Author: Barbara

You got a candidate for the title? There are lots of them out there – lots of leaders in lots of situations who are stretched to the max.  

But I challenge you to beat my nominee for winner of the dubious honor. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Since Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine, on February 22, 2022, the pressure on Zelensky has been extreme and without letup. Moreover, while it has been unrelenting from day one, it has never been greater than at this moment.   

A quick look at the dynamic from a systemic point of view – specifically at the leader, at the followers, and at the situation.

The Leader

Zelensky, previously a comedian and entertainer, has not had much to laugh about and not much to entertain him for nearly four years. Navigating the war within Ukraine and outside it, especially in Europe and vis a vis the United States, has been a Herculean if not Sisyphean task. If Zelensky has had any respite from the pressure I haven’t heard about it. His level of stress must be sky high. His level of fatigue, mental and physical, must be off the charts. He must be at the point or past it of burnout. Zelensky is not an old man, he is 47 years old. But I wonder how long he can take the pressure – and how long he should take the pressure? Will it be it time in the coming months for him to step back – to let another leader lead the charge?

The Followers

Think of it. President Zelensky has to manage his own team. He has to be symbolic and substantive leader of the Ukrainian people. He has to marshal leaders in Europe such as Germany’s Friedrich Merz, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Poland’s Donald Tusk, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. And effectively every moment of every day he has to placate the elephant in the room, the wildly unpredictable rogue elephant, Donald Trump. You try it. You try leading any of these individuals or groups and see how far you get. Even Zelensky’s most proximate constituents, his own people, have needs, wants, and wishes impossible at this time to satisfy. They are exhausted from the war; depleted from having to meet its incessant demands; and deeply affected by the toll it has taken. And now they are beset by another scandal, another corruption scandal that is contributing still further to the drain on what is left of their resources.

The Situation

It has been almost impossibly fraught since day one – since Russia violated every international norm by invading Ukraine. One could, however, make the case, and I do, that for President Zelensky the situation has never been as high stakes as it is at this moment. This is a leader trapped between the proverbial rock and hard place. Dammed if he does and damned if he does not. As David Ignatius wrote a few days ago in the Washington Post, Zelensky now “confronts the most agonizing choice of his presidency.” If he trades land for peace some number of Ukrainians will never forgive him. But if he does not the war will continue. Either way neither he nor his people will have any guarantee that the menace to the East – Vladimir Putin – will not strike again again.       

Leaders under great stress do not lack advice. It is suggested, for example, that they prioritize self-care, delegate, reflect, take breaks, get exercise, and sufficient sleep. But … what do you think the odds are that Zelensky routinely receives 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night?

As indicated in my post of 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 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 the last entry in Part I of the book, About Leadership. The author’s name might be familiar as a philosopher, specifically for her work on totalitarianism which remains still of paramount importance. But Hannah Arendt’s most famous book, certainly the one that was her most controversial, was about notorious Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann.

Arendt’s study of Eichmann relates to the work I referenced last, on obedience to authority, by Stanley Milgram. The work of both Milgram and Arendt was influenced by what happened in Nazi Germany and across most of Europe during the Second World War. Both moreover sought to answer some of the same questions: How do good people become bad people? How do bad people become evil people? And what if anything can be done to prevent an event such as the Holocaust?

The focus of their attention was however different. Milgram homed in on followers generally. And Arendt focused on one man specifically, who, moreover, was both a leader and a follower simultaneously. Specifically, the man who was the subject of Arendt’s book was not the leader, Adolf Hitler, but Eichmann, one of Hitler’s top deputies. As a top Nazi bureaucrat Eichmann certainly was without question a leader. But when it came to defending himself against charges of war crimes, he claimed, with some justification, that he was only following orders.

