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In my book, Bad Leadership, I identified Insular Leadership as one of seven different types of bad leadership.

Insular Leadership – The leader and at least some followers minimize or disregard the health and welfare of “the other” – that is, of those outside the group or organization for which they are directly responsible.   

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple for the last five years, has turned out such a leader. He and his team have sullied Apple’s name by giving the company a by now ingrained reputation for aggressive tax avoidance. This has been an issue in the US for years – now it’s also an issue in Europe. Fairly or unfairly, the European Union just ordered Ireland to get Apple to pay than $14 billion in unpaid taxes.

The details of who should collect what from Apple do not concern me here. What does concern me is that Apple has lost its polish. For years it was one of the most successful and admired companies on the planet. Now, in his zeal to increase still further Apple’s huge stash of cash, Cook has tarnished his company’s name.

A good corporate citizen Apple is not.

How does change happen? Contrary to the popular conception – that change agents are leaders – change agents sometimes are other than leaders. Sometimes they are followers. Sometimes they are ordinary people fed up with what they’ve been fed.

Yesterday the company Mylan, the maker of EpiPen, an emergency treatment for severe allergic reactions, especially but not exclusively in children, announced that it would backtrack. That instead of charging about $600 for a pack of two, it would offer a similar if not identical product that would, however, cost the consumer only about $300 .

By taking the highly unusual, indeed positively weird, step of introducing a generic version of EpiPen, thereby cannibalizing its own brand, Mylan was hoping to shut down the opposition.  Hoping to shut down the anger and furor in response to price increases that included a jump from $249 to $615 in just the last three years.

So how, precisely, did this change happen? How, precisely, were pushed parents able to push back so hard that Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan, felt forced to retreat? Here’s the sequence:

• Mellini Kantayya, an actress who lives in Brooklyn, has a husband with an allergic condition. He uses EpiPens, but his health insurance covers the cost. Kantayya was nevertheless struck by a recent piece about ambulance crews that no longer carried EpiPens, because they could no longer afford them. She was further struck by the plight of a friend, the mother of a child with food allergies, whose costs for EpiPens were not covered by insurance. Angered by what she saw as a drug company run amok, Kantayya went online to Petition2Congress.com, which collects signatures and sends them to members of Congress. Her petition went live on July 11 – it was called, “Stop the EpiPen Price Gouging.”
• Kantayya shared the link with her 836 Facebook friends.
• Within 45 days, Kantayya’s petition grew from a few dozen signatures to more than 80,000. Additionally, by then more than 121,000 unhappy letters had been sent to Congress.
• Meantime, a woman named Jennifer Vallez, who has a daughter with a peanut and tree nut allergy, was the second person to sign Kantayya’s petition. (They are friends.) Vallez also went on to share it with her 533 Facebook friends.
• Robyn O’Brien, is a well-known parent activist and writer with a strong social media following. She began hearing about EpiPens from her 165,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter. On July 21 O’Brien wrote about the price problem in a post that was shared 727 times.
• One week later, a mother whose 14 year old son had died of a food allergy, posted an article on O’Brien’s website about Mylan’s “EpiPen Profiteering.” Her post was shared 477 times, reaching out to 110,00 people.
• O’Brien and others continued to press the case against Mylan. On August 17, she joined with another parent activist, of the website Peanut Allergy Mom, to urge all their readers to sign Kantayya’s original petition. Signatures surged another 10,000.
• Along the way, mainstream media joined the fray, covering the EpiPen opposition with increasing regularity and frequency.
• On August 18, Bernie Sanders weighs in, on Twitter, against Mylan, of course. His line was retweeted 8,789 times, reaching nearly 2.8 million people.
• By the last week of August, the story of overpriced EpiPens was in full force. As detailed by the New York Times, by then it had been widely covered and Congress had gotten involved. Senator Amy Klobuchar, for example, has a daughter with allergies who carries an EpiPen. Suddenly, that is, in response to what had by now become a public outcry, Klobuchar was calling for both a Judiciary Committee inquiry on Mylan, and an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.*

And so it happened that Mylan decided to provide the public with two versions of the same drug – one half the price of the other. And so it happened that change came about not from above but from below. And so it happened that change came about within six weeks nearly entirely because pushed parents pushed back.

