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The full title of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film – which is widely considered “one of the greatest and most influential films ever made” – is “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy the Bomb.” If you’ve never seen it, I suggest you check it out. If you have seen it, could be worth a second viewing. Whatever your opinion of where we are now, the film reminds us of what we prefer to forget.
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NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. BLAME THE LACK OF MORE TIME – AND SO MANY OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH I WANT TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, THE VERY SHORT COURSE CONTINUES.
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As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they will prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so convincingly making their case that people would feel compelled to act.
The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.
Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Franz Fanon. Born into a middle-class family in Martinique, educated in France, and buried in Algeria, Fanon’s flame burned bright, but only briefly. A philosopher, a psychiatrist, and an activist as well as a writer he died at age 36 – though not before leaving behind a book that became a classic, The Wretched of the Earth.
In the tumult of the late 1960s and early 1970s Fanon was what, decades later, the New York Times described as a “minor celebrity on the radical left.”* More recently however – most dramatically during the time of Trump – Fanon has become “an icon.” Especially on college campuses he is enlisted in agendas ranging from black nationalism and Islamism to cosmopolitanism. And he is admired for the extremity and consistency of his rage against, for example, colonialism and racial injustice.
In part Fanon is invoked so frequently because of his simplicity. His world view was Manichean: masters and slaves, colonizers and colonized, whites and blacks, the former free, the latter in chains if not physically then psychologically. As I earlier wrote, his “mission in life was to end gross inequity, once and for all, by using force if necessary to bring down those with power, authority, and influence in favor of those without.”**
I include him in this short course on leadership literacy because The Wretched of the Earth is a leadership classic of a certain genre. It openly advocates the use of force to compel change. Specifically, change that is deemed not just desirable but necessary – such as ending colonialism and racial injustice. In fact, it was Fanon’s fury, and his unambiguous and unapologetic defense of violence to eliminate extreme inequity, that explains his influence on revolutionary leaders such as Cuba’s Che Guevara. And that explains his intellectual leadership even now.
*
Excerpts from Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth – 1961
*https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/opinion/frantz-fanon-colonialism.html
**Kellerman, Leadership: Essential Selections. (As above.)
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This post is for those of you who – like me – consider power part of a leader’s arsenal. It’s like authority, which is yet another part of the leader’s arsenal, as is influence.
When leaders have power, they can reward followers who follow. And they can punish followers who do not follow. Put directly, when leaders have power, they can, generally, compel compliance.
Which brings us to this story about the founding chef of a fabled, now defunct, Danish restaurant named Noma. It’s a story about the leader: the founding chef and employer, Rene Redzepi. And, equally, it’s a story about his followers: his employees, who he badly abused.
Abuse in restaurant kitchens is no longer news. We’ve known about it for years. About physical abuse, psychological abuse, and sexual abuse. (For example, we’ve known since 2017 that the famous American chef, Mario Batali, routinely behaved badly toward those in his employ.) Still, the extent of Redzepi’s abusiveness, which more recently came to light, and the willingness of those in his employ to put up with it, is a reminder of the power of power.
Redzepi’s was so great that he was able physically to attack his employees and verbally to assault them – while getting those who suffered and witnessed the abuse to remain silent. The New York Times interviewed 35 of Redzepi’s former employees. They said that between 2009 and 2017 he was known for punching them in the face, jabbing them with kitchen implements, and slamming them against walls. They additionally “described lasting trauma from layers of psychological abuse, including intimidation, body shaming and public ridicule.” Further, there were threats to use his influence to get people blacklisted from other restaurants, or to have their families deported, or to get their relatives fired from jobs at other businesses.*
All of which must raise the question of why people put up with Rene Redzepi. Why did his employees remain in his employ? Why did they continue to follow their leader year after year when their leader was so bad?
Some were asked just this question and the answers they gave were revealing. Some said enduring the experience paid off for professional reasons. They said they learned a lot, had extraordinary experiences, and were able to hone their resumes in ways they could not have done otherwise. Others mentioned the group dynamic, saying that they put up with the abuse because everyone else did. And still others felt their reputation and self-esteem were at stake. As one person put it, “I swallowed it all, because I wanted to prove that I was a team player, that I could take it.”
