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I have hardly ever reposted a post. But this one I could not resist. I foretold the perilousness of Vice President Kamala Harris’s perch last March.

Did Joe Biden Push Kamala Harris to a Glass Cliff?

What I did not, however, foretell was how quickly she would become marginalized. A figure so deep into the wilderness we have no idea where during the last half year Harris has been, or what during the last half year Harris has done. This could of course change in a heartbeat. Joe Biden’s heartbeat – either literally or figuratively. Still, what became of her during the first year of Biden’s presidency is instructive.  

• Instructive of how quickly even a prominent leader can be erased from the political scene.
• Instructive of how easy it is for the American president to reduce the role of the American vice president.
• Instructive of how women are still prone to being pushed – to a glass cliff and, or, far, very far, off center stage.

When Joe Biden first became president of the United States, he made certain to have his vice president immediately next to him, or just behind him nearly every time he appeared in public. Almost always Harris was right there, a visible symbol of her importance to his administration.

But, now no more. Now she’s gone. Receded so far into the background it’s hard to know she’s even there. It’s hard to know Vice President Kamala Harris even matters.

Shareholder activists use their stake in publicly traded companies to put pressure on managers with whom they are dissatisfied. In other words, shareholder activists are followers who have less power, authority, and influence than leaders, who have more. Occasionally, however, activists can force management’s hand, in which case the balance of power shifts, from leaders (managers) to followers (shareholders). Generally, this happens when the activist(s) are in some way well endowed, for example, when they have large sums of money or were able to mobilize public opinion.

Daniel Loeb is a prototypical activist investor who falls into the first category. He is enormously wealthy and, as CEO of a hedge fund by the name of Third Point, he is also enormously powerful. Which is why he seems to have few compunctions about taking on – at moments he deems opportune – corporate giants such as Disney, Sony, and Intel.

But not every challenger is so well endowed. Engine No. 1 is a small hedge fund that recently dared to challenge a behemoth you might have heard of – it goes by the name of Exxon. Though on paper Engine No. 1 looked weak, a mere minnow taking on a whale, the minnow was able to marshal major allies to force changes at Exxon that initially were thought inconceivable. (Engine No. 1 was aiming to compel Exxon to reduce its carbon footprint by moving more quickly away from fossil fuels.)

Such shareholder successes are becoming more frequent than they used to be – early signs of a trend that in my view has been long in coming. (I wrote about this briefly in The End of Leadership, published in 2012.) Of course, it will happen only when the will to make it happen can be harnessed to technologies that make it possible for small investors, minnows, to unite in a common cause.

As New York Times columnist Jeff Sommer recently observed, up to now shareholder democracy has “been something of an oxymoron.” Most of the time millions of shareholders have had no voice in decisions made by publicly traded American companies. If this changes, followers (small investors) will become more powerful, which necessarily means that leaders (corporate executives) will become less powerful.

In Great Britain are no laws that allow death with dignity. Assisted dying, or euthanasia, is illegal. This remains the case though other, similar countries, such as Belgium and the Netherlands have such laws on the books. This also remains the case despite repeated polling demonstrating that public support in Britain for allowing dignity in dying is overwhelming.

The situation in the US is not as bad, though it is not nearly what it should be. Should be if you believe in majority rule. Almost three-quarters of Americans say that euthanasia should be legal. But only ten states, twenty percent of states, have any legislation allowing death with dignity.

Though the issue is more complex and, therefore, more controversial, there are some parallels to legislation on gun control. In the United States the issue in general remains highly divisive. But even in this country it is not divisive in every aspect. Some gun control laws have never been enacted even though they are supported by large majorities of Americans. For example, 85% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats favor preventing those with mental illnesses from purchasing guns. Similarly, 70% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats support passing a law that would subject private gun sales, and gun show sales to background checks. Finally, majorities in both parties oppose allowing people to carry concealed firearms without a permit.

