Category: Digital Article

Our fixation on leadership is as strong as ever.

• The private sector:  In the latest such deal, the Bank of America (BOA) and the Justice Department agreed to a nearly $17 billion settlement relating to charges that the bank had duped investors into buying toxic mortgage securities. The deal does not do what outraged critics wanted it to do: it does not punish individuals for wrongdoing. Leaders in other words, those who led and managed the banks in question, have generally been getting off Scott-free. (An exception to this rule may be Angelo Mozilo, former CEO of Countrywide Financial, which was acquired by BOA.) I do not denigrate this position: punishing institutions is hardly the same as punishing individuals. This is not, however, to say that no blame is being allocated. The BOA deal is the largest government settlement by any company in American history. So, much as some of us would like to see some previously in charge behind bars, to say that everyone is being held blameless is plain wrong.

• The public sector: Of all the observations that one might make about the recent events in Ferguson, MO, for a student of leadership none was as striking as the stunning lack of it. It was, if you will, a field day for followers, for leaders were nowhere in evidence. In short order, some of the old guard, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton among them, parachuted in to town – to little or no obvious effect. Government officials in turn, local, county, and state, including the governor and the mayor, all sent conflicting signals, with no single political leader emerging to take charge. Nor did either the white community or the black one have in place a person or persons who clearly was a spokesperson. If anyone at all was, is, leader-like in style and substance, it was Captain Ronald Johnson, the black Missouri State Highway Patrol official who finally was designated responsible for security. Unlike nearly everyone else, Johnson was able to calm tensions, and he was equally able to engage blacks and whites in civilized discourse. But Johnson’s success in his unaccustomed role was a reflection not only of his leadership skills, but of the paucity of same among those from whom it legitimately was presumed.

• At home: Headline on the front page of the New York Times: “As World Boils, Fingers Point Obama’s Way” (8/16/14). ISIS is turning out what even administration officials now concede is a threat “beyond any we have seen.” The question that only history will decide is whether President Barack Obama has been in any way, to any degree responsible for the situation in which the United States of America, and for that matter the rest of the Western world, now finds itself. We are a declared target of a terrorist group that has morphed into something akin to a country. Our tendency, not surprisingly, is as it has always been: to blame the person in charge for what happened. Whether this is fair or not is almost beside the point. The point is that ISIS materialized on Obama’s watch and that, rightly or wrongly, it is he who will be held to account for how this turns out.

• Abroad: What’s perhaps most remarkable about ISIS is that until recently it was unknown and unheard of. Until this summer nearly no American even knew the name ISIS, because even to those in the know it seemed not much more than yet another group of Middle Eastern terrorists, similar to those already  familiar. But overnight or so it seemed this band of near unknowns became something else entirely: they became leaders who were able able through various means – political, military, and financial – to force the United States to respond to them in kind, by force. What’s obvious even now is that in the 21^st century the old rules of the game no longer apply. Instead a very small knot of very dangerous people can compel a global superpower to engage in a military mission – in spite of its best laid plans.

 

Note:   I’ll be hitting the road for several weeks…. So this is my last post for the duration.

The violence in Ferguson, MO – which continues to spew sporadically in the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager – raises the question of whether it is at all useful. Does violence of this sort yield benefits to those who stoke it? Or are the authorities, from the President on down, right to try, day in day out, to quell it? Just yesterday Obama weighed in again, saying that while he understood the “passions and anger” in Ferguson, they served only to “raise tensions and stir chaos.” They undermined, he said, rather than advanced justice.

Be that as it may, let’s be clear: there is a long tradition of threatening, advocating, and defending violence when peaceful methods of protest, or for that matter no protests at all, seem inadequate to the task of creating change. To illustrate the point I quote from a single source, Nelson Mandela. The following words are his, excerpts from a far longer speech delivered in 1964, from a dock in a courtroom in Pretoria, South Africa.

I cite them not, obviously, to promote violence. Nor do I intend to suggest that South Africa in the early 1960s is analogous to America in the early 2000s. But Mandela’s defense of his own use of violence serves to remind that it has played a critical role in human history – including, I might add, in American history. Needless to say that the argument in support of resorting to violence has rarely been so carefully considered or so eloquently made. And, needless to say that from a distance what in Ferguson distinguishes criminality from strategy is impossible to say. Still, the point remains the same: under certain circumstances violence can be considered a political means necessary to achieve a political end.

Nelson Mandela, from his his three-hour speech, “I Am Prepared To Die.”

“Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism …. Second, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy….

