Author: Barbara

In recent days Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg both made statements addressing the company’s current public relations crisis. The differences between them are striking.

Zuckerberg was all business. After an initial, perfunctory tip of his hat to his family, he went on to describe what Facebook would do to stop or at least slow its technology from being used by nefarious people for nefarious purposes. He assured us that he “cares deeply about the democratic process and protecting its integrity.” And he did what a CEO should do – what he could in the moment to protect his brand. In the end, though, his statement was bland, bloodless.   Passion about “the democratic process” was lacking, as was palpable remorse about what had gone wrong.

Sandberg’s statement was, on the other hand, much more deeply personal, and much more prepared to take responsibility. Her statement was brighter, bolder and in important ways better.

Two points of note:

First, Sandberg told us who she was. She was writing she said, “as a Jew, as a mother, and as a human being.” Easy enough to admit to being a human being. Easy enough to admit to being a mother. Not so easy to admit, as it were,  that she was a Jew. Zuckerberg is also a Jew. His failure to mention same does not make him a bad person. But her readiness to so testify assumes special resonance as well as importance in a context in which outbreaks of anti-Semitism have risen sharply.

Second, Sandberg took responsibility. She took responsibility for Facebook’s sloppiness, for its casual attitude toward posting hateful language which, she admitted, was “a fail on our part.” Similarly, she took responsibility for Facebook’s laxness in policing its own technology. Facebook, she admitted, did not discover various egregious offenses until others brought them to the company’s attention. Nor did it even, to its everlasting embarrassment, prepare for the dark side.  “We never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way – and that is on us. And we did not find it ourselves – and that is also on us.”

Sandberg’s iconic if controversial contribution to the national conversation was her 2013 quasi feminist tract, Lean In. Her argument struck a chord with numberless women who needed and, it turned out, wanted to be prodded to be assertive. With her post on how Facebook would face the current fiasco she did herself credit. She practiced what she preached. She leaned in.

Leadership is defined in countless different ways.  Accordingly, there is no widely accepted definition of what leadership is.

The leadership industry, however, equates leadership with something or someone who mostly is good.  Leadership expert Warren Bennis, for example, wrote that “managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing.” Somewhat similarly, leadership scholar James MacGregor Burns distinguished a leader from a “power wielder.” “Power wielders,” Burns wrote, “may treat people as things. Leaders may not.” In other words, leaders lead with their followers in mind. They lead to satisfy the motives of their followers.

What, then, are we to make of someone like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un?

• He embarked on North Korea’s “most violent Party purge in decades.”*
• He executed two of his father’s seven senior pall bearers.
• He arranged for the assassination of his estranged half-brother.
• He threatens the lives and family members of anyone who in any way opposes him.
• He demands a cult of personality which guarantees that he and he alone – along with his dead father and grandfather – is venerated.
• He is in total control of everyone and everything North Korean.
• He impacts American foreign policy to a degree entirely out of proportion with the hermetic, undeveloped country of which he is the head.
• He has developed a nuclear arsenal with which he regularly threatens each of his neighbors and the world’s leading military power.

It’s true: Kim Jong Un does not “do the right thing.” It’s true: Kim Jong Un does not lead to “satisfy the motives” of his followers. But is he not, as we generally and sensibly, if somewhat loosely and informally, define the word, a “leader”?

The question is not simply a semantic one. It is of the utmost practical consequence. For if leadership experts and educators continue to exclude from the conversation a leader such as Kim Jong Un, Leadership Studies will remain impoverished as an area of intellectual inquiry. And Leadership Development will be deprived of the pragmatism necessary to its real as opposed to imagined success.

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*Evan Osnos, “Letter from Pyongyang:  On the Brink,” The New Yorker, September 18, 2017.

Mark Warner, top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, is squeezing Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “I think that we’re still at the tip of the iceberg,” Warner said, speaking of Russia’s use of Facebook to influence the 2016 presidential campaign. “The fact is,” Warner continued, “I don’t think Facebook has put the resources, the time,” into probing the matter. “I think there’s a lot more” the company can do.

The metaphor – “the tip of the iceberg” – is Warner’s shot across Facebook’s bow. One of the Senate’s most prominent members has made it clear: none of the major tech companies will be immune any longer from public scrutiny. To the contrary – as special counsel Robert Mueller would similarly testify – these companies are prime targets in any Russia related investigation. (Because Mueller was able to secure a search warrant, he now has in hand all Russia-linked ads that ran on Facebook in the months leading up to the election.)

At first Facebook flatly denied any involvement in the campaign. Moreover, it had rejected the Clinton campaign’s contemporaneous request that it delve into the matter. In fact, Zuckerberg himself went on record as saying that the very idea that Facebook had any political impact at all was “pretty crazy.” Well, not exactly.