Eichmann was one of the main organizers and implementers of the Final Solution, the Nazis’ attempt to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews. In the immediate postwar period, however, he managed to escape detention by the Allies and to flee eventually to Argentina. Eichmann was recaptured only in 1960 when he was finally tracked down by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, brought to Jerusalem to stand trial in an Israeli courtroom, and ultimately hung for his war crimes.

It was the trial to which Arendt was witness that motivated her to write the book from which I quote here. Her conclusion was that Eichmann was ,in the end, no more than “banal.” That he was an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. That he was not so much malevolent as callow, not so much a rabid anti-Semite as without any ideology at all. As Arendt described Eichmann, one of the most notorious of all Nazi war criminals, he was “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”

The idea that evil could be banal was what got her into trouble. Arendt’s readers found it painful to read, and difficult to believe, that an atrocity on the scale of the Holocaust could possibly be the responsibility of someone who was not much different from you and me.  

Arendt never answered the question of how what came to pass came to pass. She could not. Like everything else written about the Holocaust, whatever her answer it was only in part.

• From Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)

And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody “Thou shalt not kill,” even though man’s natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody, “Thou shalt kill.”  

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it – the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably the overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder. Not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom… and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.

As indicated in my post of 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 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 as before, still all About Leadership. The author’s name might well be familiar, though not as a writer, as a social scientist. Specifically, as a psychologist whose renown came from his having conducted what arguably is the most famous social science experiment of all time.

The man’s name was Stanley Milgram, and his experiment was on obedience to authority. Milgram was not primarily interested in leadership – his primary interest was in followership. This was in the early 1960s, not yet two decades after the end of the Second World War. So, what Milgram sought to find out was how it happened that so many Germans had been willing if not even eager to follow a leader like Adolf Hitler. What Milgram was interested in then was in how ordinary people could act so “callously and inhumanely.”  

During the 1950s most scholars of the war generally, and of the Holocaust specifically, focused on the Fuehrer, on Hitler. Milgram did the opposite. He understood that the calamities the war engendered were not the handiwork of one man acting alone but of millions acting in concert. Of multitudes of followers in addition to the single leader. Hence his interest in what have called “crimes of obedience” – in what he called “obedience to authority.”

Milgram’s original experiment was conducted at Yale University. It has since been replicated in many different places at many different times, sometimes with results that somewhat differed. Still, Milgram’s findings, and his overarching conclusions, pertain now as they did then and, likely, forever will.

The excerpt below is from Milgram’s book, which was written about ten years after his experiment was conducted.

• Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, 1974.

This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. A variety of inhibitions against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in [their] place.

Less than a year into Donald Trump’s second presidential term it’s clear that it was forged not during his first one – but during the interregnum. During the four-year period between his first four years in the White House and his second. Put another way, if Donald Trump had won reelection in 2020 as opposed to 2024, he would have been much less able to upend American policies and politics both at home and abroad.

For Trump and his team, the interregnum was, then, a gift. A span during which they had time to decide what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it if Trump were reelected. This was exemplified, of course, by “Project 2025,” a document prepared during the interregnum by the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 was both aspirational and literal. It was drafted as a governing agenda for Donald Trump – and as an administrative agenda. It was a blueprint for how his administration could “go to work on Day One to deconstruct the administrative state.”

Same can be said about the Democrats. How they are now is because of how they were then – during the four years that Joe Biden was president. Had Biden lost in 2020 the Democrats would have used the period after the election to, without so much as a second thought, leapfrog the old-timer to brace themselves, prepare themselves, for the brave new world that lay ahead. But, as it was, given Covid, given Biden, and given the Democrats could not conjure Trump rising Phoenix-like from the ashes of his defeat, instead of reinventing themselves they reinvented the wheel. No surprise that since then they have struggled. For all their electoral success a week ago today – which was much more an anti-Trump vote than a pro-Dem vote – the Democrats still come across as being somewhat hapless and badly divided.  

