Barbara Kellerman was Founding Executive Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a member of the Harvard faculty for over twenty years, and a Fellow at the Center for five years. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, Uppsala, and Christopher Newport Universities, as well as at Dartmouth, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also served as Director of Graduate Studies at Fairleigh Dickinson, and as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland.
Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. At Uppsala University she held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books including Bad Leadership; Followership; The End of Leadership; Professionalizing Leadership, and Leadership from Bad to Worse. Kellerman has appeared on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters, and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Harvard Business Review.
She has spoken to audiences all over the world including Berlin, London, Moscow, Melbourne, Sao Paolo, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Toronto, Kyoto, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Sydney, and Seoul. The title of her next book is Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. It will be published in September 2026 by the University of Toronto Press. Kellerman regularly posts at https://barbarakellerman.com/articles/
Once upon a time, “Watch your tongue!” was a common admonition. A warning that if your language was not reigned in or cleaned up there would be a price to pay.
But in the time of Trump our standards for what is rhetorically acceptable – specifically for what an American leader can and cannot say in public – are out the window. We have become so accustomed to the president’s verbal coarseness, so used to his slurs and insults, so immune to even the foulest of his curses that we scarcely notice even when his words are as foul as any in the English language.
But what remains to be seen is if Trump is an exception. Does every American leader now have such rhetorical license? Does, for example, America’s vice president have the same leeway as America’s president?
The question came to mind this week when Vice President JD Vance called Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, “very, very evil.” It was at a campaign rally near Detroit, Vance accusing El-Sayed of exacerbating racial and religious divisions.
The issue here is not whether Vance is or is not substantively correct. The issue here is his labeling – his use of the word “evil” against a legitimate domestic political opponent.
The dictionary defines evil as “profound immorality or wickedness or conduct that intentionally causes significant harm, pain, or suffering to others.” Does El-Sayed qualify?
In my book, Bad Leadership, I identify seven different types of bad leadership. These types are in escalating order, which is why “evil” leadership is the last and worst of the lot. Evil leadership is when the leader and at least some followers commit atrocities. They use pain as an instrument of power. The harm done to men, women and children is severe rather than slight. The harm can be physical, psychological, or both.* Does El-Sayed qualify?
Probably Vance did not read my book. Probably Vance does not define evil as I do – or as the dictionary does. In which case he should watch his tongue.
*Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
Lots of ink will be spilled over the passing of Gloria Steinem. Properly so. In her heyday – the 1970s and ‘80s – she was a feminist star. And for decades thereafter she remained a leading voice if not the leading voice on all issues relating to securing equal rights for women. She was known not only at home but abroad, hobnobbing with elites around the world, while retaining her gift for connecting with women of every station.
What made Steinem special? Why did she, in a sea of so many other bold, bright feminists in the last quarter of the last century, stand out from an early age to the end of her life? She was of course on the cutting edge. With immaculate timing she struck just when the iron – civil rights now including women’s rights – got hot. For example, in 1971 she co-founded what became the leading feminist publication, MS magazine. Moreover, she was in every way up to the task. Unafraid, undeterred, and unerring in her political instincts, she was substantively remarkable.
What I argue here though is that what stood out most about Steinem – and what best explains her singularity – is that she was stylistically remarkable. In an era in which feminism was often associated with bra-burning, when feminists were easy to label brazen and uppity, and in which many still regarded the women’s movement as an afterthought, Steinem stood out for her presentation of self. She was unabashedly beautiful. She was always, always, perfectly groomed, immaculately coiffed, and well dressed. And she was calm and cool and reliably collected. Leave it to other women to scream and yell – not Steinem. Her tone was level and measured. Her words were pointed and articulate. She was neither vague nor defensive. She was fierce but never abrasive.
Gloria Steinem looked like a lady, and she sounded like one. She was a lady in the old-fashioned sense of this word – without exception she was well-mannered and with high standards of conduct.
But make no mistake. This lady was a leader. Her leadership of women, and for women, is legend. And so, it will properly remain.
I will not write one line about Tim Cook – who just retired after fifteen years as chief executive officer of Apple – that has not been written before. He did what is usually impossible to do. He was successor to a founder, Steve Jobs, who was himself a legend and, if anything, outdid him. Under Cook’s leadership, the company’s market value increased tenfold and its revenue and profits quadrupled. He transformed Apple into what Matthew Lynn (in the Washington Post) aptly called “a colossus of global capitalism.”