Of course, not everyone was willing to put up with Rene Redzepi – some of his followers refused to continue to follow. A few reportedly fled mid-shift, in tears, and others were said just to have disappeared. But most stayed on, where they were, which is hard to understand. They were, after all, free to leave. To quit Redzepi’s establishment and go to another first-rate place where the environment was less toxic. So, why stay in such an awful workplace? Why continue to put up with such a bad boss?
Answering these questions requires more than a simple cost-benefit analysis. And more even than understanding the human condition. It requires we grasp that the context within which people are situated can explain not just their obeying authority but their kowtowing to power.
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*The information in this post, and the quote, is from this piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/dining/rene-redzepi-noma-abuse-allegations.html
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“Why Are There Still So Few Women CEOs?” asks a recent headline in the Financial Times.”* Good question, for the numbers remain sobering though not surprising. In 2021 among the United Kingdom’s 100 largest (most highly capitalized) companies were 8 female CEOs. By 2025 this number had increased – to 9.
The reasons given for the paucity of women at the top were drearily familiar. They included failure of the executive pipeline, lack of sufficient relevant experience, bias against women, and lack of mentors. Add to this the backpedaling on diversity – which in the US is now rampant – and the likelihood of the numbers of women leaders significantly increasing is, for the indefinite future, low. Very low.
Those familiar with my work know that on this topic I long since concluded that the elephant in the room is the physical, and psychological, difference. The physical and psychological difference between the bodies of women and the bodies of men. (Below are links to some of my writings on this subject.) Yet for all the handwringing on the lack of women leaders, this difference, these differences, are nearly never addressed.
Ironically, there is another recent headline, this one also in a British publication, that directly pertains. It is titled, “Pregnant Women’s Brains Shed Grey Matter to Prime them for Motherhood.”** Suffice it here to note that the evidence that “pregnancy has a profound structural impact on brains…of mums-to-be” is increasing. So, why exactly is it that brain changes in women during and for some time after pregnancy are presumed irrelevant to the issue of women and leadership? Whatever the reasons, they escape me.
On this issue it does not help to continue to make believe year after year, decade after decade. To continue to make believe that the differences between women’s bodies and men’s bodies either do not exist or that they do not pertain.
Guess what though. Men will never raise the issue of menstruation, or of fertility, or of pregnancy, or of breast feeding, or of menopause. So, women must. For unless they do, nothing will change and they will stay stuck. They, we, will continue to be precluded from climbing to the top of the greasy pole in numbers meaningfully greater than what they, we, are now.
*https://www.ft.com/content/57ceb556-681f-471b-9f13-28fcdfd65193
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There are a few excellent books about decision making – and many that are not excellent. The former includes, for example, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Irving Janis’s Groupthink, and Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision. Deciding – how we decide, when we decide, with whom we decide, and why we decide what we decide – is fascinating first because every day each of us decides repeatedly, usually without much if any forethought. And second because we understand intuitively if not intellectually that the leaders to whom we generally defer – politically, professionally, and personally – make decisions that can make, or break, our lives.
Our ongoing interest in decision making explains our so far ongoing interest in a story that broke several weeks ago about an avalanche in California that killed nine people. It was the deadliest such accident in modern California history. And the nine who died were three supremely experienced guides and six supremely experienced backcountry skiers.
Which raises the question – how did this tragic accident happen? Especially given the public warnings that an enormous explosion of snow and ice was not merely possible but probable. And how did this tragic accident happen, especially given that the decision to leave their shelter first was made, and then was implemented during a blinding blizzard with a long way to go before reaching another safe harbor?
Much has been made of the excellence of the nine who died. In addition to the three expert guides, there were six others, each of them also expert skiers who, moreover, were highly accomplished, mature adults who were anything other than foolhardy. And yet. And yet together, as a group (along with four others who managed to survive), they made at least one dreadful decision that with the benefit of hindsight seems both exceedingly reckless and terribly stupid.
The point of this piece is not to blame the victims. Rather it is a reminder that even the best and brightest can and do make decisions that are catastrophically bad. There is an entire literature on this: on bad or deeply flawed decision making, as for example during the war in Vietnam, when America’s political and military leaders made decisions that cost many thousands of their followers their lives for reasons now usually judged wrong-headed.
