Kellerman comments…
Dropping like flies just in the last month….
Among others….
Having their wings clipped just in the last month….
Among others….
Just saying.
I have written before about the problems associated with muddling the words “management” and “leadership.” Such muddling has a long if not exactly distinguished history in both management and leadership studies – and there are practical consequences as well. For example, graduate students in, say, business and public administration typically find the courses they have to choose from do not distinguish between “management” and “leadership.” The words are usually used, in effect, interchangeably, as if they were synonymous. This is not to say that no academic has ever addressed the difference between the two. Some have. But the distinctions that have been made between “management” and “leadership” never became common currency, so the confusions persist.
Most academics in management and leadership think of themselves as experts in either the one or the other. All of them must, however, or they should, grapple with questions of definition. In other words, even though I, for example, roost in leadership studies as opposed to management studies, questions of how I define leadership and distinguish it from management come up.
Here though I set semantic issues aside. Not only will I not define either “management” or “leadership,” I will conflate the two as if they were interchangeable because, for the purposes of this post, they are.
Anyone familiar with my work knows that for more than a decade I have found fault with the field of leadership studies. For example, in my book Bad Leadership (2004) I asked why we fixate on developing good leaders while ignoring virtually entirely the ubiquitous, pernicious problem of bad leaders. Somewhat similarly in my book Followership (2008), I raised the question of why we obsess about leaders while neglecting almost entirely their necessary counterpart, followers.
As I wrote in a more recent book, Professionalizing Leadership (2018), for many years I was almost alone in my critiques. While all along there was some bitching and moaning in addition to mine, by and large what I came to call the leadership industry remained unscathed, untouched by the missiles that I and a handful of others regularly launched.
In recent years this began, however, to change. More specifically, in recent years I have been joined by a small but fierce cadre of critics who point to, among other things, the yawning gap between what the leadership industry claims to do and what it really does. For example, Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of business at Stanford University, concluded in a book titled Leadership BS no less, that the leadership industry had “failed.” Similarly, Rakesh Khurana and Nitin Nohria, while they were still primarily faculty at the Harvard Business School (now they are primarily administrators), wrote that the “current state of leadership education lacks the intellectual rigor and institutional structure required to advance the field beyond its present (and precariously) nascent stage.”
Today’s post is motivated by a new book and article that make clear their author has joined the ranks of the loyal opposition. Both were written by Dennis Tourish, Professor of Leadership and Organization Studies at the University of Sussex. The titles of his book, Management Studies in Crisis, and his article, “The Triumph of Nonsense in Management Studies” (published in Academy of Management Learning & Education) say it all. I cannot in this piece do justice to the totality of Tourish’s argument. So here just a line from the abstract of the article: “I argue that our discipline is in crisis. We neglect really important issues in favor of bite sized chunks of research that are more likely to find quick publication in leading journals…. We pretend to be doing more important work, and more competently, than we really are.”
In addition to his academic post, Tourish edits the well-respected journal, Leadership. He is, then, in a position to know. He is not new either to the field of management or to leadership – he can, in fact, legitimately lay claim to being expert in both. Which is precisely why attention must be paid. When someone of Tourish’s breadth and depth takes aim it is for good reason. Academics and, for that matter, practitioners who ignore his cautions and concerns do so at their professional peril.
He’s done it. In addition to all his other claims to fame – including being among the richest and most successful people on the planet – Jeff Bezos has catapulted his company, Amazon, to the top slot among the “Best-Managed Companies of 2019.”
Amazon was so anointed not by some fly-by-night fraudster, but by the Wall Street Journal, an establishment publication if ever there was one. Moreover, in order to legitimize its rankings, the Journal employed “a team of researchers at Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute.” Named after the venerable management guru, Peter Drucker, the Drucker Institute, via the Journal, bestowed on Bezos, Amazon’s already legendary founder and CEO, an ostensibly well-deserved badge of honor for his exceptional leadership and management.
To determine the rankings, which were designed to “reveal how effectively a company is managed,” five criteria were invoked: customer satisfaction, employee engagement and development, innovation, social responsibility, and financial strength. Readers of the Wall Street Journal were not told how exactly these five criteria were weighted, but we were informed that Amazon shot to the top of the list by “earning an off-the-charts ranking in innovation.”
