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For some time now Mark Zuckerberg has been regarded as one of America’s genuine originals. One of its most remarkable innovators and, as Facebook grew into a behemoth of a business, one of its greatest corporate leaders ever. The kid in the hoodie, the Harvard dropout, the computer genius at the center of the award-winning film “The Social Network,” by the time Zuckerberg turned 25 he was a legend.

But now his leadership of Facebook has been clouded by suspicion. Suspicion that his company profited handsomely from its dealings with the Russians. Suspicion that his company is being less, much less, than transparent. Suspicion that his company is putting its financial interests ahead of America’s political interests – ahead of its electoral integrity.

This leaves Mark Zuckerberg with a choice. Starkly put it’s between his private interest on the one hand, and the public interest on the other.  I wonder if he’s aware that straddling the line on this won’t do. I wonder if he’s aware that he’s already in Congress’s crosshairs. I wonder if he’s aware that his legacy will depend on how he decides.

Just this past week, about a year after Wells Fargo first got embroiled in scandal, the bank made a further announcement: there were some 70 percent additional potentially unauthorized accounts than it originally admitted. These accounts now number about 3.5 million.

Moreover, the bank’s recent review revealed another problem: unauthorized enrollments – that is, unauthorized by those being enrolled – in the bank’s online bill payment service. Wells finally confessed to finding more than a half million such cases, and to hauling in close to a million dollars in additional fees. A million ill-gotten gains here, a million ill-gotten gains there, well, it adds up.

As Gretchen Morgenson summarized the situation: “The mounting infractions at Wells Fargo are getting hard to track without a scorecard. Unrequested auto insurance that affected 800,000 people – check. Unauthorized changes to mortgage repayment terms in bankruptcy – check. Improper withholding of funds to some car loan customers – check.”*

When there is this much malfeasance, over such a sustained time, blaming those at the top does not suffice to assign guilt.  Or to explain what happened and how. There is, in other words, no way in hell to understand the scandal at Wells Fargo without a systemic analysis.

• First, an analysis of the bank’s leadership group – that is, its entire management team including the board and senior executives.
• Second, an analysis of the bank’s cadres of followers, including, for example, its lawyers and other enablers, along with its minions of mid-level employees, many if not most of whom no doubt knew they were doing wrong but did it anyway.**
• Third, an analysis of the bank’s corporate culture, including its values; its premium on making money even if at the expense of its customers; its sanctioning of high pressure sales tactics; and its shameless abandonment of individual and institutional accountability.

The government is not done with this case. Democrats in the House and Senate have called for further hearings, though it’s not yet clear if the Republicans will go along.

The leadership industry, in any case, cannot afford to ignore this case. We, we leadership experts and educators, must show our clients and customers, and above all our students, how relatively easy it is to go to the dark side. And how, when bad things happen, not only are leaders responsible but followers as well.

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*https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/business/wells-fargo-testimony.html?_r=0

**A handful of Wells Fargo employees did try to blow the whistle. But they obviously were in the tiny minority.

Some two decades ago, I wrote in a book that nearly no one read that while historically they had been different, leadership in government and leadership in business were beginning to converge.*

But now times have changed. The old rules no longer apply. To create change in the twenty-first century a more eclectic approach will be required. More precisely, 1) politicians will have no choice but to take cues from their corporate counterparts; 2) business executives will have no alternative but to learn lessons from leaders in government; and 3) leaders in both domains will have to reinvent themselves to create something new… the reinvented leader: the man or woman whose capacity to create change will confirm that what works in one domain is nearly identical to what works in the other.

My prediction was accurate. Political leaders and corporate leaders are far more similar now than they are different. What has not, however, happened, is that leaders in one domain cross over in any numbers to the other. There are occasional exceptions to this general rule: first CEO and then Mayor Mike Bloomberg is a notable example. But by and large leaders stay in their lanes. More specifically, by and large leaders in the private sector confine themselves to the private sector. They are careful not to take risks by venturing into the public one.

The presidency of Donald Trump – and the inefficacy of government more generally – has thrown this practice into question. In recent months, more CEOs have spoken out against political business as usual, and for improved governance in the White House and beyond. Recent examples:

• Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier (who resigned from the president’s American Manufacturing Council in the wake of the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville): “As CEO of Merck and as a matter of personal conscience, I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism.”
• Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz: “This is a time in the history of our country when every business leader needs to demonstrate the moral courage to stand up for what this country is all about.”
• JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon: “Constructive economic and regulatory policies” are insufficient to get the country back on track given the “divisions in our country. It is a leader’s role, in business or government, to bring people together, not tear them apart.”
• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: “CEOs have to be responsible for something more than their own profitability. You have to serve a broader group of stakeholders – from employees to the environment – and when politicians don’t get things right, corporate leaders have to act. That’s a big shift.”
• Marriott CEO Arne Sorensen: A more political role for chief executives today is “unavoidable and essential….There is enormous anxiety right now among our guests, and our community all over the world. They want to hear a voice that is welcoming, and affirming.”
• Apple CEO Tim Cook: “The reality is that government, for a long period of time, has for whatever set of reasons become less functional and isn’t working at the speed that it once was. And so it does fall, I think, not just on business but on all other areas of society to step up.”

