Author: Barbara

The literature on leadership focuses nearly entirely on the relationship between leaders and followers. From Plato’s Republic to Freud’s Moses and Monotheism to the countless contemporary tomes on the subject, the spotlight is on how leaders are, or are not, able to get their followers to do what they want them to do.

This suggests that there is at least one area of study that has been badly neglected: the relationship between leaders and leaders. What, in other words, is the dynamic between two (or more) people when neither is prepared to play the part of follower and when both seek to claim, and to maintain the mantle of leader?

As we have just seen, this is precisely what happens in the domain of international relations. When President Joe Biden flew to Europe last week to gather with many other leaders of many other countries, culminating in his encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he met not with his subordinates or constituents, but with his equals. To be sure, the United States is much more powerful a country than is, say, France or Belgium. Still, When Biden got together with France’s President Emmanuel Macron or Belgium’s Prime Minister Alexander De Croo they did so as equals. One was in no formal or obvious way subservient to the other.    

The point pertains especially to the relationship between Biden and Putin. Though Russia is in virtually every way far weaker than the United States, it is a point of enormous pride to Putin to present himself as the equal of any other leader on the planet. In fact, anyone who understands Putin at all, or indeed what happened to Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, has a visceral understanding of how important to Russia’s identity, and to Putin’s, is this posturing of strength.

Usually, one of a national leader’s most important domestic policy responsibilities is to initiate change and then to implement it. But, ironically, one of a national leader’s most important foreign policy responsibilities is precisely the opposite. In fact, managing leader-leader relations, as opposed to leader-follower relations, might well depend on the national leader’s willingness not to lead or, at least, not to appear to lead.

There was no way in hell that Putin was going to allow himself to appear anything less than Biden’s full equal. This meant that Biden’s task was to appear in charge and in control – while at the same time conveying to Putin that he was not trying in any way to dominate him.

The leader-leader dynamic tends to be especially fraught when it pertains to leaders of countries with a long history of conflict between them. With a few significant exceptions – such as the years 1941-45, during which Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt were wartime allies – the United States and Russia fall into this category.  For example, President Richard Nixon met several times with the leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev. But while these meetings were cordial enough, and sometimes even productive, there was no mistaking the impression  that each of the two men were the other’s equals. And that each were leaders of superpowers that were much more adversaries than allies. Not for nothing was the world at the time considered bipolar. Not for nothing were such meetings called summits.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of yesterday’s encounter between Biden and Putin, the dynamic between them is unfamiliar. Leader-leader relations differ from leader-follower relations in that the latter has been widely studied, while the former has not. This should change.

In recent weeks millions have watched a herd of 15 wild elephants embark on a long, strange trip out of the jungles of southwest China. Instead of staying where they were, they took to trekking in unfamiliar places – including in some sizable cities. Twitter and YouTube have become clogged with clips of their various antics, especially the babies, the latest media darlings not only at home, in China, but abroad.

Meantime, the experts have been baffled. Why would this herd do that? Normally elephants stay close to where they are: on or around their home ranges, turf they know. So, their behavior in this case is a departure.  

Which is why so much speculation about the explanation.  Search for a new habitat? A freshly developed taste for corn or other delectable, normally unavailable crops?

Or is it perhaps something altogether different? Is it a failure of leadership? Did the leader of the herd just get lost?

As a bit of a leadership expert myself, I cannot resist this theory. How could I take issue with Chen Mingyong, a professor at Yunnan University’s Asian Elephant Research Center, who says it could well be that the “lead elephant lacks experience” and, therefore, “led the whole group astray.”

Sound familiar? Far be it from me to anthropomorphize elephants! But who can deny that inexperienced leaders leading their followers astray is a behavior with which we, we humans, have had extensive experience?!

The piece below was originally posted on March 25th.

Did Joe Biden Push Kamala Harris to a Glass Cliff?

