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The president of the University of Southern California, C. L. Max Nikias, has had what could legitimately be described as a successful tenure. He has been president for almost eight years and, according to the Los Angeles Times, his time in office was “marked by a significant boost in the university’s prestige and fundraising prowess.”  In addition to raising billions of dollars for USC, and using the money to recruit top students and hire top faculty, he pushed the university to see itself as an elite global institution. Moreover, he presided over its renovation and expansion, and extended its ties to China and the Pacific Rim.  What could go wrong?

Well, what could go wrong did. Specifically, key stakeholders came to conclude that USC had failed to respond promptly, publicly, and aggressively to several scandals, especially the most recent one, in which a gynecologist was accused of repeatedly abusing students. (Dr. George Tyndall had worked for decades at USC – he was the school’s only full-time gynecologist.)

What’s telling in this case – particularly for students of leadership and followership – is the trajectory of recent events. Even since the news broke about this last scandal, USC’s Board was dogged in its resistance to the cries of the crowd: it continued to reject the growing demand that Nikias be fired. In fact, as recently as last Tuesday – after 200 faculty members had called for Nikias to be replaced – the Board’s Executive Committee issued a statement saying that it had “full confidence in President Nikias’ leadership, ethics, and values and is certain that he will successfully guide our community forward.”

But, a mere three days later, the Board completely reversed itself. It admitted that something was “broken,” and that “urgent and profound actions” were needed. It announced, moreover, that it would, presumably virtually immediately, “commence the process of selecting a new president.”

The case of C.L. Max Nikias recalls the case of Lawrence Summers, who in 2006 was obliged to resign as president of Harvard University. Both men were supremely well qualified to run supremely eminent universities. Both men ran into trouble that did not, initially, cause their boards to lose confidence. Both men staunchly and for some time resisted the growing calls for them to quit. But, when faculty become involved, when faculty members banded together to demand their resignations, both men were ultimately obliged by their boards to surrender their tenure. Seems that on those rather rare occasions when faculty are highly motivated to do their leaders in, chances are good they will succeed.

Note: This blog site has been down for the last three weeks. Today chatter about leadership and life resumes.

Great art – music and movies, poetry and prose, painting and sculpture – can be and not infrequently is, great leadership. Picasso’s powerful antiwar painting, “Guernica,” is an example; as is Dylan’s prescient tune, “The Times They Are A-Changin’;” as is Scorsese’s scorching film, “Wolf of Wall Street.” In each case the artist intended to shape how we thought and what we felt. In each case the artist succeeded, brilliantly, in exercising influence. And, in each case the work lingers – timeless and transcendent.

This week died another such artist – Philip Roth. The greatest American novelist of his generation – and one of the greatest American novelists ever – was, also, a leader. From the start he had his detractors – especially women who were offended by what they perceived to be his misogyny, and Jews who were offended by what they perceived to be his anti-Semitism (Roth as self-hating Jew). But from the start his impact on American literature, and on American culture more generally, was immense.

Sex, especially male sexuality, was a running theme, and, inevitably, a forcefield. So was being Jewish in America or being a Jewish American or being an American Jew. And so was politics. Roth in midlife especially – a period during which he was as febrile as fertile – dug deep into politics, turned politics into grist for his novelistic mill. An example is The Plot Against America (2004), which I single out because in sketching an alternative universe, in this case one in which America has gone fascist, Roth is eerily, scarily, anticipatory of the time in which we live. The time of Trump.

Roth has been described, variously, as protean, prolific, profound and, of course, profane. He was also funny, regularly and occasionally relentlessly if blackly funny, which is one of the traits that separates him from peers such as John Updike and Saul Bellow.  Updike and Bellow are in different ways peerless. But, curiously, their literary and cultural influence seems even now, not long after their deaths, to have waned. Roth. I predict, will escape that fate. I predict the impact of his art will forever endure.

Bad leadership in American politics has become as endemic as extreme. The President, along with some members of Congress, are violating every premise and principle on which conceptions of good leadership historically have been based.  Some are components of character – such as decency and integrity. Others are instruments of intelligence – such as information and ideas. Still others are parts of personality – such as flexibility and receptivity. Every one of these fundamentals – fundamentals of good leadership – has been tossed aside, ripped asunder by the tsunami that is the Trump presidency.

The tragedy of the “leadership industry” – my catchall term for the now countless leadership centers, institutes, programs, courses, seminars, workshops, experiences, trainers, books, blogs, article, websites, webinars, videos, conferences, consultants, and coaches that claim to teach people how to lead – is that it has nothing to say about any of this. Some forty years after its inception, the leadership industry still sees fit to focus its attention, laser-like, on how to grow good leaders, while it ignores entirely the perennial, pernicious problem of how to stop bad leaders.

One could argue that in good times this obsession with developing good leaders is understandable – if only because in professing to develop good leaders there’s good money to be made. But when times are bad – particularly when the president is as ignoble as ignorant – for the leadership industry to play ostrich is inexcusable. Indefensible.

