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Today’s the Big Day – the day that some 40,000 people who flocked to Omaha to hear the Great Man will get their great reward.  Warren Buffett along with his indispensable sidekick Charlie Munger will regale the throngs with their words of wisdom about Berkshire Hathaway – and about whatever else comes to Warren’s still fervid and fertile mind.

It’s easy enough to poke fun at this ritual – Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. The so-called “Oracle of Omaha” is sometimes now windy, and the event itself is not only jam packed, but expensive to attend and substantively mostly sparse. Some of the goings-on are, moreover, sort of dopey – like the newspaper toss context and the mini-parade led by two Texas Longhorn steers.

Still, there is this. There is Warren himself – as remarkable an individual as corporate America has ever produced. And there is the annual meeting itself: notable this year for its celebration of Buffet who has been 50 years at the helm but, more importantly, notable for decades for engaging shareholders to a degree and in a manner that is unrivaled.

One of the problems with corporate America is that those who own it – shareholders – are nearly never informed about or involved in the companies that they, we, own. Most of us sit on our stocks and hope they’ll go up. We do not take the time or the trouble to discover or uncover much of anything about that in which we’ve invested some of our presumably hard-earned money. Nor do most of those who lead and manage America’s businesses take the time or the trouble to bring us in any meaningful way into the process.

Warren Buffett though has long been different. For at least the last ten years he has made his annual event something of a cross between a seminar, a carnival, and a revival meeting. It’s intended as a learning process, and as fun, and as a way to engage and re-engage stockholders both in the company and in buffing the legend of Buffett himself. It’s been a win-win game in which everyone and everything involved – corporate leaders; corporate followers (mostly but not only Berkshire Hathaway shareholders), and the corporation itself – have come out ahead.

Buffett can get away with being an unmitigated ham because his performance has been brilliant. But his performance must be measured in ways other than the most obvious – Berkshire’s stock price. It must also be measured by Buffett’s singular ability to pull into his orbit those around him, including those legions of us who never have had, and will never will have, any association whatsoever with Berkshire Hathaway.

We know that leaders are less likely than they used to be to last long. For systemic reasons – reasons pertaining to the nature now of followers and the nature now of the contexts within which leaders and followers are located – the tenure of those at the top has been abbreviated. In 2000, for example, CEOs stayed in office an average of 10 years. By 2012 this number had shrunk to 8.1.

It’s one thing, however, for ordinary organizations to change leaders more often than they used to. It’s quite another when these organizations are precisely those that supposedly specialize in teaching leadership. Put directly, when you see an article headlined, “Short Tenure of Deans Signals a Leadership Gap,” and when you realize that the deans to whom the article refers are deans of business schools, you know something’s gone wrong.*

What an irony! Given that on the one hand teaching leadership and management is the mainstay of virtually every business school, and given that on the other hand fully one quarter of all business school deans remain in place for a measly three years or less, it’s clear there’s a disconnect. I’m the last person to argue that leaders should stay in place for too long – ten years is generally the optimum maximum. Still, to cycle in and then out of a business school deanship in five years or less is nearly never good. It’s too short a time in which to do what leaders generally are expected to do: envision change, mobilize for change, create change, and finally manage change.

There’s no shortage of explanations for why so many business school deanships amount to revolving doors – the enticements of money among them. But, before professing to teach leadership, the relevant players might want to model it by, among other things, staying in place as long as it takes to get good work done.

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*Della Bradshaw, Financial Times, April 27, 2015.

Joseph Schumpeter was an eminent Austrian-American economist best known for his work in the first half of the twentieth century. “Schumpeter” is also the name of a regular column in the British news magazine, The Economist, dedicated largely (though not exclusively) to the coverage of corporations, to big business.

