Author: Barbara

I yesterday wrote that President Donald Trump is intellectually and temperamentally unequipped to occupy the nation’s highest office. This presents a pressing problem absent a national crisis. This presents an existential problem present a national crisis. Particularly one that involves nuclear weapons.

It has been argued that past presidents failed to eliminate through conventional diplomacy the threat of a nuclear North Korea. There is merit to this argument. However, the off-the-cuff way in which Trump threatens unprecedented “fire and fury,” the almost casual way in which he invokes an event so catastrophic it has “never been seen before,” is unsettling to understate it. There appears no coherent national security strategy. There appears disorder and disunity among the president’s top foreign policy advisers. And there appears a diplomatic apparatus that is inexperienced and unseasoned, decimated and marginalized. It’s a state of the nation the nation cannot afford.

What to do? If the person at the top is disabled, or for some other reason not responsible, it is up to those close to the top carefully and cleverly to manage the situation. In this case, it is up to those close to the top to make certain that Trump does not abuse or even misuse his power.

Who in this case qualifies? Who might we trust to hold steady the ship of state? Whatever might be our misgivings, some obvious names come to mind.

• Vice President Mike Pence.
• Trump’s family, especially his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
• Trump’s closest advisors, especially Generals John Kelly and H. R. McMaster.
• Trump’s cabinet, especially Secretaries Rex Tillerson and James Mattis.
• Members of congress, especially powerful and prominent Republicans, such as Senators Mitch McConnell and John McCain, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Which raises the question of how this group could organize itself to build a buffer between the president and his own most dangerous impulses. Could be that one of these individuals takes the lead. Could be that some sort of alliance forms, a smaller, like-minded group within this larger group that comes together for the good of the country.  I do not claim that the solution to the problem is easy. I do claim that the problem of coping with a president who potentially is extremely dangerous is of the greatest national urgency.

Jerrold Post (who is a psychiatrist) and Robert Robins have written about how difficult it is to constrain leaders who in some way are impaired. They write, for example, that “an illness that affects the leader mentally and impairs decision making ability and intellectual acuity is particularly threatening.”* It is precisely because Trump at the helm could be “particularly threatening,” that those who might mitigate the threat have a responsibility to act if the danger becomes acute.

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When Illness Strikes the Leader (Yale University Press, 1993), p. 201.

Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962) is one of the best-selling and most admired history books of all time.  Centered on the first month of the First World War, historian Margaret MacMillan describes the book as “reading like a novel” from the very first sentence:

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.  

Tuchman was famous for her writerly majesty, especially for her ability to bring the past back to life. But her primary purpose was didactic. Her intent was to show how world leaders, even those relatively clever and well-intentioned, stumbled and bumbled their way into one of the greatest catastrophes of all time – a war during which a generation of European men was decimated. (More than nine million combatants and seven million civilians died in World War I.)

Among the leaders’ many miscalculations and misperceptions was that a war on European soil would be short, not long, and that the casualties in consequence could be contained. In fact, most of their errors of judgment fell into this category: a tendency to gravitate toward positive probable outcomes rather than negative ones. An inability to carefully consider the possibility that once war started, it would be difficult if not impossible quickly to stop, with calamity the inevitable outcome.

Leaders are mere mortals, Even the best and brightest are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of human nature. Which means that those who are less than the best and brightest – not to speak of those who are much, much less than the best and the brightest – should never, ever be entrusted by us to mediate matters of war and peace.

But, followers too are mere mortals. Which explains why we do what ideally we should not: leave it to our leaders, no matter how extremely ill-equipped, to decide our fate.

No two leaders with nukes in their grasp could possibly be temperamentally and intellectually less suited to the responsibility of preventing nuclear war than Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Which is precisely why it is up to those around them, those who have access, to temper their excess. Ordinary people have no choice but to rely on these minions to save us from what Tuchman, in another volume, called “the march of folly.”

It’s been widely observed that President Donald Trump seems really to respect “his” generals. He’s had generals in high positions since taking office. And by naming recently retired Marine Corps General John Kelly to be his chief of staff, making him, ostensibly, his closest advisor, the president sealed the deal. Not since the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a retired five-star general, have senior military officers been so empowered in what is, after all, a civilian government. In the United States of America, the military is supposed to implement policies set by civilians, not the other way around.

Trump’s military cadre is dominated by four top officials: Kelly; Secretary of Defense James Mattis, a retired Marine Corps general; National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, a Lieutenant General still serving in the army; and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joseph Dunford, another Marine general. Dunford’s role necessarily is filled by military. But the other three slots are not. Normally they are filled by civilians.