The real issue though is a larger one – it goes beyond Facebook. The real issue is, as New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo recently put it, that the most “glaring and underappreciated fact of internet-age capitalism,” is that all of us are now in “inescapable thrall” to the “Frightful Five” –  that is, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet. Ironically, until now, all five of these companies were virtually immune from public criticism, at least in the US. To the contrary, as Maya Kosoff wrote in Vanity Fair, for years, they were the object of our admiration, “ensconced in a halo of good will” that mostly protected them from the sorts of anti-trust investigations and large fines that were being leveled against them in Europe. Founders and chief executive officers were similarly ensconced – in that “halo of good will.” Men such as Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook have been far more admired for their extraordinary capacities than criticized for their inordinate overreach.

The times though “they are a-changin’”. Unsavory stories featuring one or another major tech company have started recently regularly to appear. (In the last 24 hours was this New York Times headline, “Google and Facebook Face Criticism for Ads Targeting Racist Sentiments.”) Additionally, is the climate in Washington, which is slowly starting to favor regulatory action. Prominent progressives have been critical of the major tech companies for some time. (Elizabeth Warren warned last year that companies such as Google and Amazon were “trying to snuff out competition.”) And now they are joined by Trump administration officials skeptical of behemoth tech companies that are usually perceived as left-leaning. Former White House aide Steve Bannon, for example, argued in favor of regulating Facebook and Google as public utilities.

For more than a decade no American leaders have been as powerful as those at the top of the Frightful Five. But in recent years they’ve been flying increasingly, perilously, close to the sun. Unless they get out in front of the recent headlines, they, like Icarus, are sure to get their wings clipped.

For some time now Mark Zuckerberg has been regarded as one of America’s genuine originals. One of its most remarkable innovators and, as Facebook grew into a behemoth of a business, one of its greatest corporate leaders ever. The kid in the hoodie, the Harvard dropout, the computer genius at the center of the award-winning film “The Social Network,” by the time Zuckerberg turned 25 he was a legend.

But now his leadership of Facebook has been clouded by suspicion. Suspicion that his company profited handsomely from its dealings with the Russians. Suspicion that his company is being less, much less, than transparent. Suspicion that his company is putting its financial interests ahead of America’s political interests – ahead of its electoral integrity.

This leaves Mark Zuckerberg with a choice. Starkly put it’s between his private interest on the one hand, and the public interest on the other.  I wonder if he’s aware that straddling the line on this won’t do. I wonder if he’s aware that he’s already in Congress’s crosshairs. I wonder if he’s aware that his legacy will depend on how he decides.

Just this past week, about a year after Wells Fargo first got embroiled in scandal, the bank made a further announcement: there were some 70 percent additional potentially unauthorized accounts than it originally admitted. These accounts now number about 3.5 million.

Moreover, the bank’s recent review revealed another problem: unauthorized enrollments – that is, unauthorized by those being enrolled – in the bank’s online bill payment service. Wells finally confessed to finding more than a half million such cases, and to hauling in close to a million dollars in additional fees. A million ill-gotten gains here, a million ill-gotten gains there, well, it adds up.

As Gretchen Morgenson summarized the situation: “The mounting infractions at Wells Fargo are getting hard to track without a scorecard. Unrequested auto insurance that affected 800,000 people – check. Unauthorized changes to mortgage repayment terms in bankruptcy – check. Improper withholding of funds to some car loan customers – check.”*

When there is this much malfeasance, over such a sustained time, blaming those at the top does not suffice to assign guilt.  Or to explain what happened and how. There is, in other words, no way in hell to understand the scandal at Wells Fargo without a systemic analysis.

• First, an analysis of the bank’s leadership group – that is, its entire management team including the board and senior executives.
• Second, an analysis of the bank’s cadres of followers, including, for example, its lawyers and other enablers, along with its minions of mid-level employees, many if not most of whom no doubt knew they were doing wrong but did it anyway.**
• Third, an analysis of the bank’s corporate culture, including its values; its premium on making money even if at the expense of its customers; its sanctioning of high pressure sales tactics; and its shameless abandonment of individual and institutional accountability.

The government is not done with this case. Democrats in the House and Senate have called for further hearings, though it’s not yet clear if the Republicans will go along.

The leadership industry, in any case, cannot afford to ignore this case. We, we leadership experts and educators, must show our clients and customers, and above all our students, how relatively easy it is to go to the dark side. And how, when bad things happen, not only are leaders responsible but followers as well.

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*https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/31/business/wells-fargo-testimony.html?_r=0

**A handful of Wells Fargo employees did try to blow the whistle. But they obviously were in the tiny minority.

Some two decades ago, I wrote in a book that nearly no one read that while historically they had been different, leadership in government and leadership in business were beginning to converge.*

But now times have changed. The old rules no longer apply. To create change in the twenty-first century a more eclectic approach will be required. More precisely, 1) politicians will have no choice but to take cues from their corporate counterparts; 2) business executives will have no alternative but to learn lessons from leaders in government; and 3) leaders in both domains will have to reinvent themselves to create something new… the reinvented leader: the man or woman whose capacity to create change will confirm that what works in one domain is nearly identical to what works in the other.

