Author: Barbara

To read about the “unstoppable climb in CEO pay” is to be disheartened. Notwithstanding censorious public opinion, and increasing income inequity, and even some times their professional performances, CEOs’ median pay package in 2012 was 16 percent higher than in 2011. Corporate boards moreover are tone deaf – or maybe simply indifferent to what shareholders say on executive pay.

But the status of business leaders in 21st century America is more tenuous than these astronomical earnings – the median is over $15 million a year – would seem to suggest. CEOs are not as vulnerable to slings and arrows as their political counterparts. But neither they are invulnerable, impervious to the temper of the times.

Let me name just four ways in which corporate leaders are more precariously perched than they were, say, a decade ago.

First among them is a level of anger against corporate America that while not generally in evidence in the streets, nevertheless is palpable. A 2013 survey of trust in the professions found that business people and bankers ranked last, along with politicians.

Second is the way leaders in business are being constrained. CEOs are being watched as never before. They are being monitored as never before. And they are being tethered as never before. As an example of the last, in 2012, more than 20 percent of companies in the S&P 500 Index reported appointing an independent outsider as their chairman, up from 12 percent in 2007. And as another example, the Shareholder Rights Project, located in the Harvard Business School, is working with some measure of success to persuade companies to eliminate classified boards – boards whose directors do not have to stand for election each year.

Third is the stakeholder situation, much more complex than it used to be. Corporate leaders currently have to cope with stakeholders more numerous as well as more demanding. Among them are boards, customers, employees, governments, regulators, industry watchdogs, special interest groups, consumer groups, and the public at large.

And fourth is the larger global context about which I regularly write – in which leaders generally are getting weaker and followers stronger. Suffice it to say here that the tenure of CEO’s has been halved, from about ten years in the last decade of the 20th century to about five and a half in the first decade of the 21st.

So whatever the level of their material success, America’s corporate elite is not exempt from the larger forces that impinge on their power, authority, and influence. They would do well to bear in mind this bigger picture, as they sit in the counting house counting out their money.

…it’s a coup! What happened in Egypt is, by conventional standards, just that – a forcible seizure of power by the military of a democratically elected president.

But… the Obama administration is loathe to call it a coup because if it did, Egypt would be ineligible for the fat check the president wants in fact to bestow. So for the moment he is content to defer to Egyptian officials who are calling what just happened a popular uprising.

But wait just a minute! Hold on! Isn’t that exactly what took place in the streets of Cairo and elsewhere across Egypt? Isn’t that what it was – a popular uprising, not a coup in any usual use of this word? President Morsi did not wake up one fine day and ask to be ejected from office. The Egyptian military did not wake up one fine day and ask to run the government. No. What transpired instead is that ordinary Egyptians, huge numbers of ordinary Egyptians, made their preference plain. When they refused to shut up and go home, certain of Egypt’s leaders finally felt they had no choice but to follow Egypt’s followers.

My strong interest in followership – as opposed to only in leadership – began about ten years ago. I was writing my book Bad Leadership, when it became evident that there were no bad leaders without bad followers. The former simply did not, could not, function without the support of the latter. Since then, I have nearly never talked about leadership without, simultaneously, referencing followership.

Only in the last few years though did something else become apparent: leaders are getting weaker and followers stronger. Not a day goes by without evidence that testifies to events driven as much from the bottom up as from the top down. It’s not that leaders have become unimportant or irrelevant. But in the 21^st century most followers make it hard for most leaders to get so much done. And in the 21^st century followers feel empowered and emboldened to a degree that historically is unprecedented. While this phenomenon appears at first glance to be primarily political, it is not. It is evidenced in every sector; and it is evidenced worldwide, in the United States certainly, but equally in places like China, and Brazil, and Bangladesh, in effect, everywhere.

This change in the way the world works is so blatantly obvious, at least to me, it’s a mystery, at least to me, that anyone anywhere can any longer teach leadership without teaching followership. But, there it is. For whatever constellation of reasons the study of leadership remains a bull market, while the study of followership still languishes. Maybe some day this will change. Maybe some day people will realize that the way the world works in the present, as opposed to the way the world worked in the past, mandates we pay attention to those in the middle and at the bottom, as well as to those at the top.

