Category: Digital Article

Two months ago, I posted a piece titled, “A Radical Relook at the Gender Gap.” (The link is below.) I pointed out that a half century after the start of the modern women’s movement, progress toward equity at or even near the top of the professional ladder remains slow. This especially applies to the number of women in positions of top leadership and management as compared to men.

My argument was “radical” in that it dared to go where others have not. I argued that one of the several reasons for this persistent gender difference is that women and men are different. First, “there are enormous physical and psychological differences between being a woman and being a man.” Second, these differences have consequences. Specifically, they have consequences for women and leadership. They are among the reasons why women continue to lag men when it comes to seeking, and to exercising, power and authority.  

As I wrote in my previous post, “not every woman has menstrual cramps; or gets pregnant; or is exhausted or nauseous while pregnant; or chooses to breast-feed her baby; or feels more responsible for her child than her partner; or has symptoms of menopause. But many or even most women do.” Which is precisely why to presume that all these – separately and cumulatively – are irrelevant to women in the world of work seems to me absurd.

From time to time I will revisit this argument, notably when there is further evidence either to confirm or disconfirm it. (I obviously think the former is far more likely than the latter.) Today then I am pointing to a new book by Lisa Mosconi, titled The Menopause Brain. Mosconi is an Associate Professor of Neuroscience in Neurology and Radiology at the top-flight Weill Cornell Medical College. In this book she further develops the argument made in her earlier, The XX Brain, that women age differently from men. Physiologically differently, psychologically differently.

In The Menopause Brain she reports on how scans confirm that women’s brains change during menopause – and for that matter during puberty and pregnancy – in ways that can and often do affect how they function. Predictably, Mosconi is careful to be sensitive to the point of being politically correct. While her research seems to suggest that at least some of what women experience during menopause would cause their performance, including in the workplace, somewhat to deteriorate, she prefers to refer to the brain as undergoing “a renovation.” For most women menopausal symptoms are transitory – their brain is simply “adapting to its new biology.”

Clearly Mosconi has hit a nerve. Her new book is selling like the proverbial hotcakes, and her TED talk on how menopause affects women’s brains has been viewed over 4 million times. Even more curious then that the question of how being in the body of a woman impacts women and leadership remains generally unasked and, therefore, unexplored.  

The average woman menstruates about once a month, for about five days, for about forty years. Moreover, about ninety percent of women report they have premenstrual symptoms such as headaches or bloating, and about half have menstrual cramps. Can it possibly be, then, that these facts of life are entirely irrelevant to the still relatively small number of women at the top of the greasy pole? Can it possibly be, then, that women’s experiences of menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, childbearing, breast-feeding, and menopause – none of which are experienced by men – have no bearing whatsoever on who in America holds power and exercises authority?

A Radical Relook at the Gender Gap

In a piece posted on December 30, 2023, I named the late Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny, “Follower of the Year.” (He died in February.) In part I wrote, “No single individual is so strikingly lacking in power, authority, and influence as is Navalny – and is nevertheless leaving such a significant imprint. Navalny’s years-long resistance to Russia’s dictator president, Vladimir Putin, is destined forever to linger.” (A link to the post is below.)

Some eight months earlier, I had posted another piece, this one about another Russian dissident, titled “Vladimir Kara-Murza – a Diehard.” In my book Followership I identified five different types of followers, one of which is a Diehard. Diehards are, as their name implies, [followers] prepared to die if necessary for their cause, whether an individual, or an idea, or both. Diehards are deeply devoted to their leaders; or, in contrast, they are ready to remove them from their positions of power… by any means necessary. Diehards are defined by their dedication, including their willingness to risk life and limb. Being a Diehard is all-consuming. It is who you are. It determines what you do.  (A link to this post is also below.)  

Kara-Murza willingness to endure pain and risk death to poke, to provoke, Putin, rivals Navalny’s. For his troubles Kara-Murza is currently serving time in prison, specifically the first year of a singularly severe, twenty-five-year, sentence. (It is the longest jail term given to a Russian dissident in post-Soviet Russia.) He is, for now at least, Navalny’s most prominent, most eminent, and esteemed successor. Like Navalny, Kara-Murza is a Diehard, willing to sacrifice everything, even to pay the ultimate price, to resist the Russian dictator.

Two days ago, Vladimir Kara-Murza was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. This was in recognition of seven columns he wrote for the Washington Post, all published in 2023. The Pulitzer judges pointed to his “passionate columns written under great personal risk from his prison cell, warning of the consequences of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and insisting on a democratic future for his country.”

A splendid acknowledgement of among the bravest of men. I could not help but notice, though, the absence of evidence that he is able to continue to publish.

Vladimir Kara-Murza – a Diehard

Follower of the Year – 2023

On the surface America’s corporate leaders are divorced from what’s happening on the campuses of many of the nation’s colleges and universities. What business is it of theirs if students protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza and America’s support of Israel? 