It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle…. We did so not because we desired such a course, but solely because the Government had left us with no other choice…. I can only say that I felt morally obliged to do what I did….”

 

Does Jeff Bezos give a damn that over 1,000 writers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have now joined with over 900 authors from the United States to protest Amazon’s business practices? Does Jeff Bezos give a damn that over 1,000 writers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have now similarly signed a letter that claims that Amazon “manipulates recommendation lists”?  Does Jeff Bezos give a damn that over 1,000 writers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have now charged Amazon with making false statements about books put out by Bonnier, a publisher which, like Hachette, is taking on Bezos’s behemoth over e-book prices?

If he doesn’t, he should. First, you never want to get into a pissing match with large numbers of your suppliers. Second, you never want to get embroiled in a battle that blackens your name – over and over and over again. And third Bezos should know better than anyone else that in 2014 complaints are contagious – if they’re legit they go viral. The likelihood, in short, that Bezos can crush these now nearly 2,000 authors without getting his hands even a little bit bloody is small.

Followers Refusing to Follow

 

It was an arresting sight – to those of us who still read the papers on paper. Last Sunday two full pages of the New York Times were filled with names. Some 900 names, so the print was small. But there they were, some of them famous, some not, all of them belonging to authors lining up, signing up to protest one of the most visionary of American leaders, the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.

Like other tech titans approximately of his generation, Bezos has been an American darling, not only because of his technological genius but because of his acumen as a businessman. In relatively short order, Bezos built Amazon into one of the greatest operations on the planet. So for years he was untouchable: we watched in amazement and admiration as he grew his company beyond anyone’s wildest early imaginings.

Now however the worm has turned, at least slightly. First, the size of Amazon’s losses (some $800 million this quarter alone) has raised eyebrows, questions about whether, as the Times put it, “Amazon’s money-losing ways are finally catching up with it.” Second, one major publisher, Hachette, has had the nerve publicly to take on Amazon, to challenge in no uncertain terms some of its most onerous practices. And third… this. This spectacle of many of America’s best known writers – Stephen King, Donna Tartt, Robert Caro, Malcolm Gladwell, and Michael Lewis among them – standing alongside many of their lesser known counterparts to pressure Bezos to settle its pricing battle with Hachette. to “stop harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business.”

By definition writers are a lonely lot. Or, at least, they do not work in groups and they do not travel in packs. This though is an exception to the general rule. This is an example of an assemblage that normally is disparate and disorganized joining forces and getting organized. For the purposes of this protest they have grown a leader – Douglas Preston, who publishes with Hachette – and they have become a group that has a name, Authors United. But the 909 people who signed the letter to lobby Bezos have no common cause – except this one. The fact that they became a collective to oppose the very man on whom they depend for sales of their wares sends a signal  that Bezos would do well to heed.

Emily Rafferty, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced last week that she was stepping down after ten years as head. Ms. Rafferty got it right – after some time as a leader this time ought to be brought to a close.  There’s no clock to signal the moment is right to get out; there’s no chime to sound the end has come. But ten years – a decade as a leader – likely is as good a span as any for most leaders in most situations to call it quits.

Some years ago I wrote a book titled Bad Leadership. As I was writing the book I realized how relatively frequently people begin as good leaders but, after some extended period of time, become bad leaders. Juan Antonio Samaranch, former head of the International Olympic Committee, was such a leader. And so was William Aramony, former head of the United Way of America. As I wrote about both men, I realized that during their prolonged periods of maximum power and authority something went wrong. Both men had led their organizations for some 20 years, roughly the first half as good leaders and the second as bad leaders.

The reasons for going bad vary, of course. Moreover none of this is to say that leaders necessarily deteriorate after some number of years. But it is to suggest that the frequency of such a trajectory is unsettling. And it is to suggest that in the second decade of the 21^st century, when the world is changing at a famously rapid clip, consideration should always be given to how long a leader should lead.

Leaders in business are by no means immune to this general rule. But leaders in government are even more vulnerable to abusing their office simply by clinging to it for too long. Robert Mugabe has been president of Zimbabwe for over 25 years. Hun Sen has been prime minister of Cambodia for nearly 30 years. Vladimir Putin has already been either President or Prime Minister of Russia for 14 years and is promising, threatening, to stay in place for many more years to come.

This tendency to become addicted to power is in evidence also in Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has “only” been in office 11 years. But he has started to clamp down on his opponents, harden his views, and hold on to his position with the rough equivalent of dear life. What’s especially interesting about Erdogan is how clearly he demonstrates, yet again, this tendency for leaders to deteriorate over long periods of time.

