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There ought to be a law. I don’t just mean a U.S. law. I mean an everywhere law. A law in China as Canada, in Russia as Argentina as Venezuela. Moreover, I don’t just mean a law in government. I mean a law in business – and in every other entity arranged hierarchically.

The law pertains to age and to time served. So, it would have a Part A, and a Part B, and it would look like this:

• Part A: No leader anywhere, of any group or organization of any kind, may serve over the age of 80.
• Part B. No leader anywhere, of any group or organization of any kind, may serve for longer than 12 years.

The arguments for such a law are almost self-evident. People like power and when they have it, they don’t usually want to give it up. Some stay on long past their sell-buy date, well past when they have the requisite mental and physical vigor. Others stay on long past when they have ideas that are new and fresh, well past when they are imaginative and innovative. And still others stay on long past when they can connect with those who are younger, especially with those who are younger not just by one generation but by two.

This last is especially important at a time when robotics are near certain to wipe out large numbers of blue-collar jobs. And at a time when Artificial General Intelligence is near certain to wipe out large numbers of white-collar jobs. Hard even for 50-year-old leaders to connect with followers more than half their age – not to speak of leaders who are 60, 70, and even 80 years old.  

Does advanced age have advantages? Of course. 50-, 60-, and 70-year-old leaders have assets – traits, characteristics, experiences, bodies of knowledge – that leaders half their age do not. So, I am not arguing that older leaders are per se inferior. All I am arguing is that they do not serve either indefinitely or into their dotage.   

Leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el Sisi are all over the age of 70 and they have all held power for between ten and twenty-five years. Corporate leaders like Jamie Dimon and Bob Iger are similarly long-lived. Dimon is almost 70 years old and has served as CEO of JPMorgan for approximately two decades. Iger is just under 75 years old and has served as CEO of Disney for approximately two decades.  

Each of these long-lived leaders remains in many ways impressive. By many measures Putin, Xi, Erdogan and el-Sisi have been and remain leaders who are extraordinarily effective. The same can be said of Iger and, especially, Dimon. Moreover, their legacies will endure – their impact on their countries and companies has been that great.

Contrast this though with the American military. Though Americans’ trust in the military is not as high as it used to be, say a generation ago, it still ranks far higher in our estimation than most other American institutions. For example, in 2023, 60% of Americans trusted the military “a great deal or quite a lot,” whereas only a scant 26% said the same of the presidency.

Is it pure coincidence that in the U.S. military mandatory retirement of all generals and flag officers is 64? Is it pure coincidence that this can be extended to age 66 only under exceptional circumstances? Is it pure coincidence that this can be extended to age 68 only on the orders of the president?

No. No. And no.

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Oratory has become a lost art. In most American schools public speaking is no longer taught. In most American schools debating is no longer prized. In most American schools speaking up and speaking out is as likely to be excoriated as extolled.

Similarly, in most American businesses orders from on high are given in writing. In most American businesses information is distributed not by leaders but by managers. In most American businesses communication is more likely to be among peers than between superiors and subordinates.

Same applies to America’s commons, to speech broadly defined as political. Most members of the Supreme Court are effectively silent. Most members of the House and Senate are rarely seen and even less heard. Most presidents of the United States – certainly our most recent ones – have been many things but being a good orator has not been among them. During his first term in the White House Donald Trump was more off the cuff entertainer than deliberate speaker. During his only term in the White House Joe Biden was more muffled muser than considered communicator. During his second term in the White House Trump is more stream of consciousness rambler than reliable reporter. In sum, Trump, Biden, and then again Trump have failed, totally, to perform even respectably well on what is widely considered among the most important leadership skills – the capacity to communicate.  

This could mean one of several things. For example, that some leaders are exempt from the usual standards – that they can get away with communicating poorly whereas others can’t. Or it might mean that how “good” communication is measured in the present is different from how it was measured in the past. Or that followers just don’t care anymore how, or even if, their leaders communicate with them. Maybe there are now so many distractions, so many things competing for our attention, that what leaders say and how they say it no longer matter.

