Author: Barbara

Donald J. Trump has been lustful lifelong. Lifelong he has lusted for money and power; sex and success; women and attention.  But, lifelong, a single lust has transcended the rest – his lust for money.

In a book titled Leaders Who Lust, my coauthor and I defined lust this way. A psychological drive that produces intense wanting, even desperately needing to obtain an object, or to secure a circumstance. When the object has been obtained, or the circumstance secured, there is relief, but only briefly.

Lust soon returns, again to be all-consuming. On the plus side a leader who lusts is a force of nature. On the minus side, a leader who lusts is driven by a single passion that crowds out everything, and everyone else.  

Since he first ran for president of the United States in 2015 it has been widely assumed that Trump’s overweening desire was for power. During the first year of his second term this assumption was reinforced by his unyielding demands for first for abject loyalty and second, that those who denied him be punished.

But Trump’s lust has never been for power. Or at least not power per se. Rather power has always been and it still is a means to an end. A means for him to satisfy his lust which is for money. Policy is secondary, even tertiary.  

In the last 24 hours were shock and awe at the revelation that in 2025 Trump’s revenue jumped to at least $2.2 billion – staggeringly more than it was before he became president a second time. And, obviously, staggeringly more than any other president in American history.

People are wringing their hands, seemingly stunned by what Trump himself has trumpeted as long as he’s been in the public eye. When he first ran for president, in 2016, Trump gleefully boasted, “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy.” And once he won the White House, the edifice itself has testified to his obsession with abundance and affluence. All that gilt, all that gold? Silent signs of Trump’s lust.

From a psychological perspective it’s far more instructive to think of President Trump as a kleptocrat than as an autocrat. They’re related, of course – the lust for money and the drive for power. But they are not the same and, in this case, the first dominates and drives the second, not the other way around.   

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For more on lust generally, and on Trump and lust specifically see:

Barbara Kellerman and Todd Pittinsky, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy (Cambridge University Press, 2020.

and

2025 LEADER OF THE YEAR

In 2025 the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) published a piece titled, “Can You Identify Your Organization’s Leadership Culture?”* The piece prompts me to return to my post of June 15 (2026) in which I defined how I use the term, “leadership culture.”

In CCL’s discussion of leadership culture, it is an aspect of, a subset of, organizational culture. I however define “leadership culture” differently, more broadly. According to my definition leadership cultures transcend organizations. Leadership cultures reflect more, far more, than the organizations of which, sometimes, they are a part. (Note moreover that not all human groups are organizations.)

Organizational cultures are themselves situated in larger cultures. These larger cultures might be, for example, national or regional, religious or educational, public sector or private. The point is that they impact, influence, and indeed shape the organizations located within them. Therefore, every organization’s leadership culture is derived in part from the larger cultures, or contexts, within which it is situated.  

Alibaba’s organizational culture is described as a “blend of Eastern philosophical traditions and Silicon Valley dynamism.” In contrast, Amazon’s organizational culture is described as “an intense, data-driven, and highly competitive environment.” While there is, no doubt, some overlap between the organizational cultures of both, there are also very significant differences.  Among these are some screamingly obvious ones such as Alibaba is a Chinese company and China is a communist state, while Amazon is an American company and America is a capitalist state. Further, China has an ancient history of autocratic rule and America a recent history of democratic rule.

Thus, the leadership culture of any organization in China, or in America, or anywhere else for that matter will be impacted not only by the organization per se, but by the larger culture of the country within which the organization sits.  

As I define it then, a leadership culture is a manifestation of, an amalgam of, each of the contexts within which they are located. The leadership culture at JPMorgan Chase (JPM) reflects the history and habits, values and attitudes, patterns and practices of JPM itself. But the bank’s leadership culture is additionally derived from the capitalist, corporate, financial and national contexts within which JPMorgan Chase necessarily sits.

* https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/whats-your-leadership-culture/

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On June 15, 16, and 17, I posted a three-part series about leadership culture. While all three focused on America’s leadership culture, the first of these posts introduced the concept of leadership culture by describing it as similar to national culture and organizational culture. Specifically, while “culture” is impossible precisely to define, it suggests shared values and beliefs, traditions and norms. Leadership culture then refers to those values and beliefs, traditions and norms that apply to relations between leaders and followers.         

