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The rap on Obama is that the crisis in Crimea has confirmed that he is weak and Putin is strong.  Given that Crimea is near-certain to revert to being Russian, this charge in particular will not soon go away.   

I myself have been strongly critical of American foreign policy under President Obama, particularly, ironically, of the agreement with Russia on Syria’s chemical weapons. But any comparison between Obama and Putin cannot be confined to who they are and what they consist of – personally, psychologically, and temperamentally. Any comparison between them must be expanded to consider context.

Fact of the matter is that Putin is free more or less to do what he wants. This is not to say that he does not have some contextual constraints. As I have previously pointed out, he does. But the constraints on the Russian president pale in comparison with those on the American president. Obama’s hands are tied to a very considerable degree by a difficult if not downright recalcitrant Congress, by a press corps that carps 24/7; and by a body politic that has been increasingly less approving. Putin on the other hand has no such concerns. Russia’s parliament is in the palm of his hand. Russia’s press is near uniformly endorsing. And Russians themselves are generally admiring.

More to the point is that when Putin does encounter opposition – by the people, say, or by the press – he tends to crush it, without reprisal. Amazing what you can do in the 21^st century if you’re leader of an autocracy – not democracy! 

For all our fixation now on Putin – a fixation I myself generally share – let’s be clear here. The crisis in Ukraine did not start with him. It started with the Ukrainian people whose overthrow of their democratically elected, though feckless and corrupt President Viktor Yanukovych, gave Putin all the excuse he needed to step into what he correctly perceived as a vacuum.

No doubt the Russian autocrat had long considered how to reclaim the Crimean peninsula. But he needed an ostensible reason, a putative justification for Russian occupation. As it happened, he was handed one on the political equivalent of a silver platter. Once Yanukovych was overwhelmed by the street and fled his post as president, Putin had what was required to take what he wanted.

This is not of course to excuse Putin from his land grab. Rather it is to remind how all this started. Not with him, not at the top, but at the bottom, with ordinary people pressing for political change. Of course, as we have seen elsewhere in the world, once change takes place all bets are off.                  

As anyone who has read my blog since its inception will know, I regularly write a column titled as above. Why? Because I have long been interested in Russia – and I have long been interested in the man who long has been its leader. Putin has always struck me as the worst kind of autocrat who, however, interestingly, is constantly being constrained by the context within which he lives.

 Most of the world’s markets soared yesterday – especially the American market, where the Dow Jones was up over 225 points. The reason was obvious: the crisis in Ukraine seemed to have ebbed, if only slightly. And Putin seemed to have blinked, if only fleetingly. Nothing is settled, of course. The situation remains volatile and the outcome uncertain. But early evidence suggests that Putin wants to go only so far – and no further.

 Let’s look at why this could be the case. Is it President Obama who scares President Putin? Is it the European Union? Is it the United Nations? Not hardly. None of these more traditional actors have the capacity to put the fear of God into anyone, certainly not the Russian leader.

 But here’s who does scare him: his own people. What Putin did not anticipate was the instant economic impact of his incursion into Crimea, an impact that immediately affected Russia itself. In no time flat the ruble had dropped precipitously. And in no time flat the Russian stock index had dropped similarly precipitously – over 10% in a day. Moreover Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas monopoly, which accounts for no less than one quarter of all Russian tax revenues, lost $15 billion in market value, in the same single day. These are big numbers – big enough to sober if not scare President Putin, big enough to remind the rest of how deeply entwined are politics and markets, and of how deeply entwined is one nation’s economy with other nations’ economies.

 The Russian people generally strongly support their incumbent president. But there is dissent in Russia. And while Putin typically suppresses dissent, he cannot, especially in the wake of what happened in Kiev, necessarily count on suppressing dissent smoothly and swiftly. And he cannot necessarily count on suppressing dissent without erasing entirely the image he so carefully cultivated at Sochi: that of a man of the world ready to hobnob not only with his own kind, but with movers and shakers the world over.

 For all his miserable Machiavellianism, Putin is not Stalin. And for all the echoes of the Cold War, the second decade of the 21^st century is strikingly different from the seventh decade of the 20^th.  

 In 2004 Harvard Business School Press published my book titled, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters. In the book I identified seven different types of bad leadership.  

•  Incompetent
• Rigid
• Intemperate
• Callous
• Corrupt
• Insular
• Evil

I made clear at every turn that “bad” refers not only to bad leaders but also, inevitably, to bad followers. There is no bad leadership without bad followership, which is precisely why the book was titled Bad Leadership, as opposed to Bad Leaders.