Cook’s feat was not singular. But it was rare. It’s extremely unusual for the successor of a brilliant, colorful and charismatic founder to succeed on his own and ultimately to surpass his predecessor.
Cook moreover has been a second sort of pathbreaker. He has been a pioneer, a leader, in civil rights. In this case gay rights. He did not make a show of it, ever. But nor did he shy from claiming his identity. On the contrary, he made a point of doing so loudly and proudly when no other leader of a Fortune 500 company had ever done anything remotely similar.
In 2014, in an op ed for Bloomberg Businessweek, Cook wrote: “So let me be clear: I am proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts that God has given me.” In 2015 Cook explained further. On The Late Show he told host Stephen Colbert that he “needed to do something” because kids like he “were getting bullied in school, kids were getting basically discriminated against, kids were even being disclaimed by their own parents.”
So, while my last post was about how unless bad leaders are stopped, they always get worse, this one makes a contrary claim. Seems to me that sometimes at least good leaders get better. And then better. And then better still. As Tim Cook did. Not just in one arena of American life but in two.
I do not, I deliberately do not, often post about the president. Opinions differ. And precisely because there is so much to be said, usually someone somewhere is saying it.
But every now and then I decide to weigh in – and today is such a day. Today is an exception to my usual rule because it’s becoming blindingly clear that the president is weakening the Unites States not just at home but abroad. Imagine how much it takes for an already decimated military – during Trump’s second term some 20 top-ranking generals have been fired or forced out – to take issue with orders given by Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. Safe to say, a lot.
But that’s what just happened. In response to a command from the Pentagon indicating that the administration was planning to extend the war with Iran, several top military leaders responded with, “non-concur.” This meant they would carry out the orders they were given – but they disagreed with them. They disagreed because they were persuaded that they would further weaken U.S. military operations in the rest of the world. Given the U.S. has also been depleting its munitions while additionally alienating its allies, it’s clear that America’s national security is weaker than in decades.
Trump is slated to be chief executive for another two years and four months. I can tell you, with certainty, that if he is not stopped he, like other bad leaders, will go from bad to worse.
In my book, Leadership from Bad to Worse, I wrote this: “The process of going from bad to worse tends to be steady, not sudden or hasty. But once bad has burrowed in, it digs deep and then deeper, making it finally very difficult to extract or excise.”*
I also make the point that when a leader goes from bad to worse, it is in four stages. The first is “Onward and Upward.” It’s when the leader paints a picture of a future fantastically brighter than the past – as in “Make American Great Again.” The last stage is “Bad to Worse.” When the leader and their followers extend and expand being bad because they were at no previous point interrupted or impeded. “In which case the outcome is as inevitable as predictable. It is dismal.”
I am not a seer, psychic, or soothsayer. But you can take this to the bank. Trump will not stand still. Unless we the American people stop or at least slow him, he will go from bad to worse.
In mid-July I started posting more consistently about leadership or, better, the lack of it in the brave new world – the world of AI. On July 20th was a piece titled, “AI – Who Must Lead?” On July 22nd was another one, “AI – Who Leads”? And on August 13th was a third, “Who Do You Trust?” (The links are below.)
These are all short pieces, and none is rocket science – I am not a rocket scientist. Nor am I an expert on AI – not hardly. But I am an expert on leadership. And I am not an idiot. I can see that AI is taking off at unanticipated speed and steering us in directions that no one can predict or control. For example, this headline, this week, in the New York Times: “A.I. Stumps Handlers Trying to Contain It.” How’s that for reassuring?
Until recently scant thought was given to the sorts of questions that I raised about how to control what so far is out of control. Specifically, artificial intelligence that stumps even the best and brightest. But in the last half year this has started to change. Which is to say that I am not the only one on whom it’s dawned that “Houston, we have a problem.”
Specifically, a few of the world’s leading experts on AI have begun to think about how to lead and manage, how to control, if it’s possible, the genie already out of the bottle. Which is of course AI itself.