Leadership cultures are related to and even derivative from the larger cultures within which they are located. So, America’s leadership culture is different from Russia’s leadership culture because the U.S. and Russia are different. And, so, similarly, the leadership culture of the Catholic faith is different from that of the Jewish faith; Harvard University’s leadership culture is different from Liberty University’s leadership culture; and the leadership culture at General Motors is unlike that at Volkswagen.  

Russia’s leadership culture is in stark contrast to America’s. Moreover, unlike President Donald Trump, who is in disharmony with America’s leadership culture, President Vladimir Putin is in harmony with Russia’s. Trump is a proto autocrat who leads in a democratic leadership culture. Putin is an authentic autocrat situated in a leadership culture that is authentically autocratic. So, inevitably, Trump has had a bumpy ride during his less than six years in office – recall that he was impeached twice in his first term – while Putin has enjoyed a relatively smooth ride especially given that he’s been in office for over a quarter century.

Putin is in the Russian leadership tradition, a quintessential product of Russia’s leadership culture. He is a recognizable successor to his most famous 20^th century predecessors, Lenin and Stalin. And he is steeped in Russia’s more distant history – replete with its succession of autocratic czars and of similarly powerful patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, Putin consciously fuses the two: whenever he dedicates a new statue to one of his czarist predecessors, he does so in the company of by an Orthodox priest who speaks to the holiness of the moment.

Putin’s otherwise inexplicable 2022 decision to attack Ukraine, under the illusion the country could be conquered in less than a week, was seeded in his fantasy of grandiosity. Putin was certain he could restore the Russian empire to something resembling what it was under his czarist predecessors beginning in the 17^th century, and then continuing into the 20^th under their successors, Lenin and Stalin.

In general, leadership cultures suggest leadership that is predictable. So, Putin has been a predictable product of the leadership culture within which he is situated. But, as always in these matters, to every rule there are exceptions.  As with Trump who deviates from the leadership culture into which he was born and over which, as president, he presides.

British Prime Minister Kier Starmer finally bit the bullet – he resigned his post. Even though he won Britian’s last national election in a landslide victory, and even though he is by all accounts a political centrist and man of moderation, Starmer concluded he had no choice – he had to quit. In astonishingly short order he had become miserably unpopular both among the electorate and within his own party and, therefore, woefully ineffective.  

By the time he leaves office Starmer will have served as prime minister for scarcely two years. Moreover, when his near certain successor, Andy Burnham, takes his place, he will be the seventh person to serve as British PM in the last ten years. It’s an astonishment. Or, more precisely, it would be if Britain were alone in having voters so fickle that they render their respective countries near ungovernable.  

Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s approval ratings are around 19 percent. Same for France’s President Emannuel Macron. President Donald Trump would boast of his comparatively good approval ratings – they’re at about 37 percent – but those who know better might remind him that not in nearly two decades have Americans had a president who had such stats for more than a few days in succession.

Not every Western leader suffers from such abysmally low numbers. Canada’s Mark Carney is an example of an exception to the general rule. His approval ratings are over 50 percent but… he’s an exception.

For students of political leadership and followership the point is the same as the one I made more than a decade ago in my book, The End of Leadership. Which is to say that in democracies leaders are getting weaker while their followers are getting stronger. As currently in Great Britain, it’s the riders who repeatedly decide to change horses in mid-stream. It’s not the horses.

Lest you think that Americans are exempt from this general rule, think again. In the last decade, we had Trump as president; then Joe Biden as president; then again Trump as president. Moreover, if a free and fair national election were held today there is scant doubt Trump would lose.

Such incessant disruption up top and dissatisfaction down below is not conducive to organizational or institutional success. Imagine Apple or Berkshire or General Motors having similar turmoil.  It’s unthinkable.  

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In September the University of Toronto Press will publish my next book on followership and, therefore, on leadership. It’s titled, Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t.

NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. BLAME THE LACK OF TIME – AND ALL THOSE OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH I CHOOSE TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, 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 – or at least they had an enduring impact. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.

Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Betty Friedan. Friedan was both singular and part of a tradition. She was part of a tradition of great women writers – such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – who fought for the cause of women’s rights with such immense eloquence and preternatural persuasiveness that they started or at least suggested a social movement. Friedan though was singular in that she identified a problem – a problem with no name – that most women of her time did not consciously even know existed. After all, in the 1960s women could vote, they could divorce their husbands without losing their children, and they could own property. In other words, unlike the women in Wollstonecraft and Stanton’s time, women in Friedan’s time, especially if they were white and reasonably well-off, had nothing obvious to complain about. Not to speak of revolt about.

But Friedan did it, changed the way women thought. Moreover, her classic contribution, The Feminine Mystique, which was, not incidentally, published the same year (1963) as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” hit a nerve almost immediately. Large numbers of women across the country identified with the issues that Friedan had raised, and they responded accordingly. It is not too much to say that The Feminine Mystique was the match that lit the movement. The women’s liberation movement that in the 1960s and ‘70s especially played a such a prominent part in the American political firmament.   

Friedan continued to be politically active to the end of her life. And she continued to write books. But The Feminine Mystique was her signal contribution. As the New York Times wrote in her obituary, the book “permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world.” In other words, a classic of both literature and leadership.

From Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique – 1963:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, and ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – Is this all?

…. If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a mater of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone realizes…. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says, “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”

 In Part II of this series on America’s Leadership Culture, I listed the culture’s ten key components. I made plain that these were norms – indicators of how leaders were expected to lead. Each was, however, a reasonable expectation, not an unattainable ideal. Americans do, for example, expect their leaders not to compel compliance by using force. They expect their leaders not to violate the law but to abide by it. And they expect their leaders to respect their followers independent of station or status.  

But what happens when American leaders fly in the face of America’s leadership culture? Especially when they flagrantly and repeatedly violate its norms?

The answer is “it depends.” As always, it depends on who is the leader, who are the followers, and what is the context within which the norms are being violated.*

Elon Musk is a glaring example of an American leader who gleefully flies in the face of its leadership culture. No question he is a leader. A leader of several extraordinary companies. A leader on earth and in space. A trillionaire leader who, because of what is now his historically great wealth, will wield even more power in the future than he did in the past.

Musk doesn’t bother with authority or influence. He is so dominant that all he must do to get his way is to exert the power that already is his. Starbase, Texas, is an example. It’s a company town, built to accommodate people who work at, or are otherwise closely affiliated with Musk’s company, SpaceX. Musk controls Starbase as would an all-powerful king, or tsar, or emperor. The town is described by locals as having a “highly secretive environment overseen by a company-affiliated commission that rubber-stamps Mr. Musk’s vision, a place where even kindergartners are guided by his philosophies.”**  

What we have then are two truths – truths that would appear contradictory, but which nevertheless coexist. America has a leadership culture that consists of norms to which most leaders are expected to adhere. But to this general rule as with other general rules, there are exceptions. Musk is a genius – which is why he is one.    

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*I always think systemically. Specifically I conceive of leadership as a system with three parts that are equally important: leader, followers, contexts.

**https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/opinion/elon-musk-spacex-starbase-texas.html

In the post preceding this one I introduced the concept of leadership culture. I wrote that it consisted of widely held values, attitudes, opinions and norms as they pertained to leadership in a particular group or organization. I further applied the concept of a “leadership culture” to the performances of two leaders, both Americans, Donald Trump and Jamie Dimon. The former in disharmony with his leadership culture; the latter in harmony with it.

In this post I list the ten key components of America’s leadership culture. They apply across the board – to leaders in government and business; religion and education; the military and the media. To American leaders wherever they are located.

• All American leaders are expected to rely far more on authority and influence than on power.
• All American leaders are expected to be checked by constitutional, institutional, or organizational constraints.
• All American leaders are expected to abide by the American creed which includes, among its virtues, adherence to the rule of law.
• All American leaders are expected to, at some point, agreeably and gracefully surrender their posts.  
• All American leaders are expected to behave in ways that conform to the norms of their groups or organizations.
• All American leaders are expected to communicate both within their groups or organizations, and without.
• All American leaders are expected to protect and defend their followers no matter any risk to themselves.
• All American leaders are expected to respect their followers independent of their station or status.
• All American leaders are expected to leave their groups or organizations better off after they served than before.

