Ever wondered why educational leaders – along with leaders in other domains – have suffered the slings and arrow of declining reputations?
Ever wondered why educational leaders are no longer the models of rectitude they were until only rather recently?
Ever wondered why the smell of money seems to permeate every corner of 21st century America – including higher education?
If yes… read this!
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For a couple of years now I’ve been blogging intermittently under the above heading – “Putin Patrol Continued.” Like Mitt Romney – this is one of the few things we think in common! – I have long believed that under Putin Russia remains not only alien to Western values, but downright dangerous. Hence I have taken some satisfaction in monitoring him and his various oppressions and repressions, and was not in the least surprised when a couple of months ago he started making trouble, real trouble, abroad, in Ukraine.
I know, I know. There are, arguably, reasons for his having done so, in particular the eastward expansion of NATO in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But still. Not good to redraw the map of Europe if and when you decide you want to do so.
I’ve refrained from blogging about Putin recently because he was well covered in the American press. Once Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, Americans suddenly realized that they had a problem on their hands – potentially a significant one. In fact, Europeans as well as Americans were good and worried that Putin would decide not only to grab Crimea but to march his troops into Eastern Ukraine. For several weeks, as we all know, Putin was front page news.
But, almost as suddenly he has, for the moment at least, vanished from the front pages. He is relegated now to the back burner as his rhetoric tones down and he orders his troops, for the second time, to withdraw from the Ukrainian border.
So what happened? How to explain this shift in Putin’s disposition, at least for now? President Barack Obama might argue that it’s the sanctions that worked, however mild and meager. Chancellor Angela Merkel might argue that it’s her behind-the-scenes diplomacy that did it, however careful and cautious. And still others, experts included, say that Putin’s simply satisfied for now, Crimea in his hip pocket.
I, though, would venture another explanation, an explanation that lies not in what leaders do and decide but rather in what followers do and decide. In this case the turning point seems to have been when Putin was at first excited by the demonstrable support he was receiving from Eastern Ukrainians, and then unsettled by his obvious inability to control them. At one point he came right out and announced that he was against a referendum on secession from Ukraine, only to be entirely ignored. Eastern Ukrainians, some number of them, went ahead and held a referendum anyway.
It’s one thing, in other words, for an authoritarian leader to flex his muscles. It’s quite another, however, for an authoritarian leader to discover that however muscular his reach, it has exceeded his grasp.
A couple of years ago I thought that in the 21st century some corporations would be obliged to change some of their ways primarily because of shareholder activism. Now I’m not so sure. Now there is growing evidence that while in some cases shareholder activists have an impact – they are, for instance, big on the issue of executive pay – there is scant evidence that they shape corporate policies.
The same cannot be said about ordinary people who increasingly employ social media to mount collective campaigns against corporate policies of which they strongly disapprove. By and large these policies pertain to issues whose time has in some indefinable, but indisputable way come.
Two significant cases in point, just in the last week.
First, Stanford University, bowing to pressure from students around the country intent on getting their institutions to stop investing in the most egregious of fossil fuels, agreed to stop putting any of its multi-billion dollar endowment into coal mining companies. In response to recommendations from a panel consisting of students, faculty, staff, and alumni, Stanford’s board of trustees agreed that investments in alternatives to coal would be less harmful to the environment. As Stanford’s President John Hennessy put it: “The University’s review has concluded that coal is one of the most carbon-intensive methods of energy generation and that other sources can be readily substituted for it.”
What’s new here of course is not the conclusion. We have known for some time that coal is “one of the most carbon-intensive methods of energy generation.” But what we did not have before is an organized movement, led by students, protesting against universities that continue to invest in coal mining companies.
Second is the case of Portland, Oregon, which a few days ago announced that it had begun to divest itself of its holdings in Walmart. Why? Because as one city official put it, “We as a city talk a lot about our progressive values. We care about working people, we care about the environment, we care about human health – and money talks. We don’t want our money to be saying things that are at cross purposes with values we profess every day.”
Again, Walmart did not just yesterday develop a reputation for treating its workers with minimal care and concern. And it did not just yesterday begin to pay its workers less than a living wage. But what has happened in the last year is that the issue of income inequity – the issue of a growing gap between them that has too much and them that has too little – has become more resonant.
None of this is to say that we have reached a tipping point, either on the environment or inequity. Rather it is to point out that there are some signs of change – and that the way change is being created is less real than virtual.
Thomas Friedman, best-selling author and foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, has discovered “the Square People.”* The square people protest literally, as in, say, Cairo’s Tahrir Square or Kiev’s Maidan. Or they protest virtually, they connect on the internet, using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (or their domestic equivalents) to challenge authority and promote change.
