when they want to do it.

Confused? Don’t be. When you think about it, it’s quite simple. Authoritarian leaders exist only when people give them permission to be authoritarian. This is especially important early on, when authoritarianism first takes hold. For as I write in my book, Leadership from Bad to Worse, later, when authoritarian leaders become stronger and more deeply entrenched, resistance becomes more difficult and, frequently, more dangerous.

Initially, followers of authoritarian leaders tend to be meek. They are compliant, because they think that pleasing, pacifying, placating the authoritarian will work. But it rarely does. Authoritarian appetites grow with eating. The more such leaders eat the hungrier they get. Satiation is out of the question.

As Stephen Kotkin points out in his most recent article in Foreign Affairs, “no authoritarian regime could survive without security police and military forces capable of domestic repression.”* As I write we see this playing out most dramatically in the state of Minnesota, the city of Minneapolis consumed by the spectacle of armed and masked federal agents struggling to control a situation in which resistance to their intrusion has gone from intermittent to consistent and from furious to fierce. We’re at the point where resisting ICE agents in Minneapolis is risking your well-being. Still, out in the ice-cold streets are refuseniks, ordinary people refusing to comply with Trump’s authoritarian strictures.

They, however, are only the most dramatic example of followers refusing to follow. This post is to point out that whereas early in the second Trump administration people caved – they did what he wanted them to do, cowed by his bullying and mute in the face of it – times are changing. I am not predicting the end of the Time of Trump. Nor am I minimizing the complexities, and the risks of resisting the American president. What I am claiming is that Trump’s followers are refusing to follow with greater clarity and sense of purpose, and increased frequency.

People in the streets across America? You got it. The Chair of the Federal Reserve shedding his longstanding reserve to hit back hard at the administration that threatened him? You got it. CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, who up to now has played footsie with Trump, finally taking him to task on the issue of the independence of the federal reserve? You got it. Congress – suddenly, astonishingly, bipartisan – rejecting Trump’s draconian budget cuts to, for example, foreign aid, global health, and scientific research? You got it. Members of NATO including Germany, France, Canada and Great Britain stiffening their spines, increasingly grasping that being accommodating to Trump he sees only as weakness? You got it. China more formidable a competitor than ever, Xi now considering Trump a paper tiger who is not to be toyed with, but also not to be cowed by? You got it.  

Heaven knows there’s a long way to go. A long way to go before President Trump’s followers stop following long enough, and in numbers large enough, to make a significant difference. But, unlike early last year, early this year are fledgling signs of life. Of followers finding their footing.     

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*Stephen Kotkin, “The Weakness of Strongmen,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2026.    

As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by making a case so convincingly that people would feel compelled to act.

The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.

Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Elizabeth Cady Stanton. For our purposes, it’s best to think of Stanton picking up where Wollstonecraft left off. Just as the latter was a product of her time – the time of the Enlightenment – so the former was a product of her time. Stanton wrote The Declaration of Sentiments in 1848. The year during which throughout Europe were popular revolutions against unpopular monarchs. And the year during which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels penned the most famous revolutionary document of all time, The Communist Manifesto.

No surprise then that while Wollstonecraft’s prose was gracious, ladylike even, Stanton did not bother with literary niceties. Notwithstanding her stable marriage, or her seven children, she challenged and indeed attacked men with not a smidgeon of hesitation. In both her politics and prose she was as fierce then as she is famous now.   

The Declaration of Sentiments – the document deliberately evoked The Declaration of Independence – was released at the now-legendary Seneca Falls Convention. The Convention was a gathering of some 300 people (mostly but not only women) who came together in the summer of ’48 to declare that the patterns of the past were intolerable – and that therefore they would no longer be tolerated. To declare that women were sick and tired “of the repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.” And that, henceforth, women would or at least should “refuse allegiance” to the existing government and seek to establish a new one. This new one would rectify the wrongs of the past – a past in which men had all the power and women had none – and it would be based on principles that “shall seem most like to effect the safety and happiness” of the women whose time had long since come.

The most striking thing about the Declaration is its list of the litany of abuses on the part of men toward women. In fact, a good part of the document consists of item after item in sequence, each of which documents the outrageous injustices that resulted not just in the disenfranchisement of women but also in their “social and religious degradation.”  

We know now of course that the Seneca Falls Convention and the remarkable document that was its hallmark was not of itself sufficient. Women’s rights along with other civil rights took more than another century significantly to surface. Moreover, the fight continues. By no means are women equal to men – not anywhere in the world. Still, there has been progress, progress to which Stanton’s fiery prose has long contributed, and does still.