I am not of course claiming that all American leaders conform to these norms. I am claiming that they constitute a template for what leadership in America is supposed to look like.

Just as there is such a thing as a national culture, or an institutional or organizational culture, there is such a thing as a leadership culture. Broadly speaking leadership cultures are composed of two parts – the general and the specific. So, for example, the leadership cultures of the president of the United States and the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase are both rooted in American soil. In this sense they are similar. However, at the same time these two leadership roles are rooted in the specifics of their institution and organization. So, President Donald Trump’s leadership culture is that of the United States and of the American presidency. While Jamie Dimon’s leadership culture – he is CEO of JPMorgan Chase – is that of the U. S. and of his bank, JPM. As a result, while the leadership cultures in which Trump and Dimon are located have some things in common, they do not have everything in common.

Moreover, the two men are different. Dimon has led in harmony with his leadership culture. Under his leadership his company has thrived in virtually every aspect. Additionally, after more than two decades at the top, Dimon remains widely regarded as one of the most admirable and successful CEOs in American history. He looks, acts, and plays his part perfectly.  Perfectly in keeping with the leadership culture in which he is situated.

Trump in contrast has led in disharmony with his leadership culture. There is a reason a scant 16 percent of Americans approved his having held a cage match on the grounds of the White House. It’s because it seems to them inappropriate. Out of keeping and character with what we think of as properly belonging in this time at that place. The occasion – celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States – would seem to demand a sense of history and modicum of propriety. Trump was not, after all, elected referee or ringmaster. He was elected president, chief executive of a country with a flawed but, still, fabled history.  

We should conceive of a “leadership culture” as akin to a “national culture” or “organizational culture.” While the concept of culture is somewhat vague – it cannot be precisely defined or easily quantified – we know it has substance. The national culture of China is obviously radically different from that of Argentina or Canada.  Similarly, the organizational culture at Meta is obviously radically different from that of Mercedes or Merck.  

The components of culture are nowhere written or otherwise enshrined. Still, there is broad agreement that they include loosely but nevertheless widely shared values, beliefs, attitudes and opinions.  We similarly know that they include norms and habits that, while not codified, are nevertheless understood widely to apply.

In general, then, all American leaders are expected to abide by, for example, traditional American values such as democracy, and they are expected to act accordingly. At the same time while it is expected of some American leaders, notably those in the private sector, to make a lot of money both for themselves and for followers such as shareholders, other American leaders, notably those in the public and nonprofit sectors, are not expected to make a lot of money, not for others and assuredly not for themselves.

The accumulation of wealth, certainly of great wealth, is, ostensibly, one of the things that most obviously distinguishes the leadership culture of the American president from the leadership culture of the chief executive officer of JPMorgan. The first is expected to be wholly uninterested in personal financial gain. The second is expected to be highly interested in personal financial gain if only because their wealth is inextricably tied to that of the companies they lead.

Trump has seemed to pride himself on shattering presidential norms, on breaking with the leadership culture that for generations has been associated with America’s chief executive. Dimon has done the opposite. He appears to pride himself on perfectly conforming to his company’s leadership culture – which is why, while history will treat Trump poorly, very poorly, it will treat Dimon kindly, very kindly.    

Every year that Xi Jinping has been president of China – starting in 2013 – he has tightened the screws further. His government has more assiduously than the year previously monitored the Chinese people – which of course makes dissent more dangerous and therefore more infrequent.

Those of us who’ve never experienced living in full out autocratic state have a hard time conjuring what it’s like. Even the Orwellian conception of Big Brother does not do what’s happening in China full justice. For China continues to take the most advanced monitoring technologies – now obviously enhanced by AI – to new levels of surveillance.    

The most extreme example of Chinese repression is of the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic group of about 12 million people who live in northwest China. For more than a decade they have been forcibly “reeducated” to be assimilated. While China predictably denies “eliminating Uyghur language and culture,” the government’s own messaging contradicts the claim. What Beijing regularly and relentlessly emphasizes is “ethnic unity” and “love of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Mainstream Chinese fare better, of course. But by no means are they free of Xi’s iron fist. The government uses artificial intelligence, biometric tracking, and obligatory digital tracking to operate by far the world’s largest and most sophisticated mass surveillance network. As the New York Times put it, China’s near perfection of the surveillance state has resulted in “Mao-era policing on steroids.”

