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So far she’s been nearly invisible and entirely inaudible. But one of these days Melania Trump will emerge from behind her gilded curtain and then, well, just you wait! You think the press and the people have gone gaga over Trump now… once his wife is part of the picture the celebrity factor will be multiplied many times over.

Melania Trump is no bimbo found in the bulrushes. Before she married Trump – she is his third wife – she was a highly successful model. She has since become a businesswoman, and is involved in several charitable endeavors. But let’s get real: the insatiable interest in her will be not for her substance, but for her style. She is drop dead gorgeous and dresses to kill.

Melania would hardly be the first wife of a presidential candidate, or of a president, known not for what she says or does, but for how she looks. Most recently in our history was Jackie, Jacqueline Kennedy, a formidable political asset I decades ago dubbed a “Decoration.”

The first book I ever wrote – it was published in 1980 – was titled All the President’s Kin.  It made what at the time was an original argument: that for various reasons close members of president’s families – their parents, siblings, spouses and offspring – were becoming politically consequential.  I grouped the presidents’ kin into several different types, one of which was “Decoration” – one of whom was Jackie.

Decorations were defined as follows

Decorations make the president [or candidate] more attractive. They enhance the man, make him and his administration more glamourous – or at least more appealing. They add nothing to the substance of the presidency but a great deal to the style. They lend an intangible aura of pleasure to the grit of day-to-day politics; their presence alone lends grace. At their best Decorations are in fact quite removed from politics. In what would appear, but only at first glance, to be a paradox, it is this distance that allows their charm to exert its political impact.

Let me be clear. Typing Melania Trump a Decoration does not mean typing her a lightweight – any more than typing Jacqueline Kennedy a Decoration meant typing her a lightweight. All I am claiming is that physical beauty can be a political asset of considerable consequence.

Hillary Clinton is being blamed for e mail evasion – and maybe more.

Her top aides are being blamed for e mail evasion – and maybe more.

Her lower level staff is being blamed for e mail evasion – and maybe more.

Her lawyer is being blamed for e mail evasion – and maybe more.

The State Department is being blamed for e mail evasion – and maybe more.

John Kerry is being blamed for e mail evasion – and maybe more.

But, where does the buck stop? To take the obvious examples: if the former secretary of state is guilty of something, and if the present secretary of state is guilty of something, and if state department officials are guilty of something, well, then, how does the incumbent president remain long out of the loop? Is he not the chief executive as well as commander in chief ? Is he not responsible for what happens on his watch? Should he remain immune from inclusion?

The diminished status of chief executive officers is everywhere in evidence. But every now and then one of the most prominent of American CEOs is so openly demeaned that even I am struck.

Such was the case several days ago when an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal (link below) that chronicled in painful detail the decline (and likely someday fall) of Coca-Cola’s CEO, Muhtar Kent. The publication of such a piece is itself humiliating, revealing for all the world to see Kent’s perceived weaknesses. It is also debilitating, no doubt enfeebling Kent still further, if only  because his leadership has been so visibly thrown into question.

The essence of the piece – in five easy pieces:

• Coke’s board has been urging Kent “to appoint a No. 2 for some time.” Translation: Coke’s board has been urging Kent for some time to share his power and authority.
• Recent discussions between Kent and Coke’s board had “gotten intense and focused.” Translation: Coke’s board was becoming increasingly impatient with Kent’s procrastinating, and increasingly insistent that he agree to the appointment of a second in command.
• Kent has been a “detail-oriented executive who is sometimes reluctant to give up the reins to other executives.” Translation: The board concluded first that Kent hoards his decision making authority; and second that he lacks the leadership skills to reverse the company’s declining fortunes.
• Coke’s appointment of James Quincy, who was given the titles of both president and chief operating officer, is intended to “compliment Muhtar’s skills and qualities.” Translation: The board expects Quincy to pick up what Kent has let drop.
• The lead independent director, Sam Nunn, said of Coke’s board that it remains “fully confident” in Kent’s leadership. Translation: Coke’s board is already looking around for Kent’s successor, with Quincy a top candidate.

Coca-Cola has suffered slings and arrows in recent years, which have little to do with Kent and lots to do with context. The growing evidence that soda is bad for our health is a hill that all soda-sellers will find difficult to climb. I am not claiming that Muhtar Kent is Clark Kent. I am only pointing out that whatever his leadership deficits, he has been a victim of bad timing.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/coca-cola-names-james-quincey-president-and-chief-operating-officer-1439468736

If being a leader means no more than, though no less than, getting others to follow, Donald Trump is the real thing! The degree to which he has twisted the usual campaign template to suit his unusual carnival temperament is stupefying.

He’s not what’s remarkable. What remarkable is us. What’s remarkable is the degree to which we’ve been willing to bend to the whiff of his will, oblige his every whispered whim, and follow his lead no matter how dopey the destination.

