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The course that I currently teach at the Harvard Kennedy School is titled, Leadership System – Leaders, Followers, and Contexts. As the title implies, the course gives no more weight to the study of leaders than it does to followers – and to contexts. Regarding the last, I am forever preaching the virtues, to leaders, of being 1) contextually conscious; 2) contextually expert; and 3) contextually intelligent.

I was gratified to read, therefore, that increasingly I’m in good company. According to a recent article in the Financial Times, business schools especially are coming to recognize that “geopolitical events shape the environment in which businesses operate” and that, therefore, familiarizing their students with these environments is of paramount pedagogical importance.*

This might not seem like rocket science. But, as a rule, leadership training and development focus on individuals, not on the context(s) within which these individuals must, perforce, function. Always was ridiculous – and is even more ridiculous now when, as one professor put it, the importance of geopolitics is so obvious, courses on the subject have transitioned from being “nice-to-have” to “must-have.”

Leadership learners of every stripe would be well advised to take a cue from their corporate counterparts. It is impossible to lead even reasonably wisely and well in this world without having some semblance of understanding it.

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*https://www.ft.com/business-education

It’s been difficult. It’s been difficult as a putative expert on leadership not to write regularly about Donald Trump. He’s screamingly obvious grist for my mill – which is precisely why I’ve resisted the temptation. Why I’ve focused on subjects other than the American president, who inexorably violates not laws, and rules, but norms.

But on occasion someone else writes a piece about Trump that is so well written, and that so completely reflects my own point of view, that I’m tempted to tout it. Today is an example. Ezra Klein’s “The Normalization of Impeachment” is strongly recommended. (Link below.) It’s a piece that I wish I had written. But since I did not, I am glad that someone else did.

Full disclosure: I’m a betting woman – who bet some time ago that President Trump would not serve out his full first term in the White House.

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https://www.vox.com/2017/11/30/16517022/impeachment-donald-trump

One of the enigmas of the human condition is how it happens. How it happens that the worst type of leader can cling to power year after year after year after year.

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe – who finally, yesterday, at the age of 93, was compelled to resign – is just the latest case in point. He began his career as a public official a hero, an anti-colonialist, a nationalist and activist who played a role in the transition from British-ruled Rhodesia to the sovereign state of Zimbabwe. But he presided for decades over Zimbabwe’s evolution from a country with a large reserve of human capital and a well-diversified economy, to being sub-Saharan Africa’s basket case. Early this century land reform accelerated what already had been a steep decline: GDP plunged 45 percent in a decade, and farm production collapsed to two thirds of what it was ten years  earlier.

Mugabe was, moreover, a tyrant, a despot, a totalitarian dictator known for nothing so much as demoralizing and even terrorizing his people, while aggrandizing himself and enriching his coffers. For at least a quarter century this man’s leadership had nothing whatsoever to recommend it. Quite the contrary – it was so bad it was evil.

Still, it took decrepitude to get him out. It took being a nonagenarian for his grip on power to be weakened to the point where others mustered the courage finally to force him to quit.

Predictably, when Mugabe’s resignation finally came there was “wild jubilation in parliament,” followed almost immediately by celebratory crowds jamming the streets of major cities. The Guardian reported “Zimbabweans raced up and down the wide boulevards of the capital as the sun set, honking car horns, waving flags, singing, dancing, cheering.”

Which is where mystery manifests itself. Why do followers put up with leaders who obviously are atrocious and who manifestly they detest? Year after year after year after year? I get that these leaders control the levers of power – which is how they strike fear in their followers. Which, in turn, is exactly why it’s up to us to assure we never allow democracy to morph into autocracy, which has a proclivity to morph into tyranny.

         One of the most significant changes for all businesses since the financial crisis is consumers are more demanding and expect to know more about you. They are more questioning of all authority…. You are no longer in control of your message.

Steve Easterbrook, CEO of McDonald’s, who, after four years of shrinking profits, is being credited with turning around the company’s fortunes.

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         Nelson Peltz narrowly won a seat on the board of Procter & Gamble Co … an embarrassing turn of events for a company that weeks earlier had claimed to have defeated the activist investor…. The uncertainty of the P&G vote was magnified by the large portion of shares held by small investors, leaving both sides scrambling for support from some 2.5 million shareholders instead of just a few dozen who typically control such votes.