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*For more details, see the article on which this blog drew, by Tara Parker-Pope, “How Parents Harnessed the Power of Social Media to Challenge EpiPen Prices,” New York Times, August 25, 2016.

When Anne-Marie Slaughter first became director of policy planning at the U.S. Department of State, she had what she thought the perfect job. The work was fascinating, important, and right up her alley. Her husband and two young sons lived not far away, in Princeton, New Jersey. His position was such that he was able to be close to a full-time father. And Slaughter had what she herself has described as a “tremendously supportive boss,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But, after a time, Slaughter found her situation untenable. As she has repeatedly told, including in her book, Unfinished Business, once she perceived that her children needed her home more that she could possibly be while properly performing her job, she found her situation untenable – so she quit. Slaughter left her dream job to return for a time to the family fold.

Ironically, though their circumstances are different, the Vice Chairwoman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Huma Abedin, now finds herself similarly situated. Earlier today she announced her separation from Anthony Weiner, the former Congressman who is, again, ensnared in a sexting scandal. While I cannot know for certain, it seems reasonable to surmise that Abedin stuck it out for so long with Weiner, who has a troubling history of aberrant behavior, because, in addition to her all-consuming job, she has a young son.

By every account, she and Clinton, who have worked together for twenty years, are exceedingly close. But this will not save Abedin from having to make a choice similar to the one that Slaughter faced. Both women were elevated by Hillary Clinton to positions of singular prominence – which, however, did not spare both women from having to make a singularly difficult decision. There is no reason to presume that Abedin will decide as Slaughter did, to leave Clinton’s side to be with her child. But it would not surprise me if she did or if, at least, she opts to considerably lessen her professional commitment, at least for now.

It’s too early to come to firm conclusions. But it’s not too early to make preliminary assessments. Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House is not over. But, but it is almost over. So safe to rate the following:

• History will give Obama high marks for character. There is every evidence that he is a man of rectitude.
• History will give Obama high marks for temperament. There is every evidence that he is serious, stable, and psychologically secure.
• History will give Obama high marks for dignity. There is every evidence that he behaved throughout his time in the Oval Office in keeping with the nation’s highest office.
• History will give Obama low marks for interpersonal skills. There is every evidence that he failed to use his considerable personal charm, or even the perks of his presidential office, to firm his domestic political alliances, and, or, to win over his domestic political opposition, most obviously members of Congress.
• History will give Obama low marks for foreign policy. His deeply ingrained reluctance to use American power, or to even threaten to use it, has not served the West well. Moreover, America’s willingness to stand by and do nothing while the catastrophe that is Syria continues to drag on, will forever stain his presidency.
• History will give Obama high marks for domestic policy. Not so much for the passage of legislation – though he has had major legislative victories, including the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act – as for his use of executive power. Once Obama realized that if he was to continue to create change, he would have to do so without the benefit of a partnership with Congress, he took the regulatory route – full speed ahead. To quote from the New York Times, once Obama got a taste of it, “he pursued his executive power without apology, and in ways that will shape the presidency for decades to come.”* During his first seven years in office the president finalized 560 major regulations – nearly 50 percent more than did his predecessor during the comparable period. In coming years, Obama’s full-throated embrace of executive power will be seen as a significant extension of the reach of presidential leadership. During a time in which getting followers to go along is a task increasingly onerous, being able to create change without exercising presidential leadership in the traditional sense, will be an option attractive not only to the incumbent, but to his successors as well.

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*Binyamin Applebaum and Michael D. Shear, “How the President Came to Embrace Executive Power,” August 14, 2016.

Far be it from me to blame the victims. The culture at Fox News was toxic. And the punishment for doing anything but kowtowing was potentially professionally lethal.