The avalanche in California is a somewhat similar story, in miniature. It seems the leaders, and their followers, made at least one decision so horribly bad that it cost most of them their lives.
The nine who died fell into two groups: the leaders who were three guides; and their followers who fell into line, who deferred to the professionals. Some pertinent points and lessons to be learned.
This story, this case, is likely to be studied for years to come. It is so unnecessarily tragic – so stark an example of bad decision making by both leaders and followers – that it cannot help but be instructive.
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*This quote as well as further information can be found in: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/02/28/us/tahoe-avalanche-survivors.html
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President Donald Trump has developed a taste for war. He did not used to have an appetite for armed conflict. To the contrary. He frequently insisted that he was a president for peace and, in his second inaugural address, he declared that he would measure his success not just by wars we win but by “wars we never get into.”
That though was then. Since then, he has intervened near and far by using America’s military might to accomplish or to try to what he deemed a desirable end. This most obviously and ominously includes, a few days ago, in Iran. In Iran again, this time far more forcefully than previously.
Trump’s intervention has of course triggered an avalanche of reactions at home and abroad. Here then are just three more.
First, ironically, Trump’s most recent decision to undertake American military intervention comes just when his health is again being questioned. His mental health. For years it has been said of the president that he is, among other things, an extreme narcissist who, moreover, is divorced from reality. But Trump’s behaviors even in recent weeks have triggered a new onslaught of questions. His proclivities to extreme self-aggrandization and self-mythologizing have become even more exaggerated, unsettling even some of those who up to now were strong supporters. Have the countless attacks on Trump’s proclivity to cult of personality stopped him? Not at all. If anything, he has become more extreme, more of what he was before, more of what he has always been which includes being largely indifferent to what others think or feel.
Second, Trump went ahead in Iran without requesting Congressional authorization, or informing America’s allies, or explaining to the American people why he was authorizing military action and what was the endgame. He went ahead on his own, with the blessings only of those who anyway bless everything he does and says. A bad idea. It’s especially a bad idea in a time when, instead of going meekly and mildly along with their political leaders, followers are nearly as likely to not go along with them. This is the third decade of the 21st century. And in the third decade of the 21st century followers – voters, constituents, electorates in liberal democracies – cannot be counted on to follow. Several prominent members of Trump’s own MAGA base are already rebelling against his assault on Iran, and they are attacking the president personally and politically for deciding to get militarily involved. Moreover, as of this morning, only 27% of the American people support the president’s engagement in armed conflict in the Middle East. President Harry Truman committed American forces to the war in Korea without formal congressional authorization. But we are not living in the time of Truman.
Thirdly, while most Americans tend to think of Trump – or at least they did – as primarily a domestic president, in the past year his impact on world politics has become clear. As Robert Kagan pointed out in The Atlantic, the second Trump administration declared the American dominated world order was over.* Trump demanded America’s traditional allies in Europe and Asia take over their own defense. Trump launched aggressive tariffs against them, and he waged ideological and political warfare against them. Further, he threatened territorial aggression against, of all countries, Canada and Denmark. Meanwhile, Trump seems to regard Russia and China not so much as adversaries but as partners in carving up the world. Even before America’s most recent intervention in Iran, Kagan concluded that “Trump’s megalomania is transforming the United States from international leader to international pariah, and the American people will suffer the consequences for years to come.”
Kagan regards Trump’s imprint as permanent or, at least, indefinite. I though am less certain. I think it possible that post-Trump will be a return to both domestic and foreign politics as they were pre-Trump. Not exactly pre-Trump, of course. But much more akin to pre-Trump than to Trump.
The far future depends in good part on the near future. Trump’s second presidential term has nearly three more years to go. The more badly they go the more likely history will treat him as an awful aberration.
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*March 2026 issue.
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NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. MY EXCUSES ARE LACK OF MORE TIME – AND SO MANY OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, IT, THIS VERY SHORT COURSE, CONTINUES.
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As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they will prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so convincingly making their case that people would feel compelled to act.
The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.
Today’s writers as leaders – or, if you prefer, leaders as writers – are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Recall that their immediate predecessor in this series was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. All three were products of the Enlightenment and all three were products of their time – specifically the year 1848. As I previously wrote, it was a year during which there were, in several countries in Europe, popular revolutions against unpopular monarchs. Perhaps no surprise then that 1848 was not just the year during which Stanton penned her brilliant feminist rant but also the year during which Marx and Engels wrote the most famous, and infamous, revolutionary document of all time, The Communist Manifesto.
