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Whereas the Republicans have at the helm a charismatic leader – Donald Trump’s ability to attract attention and admirers remains remarkable – the Democrats have at the helm no leader at all. This became clear again today, when they proved incapable, completely incapable, of using Robert Mueller’s testimony to significant effect.

Part of the reason obviously was that Mueller failed persuasively to present either himself or his report. But part of the reason was that none of the Congressional Democrats have the magnetism to pull us into their orbit.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler, leader of the House Judiciary Committee? For all his reliability and resolve, I don’t think so. Congressman Adam Schiff, leader of the House Intelligence Committee? For all his insight and intelligence, I don’t think so. Even Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi – cautious to a fault and dithering ineffectually on impeachment – doesn’t cut it. As she proved again today, when she spoke after the proceedings were over, she’s the leader in name only. She’s failed completely – though in fairness it’s not clear she’s even tried – to capture the public imagination.

The same can be said about the candidates for the Democratic nomination for president. For the moment there’s too many of them – who can remember each of their names, not to speak of distinguish the one from the other? And for the moment not one stands out, stands head and shoulders above the rest because he or she is so obviously convincing and compelling. Even the front runners – Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris – have yet to prove they can cut it. Have yet to prove they could conceivably take on Mr. Charisma and be the one left standing. Meantime it’s Trump who continues to hold center stage. It’s he who continues the star of the circus.

We in the leadership industry are responsible – at least in part.

We in the leadership industry are responsible at least in part for the miserable mess that is American politics.

We in the leadership industry are responsible at least in part for the diminution and degradation of American political culture.

We in the leadership industry are responsible at least in part for the fact that not since the advent of political polling have our leaders been as disliked, disrespected, and distrusted as they are now.

We in the leadership industry are responsible at least in part for sending the message that leaders can be novices – completely inexperienced, altogether inexpert, and wholly untested. As was Donald Trump when he was elected president of the United States.

We in the leadership industry are responsible at least in part for sending the wrong message. For sending the message that learning to lead is simple – that it can be accomplished as quickly as easily.   

We in the leadership industry are responsible at least in part for not sending the right message – that learning to lead is hard. That learning to lead involves each of these three: leadership education, leadership training, and leadership development.

We in the leadership industry are responsible at least in part for not getting our act together: for not cooperating and collaborating, among ourselves, to agree on a core curriculum, to set minimal standards, and first to aspire to and then to achieve professionalism.

We in the leadership industry are responsible at least in part for failing to develop a widely accepted and deeply respected analogue to the Hippocratic oath.

We in the leadership industry are responsible at least in part for the fact that America’s followers – the American people – have never been taught that good leadership absent good followership is not only improbable but impossible.   

Megan Rapinoe is just getting started and already she’s being compared to Billie Jean King and Muhammed Ali. Two other athlete-activists who left an enduring mark on American sports, American politics, and American culture.  

My guess though is that Rapinoe will turn out different. Only time will tell, of course. All I can do is imagine what she’ll be like ten, twenty years from now. But to listen closely to what she says and to how she says it is to witness a woman who is being nothing if not deliberate, and who is doing nothing if not preparing in the present for her future. For her future as a leader. I don’t mean a leader just in sports, which already she is. Or a leader just in the fight for equal rights, which already she is.  I mean a leader with a capital “L.” A leader in the largest sense of this word – a leader of, say, the United Nations or the United States.  

King and Ali were reactive: they reacted to the situations in which they found themselves. Rapinoe is similarly reactive – she does respond to cues from the contexts within which she is situated. But, additionally, she is proactive. She ventures forth, looks as far into the distance as she possibly can, and then dares to report what’s broke and to tell us how to fix it.

Rapinoe is riding the wave. She is intensely aware of the incredible, indelible, moment in which she finds herself – and intensely aware that it was she who, more than any other single individual, is credited with creating it. But she is also smart enough to be inclusive in her accomplishments; she is also ambitious enough to plan for when her career as a (soccer) player is over; and she is also tough enough to take on, even now, anyone anywhere who has the temerity to get in her way. Megan Rapinoe is no ordinary star athlete. She is a leader who will, in time, almost certainly become more influential and, ultimately, consequential.  

An assassination is a murder. But the word “assassination” is usually reserved for the murder of a prominent person – often a politician picked off for political reasons.

Recently was an assassination about which most Americans never heard. Never heard though it occurred in a country that is, or it should be, one of America’s closest and most important allies. Never heard though it triggered in the staid, stable Financial Times an editorial with a decidedly alarming headline, “German Radical Right Threatens the Survival of Democracy.”  