My focus here is on Insular Leadership, which I defined as follows: “The leader and at least some followers minimize or disregard the health and welfare of ‘the other’ – that is, those outside the group or organization for which they are directly responsible.” Think, for example, of the leaders astride cigarette companies in the 1960s and ‘70s. They were beginning to suspect if not know full well that smoking was bad, really bad, for people’s health. But, they did everything they could to conceal this fact from their customers, even resisting until they could no longer labels warning of the dangers.

Insular leaders and their followers establish boundaries between themselves and their immediate constituencies on the one side, and everyone else on the other. To a degree, of course, this is simply human nature. My group – my family, my tribe, my country, my company – competes with your group for resources, and in every other way as well. Still, in this day and age, when everyone knows what’s happening to everyone else, it should be difficult to turn a blind eye to danger, not to speak of tragedy, even when it befalls people who are “the other.”

So I fault President Barack Obama not so much for finding it difficult to respond to Russian aggression in Ukraine. His options are limited given the circumstances and given how, in my view at least, Putin will stop at nearly nothing to hold on to a country that he views as essential both to greater Russia and to himself, personally and politically.

Rather I fault the president for insularity in his foreign policy leadership more generally. Obama’s foreign policy has been one of restraint, of holding back, of letting events follow their natural trajectories, of leading, if at all, “from behind” – whatever that means. His restraint has been in evidence at every turn, most strikingly arguably in America’s policy toward Syria, which has been to let history take its course while we stand by and do nearly nothing.

To be sure, there is a single exception to this general rule: when Obama had no where else to turn, he turned to Vladimir Putin to strike a deal on Syria’s chemical weapons. But, as we now know, this had the miserable effect of strengthening the hand of Putin’s client, Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. It gave Assad free rein to continue to punish severely the Syrian people, and to further contribute to the worst humanitarian crisis in at least a generation. Let’s be clear: the number of dead in Syria, the vast number of Syrian refugees (two million and counting), and the overwhelming misery of the Syrian people more generally will be a reminder for many to come of how high the price of Insular Leadership. In the end the cost of doing nothing is way more – practically, politically, and obviously morally – than the cost of doing something. Don’t tell me that the Americans, the West more generally, and the United Nations could not have come up with a policy somewhere between military intervention and being a bystander to catastrophe!

Is there a connection between Obama’s general insularity and the situation in which he finds himself now – threatened, however indirectly, by yet another Russian dictator? Who knows? Safe to say though that pulling back from world politics, letting events unfold while we Americans stand by and watch, is not a foreign policy that history will judge one of distinction.

A key player in the crisis in Ukraine is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She is known to want nothing so much as to avoid international conflict that would in any significant way drag in Germany. So what she did was to pick up the phone and call President Vladimir Putin, twice in recent days, to urge him to play nice. 

The connection however must have been poor – for evidence is Putin heard not a syllable she said. Evidence is Merkel’s words fell on deaf ears.    

Surprise, surprise! Putin did what some of us predicted he would do: stake his personal and political reputation on refusing to stand by and do nothing while Ukraine slipped into the embrace of the West. As of this morning, thousands of extra troops, presumably Russian, have been sent to Crimea, to make clear that if Kiev continues on its current course, away from the East and toward the West, it will do so without Crimea. It will lead either to a breakup of the Ukrainian state, or to considerable civil strife if not all out civil war, or to some brokered arrangement in which Crimea is given a high degree of autonomy within a larger Ukraine. 

The ultimate outcome of this standoff is obviously unclear. What is completely clear is that no amount of ordinary chit chatting will get Putin to stand down. For once, Chancellor Merkel, just like President Obama, will have to get deeply involved and her hands somewhat soiled.       

For all the years that I have been teaching a course titled “Women and Leadership” – both at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth – one of the running themes has been what most women experience as a  tension between family and work. While the demographics of my students skew toward women eager “to lead,” the theme has become a commonplace, a constant commentary on the stresses associated with trying to “have it all.” 

Until recently these stresses have been owned nearly entirely by women, especially by those who are intent on having one or more babies while at the same time striving toward achieving a successful career. The “biological clock” was thought to tick for women, not men, the former not the latter saddled with the issue of how to get ahead while first being pregnant and then parenting young children. 

But, in the last year or two, in the wake of sometime studies suggesting that men too had some sort of biological clock, our attitudes began gradually to change. Moreover now, with a major new study just out of Sweden reporting that children born to middle-aged men are more likely than those born to younger men to develop mental difficulties ranging from autism and schizophrenia to attention deficit and bipolar disorder, the discourse will have to shift. Now whatever the concerns associated with when to have a baby and when to focus on career will have to be more equally shared. 