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Excerpts from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments – 1848

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her….

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men – both natives and foreigners….

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

He has taken from her all right in property….

He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction….

He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education

He has endeavored in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life….

Resolved. That the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous and untiring efforts of both men and women, for the overthrow of the monopoly of the pulpit, and for the securing to women an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce.

Excerpts from Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776,

• I have heard it asserted by some that as America has flourished under her former connection with Great Britain, the same connection is necessary towards her future happiness…. Nothing could be more fallacious than this kind of argument. We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat, or that the first twenty years of our lives is to become a precedent for the next twenty.

• But Britain is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her conduct. Even brutes do not devour their young nor make war upon their families.… This new World hath been the asylum for persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from EVERY PART of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home pursues their descendants still.”

Prefatory Note: My choices for 2025 Leader of the Year and 2025 Follower(s) of the Year reflect my political preferences. They are for government that is reasonably democratic and decent.

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I define followers by their rank – not by their behavior. Followers have little or no power, authority, or influence. This contrasts with leaders who have all or most of the power, authority, and influence. Because of this difference, followers usually – though as this post will show they do not always – fall into line.

How do I distinguish between power, authority, and influence?

• Power is A’s capacity to get B to do what A wants by any means necessary, including force.
• Authority is A’s capacity to get B to do what A wants because of A’s superior rank, status, or credential.
• Influence is A’s capacity to get B to do what A wants, usually by persuasion, of B’s own volition.   

Followers matter as much as leaders. There is no leader without at least one follower. Moreover, followers matter when they do something, and they matter when they do nothing. If a follower, say, an American who is eligible to vote but does not, it makes a difference. Further, just as there are times when leaders matter more, there are times when followers matter more. Such as in the event of a revolution, when people who are powerless wrest power from people who are powerful.

This year I name not one but four Followers of the Year. I identify four individuals who, despite their relatively low levels of power, authority, and influence have, in 2025, nevertheless have had a significant impact on American politics. Each of the four has challenged their nemesis, President Donald Trump. And each of the four has put a chink in Trump’s generally formidable armor.

My Followers of the Year are in opposition to my Leader of the Year.  Trump dominated American politics in 2025, but he did not dominate them completely. Other people played a part – four of which are singled out in this post not because they followed. But because despite their weakness in comparison with Trump’s strength, they resisted. Unlike many other Americans – including many who themselves had large or even enormous reserves of power, authority, and influence – these four had the fortitude to voice their opposition to Trump and to act on it.

The four Followers of the Year are in two pairs: the first two are theorists, the second two are activists. The first two primarily write: they use the written word to try to persuade their readers to see the world as they do. The first two do however also speak. In 2025 they used media to spread their word and make their case. The second two Followers of the Year do not so far as we know now write and only one occasionally speaks in public. What they do is organize. This year they organized massive demonstrations whose source of energy was fierce opposition to the American president.

• Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder – 2025 Followers of the Year

Until a few years ago, few people had heard of Anne Applebaum. While her name is still not widely known, she is at the forefront of public intellectuals who came out early and vociferously against Donald Trump. From the beginning of his political career, she worried that he could and would become an authoritarian, a type of leader she knew well because she had studied it at length and in depth.

The same can be said about Timothy Snyder. Snyder too harbored grave doubts about Trump early on. Doubts that similarly grew out of his in-depth studies of leaders who were autocrats and fascists, tyrants and dictators. Additionally, pointedly, years before the time of Trump, both Applebaum and Snyder had the same regional expertise: Eastern Europe including Russia and what had been the Soviet Union.

For decades Applebaum has been in the front ranks of American journalists. She worked at The Economist and The Washington Post; now she is on the staff of The Atlantic. She is also a highly regarded author of, among other books, Gulag: A History, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. Gulag, nearly 700 pages long, is a dark, relentlessly grim history of Soviet prison camps under the dictatorial, paranoid leadership of Joseph Stalin.

Snyder is an academic, a professor of history, now at the University of Toronto, previously at Yale. He too is author of several books, one of which bears similarities to Applebaum’s volume on the gulag. Snyder’s is titled Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. It too is highly praised and is, as its title suggests, dark, grim.    