To this question, three of the greatest minds in technology have now devoted significant attention. They are Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, which is positioning itself to have the biggest IPO in stock market history. And Bill Gates, the legendary founder and longtime CEO of Microsoft as well as a path-breaking philanthropist. And Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize winner and pioneering AI researcher and entrepreneur.
The first and most ambitious of these attempts to address the issue is Amodei’s essay of some 20,000 words, published in January. Titled, “The Adolescence of Technology,” it ranges far and wide.* Still, it’s apparent early in the essay that Amodei was motivated above all by his concern that “humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”
Though at the end of his essay, he turns to the question of how we might manage the seemingly unmanageable, he does so unconvincingly. Amodei admits that if we want to succeed “we will have to step up our efforts.” And that it remains for us to “convince the world’s thinkers, policymakers, companies and citizens of the overriding importance and imminence of this issue.” Oh dear.
The second most ambitious of these efforts was this week when Bill Gates published his own shorter (6,000 words) but still ambitious essay titled, “The Turbulent AI Era is Here. The Choices We Make Now are Critical.”** Gates has been foolishly exiled in recent years because he foolishly got involved with Jeffrey Epstein. But the powers that be now seem satisfied that he can return from Siberia and participate in the nation’s discourse. About time. For Gates is among the most valuable human resources we have on several subjects, including, most pressingly, climate change and AI.
Gates names a few problems as the most threatening, one of which is “many jobs will disappear forever.” However, like Amodei, he does not seem, at least not at heart, sanguine that we, we humans, can solve them. Toward the end of his essay, Gates writes that “the world needs a plan.” Who can argue with that? But the best that he can do is to write that while we cannot expect AI companies “to propose solutions to challenges raised by their own technology,” we can develop solutions “through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policy makers, educators, health workers, local officials and community leaders.”
Now there’s a good idea! OK, so which elected officials might take the lead on this? You got one in mind? Does Gates? Similarly, which health workers? Which community leaders? I don’t see a single individual who, as of now, qualifies. Who could take on the task that Gates suggests.
The only other name I’ll mention here is Hassabis’s. Unlike Amodei and Gates, Hassabis is not front and center in America. He is British born and he just resigned as chief executive at Google DeepMind. But he is deadly serious about this issue – the issue of how AI might be controlled – and he has given it much thought. Among his efforts in this regard is his proposal for an independent industry entity that would codify AI safety guardrails and best practices. He compares it to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a nongovernmental watchdog that promotes cooperation on nuclear energy.
We are past the point of worrying about a single AI agent going rogue. What we have to worry about for the moment are multiple agents going rogue at the same time. Agents that communicate with each other and cooperate with each other while leaving humans behind. While leaving us in the dust.
You think what I describe is a high hill to climb? Think again. For the far higher hill is that whatever progress Americans might make on this issue, it will have to be matched by the Chinese. Controlling AI, leading and managing in the AI space, is not a game that Americans can, or should, play alone.
In September the University of Toronto Press will publish my next book. It’s titled Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. These four are among the questions to which the book provides answers. First, what are our rewards for following? Second, what are our punishments for not following? Third, what are our rewards for not following? Fourth, what are our punishments for following? Today’s post is in keeping with this theme – with the focus on followers.
In her weekly piece for the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan chose last weekend not to write, as she usually does, about the high and the mighty. She chose instead to write about ordinary people – the American people.* Her subject was the impact on us of “Trump-era corruption.” The impact on us of Trump’s rampant “personal enrichment” and his use of “government to satisfy private goals.” Noonan worries that the president is serving us a toxic brew that will damage, permanently, our sense of ourselves a “moral actors… to whom politicians have to answer.”
To her credit, Noonan tries in her column to do something unusual. She tries to answer the question of how it happened. How “Trump-era corruption” came to pass? Specifically, why has there been such an “absence of furor”? Why has there been “no public outcry”?
Noonan goes on to answer her own questions.
Because corruption is a constant, and the “other side is dirty too.
Because the scandal threshold has skyrocketed.
Because Trump never sold himself as a man of moral rectitude.
Because the corruption is on such an enormous, nearly overwhelming, scale.
Because the extraordinary becomes ordinary through repetition.
Because when scandals add up and become a blur, they no longer serve as a call to action.
I say, “Yay Noonan”! Because when the history of this period is written the mystery will not be the man at the top. Trump has always been an open book. Moreover, the risk of a leader like he has always been known. Including by the Founders who were acutely aware of the dangers of leaders who were louts, insatiable for, say, money or power.
