Author: Barbara

Now’s a good time to be a boss. A very good time.

Not long ago, things were different. During the pandemic and for a while thereafter times were tough for corporate leaders. Employers would say “jump” and their employees would answer, “not so fast.”

• “You think I should be back in the office again, five days a week, from 9 to 5? Think again!”
• “You think I should sit seven hours a day in a sea of desks and a building without benefits? Think again!”
• “You think I’m unfree to say what I want when I want? Think again!”
• “You think I should accept your job offer with its puny pay and punier benefits? Think again!”

Now though the worm has turned. It’s the leader, the employer, who’s back in the catbird seat, and the follower, the employee, who’s behind.  

Why the role reversal?  

• Reason # 1: Historically, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels pointed out in 1848, generally capitalists (owners) are far stronger than proletariats (workers), who are far weaker.
• Reason # 2: The labor market, while still quite good, is less robust than it was a few years ago. This year alone U.S. based companies announced more than 800,000 job cuts. Amazon is a case in point: it has eliminated more than 27,000 jobs since 2022 – and CEO Andy Jassy made clear that more cuts are coming.
• Reason # 3: AI is changing not just the conversation but the facts on the ground. Entry level jobs have been especially hard hit, AI in part the explanation. Moreover employers are leery of over-hiring, especially for jobs likely in short order to be done better, faster, and cheaper by artificial intelligence.
• Reason # 4: The Trump administration is providing the leadership class with a favorable climate and safe harbor. Moreover, Trump’s own financial, professional, political, and personal sympathies lie not with workers but with those who hire and fire them.
• Reason # 5: The Trump administration is changing, or trying to, regulations that are more favorable to shareholders than to managers. For example, the president proposed that the Securities and Exchange Commission drop its requirement that every three months publicly held US companies disclose their financials.
• Reason # 6: The Trump administration favors tax policies kind to haves and distinctly less kind to have-nots. It’s not as if haves need it! According to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs now earn nearly 300 times as much as workers. CEO salaries have risen fully 1,094% since 1978. And in 2024 CEOs took home an average pay package of nearly $23 million.    
• Reason # 7: The Trump administration has made no bones about it: CEOs abjectly loyal to the president will benefit from his largesse.
• Reason # 8: Workers – employees, followers – are laboring in tough times. Moreover, they have few arrows in their quiver. Only recently, when Joe Biden was president, unions showed signs of life. In 2023, for example under the leadership of Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers negotiated successful agreements with the big three American automakers. Under Trump, however, Fain and his ilk have been nowhere to be seen.

Most people would say they would rather lead than follow. Especially now. For bosses are not only back they are back in a very big way.

As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

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

Today we are turning to John Stuart Mill – of whom critic Adam Gopnik wrote, “Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth -century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil.”

It’s a lovely, witty, comment, testimony to Mill’s being the quintessential, near perfect, liberal. A champion of equality between and among everyone, everywhere in the world. Which of course has implications for leadership – and followership.

The timeless essay from which I draw below – “On Liberty” – is as vivid testimony to the right to autonomy as anything written in English. It was penned in 1859 by which time, of course, the American and French revolutions had already taken place and the old order ostensibly overthrown. But as the persistence of slavery in the West all too vividly testified, the new order had still to find its footing not just in the United States but in Europe.

In “On Liberty,” Mill speaks to this issue. Specifically, to the work that still had to be done to realize every man’s full potential. And… every woman’s. For Mill was a famous feminist – married, not incidentally, to a famous feminist, Harriet Taylor – almost before there was such a thing.

The essay, or treatise, is not directly about either leaders or followers. Indirectly, however, it is about both. For above all it is an ode to human freedom. Mill’s insistence that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign,” is as compelling a claim as there is of your right to captain your ship, and my right to captain mine. Mill was not a libertarian. He would not have argued against the role of government, with a few necessarily doing the governing while the many must consent to being governed. Still, he would have insisted that in so far as possible, and in so far as it does not intrude on anyone else, all leaders should give all followers a free hand to live as they see fit.   

From “On Liberty” ….

• The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people But if he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgement in things which concern himself, the same reasons which allow that opinion should be free, prove also that he should be allowed without molestation, to carry out his opinions into practice at his own cost.

• Neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.

• Considerations to aid his judgment, exhortations to strengthen his will, may be offered to him, even obtruded on him, by others. But he himself is the final judge. All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.

In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, George Packer has an article titled, “America’s Zombie Democracy.” (Link below.) As always with Packer, it is excellent. As often with Packer, it is a definite downer. It’s not necessary for me here to expand on exactly how – the title tells the tale.  