Trump’s own military experience was confined to his early and middle adolescence: his parents sent him to a military boarding school, New York Military Academy, when he was 13. So, while he never served in the armed forces, it’s plausible that during his years as a young cadet Trump developed an enduring fascination with, and fondness for men in uniform. Moreover, the president seems greatly to admire tough guys of any kind – and no one tougher than men who know war. So though there seems on the surface a disjuncture between Trump’s own undisciplined and even unruly nature, and the exceedingly high level of discipline that characterizes senior military leaders, in fact the “axis of adults,” the generals, have becalmed not only the president, but everyone else as well. The president himself might be a loose cannon, but the generals, we presume, are not. So we leave it to them to protect him, and us, from his own worst impulses.

In ordinary times, the American people might be puzzled or even alarmed by so many generals in so many high places. But, these are not ordinary times and Trump is no ordinary president. Which is precisely why so many us believe that “adult” supervision is required. Supervision of the commander in chief by men who, on paper certainly, are his subordinates. Telling is our faith that they have what it takes. Telling is our belief that they are up to the task. Telling is our trust that they can be counted on to do the right thing.

Which raises the question of why – why are America’s senior military leaders more reassuring than unsettling? Why, even when they play political parts, as opposed to military ones, are we relieved to see them in position? Because as a group they are better equipped to exercise leadership than anyone else in America.  Because as a group they are better prepared to assume leadership roles than anyone else in America. Because as a group they are better educated and trained for leadership than anyone else in America. Because as a group they better than anyone else in America are socialized to understand that leadership development is development lifelong.

Americans trust military leaders more than any other leaders – by far. In 2016 Pew reported that more than 75 % of Americans surveyed said they trusted military leaders either a “great deal” or a “fair amount.” This is in strong contrast even to religious leaders, who get similarly positive ratings from only 53% of Americans.

This is not good. In fact, it’s a sad commentary on how low is our regard for leaders in sectors other than the military. It’s especially sad because it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no reason in the world military leadership education and training should be so strikingly superior to leadership education and training elsewhere in America. We have the capacity to change this – to improve leadership education and training for everyone. All we need is the will.*

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*For an elaboration of this argument, see my forthcoming book, Professionalizing Leadership (Oxford University Press, early 2018).

In the last few days were two articles in the New York Times about the still remarkably low number of women at the top. In both was an element of surprise – as if by now women leaders should no longer be so few and far between.

The first was titled, “Women Dominate at Law School, but Not at Law Firms.”* It painted a “bleak picture for gender equity among leadership roles,” pointing out that though women now constitute more than half of current law school graduates, their share of equity partnerships remains at 20 percent. Moreover, in recent years this number has not ticked up one whit.

The second article, long and prominently featured, was titled, “Why Women Aren’t C.E.O.s.”** It focused on women who came close to the top, but then for various reasons “didn’t quite make it.” The sample here was select: women who were singularly successful but who never reached the highest rung. Which raises the question of why?

As usual, men got most of the blame. Not all of it. Some women, it was reported in the second piece, “are not socialized to be unapologetically competitive.” And many women – more than half of those who earn M.B.A.s – drop out of the full-time work force within a decade. Still, in the main the problem was said to be men. “Men remain threatened by assertive women.” And men get “extremely jealous.” And men think, “If I kick her, she’s not going to kick back.” And men create a climate in which the bias against women, while subtle, is “more pernicious than blatant discrimination.”

It’s amazing to me how after all these years, two to three decades at least, of wondering why the overwhelming majority of leaders remain men not women, the answers are still so conventional, so mind-numbingly repetitive. Mind you, this does not make them untrue. Men do, for example, remain threatened by assertive women – as I can attest! But to treat this issue as fundamentally psychological or sociological or organizational or structural or personal or interpersonal or behavioral is to miss the point entirely. The roots of this problem go all the way down, to the deepest level of what it means to be human. Of what it means to be a human animal – a mammal – which for most of human history meant males go out to hunt for food while females hang back to tend to their young.

To understand the role of sociobiology in the problem of women and leadership is not to say it is insoluble. But, it is to attack the problem from a different angle entirely.

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*https://www.google.com/search?q=Elizabeth+Olson%2C+%22Women+Dominate+at+Law+School%22&oq=

El&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i59j0l3.1703j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

**https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/21/sunday-review/women-ceos-glass-ceiling.html

Poland is among the more striking recent cases of countries taking a sharp turn to the right. For more than a decade it was the pride of Eastern Europe: an exemplary example of a country recovering from decades of communist stasis, with a thriving economy, a growing middle class, and a political sensibility closer to America than to Russia.

But, over the last two years Poland has changed.  Under the right-wing leadership of the Law and Justice party, the government has shifted sharply, away from democracy and toward autocracy.  According to Freedom House, an independent watchdog group, in the last couple of years the government has, for example, interfered excessively in the affairs of public media, and placed increasing restrictions on speech regarding Polish history and identity. Retreats like these “have collectively contributed to increased self-censorship and polarization.”