Some day we – we who constitute the leadership industry – will pay a price for our unwillingness to educate people about bad leadership. And some day we will pay a price for our unwillingness to train followers how to upend bad leaders. Meantime the American experiment and experience remain under threat.

Less than a year ago Emmanuel Macron was the golden boy of Western politics. The youngest French president ever, he was good-looking and well-heeled, brilliant and bold, centrist leaning and forward looking. Macron was also strikingly ambitious. He successfully started his own political party. He successfully updated France’s political agenda. And he successfully fashioned a plan to revive and reinvigorate the European Union. For a brief shining moment Macron was the great Western hope – one of the few leaders of a liberal democracy likely to beat the odds. Likely to succeed where most of his counterparts had failed – in the exercise of leadership.

Now his future, and France’s, and Europe’s, are less clear. Because Western followers refuse to give Western leaders much if any slack, the bloom is already off Macron’s rose. His approval ratings have dropped. Strikes and demonstrations have tested his mettle. His former mentor, his predecessor, Francois Hollande, has trashed him in a new book. And in a recent interview on French television, two veteran journalists went out of their way to demean and diminish the president they purportedly planned politely to question.

Whatever history’s ultimate judgement on this young and clearly clever politician, we are to blame for putting our leaders on such a ridiculously short leash. If Macron fails to restore France to even a measure of its former glory, and if he fails to inject the European Union with a fresh sense of possibility and destiny, it will be less his loss than ours.

Fortune magazine just announced its 2018 list of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.” The top ten are:

1. The Students (Marjory Stoneman Douglas and other schools)
2. Bill and Melinda Gates (Cofounders, Gates Foundation)
3. The #MeToo Movement
4. Moon Jae-in (President, South Korea)
5. Kenneth Frazier (CEO, Merck)
6. Scott Gottlieb (FDA Commissioner)
7. Margarethe Vestager (Commissioner for Competition, European Union)
8. Larry Fink (CEO, BlackRock)
9. General Joseph Dunford (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff)
10. Liu He (Vice Premier, China)

What on this roster stands out? One could argue the dearth of people of color. One could argue the dearth of women. One could argue the dearth of non-Americans. Or, one could argue, as I do, the inclusion of groups. Groups who a few months ago had zero power, zero authority, and zero influence. Groups who morphed overnight from followers into leaders.

“The Students” – who remain mostly nameless – were, until they were not, ordinary kids, typical high schoolers, average followers. But in the equivalent of a New York minute they became leaders – leaders motivated by a mission created by a calamity.

The #MeToo Movement is similar. No single individual is identifiable as its leader. Rather it is a collective whose anger met the moment. Whose anger got channeled into social media. Whose anger found resonance among millions of others who had experienced sexual harassment but who felt too weak, too vulnerable, too disenfranchised to do anything about it.

The words “leader” and “follower” are fungible – though the moment when a follower becomes a leader, and a leader a follower, can be difficult to detect. Still, usually we know it when we see it. When those who previously were powerless join to vent their outrage clearly and consistently – and strategically – they can become powerful. Not always, but sometimes.

In the leadership literature the term “managing up” is reasonably common. But how subordinates should manage their superiors – particularly in the workplace – nevertheless gets short shrift. Which is curious, because the problem confronts people at every level. Low level employees fret about how they and their bosses relate – as do mid-level employees and indeed upper level ones. Still, we are so fixated on problems facing leaders that problems facing followers are largely ignored.

A welcome exception to this general rule is a recent article by Sue Shellenbarger in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Right and Wrong Ways to Manage Up.”* The article points out that the number of dollars spent on leadership training for mid-level managers has decreased, while the number of dollars spent on leadership training for senior level managers has increased This leaves most mid-level managers especially without much education or training of any kind – including lessons on how to manage those more highly positioned than they.

There is nothing in Shellenbarger’s article that leads you to believe that any of what constitutes how to manage up is rocket science. To the contrary. Most of the advice is no more than simple common sense. Still, some of the nuggets on how to communicate with, how to engage, those more highly positioned than you, will be useful to some of the people some of the time. At a minimum they focus attention on those in the middle who tend not to benefit one whit from the big bucks big business invests in the leadership industry.

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* https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-right-and-wrong-way-to-manage-up-at-the-office-1523366792

In The End of Leadership, which was published in 2012, I wrote about what evidently was becoming a leadership gap. A technology gap between older leaders and younger leaders – and, more importantly, younger followers. I noted that few CEOs were cutting edge, were “using social media to engage with others in their companies, to share information and ideas from their companies’ perspectives, and to empower their work force to communicate on behalf of the organization.” I further quoted an expert who remarked that leaders were “wasting the opportunity to lead and manage in cyberspace.”

During the last six years the gap in technology savvy between older leaders and younger ones has become seismic. To wit: the evidence of earlier this week – during Mark Zuckerberg’s two-day testimony before Congress. This is not to fault members of Congress. They are who they are, politicians, usually of a certain age, up against a man who likely is decades younger, and who arguably is social media’s greatest innovator.

It turned out no context.

