Author: Barbara

All well and good for Dr. Deborah Birx to tell us now that Donald Trump’s White House had “gotten somewhat complacent” in 2020 – as the pandemic went from bad to worse. That had the Trump administration not been so “distracted,” more than 130,000 lives could have been saved.  

So testified Birx two weeks ago before a House subcommittee. But where was the good doctor when we most needed her? Needed her as the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator under Trump to speak the truth as she saw it? Surely, she understood then as she does now that he could easily have done a few simple things to lessen the impact of the pandemic. But while Birx served under Trump, she remained mute, certainly in public. She did not share with the American people what she really thought.

During her time in the White House Dr. Birx was an enabler. Enablers are subordinates who allow or even encourage their superiors to engage in, and then to persist in behaviors that are destructive. As I wrote in my recent book, The Enablers, they are accomplices. Superiors cannot go wrong or do wrong without the support, active or passive, of some of their subordinates.

Dr. Birx was not alone in her enablement. Donald Trump has had enablers lifelong, especially during his political career. It’s that the year 2020 was no exception. While the plague raged, Trump benefited from others being complicit, including medical professionals in addition to Birx; elected officials; cabinet members; White House aides; media luminaries; and family members.

But physicians going along to get along is especially disturbing and disheartening.  Not that this is new. History has taught us that medical professionals are not immune to the attractions of power. Still, because history repeats itself costs were incurred. Dr. Birx herself testified that tens of thousands of lives were lost to the coronavirus because Trump was “complacent.” What she did not say was that it would have been impossible for the president to do what he did – and to not do what he did not – without support from some in the medical establishment.

The president was aided and abetted by physicians in addition to Birx, including, for example, Dr. Robert Redfield, who between 2018 and 2021 was Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Redfield was meek and mild while Trump tinkered and tampered with his agency, precluding it from performing optimally during a national health crisis. Even the highly praised and widely admired Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, shares blame. Though as time went on, he spoke out more, invariably he did so carefully and cautiously, presumably at the time to protect his relationship with the president.    

To be fair, physicians such as Birx, Redfield, and Fauci were in a difficult position. On the one hand, they were professionally obliged to do no harm. But, on the other hand, they were saddled with a superior who was interested not in the public welfare but in his own.  

What should they have done, these presumably well-intentioned medical professionals in government service?  They should have spoken up and spoken out. Done so loudly and clearly then and there, ideally early on and in tandem, as one. Never should they have been compliant for so long. Never should Dr. Deborah Birx have sat in near silence as President Donald Trump suggested to her at a White House coronavirus task force press briefing in April 2020, “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous – whether its ultraviolet or just very powerful light – and I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it…. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves, that we are underlings. Nowhere was it written that President Donald Trump’s enablers were destined to do what they did. They could have done differently, decided not to enable, decided not to be, because they did not have to be, underlings. In which case the American experience of the pandemic – and everything that was subsequent – would have been different. For history is made not by institutions, but by individuals. This includes Birx and numberless others too timid or craven to speak truth to power.         

It’s not often that the president of a country is credibly accused of homicide. It’s even less often that a sitting president of a country is credibly accused of homicide. And it’s even less often than that that a sitting president of one of largest countries in the world is credibly accused of homicide.

Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world in both area and population. Its incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, is an exception to the above-mentioned rules. After an extended and painstaking investigation, a Brazilian congressional panel just released its report on how the government handled the Covid-19 crisis. It was damning. It charged that Bolsonaro “actively helped to spread the virus.” That his stewardship of the country throughout the pandemic was, is, “catastrophic.” And that had his leadership in the last year and a half been modestly better than it was, “400,000 Brazilians would still be alive.”* The panel recommended the president be charged with nine crimes, ranging from irregular use of public funds all the way to crimes against humanity.   

Which inevitably raises the question of “now what?” Alas, the likely answer is now nothing. Like so many other bad, even atrocious leaders the world over, Bolsonaro is likely largely, even entirely to escape the long arm of the law. In this case the president of Brazil is protected by friends in high places, including the prosecutor general.

However, Brazil is a functioning if flawed democracy. So even if Bolsonaro escapes a legal accounting, he is likely to pay a political price. Recent polls confirm his approval ratings have badly sagged. In one such poll taken a month ago, 59% of Brazilians said they would never again vote for him under any circumstance.

Still, it’s an outrage when leaders who are criminals are not held legally responsible. In this case, Bolsonaro continues even now to undermine commonsense measures against Covid-19 such as masking, social distancing, and mass testing. Moreover, he still promotes ineffective drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, and insists, at least publicly, that he will never get vaccinated.    

It’s not always a sadness that we remain so ill-equipped to take on bad leaders. Sometimes it’s a tragedy.    

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The quotes are from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/opinion/bolsonaro-brazil-report.html

Followers can be defined by their rank – followers are subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than do their superiors.