So, what do I mean by “no leadership – even on low hanging fruit”? I mean leadership is hard to come by these days. These are fractious times, not just in the United States but in liberal democracies everywhere. This makes it especially important that leaders demonstrate they can get some things done. Low hanging fruit – issues on which there is, fortuitously, unusually, wide agreement – would seem obvious targets of accomplishment.

Last week was a hell of a week for whistleblowers! A banner week … unless it was you in their line of fire, you a target of their ire.

Are there more now than there used to be – or am I imagining it? Imaging more whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork. Imagining more good followers daring to speak out against more bad leaders. Imaging more apparently ordinary people willing to take the risk of speaking up and speaking out.

Of course, not every whistleblower is justified. Every now and then whistleblowers blow for insufficient reason. But in the main they are women and men who risk being professionally and sometimes even personally crucified for daring to speak truth not to power, but about power.

Last week’s single most striking whistleblower – she got an enormous media attention – was of course Frances Haugen. Haugen pulled the plug, or tried her level best to, on Facebook. Specifically on her erstwhile leader, her erstwhile employer, Mark Zuckerberg. Haugen shared documents with the Wall Street Journal, and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and with Congress that, she claimed, were proof Facebook prioritized profits over people.   

Not quite as attention-getting but a very, very big story nonetheless was the release of the so-called Pandora Papers. What are they? They are nearly 12 million documents leaked by good followers to reveal for the world to see the greed, the legalized corruption, of bad leaders. These followers mainly are journalists; and these leaders mainly are top dogs including former and current presidents and prime ministers. I should add we’re not talking here garden variety corruption. We’re talking corruption on what Brooke Harrington, writing in the New York Times, described as being on “an almost unimaginably vast scale.”

Finally – for now – the women of the National Women’s Soccer League who put on public display their simmering rage at the imbalance of power. It is the women obviously who play they game. But they are powerless. Specifically, they are powerless against the men, the team owners, the executives, and the coaches, all of whom are powerful. The men control the game, and the men control the money. Hence the men control the women. Last week the women decided they had had it. They were fed up. On Wednesday night they halted several games at the six-minute mark, so they could stand together, arms linked, in silent protest. “We have hit rock bottom and we are going to fight as hard as we need to, as hard as we can, for everything we deserve and need,” said one of the players. “We won’t be silent anymore.”  

In Monday’s post I juxtaposed whistleblowers against enablers. Enablers I described as “followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive.” * Whistleblowers, in contrast, are “followers who try to stop their leaders from being bad by publicly exposing their noxious – as in illegal, or abusive, or unsafe – behaviors.” Which raises the question of what motivates whistleblowers? What makes the powerless risk taking on the powerful? Haugen reportedly decided to go public, to blow the whistle, only in September. She explained her decision this way: “I just don’t want to agonize over what I didn’t do for the rest of my life. Compared to that, anything else just doesn’t seem that bad.”   

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*The definition of enabler is from my latest book, The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Brady is one of the main characters in the book I recently wrote with Todd Pittinsky, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. Brady, we found, was a leader whose lust for success particularly was so visceral, so palpable, so unquenchable as to singlehandedly explain his preternatural accomplishments.

I was interested therefore to read that Brady himself thinks leadership the single most important explicator for his success on the field. “What,” he was asked a couple of weeks ago by the Wall Street Journal, is the “one essential talent for a quarterback?” At first he gave a one-word answer: “Leadership.”

Then he continued, “Leadership is not a physical trait; it’s more of a mental/emotional trait. You know, I’m the one calling the plays. If I lack any confidence [my teammates] see right through it.”

In other words, though he did not frame it as we did in the book, Brady clearly considers his lust for success to be contagious. He has it – and he gives it to his teammates.  No wonder where he goes success follows.

I became as interested in followers as in leaders in the early aughts, when I wrote two books, one titled Bad Leadership, the other Followership. The path taken continued to another book, four years later, in 2012, The End of Leadership. Notwithstanding my other writings in between, my most recent publication, another book, this one titled, The Enablers, sustains what is by now a running theme: That followers have always been more important than the leadership industry has given them credit for; and that for various reasons – above all changing cultures and technologies – they are more important now than they have ever been before.