This week’s column (link below) is titled “Twilight of the Guru’s.” Which gurus are being eclipsed, according to The Economist?  Management gurus, men, and the occasional woman, who years ago held such sway that they could leap across buildings and, more importantly, sell millions of copies of their books in a New York minute. What we have now, Schumpeter writes, is a “far cry from the glory years of the 1980s and 1990s, when ‘In Search of Excellence,’ by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, sold 3m copies in its first four years and ‘Re-engineering the Corporation,’ by James Champy and Michael Hammer, touched off a global re-engineering craze.”

Assuming that the claim is true – that the “guru business is reaching the end of a long cycle of creativity” – the question is why? Why is that the “thought leadership industry” has entered into what Schumpeter suggests could be a permanent drought? Is it that we’ve become stupider, that the thought leaders of a generation or so ago were simply smarter? Or, has something else changed, something that makes it harder for single individuals to be thought leaders now, at least in the same way, than it was say twenty, thirty years ago?

For my own answers to my own question, stay tuned.

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http://www.economist.com/news/business/21649478-management-pundit-industry-shadow-its-former-self-twilight-gurus

 

 

Note: As some of you will have noticed, for the last two weeks my blog was shut down. It’s now… not shut down! As of today I’m resuming posting, though the piece below was written a couple of weeks ago, before I realized I had been muzzled. Subsequent to today, all blogs will again have their previous immediacy. 

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In the just published Epilogue to her year old memoir, Hard Choices, which focused on her years as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton reinvents herself. Rather than providing a pertinent postscript to her original volume, Clinton chose this time around to speak in a different voice – an altogether feminine one.

We know why. We know that she and her advisors made a deliberate decision to soften her image, to embrace her womanly side rather than shy away from it. They presume that in order for a female to win the White House she will have to shed some of the masculine, or more typically leader-like characteristics that got Clinton to where she is in the first place, and instead don the mantle of femininity.

Like the good student she famously is, Clinton has shed her old skin nearly entirely. Her Epilogue is nothing as much as an ode not only to her role as a mother and grandmother, but also, if you can believe it, to her role as a wife.

She writes adoringly – yes, adoringly – of husband Bill, who spoke on the night of the 2012 Democratic convention. “I had to smile when I saw him take the stage in front of the enthusiastic crowd…. He still loved the excitement of a great political moment…”I was full of pride for the former president I married….”

She writes adoringly of memories of daughter Chelsea: “When Chelsea was born I was full of nerves…. I was unprepared for the sheer wonder and responsibility of parenthood. I prayed that I would be a good enough mother …. It was magical and terrifying all at the same time… When Chelsea was little, Bill and I read to her nonstop….Goodnight Moon was a particular favorite.”

But mostly, by a wide margin, Hillary Clinton writes adoringly about granddaughter Charlotte. When Charlotte was born, she and Bill sat quietly, “holding hands, trying to process the rush of emotions. I looked over and saw a tear in Bill’s eye.”

In the weeks subsequent, Bill and Hillary “spent as much time as we could visiting and helping” the new parents. She watched glowingly as Bill carried Charlotte “around our house, stopping at nearly every book on the shelf to explain the plot and how much she will enjoy reading it one day.”

Every day with Charlotte, Clinton writes, is “a miracle.” Charlotte’s every gesture “sweeps” her off her feet. Charlotte, she continues, “has already helped me see the world in new ways.” And so it goes. The topper though is the connection between Charlotte and her grandmother’s decision to run for president. It is Charlotte who has made Clinton think “deeply about the responsibility we all share as stewards of the world.” It is Charlotte who, instead of making her want to slow down, has “spurred” her instead to “speed up.”

It is no accident that while Clinton writes freely and gladly about being a wife and mother, the role she focuses on is that of grandmother. A lot of words have been spilled about why even in the second decade of the 21^st century so few American women are in positions of leadership. This applies across the board – in business and politics, in the military, even in the larger nonprofits. I have written about the virtues of androgyny – adopting an androgynous style of leadership – as a way for women who want to be leaders to get around the double bind of being perceived as either too feminine or too masculine. What Clinton clearly has concluded is that tethering herself to Charlotte is a way for her to be seen as very much a woman – but as a particular kind of woman. An old woman – or, at least, a relatively old woman. To be a grandmother is, to put it bluntly, to be generally perceived as past your feminine prime. As a woman you are no longer threatening in a way you might have been twenty years earlier.