Article in the Wall Street Journal (11/16/17) describing how it happened that P&G’s management team was stunned, was slammed, by small, heretofore generally powerless, investors.

When Jacqueline Kennedy was First Lady, she seldom spoke in public. And when she did, it was in a breathy whisper, more evocative of a young girl than a mature woman.

But to her husband, John Kennedy, she was an enormous political asset nonethless. She never failed to look picture perfect, her singularly lovely face set off by elegant, expensive clothes that graced her slender body. More to the point though, she was obviously not a lightweight. Though during her brief tenure in the White House, she was still young, in her early to mid-30s, she managed to make a mark.

First, her remarkable, atypical beauty made her a style icon. While this might now seem a frivolous credential, in the early 1960s it was not.  Even by Inauguration Day, Mrs. Kennedy’s dresses, suits, coats, gloves, shoes, purses, and hats were admired and copied not only in America but in much of the rest of the world as well – including in what then was the Soviet bloc. The First Lady’s grace and beauty were so strong an attraction they were a magnet – a magnet as political asset.

Second, Jacqueline Kennedy brought taste and class to the presidential mansion. Not only did she function in the long tradition of First Ladies who had the imagination and determination to use the White House to their husband’s political benefit, she updated and upgraded every social occasion of any consequence. What gave White House entertainments during the Kennedy years their special éclat, their class, was, perhaps more than anything else, the guest list. It was studded with great names, particularly from the worlds of art, music, and literature. Carl Sandburg was there, as was Igor Stravinsky, as was Aaron Copeland and Leonard Bernstein and Robert Frost and Andrew Wyeth -and so on. Seldom in American history was the White House as stunning a repository of the best and brightest, the most gifted and talented.

Third, Jacqueline Kennedy took it on herself to refurbish, to restore, the White House. This though was no ordinary home improvement. Not by a long shot. Mrs. Kennedy approached the task with the utmost seriousness of purpose, firm in her resolve to make the White House worthy of the name, the president’s residence. Congress was persuaded to designate the executive mansion a national museum. Personal campaigns were undertaken to secure treasured gifts of furniture and art to enhance and even ennoble the cause. And various commissions were formed such as, for example, the White House Historical Association, to assure the presidential mansion would be worthy of its fabled history. “Every gallery and museum in the country,” it was said, “was laying its treasures at Jackie’s feet for her to pick and choose.”* And when her work was well along, she did something that at the time was extraordinary. She took to television to serve as guide for an extended tour of the White House. The show was a personal triumph – the White House had been transformed, by her, into a museum worthy of America’s heritage.

Since Jacqueline Kennedy has been rather a long list of First Ladies, most of whom were in one or another way a national asset. Some greater, some lesser, but nearly all left an imprint that was to the benefit of the American people. Until now. Until Melania Trump.

I described Mrs. Kennedy’s tenure as First Lady in brief detail because in some ways Mrs. Trump is more like her than any other relatively recent predecessor. She looks great and says little. But, so far at least, the resemblance ends there. So far at least, Melania Trump has been all appearance, no substance.  So far at least, her contribution to the conversation has been zero, zilch, nada. So far at least, her husband has so completely sucked the air out of the room that she has gone missing.

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*Barbara Kellerman, All the President’s Kin, Free Press, 1980.

The moment in which we live is counter-intuitive: It is characterized by the rise of political authority on the one hand, and the decline of political authority on the other.  While they seem to exist independent of each other, each in its own parallel universe, they do not. In fact, they are interdependent, the one a function of or, if you prefer, a reflection of, the other.

In the last week alone, on his trip abroad President Trump met with three of the world’s most powerful strongmen, each more potent in the present than he was in the past: China’s Xi Jin Ping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.

Meantime, at home, Trump is being inexorably enfeebled, a victim of his own idiocies and idiosyncrasies, of his own callousness and corruption. But, he is also being weakened by the liberal democracy that constitutes his context. To its credit, this democracy features institutions that eventually will be his undoing. To its detriment, the process of this undoing is arduous and laborious, which is why, at the moment, America’s political system is partially paralyzed.

