Category: Digital Article

Whoever even heard of ISIS – until a week or two ago?  Whoever even heard of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (or, in some translations, Iraq and the Levant) – until a week or two ago? Who knew that in the proverbial blink of an eye ISIS would occupy large swaths of Iraq as well as Syria, and seem to the government in Baghdad to be an existential threat?

I certainly did not. But I should not have been surprised. ISIS is precisely the sort of non-state actor that in the 21^st century has become a major player in the international system.

Consider only the two most recent international crises. To be sure, it was Vladimir Putin who made the decision to seize Crimea. But he did so only as a response to the people’s uprising in the Maidan – the upending of leaders (primarily Putin’s putative puppet, President Viktor Yanukovytch) by followers in Kiev. Moreover once Crimea was Russian, Putin was prepared to pick up his marbles and go home. But, he was precluded from doing so by separatists in Eastern Ukraine – again, non-state actors – who continue to agitate for a further break-up of the Ukrainian state. Similarly, this most recent implosion of Iraq. It was triggered not by any leader of any nation-state, but by a non-state actor, ISIS, that though previously unknown, nevertheless changed the direction of the global conversation.

One of the interesting things about ISIS is that it is not, as most would depict it, a ragtag band of furious fundamentalists.  Rather it is a well-organized group, even organization that for several years now has had a structure and a strategy – both of which have been carefully documented in annual reports.

You read that right! Since 2012 ISIS has issued annual reports similar to those with which Americans are familiar: they describe how the organization has performed in the last year and its goals for the next year. Of course the content of ISIS reports are a smidgen different. For example, in 2013 ISIS recorded nearly 10,000 operations in Iraq that included, among other things, 1,000 assassinations and the planting of 4,000 explosive devices. Nor has ISIS been old-fashioned in its operations. Quite the contrary. It’s been adroit at fund-raising, by any means necessary. And its use of social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are reputedly remarkably deft.

None of this is to say that ISIS will eventually triumph in either Iraq or in Syria. (Our new BFF is Assad!) It is likely in fact that an array of state actors, including the United States and Iran (our second new BFF!), will see to it that in the end ISIS is relegated to bit player. However… the frequency with which state leaders, and nation states, are compelled to cope with non-leaders and non-states is mind-bending.

Walter Russell Mead just wrote a timely piece for the Wall Street Journal (link below) in which he stated the now nearly obvious: that not since the “end of the Cold War have so many crises erupted in so many places.” Russia’s seizure of Crimea (which redrew the map of Europe); continuing conflict in Ukraine; China’s aggression in the South China seas; terrorism in Nigeria; and the surge in jihadist violence over a land mass that stretches from Syria to Iraq – all indications the liberal world order faces challenges daunting to the point of overwhelming.

What is less obvious is Mead’s second point, which is that mayhem and murder the world over fly in the face of the American disposition, which is to believe that in this best of all possible worlds everything will be for the best. It’s true: for various reasons, both historical and contemporaneous, Americans are congenitally disposed to believe that people are good and that, again to quote Mead, “win-win solutions are easily found and that world history is moving inexorably toward a better and more peaceful place.”

This congenital disposition was reinforced during the last decade of the 20^th century – in hindsight a holiday from history. The Soviet Union had collapsed. Communism was dead and gone. The U.S. was prosperous and at peace – and it seemed destined indefinitely to remain the sole superpower in a world increasingly liberal and democratic.

Curiously, America’s founders were not so blinkered. They knew better. They knew to structure a government based not on the assumption that man (woman) was good, but that he (she) was likely as not to be bad. Not only was the system replete with checks and balances to preclude any single individual or small group from seizing power. More important was the underlying assumption: it was that human nature was, at best, fickle. As James Madison put it the Federalist, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

I wrote a book titled, Bad Leadership. And, a handful of my colleagues, experts in leadership, did something similar: they wrote about the dark side of leadership and, yes, followership, in order to explore and explain situations such as the one the U. S. is in now. In order to explore and explain the gamut of being bad, from being a bad boss to being a totalitarian tyrant; from being a Bystander follower, who stands by and does nothing, to being a Diehard follower, who freely, willingly, even eagerly supports a leader who is evil.