Everyone who pays attention to these things knows that in the wake of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to admit into Germany a million or more immigrants, refugees, seekers of safe havens, has been a political resurgence of Germany’s extreme right wing. For obvious reasons such a resurgence in Germany particularly has historical resonance. But, additionally, contemporaneously, in the last several years has been a surge in rightwing activity not just virtually, online, but actually – in the streets and in the corridors of power.  

Still, the assassination on June 1^st of a popular politician, Walter Luebcke, by a single shot in the head fired at close range, is another matter entirely. Given it was the first murder of a politician by a rightwing extremist in Germany’s postwar history, it is not too much to insist that though attention has not been paid, attention must be paid.      

The difference is of significance. Laypeople are murdered, leaders are assassinated.  

Yesterday was one of those days. Impossible to follow the news without being reminded of just how much the world has changed, even in the last ten years. It’s not that leaders have become less important. It’s that followers have become more important. Important to the point where focusing on leadership to the exclusion of followership is to focus wrong.

• The previously promising presidential campaign of the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, has been derailed, possibly permanently. Derailed by African American residents of South Bend, furiously protesting the fatal shooting of a black man by a white police officer.
• The dictatorial leader of Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suffered his most stinging defeat in years. In consequence, Erdogan has lost, at least for now, electoral control of Istanbul, by far Turkey’s most consequential city.
• The protests in Prague were the largest in the Czech Republic since 1989. Well over 200,000 people took to the streets to demand the resignation of the country’s prime minister, Anrej Babis. Babis has long been accused of corruption and malfeasance. Signs are anger against him has reached a boiling point, a point at which sweeping change transitions from request to requirement.  

I cannot foretell the future. It’s possible that all this sound and fury will in the end among to nothing. But, it’s just as possible that Buttigieg’s heyday is over. That Erdogan’s heyday is over. And that Babis’s heyday is over.

Women and Leadership – Redux (June 2019)

Women and leadership – it’s one of my running themes. And why not? Among the reasons to continue the conversation:

• While during the last couple of decades more women have secured positions of leadership, the number of women at the top remains low, very low. This applies to virtually every place on the planet.
• While during the last couple of decades the amount of ink spilled discussing women and leadership has been, shall we say, abundant, change continues more incremental than impressive.
• While the situation remains static and our fretting about it does the same, the heart of the matter, the beating heart of the matter, is still being sidelined.  

You forget what I wrote was the heart of the matter – the beating heart of the matter?  It’s babies. It’s that women bear babies and men do not.

Some stats:

• In recent years American women have increased the amount of time they spend on their jobs.
• American women who work outside the home spend an average of seven hours and 20 minutes each day on the job.  
• American working women spend about a half-hour more each day than American men on household chores such as cleaning and cooking.
• American working women with young children spend about two hours a day on tasks related to childrearing. American working men spend less than an hour and a half per day doing the same.  
• In 2018 American women worked longer and played less than they did in 2017. They also slept less. *

Some facts:

• Pregnant women who carry a baby to term reach the same peak levels of endurance as Ironman competitors.
• Human mothers have the biggest children and the longest pregnancies of all apes.
• Over 80 % of new mothers start out breastfeeding their children.
• Breastfeeding is usually a positive experience for mother and child. At the same time, it makes demands on the mother, physical and psychological, that are not easily compatible with full time employment. These demands include time and energy, special attention to nutrition and caloric intake, and the need for enough rest and adequate sleep.

Those of us who still wonder why, despite the many high ambitions and the many good intentions, the number of women who lead continues to remain comparatively low have only to look at the whole truth. A truth that includes the impact on women of being solely responsible for bearing the baby and birthing the baby – and then largely responsible for raising it.  

And oh, then there is this!

In the United States today are nearly 12.6 million single parents raising over 21 million children. Of single parents only 16 percent are fathers. Which means that approximately 84% of single parents are mothers. Still wonder why so few leaders are women?   

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*Theses figures are from the annual U. S. Labor Department Time Use Survey.

I posted Take One of “Democracy in a Petrie Dish” on September 9, 2016. (Link below.) It was about how and why anyone with an interest in the necessary tension between autocratic leaders and democratic followers should pay close attention to the events in Hong Kong. Now, over two and a half years later, my point remains the same. Since 2014 Hong Kong has been an experiment in democracy – an experiment in whether it’s possible for Hong Kong’s relatively powerless few to bring to their knees China’s inordinately powerful many.

Since that initial post on Hong Kong the situation has changed. China has become even more stringent and less tolerant of political dissent. Moreover, its leader, Xi Jinping, has evolved from being an authoritarian to a totalitarian. At this point, he uses the Chinese Communist Party to maintain complete control over the Chinese people, while having secured for himself the constitutional right to remain leader for life.  

