Author: Barbara

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.

Elon Musk is the richest man in the word. He is founder and chief executive officer of Tesla and SpaceX, two of the most iconic companies ever. And now he is undertaking the largest IPO (initial public offering) in history – SpaceX is set to go public next week. A single share will be priced at $135, which means the company aims to raise about $75 billion at a valuation of about $1.77 trillion. The numbers are astronomical which, given Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars, is the pitch perfect adjective.

However, those among you who are thinking of investing in SpaceX, in getting in on the action while the action is hot, might want to ask yourselves this. What happens to SpaceX if something happens to Elon Musk? Which is possible. He’s singular. But he’s also like you and me in that he is a mere mortal who is, therefore, vulnerable. Vulnerable to having an accident or to getting seriously ill. Vulnerable to – however much he tries to fend them off – the vicissitudes of aging.

I’m certain that Musk has some sort of succession plan. I’m equally certain that he is the axis around which everything in his domains turn – including SpaceX. SpaceX is betting its future on Elon Musk’s future. The prevailing assumption being – the assumption on which the IPO is based – that Musk is impermeable. Which he is not.

Leadership experts have forever disagreed about how important leaders really are. On the one extreme are those who argue that they are all important. On the other are those who insist that they are unimportant. That they are mere pawns on the chessboard of history. As Leo Tolstoy, an expert on everything, concluded in War and Peace, “A king is history’s slave.”

Let’s say though that Tolstoy was wrong. That while many leaders are no more than bit players, some really are stars. They matter – some even a great deal. In which case Musk is among the chosen few. Whatever his flaws, he is as wildly inventive, singularly brilliant, and ferociously ambitious a leader as he has been a successful one.

Space, moreover, is his dreamscape. Safe to assume that for the rest of his sentient life every fiber of Musk’s self will be devoted to the pioneering success of SpaceX.  So, if you’re inclined, and persuaded that he’s just getting started, you might want to throw some of your weight behind SpaceX. But if you’re nervous about Musk’s mortality and everything that this implies, you might want to put your pennies elsewhere.   

Nearly no one wants to hear it. But I surmise a link between our bodies and our lives – specifically, our work lives. Especially as it pertains to power. I refer to the apparently forever gap between the number of women in positions of leadership and the number of men.* The latter continuing to outrank women everywhere, by large margins.

The evidence that women’s bodies affect them in ways that men’s do not is ubiquitous. For example, a recent article in the New York Times that focused not on how some women have a hard time getting pregnant, and not on what many women experience during pregnancy, but on what happens to women in the year after. The piece points out that during this last especially vulnerable period – the twelve months or so after a baby is born – the mother is highly unlikely to get coordinated medical attention.  

Three pertinent points:

• Mental illness spikes in the months following delivery of a baby.
• Both the demands of caring for a baby and the lack of paid leave deter women from seeking medical care.
•  The “dominant obstetric care model treats postpartum recovery as a brief coda to pregnancy.”** It does not address the real and sometimes urgent medical needs of women in the aftermath of having a baby.

The questions that I repeatedly pose are not directed at men. They are directed at women.  At the top of the list are these: First, do you agree that many if not most women have issues relating to, for example, menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause that affect their lives at work? If yes, do you think it likely that this is one explanation, an important one, for why women are still so much less likely than men to be in top leadership roles? And third, if yes to this, do you think that anything can be done about it and if so, what?

Our continuing refusal to talk openly and honestly about how our bodies affect our lives at work, and our continuing temerity about demanding accommodation, explain more than anything else why we still are where we are. Far behind men who, years after the latest iteration of the women’s movement, still have vastly more power and authority than do we.

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*Here are some of my previous posts on the subject.

Women and Leadership – Our Bodies, Ourselves

Women and Leadership – Our Bodies, Ourselves (Continued)

**The present post was prompted by this piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/opinion/women-childbirth-postpartum-care.html

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, IN VARIOUS VENUES, TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, THE VERY SHORT COURSE CONTINUES.

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As indicated in my post of August 21, 2025, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the earlier 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 Rachel Carson. She is appropriate to write about on Memorial Day 2026 maybe not in the conventional sense – but certainly in the larger one. Carson was a great American who fought tirelessly for her country, for those who then peopled it, and for the generations of Americans yet to be born. For she was among the angriest – and most influential – environmentalists ever. Carson was angry at all the soiling and spoiling of the air we breathed, and the water we drank, and she was angry at the harm being done, some of it irreparable, to irreplaceable flora and fauna.  

To her anger she harnessed her formidable powers – two in particular. First, she was an expert. As I wrote in Leadership: Essential Selections, “this was no mealymouthed, ladylike lady, shedding wasted tears over the loss of what once had been.” No, this woman was, atypically in the 1950s and 60’s, a highly trained scientist (marine biologist) who marshalled her great knowledge on behalf of her great cause.