The point of this post is different in one all-important respect. It is that whatever is plaguing democracy in the United States is plaguing democracies everywhere. No nation is exempt from the ills that are ours.

For example, no democracy is exempt from leaders who seem feckless and hapless, especially in comparison with other sorts of leaders. Leaders who are authoritarians and who sometimes seem far more able to get things done. To be efficient as opposed to inefficient, and to ensure security and stability. China’s President Xi Jinping is the quintessential example.

But lest we think that leaders are to blame for zombie democracies we should think again. No democracy anywhere in the world is exempt from followers who are angry and frustrated, impatient, coarse, and rude. From followers who are extremely quick to attack their leaders, to tear them down, but excruciatingly slow to praise them, to lift them up.

America is not. then, the only zombie democracy. Zombiism is nibbling at or even swallowing democracies the world over.

• In Great Britain where Prime Minister Keir Starmer – though he has been in office only a year – already has approval ratings lower than those of any other western leader.
• In France where beleaguered President Emmanuel Macron is contending with yet another collapsed government – yet another indicator the country is now suffering from “chronic political instability.”
• In Germany where Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, the Christian Democrats, has fallen behind Germany’s far right party, the Alternative for Germany.
• In Brazil where, having been found guilty of plotting a coup, former president Jair Bolsonaro has been sentenced to 27 years in prison.
• In Japan where the recent resignation of the prime mister – again, after only a year in office – has set the stage for “a period of renewed uncertainty.”
• In South Korea where, following the impeachment last year of its prime minister, the government continues to experience “significant political instability.”
• In India, the so-called “world’s largest democracy,” where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has, according to Freedom House, significantly increased harassment of its critics and discriminatory policies, especially against Muslims.
• In Turkey where … well, I could go on….

What Packer identifies and describes is not, then, just an American problem. Zombiism is far more widespread which means it is far more insidious. Moreover, because it afflicts democracies everywhere, it raises the question of whether, given the times in which we live, democracies are sentenced indefinitely to struggle. It could be that 21^st century cultures and technologies have got to a point where strongmen are the future not just in some countries but in most.

I am not saying that we are destined indefinitely to live in democracies metamorphosed into zombies. I am saying that zombiism is not peculiarly American. And that it might run wider and deeper than we now know.

New York Times columnist David French is an Evangelical Conservative. He is decidedly not a Democrat, a leftist, or even a centrist. But in his recent column about the deal slated to hand Tik Tok to a small group of American investors, he describes President Donald Trump as the worst sort of crony capitalist. This when “crony capitalism has reached a new low.” French concludes , “There is no law holding [Trump] back. Instead, we are left to the whims and desires of a man who cares about only himself, a man who is willing to discard any law or standard to satisfy his insatiable lust for power.”

French’s use of the word “lust” overlaps precisely with how Todd Pittinsky and I define it in our book, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy.* Our definition of lust is simple, even prosaic. Lust is 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, temporarily. Then the craving, and the quest, begin anew.

If you assume, then, as French does, that Trump has a “lust for power” then you assume several things at the same time.

• That Trump has a ceaseless craving to control.
• That this craving is, as French notes, “insatiable.”
• That this craving is all-consuming.
• That this craving will last as long as Trump does.
• That this craving will not be stopped or slowed by anything or anyone in any conventional way. Such as, for example, the rule of law or reliance on a traditional norm. If then, Trump is to be stopped or even slowed it will have to be in a way that historically is unprecedented.  

Americans who dislike and distrust Trump need to understand that leaders who lust appeal to followers. Trump was not rammed down America’s throat. He was freely elected and, if a presidential election were held today, it’s possible he would be voted in again. As we observe in our book, “leaders who lust can and often do appeal to followers pulled in by the leader’s obvious, sometimes even ostentatious passion, by their fierce ambition, and by their relentless determination.”

It’s precisely because leaders who lust, especially for power, appeal to followers who seek a savior, those of us not so inclined need to understand how high and steep our climb.  

———————————————-

*Cambridge University Press, 2020.

As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

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

Today we are turning not to one contributor to the great leadership literature but to three: Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, and Leo Tolstoy.  The reason is they come down on different sides of the great debate: Do leaders make a difference? Or are even the greatest of leaders merely pawns on the chessboard of the cosmos?

Carlyle, a mid-nineteenth century Scottish philosopher and historian was and still is the most famous proponent of the importance of great men (yes, men). Specifically of the dominant role of the hero in the so-called “the hero in history” debate. Carlyle believed that the role of great men is not just important but all-important. It was so important that it far transcended the importance of anything or anyone else. Carlyle was, however, ecumenical and expansive in his conception of who the hero was and what the hero did. Alongside the king stood the poet; alongside the revolutionary stood the man of letters. To the degree that each was great each was a great leader. And to the degree that each was a great leader each made the world spin on its axis.