Followers can also be defined by their behavior – followers go along with what their leaders want and intend.

I use the first definition. In my lexicon followers are subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than do their superiors and who therefore usually, but not invariably, fall into line.

Here’s another definition – this one of a whistleblower. Whistleblowers are followers who try to stop their leaders from being bad by publicly exposing their noxious – as in illegal, or abusive, or unsafe – behaviors.  

Blowing the whistle is risky business. Often the stakes are high, and the deck is stacked against the far weaker follower in favor of the far stronger leader. Moreover, when whistleblowers fail, when their leaders survive their assault, the former usually pay a high price. They suffer not only professionally but personally, and, frequently, financially.

However, when a whistleblower does succeed in focusing widespread attention on a leader’s wrongdoing, thereby damaging, sometimes badly, his or her reputation, the outcome can be different. Very different.

Frances Haugen, the woman who testified before the U.S. Congress against Facebook, and against its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg – and who is doing the same today before members of the British Parliament – is such a whistleblower. Even now she has succeeded in doing what she wanted and intended. Which explains why, even now, still early in the process, she has transformed from powerless follower into a powerful leader.

What enabled her to succeed where others typically fail? A brief systemic analysis provides some answers to this question. Recall, the leadership system has three parts: 1) the leader; 2) the followers; and 3) the contexts.

Facebook’s founder and leader has been Mark Zuckerberg. But in some ways – certainly in terms of his public reputation – his time has come and gone. Once greatly admired as one of the boy geniuses of Silicon Valley, he is now widely viewed as not only rapacious but malicious. As a man who, by his own testimony, puts his company ahead of his country.

The follower in this case is Haugen herself. Professionally well credentialed, before going public she made certain also to be exceedingly well-armed. She accrued a large trove of previously secret Facebook documents that made her case even before she made her case. She did nevertheless testify before Congress, for long stretches, responding to questions with superlative precision and poise.

Finally, there is the context. The moment for Haugen’s attack on Facebook was right. In fact, it was ripe for such an assault. Worldwide the public’s patience with Facebook has been wearing thin, especially given recent revelations about the damage Facebook has inflicted on everything from the health and well-being of teenaged girls to the health and wellbeing of liberal democracies.

Whistleblowing is risky business. Nothing Haugen has accomplished changes this. What she has however done is to remind us that when the stars are aligned the weak can successfully take on the strong. For whatever the ultimate outcome of what she has done, it is she, Haugen, who for the moment is in the lead, and it is he, Zuckerberg, who for the moment is forced to follow.   

I am as guilty as the next pundit. An American so preoccupied with leadership in America – especially since the advent of Trump – that I am prone to ignore what’s happening in the rest of the world.

Big mistake, for several reasons. Among them is that what happens elsewhere, especially in the West, sometimes foreshadows a more general trend. So it’s worth noting the events of recent weeks in two small European countries. The first is the Czech Republic (population 10.7 million); the second is Austria (population 8.9 million). In both places was a political earthquake. In both places the nation’s top political leaders were dealt a body blow.

In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis lost a parliamentary election. Though as I write the long-term implications of his loss are unclear, no question the surprising development badly weakened him, and no question it could spell the end of his hold on political power.

Babis lost shortly after the release of the Pandora Papers – that treasure trove of documents detailing corruption in high places worldwide – which revealed he had used shell companies to purchase a $22 million French chateau. But he might have lost anyway, since this electoral cycle his political opponents set aside their differences to challenge the populist prime minister who happened, by the way, also to be a billionaire. As one insider put it, a Czech political analyst, “The two opposition groups were formed because they wanted to be sure that liberal democracy would not be under the same attack as in Hungary and Poland.”

In Austria the boy wonder of European politics, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, was toppled. He was forced to resign after a scandal indicating the heart of the Austrian government was riddled with corruption – and that he personally was guilty of using taxpayer money to fund his rise to power.

Just a few years before Kurz was king of the hill. When he was first elected chancellor, in 2017, he was the youngest head of government in the world, and the youngest chancellor in Austrian history. But his fall was as swift as certain, here too his opponents joined to dispose of him with dispatch. To be clear, Kurz remains the head of his political party, and he is still just 35 years old. But his fall has been as ignominious as precipitous, a vivid, almost visceral reminder that uneasy ought to be any head that wears any crown.

I have hardly ever reposted a post. But this one I could not resist. I foretold the perilousness of Vice President Kamala Harris’s perch last March.

Did Joe Biden Push Kamala Harris to a Glass Cliff?

What I did not, however, foretell was how quickly she would become marginalized. A figure so deep into the wilderness we have no idea where during the last half year Harris has been, or what during the last half year Harris has done. This could of course change in a heartbeat. Joe Biden’s heartbeat – either literally or figuratively. Still, what became of her during the first year of Biden’s presidency is instructive.  