Sentiments such as these are in consequence of bad circumstances. But they are welcome. The United States can no longer afford leaders who are siloed. We need CEOs who recognize that corporate social responsibility assumes a civic role. We need CEOs who openly acknowledge that issues such as immigration and education require their intermittent intervention. We need CEOs who are, if not citizens first, at least citizens second.

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*Reinventing Leadership: Making the Connection Between Politics and Business, State University of New York Press, 1999.

Like the sound of it?

Don’t like the sound of it?

Either way, get used to it.

Just a few days ago, Maureen Dowd, in one of her must-read columns in Sundays’  New York Times, wondered if the “Blowhard Will Blow Us Up.” If Donald Trump would usher us into the “nuclear winter.”

Impossible to imagine that anything Trump could do in the interim would wipe America’s nuclear showdown with North Korea off the front pages. But he did. Recent events in Charlottesville, and the president’s response to these events, have stolen his own thunder.

Donald Trump is a walking, talking machine gun. His leadership style is to fire at his followers a volley of bullets in almost immediate succession. His bullets come so fast and furiously impossible to gather ourselves before the next round is fired.

Leaders as lethal as Donald Trump never, ever leave of their own accord. They must be dragged off stage – by their followers. To their credit, many Americans in many different places have already said their piece. They have already publicly stated that Trump is a president so bad they refuse to support him. In fact, since yesterday’s “off the rails” presidential press conference, there has been something of a follower feeding frenzy – people standing in line to take a stand against the president.

But, while the current feeding frenzy is heartening, it is insufficient. Moreover, it threatens to wind down before the deed is done. The pressure on the leader-in-chief must be relentless until he exits. The American people must sustain their feeding frenzy until this presidency is devoured.

Robert S. Mueller, III, the special counsel investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, is known for the judicious, meticulous way in which he comports himself and conducts his professional practice. By all accounts he is slow and deliberate in his work, and above all thorough. When Mueller is in charge, no stone is left unturned.

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This time, though, I’m begging you, Bobby! Please leave just one little rock where you found it!

Far be it from me to question your methods, which clearly are formidable. Few Washington players have reputations as unblemished as yours. But, could be this investigation is different. Could be this investigation is time-sensitive in a way that others were not. Could be this investigation has national and even international implications that others did not. Could be this investigation demands you be just a tad less exhaustive and a tad more efficient.  

Publicly the president insists he’s not going to fire you. Asked about this just two days ago, Trump replied, “No, I’m not dismissing anybody. I mean, I want them to get on with the task.” But, we know that statements like these are in stark contrast to what Trump has said privately. Privately he has suggested that if he could he would fire you in a New York minute (my phrase), because he worries your investigation will undermine him.

Even more troublesome is the apparent connection between your investigation and Trump’s tendency to go off half-cocked to distract us from what otherwise would dominate the news – anything that connects Trump to anything Russian. Impossible for me to say with certainty if, for example, his out-of-nowhere ban on transgenders in the military is connected to your investigation. Equally impossible for me to say with certainty if his out-of-nowhere escalation to the point of nuclear showdown is similarly related. But the timing is suspicious. And the president’s past patterns suggest that diversion from your investigation is likely his motivation for more than one curious, dangerous, outburst.

Bottom line Bobby, is this. The fate of the world is in your hands. So, the sooner your work gets done, the better.

No pressure.

I yesterday wrote that President Donald Trump is intellectually and temperamentally unequipped to occupy the nation’s highest office. This presents a pressing problem absent a national crisis. This presents an existential problem present a national crisis. Particularly one that involves nuclear weapons.

It has been argued that past presidents failed to eliminate through conventional diplomacy the threat of a nuclear North Korea. There is merit to this argument. However, the off-the-cuff way in which Trump threatens unprecedented “fire and fury,” the almost casual way in which he invokes an event so catastrophic it has “never been seen before,” is unsettling to understate it. There appears no coherent national security strategy. There appears disorder and disunity among the president’s top foreign policy advisers. And there appears a diplomatic apparatus that is inexperienced and unseasoned, decimated and marginalized. It’s a state of the nation the nation cannot afford.

What to do? If the person at the top is disabled, or for some other reason not responsible, it is up to those close to the top carefully and cleverly to manage the situation. In this case, it is up to those close to the top to make certain that Trump does not abuse or even misuse his power.

Who in this case qualifies? Who might we trust to hold steady the ship of state? Whatever might be our misgivings, some obvious names come to mind.

• Vice President Mike Pence.
• Trump’s family, especially his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
• Trump’s closest advisors, especially Generals John Kelly and H. R. McMaster.
• Trump’s cabinet, especially Secretaries Rex Tillerson and James Mattis.
• Members of congress, especially powerful and prominent Republicans, such as Senators Mitch McConnell and John McCain, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Which raises the question of how this group could organize itself to build a buffer between the president and his own most dangerous impulses. Could be that one of these individuals takes the lead. Could be that some sort of alliance forms, a smaller, like-minded group within this larger group that comes together for the good of the country.  I do not claim that the solution to the problem is easy. I do claim that the problem of coping with a president who potentially is extremely dangerous is of the greatest national urgency.