Hard to tell, in other words, how well Amazon did – or did not do – on other measures such as, to take a random – or not so random – example, employee engagement and development. Just so happens, though, that just as the Journal was trumpeting its “Management Top 250” report, there was another report, this one just a teeny-weeny bit less favorable to Amazon. This one, in fact, exceedingly critical of Amazon, specifically regarding its treatment of those in the lower ranks of its employ.
Suffice to say here that an article just published in the Atlantic, written by Will Evans, is titled, “Ruthless Quotas at Amazon are Maiming Employees.” (The story was also featured on Public Television.) As the piece documents, Amazon’s ruthless drive for speed in addition to innovation led has to the rate of serious injuries in its fulfillment centers nationwide being “more than double the national average for the warehousing industry.”
Which returns us to the previously mentioned rankings, those rankings proudly touted explicitly by the Journal, and implicitly by the Drucker Institute. The Journal writes that Drucker defined “effectiveness” as “doing the right things well.” What it does not go on to explore is what is, what constitutes, “right.”
Is speed – particularly same day delivery of a package – necessarily a right? Is innovation – even an “off-the-charts ranking in innovation” – necessarily a right? And, even if they are, do these rights transcend in importance other rights, such as the well-being, physical and mental, of those of who people Amazon’s ranks, at every level? You tell me.
Bezos has become so big a behemoth that his “leadership principles” are gospel. Principle number one? “Customer obsession.” Leaders, the behemoth insists, start with the customer and work backwards. For Bezos it’s paid off – and then some. As the article about Amazon by Scott Shane in today’s New York Times reminds us – this one’s titled “Prime Mover: How Amazon Wove Itself into the Life of an American City” – for several years now Amazon has been ranked by consumers either one or two among all American companies.
Which raises the question, which is the chicken and which the egg? Must we stop demanding instant gratification? Or is it up to Bezos to educate us? To tell us that because instant gratification extracts a price – a pound of flesh from Amazon’s warehouse workers – he is no longer able, that is, willing, to deliver our sweater, our book or our blender in less than a day? That we might, in other words, have to exercise the patience of saints – wait two.
I do not normally link my blog to anything else. But to every rule usually there should be some exceptions.
Since yesterday I posted a blog about Margrethe Vestager – Silicon Valley’s “biggest foe” – and since an hour later I received from a former student a link to Sacha Baron Cohen’s scathing critique of the tech industry, I am hereby violating my own general rule. I would not be providing the link did I not think that Cohen, along with Vestager, has a strong case to make. For reasons relating to the general welfare, time to cut some leaders of some big tech companies down to better size.
Americans are obsessed with leaders. Even if we hate them, we focus on them, fixate on them to the point where no one else and nothing else seems much to matter. This disposition is fueled obviously by the leadership industry, which supports our obsession and feeds off our fixation.
Leader-centrism is, however, problematic in more ways than one. It is intellectually misleading. It is practically misguided. And it is morally dispiriting. It is moral dispiriting because so few of our political leaders provide shining examples – and so few of our corporate leaders shed beacons of light. In fact, though on one level some are highly successful, on another level many of America’s most visible leaders – from Bezos to Musk to Trump – are famously if not fatally flawed. The irony, then, is that for all our fixation on those at the top, those at the top tend deeply to disappoint.
Polls prove the point. For example, more than 81% of Americans think that members of Congress behave unethically some if not most of the time. And more than 77% of Americans think the same of leaders of technology companies. Moreover, in some number of cases, yesterday’s most admired leaders have become today’s most reviled leaders. I am thinking especially of founders of America’s most fabled technology companies, who five minutes ago were being valorized and who five minutes later are being demonized. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are arguably the most striking cases in point. He once a wunderkind, she once a feminist icon, both now seriously suspect, suspected of being as greedy for power as for money.
Ironically but perhaps not surprisingly, then, it is to Europe I turn to locate a good leader. Ironically but perhaps not surprisingly, then, it is to a regulator I turn to locate a good leader. To locate a leader who is, simultaneously, effective and ethical.