Pari Dukovic observes in The New Yorker that while Erdogan is now an autocrat, “it wasn’t so long ago” that he was a “different kind of politician.” Not so long ago he spoke of unity and tolerance, was a moderate Islamist, smashed corruption, and advanced free expression. But then, Dukovic writes, “the Prime Minister’s office began to transform Erdogan.” He became intolerant of dissent, cultivated a climate of fear, built patronage networks, attempted to dictate private habits, and developed a personal agenda to perpetuate his political power.

Sad to say the case of Erdogan is typical. Too much power held for too long a time tends to be unhealthy – tends to go bad. It’s why there ought to be a law – ten years in any position of power and you’re out.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/portfolio-ghosts-of-gezi

 

 

 

 

 

For three years I have argued that patterns of leadership and followership have changed, fundamentally and irrevocably. There is nothing new in this: patterns of leadership and followership have always changed, from one era to the next. But until new systems are in place, people struggle to make sense of what’s happening. They struggle to govern themselves in a manner reasonably orderly.

Change is now everywhere in evidence: nearly no region, no sector, no group or organization is immune to new and foreign forces. Moreover these forces are at every level: at the level of the small group and the large organization, at the national level and at the international level as well.

Consider the newly established Brics’ bank – the bank just set up by the Brics countries, Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa.  On the one hand nations such as Russia, China, and India are not exactly “followers.” But on the other hand they have been in many ways -including in international banking – lesser than, second class citizens in comparison with countries such as Germany and the United States. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example, is routinely led by a European, and the World Bank is routinely led by an American. Small wonder both have been slow to recognize that the world is changing, and that less developed countries are no longer so willing to wait for more developed countries to pay them adequate attention.

As David Pilling pointed out in the Financial Times, old, previously existing institutions such as the IMF and World Bank reflect the realities of a receding age. The spanking new Brics Bank is in stark contrast. It reflects the reality of a rapidly changing world – one in which poor countries gradually are closing in on richer ones, and the previously meek increasingly assert themselves against the obviously strong.

The Brics bank constitutes a creative response to the forces of change. Not necessarily so, of course, for example in Libya, the latest example of a state so badly failed, so dismally dangerous  that the U. S. has decided to all but evacuate its embassy in Tripoli.

Strange to say that events like these – global change of great magnitude, imprecisely foretold – reduce even the best and the brightest to platitudes. To wit, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who last week repeated yet again his lament about the lack of good leadership. He closed out his column on Wednesday as follows: “”Keeping Madagascar out of the world of disorder…requires good leadership, and good leaders today – anywhere – are the rarest species of all.” What Friedman fails to appreciate is that the good old days – when good leaders seemed in relative abundance, and good followers seemed glad to go along – are over. Instead, people the world over, no matter their station, are taking matters into their own hands.

 

 

 

It’s odd – though mostly deeply sad – that James MacGregor Burns and Warren Bennis both died late last month, within a couple of weeks of each other. The death of neither man was untimely, Burns was 95 and Bennis 89. But together they leave a hole so large, so downright gaping, it’s not clear that it can ever be filled.

The field of leadership is not exactly fertile.  To be more precise, over human history it has been wonderfully well endowed with great minds thinking great thoughts about how people should lead – and for that matter about how they should follow. Thinkers from Plato to Paine, from Machiavelli to Mill, from Locke to Lincoln, and from Freud to Fanon all spent the better part of their lives on leadership. But the last part of the 20th century and the first part of the 21st have not been rich or replete with first rate minds thinking first rate thoughts about how people organize themselves – about how they can be led, should be led, are led in a world characterized by change at a ferocious clip.

So to those of us who remain relentlessly engaged in the study of leadership, the near simultaneous loss of Burns and Bennis is particularly painful. They both loomed large over the field, known for their intelligence and integrity, for their voluminous productivity, for their grace and generosity, and, perhaps above all, for their shared concern over the human condition.

Withal, for all their expert tilling of a certain soil,  it’s likely that Bennis, like Burns, will be better remembered for what he was than for what he did. Bennis’s grin preceded him – his joy in life so inordinately infectious that no one was immune. Not a bad tribute – which is why he, like his approximate contemporary, is a loss as personal as professional.

 

 

 

 

Stresses between leaders and followers are everywhere in evidence. Nearly no place on the planet is exempt from the changes in culture and technology that have altered forever relations between those who ostensibly lead and those who ostensibly follow.

However, what has happened in China in the last couple of years, and what has happened in Russia, is similar in ways best explained by turning back the clock – by looking to the past to shed light on the present.

