Category: Digital Article

About the Bushes these days the burning question is will he, or won’t he? Will Jeb Bush decide to run for president in 2016 or will he not?

Texans know better. They know that though Jeb Bush might someday be president of the United States, the Bush to watch on Tuesday is not the father but the son. The Bush to watch on Election Day is not Jeb, but his oldest offspring, George Prescott Bush, candidate for Texas land commissioner.

George P. is not unfamiliar. Notwithstanding his youth – he is 38 – as the son of a former governor of Florida, and as the grandson of one former president and nephew of another, he has been on the margins of national politics for years. What’s different now is that he is poised to move from the side to the center, to play in his own right a prominent part.

I do not for a moment dismiss the importance of his last name – any more than I dismiss the importance of Hillary Clinton’s last name. It is not an attack on Hillary, or an assault on her own enormously impressive credentials to point out that she too was given an inestimable assist up the top of the political ladder by a former chief executive – who happened to be her husband. Similarly, it’s fair to say about George P. that notwithstanding the advantages of family ties, he is, on his own merit, positioned for political success.

Bush has in addition to his last name and family heritage on his mother’s side – she is originally from Mexico and he speaks Spanish as he does English – an impressive professional resume and a persona perfectly poised for the national spotlight. He has been a teacher, and a businessman, and he remains an officer in the U. S. Navy Reserve.  (Notably, Bush served eight months in Afghanistan.)  He has already raised money in ten states and Washington DC, and if he wins he will take office with a nifty $3 million in his campaign account. Moreover he is good looking and personable, with a good looking lawyer wife, Amanda Williams, and a one year old son to round out the family picture.

It’s easy enough to rail against the nepotism that threads through our national politics. But it’s also easy enough to explain – candidates with a familiar last name have advantages ranging from name recognition to (relatively) easy fundraising. So one way of looking at it is this. In a perfect world electoral politics would be a meritocracy. The best man or woman would win; second best would lose. But in this imperfect world, in which nepotism has played a role in American politics since the beginning of the Republic – our sixth president, John Quincy Adams, was the son of our second president, John Adams – we can consider ourselves fortunate if the beneficiary of family ties is, in his or her own right, worthy of our collective consideration.

Among the experts there’s a perennial debate – sometimes called the hero in history debate – about whether the times make the leader or the leader the times. In general, it’s agreed it’s an amalgam, so that, for example, while Barack Obama bears some responsibility for the state of the nation, he is not solely to be credited with what goes right or solely to be faulted for what goes wrong.

To most rules, however, there are exceptions, including this one. There are cases in which the passage of time confirms that a single individual changed the course of history. This is not to exempt even in these cases the importance of other actors, or to minimize the significance of context. But it is to say that leaders can be and sometimes are the dominant explicators.

In a recent essay in the New York Review (11/6/14) titled “If Stalin Had Died…,” Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin makes the case for Stalin. He argues persuasively that had Stalin died decades earlier (death came in 1953) the history of the Soviet Union would have been dramatically different. It would have been dramatically less deadly.

When Americans think of leaders who are villains they tend to think first of Adolph Hitler, not of his World War II contemporary, Joseph Stalin. But years before Hitler even came to power (1933), Stalin was already culpable in the deaths and deprivations of millions. Kotkin: “Countrywide, nearly 40 million people would suffer severe hunger or starvation and between five and seven million people would die in the horrible famine, whose existence the regime denied.”

The numbers are not new. What is new – or, more accurately, freshly argued – is the vigor of Kotkin’s argument that had it not been for Stalin, many of these deaths not only could have been avoided, they would have been avoided. Other countries – including fascist ones such as Italy – modernized differently. Fast-paced industrialization did not require that people be brutalized.

Stalin though was different, as fiercely determined and ferocious as ultimately impactful. Kotkin: “If Stalin had died, the likelihood of coerced wholesale collectivization… would have been near zero…. Stalin made history, rearranging the entire socioeconomic landscape of one sixth of the earth. Right through mass rebellion, mass starvation, cannibalism, the destruction of the country’s livestock, and the unprecedented political destabilization, Stalin did not flinch.”

Does this settle the “hero in history” debate? No. The argument about when exactly individuals matter more than does anything or anyone else will continue. But Kotkin makes a strong case: some of the time some leaders are all-powerful.

I have written before about “the glass cliff.” It’s a term coined in 2004 by two British researchers who suggested that women were especially likely to ascend to top leadership roles during times of corporate crisis or downturn.  The implication is that women more than men are set up for failure.