Lest you think this suffices, it does not. China is using AI to develop a predictive model. A model intended not to identify who poses a risk to the authorities today – but who will pose a risk to them tomorrow!

Sounds like sci-fi but it is not. According to researchers at Vanderbilt University, a Chinese company called Geedge Networks is developing new surveillance and censorship software that will allow the regime to predict who is likely to say or do something critical of it in the future.     

So, those of us who live in a democracy that we benignly neglect better shape up. Lest we live in an autocracy that deprives us of that luxury.   

Jill Biden’s new memoir, View from the East Wing, will sell well. She’s tirelessly promoting it. The interest in “what happened to Joe Biden and when” remains strong. And the appetite among Democrats – as well as many independents and some Republicans – for blaming someone, anyone, for Donald Trump’s reelection remains unslaked.

But for those of us with a particular interest in how leadership is exercised – or not – the mere fact of the book is a reminder of the power of the pillow, specifically of pillow talk, especially in the American presidency.

My use of the term “pillow talk” is to indicate an intimate relationship between husband and wife. Not every president and first lady have pillow talks, not for example, so far as we can tell, Donald and Melania Trump. Nor Richard and Pat Nixon. But they are the exceptions, not the recent rule. In the modern American presidency, most presidents are politically and personally heavily dependent on their wives. Which explains why their relationships are intimate – in different ways they are extremely close.

Presidents share with their wives the pleasures of the White House and the burdens of the office. Similarly, presidents share with their First Ladies information and ideas, duties and responsibilities, values, beliefs, and opinions. Think Gerald and Betty Ford, Jimmy and Roselynn Carter, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, George H.W. and Barbara Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton (no eyerolling, please!), George W. and Laura Bush, and Barack and Michelle Obama.  

From everything we know, Joe and Jill Biden have had, from the beginning of their marriage up to now, a relationship that was intimate. Given their shared triumphs, tribulations, and tragedies, we can even surmise that it was unusually intimate. Joe Biden was senator from the state of Delaware when he and Jill married. He stayed in the senate for about thirty years; then served eight years as vice president; and finally, four years as president. Every step of the way his wife Jill was close by, right by his side.   

At the same time Jill Biden made a point of claiming her own identity. Specifically, as an independent woman with her own, separate and distinct, professional life.  Having received an Ed.D. degree in educational leadership, she insisted on being called “Dr. Jill Biden,” which some thought pompous and others just a sign of the respect she was anyway due.

The one time in Dr. Biden’s life when, by her own account, her roles conflicted was when her husband, president of the United States, showed serious signs of serious aging. One the one hand she continued to be the independent woman who was the first First Lady to hold a paying job outside the White House. On the other hand, she continued to be the dutiful wife, consort and consigliere to the president. But, as it turned out, it was not possible for her responsibly to play both parts at the same time.

In her book, the portrait she paints of her marriage is in one all-important respect curiously, even weirdly, old-fashioned. When it came to her husband’s health, Jill Biden claims that an open and honest exchange, pillow talk, was unimaginable. It just wasn’t done. In an interview she insisted that her extreme discretion on such matters was “generational.” It was, she said, “the way we grew up.” In her book she asserted the same thing – that she never, ever, discussed her husband’s health with him. “It’s always been the nature of our relationship,” she wrote, “that we’ve maintained a veil of discretion around personal health.”      

Well… each to their own. It’s not my place to question the ways of others. It is however my place to point out had Jill Biden had “the talk” with Joe Biden, the pillow talk, history might’ve turned out differently. It takes no great leap of the imagination to conjure a world in which Dr. Biden spoke with President Biden reasonably openly and honestly. In which she would draw on the power of the pillow to urge him to withdraw from, or better, not even to launch another presidential campaign. Hard to imagine a competent modern woman unable to see her husband as he was and, or, not wanting to use the power of the pillow to get him to leave the stage while there was still time.