Nor is the US the only liberal democracy so afflicted. Brexit has not only fractured Britain’s political system, Teresa May’s premiership is “shaped above all by her weakness.” She is openly defied even by her own ministers, while the government more generally, including parliament, seems to have lost control. One close observer put it this way, “Eighteen months ago I wrote that Britain’s politics were starting to imitate those of Greece. At the time I might have admitted a certain hyperbole. Now I think the parallel understates the British condition.”*

All the while the world is watching. While the two most powerful and prominent liberal democracies struggle to balance deeply flawed leaders with deeply dissatisfied followers, growing numbers of other countries are turning to authoritarianism as a way of keeping the trains running and the lid on.

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*Philip Stevens, “Brexit Has Broken British Politics,” Financial Times, November 8, 2017.

By way of explaining why no blog for the past couple of weeks, there is this. Page proofs. I’ve been reviewing the page proofs of my forthcoming book, titled as above – Professionalizing Leadership. It will be published by Oxford University Press on or about February 1^st.

This is from the Introduction, titled “Learning Leading – Lame Undertaking.”

Professionalizing Leadership looks at a leadership culture that is as widespread as deeply entrenched. It looks at an industry that is enormously profitable but entirely unregulated. It looks at a pedagogical practice that falls stunningly short of any imagined ideal. And it looks at what can be done to bestow on leaders a semblance of the gravitas that we associate with professionals. 

One could make the case – and I do – that hardly any of America’s corporate behemoths have had a decade as degrading as General Electric.

The decline began during the financial crisis when GE, once proud to the point of arrogance, turned hat in hand to the federal government. The government obliged with a bailout – to the tune of $140 billion.

It climaxed this week with a spate of headlines, each screaming GE’s continuing degradation to the point of debilitation.

• “GE’s Awful Week Pushes This Year’s Stock Wipeout to $100 Billion”
• “Odds of a GE Dividend Cut 100%”
• “GE Vows Changes as View Darkens”

GE’s new CEO, John Flannery, was forced to say something, so what he said was this: “Our results are unacceptable to say the least.” He went on to add the obvious, “Things Will Not Stay the Same at GE.”

Flannery took over from his predecessor, Jeff Immelt, this summer. Recently, Immelt took himself out of the picture altogether, stepping down earlier than expected as director and chairman of the board. His performance as CEO had been, shall we say, erratic. After all, he took over a thriving operation and left one in a semblance of shambles. For his troubles he was, in any case, paid handsomely, earning, for example, a cool $54 million during the period 2006-11.

Immelt himself succeeded the storied Jack Welch in 2001. Welch had been GE Chairman and CEO since 1981, and when he retired he was widely acclaimed one of America’s best and most admired chief executives. His formidable reputation, while not untarnished, remains generally intact to this day.

Here though is the irony – the ultimate irony. One of the skills of which Welch was proudest was developing leaders. He prided himself on his singular ability to locate leaders and then to groom them, to educate and train them, for the sole purpose of keeping GE at the pinnacle of corporate America.

To this end his special baby was GE’s fabled management training center in Crotonville, NY. GE is by no means the only company to have designated an off-site space for leadership learning – the Boeing Leadership Center near St. Louis is another example. But, Crotonville is special. It was founded in 1956, and since has come to consist of a 59-acre campus where selected GE employees “can engage in continuous learning with a personalized curriculum to develop unique strengths and own their leadership journey.” Leadership is, in other words, what Crotonville does – Welch made sure of that. As its website advertises, Crotonville offers a “broad curriculum of leadership experiences and skills courses around the globe [as well as] world-renowned leadership development programs.”

Up to now, Crotonville has continued to be deemed by management to be worth the investment. Despite GE’s humiliating descent, and despite the high cost of its leadership training operation, reported to be $1 billion worldwide, so far at least Crotonville remains undisturbed.

The question now is will Flannery see the irony? The irony of running a fancy, costly leadership center when GE’s own leadership cadre has fallen so far short? I have no doubt that good things happen at Crotonville – that many of those who go learn something about how to lead and manage. I similarly have no doubt that something’s wrong with this picture. That running a leadership center when your own house is other than in order is curious – if not ridiculous.

“Things will not stay the same at GE”? Things should not stay the same at GE – including at Crotonville! At an absolute minimum, those responsible for its leadership curriculum should review, revise, and reconstitute it in light of GE’s own painful recent history.