But we are much in the minority. Overwhelmingly the leadership industry is, like Americans more generally, disposed to focus exclusively on developing good leaders, while ignoring altogether the question of how to stop or at least slow bad leaders. In a time such as this one, in a time in which the United States is beleaguered on all sides, such a lop-sided approach to leadership education is misguided as it is misleading. Those of us who till this soil owe it to our students, to our clients, to those who turn to us as experts, to see the world as it is – not as we would prefer it to be.

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http://online.wsj.com/articles/for-americans-a-world-of-disappointment-1402704752

What a week!  You must be wiped! No wonder those gray hairs on your head are multiplying at such a rapid clip!

I am by no means among your greatest fans. But I respect your intelligence and integrity. And I admire your dedication to service as president of the United States. Moreover I do not doubt for one moment that what you do do and do not do is being done or not done in what you judge the best interest of your country.

This last week has in the event been daunting. Given the contextual complexities, I for one am starting to doubt whether any single individual can lead from the White House over any protracted period of time without being regularly, relentlessly, pilloried.  But some weeks are more challenging than others – and this past one has been a  whopper. There is no way you could have anticipated one week ago that which came to pass. To be sure, you’re hardly the first president of the United States who has had to cope with a bolt out of the blue. After all, your much derided immediate predecessor had to face a mind-bending attack on American soil. But, it is also true that by and large leadership work is like other sorts of work: it is predicated on a set of presumptions that enable us to function reasonably coherently. So, when these assumptions are upended, when our game plan for any given day not to speak of week is derailed, it complicates our task.

I don’t know, Barack, if you read my blogs. In the event you do, you’re aware that my most recent one was about how our domestic politics was turned on its head from one day to the next by the unceremonious and wholly unanticipated defeat of  Eric Cantor. What was it like then for you to discover only a day or so later that our foreign politics too had been upended, this time by a turn of events in Iraq that included a series of stunning victories by Islamic extremists. Five minutes ago your biggest foreign policy challenge was to tame Vladimir Putin. Now, suddenly you’re being asked to deal with a large swath of the Middle East that seems to have become overnight an existential threat – not merely to moderates in the area, but to the United States as well.

It’s not easy being a leader these days, least of all American president. What this means is that whatever the deficits of your presidency, you’re likely to shoulder some of the blame – but by no means, no stretch of the political imagination, all of the blame. Times are tough, very tough – an objective fact that is independent absolutely of who sits in the Oval Office.

So make sure on this warm, lovely Saturday in Washington to go out and play golf, to hang with family and friends, to have a cold beer.  You need to chill out and check out, at least one day each inordinately taxing week.

Best,

Babs

Don’t you just love it when plain people perplex plutocrats?

Don’t you just love it when those without obvious sources of power, authority, or influence upend those with?

Don’t you just love it when those without deep pockets upend those with?

Don’t you just love it when experts look like dopes because they were unable altogether to anticipate the future?

Don’t you just love it when someone you’ve never heard of pushes off his perch one of the most prominent persons in America?

If the answer to all of these questions is yes, this morning’s made for you! Republican leader Eric Cantor was ousted by Republican nobody-ever-before-heard-of, Dave Brat. And no one, absolutely no one, saw it coming.

More than anything else that’s what’s news. It’s not so much that power turned out useless,or that money turned out irrelevant. It’s that the conventional wisdom, the received wisdom, was wrong. However clever the talking heads, however sophisticated the political analysts, however experienced the politicians themselves, none can get it through their heads that leaders can be decapitated in a heartbeat by followers who are fed up.

In general, the system works like this. Company A makes a particular product. In order to survive, Company A must sell its product to a sufficient number of buyers to make at least a modest profit. In turn, in order to sell, Company A must persuade would-be customers to purchase its particular product rather than that of any of its competitors.

In this sense the seller is the potential leader; the buyer the potential follower. If the seller can influence the buyer to do something that he or she might not do otherwise, then the former has gotten the latter to follow its lead. Of course the buyer in turn is free to not buy the product, to ignore whatever the seller’s blandishments and buy elsewhere.

All this especially applies to the United States of America in the second decade of the 21^st century. We are inundated every day by consumer choices – to buy a can of tomato soup means to decide among several different brands of tomato soup. Again, in this sense we are free agents, that is, no one is obliging us to buy any particular brand; we not only have choices, we have the right to decide among them.