Call it a double standard. No man running for president would dream of going on about being a grandfather as fulsomely as has Hillary Clinton about being a grandmother. But, if it helps get her to the White House, who cares? Certainly not Hillary, or Bill, or Chelsea, or, presumably, Charlotte.

 

Barbara Kellerman teaches Women and Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Her most recent books is, Hard Times: Leadership in America.

 

One of the defects of the Leadership Industry is that it is isolated from the arts. Notwithstanding some exceptions, it is separate and distinct both from the fine arts and the liberal arts.

This apartheid was brought to mind by a recent article on Bob Dylan. The author, Richard Woodward, emphasized Dylan as a musical trailblazer, as a leader of other musicians who followed him in droves. Woodward writes, “Bob Dylan’s ‘Bringing It All Back Home,’ 50 years old on Sunday [March 22^nd], has as strong a claim as any album of its day to be called the spark that ignited the music of the 1960s…. Lyrics with jagged edges, enigmatic visions of America adrift accompanied by dark, cynical laughter, were not common until Mr. Dylan’s surrealist poetry entered the mainstream of popular song.”*

But Dylan’s leadership was not limited. He led not only other musicians, but large swaths of the American people. Dylan played Pied Piper to a whole generation of mostly (though by no means wholly) young Americans thrilled to have found a troubadour they thought their own. Here is where came into play not so much Dylan’s music as his lyrics – that peculiar, particular, protest poetry that people have found perpetually powerful and persuasive.

“Blowin’ in the Wind,” arguably the most iconic of his tunes, has spoken as eloquently to those involved in civil rights movements – “Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist, before they’re allowed to be free?” – as to those involved in antiwar movements.

“Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly

Before they’re forever banned? …

Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows

That too many people have died?”

Is this man, then, Bob Dylan, not a leader? A leader of his own kind, other musicians? And a leader in addition of countless numbers the world over who yearn to be emboldened by his art, so that they too can find their voice and speak truth to power?

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“Dylan’s Double Personality,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2015.

 

Mostly the incumbent president is loath to get his hands dirty. Mostly he seems to believe that a good idea, a good policy, should sell itself, Mostly he has avoided the wheeling and dealing, the personal politicking, that is necessary to get things done in Washington.  To this general rule there has been one exception – the Affordable Care Act – but only one or, at least, only one that stands out.

Now it appears that there is a second exception. It appears that President Obama intends to go all out during the next three months to try to sell to the American people, and to the American Congress, and to the world at large the virtues of moving from a draft nuclear deal with Iran to a permanent one.

The most striking indicator so far of Obama’s investment in this arrangement is his extended one on one interview with New York Times foreign affairs columnist, Tom Friedman. The interview, conducted in the Oval Office on Saturday afternoon, was wide-ranging and far-reaching, and clearly targeted at a large audience not only at home, but abroad. The full text was promptly posted on line, as was a video. Moreover Friedman was quick himself to write an extended piece about the substance of what the president said – which Friedman framed as the “Obama Doctrine.” What is the Obama Doctrine? It is Obama’s conviction that “engagement,” in combination with meeting America’s strategic needs, better serves the national interest than the endless sanctions against three countries that have long been isolated from the international community: Burma, Cuba, and Iran.

My point though is not about what precisely the president will be saying. It is about how precisely he will be saying it. How will Obama try to sell the agreement with Iran in a context that is so inhospitable?  In a context in which so many of his political opponents – and even some of his political allies – are questioning not only the substance of the deal but the legality of trying to secure it without Congressional approval?