Things came to a head this week, when Poland’s parliament approved a measure, by a vote of 55 to 23, that would have drastically reduced or even eliminated judicial independence by, among other measures, putting the Supreme Court under the control of the governing party.

The European Union (EU), of which Poland is a member, made its opposition clear. It warned that the EU was “very close” to asking its member states to “issue a formal warning against Poland” over its attempts to subject the judiciary to political control.

But it was not the EU that suddenly motivated Poland’s President Andrzej Duda to announce today that he would veto the two bills that threatened judicial independence. It was the Polish people. Polish people protesting by the tens of thousands in more than 100 cities across the country – expressing their anger over the prospect of a return to rule by autocrats.

Still, today’s presidential veto notwithstanding, this battle is by no means over. Poles who prefer democracy over autocracy will, likely for years to come, have to fight for what they think right.

Mitch McConnell is a Republican Senator from the state of Kentucky. He has served in the Senate since 1985, and as Senate Majority leader since 2015. Susan Collins is a Republican Senator from the state of Maine. She has served in the Senate since 1997.

Collins is known as a smart, sensible, and solid senator. But McConnell is known as among the most clever and cunning of senators, a so-called Master of the Senate, credited with being super-savvy about the legislative process. The more startling, then, that on the most important of all recent congressional initiatives, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), McConnell lost and Collins won. He wanted Republican repeal and replace measures to pass. She did not – they did not.

Why? In part because the supposedly crafty McConnell made a major mistake at the outset. He chose not to invite a single woman to participate in working group meetings on repealing and replacing the ACA. That’s right. Though he claimed to have “everybody at the table,” in fact McConnell’s 13-member working group consisted exclusively of white males. As foolish as outrageous – an egregious error that cost him dearly. When time came to push for a vote on repeal, three Republican senators declared publicly that they would not support any bill that legislated repeal but not replace. All three were Republican women, led, arguably, by Senator Collins, who, from the outset, made her misgivings clear.

Michele Swers has written a very good book – Women in the Club – on gender and policy making in the Senate.  Had McConnell ever taken a look at the book he would’ve understood how excluding women from policy making, especially on an issue such as health care, was bad business. Since “gender affects the policy priorities of individual senators and the intensity of their commitment to issues,” keeping women out of the room while ACA decisions were being made was strategy idiocy.* McConnell should have known that the days when women in America can be excluded altogether, without men paying a price, are over. As Susan Collins might, in her understated way, be the first to testify.

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*Women in the Club: Gender and Policy Making in the Senate, University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 231.

Yesterday’s blog was about how uncertain a leader’s legacy, depending largely, though not entirely, on the leader’s successor. As of last night, it seems the cornerstone of Barack Obama’s legacy, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), will remain in place. Despite having control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, the Republicans were unable to repeal “Obamacare,” not to speak of replace it.

This raises the question of why? Given how strong their position, why were Republicans unable to do what they had repeatedly and relentlessly sworn to do for two years?

The ACA proved difficult and, likely, ultimately, impossible to dislodge for many reasons that include but are not limited to: 1) lack of transparency associated with the repeal and replace process; 2) widespread public disapproval of the replacement bill; and 3) difficulty in retracting any public benefit once it’s been granted.

I would argue though that there’s a single overweening explanation for why the ACA still stands – President Trump. Trump eagerly and effectively undid a slew of other Obama initiatives. The ACA, in contrast, he mouthed off about – but that was pretty much it. All Trump did to kill Obamacare was to announce that he was waiting, “pen in hand,” to sign the repeal and replacement legislation that Mitch McConnell was supposed magically to navigate through congress.

Everything we know about what it takes to enact major legislation of this sort tells us that presidential leadership – presidential wheeling and dealing, presidential back-slapping and hand-holding, presidential pleading, promising and threatening – is essential. Critical to the success of a controversial and complex legislative initiative, especially one on healthcare. Without relentless presidential involvement, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act was, in other words, never in the cards.

Truth is that large parts of Obama’s legacy were undone because his successor was determined to undo them. Truth is that the ACA remains the law of the land because if his successor was determined to repeal and replace it, there was scant evidence to this effect.

Once upon a time, long, long ago I led an organization. I thought I was good at it, leading the organization to places that were new and different, initiating and implementing ideas that were widely appreciated and applauded.

After a time, I went on to do other things, foolishly thinking that what I had accomplished would stay accomplished. Was, in effect, engraved in stone, destined to stay in place if not exactly in perpetuity then, at least, for some years.

Wrong. No sooner was I out the door and replaced by someone else, brick by brick what I imagined my legacy was largely dismantled. Never since to be restored or replaced by anything like it. I should’ve known better – but I did not. I was not then but am now aware of how fragile a leader’s legacy. To be sure, it is not always fragile, not always vulnerable to the vicissitudes of change. But sometimes it is – depending largely though by no means entirely on who is the leader’s successor.