No, the mystery lies not in leaders who act in their self-interest. Rather it lies in followers who frequently do not. Or so on the surface it appears.
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*“The Art of the Self-Deal” in the Wall Street Journal, August 22-23, 2026.
I’ve long been interested in the intersection between women and leadership on the one hand and women and their bodies on the other. How, in other words, does being in the body of a woman affect being a leader – if at all?*
So I was especially interested to see that one of the brightest stars of the Democratic Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recently went public with her decision to freeze her eggs. Moreover, her decision to be so revealing was not seen as a political disadvantage, quite the opposite. In the mainstream press it was widely viewed as an advantage. A precursor to a presidential bid precisely because her personal, confessional, rollout had just the social media savvy that first made her famous.
Ironically, given the history of women and power, it was suggested that Ocasio-Cortez’s openness made her especially suitable for leadership. As the New York Times put it, going public about such previously private matters was itself a “form of empowerment.” It represented the “kind of leadership that women are hungry for.”
Seems to me though that this remains to be seen. Whether Americans more generally – even American women – are ready, not to speak of hungry, for the sorts of disclosures that Ocasio-Cortez put out there is not yet clear.
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*This link will take you to three of my previous posts on this subject:
I became interested in leadership when I was a graduate student in political science at Yale University. Though this was not long before the explosive growth (beginning in the 1980s) of the leadership industry, at the time was a remarkable paucity of relevant materials. In fact, the word “leadership” was scarcely to be found in the now antediluvian card catalogue of the University library, though the word “management” was, as was “elites.”
To this general rule were few exceptions. Perhaps most notable among them was the eminent historian and political scientist James MacGregor Burns, who was a longtime professor at Williams College. There was also the distinguished Soviet expert, Robert C. Tucker, similarly an historian and political scientist, who was for many years faculty at Princeton University. Both men researched and wrote about leadership full on. Burns became something of an elder statesman in the nascent field of Leadership Studies; Tucker was less central in part because his work was largely on the Soviet Union.
In a small book by Tucker that was published in 1981, titled Politics as Leadership, he made a distinction between those he called constituted leaders and non-constituted leaders.* Constituted leaders occupy official leadership roles. Because of the title and position they hold they see themselves as leaders – and they are so seen by others. In contrast, non-constituted leaders are leaders “without possessing power or occupying high political office.” Some have not even aspired to it, such as, Tucker points out, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. For obvious reasons, it’s harder initially for non-constituted leaders to get others to follow than it is for constituted ones. But once they, non-constituted leaders, have reached a certain point, a point at which they have earned the trust of their followers, there can be no stopping them. Sometimes their successes far outstrip those of their more conventional counterparts.
Tucker’s distinction has come to mind in recent months for not since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 – not since the heyday of King – have voting rights in America been as threatened as they are now. The threats have emanated not just from the White House, with its fixation on, for example, mail-in ballots. As much or even more they have come from the Supreme Court which, for example, last April issued a ruling widely seen as a heavy blow to the voting rights of minority voters. According to the Campaign Legal Center, the decision in the case of Louisiana v Callais did nothing less than “eviscerate the Voting Rights Act.”
Predictably, Democrats have inveighed against the Court’s decision and against the attacks on voting rights more generally. But their words and deeds have failed to capture the nation’s attention. They have failed to sound the alarm loudly enough.
Could this be because, unlike in the 1960s, today most of the nation’s black leaders are constituted leaders? They are leaders like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Raphael Warnock, and Governor Wes Moore – all part of the system. They are in the system – they do not stand or operate from outside it. King on the other hand – along with colleagues, contemporaries, and compatriots such as Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson, and Malcolm X – was a leader who was non-constituted. Seems plausible then that there are times when leading from the outside is more powerful a force, more effective a strategy, than leading from within.
What does it mean to say someone marches to the beat of their own drummer? It means that they refuse or at least they choose not to follow their leader. It further means that they don’t care if anyone follows them. It means that they are independent agents, most definitely not followers, probably not leaders.