Still, it is impossible for someone like me to look at what happened at Fox without raising the subject of followership. Without raising the subject of what happens when a wretchedly bad leader succeeds in frightening followers into remaining mute.

Ever since former Fox Anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment suit against former Fox behemoth Roger Ailes, former Fox women (and one prominent present woman) have come out of the woodwork. More than twenty women – 20! – finally came forward to say that Ailes had sexually harassed them, in some cases decades ago.

Which raises the question: Why did these women stay silent for so long? Why did they stay silent until after Gretchen Carlson went public?

It’s clear that Carlson’s decision go public and hold power accountable emboldened the others. Moreover, it’s clear why they waited for someone else – someone who, not incidentally, had already been professionally successful – to take the risk.  But let’s be clear. Had these victims spoken out sooner, Fox’s miserably misogynistic culture and its miserably misogynistic leader would sooner have been upended.

Followers matter. Not just leaders.

So sayeth Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management. (Quoted in the Wall Street Journal, August 10.)

Is he scary – or funny?! I suspect that Professor Sonnenfeld regrets his remark, which looks perfectly foolish on paper. After all, we now have thirty plus years of extensive research and writing on women and leadership – so it’s not exactly as if they’re an unknown species, only recently emerged from under a rock.

The article focused – yet again, ho-hum – on Marissa Mayer. But here’s what’s interesting. While we fixate on a handful of female stars – one Hillary Clinton comes to mind – the numbers stay stubbornly the same. There are some exceptions to this general rule – about which more another time – but by and large the number of women at or even near the top remains low. To take just a single random example, the number of women on the boards of the United Kingdom’s largest companies is just over 25%. This figure is hardly any higher than it was in 2011, when a 25% target was initially set. (The target has since been updated, to 33% by 2020.)

Here’s my point. It’s not that we’re “just learning how to understand women as leaders.” We understand a lot about “women as leaders.” It’s just that we don’t see a lot of women as leaders. There’s a distinction, in other words, between what we know and what we see. It’s a distinction Professor Sonnenfeld would do well to bear in mind.

The word “totalitarian” – as in totalitarianism, or totalitarian leader – was once in fashion. Now we hardly hear it anymore, but in the 1950’s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, it was used with some frequency, certainly by political scientists, especially when referencing Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hannah Arendt’s classic, Origins of Totalitarianism, originally published in 1951, gave the word a certain currency, which for decades thereafter it maintained.

However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and obviously the defeat of Nazi Germany, the word has lapsed in our lexicon. Seemed almost obsolete. But, it is not. Just because Great Dictators no longer control so much of the earth’s surface does not mean that they are extinct.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin controls what he can, though he cannot be a totalitarian leader without risking his neck. And China’s Xi Jinping controls what he can, though he cannot be a totalitarian leader without risking his neck.

There is, however, one totalitarian leader without question – one leader who violates the general rule. Who has total control over every aspect of civilian and military life in the country in his grip. I refer, of course, to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

His grandfather, Kim Il-sung, ruled North Korea from 1948 until his death in 1994. His father, Kim Jong-il, ruled North Korea from 1994 until his death, in 2011. Since then North Korea has been ruled by his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, with no less than the proverbial iron fist.

How is a totalitarian leader distinguished from an authoritarian leader? Or from a despotic or dictatorial leader? The answer is as the word implies: the continuous capacity to exercise total control over everyone and everything. How is this accomplished?  The shortest answer: through terror. It is not the only answer. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written about the phenomenon of totalitarianism. But the easiest way to understand why followers submit so completely and obsequiously to a single leader is that they are scared to death of doing otherwise.

For good reason. When the most serious threat to Jong-un’s authority was thought by him to be his uncle, he arranged for his father’s sister’s husband to be seized by uniformed guards in front of hundreds of high-ranking officials. After being denounced as “an ugly human scum worse than a dog,” Jong-un’s uncle was summarily executed by a firing squad. Many of his followers were similarly killed, others sent away to labor camps. I could go on – but you get the idea. Evil leadership takes many forms – totalitarian leadership typically is the most extreme.