The media has been willing, nay eager to carry his water, unable, nay unwilling, to turn its prying eyes away from its political prize. We in turn are the consumed consumers, waddling in line behind The Donald who leads us to we know not where.

So far nothing has worked. Corporate leaders, chief executive officers, have continued to receive outsized pay checks in spite of the fact that their followers, the rest of us, have become increasingly resentful and restless.  In 2013 median CEO pay among S&P 500 companies was $10.5 million – a figure that since the late 1970’s has climbed over 700 percent.

We’ve been bitching and moaning about income inequity for years, certainly since the financial crisis. But nothing has stopped the tier at the top from continuing to receive compensation that by most reasonable reckonings is outsized. Fifty years ago CEOs were paid on average 20 times more than their employees; by 2013 this figure had vaulted to 300 times more.

Now, after considerable delay and opposition by corporations, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has voted in a new regulation that might, just might, have an effect on the gulf in income. Beginning in 2017 the new law will mandate that most public companies reveal the ratio of the chief executive’s pay to that of their average employee.

To the degree that this law will have any effect it all, it is likely to be on boards and on activist shareholders, not on ordinary shareholders or on the American people. But, while having the additional information will not start a revolution, here is what it could do. It could be embarrassing. It could embarrass or even shame at least some chief executive officers to have us know – precisely – how much more they earn than do those in their employ.

Confucius wrote about shaming as a means of reining in not leaders, but followers. But the point remains the same: shaming as a way of controlling excesses.

Confucius in Analects:

Lead the people with administrative injunctions and put them in their place with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously.

In their 2002 book, Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders, Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas identified and to an extent popularized (at least in the leadership literature) the word “crucible.” As they defined it, a crucible was “an often difficult event” out of which leaders made meaning in ways that “galvanized” them and gave them their “distinctive voice.”  Their claim for the crucible was considerable: that it was at the heart of their “new model of leadership.”

As I saw it then and continue to see it now there are at least four problems with the crucible at the center of the leadership narrative. The first is that not every leader has anything remotely resembling a crucible experience. The second is that some crucibles seem genuine – soul-searing experiences of dreadfully “difficult events.” But there are other crucible experiences even in Bennis’s and Thomas’s book that seem exceedingly tame in comparison, no more than the vicissitudes of lives fully lived. The third is the presumption that crucibles have a benign effect. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes difficult events have malignant effects. The fourth problem with the crucible at the center of the leadership narrative – no fault of Bennis and Thomas – is that the leadership industry has taken the word “crucible” and devalued it. The word and the idea that underpins it is tossed around far too freely and frequently, rather than being reserved for those instances in which it might authentically be applied. In this sense it resembles the word “charisma,” which, when German sociologist Max Weber claimed it, had a specific, strictly limited meaning – as in Jesus was charismatic. Now we use the word charisma constantly, more likely to apply it to some celebrity or someone we know with personal charm than to the real thing, an exceptional, even singular leader.

But…every now and then there is a leader to whom the word crucible genuinely does apply, who by every indication was forever changed, for the better, by an inordinate test, or trial, or tribulation. A genuinely great leader who served many years in prison, such Nelson Mandela, falls into this category, as does Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was felled by polio as rather a young man, never again to walk on his own.*

Vice President Joe Biden falls into this category as well. Decades ago he lost his dearly beloved wife and young daughter in an automobile accident. Months ago he lost his dearly beloved older son to brain cancer. This is a crucible. These are crucibles.

I do not claim that because of these crucibles Joe Biden ought to be the next president of the United States. All I am saying is that in the event crucibles, real crucibles, matter, Biden qualifies.

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*Adolf Hitler, who also spent time behind bars, presumably similarly had a crucible experience, though with outcomes rather different from those that are the focus of Bennis and Thomas.

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 10 – Technology

“Let me state this as plainly as I can: leaders in the second decade of the twenty-first century are by and large disadvantaged by having been born before the information revolution. The revolution changed so much of such importance – how information is collected, disseminated, and stored; how plain people communicate from one to the next; how followers expect leaders to lead; how followers respond when leaders do something they don’t like; the nature of work and of the workplace – leaders across the board seem forever to be playing catch-up, trying to control a context that to them is as unknowable as it is uncontrollable. One might reasonably argue, in fact, that one of the reasons the leadership industry has exploded in the past few decades, in the United States in particular, has been a free-floating feeling that those responsible for leading and managing are, in at least one critical area, ill-equipped to do so.”

Stunning how scared they are! Stunning how scared are Chinese and Russian leaders of Chinese and Russian followers!

It’s the single persuasive explanation for why officials in China and Russia have consistently clamped down. For the last several years they have been frightened of nothing so much as plain people threatening their hold on power. Threatening to claim their own voice. Threatening to challenge persons in positions of authority. Threatening to trigger their fall from power.