It is impossible to overestimate the enormous and enduring impact of the Manifesto. Consider this: in the mid-20th century Communists were in control of fully one third of the world’s total population. Moreover, communism endures, most obviously in China. Under the iron grip of President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party of China continues to have final say on nearly everything of consequence in China, including history and ideology, politics, economics and education.
But while there is debate about how much, if at all, The Communist Manifesto bears responsibility for what has been done in its name, there is no doubt that in general communist regimes – especially but not exclusively those in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in China under Mao Zedong – have been relentlessly ruthless, oppressive and repressive, brutal even, to the point of killing many millions of their own.
However, to read The Communist Manifesto is not to read a political document so much as an economic one. For what Marx and Engels sought to address was what they considered the insidious impact of capitalism. The insidious impact of dividing people into two groups: one consisting of small numbers of employers (owners, bourgeoisie) who were permanently advantaged; the other consisting of large numbers of employees (workers, proletariats) who were permanently disadvantaged. As they saw it the situation that even then existed was intolerable and unacceptable and certain to get worse. It was certain to get worse unless someone or something intervened to stop it. Which is of course where Marx’s and Engels’s economic argument become a political one. It’s impossible to overturn the economy, they argued, without overturning the ruling class.
Hence the urgency for the “formation of the proletariat into a class.” Hence the urgency for the “overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy.” Hence the urgency for the “conquest of political power by the proletariat”! And hence the need for The Communist Manifesto – a treatise in which pens were used as swords. A treatise that ended with an exhortation to revolution. You have nothing to lose but your chains…. Workers of the world, unite!
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Excerpts from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto – 1848.
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During his State of the Union speech on Tuesday night President Donald Trump did not once mention artificial intelligence. Which in a perfect world would be a curious if not even unconscionable omission. But in this imperfect world it must be added that he is not alone. Nearly none of America’s political leaders – nor for that matter political leaders anywhere else in the world – are addressing other than perhaps tangentially what arguably are humankind’s greatest challenges. First, to make it as certain as possible that AI will do no harm; second, to harness AI to our collective advantage.
Come to think of it, no surprise. Political leaders are usually too ignorant of AI intelligently even to talk about it. To be sure, both the president of China and the president of the United States know enough to know that they do not want to lead from behind. Both Trump and Xi Jinping are intent on having their respective countries out front in the tech arms race. Still, more specifics are not just unknown to them but to nearly everyone over the age of – to pick a random number – 35.
When it comes to AI, therefore, the only leaders that we have are, by default, leaders in the tech industry. Which brings me to the point of this post. Arguably the only one among them who is not just brilliant but thoughtful and responsible – and, deliberately, a public intellectual – is co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei.
Can you imagine, say, Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Ellison, not to speak of Elon Musk, penning a document as smart and filled with forethought as this one, titled “The Adolescence of Technology”? (The link is below .) It should be required reading for any leader of any organization of any size anywhere in the world – which, alas, it is not.
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In an interview he gave last weekend, White House border czar Tom Homan announced that more than 1,000 immigration agents (ICE) had already left the previously ICE-besieged city of Minneapolis. He added that several hundred more would exit in the coming days and that only a “small force” would be left behind.
Though Homan did not of course say so, and though the victory could be considered Pyrrhic, it was nevertheless a win for the citizens of Minneapolis and a loss for the administration of Donald Trump. The latter had been so badly shamed by the former, and at such a high political cost, that the president reluctantly concluded he had little choice but to retreat.
How did this happen? How did it come to pass that the followers, the people of Minneapolis, forced the leader, the American President, to back down? After all, the people were unarmed whereas ICE agents, agents of the administration, were heavily armed. It appeared then that the people in the streets, the protesters, were weak while the authorities were strong. Especially since the people in positions of authority had not just the power of a gun to back them up but the power of the state.
Before answering the question of how the ostensibly weak beat the ostensibly strong I want to stress how counterintuitive the outcome was. After all, our assumption is that those in positions of power have power, power that they can exercise over those who have no power and even over those who have less power than they do. Our assumption equally is that those who are not in positions of power have no power or, at least, not much power in comparison with those in positions of power. But what came to pass in Minneapolis demonstrates it ain’t necessarily so. That what is expected to be the outcome is not always, not necessarily anyway, the outcome.