Both Chinese and Russian authorities have clamped down on dissent. Fearful of the political restiveness that characterizes much of the rest of the world, political leaders in China and Russia have increasingly sought to stifle, even suppress, their domestic opposition. And both have similarly sought to strengthen their positions at home by adventurism abroad. China’s President Hi Jinping has stirred the pot in the South and East China Seas. And Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has seized Crimea and wreaked havoc in Eastern Ukraine.

To see how deep the imprint of authoritarianism both in China and Russia it’s instructive to read two recent pieces – in, of all places, “The Arts” section of the New York Times. (Links below.) Of course controlling dissent by controlling creativity is nothing new. Hitler’s bonfire of the books, the burning in 1933 of some 25,000 “un-German” volumes, is the most infamous example of this type of political hooliganism. Still, it’s worth being reminded that the life of the mind remains at risk.

A new opera, titled “Dr. Sun Yat-sen,” about the founding of the Chinese Republic, had its American premiere last week in Santa Fe. It did not, however, make its debut as originally intended, in Beijing. Instead it was forced first to be performed in Hong Kong – a Chinese outpost. Moreover its star, the tenor Warren Mok, who was supposed to perform in Santa Fe, went missing, withdrawing in the last minute, near certainly because of political pressure. Along similar lines was a recent performance in New York City of Russia’s fabled Bolshoi Ballet. Here is an excerpt from the review by Alastair Macaulay, who obviously was aghast at the regressive display. “It was hard not to think of politics when watching the Bolshoi’s repertory – which was entirely pre-glasnost….  What on earth does the company’s artistic director, Sergei Filin, make of this artistic recession? … What lies ahead for this whole company, so richly talented, yet now tumbling back into a pre-1989 [Soviet] nightmare?”

To understand this crass, clumsy intrusion into arts (among many other things), we need to return to China and Russia in the not-distant past. Both were totalitarian states – they had political and economic systems in which the government had complete control. Both were led – China from 1949 to 1976; Russia from 1924 to 1953 – by totalitarian dictators, Mao Zedong and Stalin respectively, who would as soon eliminate their followers as surrender to them a speck of  power. And both were Communist states at a time in which Communism and totalitarianism were nearly always one and the same. In fact, the legacy of Communism lingers as does that of totalitarianism. Hi Jinping is not only President of China, he is, simultaneously, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China. Vladimir Putin is not only President of Russia in the present, he is the self-same Vladmiir Putin who for fully sixteen years, until it disbanded, was part of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s notorious security agency. Moreover the two men share something else – nostalgia for the good old days. Beijing has invested heavily in glorifying its Communist heritage, which explains why Chinese tourists increasingly are visiting sites that extol Mao. And Moscow has similarly revived the dream of restoring to Russia at least some of the empire it enjoyed during the Soviet era. Not for nothing did Putin describe the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy” of the 20^th century.

Totalitarian leadership begets totalitarian followership – by that I mean followers who go along to get along. Let me clear here. This certainly does not mean that there has been no Chinese or Russian dissent in the past, and it certainly does not mean that there is no Chinese or Russian dissent in the present. But what it does mean is that neither country has a long history or a clear ideology in support of the idea of democratic rule.  To the contrary. History makes clear why change from below in both China and Russia has been – and will continue to be – inordinately difficult to implement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/arts/music/dr-sun-yat-sen-in-the-american-premiere-at-santa-fe-opera.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/29/arts/dance/bolshoi-ballet-turns-back-the-clock-in-its-new-york-season.html

 

 

 

Of the 298 people who died when Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine, 193 were Dutch nationals. But while grief in the Netherlands has been palpable, the Dutch have not so far taken the lead in responding to what happened. To the contrary. Given that the Netherlands’ loss on the occasion was roughly analogous to America’s loss on 9/11, it’s rather remarkable that the Dutch have been so restrained.

The Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, has repeatedly expressed his sadness and anger over the tragic incident. The country’s new king, Willem-Alexander, has dutifully played his symbolic role. And the Dutch themselves have manifestly been affected by their grievous loss, publicly mourning their dead. Moreover yesterday it was announced that the Dutch Safety Board would be in charge of the international investigation into who exactly attacked the civilian airliner and with what military hardware.

Still, there has been no national outcry of anger and outrage. And there has been no national effort to exercise leadership on an issue – Russian aggression – that is threatening the European order.