I refer to Margrethe Vestager, who about five years ago went from being a Danish lawmaker to head of the European Commission’s antitrust division. In this role she has morphed from political unknown to powerful muckraker. In this role her name has become inextricably linked to that of Silicon Valley. In this role she has had the singular talent and startling temerity to become big tech’s biggest nightmare.
So far, Vestager has managed to fine Google more than $9 billion for breaking antitrust laws, and obliged Apple to pay more than $14 billion for tax evasion. More to the point, in a world in which politicians along with ordinary people have been reduced to standing by and doing nothing while big tech intrudes on the common good, invades our personal space, and distorts the national discourse, Vestager has figured out how to use the power of her post to contain and even to clamp down on companies that have, by general consensus, become much, much too big for their britches.
Relentlessly changing technologies are every leader’s promise – and every leader’s peril. Harnessing them completely is impossible – but ignoring them entirely is not an option. Moreover, the corporate behemoths who control Western technologies – notably Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Facebook – have been generally impervious to anyone who dared to try to take them on. Except for Margrethe Vestager.
Vestager just expanded her portfolio, one that already covers digital policy across 28 European nations. And she just signed on for another five-year-term, signaling that she will be even more active and aggressive in her second term than she was in her first. Which is precisely why as much as anyone else in the technological space, she’s a leader worth watching. It’s possible the goodness that she has evidenced so far – being simultaneously effective and ethical – will become greatness.
Let’s see now – which is worse? A corporate leader who is responsible for having a consensual relationship with an employee? Or a corporate leader who is responsible for ignoring warnings his product is dangerously unsafe?
On the surface it would seem the former. For after McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook admitted he had a relationship with an employee, he immediately said he had made a “mistake.” He then went on to explain that “given the values of the company,” he agreed with the board it was “time for [him] to move on.”
Conversely, while Boeing’s CEO Dennis Muilenburg claimed he considered stepping down in the aftermath of two fatal crashes of Boeing’s 737 Max jets, he remains in place. To be sure, the board did strip him of his responsibilities as chairman. But chief executive officer? Last I looked, five minutes ago, Muilenburg continues to hold the title.
Back to my original question: Which of the two leaders is worse? Let’s assume that Easterbrook’s relationship with his employee was – heaven forefend – sexual. What we have here then is two consenting adults of admittedly unequal status involved in an affair.
What we have, however, at Boeing is this. Two separate 737 Max crashes – one in Indonesia in October of last year, one in Ethiopia in March of this year – in which 346 people died. Died.
It’s not as if Muilenburg had no idea Boeing had a problem. He did. He knew. He knew because (at the least) he was copied on an e-mail sent four months before the crash in Indonesia in which a Boeing production manager warned in no uncertain terms that the plane was being rushed into production. He went so far as to write, “For the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing plane.” In other words, a note on which Muilenburg was copied – and to which he admitted he replied – was an exceedingly stark caution about the risk associated with this particular plane. But, not only was it not grounded before the first crash, it was not even grounded after. Only after the second deadly accident was the 737 Max finally pulled from Boeing’s rotation.
Which then is worse? Sex or death?
Must be the former. For Easterbrook is gone while Muilenburg is not.
“Scorched earth” usually refers to a military policy intent on destroying everything to preclude the enemy from seizing or using anything. But as the image it conjures implies – nothing but rubble and ruin left – for those left behind the cost is high. What they knew is no more. In its wake is nothing but destruction, decay, death.
While “scorched earth” originally has a military connotation, now the term is used more broadly. It refers to the deliberate decision to detonate – not always literally, sometimes figuratively – whatever others might deem of value. Which has led me to coin the term, “scorched earth leader.” A scorched earth leader is any leader who prefers to blow up everyone and everything – literally or figuratively – to surrendering even a smidgeon of power.
