Author: Barbara

One could make the case – and I do – that hardly any of America’s corporate behemoths have had a decade as degrading as General Electric.

The decline began during the financial crisis when GE, once proud to the point of arrogance, turned hat in hand to the federal government. The government obliged with a bailout – to the tune of $140 billion.

It climaxed this week with a spate of headlines, each screaming GE’s continuing degradation to the point of debilitation.

• “GE’s Awful Week Pushes This Year’s Stock Wipeout to $100 Billion”
• “Odds of a GE Dividend Cut 100%”
• “GE Vows Changes as View Darkens”

GE’s new CEO, John Flannery, was forced to say something, so what he said was this: “Our results are unacceptable to say the least.” He went on to add the obvious, “Things Will Not Stay the Same at GE.”

Flannery took over from his predecessor, Jeff Immelt, this summer. Recently, Immelt took himself out of the picture altogether, stepping down earlier than expected as director and chairman of the board. His performance as CEO had been, shall we say, erratic. After all, he took over a thriving operation and left one in a semblance of shambles. For his troubles he was, in any case, paid handsomely, earning, for example, a cool $54 million during the period 2006-11.

Immelt himself succeeded the storied Jack Welch in 2001. Welch had been GE Chairman and CEO since 1981, and when he retired he was widely acclaimed one of America’s best and most admired chief executives. His formidable reputation, while not untarnished, remains generally intact to this day.

Here though is the irony – the ultimate irony. One of the skills of which Welch was proudest was developing leaders. He prided himself on his singular ability to locate leaders and then to groom them, to educate and train them, for the sole purpose of keeping GE at the pinnacle of corporate America.

To this end his special baby was GE’s fabled management training center in Crotonville, NY. GE is by no means the only company to have designated an off-site space for leadership learning – the Boeing Leadership Center near St. Louis is another example. But, Crotonville is special. It was founded in 1956, and since has come to consist of a 59-acre campus where selected GE employees “can engage in continuous learning with a personalized curriculum to develop unique strengths and own their leadership journey.” Leadership is, in other words, what Crotonville does – Welch made sure of that. As its website advertises, Crotonville offers a “broad curriculum of leadership experiences and skills courses around the globe [as well as] world-renowned leadership development programs.”

Up to now, Crotonville has continued to be deemed by management to be worth the investment. Despite GE’s humiliating descent, and despite the high cost of its leadership training operation, reported to be $1 billion worldwide, so far at least Crotonville remains undisturbed.

The question now is will Flannery see the irony? The irony of running a fancy, costly leadership center when GE’s own leadership cadre has fallen so far short? I have no doubt that good things happen at Crotonville – that many of those who go learn something about how to lead and manage. I similarly have no doubt that something’s wrong with this picture. That running a leadership center when your own house is other than in order is curious – if not ridiculous.

“Things will not stay the same at GE”? Things should not stay the same at GE – including at Crotonville! At an absolute minimum, those responsible for its leadership curriculum should review, revise, and reconstitute it in light of GE’s own painful recent history.

Oxford Professor Stein Ringen recently posted a timely and telling blog about China.  (The link is below.) He correctly notes that, historically, democracies have found it difficult to deal with dictatorships. This is precisely why he argues that in this case, the West must avoid wishful thinking. China has not evolved into what the West would have wanted. Rather, Ringen writes, it has become an imperialist state – and he continues, a totalitarian one.

For the purposes of this piece I will focus on totalitarianism – on the gradualism of totalitarianism. Or, more precisely in the case of China, on the gradualism of asserting growing control. The archetypical totalitarian states are Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. In Hannah Arendt’s classic treatise, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she uses these two men, Hitler and Stalin, and these two states, Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 40s, to dive deep into totalitarian exemplars. Of course, in our own time, North Korea exemplifies the same syndrome: a totalitarian state is one in which a single individual, along with civilian and military bureaucracies beholden entirely to him, effectively have total control over everyone and everything – individuals and institutions alike.

One of the most interesting things about totalitarianism is how it comes to pass. It does not happen in an instant with, say, a sudden seizure of power. It is not in the least like a train wreck that, in a split second, destroys everything in its path. Rather totalitarian states are crafted gradually. In fact, they are heralded both in advance and along the way, so that the process proceeds with minimal disruption.

Adolf Hitler was the legally appointed Chancellor of Germany when, beginning in 1933, he set in motion a series of events that led, three to five years later, to a full- fledged totalitarian state.  Josef Stalin gradually took the reins of power after the death of Lenin, in 1924. But several years had to pass before he held these reins firmly in his grip. In other words, even these two archetypical despots had to erect their totalitarian edifice step by step, brick by brick, before it was complete.