Since President Barack Obama moved out of the White House, he has had no choice but to stand by while President Donald Trump undid much of his predecessor’s handiwork. Notwithstanding Obama’s eight years in the Oval Office, in just half a year Trump has already discarded large parts of Obama’s legacy.

At this writing, the fate of the Affordable Care Act is uncertain. But this much is certain:

• Obama’s sweeping trade deal? Cancelled.
• Obama’s global climate change accord? Inapplicable.
• Obama’s diplomatic opening to Cuba? Diminished.
• Obama’s rules on the environment, labor, financial protections, internet privacy, abortion, education, and gun rights? Many already reversed.

It remains to be seen which of these two presidents will have the greater long-term impact. It’s certainly possible that Trump’s successor will resurrect some of what Obama originally effected. Moreover, whatever the ultimate consequences of what these two leaders did or did not do, in the end it’s the people, voters, who decide. Still, leadership’s deep dark secret is, however seemingly successful, often as not it’s only temporary.

To get my audiences thinking, I’ll sometimes ask, “Who’s the greatest leader in the world”? Before they can respond with the name of someone who’s six feet under, I’ll hasten to add, “The leader has to be living – alive not dead.”

Until recently, the single name that almost everyone in any group agreed on was Nelson Mandela. As soon as his name was mentioned, everyone in the room seemed to concur: he was the greatest of all living leaders. But, Mandela has now passed, which leaves people stymied. Who is the greatest leader of all? Different people come up with different candidates – none of which elicit widespread agreement.

Asking people to identify the single greatest leader is, of course, something of a mind game. It is, nevertheless, an interesting exercise, if only because it reveals how small is the number of leaders widely considered “great.”

Still, I have my own current candidate for such an honorific – Bill Gates. Gates was one of the greatest leaders ever in technology. And, more recently, he is, along with his wife, Melinda Gates, one of the greatest leaders ever in philanthropy. A twofer unlikely soon to be rivaled.

Still, how you measure “greatness,” or even how you define it is fungible, flexible, malleable, variable. Open to interpretation and different points of view. If, for example, being a “great” leader is thought to depend only on the leader’s being effective, not on his or her being ethical, then names other than the likes of Gates come to mind – such as, now, inevitably, that of Vladimir Putin.

The degree to which Putin has accomplished what in his wildest dreams he perhaps imagined is stunning – even stupefying. Setting aside Crimea and Syria and the revival of European nationalism and populism, there is this. Under Putin’s leadership, Russia has derailed America’s political system.  Russiagate makes it even more difficult than it already is for Washington effectively and efficiently to function. Putin has at least partially paralyzed American politics which might – or it might not – make him the “greatest” leader in the world.

How to learn to lead in a time when leadership, generally, is in decline? How to learn to lead in a time when leaders, generally, are distrusted and disrespected? How to learn to lead in a time when leadership education, training, and development have so obviously fallen short?

The old model of leadership development is vividly exemplified by General Electric’s legendary management training center in Crotonville, New York. Since 1956, when GE bought the leafy 59-acre campus, every one of GE’s chief executives, most famously Jack Welch, has invested heavily invested in the idea that people in high places could learn to lead and manage, and that they could do so best in a sanctuary or retreat of some sort, especially one controlled by GE for its own particular pedagogical purposes. The fact that GE has not, for years, performed particularly well, has not deterred GE’s own leaders and managers from clinging to a model of leadership development that is nothing if not comfortably familiar.

The question is, how long will this apparently blind faith in a pedagogical template of questionable value persist? As Andrew Hill, writing recently in the Financial Times put it, “The GE way… is starting to look like an expensive, even anachronistic exception to the methods used by many companies to shape their future leaders – if they bother shaping them at all.”*

Hill does not focus on the question of metrics, on the question of how we can conclude with any degree of certainty that a leadership program is effective. Rather he points out how leadership roles themselves have changed. He raises the question of why, in an era of “looser networks and frequent job-hopping,” any company would bother to maintain its own leadership development program, especially if it was expensive.

The point of this piece is not to dwell on the anachronistic aspects of General Electric’s leadership programs. Rather it is to say that in-house leadership initiatives are diminishing in number – but that the effectiveness of what replaces them, for example, executive programs, remains still unclear. What is clear is that the appetite for learning to lead remains large. “A 2016 survey of millennials by Deloitte found that 63 percent of employees born since 1982 said their leadership skills were not being fully developed.” Which is precisely why leadership educators and experts should reassess in a major, meaningful way what learning to lead should consist of. All I will add at this point is that Plato thought that learning to lead was a process that took not days, or weeks, or months, or even years. It took decades.

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*FT Big Read. Leadership, June 23, 2017.