Herbert Spencer in contrast, another figure from the mid-nineteenth century, was a scientist and social scientist before he was a philosopher. So, he felt perfectly qualified to take on someone like Carlyle and to do so with all the intellectual clout he could summon. As we will see below, Spencer made mincemeat of Carlyle, or at least he tried to, the former finding the latter’s insistence on the importance of any single individual not just erroneous but ridiculous.

In this view he stood alongside none other than peerless Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, who similarly thought that the effort to attribute what happens to decisions made by great men was a fool’s errand. So, this post will end with some lines from Tolstoy.

From Carlyle’s, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History:

• For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in this world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment of thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

From Spencer’s, The Study of Sociology:

• But now, if dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the hypotheses [Carlyle’s hypothesis] to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step and ask whence comes the great man, we find that the theory breaks down completely.  

From Tolstoy’s War and Peace:

• The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander… should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place…. We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events…. A king is history’s slave.

In response to yesterday’s post on Jamie Dimon, one reader asked why Dimon would have done what he did. Risk his own reputation and that of the bank by keeping for as long as they did a customer as potentially damaging and even dangerous as Jeffrey Epstein.

While the answer would appear at first glance to be obvious, it is not money. At least not directly. Jamie Dimon has never been especially greedy. His appetite has never been primarily for money -and then more money. Instead, his appetite has been for success – and then more success.   

Todd Pittinsky and I describe the syndrome in our book, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy.*

• Our definition of lust is simple, even prosaic. We define lust as 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, temporarily.” And so, the wanting and needing continue, indefinitely.

• Leaders who have a lust for success have an unstoppable need to achieve. Which perfectly describes Jamie Dimon. This is a man who ten years ago survived a bout with throat cancer. And who five years ago survived sudden surgery for a near fatal heart event, a tear in his aorta. Did either life-threatening condition stop him? Not at all. Both times he got back on his horse and to his desk as soon as he could. Again, his passion is not for money. He is not, for example, like Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, who thrives on accumulating all sorts of trinkets including numerous, enormous swaths of real estate. In contrast, all Dimon seems to care about is his achievement. He has reached the pinnacle of success and is hellbent on staying there. Unless of course he can scale still higher.

*Cambridge University Press, 2020.

As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of the literature on leadership. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

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

Today we turn to John Locke.

Locke took Hobbes a step further. Much further. It is not too much to say that Locke went a long way toward balancing the scale between leaders and followers. According to Locke, followers had much more than just the right to life, and to concur on who should be their otherwise all-powerful leader. Locke maintained that followers’ rights – your rights and my rights – included liberty and the all-important right to property. To own it. It could reasonably be argued then that Locke – a figure of the early Enlightenment – built not just the foundation of democracy but of capitalism.       

There are good reasons then why Locke was the ideological rock and intellectual bastion on which America’s founders chose to stand. Bernard Bailyn, author of the classic, The Ideological Foundations of the American Revolution, observed that the influence of the European Enlightenment on eighteenth century Americans is “profusely illustrated in the political literature.” Moreover, Locke especially was quoted everywhere in the colonies, by everyone who claimed to be politically aware, especially in the 1770s. Bailyn writes that “in pamphlet after pamphlet the American writers cited Locke on natural rights and on the social and governmental contract.”   

The importance of Locke ’s contribution to the idea that between the governors (leaders) and the governed (followers) should be a contract – a social contract – is impossible to overestimate. For among other things it assured that those without power and authority had the right to unseat those with. Ideas like these were critical to American political thinking. And to the documents on which the American system of government since has been based: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

This short course will give evidence of how over time the balance of power gradually shifted – from leaders to followers. The beginnings of these stirrings are evident in these excerpts.

From Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690):

• Every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.

• There remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they find the legislative act contrary to the trust reposed in them…. [Power] may be placed anew where [the people] shall think it best for their safety and security.

• [Power can have no purpose other than to] preserve the members of that society in their lives, liberties, and possessions, and so cannot be an absolute, arbitrary power over their lives and fortunes, which are as much as possible to be preserved …. And this power has its original only from compact and agreement, and the mutual consent of those who make up the community.  

Today’s piece is one of several I’ve posted on Jamie Dimon – CEO of JPMorgan Chase – indisputably one of the most effective and influential business leaders of our time. See, for example, these, including one in which I eat crow.

In the crow-post I admit that though as a rule leaders should linger no longer than about ten years, there are exceptions, of whom Dimon seemed one. For when measured by the usual yardstick, the stock price, JPM had been and continues to be a clear winner.  The company’s shares have jumped by about 250% in the last five years – outpacing every one of its rivals.