The new study is by no means the last word on the subject. Researchers are quick to say that the results will have to be replicated, and that the vast majority of children born to older fathers will in any case be just fine. But the evidence is accumulating and suggestive if not stark: men are not immune to some of same concerns about when to have a baby that for years now have bedeviled women. 

This is not to say that gender does not matter. When last I looked women were still the ones able to bear babies and when last I looked women were still the ones able to suckle them. Still, the fact that men now also need more carefully to decide when to have a baby should in time change the debate. It should in time make more accommodating the workplace, which generally continues to require a commitment incompatible with raising young children – especially in a society that usually provides no obvious, affordable day care alternative.          

For several years now I have maintained that leaders – all leaders – are getting weaker and followers, others, stronger. It’s hard sometimes to make the case, particularly as it pertains to chief executive officers of America’s largest companies, where the metric typically used is pay, which, equally typically, is excessive. In fact, the gap between the pay of chief executives and average workers has never been wider.   

However if instead of fixating on pay to the virtual exclusion of everything else, we take a more expansive view of the context within which leaders lead, especially in corporate America, we can more easily see the pressures under which they now operate. We can more easily see how obliged they now are, even those at the top, to respond to forces other than the ones that they themselves generate.  

From time to time this blog will identify some of these contextual pressures, if only to step back from both individuals and institutions in order to identify components of context with which even CEOs are obliged now to reckon.   

For today these three:

• Public Opinion. No groundswell for sure. No groundswell by CEOs to cut down on their pay packages in response to the rising tide of anger by the 99 percent at the 1 percent, especially at the ultra rich. Still, it’s worth noting that recently several chief executives have chosen to say no to earnings to which they were entitled. A couple of examples: 1) IBM’s Virginia Rometty stood to collect an additional $8 million on top of her salary and other compensation. Instead she demurred, saying, “In view of the company’s overall full-year results, my senior team and I have recommended that we forgo our personal annual incentive payments for 2013.” Similarly, Barclay’s chief executive, Antony Jenkins, turned down his bonus for the second year running, announcing, “I have concluded that it would not be right, in the circumstances, for me to accept a bonus for 2013, and I have, therefore, respectfully declined the one offered to me by the board.” What? Who would’ve thunk it?!
• Activist Investors.  Call them what you will – corporate raiders, if you like – the fact is that they are escalating in number and in the brazenness of their attacks on CEOs who would greatly prefer they go away and never be heard from again. A single example: Nelson Peltz, who for years has toyed with chief executive officers. Most recently he has again taken on the management of PepsiCo, insisting that although the company had recently undertaken an “exhaustive” strategic review, it was inadequate. According to the Wall Street Journal, Peltz’s company, Trian Fund Management, is demanding that PepsiCo split up, spinning off its struggling beverage business (2/21/14). Moreover it is threatening that if it does not, it will begin meeting with shareholders “immediately,” and might even conduct public shareholder forums to galvanize support for the proposed company breakup. Should we pity PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi? Not hardly. Should we take a more complex view of the context within which she is operating? Oh yes!
• Shared Power. Big fuss recently over Mary Barra, the first female executive of a major American car company, General Motors. There’s just one teeny-weeny problem: signs are that GM’s board has no intention of letting her have free rein. Shared power – that is, the chief executive officer having to share decision making authority with a range of others, including board members and members of their own executive teams – is no longer anything new. But it is a very big deal. And it is a very big change from times past. And in some cases it is downright intrusive on leaders, CEOs, who would actually prefer leading without being monitored at every turn. It’s too early to tell how Barra will fare in her new position, but the early signs are that she will be kept on a short leash. Above all, while Barra is CEO of GM, she is not chair of GM’s board. That position is held by Theodore Soslo, former CEO of Cummins, who has something of a reputation for being “edgy” and “not afraid to make unpopular calls” (Reuters, 2/11/14). In other words, Soslo is anything other than shy and retiring.  Again, the arrangement is not new – by now nearly half of S&P 500 companies split up the roles of CEO and chair. But of course how it plays out depends on the individual players as well as the institutional arrangements. Even under optimum circumstances, though, inevitably the CEO’s role is, by definition, somewhat diminished.

You could argue that none of these contextual pressures are, of themselves, earth-shaking. But it would be hard to make the case that taken together they are unimportant or irrelevant.