Anyone familiar with my work knows this is what I think. They would equally know that I define followers not by what they do, but by how they are ranked. By where they fit into whatever the relevant hierarchy – social, political, economic, organizational, educational, cultural, religious, military, you get the point. In other words, followers do not necessarily follow. Sometimes they do, mostly they do; but sometimes they do not.  Followers do though, by definition, at least mine, rank low on the hierarchy that particularly pertains or, at least, they rank lower on this hierarchy than those in formal leadership roles.

This is not to say that all leaders are formal leaders, that they are clearly identified as such. Some leaders are informal leaders, defined by what they do, not by their position or status, or role or credential. Informal leaders need only to stand out to be identified as such, so it is apparent who is leading and who is following. In fact, all a person needs to be a leader, either formal or informal, is a single follower.

Still, most of the time, in common parlance, the leader is someone of relatively or even very high rank, which is why labeling a follower someone who is of lower rank is not only logical but economical. The point is that semantics matter. Our failure to agree – if only for a particular purpose or a limited time – on what is a “follower” can do us in. Followers are that important.

For this reason, this blog – my intermittent posts – will be as dedicated in the future to followers as to leaders.

Which brings me to today’s point. Like leaders, followers come in different shapes and sizes, and they play different roles. One type of follower is the 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.  

Another type of follower is the enabler.

• Enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive.

Whistleblowers are followers in that they try to stop bad behaviors in their superiors, that is, in those who have more power, authority and influence than they. Enablers are followers in that they allow, encourage, even support bad behaviors in those who are their superiors, that is, in those who have more power, authority, and influence than they.

Whistleblowers and enablers are, then, at the opposite ends of a spectrum. Which is why followers who are whistleblowers should be admired and protected – and followers who are enablers should be derided and disabled.

National elections in Germany were held on Sunday. But Angela Merkel will continue to serve as chancellor until the next government can be formed, and her successor is named.

Because Merkel led Germany and even Europe for nearly sixteen years, her imminent retirement was widely covered not only within Germany but without. Journalists and pundits the world over assessed her successes and failures, generally concluding that while she did not walk on water, she was in most ways an ethical and effective leader whose presence on the global stage will be missed.

What could not, however, be known until after the election was over was the decline in popularity of Germany’s far right party, the AfD (Alternative for Germany).  To be clear, the AfD consolidated its strength in East Germany, so by no means should it be relegated to the ash heap of history. Still, the party, which first rose to prominence in 2015 on an anti-immigration ticket, dropped in popularity overall, securing this time around just over 10% of the national vote.

Merkel’s greatest achievement, then, is that she pulled off a hat trick.

• In 2015, under her leadership, some 1.2 million immigrants, most from Syria, were allowed entry into Germany. Since then the overwhelming majority have been successfully integrated into German society.
• Notwithstanding this enormous influx, and notwithstanding what in its wake was the considerable appeal of the right-wing AfD, the party has failed, so far at least, to continued to gain traction.
•  Merkel’s personal and political popularity has held firm. Despite her doing, or maybe because of her doing, what no other world leader has dared to do, allowed in, welcomed in, so many immigrants essentially at a single stroke, her popularity has held at home as well as abroad.

In an era in which suspicion of “the other,” even hatred of “the other,” has been so strong a political force, certainly in the West, Merkel’s leadership on the issue of immigration has nowhere been rivaled. Not even close.   

In human history not a single dictatorial leader has been content to remain in place. Without exception such leaders are hellbent on becoming even more completely controlling than they already are.

No need though to go back in time. We see it now. Each of us is eyewitness to this inevitable trajectory.    

Since protests in Russia in 2011 and 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin gradually clamped down on his opponents. Moreover, ahead of today’s parliamentary elections the pace of his crushing his critics accelerated. For months, Putin’s most prominent opponent, Alexei Navalny, has been behind bars. And the others of Putin’s opposition have faced unprecedented persecution – unprecedented at least for many decades.