Friedman is making a big deal out of the square people because he considers them a powerful new force, worldwide, consisting mostly of young people “seeking either reform or social change.” He has seen them he writes, literally, in the squares of Tunis, Cairo, Istanbul, New Delhi, Damascus, Tripoli, Beirut, Sana, Tehran, Moscow, Rio, Tel Aviv and Kiev; and he has seen them virtually in Saudi Arabia, China, and Vietnam.
Friedman is careful to point out that the square people do not all want the same thing. In Egypt some square people are members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and in Ukraine some square people are right-wing nationalists. But what they do want in in common are leaders who are responsive, and who are clean not corrupt.
Two years ago, in The End of Leadership, I wrote about precisely this phenomenon. I did not mean to imply the end of leadership literally. What I did mean to suggest is that for various reasons, especially changing cultures and technologies, the dynamic between leaders and followers was changing, irrevocably, with leaders getting weaker and followers, “square people,” getting stronger.
This is in many ways a good thing – a change to be celebrated. But it is also in some ways a bad thing. When we look abroad we can see that the empowerment of ordinary people does not, or at least it does not necessarily, lead to stability and security, or even to decency and democracy. And, when we look at home we can see that for the persistent refusal to follow, to collaborate and compromise in ways that are meaningful, substantive, there is a high price to pay.
So this change is not so much a paean to participation as it is a commentary on democracy. As I wrote in The End of Leadership, the old social contract, between leaders and followers, has frayed. Why? Because the assumptions on which the contract is based have changed. First, “the old justifications for having power, authority, and influence are no longer so persuasive.” Second, “people in the present think themselves more important and more entitled than did people in the past.”
Just this week were clashes between leaders and followers in, among other places, Turkey, Vietnam, Nigeria, and Ukraine. Every one of them testified to the relative power of the 21st century follower. And every one of them testified to the relative powerlessness of the 21st century leader. Even Vladimir Putin – who just a few days ago struck fear into our hearts – has taken a step back. The reasons for his retreat relate to this blog – and will be further explored in my next blog.
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*http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/opinion/friedman-the-square-people-part-1.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
The abrupt firing of Jill Abramson from her position as executive editor of the New York Times is noteworthy for several reasons – among them how stereotypical the scenario. From what we now know, Abramson was fired by publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. on grounds with which any student of women and leadership is familiar:
The news of Abramson’s dismissal is not yet 24 hours old and it has already become a cause. Women in particular are climbing the ramparts, crying foul, calling Abramson a victim of gender stereotyping, even of out and out male oppression.
All of this may well be true. Whatever the facts that remain to come out, it’s unlikely the basics of the story will change. But it would be a disservice to Jill Abramson if she were to go out in a blaze of feminist outrage. For the important point about her tenure at the top of our most important newspaper by far, is how excellent it was. Abramson was a superlative leader. Under her extraordinarily talented direction, the New York Times was as good as it ever was. It was not only the nation’s paper of record, it was the nation’s investigative reporter. The Times dared to go where others did not because Abramson was willing to invest time, talent and, yes, money in stories that she believed had to be told.
Abramson will not go gently into the good night. Not only has she become in an instant a feminist icon, she herself is not likely to stay silent or still. But for those of us worried about the precarious state of American journalism, her disappearance from the masthead of the Times is less about rage than it is about grief.
Two days ago the Financial Times published a supplement on business education. The point was to make public the rankings of some 70 executive education programs worldwide that had been graded according to their excellence.
Such rankings are of course seen as significant. Buyers take them seriously when deciding which if any executive program to select or support. Sellers take them seriously because receiving a high ranking is a feather in their cap – and money in the bank.
In addition to the rankings the FT referenced some noteworthy trends such as, for example, the globalization of executive education. No longer is Ex Ed simply the purview of, most obviously, the Americans and Europeans. Among others Latin Americans are getting into the act – the 10 schools in Latin America that participated in the FT rankings in 2014 “had in increase in revenues of more than 17 percent in 2013, on top of growth of more than 13 percent in 2012.”
But to someone like me, a student of leadership, the most salient trend in executive education is the shift away from general or open programs to customized ones – to programs designed by schools of business solely to satisfy specific clients. What this means is that managers, leaders, are increasingly being educated not for a general purpose even vaguely related to the common good, or even for the good of the corporate sector as a whole. Rather their education is much more narrowly focused – it is “tailored to individual companies’ needs.”