Marking time is a military term for marching in place. It refers to soldiers who move their legs and feet but who nevertheless stay in place as opposed to moving forward – which is the case now with Mark Zuckerberg. The iconic, demonic, founder and CEO of Facebook is in a holding pattern. He’s in a quandary really, brilliant as always at business, less than brilliant as always at navigating the roiling waters in which inevitably he is situated.

For all his singular success, Zuckerberg is under attack now not only from without – in addition to competitors, regulators at home and abroad are aching to rein him in – but from within. Facebook’s own employees are increasingly emboldened, daring openly to challenge company policies at odds with their values.

It happened recently when Facebook helped India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to stifle dissent. It happened recently when Facebook removed posts from prominent Palestinian activists. And, of course, it happened not long ago when Facebook still gave former President Donald Trump access to its platform, no matter how outrageous his claims, no matter how fallacious his insistences.

To beat back the growing opposition, Zuckerberg created an oversight board, likened to a supreme court composed of supremely clever and beneficent sages charged with keeping Facebook on the straight and narrow. But the board serves at Zuckerberg’s pleasure. This does not mean that it is meaningless. It does mean that it is powerless at least as an independent agent able to check and balance the man to whom it is, after all, ultimately responsible.

Zuckerberg is not a leader in any conventional sense of this word. He is a czar.  A czar whose reach is as expansive as the planet he inhabits. Which is why it will take the power of the people finally, someday, properly to rein him in.   Meantime Mark marks time. He does not slide backward – but nor does he in ways that most matter move forward.      

In the old days, museum directors ran museums. Along with their boards, of course, and other top administrators, they were responsible for running the entire operation and for setting the museum’s strategic direction.

That was then. Now things are different, very different. Just like other American leaders, leaders of America’s museums no longer have a choice but to follow the leads of their followers. Museums are not, in other words, immune from the trend that a decade ago I labeled, “the end of leadership.” Or at least, the end of leadership as we knew it.

The pressures from below – especially from those whose voices previously were muted – are simply too great now to resist. Social and political contexts have changed. People’s expectations and, therefore, their demands have changed. So those in charge of America’s museums – and indeed its arts institutions more generally – have had no choice but to change with the changing times.

• New York City’s Guggenheim Museum made it a point recently to reach out in new ways to people with disabilities.
• In April, the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, opened a major exhibition dedicated to the memory of Breonna Taylor, who was shot dead in her bed by local police.
• In Washington, the National Gallery of Art announced changes that included transforming a leadership team that only recently was 100 percent white into one that was now more than half people of color.
• Though the Denver Art Museum has a history of showing Indigenous work, its strength in this area was recently further expanded. Its Indigenous collection now comprises the museum’s largest single block of works, about 20 percent of its total holdings. Denver currently has a major show featuring two Indigenous artists, one part Seneca, the other part Lakota.
• New York City’s Queens Museum has developed year-round community partnerships with organizations devoted to criminal injustice, or racial equality, or environmental advocacy that involve all parts of the museum.  
• Los Angeles’s world class Broad Museum chose to reopen after the pandemic by featuring world class artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat, who died in 1988 at age at 27, is widely regarded as one of the few black artists to have become a superstar. (In March, one of his paintings fetched $41.9 million at an auction in Hong Kong.)
• The Philadelphia Museum of Art just underwent a significant expansion and restoration. Along with the structural changes are ones in emphasis and tone. Timothy Rub, the museum’s director, and chief executive, said the new design “opens up the heart of the very center of the museum in a way that will make it even more inviting and engaging for our community to become part of the museum and for the museum to become an even more integral part of the community it serves.” One of the museum’s current exhibits, “New Grit,” is illustrative. The show’s lead curator, Erika Battle, said that when people walk into “New Grit,” they’re going to see works that talk about “Confederate monuments, they’re going to see works about immigration, incarceration and re-entry.”
• Adam Levine, the recently appointed director of the Toledo Museum of Fine Arts announced that a total overall of the institution’s strategic plan is now underway. His roadmap is for the museum is to be “one whose collection represents the demographic makeup of the country,” and where people feel a “sense of comfort and psychological safety in every interaction with the institution’s brand on-site and off-site.”
• In keeping with the nation’s newfound attention to the Tulsa Massacre, which happened a hundred years ago this year, the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa is currently featuring an exploration of artistic responses to racial violence in the United States. The exhibition is accompanied by a constellation of community engagement projects with, among others, Black-led organizations.      