It’s astonishing when you think of it – leaders so crazily narcissistic that they opt to destroy the lives of their followers rather than suffer a blow to their ego. Adolph Hitler is an infamous example. By the summer of 1944 it was well known not only to the Allies but to the Nazis that Germany’s chances of winning the war were diminishing to the point of vanishing. Still, Hitler refused even to consider surrender, preferring to see Germany go up in flames until finally he did himself in.
More contemporaneously, also infamously, is Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, who clung to power for nearly 40 years as his country declined by every measure on account of his wretchedly inept and corrupt governance. Nor did he even in old age exit of his own volition. Just two years ago, in the rough equivalent of a palace coup, Mugabe was finally forced out.
And how about Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad?! As I write he is as securely situated at the top of his country’s political hierarchy as at any time since the political protests that were associated with the Arab Spring, in 2011. In the eight years since then, Assad has consistently refused even to consider compromise, preferring instead to see the Syrian people suffer as acutely as any in this century. Large swaths of their country have been destroyed. And these are the casualties of the civil war: Approximately a half a million Syrians dead. Approximately 3 million Syrians fled from their homeland to other countries including Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. And approximately 6. 5 million Syrians displaced within their own country. Still Assad stands – a scorched earth leader if ever there was one.
It’s a phenomenon so awful it seems almost alien. How is it that followers allow, sometimes even enable scorched earth leaders? Why do we put up with those who would do us in?
Of course, we Americans have no such concerns. We would never elect a president who would burn the house down before gracefully bowing out.
For at least the last 8 years I have talked and written about leaders and followers and the trajectory of history. Put briefly: leaders in liberal democracies are getting weaker, more feckless; while followers in liberal democracies are getting stronger, more restless.
When I say this to a group, someone in the audience invariably asks, “Where does all this end?” “If followers continue to have more power and leaders less, what does this suggest for good governance?” I reply honestly, which is to admit that I don’t rightly know. I do though add that to look closely and carefully at the world in which we live is to get a few clues. Here just seven – all in the last few days.
Though he has some competition, he doesn’t have much. Howard Schultz, founder and for decades chairman and chief executive officer of Starbucks, ranks high not just as one of America’s most successful businessmen ever, but as one of its best-intentioned. Above all, though he was not always as good as his word, from the start Schultz put great stock in being an employer who treated his employees carefully and considerately. In being a capitalist with a capacious heart.
In his book, Onward, Schultz returns frequently to this theme. He remembers his father being dismissed from his job after a workplace accident with no health-care coverage and no severance. He further recalls his father never finding “fulfillment or meaning in his work.” It made Schultz vow that if he ever was a “business leader,” he would do things differently. He would “build the kind of company” his father “never got to work for.” He would “create a unique community inside the company.” He would give his workers tasks “infused” with precisely the purpose and meaning of which his father was deprived.
Nor was Schultz content to confine his reformism to the private sector. Early this year he declared he was considering taking on Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, running himself as a centrist, independent candidate. While his foray into politics remained an embryonic effort, it was an indicator of Schultz’s interest in being a well-intentioned leader not only within Starbucks but without.
It is, then, not only an irony, but a sign of the times, that Schultz of all people has got caught in the crossfire of the unrest in Hong Kong – several Starbucks’ storefronts deliberately defaced in recent protests. To say he’s not the only one is to understate it. The recent brouhaha in which the National Basketball Association got ensnared is a vivid example of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s iron grip, which can seem now as if it’s tightening around us all. But Schultz – who has always presented himself as a leader with a conscience – is a special case. A case in which there is an obvious conflict between what presumably are his professional interests, Starbucks making more money than it already is, and his personal conscience, siding with democrats rather than autocrats.
In 2017, before Xi’s control was as complete as it is now, Schultz publicly declared his company would become less dependent on the U. S. market and more on the Chinese market: “China will become a much more important component of the financial results of Starbucks,” he confidently proclaimed. He was right, of course. Toward the end of 2019 are some 170 Starbucks outlets in Hong Kong – and some 4,000 in China. Moreover, by 2022 plans are to have at least 2,000 more. You do the math.
What’s a leader to do? On the one hand, a company to run with humongous numbers of customers in a country that is a tyranny. On the other hand, a conscience to consider that is being tested at every turn of the screw.
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