Given this, I was stunned, really stunned, to read that General Motors sales have been, to quote from a headline in USA Today, “unfazed by recalls.” Not only were sales of General Motors vehicles up 13 % in May 2014 from one year earlier, May 2014 was GM’s best month since August 2008!

Give me a break! What the hell is going on here? Does no one know the news anymore? Is the American consumer oblivious to the fact that not only has GM in the last few months recalled millions of vehicles, GM has been in the last few years demonstrably guilty of wrongdoing, possibly criminal wrongdoing? Or does the American consumer know and not care? Are we willing simply to disregard what General Motors itself admitted was corporate neglect with “devastating” consequences?

GM reports that it has already dismissed 15 employees as a result of what went wrong, and disciplined 5 others. Moreover this story is ongoing – before it’s over the federal government, the law, and the victims themselves will get their pound of flesh.  But this does not absolve us, American consumers, from letting a company know in no uncertain terms what we think of it. When a company and those who people it are so self-interested as to ignore for years a potentially fatal defect, it’s up to us to boycott their products, to prove with our pocketbooks that we consider such behavior unconscionable and intolerable. For us blithely to ignore what GM did, to treat it as we would a good corporate citizen by buying what it has to sell, is to succeed bad leadership with bad followership.

When I try to persuade people of the importance of followership my effort is often in vain.  It’s hard to make the case that leaders without followers likely will go nowhere. Notwithstanding the logic of the argument, notwithstanding the objective evidence, in general people are still persuaded that the leader is all. We remain, in other words, leader-centric, reluctant to accept the proposition that without sufficient numbers of followers the leader is nothing.

This fundamental principle came again to mind when reading Dale Russakoff’s suburb article in the New Yorker title, “Schooled.” (See link below.) It is a carefully researched, thoroughly persuasive piece about how and why schools in Newark have remained so resistant to change, so miserably poor in their overall performance. This in spite of the fact that behind recent reform efforts has stood a sparkling cast of characters including former Newark Mayor Cory Booker, incumbent New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Facebook Mogul Mark Zuckerberg – the last of whom has put a lot of money where his mouth is.

At least one of the major problems – arguably the major problem – is that all those lustrous leaders from on high have failed to bring in, bring along, bring on board followers from below. The people were left out of the process or, at least, they themselves did not feel part of the process – so they fought and they balked. In other words, notwithstanding all that talent and all that money, the process itself was experienced as exclusionary.

Russakoff makes clear that all is not lost – some solutions may be closer than any of the warring sides is willing to acknowledge. But until the various leaders, many of whom are outsiders, engage the various followers, all of whom are insiders, in tough and open conversations even the best-intentioned efforts are likely to stay stalled. As one close observer put it, all too often education reform “comes across as colonial to people who’ve been here for decades. It’s very missionary, imposed, done to people rather than in cooperation with people.”

Bottom line is that those days are now over. However frustrating and cumbersome sometimes the process, leaders engaging followers is part of the deal – unless, of course, the system is autocratic, not democratic.

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https://www.google.com/?source=search_app#q=dale+russakoff+%22schooled%22

Will be working abroad …. blog suspended for about two weeks….

In the past, when I taught a course on woman and leadership, I would allude to Scandinavia as a model of what the U. S. might replicate.  Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland all have in places policies intended to close the gender gap, including at the top. Norway is perhaps the best known example. Several years ago it implemented a quota system that requires the boards of publicly held companies to be at least 40 % women. In addition it, like the other Scandinavian countries, provides generous daycare benefits, and also parental leave laws designed to encourage mother and father to share child care. No wonder it has been looked to as an exemplar, including by the European Union which has considered recommending its replication.

There’s just one teeny-weeny problem. As Christina Zander reported in the May 22 Wall Street Journal, policies that on paper were exemplary have failed. Put precisely, while they did succeed in getting more women close to the top, they did not succeed in getting more women to the top.  Consider once again the case of Norway. In 2013, as mandated, women composed 41 % of boards at Norway’s publicly held companies, compared with only 18% at privately held companies. However… only 5.8 % of CEOs of public companies were women, while at private companies the number was actually significantly greater, 15.1%. In Finland the situation is roughly the same. It has more women on company boards than any other country in the European Union. Yet not a single one of Finland’s 27 largest companies has a woman at the helm.