Meantime here is evidence – none more than a week old – of the importance of being a follower.          

• The press was focused on the nine members of the Supreme Court and what they would have to say about gay marriage. But the real story of course – the real story behind this week’s victory for equal rights – was not about the nine but about the many thousands of ordinary Americans who fought the good fight. And it was about the many millions of ordinary Americans who came in the last decade to believe that there was no reason that everyone should be entitled to the benefits of marriage – save those who were gay. As George Chauncey pointed out in the New York Times (“The Long Road to Marriage Equality”) the marriage movement emerged out of the maelstrom that was the AIDS epidemic (in the 1980s). But it was about more, much more, than legal benefits. Gays and others fought for the right for gays to marry because denial of marriage rights has always been a “powerful symbol of people’s exclusion from full citizenship.”  The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) finally became intolerable, legally, morally, because so many Americans came to believe, along with Justice Anthony Kennedy, that “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.” I might add that the woman who sued to have DOMA overturned, the woman who led the charge, Edith Windsor, is a woman now over 80 years old, who no one had previously heard of, a woman who until now was without any apparent power, authority, or influence.
• Until a few weeks ago Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, seemed untouchable, impervious to political problems. In fact, both domestically and internationally Erdogan was one of the few political leaders who was riding high, credited with transforming Turkey into a regional power, and into a model that other countries would do well to emulate. Where else had the mix of Islam and democracy seemed to work so well? But then, seemingly out of the blue, began widespread public protests that convulsed the country. Out of the blue, in other words, there came followers who previously had stayed silent, as in recent years Erdogan became increasingly autocratic, determined to have things his way and to brook no dissent. Like most such protests it began small, a dispute over a park, and then it spread, finally requiring or seeming to hordes of riot police to restore order. As it stands now, Erdogan is back in control – but the price has been high. Some 7,000 protesters and more than a dozen journalists were injured. Five people died, and several remain in critical condition. A witch hunt has begun for so-called provocateurs. Hundreds of demonstrators have been detained, and even jailed for such “crimes” as tending to the wounded. And there have been international consequences as well. Germany, for example, Turkey’s largest trading partner, is now trying to block new talks about its entering the European Union. One could argue that the protests are signs that Turkey is maturing as a democracy. But one could as easily argue that whatever the signs, so long as Erdogan remains in power, so long will democracy be suppressed. As we have seen in Putin’s Russia, fledgling democracy movements are fragile. Even the bravest, most determined followers are vulnerable to leaders who would as soon destroy them.
•  Brazil is a different story. And Brazil is the same story. Brazil is the same in that an apparently small and simple protest, in this case over an increase in bus fares, led out of the blue to complete chaos, to an ostensibly thriving, developing country in the grip of a level of unrest that only a week earlier was all but inconceivable. Hundreds of protesters became thousands, and then tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. Finally a million ordinary Brazilians vented their various frustrations, furious at their leaders for a range of offenses, most of them centering on income inequities, corruption, and spending that was perceived to be excessive on everything (including next year’s World Cup) but basic services. The point is that “all of a sudden, a country that was once viewed as a stellar example of a rising, democratic power found itself upended by an amorphous, leaderless popular uprising with one unifying theme: an angry, and sometimes violent rejection of politics as usual” (New York Times, June 21.)  What was different about Brazil – different from Turkey – is that Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff quickly did what she could to mollify the masses. To be sure, in week one the authorities tried cracking down. But when that didn’t work, the government changed course. Instead of in any obvious way punishing their followers, Brazil’s leaders tried rewarding them. Rouseff promised improvements in transportation and health services, she insisted that she would spend all of Brazil’s expected revenue from massive new finds of offshore oil on education, and finally she promised to reconfigure the country’s entire political system by convening a constituent assembly that could overhaul both the Congress and campaign-finance methods. How this will all come out in the end is impossible now to say. In any case the difference between what happened in Turkey and what happened in Brazil is palpable, save in one all-important way. Both countries were upturned not by leaders, but by followers.
• After a building collapse in Bangladesh in April killed well over a thousand garment workers, it became rapidly clear that something big would have to be change. In particular, the authorities in Bangladesh were increasingly concerned over the backlash both at home and abroad. At home there were the predictable but nevertheless impassioned protests, masses of ordinary people incensed by the manifest failure of government to regulate factories, workplaces of countless workers. And abroad there was growing disquiet, fear that, for example, Americans would finally be put off by garments that while dirt cheap, were being made by men, women, and children far from home, exploited for their dirt cheap labor. In fact, not only were leaders in Bangladesh worried, so were leaders in the U. S., corporate leaders concerned their goods would no longer sell so well, and, in a worst case scenario, actively be boycotted by consumers who would rather pay a dollar more for a tee shirt than tote a guilty conscience. Therefore, again as a result of pressure from below, it was revealed this week that Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Gap, Inc, and other large U.S. retailers were nearing an agreement to establish a $50 million, five-year fund to improve safety conditions in Bangladesh garment factories. (The agreement was contingent on the government in Bangladesh meeting criteria for accountability.) This on the heels of other retailers – in particular dozens of large European companies – who had earlier already adopted a legally binding pact to improve worker safety in Bangladesh. Activists have tried for years to improve factory conditions in Bangladesh, which has grown to one of the world’s largest apparel producers, precisely because of its low costs. But it took another catastrophe – the one in April was by no means the first – to heighten public awareness, especially outside Bangladesh, to the point where followers were seen by leaders as a likely threat.          
• About Wendy Davis you could say that before this week she was already a leader. She was, after all, a Texas state senator. However as such she had precious little of what leaders value – precious little power, authority, or influence. A couple of days ago that changed – likely forever. It was her own doing, her own willingness to speak to power, to stand up to power in the State Capitol in Austin by daring in dramatic fashion to filibuster. Ultimately, though her filibustering was under grueling, one might even say draconian conditions, it lasted more than eleven hours. And it transformed her into a political phenomenon, first on line then in real time she became an overnight star who likely will shine for some time to come. I don’t want to get trapped by word play on this one – a week ago was Senator Davis a leader or a follower? My point is that a week ago scarcely anyone had heard of her outside the state of Texas. My point is that for various cultural and technological reasons she was able to capitalize on what she accomplished in a way that would have been impossible even a decade ago, rocketing from obscurity to fame in the proverbial heartbeat.
• Is there anything left to say at this time that hasn’t already been said about Edward Snowden? Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old so-called hacker who turned America’s political establishment, especially its security establishment, on its head by leaking? Not really, except to point out that his particular trajectory is a sign of the times. It is a sign of how now a single individual can engage in role reversal – can oblige those we call leaders into following his lead.       