Second, Carson wielded her pen with the power and passion of a poet. Her gorgeous yet harrowing descriptions of what had already been lost, and her frightening depictions of destructions yet to come, were impossible to deny. As to many – though tragically not to all – they were impossible to resist.   

While her immediate concern was over the indiscriminate and reckless use of synthetic chemical pesticides (especially DDT), her worries and warnings were much more expansive. Hence her classic, her contribution to the great leadership literature, Silent Spring.  

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Excerpt from Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checker-board of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where in the spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half-hidden in the mists of the fall mornings….

Then a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families…. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours. 

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone? …. On the farms the hens brooded but no chicks hatched…. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire…. Even the streams were now lifeless….

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 are the four 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?

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As I frequently point out, for every billion books and articles about leadership there is one about followership. Imagine my surprise then when, in just the last few days, two items that made news were not about leaders but about followers.

Both were articles about work done by academic researchers. In one case the research was based on followers in Nazi Germany. (Germans during the Nazi era – the many who supported Hitler and the few who resisted him – have been grist for academic mills since the 1950s.) And in the other case the research was based on followers during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War, in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Researchers at Harvard found that those of Hitler’s followers who joined the Nazi Party before he became chancellor (in 1933) tended to be committed Nazi ideologues. In contrast, those who joined only later tended to do so less out of conviction and more out of convenience. They joined because everyone else was joining. So, they were doing no more than, but also no less than succumbing to social pressures. Conforming to what had become social norms.*

The two German social scientists who focused on what happened in Argentina found that middle or low-level bureaucrats were especially vulnerable to following orders that “violated professional obligations, fundamental norms, and even basic morality.” Why? Because if they were willing to do what their superiors told them to do – notwithstanding their superiors might be corrupt or malign – their chances of being promoted or in some other way professionally rewarded were significantly improved.**  

Though they made news, neither of these findings were surprising. In fact, they were completely in keeping with earlier research on followers, especially though not exclusively of Adolf Hitler’s.

This is not, however, to diminish their importance. Expert research on followership remains all too rare. Moreover, it has special resonance in a time such as this one when the United States has a president who is a would-be strongman. When the second largest party in Germany is far-right, so far right that just a few years ago it was seen as extreme. And when the number of democracies has been in decline while the number of autocracies has been on the rise.  

Of course, for someone like me who’s convinced it’s impossible to grasp leadership without followership, studies like those mentioned in this post are catnip.  

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*This research was reported by Sy Boles in “Who Joined the Nazi Party?” in The Harvard Gazette, May 15, 2026.

**This research was reported by Amanda Taub in “Why Autocracies Love Loyal Losers” in the New York Times, May 20, 2026.

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 are the four 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?

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As I frequently repeat, for every billion books and articles about leadership there is one about followership. Imagine my surprise then when, in just the last few days, two items that made news were not about leaders but about followers.

Both articles reporting findings by academic researchers. In one case the research was based on followers in Nazi Germany. And in the other case it was based on followers in Argentina during the so-called Dirty War in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Researchers at Harvard found that those among Hitler’s followers who joined the Nazi Party before he became chancellor (in 1933) tended to be committed Nazi ideologues. In contrast, those who joined the Party only later tended to do so less out of conviction and more out of convenience. They joined because everyone else was joining. They joined because they were succumbing to social pressures; they needed or wanted to conform to social norms.*

The two German social scientists who focused on what happened in Argentina discovered data that was somewhat different, though similarly it came as no surprise. They found that middle or low-level bureaucrats and officials were especially vulnerable to “violating professional obligations, fundamental norms, and even basic morality.” Why? Because if they were willing to do so on the orders of a superior, including one who was corrupt or malign, their chances of being promoted or of being in some other way professionally rewarded were significantly improved.**  

Though they made news, these findings were not, as indicated, new. Rather they were in keeping with earlier research on followers, especially though not exclusively of Adolf Hitler’s. This is not, however, to diminish their importance. Expert research on followership remains all too rare. Moreover, it has special resonance in a time such as this one. A time when America has a president who is, or would-be, a strongman. A time when the second largest party in Germany is far-right, so far right that even a decade ago it would have been thought extreme. And a time when the number of democracies has been in decline while the number of autocracies has been on the rise.  

Of course, for someone like me who’s persuaded it’s impossible to grasp leadership without grasping followership, studies like those mentioned in this post are catnip.  

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*This research was reported by Sy Boles in “Who Joined the Nazi Party?” in The Harvard Gazette, May 15, 2026.