What I am arguing is of course counterfactual. I cannot know what this country would look like if Biden had lost in 2020 and Trump had won. But given that I’m a betting woman I’m betting that by the time the history of the 21^st century is written it will be clear that Trump and his team were well off losing the presidency in 2020 and recapturing it only in 2024. It gave them plenty of time to do what leaders should anyway do – their homework.

Reminds me of the motto of many years of the Boy Scouts of America – “Be Prepared.” Trump must’ve been a scout.

As indicated in my post of 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 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 classics are still all About Leadership. Though the authors’ names might well be unfamiliar, they are nevertheless two of the most influential 20^th- century thought leaders, specifically on leadership. The first is Mary Parker Follett, the second is James MacGregor Burns.

Follett was a rare bird. A woman who a hundred years ago wrote about power and authority – and whose writings were widely read! She was a pioneer in the study of leadership and management, specifically in American business. But whereas years later leadership luminary Peter Drucker referred to her as “the prophet of management,” in the decades after her death (in 1933) her name was all but forgotten. Withal, by now her work is highly respected and she herself widely admired for, as one expert put it, telling “truths about human behavior that stand the test of time.” Her far sight and foresight are testified to here by an excerpt that focuses, as I think such work must, not only on leaders but on followers.   

Burns’s book titled simply, Leadership, is a foundational text. Foundational for what he would have called leadership studies, and for what I have argued has become an industry, the leadership industry. The book’s appearance, in 1978, galvanized a small but highly dedicated group of scholars (me included) into believing that the study of leadership could legitimately be at the center of their professional lives. To frame his contribution as he, for all his modesty, might have, Burns was an “intellectual leader.” A leader who dealt with “both analytical and normative ideas” and who brought both to bear on his environment.” He was not “detached from his social milieu.” Rather he sought to change it.

— From Mary Parker Follett, The Essentials of Leadership, 1933.

I have said that the leader must understand the situation, must see it as a whole, must see the inter-relations of all the parts. He must do more than this. He must see the evolving situation, the developing situation. His wisdom, his judgment, is used not on a situation that is stationary, but on one that is changing all the time….

And now let me speak to you for a moment of something which seems to me of the utmost importance, but which has been far too little considered, and that is the part of the followers in the leadership situation. Their part is not merely to follow, they have a very active part to play and that is to keep the leader in control of a situation. Let us not think that we are either leaders or – nothing of much importance.   

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— From James MacGregor Burns, Leadership, 1978.

The interaction [between leader and follower] takes two fundamentally different forms. The first I will call transactional leadership…. Such leadership occurs when one person takes the initiative in making contact with others for the purpose of an exchange of valued things. The exchange could be economic or political or psychological in nature….

Contrast this with transforming leadership. Such leadership occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leader and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality [as with Gandhi] …. Transcending leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with followers who will feel elevated by it and often become more active themselves, thereby creating new cadres of leaders.    

There ought to be a law. I don’t just mean a U.S. law. I mean an everywhere law. A law in China as Canada, in Russia as Argentina as Venezuela. Moreover, I don’t just mean a law in government. I mean a law in business – and in every other entity arranged hierarchically.

The law pertains to age and to time served. So, it would have a Part A, and a Part B, and it would look like this:

• Part A: No leader anywhere, of any group or organization of any kind, may serve over the age of 80.
• Part B. No leader anywhere, of any group or organization of any kind, may serve for longer than 12 years.

The arguments for such a law are almost self-evident. People like power and when they have it, they don’t usually want to give it up. Some stay on long past their sell-buy date, well past when they have the requisite mental and physical vigor. Others stay on long past when they have ideas that are new and fresh, well past when they are imaginative and innovative. And still others stay on long past when they can connect with those who are younger, especially with those who are younger not just by one generation but by two.

This last is especially important at a time when robotics are near certain to wipe out large numbers of blue-collar jobs. And at a time when Artificial General Intelligence is near certain to wipe out large numbers of white-collar jobs. Hard even for 50-year-old leaders to connect with followers more than half their age – not to speak of leaders who are 60, 70, and even 80 years old.  