Who knew? Who knew that a small and simple protest would lead to a public outburst? Who knew that resistance to destroying a park would lead to resistance to the nation’s highest political authority? Who knew that the lavishly praised Turkish Prime Minister, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, was so vulnerable to the passions of his own people?

Who knew? Who knew that a small and simple protest would lead to a public outburst? Who knew that resistance to an increase in bus fares would lead to resistance to the nation’s ruling class? Who knew that Latin America’s success story, the nation of Brazil, was ready to erupt at what appears to outsiders a slight provocation?

Wake up boys and girls! Get real! Go where the action is, in the middle and at the bottom, not so much at the top.

This from an article in the Wall Street Journal – hardly a left-wing rag – on June 12:

” Russia’s Parliament passed a bill Tuesday that bans the promotion of homosexual ‘propaganda’ and mandates stiff fines and jail terms for violators in what critics fear will lead to anti-gay repression.”:

The real point is a broader one: Putin has clearly concluded that, for the moment anyway, repression works. This is not a story that is, especially, about gay rights. It is about rights in Russia more generally. There is not a week without one or another story in one or another former Soviet Socialist Republic that reminds of a few simple, timeless and transcendent verities.

First, Russia has no extended experience with anything resembling liberal democracy.

Second, once an autocrat, always an autocrat. (Turks, take note.)

Third, rights movements of all kinds threaten those who crave control.

Fourth, followers who favor freedom – and who are willing to risk to secure it – tend in autocracies to be in the minority.

Fifth, autocrats are learning that even in this day and age – when brutality is easily tweeted – nothing is as effective in stifling dissent as force.

Sixth, the lesson learned by dissenters is that unless you’re a Diehard – a follower willing to risk life and limb – the thing to do is to shut up and go home.