I know the reasons for the Netherlands’ reticence. They include its extensive trade with Russia, its heavy dependence on Russian energy exports, Royal Dutch Shell’s huge investments in Russia, and cities and towns such as Rotterdam, which imports huge quantities of Russian oil, and then proceeds to refine and sell it. In other words, the Netherlands’ reluctance to antagonize Russia is based largely if not entirely on economic considerations – as opposed to political ones.

I should also note that the Netherlands is a small country – under 17 million people – which presumably figures in Dutch calculations. If Germany is a large country which all the world expects to play a leadership role, the Netherlands’ small size seems almost to exempt it, even to excuse it, from having to act boldly and bravely.

The Netherlands’ distant past is fabulous and fabled. There was the time when the Dutch ruled Manhattan Island. And there was the time when the Dutch Enlightenment trumped other European Enlightenments – and it was Amsterdam that was at the center of European culture and civilization. But, the Netherlands recent past is far less fabulous, and if it is fabled at all, it is for all the wrong reasons. I refer particularly to the dismal, dreadful record of the Netherlands during World War II as it pertains to Dutch Jews.

Though it is not well known, more than 70% of the Dutch-Jewish population perished during the war. This figure far exceeds that of nearly all other European countries including Germany (25%), Belgium (44%), France (22%), and Italy (17%). The reasons for this wretched discrepancy are, of course, complex. It should be pointed out, though, that another small country, Denmark, managed to save nearly all of its Jews, in spite of its being similarly occupied for most of the war by the Nazis.

Given this history, one might think that the Dutch would be first up to stand up to a dictator with overweening territorial ambitions. But, no such luck. In keeping with past patterns, they are choosing again to go along to get along. Too bad. For in the wake of those 193 Dutch deaths, they would have had the high ground, had they chosen to take it.

 

The above-named book by the above-named man is often described as the wellspring of the study of leadership. But leadership has, of course, been at the center of our attention for hundreds, even thousands of years – think Confucius, Plato, and Machiavelli. Nevertheless it is also true that during the last forty years leadership – both as a subject of study and as a skill that is taught – has exploded. It’s taken off. It’s the rage. It’s in fashion. Leadership has, in short, become an industry – I call it the “leadership industry” – a transformation for which Burns generally gets a good deal of credit.

No doubt Leadership is a seminal book. Even today, decades after its original publication in 1978, it is unrivaled as a contribution to the field. It’s that dense, that learned, that wise. It’s that inclusive, not only of leaders, but of followers, and of the context within which they are situated.

But Leadership is by no means perfect. I, for one, never did agree with Burns’s claim that men such as Hitler and Stalin were somehow a different species. They were “power holders” or “power wielders” he insisted – not leaders. Nor for that matter did I ever grasp why the idea of “transforming leadership” got such a strong hold on so many. After all, transforming leadership – which “occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality” – is more of an ideal to be imagined than a goal frequently achieved.

Still, Leadership was not only in its own right a significant achievement, a contemporary classic. It was also the right book at the right time. Its impact cannot, in other words, be divorced from the context within which it first appeared. Leadership was published when America was entering what Burns himself later came to call a leadership “crisis,” when the American people began for the first time in years to question their capacity to be led wisely and well.

During the Second World War and the two decades immediately succeeding, America was on a roll.  We had triumphed in war, and we, the white majority anyway, were prospering in peace. No wonder we believed that our leaders knew best. But this sense of serenity was shattered in the 1960s, first by the assassinations in relatively quick succession of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy; next by the Vietnam War and various rights revolutions that were, in effect, simultaneous; and finally by the succession of failed or partially failed presidencies, particularly Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s, but extending also to Gerald Ford’s and Jimmy Carter’s, neither of whom was able in his own right to earn another term.

Nor was the private sector immune from what was happening in the public one. In 1970, for example, Robert Townsend, a highly successful businessman with impeccable credentials, wrote a book that broke the mold. Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits turned the gray flannel suit inside out. The book was short and punchy, cynical and castigating, witty and irreverent, pedantic and pointed. Above all it was anti-authority, arguing well before it became fashionable to do so that the traditional organizational hierarchy was dated; that most organizations were cumbersome and inefficient; and that most CEOs were stuck, clinging to their old managerial ways even though they no longer worked as well as they did before Japan had turned formidable global competitor.

Burns would, I’m convinced, be the first to agree that however important was his own contribution, had Leadership been published even a decade earlier it would never have had the traction that it did. Leadership appeared at a time that, in retrospect, could be seen as the beginning of the American decline. Whatever our subsequent successes, the so-called leader of the free world, the U.S.A., has never been able to recapture the glow that it had before globalization changed the ways of production and distribution, and before scrutiny, skepticism, and scandal changed the way we view Washington.