Which brings us to Xi Jinping. Said now to be China’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping (who died two decades ago), possibly even since Mao Zedong, Xi has built his rulership carefully, measure by measure. Not all at once but gradually, Xi has come to exercise inordinate control over ideas and information, the economy and the military, the bureaucracy and the government.

His intent has been no secret.  Xi’s goal to control has been evident for several years. What then did it take for this leader to get to where he wanted to go? Followers who were compliant. To be sure, there have been dissidents (now dwindling in number) – some of them heroic in the face of overweening odds. I am thinking, for example, of human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who died recently of liver cancer while serving an 11- year prison sentence, purportedly for trying to overthrow the government.

Still, let’s be clear. A leader graduates from autocracy to totalitarianism not on his own, but with the complicity of others. Sometimes this complicity is explicit; sometimes implicit. But for totalitarianism to take root it depends absolutely on the silence of strangers. Silence that persists even as the evidence of purpose grows. And grows.

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https://thatsdemocracy.com/2017/10/20/the-truth-about-china/

Since the precipitous, scandalous descent of sequential sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein, not just the dam broke, but the floodgate opened. Not only at home, also abroad.

More than half a million women have flooded Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, using the hashtag #MeToo to volunteer that they too had experienced sexual harassment or assault. More specifically, in Sacramento, California, upwards of  140 women – including state legislators and lobbyists – came forward to charge sexual misconduct in the nation’s most powerful state legislature. “Women complained of groping, lewd comments and suggestions of trading sexual favors for legislation while doing business in Sacramento.”* And, in France, tens of thousands of women have similarly stepped up, using social media to post disturbing accounts of sexual harassment and abuse. Though most did not identify their assailants, given France’s famously chauvinistic culture, which forever has “enabled powerful men to misbehave with impunity,” it was a sign the times are changing.

How did this happen? What explains this sudden torrent of women complaining so furiously, so publicly, about behavior they previously endured in silence?

This is one of those cases where leadership explains nearly nothing. Nor for that matter does followership – though it comes closer. No, this most recent open outpouring of previously private grievances is best explained by a phenomenon referred to by social psychologists as social or behavioral contagion. The term refers to our propensity to emulate behavior exhibited by someone else – especially if that behavior resonates with our own emotion or experience. In other words, when a handful of women started to speak out on this issue, many, many others were emboldened by them finally to do the same.

Social or behavioral contagion is not so common – certainly not globally. But, when the time is right, it’s remarkable how powerful are peers!

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*All quotes in this piece of from The New York Times, October 18, 2017.

OK, the damn dam finally broke. In the last week, a torrent of accusations has submerged movie mogul Harvey Weinstein who, it seems, has been getting away with sexual harassment and, possibly, sexual assault for years.

What gives? How is it possible that this man was permitted to go on his wicked way for so long? His wrongdoing was, we now know, an open secret. Lots of people knew he was a repeat offender – lots and lots of people, not only the women who were his victims. Yet neither they, nor the countless others in the know about Harvey went public with their story. Instead they shut up – as if hypnotized by Harvey. Hypnotized by his power and hypnotized by his money.

Why? Why were so many so complicit for so long? More particularly, why were the women who he in some way attacked effectively silent until now? An article in today’s New York Times answered the question this way: “More established actresses were fearful of speaking out because they had work; less established ones were scared because they did not.”

What the hell kind of an excuse is that?! OK, I’ll buy the line about “less established actresses.” But why would someone with some measure of success stay silent? Why was it that only when multitudes came forth did individuals finally speak up?

There are of course several reasons – one of which is breathtakingly simple: While we’re big on teaching good leadership, real big, we’re nowhere on teaching good followership. Teaching people how to speak truth to power. Teaching people how to step up when there’s a wrong to be righted. Teaching people how not to be cowed – not even by those apparently mightier than they.

A 2016 study in the Harvard Business Review suggested several solutions to the problem of sexual harassment, including making people aware of the problem; teaching them that when there’s a problem they should step in; and telling them how exactly they might effectively intervene.

This is not exactly rocket science. But if women want to empower themselves they, we, must stop making excuses. We must be bolder and braver in the future than we have been in the past.