However – it seems still to hold true that when a remarkably gifted speaker enters the political arena people will stop and they will listen. They will bestow on said speaker that rarest of gifts – their attention.

Check out Zohran Mamdani. We know by now that he came out of nowhere to become mayor-elect of New York City. We don’t fully know how he did it. There are several explanations, of course, ranging from what is objectively New York City’s affordability crisis to his own, especially skilled use of social media first to make himself known and then to send his message.  But if you really want to grasp his success, check out the speech he delivered late last night, his victory speech. Whatever you might think of the content, it was a remarkable display of oratorical skill. It was a throwback to when how leaders communicated with followers was of consummate importance.

Maybe oratory is more forgotten art than lost art. Maybe when a leader speaks exceptionally clearly and concisely, forcefully and convincingly and in a ringing voice; maybe when a leader’s diction is superb and their language is well chosen, and maybe when a leader knows how to read a room and frame their presentation accordingly, maybe then great oratory remains an asset as invaluable as incalculable.  

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I apologize for the interruptions in delivering this course. I’ve been finishing writing my new book – about which more later!

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As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.

Today we are turning to one of the most formidable – and influential – minds of the 20^th century, Sigmund Freud. Freud was founder and proselytizer of psychoanalysis – a mental health therapy grounded in the relationship between the analyst and the analysand. He was, however, at least as interested in the dynamics of groups, especially large groups, as in those that are one on one. Interestingly, counterintuitively, they are closely related.  

Freud understood that his therapeutic approach depended on the degree to which his patients saw him as an authority figure. He further understood that this was similar to, if not even the same as, the way people in groups see their leaders as authority figures. Authority figures on whom they depend for safety and security.

There is, in other words, a direct correlation between Freud’s groundbreaking work on groups and his groundbreaking work on individuals, specifically on psychoanalysis. All of it emanated from and related to his ideas about power and authority – about leadership and followership.

As far back as 1921, in one of his early books, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud wrote about how groups need some sort of centripetal force – a leader – to keep them from disintegrating. Using the Catholic church and the military as examples, Freud described how in each of these large, disparate groups, individuals were deeply, profoundly connected to their leaders, and to each other.

In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, which appeared in 1939, during the time of Hitler, Freud attempted to answer the question that he himself posed, arguably humankind’s most vexing: “How is it possible,” Freud asked and then sought to answer, “that one single man can develop such extraordinary effectiveness, that he can create out of indifferent individuals and families one people…?”

From Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921.

The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father: the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extraordinary passion for authority; in Le Bon’s phrase, it has a thirst for obedience.

From Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930.

Human life in common is only made possible when a majority come together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals…. This replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization.

From Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 1939.    

Why the great man should rise to significance at all we have no doubt whatever. We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill treats them.

No matter what you think of the two massive No Kings Day protests – one held yesterday and the other last June. No matter in other words your political persuasion. If you’re interested in leadership you should know these names.

For Greenberg and Levin have done something extremely rare. Not just in the United States – rare everywhere. They have spurred a political movement and they have spun it out of whole cloth. For they are the tip of the spear – the leaders – of Indivisible. And Indivisible is the tip of the spear – the leader, despite the protestations of collaborations – of No Kings Day.

As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.

Today we are turning to the early 20^th century German social theorist, Max Weber. While Weber’s name is not now widely known, he was as responsible as anyone else for transforming leadership into a serious subject worthy of serious study. More precisely, as we have seen even in this short course, in the distant past leaders and leadership were deemed intellectually worthy – worthy subjects for great minds to contemplate. Think Confucius, Plato, and Machiavelli. However, as the academy began to slant from the liberal arts to the social sciences, the importance of individuals in politics and economics was diminished. Humans are, after all, difficult to systematize and organize. And almost impossible to measure.   