Oxford Professor Stein Ringen recently posted a timely and telling blog about China.  (The link is below.) He correctly notes that, historically, democracies have found it difficult to deal with dictatorships. This is precisely why he argues that in this case, the West must avoid wishful thinking. China has not evolved into what the West would have wanted. Rather, Ringen writes, it has become an imperialist state – and he continues, a totalitarian one.

For the purposes of this piece I will focus on totalitarianism – on the gradualism of totalitarianism. Or, more precisely in the case of China, on the gradualism of asserting growing control. The archetypical totalitarian states are Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. In Hannah Arendt’s classic treatise, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she uses these two men, Hitler and Stalin, and these two states, Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s, to dive deep into totalitarian exemplars. Of course, in our own time, North Korea exemplifies the same syndrome: a totalitarian state is one in which a single individual, along with civilian and military bureaucracies beholden entirely to him, effectively have total control over everyone and everything – individuals and institutions alike.

One of the most interesting things about totalitarianism is how it comes to pass. It does not happen in an instant with, say, a sudden seizure of power. It is not in the least like a train wreck that, in a split second, destroys everything in its path. Rather totalitarian states are crafted gradually. In fact, they are heralded both in advance and along the way, so that the process proceeds with minimal disruption.

Adolf Hitler was the legally appointed Chancellor of Germany when, beginning in 1933, he set in motion a series of events that led, three to five years later, to a full- fledged totalitarian state.  Josef Stalin gradually took the reins of power after the death of Lenin, in 1924. But several years had to pass before he held these reins firmly in his grip. In other words, even these two archetypical despots had to erect their totalitarian edifice step by step, brick by brick, before it was complete.

Which brings us to Xi Jinping. Said now to be China’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping (who died two decades ago), possibly even since Mao Zedong, Xi has built his rulership carefully, measure by measure. Not all at once but gradually, Xi has come to exercise inordinate control over ideas and information, the economy and the military, the bureaucracy and the government.

His intent has been no secret.  Xi’s goal to control has been evident for several years. What then did it take for this leader to get to where he wanted to go? Followers who were compliant. To be sure, there have been dissidents (now dwindling in number) – some of them heroic in the face of overweening odds. I am thinking, for example, of human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who died recently of liver cancer while serving an 11- year prison sentence, purportedly for trying to overthrow the government.

Still, let’s be clear. A leader graduates from autocracy to totalitarianism not on his own, but with the complicity of others. Sometimes this complicity is explicit; sometimes implicit. But for totalitarianism to take root it depends absolutely on the silence of strangers. Silence that persists even as the evidence of purpose grows. And grows.

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https://thatsdemocracy.com/2017/10/20/the-truth-about-china/

Since the precipitous, scandalous descent of sequential sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein, not just the dam broke, but the floodgate opened. Not only at home, also abroad.

More than half a million women have flooded Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, using the hashtag #MeToo to volunteer that they too had experienced sexual harassment or assault. More specifically, in Sacramento, California, upwards of  140 women – including state legislators and lobbyists – came forward to charge sexual misconduct in the nation’s most powerful state legislature. “Women complained of groping, lewd comments and suggestions of trading sexual favors for legislation while doing business in Sacramento.”* And, in France, tens of thousands of women have similarly stepped up, using social media to post disturbing accounts of sexual harassment and abuse. Though most did not identify their assailants, given France’s famously chauvinistic culture, which forever has “enabled powerful men to misbehave with impunity,” it was a sign the times are changing.

How did this happen? What explains this sudden torrent of women complaining so furiously, so publicly, about behavior they previously endured in silence?

This is one of those cases where leadership explains nearly nothing. Nor for that matter does followership – though it comes closer. No, this most recent open outpouring of previously private grievances is best explained by a phenomenon referred to by social psychologists as social or behavioral contagion. The term refers to our propensity to emulate behavior exhibited by someone else – especially if that behavior resonates with our own emotion or experience. In other words, when a handful of women started to speak out on this issue, many, many others were emboldened by them finally to do the same.

Social or behavioral contagion is not so common – certainly not globally. But, when the time is right, it’s remarkable how powerful are peers!

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*All quotes in this piece of from The New York Times, October 18, 2017.