Again, this shift in the arts from away from the elite and toward the communities they are now expected to serve is not confined to museums of fine art. It is in all the arts. As Salamishah Tillet wrote in the New York Times, “I saw black artists, filmmakers, fashion designers, musicians and poets take on the white gatekeepers in their industries and institutional homes. I identified the new conversations Black artists are having with one another across generations and disciplines. I wanted my own writing to match the immediacy with which these artists shared messages of rejecting white privilege, recentering our collective humanity and demanding a world in which Black people are truly free.”

Certainly since the murder of George Floyd, Americans like Tillet will accept no less than full participation in the system – in every one of its numberless facets and aspects. Leaders of arts institutions across the spectrum are, then, doing no more than, and also no less than, responding to what has become popular demand.

Chief executive officers of even the largest oil companies in the world have failed to read the writing on the wall. So heavily armored are they against how the world now works, they did not anticipate this week’s defeats, each of which was inevitable.  

In the Netherlands, a court order will now force Royal Dutch Shell aggressively to slash its carbon emissions. In the U.S., ExxonMobil shareholders put on the board an activist investor who charged the company was facing an “existential risk” because of its continuing dependence on fossil fuels. And a large majority of Chevron’s shareholders voted for a resolution that called on the company to “substantially reduce” emissions from products it produces.   

It’s clear the chief executives of all three companies were brought up short, trapped in bunkers of their own making. Which is why on the all-important matter of climate change they were unable to lead, which is why on the all-important matter of climate change they are being forced to follow.

Who exactly are they following? First and foremost, they are activists, typically either climate activists or activist investors. But they are no longer alone. They are being backed now by some heavy hitters, for example huge investors such as BlackRock and Vanguard. They see climate change as a risk not just generally, but specifically to the businesses in which they invest their money. Most importantly, not far behind them are ordinary people. People like you and me able finally easily to see – all those hurricanes, all those wildfires, all those climate refugees – the planet changing in ways that threaten, if not us then our children.

Subsequent to this week’s events The New York Times reported that Big Oil had been dealt a “stunning defeat.” The Wall Street Journal said something similar – it said the “defeats” were “significant.” But this is not, of course, about “Big Oil.” Nor is it even about the three companies, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron. All these are abstractions. Instead the story is about three men, three CEOs, who are flesh and blood. Who are leaders in high places paid very, very big bucks – apparently to duck the single most important issue facing the companies for which ostensibly they are responsible.    

If he wants, China’s president Xi Jinping now has the right to be president for life.  If he wants, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin now has the means to be president for life. And when President Donald Trump was trying to be funny, he twice over said being president for life was “great,” and at least once suggested Americans “try it someday.”  

Leader tenure is sometimes assumed. For example, presidents of the United States can be reelected no more than one time – thus they can serve a maximum of two consecutive four-year terms. More often, though, leader tenure is not assumed. It is uncertain, not precisely determined or even determined not at all. In other words, most of the time when a person assumes a position of authority, when that person will vacate that position is unknown.    

Moreover, the norms associated with leader tenure are weak. The leadership industry nearly never addresses the subject. And most groups and organizations impose no restrictions on how long their leaders can stay where they are. In the United States, the average tenure for a US Senator is somewhat over ten years; similarly, and likely not coincidentally, the average tenure for a CEO is also somewhat over ten years. But a good number of senators stay in their posts for longer than a decade, as do a good number of CEOs.