Weber could see, however, that as small states were becoming large nation-states, and that as small businesses were becoming large organizations, the world was changing. Among the changes: people with power were more important than ever. This pertained everywhere – in Europe, Asia and America, in business as in government, in education and in the military.

Here I will provide capsule descriptions of his distinctions among three types of leaders. More precisely of the three different sources from which leaders derived their power to lead.  In a departure from my usual practice in these posts I will not quote Weber directly, as translations of his works from German into English are not exactly enthralling. Instead, I will provide my own summaries of the three different leadership types that Weber identified.

Max Weber’s “three pure types of legitimate authority.” They are taken from his book, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, originally published in 1921.

• Type #1: Rational authority. Leaders can lead because they are seen by their followers as having a legal right to do so.

• Type #2: Traditional authority. Leaders can lead because they are seen by their followers as legitimate heirs to legitimate traditions – as for example, when a prince inherits the throne from his father, the king.

• Type #3: Charismatic authority. Leaders can lead because they are seen by their followers as so exceptional as to merit not just extreme dedication but, also, in many cases. extreme devotion.      

Now’s a good time to be a boss. A very good time.

Not long ago, things were different. During the pandemic and for a while thereafter times were tough for corporate leaders. Employers would say “jump” and their employees would answer, “not so fast.”

• “You think I should be back in the office again, five days a week, from 9 to 5? Think again!”
• “You think I should sit seven hours a day in a sea of desks and a building without benefits? Think again!”
• “You think I’m unfree to say what I want when I want? Think again!”
• “You think I should accept your job offer with its puny pay and punier benefits? Think again!”

Now though the worm has turned. It’s the leader, the employer, who’s back in the catbird seat, and the follower, the employee, who’s behind.  

Why the role reversal?  

• Reason # 1: Historically, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels pointed out in 1848, generally capitalists (owners) are far stronger than proletariats (workers), who are far weaker.
• Reason # 2: The labor market, while still quite good, is less robust than it was a few years ago. This year alone U.S. based companies announced more than 800,000 job cuts. Amazon is a case in point: it has eliminated more than 27,000 jobs since 2022 – and CEO Andy Jassy made clear that more cuts are coming.
• Reason # 3: AI is changing not just the conversation but the facts on the ground. Entry level jobs have been especially hard hit, AI in part the explanation. Moreover employers are leery of over-hiring, especially for jobs likely in short order to be done better, faster, and cheaper by artificial intelligence.
• Reason # 4: The Trump administration is providing the leadership class with a favorable climate and safe harbor. Moreover, Trump’s own financial, professional, political, and personal sympathies lie not with workers but with those who hire and fire them.
• Reason # 5: The Trump administration is changing, or trying to, regulations that are more favorable to shareholders than to managers. For example, the president proposed that the Securities and Exchange Commission drop its requirement that every three months publicly held US companies disclose their financials.
• Reason # 6: The Trump administration favors tax policies kind to haves and distinctly less kind to have-nots. It’s not as if haves need it! According to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs now earn nearly 300 times as much as workers. CEO salaries have risen fully 1,094% since 1978. And in 2024 CEOs took home an average pay package of nearly $23 million.    
• Reason # 7: The Trump administration has made no bones about it: CEOs abjectly loyal to the president will benefit from his largesse.
• Reason # 8: Workers – employees, followers – are laboring in tough times. Moreover, they have few arrows in their quiver. Only recently, when Joe Biden was president, unions showed signs of life. In 2023, for example under the leadership of Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers negotiated successful agreements with the big three American automakers. Under Trump, however, Fain and his ilk have been nowhere to be seen.

Most people would say they would rather lead than follow. Especially now. For bosses are not only back they are back in a very big way.

As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.

Today we are turning to John Stuart Mill – of whom critic Adam Gopnik wrote, “Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth -century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil.”

It’s a lovely, witty, comment, testimony to Mill’s being the quintessential, near perfect, liberal. A champion of equality between and among everyone, everywhere in the world. Which of course has implications for leadership – and followership.