 One could argue that until now President Barack Obama has not been forced to face a major foreign policy crisis. One could argue that the foreign policy crises he did face – for example, in Syria – he was able ultimately to skirt, in the case of Syria, ironically, by striking a deal (on chemical weapons) with the devil, that is, with President Vladimir Putin.

However those days might now be over. The surly statement made this morning by Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, in the immediate aftermath of the closing of the Olympics in Sochi, might be the opening salvo in a contest between East and West, between Russia on the one hand and the U.S. and Europe Union on the other, that takes us back literally to the days of the Cold War.

Let’s be clear: for various historical and contemporaneous reasons Russia’s stake in Ukraine is huge. And, let’s be equally clear: for various historical and contemporaneous reasons Europe and America’s stake in Ukraine is similarly huge. It will therefore require restraint on Russia’s side to prevent this crisis from escalating further. And it will therefore require activism on the part of the West, by the US in particular, to preclude the possibility that Russia has its way with the former Soviet Socialist Republic. Trouble is that restraint is not Putin’s strong suit. Trouble is that activism in international affairs is not Obama’s.

I cannot prove it. But here is what I believe to be true.

We all know that there have been protests in Kiev for months. For months opponents of Putin-backed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych have taken to the streets, insisting that his government shift away from Russia and toward Europe. This then raises a question: Why did the opposition suddenly up the ante this week? Why did it choose this particular moment to mount an attack on the authorities so fierce that it finally drew the attention not only of the Europeans, who had been shilly-shallying, but of the Americans, who had been pretending there was no problem?

I am convinced that it was to make certain that the Olympics in Sochi did not pass unmarred, did not allow Putin to close the games on a note of unmitigated triumph. I suspect, in other words, that the escalation of the last week was orchestrated by the Ukrainian opposition to remind the world that while Putin’s fantasy was Sochi, his reality was Kiev.

As I write, the outcome of this week’s standoff in Ukraine remains uncertain. An agreement was struck to end the violence and to hold early presidential and parliamentary elections. Yanukovych, meanwhile, is said to have fled his large and elaborate palace.  But whether the government, the opposition, or even Putin will actually adhere to the agreement is undetermined. Moreover while the American president warned of dire consequences in the event the standoff is not favorably resolved, his track record of issuing such warnings and then being ready, willing and able to back them up, is not reassuring. (See under Syria.)

What the deaths this week in Kiev have again made clear is how loathe are leaders to take on other leaders. Had the people of Ukraine not resisted their government, for sure their country would have regressed to the days of the Soviet empire, firm again in the claws of the Russian bear. For the truth of it is that until this week’s massacre, Obama, Hollande, Cameron, Merkel and their like stood by and, in effect, did nothing while Kiev simmered.

I will have more to say about leaders as Bystanders in a future blog. For the moment it’s clear that if Ukraine does manage to escape Putin’s iron grip it will not be because of leaders but because of followers, because of ordinary people who dare to speak truth to power.

OK, I admit it. I’m a junkie. I can’t get clean. I cannot rid myself of the craving, at least one time a day, for the latest on the scandal ensnaring New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. 

Weeks ago family and friends shared my addiction. But they have shaken the habit while I have not. I remain fascinated not by the man, not by the blatant abuse of power by him and/or by his closest aides, not even by New Jersey politics which, fairly or unfairly, has long been reputed to be, shall we say, gamey.

No, what fascinates me is us, how one moment we’re in love and the next we’re not. How from one moment to the next our feelings about a man long in plain view can change from fascination and admiration to fascination and abomination.

It’s not as if Christie was one thing and now is another. He has changed not in the least – he always was rude and crude, straight-talking to the point of being offensive, forceful to the point of being a bully, arrogant to the point of being a know-it-all. Moreover had we given him even a moment’s serious thought, we would have known there’s no way in hell a man like that could so brilliantly have succeeded in New Jersey politics without striking some suspect deals.

No, it’s not the governor of New Jersey who has changed it is we who have changed. It is we who have been forced to see clearly – forced by Bridgegate – the man behind the everyman mask.

So what does this say about us? It says that we are so desperate for leaders who are new and different, honest and direct, fearless and forward-looking, centrist and collaborationist, that we are willing to take at face value someone who seems to us to embody these attributes. Unless and until we’re hit over the head with the truth, we prefer to settle for someone who seems to be what we’re looking for – rather than to first do our homework and then to wait for someone who really is.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of this scandal, Chris Christie has already been revealed a grievous disappointment. The thing of it is this says less about him and more about us.