One could reasonably argue that so long as leaders are doing a good job, why not leave them alone? Is there an inherent virtue to removing them from their posts so long as they remain good at what they do? It’s not clear. It’s not clear because the question is rarely front and center. It’s not clear because on this subject there is little or no good research. Above all it’s not clear because we are disposed to leave well enough alone, especially when well enough is really rather good – or even very good.

Jamie Dimon has been chairman and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase for over a decade and a half. He is worth nearly two billion dollars and, despite mistakes along the way, is widely considered among the best bankers of his generation.

Last year, Dimon, who is 65, underwent emergency heart surgery. For a brief time, it was not clear if he would return to his post and, if so, under which if any restrictions. Turned out before long he was back full tilt, without any appreciable signs of slowing down. Nevertheless, with an apparent eye to his succession, this week Dimon appointed two women to top posts, one of whom is likely someday to succeed him.

But when that “someday” will come remains entirely opaque. In fact, members of JPMorgan’s board, more than content with Dimon’s performance over the last decade and a half, have told him they want him to stay on for a “significant number of additional years.” How many years is that exactly – what is a number that is “significant”? Who knows? Reports are that Dimon is thinking another five years at least.   

I admit to being on shaky ground when suggesting that one leader in one place for fifteen years or more seems generally a bad idea. Though we do know that autocrats tend to cling to power for unconscionably long, the comparative research on this is as indicated, meager. Still, the world in which Dimon became JPMorgan’s leader is in a thousand ways different from the world in which Dimon leads now. Moreover, leaders are like the rest of us – they get more rigid, less nimble and flexible, more set in their ways. Finally, as history attests, over time power tends to corrupt or, at least, corrode.

How would Dimon respond to the concerns I raise? I’m supposing he might grant my argument – and then point out that to every rule are exceptions.

The Financial Times recently conducted a survey of chief learning officers (CLOs) from companies around the world. More than a quarter said they intended to increase their executive education budgets in 2021, while over half planned to keep their spending at current levels. In other words, though the CLOs insisted they wanted less “fluff” in the future than they had in the past, as well as a proven return on their investment, executive education remained high on their list of priorities.*

The survey further revealed that under the rubric of executive education “leadership” was the top learning priority. Fully 82 percent of respondents cited it as important. Moreover, another 57 percent of respondents cited “change management” as important. In other words, “leadership” and “change management” – terms often thought of as synonymous – far outstripped in importance other executive education priorities such as diversity and inclusion, and digital transformation.

Ironically, it is far from clear that courses in “leadership” and “change management” will avoid the “fluff,” and provide the “return on investment” that CLOs profess to be looking for. What remains opaque, as inevitably it does, is what exactly is meant, particularly by the word “leadership.” What, more precisely, does learning leadership imply to the 82 percent of chief learning officers who deem it of greatest importance?

Are they imagining that leadership is different from management? If so, how? Are they conceiving leadership as a certain set of skills? If yes, which ones? Or are they thinking that leadership is character? If no, how is leadership distinct from character; and if yes, how is character taught? Or is character something that is innate, or instilled in early childhood?

In other words, so long as the leadership industry dodges the question of what exactly is leadership, and so long as the leadership industry skirts the issue of what can reasonably be learned about leadership in a very short period of time, so long will chief learning officers be destined to question their investment – and fret about fluff.

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*Andrew Jack, “What Employers Want from Executive Courses,” Financial Times, May 9, 2021.

My colleague (Todd Pittinsky) and I wrote a book about leaders who lust. It’s titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy.

We defined 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.

Bill Gates is one of the leaders featured in the book. But his name does not, as recent headlines would suggest, appear in the chapter on lust for sex. It appears in the chapter on lust for legacy.

This is how the two different lusts are characterized:

• “Leaders who lust for sex go on constant, countless hunts for sexual gratification.”
• “Leaders who lust for legacy long, effectively lifelong, to leave an imprint that is permanent.”

I ask you, which better describes Gates? Is he really a leader who lusts for sex? Or is he instead a leader who lusts for legacy?