The timeless essay from which I draw below – “On Liberty” – is as vivid testimony to the right to autonomy as anything written in English. It was penned in 1859 by which time, of course, the American and French revolutions had already taken place and the old order ostensibly overthrown. But as the persistence of slavery in the West all too vividly testified, the new order had still to find its footing not just in the United States but in Europe.

In “On Liberty,” Mill speaks to this issue. Specifically, to the work that still had to be done to realize every man’s full potential. And… every woman’s. For Mill was a famous feminist – married, not incidentally, to a famous feminist, Harriet Taylor – almost before there was such a thing.

The essay, or treatise, is not directly about either leaders or followers. Indirectly, however, it is about both. For above all it is an ode to human freedom. Mill’s insistence that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign,” is as compelling a claim as there is of your right to captain your ship, and my right to captain mine. Mill was not a libertarian. He would not have argued against the role of government, with a few necessarily doing the governing while the many must consent to being governed. Still, he would have insisted that in so far as possible, and in so far as it does not intrude on anyone else, all leaders should give all followers a free hand to live as they see fit.   

From “On Liberty” ….

• The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people But if he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgement in things which concern himself, the same reasons which allow that opinion should be free, prove also that he should be allowed without molestation, to carry out his opinions into practice at his own cost.

• Neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it.

• Considerations to aid his judgment, exhortations to strengthen his will, may be offered to him, even obtruded on him, by others. But he himself is the final judge. All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.

In the most recent issue of The Atlantic, George Packer has an article titled, “America’s Zombie Democracy.” (Link below.) As always with Packer, it is excellent. As often with Packer, it is a definite downer. It’s not necessary for me here to expand on exactly how – the title tells the tale.  

The point of this post is different in one all-important respect. It is that whatever is plaguing democracy in the United States is plaguing democracies everywhere. No nation is exempt from the ills that are ours.

For example, no democracy is exempt from leaders who seem feckless and hapless, especially in comparison with other sorts of leaders. Leaders who are authoritarians and who sometimes seem far more able to get things done. To be efficient as opposed to inefficient, and to ensure security and stability. China’s President Xi Jinping is the quintessential example.

But lest we think that leaders are to blame for zombie democracies we should think again. No democracy anywhere in the world is exempt from followers who are angry and frustrated, impatient, coarse, and rude. From followers who are extremely quick to attack their leaders, to tear them down, but excruciatingly slow to praise them, to lift them up.

America is not. then, the only zombie democracy. Zombiism is nibbling at or even swallowing democracies the world over.

• In Great Britain where Prime Minister Keir Starmer – though he has been in office only a year – already has approval ratings lower than those of any other western leader.
• In France where beleaguered President Emmanuel Macron is contending with yet another collapsed government – yet another indicator the country is now suffering from “chronic political instability.”
• In Germany where Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, the Christian Democrats, has fallen behind Germany’s far right party, the Alternative for Germany.
• In Brazil where, having been found guilty of plotting a coup, former president Jair Bolsonaro has been sentenced to 27 years in prison.
• In Japan where the recent resignation of the prime mister – again, after only a year in office – has set the stage for “a period of renewed uncertainty.”
• In South Korea where, following the impeachment last year of its prime minister, the government continues to experience “significant political instability.”
• In India, the so-called “world’s largest democracy,” where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has, according to Freedom House, significantly increased harassment of its critics and discriminatory policies, especially against Muslims.
• In Turkey where … well, I could go on….

What Packer identifies and describes is not, then, just an American problem. Zombiism is far more widespread which means it is far more insidious. Moreover, because it afflicts democracies everywhere, it raises the question of whether, given the times in which we live, democracies are sentenced indefinitely to struggle. It could be that 21^st century cultures and technologies have got to a point where strongmen are the future not just in some countries but in most.