Gwyneth Paltrow has finally, years later, admitted to being harassed by Harvey Weinstein. Her excuse for staying silent for more than two decades? “I was a kid. I was signed up. I was petrified. I thought he was going to fire me.”  Bull! First, she was not “a kid.” She was 22 years old. Second, she had all the resources in the world to back her up, should she have stepped up. Her mother is the renowned establishment actress, Blythe Danner. And her father was Bruce Paltrow, highly successful in his own right as a director and producer. Would Gwyneth have had to eat dirt if she had told on Harvey? Hardly!

So let’s get real here. This stuff persists because we permit it to persist. If we, we women, want our victimization to end, it’s up to us to end it. The days of the proverbial casting couch have long been over. The time is now for us to put our money where our mouths are!

• German Chancellor Angela Merkel tries to cobble together a governing coalition after losing votes in the recent election, especially to the far right. To govern reasonably effectively, her Christian Democrats will have to form a new coalition, a “Jamaica” coalition, with both the Free Democrats and the Greens.
• Myanmar’s preeminent leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, continues to be humiliated by the humanitarian crisis involving over a half million Rohingya forced to flee to Bangladesh. Manifestly Myanmar’s military is a power Myanmar’s leader is unable to control.
• Britain’s Prime Minister, Theresa May, struggles to maintain a semblance of dignity – and of power and influence. Brexit talks have gone no place. May’s cabinet, and her party (the Conservatives), war among themselves. Her performance at the Conservatives just ended conference was said to be “calamitous.” (Alas, a mortifying coughing fit during one of her important speeches did not help.) And she was forced to face down a coup attempt by some 30 plus members of her own party. A “nightmare” week indeed!

I draw no conclusion from this enumeration. But what does seem clear is that leadership is an equal opportunity exercise. That female leaders are treated just like male leaders – subjected to insults and injuries on a regular basis.

In ordinary times we want and expect the president to lead. And we want and expect others – at least most others most of the time – to follow. But, these are not ordinary times.  These times are so extraordinary that many Americans want nothing so much as for the president not to lead, but to follow.

President Donald Trump has regularly been compared to a child who needs to be managed, controlled, harnessed, reined in. Who needs above all to have adult supervision. Whether Trump is akin to a “malevolent toddler” – a term invoked by some of his staff – is open to debate. Still, few would quarrel with the claim that the nation’s chief executive does not regularly or reliably act like a grown-up. As James Mann points out, he “lies, taunts, insults, bullies, rages, seeks vengeance, exalts violence, boasts, refuses to accept criticism” – all in ways that most parents seek to prevent in their children.*

In consequence of the president’s emotional immaturity and, or, temperamental instability, many Americans have consoled themselves with the thought that there are, after all, adults in the room.  Adults who can and should do what good parents do: manage, control, harness, and rein in their children, especially if their children are errant. To put it in my parlance, Mom and Dad are expected to be leaders and toddlers to be followers.

The adults in this case are presumed James Mattis, Secretary of Defense; Rex Tillerson, Secretary of State; H. R. McMaster, National Security Advisor; and John Kelly, White House Chief of Staff. Which raises the question of what happens when these four men fail to be able to lead their man-child. When they fail to be able to execute the role reversal on which most of the nation has come to depend. When they fail to be able, that is, to exercise leadership. And when they fail equally to be able to get Trump to follow, to conform to the parameters of the presidential office.

For those of us with an interest in taming and tempering our volatile president, it’s been a bad week.

• Mattis publicly stated his view that the US should continue to adhere to its nuclear deal with Iran. No dice. The president made clear he would support an alternate strategy, one that will deviate  at least somewhat from the agreement reached by his predecessor.  So much for Mattis’s sway.
• Tillerson, though given the chance, chose not to deny that he had called the president a bleeping “moron.” Most superiors are not fond of being called bleeping “morons” by their subordinates. So, we might reasonably presume that Tillerson is not long for his post. No big deal though, as the president was undercutting his Secretary of State well before the moron mess. Remember Trump declaring that Tillerson was “wasting his time” trying to negotiate with the North Koreans?
• McMaster has survived internecine battles with, among others, hand-to-hand combatant Steve Bannon (since gone from the White House). Still, McMaster remains a favorite target of right-wingers, obliged to keep his head down while the president hurls high-risk insults at Little Rocket Man.
• Kelly tries his damnedest to keep his charge in line. But, it’s hard. Come to think of it, it’s impossible. This is not to question Kelly’s competence, or to suggest that this still relatively new chief of staff has made no difference at all. It’s become clear though that Kelly has been unable to prevent the president from saying stupid stuff, from behaving idiotically at inopportune moments, or even from inciting anger and divisiveness when what’s called for is comity and community.