Does advanced age have advantages? Of course. 50-, 60-, and 70-year-old leaders have assets – traits, characteristics, experiences, bodies of knowledge – that leaders half their age do not. So, I am not arguing that older leaders are per se inferior. All I am arguing is that they do not serve either indefinitely or into their dotage.   

Leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el Sisi are all over the age of 70 and they have all held power for between ten and twenty-five years. Corporate leaders like Jamie Dimon and Bob Iger are similarly long-lived. Dimon is almost 70 years old and has served as CEO of JPMorgan for approximately two decades. Iger is just under 75 years old and has served as CEO of Disney for approximately two decades.  

Each of these long-lived leaders remains in many ways impressive. By many measures Putin, Xi, Erdogan and el-Sisi have been and remain leaders who are extraordinarily effective. The same can be said of Iger and, especially, Dimon. Moreover, their legacies will endure – their impact on their countries and companies has been that great.

Contrast this though with the American military. Though Americans’ trust in the military is not as high as it used to be, say a generation ago, it still ranks far higher in our estimation than most other American institutions. For example, in 2023, 60% of Americans trusted the military “a great deal or quite a lot,” whereas only a scant 26% said the same of the presidency.

Is it pure coincidence that in the U.S. military mandatory retirement of all generals and flag officers is 64? Is it pure coincidence that this can be extended to age 66 only under exceptional circumstances? Is it pure coincidence that this can be extended to age 68 only on the orders of the president?

No. No. And no.

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Oratory has become a lost art. In most American schools public speaking is no longer taught. In most American schools debating is no longer prized. In most American schools speaking up and speaking out is as likely to be excoriated as extolled.

Similarly, in most American businesses orders from on high are given in writing. In most American businesses information is distributed not by leaders but by managers. In most American businesses communication is more likely to be among peers than between superiors and subordinates.

Same applies to America’s commons, to speech broadly defined as political. Most members of the Supreme Court are effectively silent. Most members of the House and Senate are rarely seen and even less heard. Most presidents of the United States – certainly our most recent ones – have been many things but being a good orator has not been among them. During his first term in the White House Donald Trump was more off the cuff entertainer than deliberate speaker. During his only term in the White House Joe Biden was more muffled muser than considered communicator. During his second term in the White House Trump is more stream of consciousness rambler than reliable reporter. In sum, Trump, Biden, and then again Trump have failed, totally, to perform even respectably well on what is widely considered among the most important leadership skills – the capacity to communicate.  

This could mean one of several things. For example, that some leaders are exempt from the usual standards – that they can get away with communicating poorly whereas others can’t. Or it might mean that how “good” communication is measured in the present is different from how it was measured in the past. Or that followers just don’t care anymore how, or even if, their leaders communicate with them. Maybe there are now so many distractions, so many things competing for our attention, that what leaders say and how they say it no longer matter.

However – it seems still to hold true that when a remarkably gifted speaker enters the political arena people will stop and they will listen. They will bestow on said speaker that rarest of gifts – their attention.

Check out Zohran Mamdani. We know by now that he came out of nowhere to become mayor-elect of New York City. We don’t fully know how he did it. There are several explanations, of course, ranging from what is objectively New York City’s affordability crisis to his own, especially skilled use of social media first to make himself known and then to send his message.  But if you really want to grasp his success, check out the speech he delivered late last night, his victory speech. Whatever you might think of the content, it was a remarkable display of oratorical skill. It was a throwback to when how leaders communicated with followers was of consummate importance.

Maybe oratory is more forgotten art than lost art. Maybe when a leader speaks exceptionally clearly and concisely, forcefully and convincingly and in a ringing voice; maybe when a leader’s diction is superb and their language is well chosen, and maybe when a leader knows how to read a room and frame their presentation accordingly, maybe then great oratory remains an asset as invaluable as incalculable.  