Why this should be so is not entirely clear. The total number of CEOs who are women remains, of course, dismally low. So is it that women are so eager to become chief executive officers that they settle for circumstances that are far from optimum? Or is gender bias at some level of consciousness responsible for putting women in unusually precarious positions? Or is it perhaps that they are not given the resources needed to surmount difficult situations?

These questions come to mind in the wake of the revelations this week that under the leadership of Virginia Rometty, IBM has performed particularly poorly. Not only has the company failed to develop a successful strategy, it has, apparently, “propped up” its stock price in recent years by “buying back shares by the carload.” The implication, in other words, is that not only has IBM failed to perform well under Rometty’s leadership, it has concealed its weaknesses by “financial engineering.”* How long IBM’s board members and, especially, shareholders will tolerate this downward drift remains obviously to be seen. But no doubt about it: Rometty is precariously perched.

The same has to be said about the much ballyhooed Marissa Mayer, who famously was pregnant when she became that rare bird: a female CEO of a prominent tech company. But her sailing since then has hardly been smooth. As of this writing she is trying to fend off a challenge from an activist investor (Starboard Value) by preparing to detail her plans on the one hand for cost cutting, and on the other hand for acquiring one or more tech startups. Like Rometty, Mayer might survive the hard times. But whether her new plan “will appease shareholders, who are growing impatient with the CEO’s lack of progress in her more than two years at the company,” is uncertain.**

As to the CEO of General Motors, Mary Barra, it’s possible that she has already weathered the crisis. The question is whether there’s another shoe to drop at GM or whether the worst of the news – its culpability in covering up vehicle defects, with calamitous consequences – is already out. Whatever the future, there can be no gainsaying that she took over the helm at GM at a low moment in its history.

Bottom line is that in less than one year all three of these generally highly esteemed chief executive officers have come under heavy fire.

It’s enough to make a woman feel paranoid.

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*See Andrew Ross Sorkin, “The Truth Hidden by IBM’s Buybacks,” New York Times, October 21, 2014.

** See Douglas MacMillan, “Yahoo CEO Set to Refresh Turnaround Plan, Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2014.

Must be in the ether. In this past week’s Economist (10/11) is another article similar to the one referred to in my most recent blog. This one, by “Schumpeter,” is titled “Beware the Angry Birds.” It makes the same point as does the Times piece by Steven Davidoff Solomon, though for a different reason. “Bosses’ careers are more vulnerable than ever” in this case not because of shareholder activists, but because they live “in the social media age.”

We’re back to technology which, as I pointed out a couple of years ago in The End of Leadership, is changing forever the balance of power between leaders and followers.

The Economist: “Today’s bosses still need to worry about the … press. But as big a threat to their careers these days is the risk of being pecked by Twitter’s swarm of angry birds. Thanks to the digital revolution, chief executives now live in glass houses. An ill-judged remark can be broadcast to the world in an instant. An unwise ‘reply all’ can provide sensitive information to a competitor. An exasperated complaint in the midst of a crisis can seal your doom.”

As I wrote previously, business leaders are now like political leaders. For that matter, they are like virtually all other leaders – vulnerable to arrows shot from every direction.  What seems finally to be changing is the growing recognition that things now are different – even for chief executive officers. Turns out that all their money and power cannot protect them against the tide of the time. To the contrary. Just like  leaders in other sectors they “make perfect click-bait.”

For some years I have written about “the end of leadership” – about leaders becoming weaker while followers, others, are becoming stronger. This shift has been most evident in the political realm, where in the second decade of the 21^st century democratically elected leaders everywhere have a famously hard time getting others to go along.  Even the most powerful political leaders seem more often controlled by other players or, for that matter, by the course of events, than in control of them.

This shift has been less obvious in the corporate realm or, at least, less screamingly obvious. In other words, while there has been for some time evidence that what applies to government applies equally to business – and of course to other sectors as well, such as education and religion – the change has been more subtle, less public and less easy, therefore, to see.

This has not, however, meant that business is exempt – a case that was made particularly persuasively in yesterday’s New York Times, in an article by Steven Davidoff Solomon. I’ve provided the link, so need here for detail. Suffice it to cite a few lines from the piece, which argues in no uncertain terms that the heyday of corporate leadership and management is over.

• “Corporate America may try to hide from its shareholders, but two recent shake-ups … show that escape is no longer possible.”
• “Corporate America, previously ruled by chief executives and boards, is racing to do shareholders’ bidding.”
• “As shareholder activists, backed by institutional shareholders, grow stronger, no company is safe.”