I will say that the president seems to get it. That the president seems to get that he has no choice on this one but to pitch his wares as persistently and persuasively as he knows how. Even if it means getting his hands soiled in ways that he typically finds personally and politically distasteful.

 

 

In the old days – say two, three, four years ago – I used to feel I had to prove my point. I used to feel I had to make a case for the proposition that the world was changing. That leaders were getting weaker and that followers – others – were getting stronger.

Now it’s rather like shooting fish in a barrel. Now it’s so screamingly obvious that leaders are lesser than they used to be, it would seem the case was closed.

This is not of course to say that leaders are irrelevant or unimportant. It’s obvious that leaders still matter. Just this week a potentially historic arms control agreement was reached between the leaders of Iran and the leaders of the world’s major powers, an understanding that would have been impossible to broker without the men at the helm.

However, leaders in both Iran and the United States remain vulnerable between now and the end of June to having the deal undone by a host of emboldened opponents, who want nothing so much as to unravel the accord their leaders laboriously stitched together.

Moreover the furor that engulfed the governors of Indiana and Arkansas in the last week, and then forced them both immediately to backtrack while simultaneously eating crow, was a reminder that if you happen to pit leaders against followers on an issue about which the latter feel fervently, the former likely will lose.

Nor are the pressures confined to leaders in government – a truism to which Lufthansa’s CEO Carsten Spohr could be the first to testify. He was too quick to claim in the aftermath of that Germanwings (a Lufthansa subsidiary) crash in the Alps that the pilot and co-pilot were “100% airworthy.” Only a few days later did we learn that years ago were signs the co-pilot was anything other than 100 % airworthy, and that, in fact, it was he who was solely responsible for the crash that claimed the lives of the 150 people on board the ill-fated airliner.

It’s not clear that Spohr will ultimately be forced out as a result of this tragedy. But the attacks on him personally and professionally must be making his life miserable. Fairly or unfairly Spohr is being held to account for what would appear to be mismanagement at lower levels of the organization long before he even became chief executive officer. A German newspaper based in Dusseldorf, where the plane was headed, was typical – it minced no words. It said that Lufthansa’s admission that it had known of the co-pilot’s mental health problems was a “helpless attempt to prevent company chief Carsten Spohr, with his fatal words ‘100 percent flightworthy’” from appearing “as a liar ripe for resignation.”

The benefits of being a leader can clearly be many. But, just as clearly, so now can be the costs. Leaders have become fat targets for followers bent on venting their frustrations.

 

My most recent book – Hard Times: Leadership in America – was published in October by Stanford University Press. The book explores the impact of context on leadership and followership.

Beginning February 3, I started posting in this space excerpts. They appear here in the order in which they appear in the book.

Excerpt from Chapter 7 – Organizations

“In spite of unanticipated consequences…, and in spite of unending debates about the various virtues and deficits of the flattened hierarchy, in the past several decades the conviction that at least somewhat flatter is at least somewhat better gradually took hold. In 1980, fewer than 20 percent of companies on the Fortune 1000 list claimed at least some sort of team management structure. By 1990, it was 50 percent, and by 2000 it was 80 percent. Obviously, not every organization adapted in ways that ultimately were meaningful. Moreover, even now many and maybe even most organizations retain rather a rigidly hierarchical governance structure – not so distant from [Max] Weber’s original conception. Gradually, however, there evolved the conventional wisdom that even the most hidebound organizations would do well to be somewhat flatter in the future than they had been in the past. Even the most hidebound organizations were advised to ‘flatten their informal channels of communication and influence, which all management theory admits are as important … as an organization’s formal structures.’”

 

We think of leadership as a relational act. It assumes that at least one leader, and at least one follower, in some way interact. We further think of leadership as an intentional act. It assumes that the leader deliberately, willfully, intends for follower(s) to go along.