Like Russia and before it the Soviet Union, China has no experience with liberal democracy. Additionally, both have had extensive experience with Communist Parties, which have been without exception strongly centralized. Like Russia China, then, provides rich soil for dictators determined to become more dictatorial.   

In recent months hardly a week has gone by, hardly a day has gone by, without news of yet another sort of clampdown by Chinese President – and General Secretary of the Communist Party, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission – Xi Jinping. In no uncertain terms he has demonstrated his lust for power. His determination to become totalitarian. As totalitarian a Chinese leader as any since Mao Zedong.   

By now no aspect of Chinese society has been left untouched by Xi and his Chinese Communist Party. Not politics, not business, not the military, not technology, not territory, not art or culture. Xi’s fingerprints are virtually everywhere – his increasingly iron grip is on virtually everyone.  

I could go on. But the point of this piece is just that left unchecked bad leadership persists. And that, step by step by step, in time it gets worse.

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in their new book, Peril, that just before and after the 2020 election, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, reached out to his Chinese counterpart to assure him about the stability of the United States. The news that this was done without the approval of the commander in chief, President Donald Trump, or Trump’s even knowing the calls had taken place, was met with appreciation among Democrats and laceration among Republicans.

While what Milley did was probably not in violation of the Constitution, he did in this instance deviate from the norm. He violated the principal of civilian control of the military. One might, then, reasonably argue, as many Republicans have, that Milley should be reprimanded or even fired. Or one might take a different perspective, which is to say that on rare occasions rules that are entrenched and even enshrined should be broken.

What General Milley did cannot be understood separate and apart from the context within which he did it. Nor can it be understood separate and apart from his own experience of President Trump. Nor cannot it be understood separate and apart from an understanding of what constitutes good and bad leadership – and good and bad followership.

In brief:

• The context that was the White House in the weeks and months before and after the 2020 election was chaotic and unreliable. Moreover, the president himself was erratic and unstable.
• The general had a previous encounter with the president in which the former openly took on the latter. In June 2020 Trump obliged Milley to be part of a photo op preceded by the use of tear gas and rubber bullets to clear the area of peaceful protesters. Immediately after the photo op was over, Milley was deeply embarrassed – both by the ugly episode and by his participation in it. “I should not have been there,” he said a short time later. “As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from.”  
• Questions: What does a good follower do when he or she is in the grip of a bad leader, a very bad leader? Fall into line? Follow orders? Or refuse to fall into line? Refuse to follow orders?

I do not mean to minimize what could be a difficult moral dilemma with considerable or even severe consequences. Still, if “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” can Milley be fairly faulted for doing something?  

New York Times prize-winning columnist Tom Friedman just wrote a piece in which he lamented the decline of American pluralism.* It’s a familiar refrain. To his credit, however, Friedman does something somewhat more novel. He singles out as a model of principled pluralism the American military. The American military, he writes, “is our last great carrier of pluralism at a time when more and more civilian politicians are opting for cheap tribalism.”

“Leadership matters,” Friedman adds, noting that good leadership in the military explains why “the ethic of pluralism and teamwork shown by many of our men and women in uniform reduces the tribal divisions within the armed forces.” Which raises this question: what accounts for so many good leaders among members of the military and so many bad leaders among our elected officials?

It happens this is precisely this question I addressed in my 2018 book, Professionalizing Leadership. Anyone interested in my argument can read the book. Here I will simply say that what I wrote then applies now:

Learning to lead in the American military is unlike learning to lead anywhere else in America. Learning to lead in the American military is better. Learning to lead in the American military is harder, broader, deeper, and richer. And it is longer. In the American military learning to lead lasts a lifetime.  

Why other American institutions – including institutions of higher education – continue to refuse to take a page out of the military’s playbook, specifically as it pertains to leadership, remains a mystery to me. And a tragedy. It’s a crying shame that among civilians learning how to lead remains largely in the hands of amateurs while professionals, members of the U. S. military, are so close at hand.   

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