It’s a striking argument not because what Davidoff Solomon says is new – but because he says it so forcefully. If he is to be believed, business leaders have just about caught up with political leaders. Like the latter, the former better watch their backs at every turn.

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On the surface, the anger, disappointment and resentment that fuel the continuing social and political unrest in Ferguson, Missouri would seem to have little or nothing in common with the anger, disappointment and resentment that fuel the continuing social and political unrest in Hong Kong. After all, the former is situated in the United States of America, while the latter is a region of the People’s Republic of China. Moreover, since the stories in both cities are far from over, how they will end remains obviously to be seen. One could go relatively well, the other badly.

Still, it is the similarities between them – between what has happened, is happening, in the small American metropolis and in the far larger Asian one – that are much the more striking. They are a reminder that in this second decade of the 21^st century the impulse to equity, the demand for democracy, the fight for autonomy are transcendent. They equally are a reminder that resistance to these insistences persists – which is why we are where we are and they are where they are.

Similarities Between the Cities

• Dissatisfactory Leaders
• Dissatisfied Followers
• Disgruntled Public
• Democracy Denied
• Disorganized Dealing
• Distant Danger
• Persistent Protest
• Meager Mediation
• Uncertain Outcome
• Lingering Lamentation

Used to be hard. Used to be hard to imagine the map as something fungible, malleable, swiftly and easily changeable. Used to be hard even to conceive of except under extreme circumstances – such as all-out regional or even global war.

But that was then.  This is now. Now the world is, manifestly, different. This year alone, just in the last few months, have been not one but two changes in the map. Moreover neither of these changes is minor, inconsequential. Both are major and both have significant geopolitical implications.

At least it can be said of the first – the seizure by Russia of Crimea from Ukraine – that it was done in the conventional way. Russia is a country, and a powerful one at that, with a national government and an identifiable head of state. It is, in other words, in the old, familiar mold. It is a state actor with its own national interests, which it will act on unless somehow held in check, either literally by, say, a credible threat of the use of force, or by international norms such as respect for national boundaries.

The second change in the map in 2014 is of course the de facto obliteration of the border between Syria and Iraq – and, indeed, for all we now know, the obliteration of both countries, period. Unlike the first change in the map, this one was engendered not by a state actor, but by a non-state actor that, until a couple of months ago, most Americans had never even heard of. It is telling that even now there is no agreement on the name. Some refer to this non-state actor as ISIS, and some, especially members of the administration, call it ISIL. Significantly this non-state actor refers to itself as a state – the Islamic State or, simply, IS. It obviously assumes at least for public consumption that the map has already been redrawn. It obviously assumes a done deal.

So far the world has been powerless to change the map back. So far the world has been powerless to stop both a conventional state actor and a decidedly unconventional non-state actor from redrawing the map as they see fit. A sobering reminder as if we needed one that the world has changed and that for all of America’s military might, it has not been able to preclude the map from changing in ways that are at odds with its own national interests.

On Wednesday, October 1 the New York Times carried a front page article titled, “Hong Kong Protests are Leaderless But Orderly.” On Thursday, October 2 the New York Times carried a front page article titled, “At 17, Setting Off Protests that Roil Hong Kong.”

On Wednesday, October 1 the New York Times carried a front page article that claimed, “Here is a movement without a clear leader, one in which crowds of largely young people are organizing themselves and acting on their own, overtaking months of planning by veterans of the city’s pro-democracy camp.”   On Thursday, October 2 the New York Times carried a front page article that claimed, “The slight teenager with heavy rectangular glasses and a bowl cut stood above the ocean of protesters who had engulfed downtown Hong Kong….It was Joshua Wong, a 17-year-old student activist who has been at the center of the democracy movement…. He played a pivotal role in setting off the demonstrations of the past week.”

To anyone with even the slightest interest in leadership and followership this constitutes a major discrepancy. On one day the stunning series of events in Hong Kong are reportedly “leaderless.” On another day, one day later, the stunning series of events in Hong Kong are reportedly the handiwork of a small number of people, Mr. Wong above all, who has become “something of a political star,” surrounded by “admiring supporters” and “mobbed by television cameras and reporters.”