In consequence of this change, most experts have come to conclude that China will continue to squeeze Hong Kong to the point where its democracy is extinguished. Of course, they are likely still to be right. So far China has not been shy about exercising its muscle and so far, while the people of Hong Kong have resisted, they have not done so fiercely enough, constantly enough, and in enough numbers to stop the Chinese behemoth.

In the last couple of weeks though, things have changed. The balance of power between the people of Hong Kong and the government of China has shifted – at least slightly, at least for now. The protesters in Hong Kong have been so great in their numbers, so united in their resistance, and so passionately dedicated to their cause that at this moment they are prevailing. Their government – led by Carrie Lam, who is pro-Chinese – has backtracked, back-peddled, apologized and suspended as opposed to implemented, for now, an onerous proposed extradition law.

Since 2014 – since Hong Kong’s so-called “umbrella revolution – I have thought of it as a test case. If Hong Kong falls, from somewhat independent democracy to totally abject autocracy, the future in places such as Taiwan, and in fact in China itself, looks grim for anyone seeking to loosen the reins of government control. On the other hand, if the people of Hong Kong successfully stave off the Chinese authorities, there’s no telling the direction of totalitarianism.

This is a long game, not a short one. The importance of winning at any given moment should not be exaggerated. But it is a game of sorts – a contest of utmost consequence.   

Democracy in a Petri Dish

Of all the conundrums confounding relations between leaders and followers, none is as daunting as bad leadership. Bad leadership traps both leaders and followers in a vise from which neither is able easily to escape.

The leader behaves badly and then, typically, behaves even more badly. His followers are stymied – sometimes divided, invariably frightened. Frightened of the consequences of doing something and frightened of the consequences of doing nothing. And so generally they opt for the latter. Being a bystander is easier than being an activist – less draining and demanding, less unsettling and unnerving.

But when bad leadership becomes worse leadership, followers must act.  If they do not, they are complicit in their own suffering. Americans have got to this point. After putting up with President Donald Trump’s rampant ignorance and outrageous malfeasance for two and a half years, time has come for every sentient citizen to put up or shut up.

Followers differ one from the other: they have different wants, needs, and wishes, and different resources and responsibilities. They are moreover situated in different contexts and they face different circumstances. Here I refer to a specific set of followers: those in the opposition and those best positioned to act against a president who has affronted our norms and violated our laws. I refer specifically to two categories of Democrats: those serving in the House of Representatives and those running for president of the United States.

In both cases women are the obvious leaders of the opposition, obvious leaders of opposing followers. First is Nancy Pelosi, who ought finally to throw caution to the wind. And second is Elizabeth Warren, who was first among Democratic candidates to call for Trump’s impeachment, and who was quick to repeat that call last night, in the wake of the president’s saying he would do again what he did before, accept information about an opponent from a foreign government. But Warren should do more than speak out. She should put out – she should take the lead in organizing at least some of her opponents in the race for the White House in order to present a united front. A united Democratic front for impeachment of the sitting Republican president.  

The United States of America was forged in the crucible of opposition to bad leadership. Opposition so fierce it culminated in a revolt against the king of England. But, to get to that point, followers needed leaders filled with fury so great it fueled them for months and more months, and finally for years. No one ever said upending bad leaders was easy. It’s not. It’s hard. Really hard. But, it’s not impossible.

Thomas Paine’s revolutionary tract, Common Sense, published in 1776, has been described as the match that lit the Revolution:

Though I would carefully avoid giving unnecessary offence, yet I am inclined to believe that all those who espouse the doctrine of reconciliation may be included within the following descriptions. Interested men, who are not to be trusted; weak men who cannot see; prejudiced men who will not see; and a certain set of moderate men who … will be the cause of more calamities to this Continent than all the other three….

According to Paine then, of all the followers of bad leaders it is moderates who do the most harm. In the current situation moderates so pusillanimous they would fail to impeach a president who, as attested to by every scintilla of evidence, deserves nothing else and no less.  

In the American system of higher education there is a single institution that regularly professes to teach how to lead. American Business Schools. Not every American Business School, but many and maybe even most American Business Schools. That is, many if not most American Business Schools declare that their primary mission is to train leaders, or to educate leaders, or to develop leaders.