No one has accused Gates of going on “constant, countless hunts for sexual gratification.” Nevertheless, the recent headlines on Gates and sex have, for the moment at least, stained his reputation and tarnished what up to now has been his stellar name.

What exactly has Gates has been charged with?

• That “in some circles” he developed a “reputation for questionable conduct in work-related settings.” (The quote is from the New York Times, though what exactly was his “questionable conduct” was not clear.)
• That his wife, Melinda French Gates, from whom Gates is getting a divorce, was unhappy with how he handled a sexual harassment charge against one of his longtime money managers.
• That on “at least a few occasions” Gates pursued women who worked for him either at Microsoft or at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Of what this “pursuit” consisted was also not spelled out – though it seems to have been no more than asking a woman out for a drink or dinner. Gates was said as well to have tried at least once to have an “intimate relationship with an employee.” But his try seems to have gone nowhere, possibly, obviously, because the woman said no.
• Gates did admit to having one “affair almost 20 years ago that ended amicably.”  

“Small beer,” as the Brits would say.

I’m aware that by global standards Americans are particularly puritanical about monogamy. However, even in America for a male leader of such enormous prominence and worldliness to have stepped outside the bounds of what is conceived of as a conventional marriage is not exactly shocking.

For the record, Bill Gates did make one serious, related misstep. On a few occasions he spent time with Jeffrey Epstein – including at his palatial Manhattan home – the notorious, now deceased, sex offender. Moreover, Gates first met Epstein only after he had already been convicted of sex crimes. No excusing this relationship – and I do not for a moment minimize what in this instance was Gates’ dismal lack of judgement.

But Bill Gates does not now, and never did, lust for sex. His lust is now what it has always been – to leave an imprint that is permanent. This explains why he became one of America’s greatest innovators ever. This explains why he became one of America’s greatest businessmen ever. And this explains why he became one of America’s greatest philanthropists ever.

Given this and given we do not have great leaders to spare, seems to me we ought not be profligate with those we do have. The few who qualify should be brought to their knees only for mistakes far graver than the ones outlined above. It does not serve us well to have perfection as a standard for great leadership – lest only saints need apply.    

As I write Liz Cheney is the most talked about woman leader in America. It’s not clear that her sudden fame will last. But there is no denying that her decision to launch a full-throated attack on Donald Trump has catapulted her into the national spotlight. In consequence of her relentless assault on the former president, she has been booted out of her leadership role in the House of Representatives. And she has decisively and possibly permanently split from nearly all her Republican colleagues.  

Liz Cheney’s last name is, yes, Cheney. So, on one level it’s understandable that the congresswoman from Wyoming is invariably introduced as Dick Cheney’s daughter. Dick Cheney was, after all, vice president of the United States for eight years (2001-2009), and a leading Republican long before that. In fact, Dick Cheney was one of the most influential leaders in recent American history, including, by all accounts, in his post as Vice President during the two-term presidency of George W. Bush.  

Still, it is not Dick Cheney who birthed Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney has a mother. Liz Cheney was delivered of Lynne Cheney who, it happens, has long been a highly accomplished and prominent figure in her own right.  

Long before it was fashionable or even normal for women of a certain class to work outside the home, Lynne Cheney did. She had an extremely successful career – or, better, plural, as in careers. For example, she was chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993. She was a CNN television host from 1995 to 1998. And over the years she has served on a range of entities from corporate boards to the Readers Digest Association.

Moreover, when time came for Lynne and Dick Cheney to leave Washington to return to their home in Wyoming, her work did not stop. Remarkably, she became a successful and prominent writer, with a focus on early American history. Her most recent books are James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (2015), and The Virginia Dynasty: Four Presidents and the Creation of the American Nation (2020). Both were very well reviewed and received, and both have become a highly respected part of the vast literature on America’s Founders.     

I admit it’s economical to describe Liz Cheney as Dick Cheney’s daughter. However, it’s both inaccurate and unfair. She is also Lynne Cheney’s daughter. And Lynne Cheney merits a place in the nation’s firmament every bit as much as does her husband.