**This research was reported by Amanda Taub in “Why Autocracies Love Loyal Losers” in the New York Times, May 20, 2026.

When I was still teaching at the Harvard Kennedy School, I would sometimes describe to my students – who were all adults – the historical trajectory toward weaker leaders and stronger followers. I addressed the trend in my 2012 book, The End of Leadership, in which I also explained it. Explained how it happened that leaders had become more enfeebled and followers more empowered.

This trajectory was characteristic only of democracies; in autocracies it was the opposite. In autocracies followers were getting weaker and leaders stronger. This was because by the second decade of the 21^st century it became clear to autocratic leaders such as Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping that unless they clamped down, controlled their followers more completely than previously, their followers would start to resemble their democratic counterparts. They would become increasingly difficult to control.

Most students came to understand and agree with my argument. But frequently someone in the class would ask, “Where does this all end?” What would happen if the trajectory that I was describing continued? If liberal democracies continued to be characterized by followers who were getting still stronger and leaders who were getting still weaker? To which I would reply that I wasn’t sure. While I was sure that what I was describing was happening, I couldn’t confidently predict where it was going.

Now, some fifteen years after I wrote The End of Leadership, we have some answers. Looking at liberal democracies – especially but not exclusively at the United States, at most countries in Europe, and at some countries in Asia – we do now know where this ends, at least for now.

• When followers get too strong and leaders too weak sometimes it ends in constitutional crisis. As it did a year and a half ago in South Korea when an exasperated president, Yoon Suk Yeol, was unable to control his constituents and so declared martial law. While the decision was quickly reversed, South Korea remains on edge and difficult to govern.
• When followers get too strong and leaders too weak sometimes it ends in voters turning sharply to the right – away from the hallowed principles of democratic rule. While this shift is in evidence in many countries, nowhere is it more striking than in Germany. Why? Because until recently, because of their history, Germans were allergic to right wing politics and politicians. Those days are now gone. The far right, populist, nationalist, conservative party, Alternative for Germany, is the second largest party in Germany.
• When followers get too strong and leaders too weak sometimes it ends in the election of a strongman. As in, obviously, the United States where Americans elected Donald Trump to a second presidential term during which his proclivity to erode democratic norms is fully in evidence. The indicators of Trump’s preference for more autocracy and less democracy include but are not of course limited to his persecution of political opponents; his vilification of marginalized groups; his use of unprecedented power for unprecedented profit; and his bypassing of legislators who, it must be added, give him permission to roll over them.
• When followers get too strong and leaders too weak sometimes it ends in persistent enfeeblement. Of which a sad, stark, example is that once great pillar of democratic governance, Great Britain. The aborted tenures of recent prime ministers speak for themselves. Theresa May and Boris Johnson each managed three years. Johnson’s successor, Liz Truss, squeaked out six weeks. And her successor, Rishi Sunak, was evicted from 10 Downing Street a scant year and a half after he moved in. Which brings us to the present – to the present Prime Minister, Keir Starmer.

To me Starmer is an especially interesting case – perhaps because his vertiginous descent seems to prove my point. As Tom McTague, editor of The New Statesman, described him in the New York Times, Starmer is one of the “most inoffensive politicians imaginable.” If that is, you believe in democratic governance. He is a centrist and a moderate, a Social Democrat who believes in and supports human rights, international law, and public services for his constituents. On his watch has been no calamity or catastrophe – and yet. And yet in less than two years Starmer’s landslide victory has curdled to a point where Brits seem to want nothing so much as to push him out. His approval ratings are historically low. Most of his cabinet has lost faith in his capacity to govern. And more than 100 members of his own Labour Party have publicly called on him to resign.

To answer the question of why for at least the last decade the British have had such terrible trouble governing themselves, McTague tips his hat to context. He points to the pandemic and to inflation, and to economic and geopolitical upheavals, prominently among them Brexit. All of which and more do pertain, as I am the first to claim. (To wit, my regular reference to the leadership system in which 1) leaders, 2) followers, and 3) contexts are all equally important.)

McTague also does what most people do – which is to blames the leaders. Starmer, he writes, is like most of his immediate predecessors, he is “utterly unsuited to the job.” We should, in other words, see Starmer as “just the latest in the long line of duffers.” He has “never known what he wanted to do in the job.” Nor did he arrive in office with any conception of “why things had gone so badly wrong before him.”  

What McTague does not, however, do is to point the finger of blame at those who are primarily responsible for Great Britain’s malfunctioning political system. They have not been the leaders. They have been the followers.

Which brings me back to where I started. Starmer, as noted, was elected in a landslide. And he was elected only relatively recently. Still, his approval ratings did not decline starting only in the last few months. They declined starting almost immediately after he was elected – well before he had any sort of chance to prove himself.