• Instructive of how quickly even a prominent leader can be erased from the political scene.
• Instructive of how easy it is for the American president to reduce the role of the American vice president.
• Instructive of how women are still prone to being pushed – to a glass cliff and, or, far, very far, off center stage.

When Joe Biden first became president of the United States, he made certain to have his vice president immediately next to him, or just behind him nearly every time he appeared in public. Almost always Harris was right there, a visible symbol of her importance to his administration.

But, now no more. Now she’s gone. Receded so far into the background it’s hard to know she’s even there. It’s hard to know Vice President Kamala Harris even matters.

Shareholder activists use their stake in publicly traded companies to put pressure on managers with whom they are dissatisfied. In other words, shareholder activists are followers who have less power, authority, and influence than leaders, who have more. Occasionally, however, activists can force management’s hand, in which case the balance of power shifts, from leaders (managers) to followers (shareholders). Generally, this happens when the activist(s) are in some way well endowed, for example, when they have large sums of money or were able to mobilize public opinion.

Daniel Loeb is a prototypical activist investor who falls into the first category. He is enormously wealthy and, as CEO of a hedge fund by the name of Third Point, he is also enormously powerful. Which is why he seems to have few compunctions about taking on – at moments he deems opportune – corporate giants such as Disney, Sony, and Intel.

But not every challenger is so well endowed. Engine No. 1 is a small hedge fund that recently dared to challenge a behemoth you might have heard of – it goes by the name of Exxon. Though on paper Engine No. 1 looked weak, a mere minnow taking on a whale, the minnow was able to marshal major allies to force changes at Exxon that initially were thought inconceivable. (Engine No. 1 was aiming to compel Exxon to reduce its carbon footprint by moving more quickly away from fossil fuels.)

Such shareholder successes are becoming more frequent than they used to be – early signs of a trend that in my view has been long in coming. (I wrote about this briefly in The End of Leadership, published in 2012.) Of course, it will happen only when the will to make it happen can be harnessed to technologies that make it possible for small investors, minnows, to unite in a common cause.

As New York Times columnist Jeff Sommer recently observed, up to now shareholder democracy has “been something of an oxymoron.” Most of the time millions of shareholders have had no voice in decisions made by publicly traded American companies. If this changes, followers (small investors) will become more powerful, which necessarily means that leaders (corporate executives) will become less powerful.

In Great Britain are no laws that allow death with dignity. Assisted dying, or euthanasia, is illegal. This remains the case though other, similar countries, such as Belgium and the Netherlands have such laws on the books. This also remains the case despite repeated polling demonstrating that public support in Britain for allowing dignity in dying is overwhelming.

The situation in the US is not as bad, though it is not nearly what it should be. Should be if you believe in majority rule. Almost three-quarters of Americans say that euthanasia should be legal. But only ten states, twenty percent of states, have any legislation allowing death with dignity.

Though the issue is more complex and, therefore, more controversial, there are some parallels to legislation on gun control. In the United States the issue in general remains highly divisive. But even in this country it is not divisive in every aspect. Some gun control laws have never been enacted even though they are supported by large majorities of Americans. For example, 85% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats favor preventing those with mental illnesses from purchasing guns. Similarly, 70% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats support passing a law that would subject private gun sales, and gun show sales to background checks. Finally, majorities in both parties oppose allowing people to carry concealed firearms without a permit.

So, what do I mean by “no leadership – even on low hanging fruit”? I mean leadership is hard to come by these days. These are fractious times, not just in the United States but in liberal democracies everywhere. This makes it especially important that leaders demonstrate they can get some things done. Low hanging fruit – issues on which there is, fortuitously, unusually, wide agreement – would seem obvious targets of accomplishment.

Last week was a hell of a week for whistleblowers! A banner week … unless it was you in their line of fire, you a target of their ire.

Are there more now than there used to be – or am I imagining it? Imaging more whistleblowers coming out of the woodwork. Imagining more good followers daring to speak out against more bad leaders. Imaging more apparently ordinary people willing to take the risk of speaking up and speaking out.

Of course, not every whistleblower is justified. Every now and then whistleblowers blow for insufficient reason. But in the main they are women and men who risk being professionally and sometimes even personally crucified for daring to speak truth not to power, but about power.

Last week’s single most striking whistleblower – she got an enormous media attention – was of course Frances Haugen. Haugen pulled the plug, or tried her level best to, on Facebook. Specifically on her erstwhile leader, her erstwhile employer, Mark Zuckerberg. Haugen shared documents with the Wall Street Journal, and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and with Congress that, she claimed, were proof Facebook prioritized profits over people.   