How can this happen? How can the best newspaper in the world contradict itself so quickly and completely on on the question of how the most important pro-democracy protests in years came about? Several explanations come to mind. Maybe it was that the paper has just announced that it was reducing its newsroom staff by one hundred people – a major body blow to the Times  organization.  Or maybe it was that something significant came to light between October 1st and 2nd – something that changed the narrative. Or maybe it was decided by reporters among others that the best way to frame this messy story was through a single individual, one who could be identified, named, and vividly described “as a hybrid of a solemn politician and a bashful teenage sensation.”

The full story behind this Big Story will not be known for years to come. But what’s clear even now is that neither the Times nor, it was thought, the American people could tolerate for long the idea that every now and then ordinary people, followers not leaders, take matters into their own hands.

On Toppling Those Up Top

•  The King is Dead. Well, he’s not dead exactly. But he’s been deposed.   Bill Gross – the long-reigning “Bond King” – was forced to resign in acrimony from Pimco, the company he had helped to found over four decades ago. Though in retrospect perhaps predictable, Gross’s departure was nevertheless experienced as sudden, a precipitous fall from grace by a legendary investor whose performance in recent years, both personal and professional was, shall we say, other than legendary. Gross’s abrupt exit was a big deal. It was such a big deal it actually rattled global debt markets, notably U. S. treasury prices which, after the announcement of his departure, fell.
• Woman Under Seige. Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer joined the ranks of corporate leaders inhibited from leading because activist investors are breathing down their necks. Since Mayer took over Yahoo’s performance has been less than stellar. So she is being pushed to, among other things, cut costs, spell out plans for Asian assets, and decide on how exactly the company will deploy the large chunk of change it received from selling shares of Alibaba. No question about it: Mayer is being challenged, which is precisely why she has no choice but somehow to respond to this significant threat to her authority.

On Eastern Ukraine, Scotland, Catalonia – and Hong Kong      

• The Rain in Spain. Let me put it this way: The likelihood is strong that you had a better week than did Spain’s Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy. Because of widespread public protests and clear public preferences, Rajoy was obliged to scuttle proposed changes in the abortion law, which would have made Spain about the most difficult country in Europe in which to terminate a pregnancy. It’s not clear why the law was proposed in the first place, given public opinion which was always strongly against. Still, it was a humiliating setback for Spain’s putative leader – though not quite as humiliating, or threatening, as being forced to face a show down with the president of Catalonia, who has now formally scheduled an independence referendum for November 9.
• Chaos in Hong Kong. This weekend tens of thousands of ordinary citizens joined pro-democracy students protesting China’s political interventions in Hong Kong’s affairs. Tensions between the protesters on the one hand, now threatening a “new era” of civil disobedience, and the authorities on the other, now resorting to tear gas to tamp down the demonstrations, were high as the battle lines between autocracy and autonomy hardened. This is a drama that has yet to be played out, for it is increasingly clear that China will not get its way with Hong Kong without the use of force. How much force will have to be expended in order to quell the unrest remains to be seen. The stakes in any case are huge.

President Barack Obama’s speech to the United Nations on Wednesday signaled a shift: America leading from behind was being ditched in favor of America leading from up front.

For obvious reasons the press focused on what he said about fighting ISIS – it is the issue of the day, the one that grabs us by throat because it strikes fear into our heart. But it was on another subject entirely that Obama’s hardened tone was the more striking. The subject was Russia, it was what the president of the United States finally said about Russia.

For many months America’s response to Russian aggression has been muted. In comparison for example with someone like Anders Fogh Rasmussen – the outgoing Secretary General of NATO – Obama’s posture vis-à-vis Putin has been positively puny. It has been Rasmussen who has been insisting, certainly since Russia seized Crimea, that Putin has a “master plan” to “establish a zone of Russian influence … covering the former Soviet space.” Obama meanwhile was slow to get on board, slow to take seriously the threat posed by Putin to the European order.

But, on Wednesday the president’s temper was different. On Wednesday he listed hard facts, among them that “Russia poured arms into Eastern Ukraine, fueling violent separatists and a conflict that has killed thousands.” On Wednesday he cited the differences in world view, Russia’s vision is one in which “might makes right” and America’s is one in which “right makes might.” And on Wednesday he put forth in no uncertain terms what America was determined now to do: it would support the people of Ukraine; it would reinforce its NATO allies and uphold its commitment to collective defense; and it would impose a cost on Russia for aggression.

At the United Nations the president could have chosen to focus nearly exclusively on ISIS – but he did not. He seized the moment to send a clear, more global message. Whatever he was in the past, he no longer was in the present. While he was slow to change, reluctant to change, Obama has changed. Of the president it may now safely be said that he is prepared to see the world as it is, not as he would prefer it to be.