These findings raise the obvious question – why? Why, in spite of policies that can only be described as extremely enlightened, are there still so few women CEOs in Scandinavia? Several theories have been put forth, nearly all of them contextual. That is, there continues to be a blame game, the fault being ascribed to insufficiently supportive cultures and insufficiently enlightened policies, both governmental and organizational.

What continues, however, to be inadequately addressed is the question of gender difference. However politically incorrect the implication, it is at least possible that women calculate differently than do men, that their needs, wants, and wishes are, on the whole, on average, slightly different from those of their male counterparts. Women may not choose to lead because in the end they don’t want to lead or, at least, they don’t want to lead given that leadership in the 21^st century usually is all-consuming.  Many if not most tasks are amenable to flex time, part time, shared time, family time, time working from home and not in the office, not to speak of time on the road. It just so happens that leadership is not one of them.

Charles Wilson, who in the mid twentieth century was CEO of General Motors, has been relentlessly misquoted. In 1953, when he testified before a Senate Committee as President Dwight Eisenhower’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, he reputedly said, “What’s good for GM is good for America.” But what he really said was this: “For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” Very different. And very apt because for so many years what Charlie Wilson thought to be true was true. For so many years when America did well so did General Motors, and yes, vice versa.

Which leads me to wonder, does it also happen that when America stumbles so does General Motors – and vice versa?

What’s happening now at General Motors is mind-boggling. The number of vehicles recalled in recent months – the total for the year is 13.5 million – is so huge as to be abstract, not fully comprehensible. Similarly, the fact  that GM has been brought so low, is being so dreadfully debased, says something not only about this particular car corporation but about America more generally.

I don’t want to go all out here – this is not about America’s irreversible decline and inevitable fall. But it is not trivial. It is not trivial that a company thought so important to American fortunes that in 2009 it received from the U. S. government a $49.5 billion bailout, has engaged in practices so dangerously deceptive that it will almost certainly be prosecuted for criminal wrongdoing. One could argue that what’s happening now is good – all those recalls testify to a company that’s finally getting its act together, acting in the public interest as opposed to its own. But…give me a break! That’s not the point! The point is that GM has failed the test of trust.

There is no way in hell that Mary Barra, who of course became GM’s CEO only earlier this year, can escape being tarnished by the truth of what happened. Among other reasons she spent most of her professional life not at IBM – but at GM. Too bad… yet another woman leader destined to bite the dust, though if there’s an alternative I can’t think of it. If Barra is spared it will not be because of merit but because of gender.

Poor us. We the American people have no choice but to watch all this play out. For years we will have before us the spectacle of a once iconic company deservedly dragged through the mud. And for years we will have before us the spectacle of a once iconic country relentlessly reminded both of what was – and of what is.

Here is the issue.

An organization is found to have done wrong. Should anything or anyone be punished? If yes, should the organization be punished? Or should those who lead the organization be punished? Or should both be punished?

Here is an example.

Banking giant Credit Suisse has just plead guilty to criminal wrongdoing.   It plead guilty to enabling thousands of Americans who did business with the bank to hide their wealth. OK, now what? The bank will in fact be penalized: it will have to pay a penalty of $2.6 billion.  Moreover its reputation will at least briefly be tarnished. But  it is unlikely otherwise much  to suffer, certainly over the long term. More to the point, the bank, the organization, is an abstraction. What does it even mean to say that a bank, an organization, has been punished, penalized?

Meantime the man who has lead Credit Suisse since 2007, Brady Dougan, goes unpunished. He is not penalized. To be sure, it’s likely he’s suffered some. It’s likely he has felt some shame, some embarrassment, some humiliation. But that’s it. Not only is he not legally penalized, he is not organizationally penalized. He remains in the wake of this outrage, this conviction of wrongdoing, the chief executive officer of  Credit Suisse.

Let me be clear about this: unless and until people are clearly and publicly punished – legally and otherwise – we can count on the wrongdoing to continue. For whatever the nature of the legal infraction you can be sure about one thing: it was committed not by institutions but by individuals.