But what if both these assumptions sometimes are wrong? What if leadership is not always a relational act, at least not in any detectable way? And what if the follower goes along, though not, or, at least, not necessarily, because the leader deliberately intends for followership to take place?

Think, for example, of great scientists and mathematicians, such as, say, Copernicus and Einstein. Presumably they had an interest in persuading others of the veracity and validity of their ideas. But they did not, so far as we know, undertake their endeavors for this primary purpose. Their primary purpose was not to lead, but to discover. Their primary purpose was the thing itself –it was not to engage or persuade others.

Still, in time, others went along. Others followed their lead. Others came to recognize that at least in one critical way, Copernicus and Einstein were superior and they were subordinate. Of course these two men were geniuses, so how might this apply in circumstances more mundane?

We know by now that leadership in the second decade of the 21^st century is difficult to exercise, specifically in situations that are more democratic than autocratic. We further know that in every group or organization there are at least some people who have little or no interest in leading and managing; they prefer not to engage with other people, but rather to be autonomous. They prefer to be left alone to do their own work.  In fact, experts often fall into this category. They are specialists whose primary purpose is to perfect the projects to which they in particular are dedicated.

The question then is, how do people like these get compensated in systems that specifically reward leaders and managers? In most organizations, even those that proclaim flat hierarchies, career advancement, along with money and power, is equated with becoming a leader or manager. But, becoming a leader or manager requires intentional interpersonal engagement, which clearly does not suit many men and women with proclivities and capacities unrelated to emotional intelligence. How then to reward these people for who they are, rather than penalize them for who they are not?

A couple of years ago, Rackspace, a U.S. based cloud-computing company, came up with an answer to this question. Rackspace had a problem that was by no means unusual: members of its technical staff frequently felt themselves inadequately compensated, and so defected to other companies. Rackspace’s rewards, in other words, were going in the main to men and women in positions of leadership and management, not to the technical experts who were, after all, responsible for making the trains run on time – in fact, for making the trains run at all.

Rackspace’s response was to come up with what it called a “technical career track” (TCT). It was a way for those who did not want to lead other people nevertheless to play a leadership role. This particular leadership role was not tied to excellence in interpersonal engagement, or for that matter to intentionality, but to excellence in a particular area of expertise. So far, though TCT is still in its early stages, it is proving promising. As one person put it, a designer of data storage systems, “I now know it’s possible to lead by using my knowledge to push what we can do for customers, rather than by managing people.”

What he has come to understand is that of itself good work can be good leadership. It’s a model that, however counter-intuitive, we would do well to bear in mind. One could argue, in fact, that a way of leading that does not depend  on intentionally engaging followers has at this particular moment a particular appeal.

 

For more on the TCT in Rackspace, see: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1c08b5b4-cc87-11e4-b5a5-00144feab7de.html#axzz3VayXfmQE

 

 

 

 

My most recent book – Hard Times: Leadership in America – was published in October by Stanford University Press. The book explores the impact of context on leadership and followership. 

Beginning February 3, I started posting in this space excerpts. They appear here in the order in which they appear in the book.

Excerpt from Chapter 6 – Institutions

“Differences among and between generations confirm, not disconfirm, that what I am describing is a phenomenon much more likely to be enduring than evanescent. That fact is that young people are even less disposed than their elders to trust people in positions of authority – leaders of institutions…. It is of course possible that people change over time – become more trusting as they age. It’s equally possible, even probable, that succeeding generations will have even less confidence in American institutions than do their immediate predecessors.

American institutions are not now what once they were. Or, at least, they seem to us in the present not to be what they were in the past. Perhaps we romanticize what’s long gone and demonize what’s here and now. However, from the perspective of a leader trying to get others to follow, to go along, it does not much matter. The bottom line is that even the best and brightest of the leadership class are now saddled with a reputational problem. Both they and the institutions for which they are responsible carry an albatross – skepticism, even suspicion – that cumulates to a considerable, cumbersome burden.”