Seventh, change may take a while and progress proceeds in fits and starts. But the Putin’s of the world will not finally stop gay rights – or for that matter any other human rights. The tide of history is too strong indefinitely to resist.

I said I wasn’t blogging any more – at least not for now. It’s because I’m writing a book and I can’t walk and walk at the same time.

But I cannot let this one go by. If you care at all about lame leaders, or fed up followers, you must, you simply must, follow the current court proceedings of Putin’s nemesis, Aleksei Navalny.

I have watched Navalny for years – and written about him with some frequency. But this time is different. This time Putin is playing hard ball with the man who is the brave-to-the-point-of-being-foolhardy leader of the Russian opposition.

But, Russia’s autocrat has just one small problem. If he goes too far, if Putin sees to it that Navalny is jailed for any considerable length of time, he, Putin, is the one at greater risk. Though his Russian opponents have for now been intimidated, don’t count on them lying low indefinitely. Putin, in any case, is unlikely to underestimate them. it’s why chances are he will go easy on Navalny – at least for now.

I’m good at multi-tasking. I can walk and chew gum at the same time.

But when it comes to writing it’s different – at any given moment I prefer working on only one project. So, I’m giving it up – I’m giving up, for now, being a regular blogger. For against all odds, and though I swore I wouldn’t, I’ve begun another book – another book on leadership and followership.

Anyone who has read my blog even intermittently will know that there are certain themes to which I return. They include but are not limited to lousy leaders; fed-up followers; the decline of leaders and the rise of followers; the impact of technology on patterns of leadership and followership; Putin as a tyrant, perhaps a petty one, but a tyrant nonetheless; the long hand of the law in snaring the unsuspecting; women either idolized (Hillary) or vilified (Pakistan and many more); single individuals as agents of change (Malala); public opinion as a force always to be reckoned with; the impact of art and popular culture on what people think and on how they behave; and how leadership and followership are not static, but fluid.

This second decade of the 21st century is the overarching context within which leadership and followership are now being exercised. This means that while differences still pertain, as they always do – among, say, countries and cultures, groups and organizations – the environment for how change is created is, as of this writing, this year, 2013. The implication is obvious – that at least some of what I said in this blog will prove evanescent. As a long time observer of power, authority, and influence, I know one thing, that there is one constant, change. Perfect for blogs – which become in an instant part of the ether!

The recent rape and resultant death of a young Indian woman received worldwide attention. There was outrage over the brutality of the case – and shock such a horrific act could take place on a public bus in one of India’s largest cities, New Delhi.

What’s come to our attention since then is, arguably, worse: a culture that effectively condones vicious violence against women – this in an ostensible democracy that has one of the world’s largest, most recently successful economies.

India is not alone in tolerating this plague. Levels of domestic violence are higher in other countries, including, for example, Columbia, Egypt, and Zambia. Moreover in a New York Times article titled, “Is Delhi So Different from Steubenville?”, Nicholas Kristof points out that Americans are hardly immune. (The reference is to an alleged rape case in Steubenville, Ohio, in which high school football players are accused of repeatedly raping an unconscious 16-year-old girl.) In fact, so far Congress has failed to renew the Violence against Women Act, a law first passed in 1994 which since has expired.

Still the numbers in India are staggering. Some two million women die annually, unnecessarily, for reasons ranging from female infanticide and infant neglect, to a high rate of death in childbirth, to domestic violence, to poor care of the elderly which affects women at a far higher rate than men. 25,000 to 100,000 women are killed each year – many by being burned alive – only over dowry disputes.

I’ve written about this issue before – in a blog titled “Enough is Enough.” But I’m moved to do so again because what I’ve learned since late December is altogether disgusting, depressing, degrading. What will it take to make violence against women as socially unacceptable, as politically egregious and outrageous as, say, slavery? The answer is not completely clear -but one thing we know for certain. The leadership class has failed to do what must be done. What this means is that for change to take place – real, meaningful, enduring change – followers will have to rise from their torpor and lead the charge. Step one is to wake up and see extreme violence against women for what it is – torture.

Until he hung himself I had no idea who was 26-year-old Aaron Swartz. Now I do. He was a technophile, a brilliant programming prodigy, who additionally was a provocative and controversial thinker on the dissemination of information.