Not quite as attention-getting but a very, very big story nonetheless was the release of the so-called Pandora Papers. What are they? They are nearly 12 million documents leaked by good followers to reveal for the world to see the greed, the legalized corruption, of bad leaders. These followers mainly are journalists; and these leaders mainly are top dogs including former and current presidents and prime ministers. I should add we’re not talking here garden variety corruption. We’re talking corruption on what Brooke Harrington, writing in the New York Times, described as being on “an almost unimaginably vast scale.”

Finally – for now – the women of the National Women’s Soccer League who put on public display their simmering rage at the imbalance of power. It is the women obviously who play they game. But they are powerless. Specifically, they are powerless against the men, the team owners, the executives, and the coaches, all of whom are powerful. The men control the game, and the men control the money. Hence the men control the women. Last week the women decided they had had it. They were fed up. On Wednesday night they halted several games at the six-minute mark, so they could stand together, arms linked, in silent protest. “We have hit rock bottom and we are going to fight as hard as we need to, as hard as we can, for everything we deserve and need,” said one of the players. “We won’t be silent anymore.”  

In Monday’s post I juxtaposed whistleblowers against enablers. Enablers I described as “followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive.” * Whistleblowers, in contrast, are “followers who try to stop their leaders from being bad by publicly exposing their noxious – as in illegal, or abusive, or unsafe – behaviors.” Which raises the question of what motivates whistleblowers? What makes the powerless risk taking on the powerful? Haugen reportedly decided to go public, to blow the whistle, only in September. She explained her decision this way: “I just don’t want to agonize over what I didn’t do for the rest of my life. Compared to that, anything else just doesn’t seem that bad.”   

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*The definition of enabler is from my latest book, The Enablers: How Team Trump Flunked the Pandemic and Failed America (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Brady is one of the main characters in the book I recently wrote with Todd Pittinsky, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy. Brady, we found, was a leader whose lust for success particularly was so visceral, so palpable, so unquenchable as to singlehandedly explain his preternatural accomplishments.

I was interested therefore to read that Brady himself thinks leadership the single most important explicator for his success on the field. “What,” he was asked a couple of weeks ago by the Wall Street Journal, is the “one essential talent for a quarterback?” At first he gave a one-word answer: “Leadership.”

Then he continued, “Leadership is not a physical trait; it’s more of a mental/emotional trait. You know, I’m the one calling the plays. If I lack any confidence [my teammates] see right through it.”

In other words, though he did not frame it as we did in the book, Brady clearly considers his lust for success to be contagious. He has it – and he gives it to his teammates.  No wonder where he goes success follows.

I became as interested in followers as in leaders in the early aughts, when I wrote two books, one titled Bad Leadership, the other Followership. The path taken continued to another book, four years later, in 2012, The End of Leadership. Notwithstanding my other writings in between, my most recent publication, another book, this one titled, The Enablers, sustains what is by now a running theme: That followers have always been more important than the leadership industry has given them credit for; and that for various reasons – above all changing cultures and technologies – they are more important now than they have ever been before.

Anyone familiar with my work knows this is what I think. They would equally know that I define followers not by what they do, but by how they are ranked. By where they fit into whatever the relevant hierarchy – social, political, economic, organizational, educational, cultural, religious, military, you get the point. In other words, followers do not necessarily follow. Sometimes they do, mostly they do; but sometimes they do not.  Followers do though, by definition, at least mine, rank low on the hierarchy that particularly pertains or, at least, they rank lower on this hierarchy than those in formal leadership roles.

This is not to say that all leaders are formal leaders, that they are clearly identified as such. Some leaders are informal leaders, defined by what they do, not by their position or status, or role or credential. Informal leaders need only to stand out to be identified as such, so it is apparent who is leading and who is following. In fact, all a person needs to be a leader, either formal or informal, is a single follower.

Still, most of the time, in common parlance, the leader is someone of relatively or even very high rank, which is why labeling a follower someone who is of lower rank is not only logical but economical. The point is that semantics matter. Our failure to agree – if only for a particular purpose or a limited time – on what is a “follower” can do us in. Followers are that important.

For this reason, this blog – my intermittent posts – will be as dedicated in the future to followers as to leaders.

Which brings me to today’s point. Like leaders, followers come in different shapes and sizes, and they play different roles. One type of follower is the whistleblower.

• Whistleblowers are followers who try to stop their leaders from being bad by publicly exposing their noxious – as in illegal, or abusive, or unsafe – behaviors.  

Another type of follower is the enabler.

• Enablers are followers who allow or even encourage their leaders to engage in, and then to persist in, behaviors that are destructive.

Whistleblowers are followers in that they try to stop bad behaviors in their superiors, that is, in those who have more power, authority and influence than they. Enablers are followers in that they allow, encourage, even support bad behaviors in those who are their superiors, that is, in those who have more power, authority, and influence than they.

Whistleblowers and enablers are, then, at the opposite ends of a spectrum. Which is why followers who are whistleblowers should be admired and protected – and followers who are enablers should be derided and disabled.