I am not saying that we are destined indefinitely to live in democracies metamorphosed into zombies. I am saying that zombiism is not peculiarly American. And that it might run wider and deeper than we now know.

New York Times columnist David French is an Evangelical Conservative. He is decidedly not a Democrat, a leftist, or even a centrist. But in his recent column about the deal slated to hand Tik Tok to a small group of American investors, he describes President Donald Trump as the worst sort of crony capitalist. This when “crony capitalism has reached a new low.” French concludes , “There is no law holding [Trump] back. Instead, we are left to the whims and desires of a man who cares about only himself, a man who is willing to discard any law or standard to satisfy his insatiable lust for power.”

French’s use of the word “lust” overlaps precisely with how Todd Pittinsky and I define it in our book, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy.* Our definition of lust is simple, even prosaic. Lust is 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. Then the craving, and the quest, begin anew.

If you assume, then, as French does, that Trump has a “lust for power” then you assume several things at the same time.

• That Trump has a ceaseless craving to control.
• That this craving is, as French notes, “insatiable.”
• That this craving is all-consuming.
• That this craving will last as long as Trump does.
• That this craving will not be stopped or slowed by anything or anyone in any conventional way. Such as, for example, the rule of law or reliance on a traditional norm. If then, Trump is to be stopped or even slowed it will have to be in a way that historically is unprecedented.  

Americans who dislike and distrust Trump need to understand that leaders who lust appeal to followers. Trump was not rammed down America’s throat. He was freely elected and, if a presidential election were held today, it’s possible he would be voted in again. As we observe in our book, “leaders who lust can and often do appeal to followers pulled in by the leader’s obvious, sometimes even ostentatious passion, by their fierce ambition, and by their relentless determination.”

It’s precisely because leaders who lust, especially for power, appeal to followers who seek a savior, those of us not so inclined need to understand how high and steep our climb.  

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*Cambridge University Press, 2020.

As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

In the coming weeks, the entries are in Part I. They are About Leadership.

Today we are turning not to one contributor to the great leadership literature but to three: Thomas Carlyle, Herbert Spencer, and Leo Tolstoy.  The reason is they come down on different sides of the great debate: Do leaders make a difference? Or are even the greatest of leaders merely pawns on the chessboard of the cosmos?

Carlyle, a mid-nineteenth century Scottish philosopher and historian was and still is the most famous proponent of the importance of great men (yes, men). Specifically of the dominant role of the hero in the so-called “the hero in history” debate. Carlyle believed that the role of great men is not just important but all-important. It was so important that it far transcended the importance of anything or anyone else. Carlyle was, however, ecumenical and expansive in his conception of who the hero was and what the hero did. Alongside the king stood the poet; alongside the revolutionary stood the man of letters. To the degree that each was great each was a great leader. And to the degree that each was a great leader each made the world spin on its axis.

Herbert Spencer in contrast, another figure from the mid-nineteenth century, was a scientist and social scientist before he was a philosopher. So, he felt perfectly qualified to take on someone like Carlyle and to do so with all the intellectual clout he could summon. As we will see below, Spencer made mincemeat of Carlyle, or at least he tried to, the former finding the latter’s insistence on the importance of any single individual not just erroneous but ridiculous.

In this view he stood alongside none other than peerless Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, who similarly thought that the effort to attribute what happens to decisions made by great men was a fool’s errand. So, this post will end with some lines from Tolstoy.

From Carlyle’s, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History:

• For, as I take it, Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in this world are properly the outer material result, the practical realization and embodiment of thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

From Spencer’s, The Study of Sociology:

• But now, if dissatisfied with vagueness, we demand that our ideas shall be brought into focus and exactly defined, we discover the hypotheses [Carlyle’s hypothesis] to be utterly incoherent. If, not stopping at the explanation of social progress as due to the great man, we go back a step and ask whence comes the great man, we find that the theory breaks down completely.  

From Tolstoy’s War and Peace:

• The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander… should be carried out, the concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place…. We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events…. A king is history’s slave.