Given the similarities between Applebaum and Synder – in their personal histories (both have spent long stretches living in Europe); in their professional interests (both have spent long stretches writing about the same region); and in their political attitudes (both are highly attuned to any hint of authoritarianism) – we should not be surprised that both are at the forefront of those who oppose President Trump.  

Synder led the charge, beginning early in Trump’s first term to sound a warning. In 2017 he published a small book titled On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The book is as its title suggests: a set of instructions on how to stop from happening in the United States what has happened in other parts of the world. Specifically, a slide from democracy to autocracy, even to tyranny. Snyder never mentioned anyone by name in the book – an implied neutrality that might in part explain why On Tyranny has sold remarkably well. Nearly a million and a half million copies since the book was published.

Applebaum’s clarion call came a few years later, in 2020, in a book titled, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Unlike Snyder’s it was not so much an instruction as an exposition of, to quote the title of a chapter, “how demagogues win.” Applebaum pointed out that to remain in power not all dictatorships rely on mass violence. Instead, some depend on “a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies.” These elites defend their leaders at all costs “however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, and however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions. In exchange, they know they will be rewarded and advanced.”

Both Applebaum and Synder continue their mission not just as writers and speakers, but as activists out to reach large numbers of people. They post blogs and appear on podcasts, and both can be seen regularly on television. Neither are likely ever to have power. But they draw on their authority, their intellectual authority, to exercise influence.   

• Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin – 2025 Followers of the Year

Unlike Applebaum and Snyder, whose names are known to some people, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin are names known to nearly no people. Which seems on their part to be deliberate. By remaining in the background, they foreground Indivisible. What, you might ask, is “Indivisible”? It is an organization that, according to its website, defines itself as a “grassroots movement … with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda.” For now, though, Indivisible’s mission is more single tracked. It is to resist Trump. It is this resistance that has, in the last year, motivated astonishingly large numbers of people to join its cause.    

Indivisible insists that it collaborates with other, likeminded groups and organizations. Still, it is Indivisible that stands out. As do the two people who founded Indivisible and continue to lead it. Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin came out of nowhere, or so it seems. Unlike Applebaum and Snyder who had authority based on their academic credentials, Greenberg and Levin had nothing. Initially certainly, no power, no authority, no influence. They met as undergraduates at Carleton College; some years later (in 2015) they married. Along the way they collected graduate degrees and worked several jobs. But when Donald Trump was first elected to the White House, they found their calling. They (and two other people) were so incensed, so concerned, that they drafted and posted an online document titled, “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.” Their Guide went viral and a movement was born.

If Trump not been reelected, it’s not clear that Indivisible would have had much of shelf life. This is not to say that the organization had no early successes, it did. Moreover, after the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City it seems possible progressivism has a future in American politics. Still, Trump was reelected which explains why Indivisible was invigorated in a way its cofounders could never have imagined.   

I refer to the astonishing turnout for No Kings Day – an initiative that Indivisible spearheaded More than any other group or organization, Indivisible is responsible for the successes of two No Kings Day protests both of which took place in 2025. The first was in June when some 5 million people took to the streets to demonstrate against Trump. The second was in October when the number of ant-Trump protesters climbed to over 7 million. By no means did all those who took part support Indivisible’s progressive agenda. But what Indivisible did was first to organize and then to implement a remarkably impressive demonstration against the American president. The No Kings Day protest in October was either the largest or among the largest protests ever in American history.

Anne Applebaum married a Polish diplomat, so in 2103 she became a Polish citizen. Still, she was born in the United States and remains also an American citizen. Timothy Snyder spends a good deal of time in Austria and in 2024 was granted Austrian citizenship. Further, as mentioned, in 2024 Snyder moved from the United States to Canada. Still, he too was born in the United States and remains also an American citizen.

So, for the purposes of this post I consider that Trump is leader of Applebaum, Snyder, Greenberg, and Levin – and that they are his followers. All four are Americans which means that so long as Trump is American president they have no choice but to follow his lead, whether to impose tariffs, bomb boats off the coast of Venezuela, decimate the civil service, or demolish the East Wing of the White House. What distinguishes these four is that while each is obligated in most ways to follow the president’s lead in both domestic and foreign policy, each has found a way, an important way, simultaneously to resist him.

Which goes to show that while most of the time followers follow, sometimes they do not. Sometimes they resist – and sometimes the consequences of their resistances are significant.  In which case – not to complicate your life – followers become leaders. As did, to take a supreme example, Martin Luther King, Jr. He began his campaign for civil rights as a follower, as a righteous resister, and became in time himself a leader.