My prediction was accurate. Political leaders and corporate leaders are far more similar now than they are different. What has not, however, happened, is that leaders in one domain cross over in any numbers to the other. There are occasional exceptions to this general rule: first CEO and then Mayor Mike Bloomberg is a notable example. But by and large leaders stay in their lanes. More specifically, by and large leaders in the private sector confine themselves to the private sector. They are careful not to take risks by venturing into the public one.

The presidency of Donald Trump – and the inefficacy of government more generally – has thrown this practice into question. In recent months, more CEOs have spoken out against political business as usual, and for improved governance in the White House and beyond. Recent examples:

• Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier (who resigned from the president’s American Manufacturing Council in the wake of the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville): “As CEO of Merck and as a matter of personal conscience, I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism.”
• Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz: “This is a time in the history of our country when every business leader needs to demonstrate the moral courage to stand up for what this country is all about.”
• JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon: “Constructive economic and regulatory policies” are insufficient to get the country back on track given the “divisions in our country. It is a leader’s role, in business or government, to bring people together, not tear them apart.”
• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: “CEOs have to be responsible for something more than their own profitability. You have to serve a broader group of stakeholders – from employees to the environment – and when politicians don’t get things right, corporate leaders have to act. That’s a big shift.”
• Marriott CEO Arne Sorensen: A more political role for chief executives today is “unavoidable and essential….There is enormous anxiety right now among our guests, and our community all over the world. They want to hear a voice that is welcoming, and affirming.”
• Apple CEO Tim Cook: “The reality is that government, for a long period of time, has for whatever set of reasons become less functional and isn’t working at the speed that it once was. And so it does fall, I think, not just on business but on all other areas of society to step up.”

Sentiments such as these are in consequence of bad circumstances. But they are welcome. The United States can no longer afford leaders who are siloed. We need CEOs who recognize that corporate social responsibility assumes a civic role. We need CEOs who openly acknowledge that issues such as immigration and education require their intermittent intervention. We need CEOs who are, if not citizens first, at least citizens second.

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*Reinventing Leadership: Making the Connection Between Politics and Business, State University of New York Press, 1999.

Like the sound of it?

Don’t like the sound of it?

Either way, get used to it.

Just a few days ago, Maureen Dowd, in one of her must-read columns in Sundays’  New York Times, wondered if the “Blowhard Will Blow Us Up.” If Donald Trump would usher us into the “nuclear winter.”

Impossible to imagine that anything Trump could do in the interim would wipe America’s nuclear showdown with North Korea off the front pages. But he did. Recent events in Charlottesville, and the president’s response to these events, have stolen his own thunder.

Donald Trump is a walking, talking machine gun. His leadership style is to fire at his followers a volley of bullets in almost immediate succession. His bullets come so fast and furiously impossible to gather ourselves before the next round is fired.

Leaders as lethal as Donald Trump never, ever leave of their own accord. They must be dragged off stage – by their followers. To their credit, many Americans in many different places have already said their piece. They have already publicly stated that Trump is a president so bad they refuse to support him. In fact, since yesterday’s “off the rails” presidential press conference, there has been something of a follower feeding frenzy – people standing in line to take a stand against the president.

But, while the current feeding frenzy is heartening, it is insufficient. Moreover, it threatens to wind down before the deed is done. The pressure on the leader-in-chief must be relentless until he exits. The American people must sustain their feeding frenzy until this presidency is devoured.

Robert S. Mueller, III, the special counsel investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, is known for the judicious, meticulous way in which he comports himself and conducts his professional practice. By all accounts he is slow and deliberate in his work, and above all thorough. When Mueller is in charge, no stone is left unturned.

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This time, though, I’m begging you, Bobby! Please leave just one little rock where you found it!

Far be it from me to question your methods, which clearly are formidable. Few Washington players have reputations as unblemished as yours. But, could be this investigation is different. Could be this investigation is time-sensitive in a way that others were not. Could be this investigation has national and even international implications that others did not. Could be this investigation demands you be just a tad less exhaustive and a tad more efficient.  

Publicly the president insists he’s not going to fire you. Asked about this just two days ago, Trump replied, “No, I’m not dismissing anybody. I mean, I want them to get on with the task.” But, we know that statements like these are in stark contrast to what Trump has said privately. Privately he has suggested that if he could he would fire you in a New York minute (my phrase), because he worries your investigation will undermine him.

Even more troublesome is the apparent connection between your investigation and Trump’s tendency to go off half-cocked to distract us from what otherwise would dominate the news – anything that connects Trump to anything Russian. Impossible for me to say with certainty if, for example, his out-of-nowhere ban on transgenders in the military is connected to your investigation. Equally impossible for me to say with certainty if his out-of-nowhere escalation to the point of nuclear showdown is similarly related. But the timing is suspicious. And the president’s past patterns suggest that diversion from your investigation is likely his motivation for more than one curious, dangerous, outburst.

Bottom line Bobby, is this. The fate of the world is in your hands. So, the sooner your work gets done, the better.

No pressure.