You could claim this is fine if it were demonstrably effective. But it is not. According to a survey by the Henley Business School, “leadership” continues still to top companies’ concerns, with some 71 percent of respondents saying that leadership is their “biggest challenge.”
Perhaps the assumption is that the increasingly narrow focus of leadership education will address this “biggest” of all challenges. I would suggest though that this is highly unlikely. Businesses do not operate in a vacuum. They are not isolated or insulated from each other; nor are they separate and distinct from the larger context within which they are embedded. Moreover the problems that most bedevil us – climate change, terrorism, poverty and income inequity – are not exactly confined to the corporate sector. Quite the contrary, they require just the sort of collaboration that transcends groups and organizations, just the sort of work that requires an education different from the one that is implicit even in the idea of a “customized” program. Of course business schools are just following the money… and the money these days is in customized programs. But if they themselves are to be leaders not followers, business schools must insist on a leadership curriculum that is broader, much broader, than the one currently in fashion.
In my most recent book, The End of Leadership, I raised some serious questions about the Leadership Industry. In particular I raised some serious questions about teaching leadership, such as how do we know when we get it right.
Becoming a leader has of course become a mantra. The business of teaching people how to lead has exploded in the last thirty, forty years, with lots of people making lots of money on the generally unquestioned assumption that developing leaders is a legitimate, even proven undertaking.
But, as I write in The End of Leadership, “for all the large sums of money invested in the leadership industry, and for all the large amounts of time spent on leaching leadership, learning leadership, and studying leadership, the metrics are mostly missing. There is scant evidence, objective evidence, to confirm that this massive, expensive, thirty-plus-year effort has paid off.”
When I wrote the book I was aware, well aware, that I was biting the hand that feeds me. I was similarly aware that some of my colleagues were likely to look askance at someone who had the temerity to question the legitimacy of what they do. So far I’ve not been tarred and feathered – the book was published in 2012 – and indeed the book has received modest recognition. (For example, Choice, a trade magazine for librarians, named it an “outstanding academic title of 2013.”) But my argument did not catch on – the leadership industry continues to thrive, despite my doubts about what we really know about teaching how to lead.
In some sense then it was heartening to learn a few days ago that I was not alone – I was not the only skeptic. To be sure, in an article in the Wall Street Journal (5/7/14), Carl Schramm, University Professor at Syracuse University, did not raise questions about teaching “leadership.” But he did raise questions – the same sorts of questions – about teaching “entrepreneurship.” I at least would argue, same thing.
“Many colleges and universities across the country offer courses and programs in ‘entrepreneurship,’” Schramm writes. “Are they worthwhile? Entrepreneurship is apparently an occupational category now, yet when it comes to judging the value of what they teach, its practitioners are flying blind.” Schramm goes on to point out some of the problems endemic to teaching entrepreneurship, including the lack of academic consensus on what works for a new business, a teaching approach that is “cobbled together from strategic-planning and venture-finance insights,” and case studies that can easily be cherry-picked to “conform” to the teacher’s belief about how businesses should start.
The parallels between what I call the leadership industry and what might be called the entrepreneurship industry are striking. In both cases it’s time for what Schramm calls “an evidence-based revolution.” And in both cases it’s time for those professing to teach how-to – how to be a leader and how to be an entrepreneur – to be more honest with those expecting the keys to the kingdom.
Vice-President of the United States under George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, has long loomed large on the American stage. In fact, he looms even larger now, in retrospect, than he did before, than he did while he was in office.
Either credited or blamed with fashioning U.S. foreign and military policy, especially during Bush’s first term in the White House, Cheney is widely judged the most powerful vice-president in American history. In an article in the New York Review titled, “He Remade Our World,” Mark Danner claims that Cheney is responsible for no less than a “transformation” in the American disposition – a transformation that is “truly breathtaking.” Danner writes that the “revolutionary changes in our government’s policies toward holding prisoners, toward waging war, and toward surveilling its citizens could never have been effected without the imagination, experience, and audacity of Dick Cheney.” (April 3, 2014.)
Curiously, one of the most interesting things about this most interesting man is, of all things, his wife. In another life, in another time, Lynne Cheney would be a standout, one of the most well-known and well-respected women in America. Ambitious and powerful long before it became oh-so-fashionable for women to be ambitious and powerful, Lynne Cheney has had an extraordinary professional as well as personal life. It is, however, a life that has been largely overshadowed by her husband’s larger-than-life hold on the American imagination. And it is also a life that has been all but obscured by the media’s liberal bias, for like her husband, Lynne Cheney is an ardent conservative.