• Zuckerberg emerged from the proceedings unscathed by lawmakers purportedly assembled to rake him over the coals.
• Zuckerberg was master of the technology – and master of the chamber. He was as consistently respectful and appropriately deferential as deeply informed.
• Zuckerberg did more explaining Facebook than defending Facebook.
• Zuckerberg demonstrated that technological illiteracy is major problem for many if not most senior leaders. Most senior leaders cannot possibly address their illiteracy on their own. They must depend on, generally, younger followers.
• Zuckerberg would do well to cooperate and collaborate with Congress. Most of the very members he once regarded as enemy aliens would be willing to work with him and his kind to regulate business behemoths such as his. Ironically, these selfsame lawmakers will need him to help them regulate him.

Each month there’s new evidence that the difference in professional trajectories between men and women is on account of the “ten-year baby window.” Immediately after the first birth, the pay gap between spouses doubles. This applies especially to women who have their first child between the ages of 25 and 35. In other words, women who have their first child either before age 25, or only after age 35, are more likely eventually to close the pay gap – and, we may assume, the leadership gap – with their husbands.

This of course raises the question of why. Why are women more likely than men to suffer the consequences of having a child during an all-important professional decade? The answer of course is time – time spent on the job versus time spent on child care.  As Claire Cain Miller writes in the New York Times, children require a lot of time, particularly young children, and mothers spend “disproportionately more time than fathers on child care and related responsibilities…. Women are more likely to reduce their work hours, take time off, turn down a promotion, or quit their jobs to care for families. Even in in families in which both parents work full time., women spend almost double the time on housework and child care.”*

Which again raises the question of why. Why do women agree to do this, to make this professional sacrifice? Or is it possible that many women, maybe even the majority, actually want to do this – want to work less outside the home and more inside the home when their children are young?!

To answer these questions, I refer you to my previous blogs on this topic that insist that biology is key. Humans are animals – mammals. Male mammals parent differently from female mammals. Period. Full stop.

This is not to argue that biology is destiny. It is to argue that biology matters.

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*Claire Cain Miller, “10-Year Baby Window is Key to Women’s Pay Gap.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/upshot/the-10-year-baby-window-that-is-the-key-to-the-womens-pay-gap.html

In my recent book, Professionalizing Leadership, I argue that to be considered an earnest endeavor, leadership learning must encompass 1) education 2) training; and 3) development. Which raises the question of what should each of these three consist of?

In pondering the stuff of a good leadership education, I am struck by how biography has come to seem quaint.  For eons leaders were told to learn to lead by studying the lives of great leaders – even if they were flawed. The lives of great men – to wit, Plutarch’s Lives – were presumed pedagogical tools, instructing by illustrating how not to be ordinary but to be extraordinary, especially by getting others, in some cases by whatever means necessary, to follow your lead.

Now, though, such instruction seems dated, old-fashioned. While there are some exceptions – the life of Ernest Shackleton continues to be an exemplar – generally biographies are missing from leadership curricula. Our loss, for they remain a wonderful way of modeling behavior to be emulated or, for that matter, to be scorned. A great biography brings great gratification. A great biography is great art. And a great biography can be a great pedagogical implement.

If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Machiavelli. Here is what he wrote in his classic manual on how to lead, The Prince:

As regards the exercise of the mind, the prince should … study the actions of eminent men, observe how they bore themselves in war, and examine the causes of their victories and defeats, so that he may imitate the former and avoid the latter. But above all he should follow the example of whatever distinguished man he may have chosen for his model, assuming that someone has been specially praised and held up to him as glorious. Whose actions and exploits he should ever bear in mind….

A wise prince should never be idle in times of peace but should industriously lay up stores of which to avail himself in times of adversity; so that, when Fortune abandons him, he may be prepared to resist her blows.   

I’ve just published an entire book – Professionalizing Leadership – on how badly we treat leadership. On how we treat it as a game for amateurs. On how we treat it as something that can be learned on the fly. On how we treat it as an occupation – not as a profession.

We elect to the White House a man with zero government experience, zero political experience, and zero military experience. We take seriously as a candidate for New York governor a smart and well-intentioned actress, Cynthia Nixon, who however lacks all familiarity with what it takes to govern. And when Oprah Winfrey delivers an inspiring speech at an awards ceremony, we immediately start to flutter about, touting her for high political office.

This miserable treatment of leadership as a task for which neither experience or expertise is required is evident again in President Trump’s appointment of Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson as Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. By all accounts Jackson is a good man and a good doctor. What he is not is an individual with extensive experience running an organization of any size, not to speak of one of the largest bureaucracies in the world. Jackson has, in other words, been given a task for which he is woefully ill-prepared.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is notoriously troubled. In other words, none of its recent executives has proven skilled in improving its services to its constituents.  So, for all I know, Jackson will defy my prediction. Maybe he will succeed where his immediate predecessors have failed. I certainly hope so. Still, there is something about appointing a leader who is a novice to a position of extreme importance that is, of itself, an insult. An insult to the exercise of leadership which should require in each and every circumstance rigorous education and training in preparation for the task at hand.