The outcome in this case was not an act of magic, nor was it happenstance, nor was it, so far as we know, divine intervention. Instead, it was the result of a lot of ordinary people doing a lot of hard work – as individuals and as members of groups – while demonstrating discipline and determination. Above all these people – the resisters – remained throughout unafraid to do what they thought was right, unafraid to speak truth to power.
If the overarching strategy of those in Minneapolis who strongly objected to Trump’s immigration policies was organized resistance, what were their tactics? What more specifically did the resisters do to push the president to tell Homan to tell ICE to retreat?
Their tactics included but were not limited to:
What happened in Minnesota was so evident a case of a leader overstepping his authority, and so evident a case of followers resisting a leader overstepping his authority, it did not take long for the story to attract attention. Especially after the second fatal shooting of a follower who failed in the eyes of ICE to follow, the context widened beyond the city of Minneapolis and even the state of Minnesota. The context was now national and American public opinion was becoming a factor. Enter the pollsters. Once their findings became public, it was game over. The followers in Minneapolis had won. And the leader in the White House had lost.
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I’ve written about the high rate of leader turnover before. (See, for example, my two posts linked below.) It’s not a phenomenon limited to one sector or another, it’s across the board. Or to be more precise, in democracies it’s across the board. In autocracies, the tenure of political leaders, of strongmen, is as long as its ever been. To wit in Egypt, Turkey, and Hungary and, of course, in Iran, Russia, and China.
Democracies are different. In recent years British prime ministers have turned over at an almost embarrassingly rapid rate. In Germany Olaf Scholz, the chancellor before the current one, Friedrich Merz, lasted less than four years. His immediate predecessor, in contrast, Anglela Merkel, served for more than sixteen years. Even in the United States has been churn. Bill Clinton was president for eight years. His successor, George W. Bush, was president for eight years. And his successor, Barack Obama was also president for eight years. But his successor, Donald Trump, was voted out by the American electorate after four years. As was his successor, Joe Biden. Turnover in Congress, heading into the 2026 election, is also high, with over 10% of members not seeking reelection. Which represents a “significant, accelerated transition.”
In the private sector the churn has been even greater, and it has been faster. “Turnover in CEOs is Most in Over a Decade” ran a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. The reasons why? Given my insistence that leadership is a system not a person – a system that has three parts, the leader, the followers and the context – I find the explanations the Journal provides necessary but not sufficient. The Journal claims the reasons for the high rate of turnover at the top are contextual. Changes in the context that include, “the swift rise of artificial intelligence, the unraveling of long-established trade practices, and an unsettled economy and geopolitical order.”
All true. Each of these pertains. But context is not the only reason for the change. The other reason is the third cog in the system – the followers. Who more precisely am I talking about? Who needs to follow CEOs for CEOs to get their jobs done? Who needs to fall into line not just literally but rhetorically? To, in other words, go along with the leader without incessant bitching and moaning, without incessant belittling and complaining?
The list is not long, but usually it’s large. The list is especially large when we are talking about CEOs of large publicly held companies. In which case the list of those who must follow the leader for the leader to do their work includes boards of directors, C-suite executives, rank and file employees, stockholders, clients and customers, and supply chain providers. Again, not a long list but a list that could consist of followers numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands, even in the millions and tens of millions. Most of whom must acquiesce to CEOs – or at least not resist them – for them to do what they were hired to do.
But what if some or, worse, many among this long list of people refuse to follow? Or, what if they follow but they do so only grudgingly and reluctantly, while carping and criticizing whoever their leader? Not a pretty picture. Not a circumstance calculated to satisfy or gratify the leader or to make their position tenable for long.
Which is precisely what’s happening. The reasons for the high rates of leader turnover are not then just about context. They are also about followers who are bolder and ruder than they used to be; less patient and quicker to pull the trigger; armed with more information, and with ample outlets, especially social media, for registering their complaints and airing their grievances.
For leaders – leaders in every sector – times are tough. While their financial compensation is often outsized and sometimes outrageous, their other compensations tend to be fewer and further between.
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