Not a week goes by without evidence of the syndrome. In China just recently the authorities detained dozens of rights lawyers and social activists; dozens more were summoned by the police, admonished, and warned not to speak publicly or to take any action on behalf of the detainees. In Russia just recently the MacArthur Foundation made the difficult decision to shut down its operations in Moscow, bowing to Russian lawmakers preparing to ban groups deemed “undesirable” and purportedly posing a threat to Russia’s security. Similarly, last month in Hong Kong, which is in thrall to Beijing, legislators failed to approve a system that would have allowed citizens a measure of freedom in their selection of chief executive. (Recall just last year Hong Kong activists seized center stage, by occupying key parts of the city for weeks.)

The question is how long? How long will Chinese leaders be able largely to stifle Chinese followers? How long will Russian leaders be able largely to stifle Russian followers? Of course I have no answer to these questions. What I do know though is that the trajectory of history does not favor the politically powerful over the politically powerless.

Compared to the subject of leadership, the subject of followership languishes. While the contributions of good followers and the consequences of bad followers are more widely appreciated than they used to be, the impact of those who are other than leaders is undervalued and ununderstood. If leadership is the belle of the ball, followership remains the stepchild, languishing out of the limelight.

The foolishness, the obtuseness, of this view was driven home again this week by what happened at Toshiba, the Japanese industrial and electronics giant that was discovered to have overstated its profits by more than $1.2 billion over a period of seven years.

When the news about one of Japan’s biggest ever accounting scandals broke, several of Toshiba’s most highly placed executives, including CEO Hisao Tanaka, resigned, apologized, and bowed publicly in contrition. In further keeping with Japanese culture and custom, Tanaka admitted at a packed press conference that Toshiba had suffered under his leadership, “what could be the biggest erosion of our brand image in our 140-year history.”

There is no question that in their attempt to inflate profits, Tanaka and other top Toshiba leaders engaged in a multi-year cover-up. But there is equally no question that they were not the only ones guilty of wrongdoing. Other employees, numberless subordinates, were cowed by their superiors and the corporate culture into keeping quiet, into concealing information that ideally they should have made public. In their recently released report, independent investigators concluded that mid-level managers had, however reluctantly, colluded in the wrongdoing by helping to cook the books.

I do not for a moment minimize the situation in which these mid-level managers, these subordinates, found themselves. The context was such that resistance to their superiors must have seemed impossible, maybe even unthinkable. But there is a literature on followership that makes clear that ordinary people are not immune from responsibility for bad outcomes. As Ira Chaleff puts it in his recent book, Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told to do is Wrong, “we must develop the capacity to not only speak our truth… but to act on our truth … when authority is misusing power.” To do anything less is to join bad leaders by becoming bad followers – a truth about people without power no less important than similar truths about people with.

It has always had a strong appeal – being leaderless. There is something innately engaging about the idea that people might organize themselves in ways that are non-hierarchical, in ways that are totally democratic.  Imagine! Everyone is the equal of everyone else. Imagine! No single man or woman has more of a say than does any other single man or woman.

Since time immemorial utopias have been built on the idea of this ideal. And so have countless social movements including, most recently, the Occupy movement. Nor is the principle of being leaderless confined to the political sphere. It has found a niche in the corporate sphere as well. In their widely read book The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom argue that whereas in “spider companies power and knowledge are concentrated at the top,” in starfish organizations “power is spread throughout.”

But, almost always, the dream of being leaderless is just that, a dream, a fantasy not a reality, at least not for any prolonged period of time. A recent case in point? Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, who has wanted nothing so much as to take his successful company and turn it into a successful democracy. In his quixotic quest, Hsieh embraced “Holacracy,” a system in which hierarchy and bureaucracy are supposed to be abolished or, at a minimum, drastically reduced. A system in which everyone has a voice – even an equal voice.

However according to a detailed piece in the New York Times (link below), two years into Holacracy, Zappos is anything but a workplace utopia. Among several reasons, those who are supposed most to benefit from it, don’t like it. While the majority of Zappos employees are willing to go along, most are unenthusiastic. And some number actually hate Holacracy. They complain it’s complicated and time-consuming, inefficient and unconducive to innovation. When Hsieh sent a 4,700 word e mail to everyone at the company accompanied by an ultimatum – embrace Holacracy or get out – fully 14 percent of the workforce up and left!

Of course Hsieh’s ultimatum conveys the conundrum: for all the talk about Holacracy being non- hierarchical, at Zappos it was imposed on those below by a CEO from on high. Hsieh did not exactly practice what he preached.

But there is another truth that has nothing to do with Zappos. Which is that history suggests that being leaderless is inimical to the human condition. The overwhelming evidence is that human animals, like other animals, prefer having someone at least a little bit in charge.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/business/at-zappos-selling-shoes-and-a-vision.html?_r=0