They are, moreover, rare. Why? Because most of us follow most of the time. We prefer to be part of the herd rather than to stand alone. Standing alone is lonely and often it’s scary. Standing alone is standing out. Standing alone leaves us vulnerable to being alone – to being defenseless against whatever the gathering storm. Marching to the beat of your own drummer is then not just a lonely business. Often, it’s also a risky one.
Lisa Murkowski marches to the beat of her own drummer. She’s been U.S. Senator from the state of Alaska for over two decades. But maybe because she’s from Alaska – Alaska being so far from the continental United States, and so sparsely populated – her fierce independence and risky idiosyncrasy are largely ignored.
When she comes right out and says or does something that Donald Trump detests – as happened again last week when she refused to vote to confirm Todd Blanche as U.S. Attorney General – the president explicitly insults her and implicitly threatens her. Calling her as he did a few days ago a “traitor” explains why more than once she dared to point to the president’s malevolence. “We’re in a time and a place,” she said on one occasion, “where… I’ve not been before.” She continued, “I’ll tell you that I’m often times very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”
In another era Murkowski’s regular refusal to go along not just with the White House but with her Republican colleagues in the Senate – who prefer to kowtow to the president in unison – would make her stand out. Would certainly in some quarters confer on her the honorific of American heroine. But as it stands, she remains widely ignored not just by Republicans but by Democrats.
Except of course among Alaskans, enough of whom value, maybe even treasure, that the woman who represents them dares to say what she really thinks and then to vote her conscience. Who risks in an age of abject timorousness and extreme conformity to march to the beat of her own drummer.
In September the University of Toronto Press will publish my next book. It’s titled Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. These four are among the questions to which the book provides answers. First, what are our rewards for following? Second, what are our punishments for not following? Third, what are our rewards for not following? Fourth, what are our punishments for following? Today’s post is about, you guessed it, followers. More precisely, it’s about who followers, ordinary people, can trust.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, “Who Do You Trust?” was the title of a popular television game show. For five years it was emceed by Johnny Carson who went on, of course, to become the GOAT of late-night television hosts. But then his role was to get contestants to decide if they trusted themselves correctly to answer a question – or thought it better to trust someone else. Who did they think was more likely to get the right answer?
Though the show is from another era, the question it asks is more urgent than ever. It is key not just to how we function as individuals but as a collective. Who do we trust? Who do we trust personally, professionally, politically – and technologically?
In the old days, when “Who Do You Trust?” aired, Americans were generally a trustworthy people. Specifically, into the mid-1960s we trusted people in positions of authority. But our trust specifically in government, in our political leaders, began to wane first after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. And second, after the military and political mendaciousness that was associated with the war in Vietnam. Since then, the trend has never reversed. And since then, mistrust has spread.
In his 2017 book The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols argued that mistrust had become endemic.* Moreover, its demise implied not just a rejection of existing knowledge, but of science, of objective reality generally. It was emblematic of an age, Nichols wrote, in which “all citizens [all followers] believe themselves to be experts on everything.”**
The years of covid – which were characterized as much by ignorance as fear and loathing – further accelerated and exacerbated the existing trend. Many Americans were more ready to believe what the president of the United States said than medical and scientific experts. It didn’t help that President Donald Trump appeared convinced of his every word while the experts seemed to be fumbling in the dark – which often, for good reason, they were. To this day Trump continues to sell himself as a medical expert. Just this week he issued an executive order on measles vaccines for children that, to quote the Wall Street Journal, “isn’t based on rigorous science, or really any science at all.”
Which brings us – as all roads seem now to do – to AI. As the pace of its development accelerates, experts and laypeople alike are becoming perceptibly uneasy. Uneasy not just about the rapidity and extremity of the changes taking place – five years or less before AI is smarter than we are? – but about who exactly is in charge. Who in matters of artificial intelligence is leading and who following? It’s fine to argue that “humans cannot be passengers” in the AI car.*** And it’s fine to charge that companies are making critical AI decisions without any kind of social or political mandate. But how exactly are followers, we, supposed to weigh in? How exactly do we “acquire more agency over our human future”?
Who do we trust? Do we trust us?
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*The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford University Press).
** Nichols’s argument was presaged by my own. In The End of Leadership (HarperCollins, 2012).I point out that because of changing cultures and technologies leaders (experts, authority figures) in Western democracies were getting weaker while followers (ordinary people) were getting stronger.
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