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I apologize for the interruptions in delivering this course. I’ve been finishing writing my new book – about which more later!

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As indicated in my post of 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 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.

In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.

Today we are turning to one of the most formidable – and influential – minds of the 20^th century, Sigmund Freud. Freud was founder and proselytizer of psychoanalysis – a mental health therapy grounded in the relationship between the analyst and the analysand. He was, however, at least as interested in the dynamics of groups, especially large groups, as in those that are one on one. Interestingly, counterintuitively, they are closely related.  

Freud understood that his therapeutic approach depended on the degree to which his patients saw him as an authority figure. He further understood that this was similar to, if not even the same as, the way people in groups see their leaders as authority figures. Authority figures on whom they depend for safety and security.

There is, in other words, a direct correlation between Freud’s groundbreaking work on groups and his groundbreaking work on individuals, specifically on psychoanalysis. All of it emanated from and related to his ideas about power and authority – about leadership and followership.

As far back as 1921, in one of his early books, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud wrote about how groups need some sort of centripetal force – a leader – to keep them from disintegrating. Using the Catholic church and the military as examples, Freud described how in each of these large, disparate groups, individuals were deeply, profoundly connected to their leaders, and to each other.

In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, which appeared in 1939, during the time of Hitler, Freud attempted to answer the question that he himself posed, arguably humankind’s most vexing: “How is it possible,” Freud asked and then sought to answer, “that one single man can develop such extraordinary effectiveness, that he can create out of indifferent individuals and families one people…?”

From Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921.

The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father: the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extraordinary passion for authority; in Le Bon’s phrase, it has a thirst for obedience.

From Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930.

Human life in common is only made possible when a majority come together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals…. This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization.

From Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 1939.    

Why the great man should rise to significance at all we have no doubt whatever. We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill treats them.

No matter what you think of the two massive No Kings Day protests – one held yesterday and the other last June. No matter in other words your political persuasion. If you’re interested in leadership you should know these names.

For Greenberg and Levin have done something extremely rare. Not just in the United States – rare everywhere. They have spurred a political movement and they have spun it out of whole cloth. For they are the tip of the spear – the leaders – of Indivisible. And Indivisible is the tip of the spear – the leader, despite the protestations of collaborations – of No Kings Day.

As indicated in my post of 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 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.

In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.

Today we are turning to the early 20^th century German social theorist, Max Weber. While Weber’s name is not now widely known, he was as responsible as anyone else for transforming leadership into a serious subject worthy of serious study. More precisely, as we have seen even in this short course, in the distant past leaders and leadership were deemed intellectually worthy – worthy subjects for great minds to contemplate. Think Confucius, Plato, and Machiavelli. However, as the academy began to slant from the liberal arts to the social sciences, the importance of individuals in politics and economics was diminished. Humans are, after all, difficult to systematize and organize. And almost impossible to measure.   

Weber could see, however, that as small states were becoming large nation-states, and that as small businesses were becoming large organizations, the world was changing. Among the changes: people with power were more important than ever. This pertained everywhere – in Europe, Asia and America, in business as in government, in education and in the military.

Here I will provide capsule descriptions of his distinctions among three types of leaders. More precisely of the three different sources from which leaders derived their power to lead.  In a departure from my usual practice in these posts I will not quote Weber directly, as translations of his works from German into English are not exactly enthralling. Instead, I will provide my own summaries of the three different leadership types that Weber identified.

Max Weber’s “three pure types of legitimate authority.” They are taken from his book, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, originally published in 1921.

• Type #1: Rational authority. Leaders can lead because they are seen by their followers as having a legal right to do so.

• Type #2: Traditional authority. Leaders can lead because they are seen by their followers as legitimate heirs to legitimate traditions – as for example, when a prince inherits the throne from his father, the king.

• Type #3: Charismatic authority. Leaders can lead because they are seen by their followers as so exceptional as to merit not just extreme dedication but, also, in many cases. extreme devotion.