It pains me to write this, but whatever our hopes for the adults in the room, they have been, not wholly, but largely, dashed. For now, the emotionally immature and temperamentally unstable American president continues mostly to lead, while the grown-ups continue mostly to follow.

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*http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/26/trump-adult-supervision/

The president of France, Emanuel Macron, and the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, would like nothing so much as to see Europe solidify. Becomes more unified over the next ten years, not less.

Similarly, the prime minister of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, would like nothing so much as to see Spain solidify. Specifically, to rid itself of Catalonian separatism, so that Spain becomes more unified over the next ten years, not less.

But it’s not clear that anyone of these the leaders will be able to keep their followers in line. The immediate problem is Rajoy’s. Though most Americans cannot conceive of such a thing, yesterday’s Catalonian referendum, which the central government in Madrid did everything it could to stop, including using force, confirmed that separatist sentiment was strong. Despite the chaos surrounding the proceedings, some 42% of Catalonians managed to cast their ballots – and of these fully 90% voted for independence.

The immediate outcome of the referendum is a constitutional crisis. On the morning after the night before no one can say with certainty what will happen next in the struggle between Madrid (capital of Spain) on the one hand, and Barcelona (capital of Catalonia) on the other. Again, similarly, on the morning after the night before no one can say with certainty what will happen next in the struggle between leaders loyal to Brussels (headquarters of the European Union) on the one hand, and followers loyal to various isms on the other – isms such as separatism, nationalism, and populism.

But make no mistake about it. Spain, while no match for France or Germany, is one of Europe’s powerhouses. If it falters, so does the European Union. And, if it falters, so does liberal democracy.

• Tom Price, former Secretary of Health and Human Services, forced to resign.
• Richard Price, former CEO of Equifax, forced to resign.
• Norman Pelz, super shareholder activist, about to muscle his way onto P&G, Board despite opposition from majority of Board and P&G CEO.
• Wolfgang Hatz, former top executive at Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche, arrested.
• Conflict and chaos in Catalonia.
• Mayor of San Juan takes on the American president – Puerto Rico is decidedly not, she charges, a “good news story.”
• American president takes on mayor of San Juan – attacks her for “poor leadership.”
• Supernova Lin Manuel Miranda tweets the American president will go “straight to hell.”
• Portrait of Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Myanmar’s putative leader, Aung Sau Suu Kyi, removed from the hallowed halls of Oxford University.

She hovers. He haunts. Angela Merkel has secured a remarkable fourth term as German Chancellor. Adolf Hitler has secured a remarkable return to German political discourse.

I do not draw a precise parallel between the present far-right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the past far-right party, the Nazi party. But in this weekend’s German elections, the overtly nationalist, populist, xenophobic AfD, which until recently was marginal, achieved a significant victory. It secured 13 percent of the vote, guaranteeing it representation in parliament and a political platform to be reckoned with.

No sense exaggerating the importance of this. Voters in other European countries have made the same right turn, as have voters in the US. Still, this is the first time a far-right party has been represented in the German parliament in more than 60 years. Given Germany’s not-so-very- distant history this is an outcome of consequence.

Angela Merkel is assured her place in history. She has been and remains a remarkably effective leader in Germany, and in Europe more generally. Moreover, her even temper and stable temperament are badly needed counterweights not only given Germany’s past, but given the problematic present, in which follower’s attraction to half-cocked strongman leaders remains very much in evidence.

It is not too much to say that moderate Merkel represents the better angels of our nature, whereas the AfD pulls in extremists attracted by apparently simple solutions to complex problems. In the wake of the results of the election, one AfD leader told the party faithful that he was “absolutely euphoric.” Claimed another, “We did it…. We will change Germany!”

Again, no sense exaggerating the importance of this. But given where liberal democracy is in the first quarter of the 21st century, and given where Germany was in the second quarter of the 20th, attention must be paid.

I HAVE NEVER REPEATED A BLOG – POSTED A BLOG I WROTE IN THE PAST AGAIN IN THE PRESENT. BUT… TO EVERY RULE THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS. TODAY IS ONE. AFTER THIS WEEKEND, DURING WHICH PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP WENT OFF HALF-COCKED AGAINST “LITTLE ROCKET MAN,” AND GRATUITOUSLY TOOK ON A LARGE FRACTION OF THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE, THE FOLLOWING BLOG, ORIGINALLY POSTED ON AUGUST 12, BEARS REPEATING. YES, BOBBY, RUN!

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Run, Bobby, Run!