Jerrold Post (who is a psychiatrist) and Robert Robins have written about how difficult it is to constrain leaders who in some way are impaired. They write, for example, that “an illness that affects the leader mentally and impairs decision making ability and intellectual acuity is particularly threatening.”* It is precisely because Trump at the helm could be “particularly threatening,” that those who might mitigate the threat have a responsibility to act if the danger becomes acute.

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When Illness Strikes the Leader (Yale University Press, 1993), p. 201.

Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962) is one of the best-selling and most admired history books of all time.  Centered on the first month of the First World War, historian Margaret MacMillan describes the book as “reading like a novel” from the very first sentence:

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.  

Tuchman was famous for her writerly majesty, especially for her ability to bring the past back to life. But her primary purpose was didactic. Her intent was to show how world leaders, even those relatively clever and well-intentioned, stumbled and bumbled their way into one of the greatest catastrophes of all time – a war during which a generation of European men was decimated. (More than nine million combatants and seven million civilians died in World War I.)

Among the leaders’ many miscalculations and misperceptions was that a war on European soil would be short, not long, and that the casualties in consequence could be contained. In fact, most of their errors of judgment fell into this category: a tendency to gravitate toward positive probable outcomes rather than negative ones. An inability to carefully consider the possibility that once war started, it would be difficult if not impossible quickly to stop, with calamity the inevitable outcome.

Leaders are mere mortals, Even the best and brightest are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of human nature. Which means that those who are less than the best and brightest – not to speak of those who are much, much less than the best and the brightest – should never, ever be entrusted by us to mediate matters of war and peace.

But, followers too are mere mortals. Which explains why we do what ideally we should not: leave it to our leaders, no matter how extremely ill-equipped, to decide our fate.

No two leaders with nukes in their grasp could possibly be temperamentally and intellectually less suited to the responsibility of preventing nuclear war than Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Which is precisely why it is up to those around them, those who have access, to temper their excess. Ordinary people have no choice but to rely on these minions to save us from what Tuchman, in another volume, called “the march of folly.”

It’s been widely observed that President Donald Trump seems really to respect “his” generals. He’s had generals in high positions since taking office. And by naming recently retired Marine Corps General John Kelly to be his chief of staff, making him, ostensibly, his closest advisor, the president sealed the deal. Not since the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a retired five-star general, have senior military officers been so empowered in what is, after all, a civilian government. In the United States of America, the military is supposed to implement policies set by civilians, not the other way around.

Trump’s military cadre is dominated by four top officials: Kelly; Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general; National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, a Lieutenant General still serving in the army; and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joseph Dunford, another Marine general. Dunford’s role necessarily is filled by military. But the other three slots are not. Normally they are filled by civilians.

Trump’s own military experience was confined to his early and middle adolescence: his parents sent him to a military boarding school, New York Military Academy, when he was 13. So, while he never served in the armed forces, it’s plausible that during his years as a young cadet Trump developed an enduring fascination with, and fondness for men in uniform. Moreover, the president seems greatly to admire tough guys of any kind – and no one tougher than men who know war. So though there seems on the surface a disjuncture between Trump’s own undisciplined and even unruly nature, and the exceedingly high level of discipline that characterizes senior military leaders, in fact the “axis of adults,” the generals, have becalmed not only the president, but everyone else as well. The president himself might be a loose cannon, but the generals, we presume, are not. So we leave it to them to protect him, and us, from his own worst impulses.

In ordinary times, the American people might be puzzled or even alarmed by so many generals in so many high places. But, these are not ordinary times and Trump is no ordinary president. Which is precisely why so many us believe that “adult” supervision is required. Supervision of the commander in chief by men who, on paper certainly, are his subordinates. Telling is our faith that they have what it takes. Telling is our belief that they are up to the task. Telling is our trust that they can be counted on to do the right thing.

Which raises the question of why – why are America’s senior military leaders more reassuring than unsettling? Why, even when they play political parts, as opposed to military ones, are we relieved to see them in position? Because as a group they are better equipped to exercise leadership than anyone else in America.  Because as a group they are better prepared to assume leadership roles than anyone else in America. Because as a group they are better educated and trained for leadership than anyone else in America. Because as a group they better than anyone else in America are socialized to understand that leadership development is development lifelong.

Americans trust military leaders more than any other leaders – by far. In 2016 Pew reported that more than 75 % of Americans surveyed said they trusted military leaders either a “great deal” or a “fair amount.” This is in strong contrast even to religious leaders, who get similarly positive ratings from only 53% of Americans.

This is not good. In fact, it’s a sad commentary on how low is our regard for leaders in sectors other than the military. It’s especially sad because it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no reason in the world military leadership education and training should be so strikingly superior to leadership education and training elsewhere in America. We have the capacity to change this – to improve leadership education and training for everyone. All we need is the will.*

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*For an elaboration of this argument, see my forthcoming book, Professionalizing Leadership (Oxford University Press, early 2018).