How’s that going for them? Not so well. The number of full-time M.B.A. programs continues to dwindle. This trend is not new. But the fact that it’s been sustained without a break since at least 2014 is troubling; at least it’s troubling to deans of the nation’s business schools who are charged with, among their other tasks, keeping enrollments from dropping. As Jeffrey Brown, dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois, put it: “If you were able to get every dean in the U. S. under a lie detector, outside of maybe the top 20 M.B.A, programs, every one of them would admit they were struggling to maintain enrollment and losing money on the program.”*

There are, of course, several reasons for the continuing drop in the number of full-time, two-year business school programs. They include costs, not only in money but in time; and a relatively strong job market even for those without advanced degrees; and competition from other business school programs that take only a year to complete or require no residency at all but are offered instead online.  

There is however another reason – one that pertains to their primary mission. Because of their brands, schools such as the Harvard Business School and the Stanford Graduate School of Business can still get away with saying that their mission is to “educate leaders who make a difference in the world” (Harvard) or to “develop innovative, principled, and insightful leaders who change the world” (Stanford).  However, a school such as the one led by Dean Brown does not have the advantage of brand: by every measure the University of Illinois is less prestigious an institution than either Harvard or Stanford. So, bowing to the marketplace Geis is being forced to shrink beyond recognition. After this year’s incoming class completes its studies, the school will no longer offer either full-time or even part time M.B.A. degrees. The only such degrees it will offer will be online.  

In all the ink that’s been spilled on why traditional M.B.A. programs are biting the dust in such significant numbers, one reason is never given. It is that most, if not all, of these schools fail to fulfill their primary mission. Harvard and Stanford can still get away with claiming, respectively, that they educate leaders and develop leaders. Their brands remain that strong. But a school such as Geis could not. Here is Geis’s mission statement: “We prepare and empower exceptional, innovative, purposeful and ethical business leaders through knowledge creation and immersive learning experiences.” Seems to me self-evident that had Geis been able somehow to prove it really did “prepare and empower” exceptional leaders it would still be in business. But the fact that it, like nearly all such schools, could not, consigned its traditional graduate programs to the ash heap of history.

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*Quoted in Kelsey Gee, “Full-Time M.B.A. Programs Dwindle,” Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2019.

We’ve heard the moaning and groaning about income inequality for years. Yet the American disposition to pay leaders obscenely well while paying everyone else obscenely less well continues apace.

CEOs are the most obvious beneficiaries of this obnoxiously skewed system. In the last year the average wage of American workers finally grew, by 4 percent to an average annual income of $47,000. (All figures are rounded.) But, the average wage of their bosses (of S&P 500 companies) also grew, by 7 percent to a median income of more than $12 million. This despite executive performances overall that were disappointing.* This despite multiple efforts to rein in executive pay. This despite having the wind anyway at executive backs – in 2018 a strong economy, a favorable tax cut, and a large increase in stock buybacks that lifted share prices.

There’s no logic to any of this. Rich leaders are getting inordinately richer not because they deserve to. Or because they perform tricks that no one else can. Or because they are indispensable to successful corporate performance while everyone else is dispensable.  

Rather rich leaders are getting inordinately richer first because of a herd mentality – the idea that leaders are all-important has become deeply entrenched in America’s collective consciousness. And second because executive compensation is a train that’s left the station – and no one’s been able to stop it. In 2018, Robert Iger, the exceedingly capable CEO of Disney, earned about $140 million. Abigail Disney, niece of one of the founders, publicly objected to the size of Iger’s compensation package not because she thought him less than excellent. To the contrary, she made a point of saying, “he deserves a lot of money.” Rather she objected because his earnings were already outsized, “How far,” she asked, “are we going to go?

Among the leaders most lavishly compensated, many if not most give back. At the highest level is the Giving Pledge, which urges the nation’s wealthiest individuals to donate at least half their assets to charitable or otherwise good causes. At lesser levels are countless other philanthropies, all of them intended to redistribute wealth or at least some of the benefits that money can buy.   

Still, invariably, Big Money is controlled by the few not the many. Which raises this question: Why do executives accept the extravagant sums of money their boards are willing to pay? Why don’t they just say no? Why don’t they just tell it like it is – which is that no single individual deserves to earn so exponentially much more money than does virtually everyone else.

Anyone ever heard the term role model? Anyone ever heard the idea that a leader should be a role model? Anyone ever heard of history? Anyone ever heard what history teaches? Which is that a leadership class that gets too big for its britches will one day or another, one way or another be taken down a notch. Or two.

Just yesterday Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described democratic socialist, created pandemonium in a restaurant in Queens when she made an appearance to support tipped workers. Why did she feel the need? Because the federal minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour.  

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* Median shareholder returns for these companies was minus 6 percent, “the worst showing,” the Wall Street Journal reports, “since the financial crisis.”)