Bad leadership – it’s worth regularly reminding ourselves – is a slippery slope. It can go from bad to worse. And from worse to worst.

It’s curious that good leadership at the International Olympic Committee has been a standard so difficult to meet. It’s curious because, given the Olympic ideal, which is performance at the highest level of excellence, one would think its leadership of similar caliber. But it is not. For decades now the I.O.C. presidency has been shrouded by a cloud of suspicion.

In my book Bad Leadership, I wrote extensively about Juan Antonio Samaranch, a Spaniard who was president of the I.O.C. for over twenty years (from 1980 to 2001), but whose reputation as a leader has since been shredded. Derided for his love of money and luxury, for his cronyism and capitalism, and for cozying up to dictators who sanctioned doping, Samaranch bequeathed the presidency of the I.O.C. to Jacques Rogge. A Belgian, whose tenure was less questionable, Rogge nevertheless presided over a series of controversies, including tolerating internet censorship in China during the 2008 summer games.

Now the I.O.C. is led by a German, Thomas Bach. Bach has been president only since 2013, but his time in office has already been other than stellar. Whatever the shining moments in Rio, the games have already been marred, especially by Bach’s decision not to bar all Russian athletes from participating – in spite of the massive evidence of state-sponsored doping.

As Juliet Macur put it, writing in the New York Times, “Instead of using the power of the I.O.C. to stand up to Russia, a nation whose highest sports officials have been implicated in a doping program that lasted at a minimum from 2011 to 2015, Bach withered…. Bach could have set a strong example for nations who dare to cheat…. But he failed, and in so many ways, too. As a Leader. As a voice for clean sports and clean athletes. As someone expected to keep his word.” *

What is it about good leadership? Why is good leadership – leadership that is effective and ethical – so damn difficult to find?! Even among Olympians?

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• July 26, 2016.

Up to now, Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, has been the perfect Republican citizen. After failing in her own campaign for governor of California (2010), she stayed staunchly aligned with the Republican party, remained close to Mitt Romney (the 2012 Republican presidential nominee), and continued actively to fund-raise for the party in which she believed.

Yesterday, however, she broke ranks. Rather than remaining a rigid follower, she become a good follower. She refused any longer to follow in the footsteps of top elected Republican officials – including Paul Ryan (Speaker of the House), Mitch McConnell (Senate Majority Leader), and John McCain (Senator, 2008 Republican candidate for president, and war hero). Instead she left the fold, at least for now. Whitman declared Donald Trump a “dishonest demagogue,” and announced she would “vote for Hillary.” Moreover, she put her money where her mouth is. Whitman made what was described as a “substantial” contribution to Clinton’s campaign.

Leadership experts pay scant attention to followership. The Leadership Industry is forever touting its capacity to teach good leadership, while ignoring nearly entirely the critical importance of good followership. The critical importance of followers who support good leaders – but who refuse to support bad leaders.

Whitman’s loud, clear parting of the ways with the Republican leadership class is a vivid reminder of the importance of exemplary followership. She sets a splendid example for those among us so pusillanimous we avoid speaking truth to power.

It happens rarely. But it happens sometimes.

Sometimes there’s spontaneous combustion – the man meets the moment and a leader is born.

So it was, last week, with Khizr Khan, who, along with his wife Ghazala, addressed the Democratic Convention to speak of their fallen soldier son – and to take on Donald Trump.

Mr. Khan was able to do what no one else has been able to do. To draw blood, to wound Mr. Trump, who previously had been impervious to political harm. Khan changed the nature of the conversation, made it all but impossible for even the silent majority to remain silent. But, as important, after years in which outsiders have longed for a moderate leader from within the Muslim community, to no avail, one has now emerged. Mr. Khan, it would appear, is not going anywhere. In other words, American Muslims, Muslims the world over, now have a leader who speaks in measured tones and who can, therefore, be a bridge. A bridge between individuals and groups that have trouble communicating, connecting, and collaborating.