Turns out he was far out. Swartz was a radical on the subject of free information, believing the Internet could and should provide easy, open access to whatever constitutes our collective body of knowledge. In this one way he was similar to Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, and to members of other loose-knit groups such as Anonymous, which are similarly disposed to disclose.

Swartz was also rather like Bradley Manning, the 21-year-old soldier who in 2010 was charged by the government with collaborating with Assange to upload thousands of secret U. S. documents. For his troubles, Manning was sealed in solitary confinement for nine months. Moreover in spite of his facing a possible life sentence, he sits in prison still – over a thousand days after his initial arrest. If only on this one count – if only because was denied the right to a fair and speedy trial – Manning has been abused by the government that once he served.

At the time of his suicide, Swartz was in a situation not entirely dissimilar. In 2011 he was arrested and accused of using MIT’s computers to gain illegal access to millions of scholarly papers – which he then illegally downloaded. Like Manning he believed that what he was doing was right. Like Manning he ran afoul of the law. And, like Manning, the government went after him full force. At the time of his death, Swartz was facing the possibility of millions of dollars in fines and legal fees, and up to 35 years in jail.

My comment is not about whatever the crime Manning did or did not commit, or about whatever the crime Swartz did or did not commit. My comment is about whether or not in both cases the proposed punishment could possibly be said to fit the crime. On the face of it, Manning and Swartz, however different, did share their youth, their idealism, and their deep commitment to the widespread dissemination of all information. For the government to wreck these young lives, to treat these two men as if they were the most abject of criminals, is a misuse, an abuse, of government power. At an absolute minimum the death of Aaron Swartz should occasion a revision of computer crime laws, and the elimination of overzealous prosecutors who are hell bent on squashing any David who dares take on Goliath.

The conventional wisdom is that Wall Street has got off Scot free – that those responsible for the financial crisis never had to atone for their wrongdoing. The conventional wisdom is, in other words, greed pays.

The conventional wisdom is right – but only to a point. It’s true that most individuals who played a part in the debacle – whether on Wall Street, or in Washington, or along any of the other corridors of power – never had to pay a personal price for the errors of their ways. But it’s also true that some in the financial services industry have been, will be penalized for their voracious appetites.

I have no pity for the industry. Still, let’s get real. During any given week – during the last one, for example – it’s plain to see financial services is paying the piper, at least to a degree. Here three recent examples:

First, Morgan Stanley announced it would eliminate some 1,600 jobs. CEO James Gorman had cautioned some months ago that the entire industry was suffering from “way too much capacity,” and that compensation that was “way too high.” The cull conveyed this week was on top of one last year, which already cost some 4,000 Morgan Stanley their jobs. Moreover Morgan Stanley is hardly alone. Last year Citigroup said it would eliminate 11,000 jobs, and UBS said it would cut 10,000.

Not incidentally, among those hardest hit are leaders and managers high in earnings and high on the corporate ladder. Wall Street veterans are particularly vulnerable, with banks and securities firms looking to cut costs by bringing in younger, less-experienced, and cheaper employees.

Second, the legendarily successful hedge-fund group SAC, led by legendarily successful trader and founder Steven A. Cohen, let it be known, if not yet publicly, that it was bracing itself for monstrously large client withdrawals, possibly totaling some 17% of assets from outside investors. Why has this threat come to pass? Not because of a sudden rash of poor performance. Rather it is that SAC recently has been an obvious target of government investigators, ready to pounce on charges of insider trading. In fact, some lower level types at SAC have already been charged, in hopes of, among other things, ultimately snagging, nailing, Cohen himself.

Finally there’s this nasty message – or, if you prefer, cautionary note – from the CEO of UBS (formerly Union Bank of Switzerland), Andrea Orcel. Orcel warned that bankers were too “arrogant.” They were “too self-convinced that things were correct they way they were – I think the industry has to change.” He added that UBS was itself now “trying to recover the honor and standing that the organization had in the past.”

So why now Orcel’s incantation? Maybe, just maybe, it’s because UBS has had a dreadful time of it in recent years: putrid publicity, serious scandals, and large losses.

I’m not claiming that there has been punishment enough. All I’m saying is that to insist that Wall Street has got off Scot-free is to insist wrong.