British followers, British voters, are so exceedingly fickle they are failing to keep their end of the bargain. Both Sunak and Starmer were in every way normal. Normal men and normal leaders in that they were reasonably competent and reasonably middle of the road in style and substance. Still, the British electorate was inordinately quick to be dissatisfied and so they exercised their muscles. They showed who in the 21^st century was getting stronger – followers. And who in the 21^st century was getting weaker – leaders. Amazing how fast the furious Brits have repeatedly brought their leaders to their knees.

When the world’s two most powerful leaders meet face to face it’s news. It’s news even when nothing much happens. As was the case this week when American President Donald Trump met in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Summits – especially between leaders of superpowers – have a mixed record. Occasionally they result in breakthroughs, as did the several meetings between American President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Both then and now was wide agreement that the two leaders got on surprisingly well and that, together, they transformed the decades-long Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union into something considerably more cordial.*

More often though summits are exercises in pomp and circumstance on the one hand and futility on the other. They do not generally lead to breakthroughs either in politics or policies. When they do, they are in consequence of extensive and extended advance planning – the sort of preparation for which Trump is not, to understate it, well known.  

The summit just concluded was, then, neither a notable success nor a fearsome failure. Nor was it a surprise. But this is not to say that the meeting between Trump and Xi was meaningless, it was not. Here then three items to make meaning of.

First, the summit confirmed that the critical relationship between China and the United States is back on track. Closer at least on the surface to cordiality than animosity.

Second, Trump secured no significant gains. Certainly not on the all-important issue of the war with Iran. Or on the equally important issue of critical (or rare-earth) minerals – a singular asset on which China continues to have a chokehold. (Critical minerals are essential to making everything from munitions to renewable batteries. How China came to came to control the global supply is another story.)

Third, Xi reaffirmed his (implicit) claim to being the single most important leader – the single most powerful player – in the world. Which, as it happens, he is. History will testify that it is he not Trump who has by far the more impressive track record and that it is he not Trump who presides over a country that during his time in office has been relentlessly on the ascent. Moreover, in Beijing it was Xi not Trump who had the temerity to launch a shot across the bow. Out of the gate it was China that issued a stark warning to the American delegation not to interfere with, not to defend, Taiwan.

Xi has been in power in China since 2012. Moreover, unlike Trump, Xi has no opposition. In China Xi is in control of everyone and everything. Also, unlike Trump who will be out of power in two and a half years, in 2017 Xi arranged things so that he is leader for life.

His supreme self-confidence is, moreover, justified. He has much to be confident about. Within China Xi reigns supreme over an enormous country that has by most measures thrived beyond anyone’s imaginings. And without China he is a force that every other national leader in the world has no choice but to reckon with.

Xi casts himself as a Confucian and a custodian of Chinese civilization. Which, I might add, goes back not a mere, measly, hundreds of years but thousands. Xi with boundless assurance governs a country with over a billion people who from kindergarten through graduate school are taught “Xi Jinping’s Thought.” This thought is, make no mistake, communist. Unlike say, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin who is a not-so-secret capitalist, Xi is a deeply committed socialist. He is also, in keeping with previously prominent communists, including his revolutionary predecessor, Mao Zedong, an authoritarian leader to the point of being a totalitarian leader.   

So, if the summit favored China President Xi Jinping over American President Donald Trump no wonder. The former is a strongman who looks in the mirror and sees Superman. The latter in contrast is a strongman who looks in the mirror and thinks he sees Superman.

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*The fact that Gorbachev’s tenure finally succumbed to the collapse of the Soviet Union is another, arguably related, matter.

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 are the four 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?

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This post is to the point. Here are four books – all published in the last few months – that are all about followers, not leaders.

*The first is about resistance – about how followers who refuse to do what they are ordered to do and, or supposed to do and, or expected to do, can defy both the system and those who are leading it. The book is by Gal Beckerman and is titled How to Be a Dissident.   

*The second is about the absence thereof – the absence of resistance. It’s about how (most) Germans who lived in Berlin from the beginning of World War II to the end followed. They conformed to and accommodated the Nazi regime. The book is by Ian Buruma and is titled, Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-1945.

*The third is a memoir by one of those rare birds who defied or tried to the second administration of Donald Trump – specifically, the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development. The book is by Nicholas Enrich and is titled, Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.   

*The fourth is about how corporate scandals can end in backlash. About how when wrongdoing is uncovered – specifically about companies that are behemoths – they can and sometimes do provoke people to protest. The book is by Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee and is titled, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy.

I lament that for every billion books about leadership there’s just one about followership. Books about followers though abound. We just need to look in the right places!