I will not list here her remarkable string of accomplishments. A quick check with Wikipedia will provide the curious reader with a handy-dandy chronicle of Lynne Cheney’s various careers as a much-published author, highly-placed administrator, and well-known political activist. What really impressed me though was the review in the New York Times this past Sunday (May 4, 2014) of her most recent book, James Madison: A Life Reconsidered.
The review was written by none other than Gordon S. Wood, long considered one of the most eminent and esteemed of American historians. And it was, by and large, excellent. That is, while Wood’s essay on Cheney’s book did not claim that it was perfect – she tended, he wrote, “to flatten out her narrative line” – it did claim that it was first rate. It would appear, in other words, that the women who is the wife of Dick Cheney has written one of the most important biographies ever of one of the most important Americans ever. Wood concludes his review as follows: “Cheney’s biography is lucidly written… and she clearly brings to life the character and personality of Madison. Apart from Ralph Louis Ketcham’s 1971 life, this is probably the best single-volume biography of Madison that we now have.”
Not too shabby for a Second Lady.
As I define the antonym of leader – which is follower – it is a person without apparent power, authority, or influence. In this sense the three women named above all were followers. They were, to all appearances, ordinary undergraduates at three different, as it happens illustrious, undergraduate institutions, respectively Amherst, Harvard, and Columbia.
However according to what became their public testimony, they shared a searing experience: they were raped on campus. Angie Epifano went public in 2012, in the Amherst student newspaper, where she published an extended account not only of having been “raped by an acquaintance” in one of the college dorms, but also of the traumatic aftermath. Emma Sulkowicz became “the talk of Columbia” this past winter, when an article, also in a student magazine, described in detail her sexual assault at school and the events subsequent, which were enraging to the point of being emboldening. Madeleine Smith, who was raped at Harvard, stood alongside Vice President Joe Biden this past week at an event at the White House, intended to to draw fresh attention to the problem of sexual assault on college campuses.
The problem is obviously not a simple one – it’s not as if college officials have turned a blind eye to a common casualty of campus life. But it’s safe to say that until recently – until women undergraduates started speaking out and organizing on their own behalf – the problem was hidden. It was infrequently articulated, less infrequently publicized, and only rarely successfully addressed and adjudicated.
There are two main reasons for the recent shift: as usual they are changes in culture and changes in technology. First, victims of sexual assault are not so willing any longer to stay silent, or to be permanently stigmatized by what happened to them when they were in school. Moreover more than before they are ready, willing, and even eager to fight the good fight – in their own name. Second, one of the ways they have become empowered is through social media, which enable them to gain information about other women in similar situations; to connect one with another to provide everything from emotional support to legal advice; and to organize to compound their clout through the power of numbers.
The problem of sexual assault in the American military is by now well known, in considerable part because of leadership on this issue by New York Senator Kristin Gillibrand. But though according to the National Institute of Justice one in five women is sexually assaulted while in an American college, this particular placement has so far been immune to the sort of public scrutiny with which the military is by now familiar. Thanks largely to the efforts of undergraduates across the country who are willing now to go public – women such as Epifano, Smith, and Sulkowicz among them – the problem of one college student sexually assaulting another college student has finally been exposed. It is now where it should be – out in the open.
As the Washington Post’s Jason Reid points out, it took a while for NBA players finally to protest Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. Though many among them were aware of his racist views for some time, they did nothing when, for example, in a 2002 housing discrimination case, Sterling said that African Americans “smell and aren’t clean.”
This time though the players chose not to avoid the issue. For a constellation of reasons – including the scandalous publicity surrounding these latest of Sterling’s comments; the fact they were directed at one of their own, Magic Johnson; and that it’s 2014 and not, say, 2002 (times do change, American attitudes do evolve) – this time the players took action. This time they made clear in no uncertain terms that if the NBA under Commissioner Adam Silver did not respond strongly and swiftly to punish Sterling for his transgression, they would act accordingly. They would refuse to play ball.
Their various gestures – players for the Heat, Bobcats, Spurs and Mavericks all took part in the public protest – were in evidence for everyone to see. They were made on the court, they involved various articles of clothing, and they signaled solidarity in a way that threatened an imminent league-wide boycott in the event the NBA, Silver in particular, dared to disappoint.
NBA players were not the only ones to protest Sterling’s remarks. A series of sponsors also took their leave in the wake of the negative publicity, including State Farm, Virgin America, and Kia Motors. Moreover the widely-praised Silver does deserve credit for his speedy, sturdy response. But the players were key here. They framed the shot and they insisted on an immediate response. Show me the money? They are the money. They hold the keys to the kingdom – which is why great athletes across America, including undergraduates, increasingly are demanding what they believe they are owed.
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