Now though we know that Dimon is a mere mortal. He made a mistake that other leaders make, especially when they are extremely ambitious and exceptionally successful. They fly too close to the sun – and then pratfall on their pride.

Dimon did two things wrong. First, he always assumed he was right. Second, when it turned out he was not – that on his watch was a grievous lapse in judgment – he tried to cover it up. But he failed. It has become abundantly clear that Dimon was indirectly involved in one of the biggest scandals of the 21^st century. The scandal that surrounds Jeffrey Epstein.

No need here to provide details. They’re easy to find, notably in this remarkable piece of investigative journalism.

The Times article has just been published. So it’s not clear if it will impact either Dimon’s short-term performance or his long-term reputation. Both seem unlikely. Still, what Dimon did is not a good look. He pretended not to see what he did not want to see. On his watch the bank continued , for many years, to milk to the max one of its most lucrative clients. This despite said client being fully engaged in activities that were unquestionably illegal and profoundly immoral.

Perhaps the piece in the Times is wrong. I did not witness what Epstein did nor what the bank did and did not do in response. But the apparently deeply reported story would have to be wrong in almost every detail to give Dimon a pass. To believe that during the bank’s 15-year relationship with Epstein Dimon had no idea whatsoever that Epstein was high on the list of JPM’s most questionable if not reprehensible clients.

Epstein’s checkered history within the bank and outside it was a closely guarded secret – but it was not that closely guarded. Red flags about Epstein were repeatedly raised inside the bank and several of Dimon’s top lieutenants knew or strongly suspected at least some of what was going on. So, to believe that Dimon was entirely ignorant of the bank’s long relationship with Epstein is to strain credulity.  

Dimon resorted – and still does – to what social psychologists call “plausible deniability.” It’s when people high on an organizational ladder deny knowledge or responsibility for decisions made by those lower down. The higher ups get away with their denials because there is no hard evidence to the contrary – even when their protestations of ignorance are ridiculous.

Jamie Dimon is now as he was before – an exceptionally good leader. But he is imperfect. He had a connection with Jeffrey Epstein that, no matter Dimon’s denials, will never be fully believed or forgotten.

As indicated in my post of August 21, I am delivering on this site a very short course on the classics of literature on leadership. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The course will draw on my edited volume, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). Here I can provide only short bursts of texts. My hope is that 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.

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

Today we turn to Thomas Hobbes, to his book, Leviathan. I have always had a special interest in Leviathan – I am almost tempted to write fondness for it- as the book is one of the first important works to emphasize not just the importance of leaders but of followers. Given that I consider followers as important as leaders it’s heartening that, even preceding the Enlightenment, one of the major political philosophers focused on the rights of ordinary people.

To be clear, their rights were modest enough. First was the right to life which, however, given the time in which Hobbes lived, the assertion of which was no small thing. Think of it this way. Not much more than a hundred years passed between the publication of Prince and Leviathan. But whereas Machiavelli was nearly entirely focused on the near boundless rights of the prince, Hobbes insisted on the all-important right to life not just of the prince, but of his subjects.

Further, though Hobbes declared that once there was a leader that leader had to be all powerful, there could be no leader without the consent of those who were to be led. During a time when monarchs still strode the world like the kings and, sometimes, queens they were, this was, itself, revolutionary.

Hobbes’s was, however, disposed to be dark. His view of human nature was bleak, his view of the human condition even bleaker. Because we were not to be trusted, because we, you and me, were fearful and rapacious, selfish and dangerous, we had no choice, really, but to be governed by a super strong leader of a super strong state. Otherwise, we were destined, doomed, to do each other in. To put it differently, though directly, Hobbes believed that for even our right to life be realized, we had to surrender nearly every other right to the state.

From Leviathan – “On the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning their Felicity and Misery”:

• The difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.

• Therefore, if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.

• Hereby it is manifest that men [must have] a common power, a [strong state, a leviathan] to keep them all in awe [lest there is a war] of every man against every man.

• [But] nor can any law be made till they [the people] have agreed upon the person that shall make it.

I define followers by rank. Which is to say that in my lexicon followers have less power, authority and influence than leaders. And sometimes they have no power, authority or influence at all.

The victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s by now all too well known predation were then, as I define them, followers. For many years that’s all they were. Bereft of any resources they were where the wind blew them. But in the last 24 hours this changed. Summoning their courage in tandem they put their foot down. They are insisting they will stay silent no longer. They are taking control of a narrative that for decades had controlled them.

If they succeed in shifting America’s political dynamic even some would that transform this band of followers into leaders? Yes. But this will not now or ever diminish their origin story. For a very long time they were followers who had nothing and no one.