But not so fast. Recent incidents of campus unrest merely underscore how impossible it is for business leaders entirely to separate themselves from what’s happening in the United States more broadly. They, of course, want nothing so much as to stay in their own silo – the private sector – without getting involved with the public sector. Politics are complicated. Politics are messy. Politics are heated. And, worst of all, politics are divisive. In 2024 American politics are so divisive that if business leaders so much as open their mouths they risk being pilloried – and their businesses negatively impacted – by those who differ even a smidgeon.

Off the record, they do worry. Business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that a number told him they are “deeply concerned,” especially about “incidents of harassment of Jewish students.” But Sorkin adds that despite the handwringing, “there has been little action from corporations, which have a synergistic relationship with the schools where they recruit employees.”

Sorkin could additionally have pointed to the growing calls by protesters for their institutions to divest themselves from companies that have investments in or do business with Israel. In a major concession to students who took issue with policy at Brown University, the school promised that at the corporate board’s next meeting, to be held in October, members will vote on a resolution to divest.

In a column for the New York Times, Sorkin focused on the growing campus antisemitism and what business leaders might do about it. Clearly, he believes that they could do something as opposed to what they have done – nothing. He suggests, for example, that chief executive officers could announce that any school that refuses to take decisive action against antisemitism is one from which their companies will not recruit. Sorkin additionally notes that private equity and venture capital firms are uniquely positioned to influence what happens in institutions of higher education. They could- though they have not – threaten to stop managing a school’s endowments.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal similarly insisted that at least in some situations corporate leaders must get more involved in what’s happening on the nation’s campuses. They cannot be or at least they should not be what most would clearly prefer to be, certainly in public, bystanders.

The Journal ran an editorial that compared how the crisis is being managed at three different universities – Northwestern, the University of Florida, and Columbia. Not surprisingly it singled out the last for leadership that went from bad to worse, charging that Columbia’s president, Nemat Shafik, “has all but surrendered the campus.” The school, the editorial contended, “is barely serving students who pay more than 80,000 to attend, let alone making Jewish students feel safe.”

Then the editorial went a step further. Where, it asked, is Columbia’s board of trustees? Naming names in bold print no less – specifically the names of the board’s chairs and vice chairs, at least three (out of five) of whom are evidently from the private sector, such as David Greenwald, chairman emeritus of the eminent law firm, Fried Frank – the piece pointed out that it is they who are “the ultimate custodians of the institution.” They, in other words, members of the board of trustees, are the leaders ultimately responsible for what is happening, and not happening, at Columbia.

Campus unrest is, of course, not the only hot-button issue on which leaders in corporate America are being pressed to take a stand. The old days when those in the C-suite could wall themselves off from what was happening beyond their four walls are dead and gone. The question though remains – especially during a year in which democracy in America will undergo a stress test – how will they respond? Will it suffice for business leaders to see nothing, hear nothing, and say nothing? Or will they conclude in the coming months that the price for their blindness, and deafness, and silence, might be too high?

There’s a new book out about former British Prime Minister Theresa May* She is described as a dutiful and devoted public servant. But the book’s main argument is that as a leader she was a disaster. “She lacked the strategy, political acumen, communication skills and negotiating abilities demanded of a prime minister, particularly one called upon to deliver Brexit.”**

The depiction of her tenure as an abject failure recalls the three women who, since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, have became symbols of dismal leadership on many of America’s college campuses. They are: 1) Elizabeth Magill, former president of the University of Pennsylvania who in effect was forced to resign her presidency last December; 2) Claudine Gay, former president of Harvard University who in effect was forced to resign her presidency last January; and 3) Nemat Shafik, president of Columbia University who, while still in office, has become emblematic of a leader in higher education unable to control her followers. Columbia is the epicenter of the student protests to which we currently bear witness.

Which raises the question: Is it sheer coincidence that the three leaders who are synonymous with choas on campus are all women? Maybe, maybe not. Whatever the answer, the following points are relevant.

First, women leaders more than men generally feel a need to be ingratiating. They want to be because they believe it’s in their interest to be, liked. Their experience is that confrontation works less well for them than accommodation. Shafik exemplified this phenomenon when a day after she became president, she told a campus publication that she preferred to lead from behind. “Most of the time,” she said, “you can allow your colleagues … to take things where they need to go.”

Second, women leaders who are confrontational are quicker than men to be labeled by others, by their followers, as aggressive. Hence, they are more disposed than men to negotiate – to try to find a middle ground – than to hang tough.

Third, students and faculty are much less familiar with women leaders than they are with men. The history of leadership on American campuses – is dominated by men. It is they who historically have been in positions of power and authority. When Claudine Gay become president of Harvard, she had exactly one female predecessor, Drew Gilpin Faust. Otherwise, in the long history of Harvard – the school was founded in 1636 – was not a single woman at the top.

Fourth, in part because higher education has changed only in the recent past – with many more women deans, provosts, and presidents now than even a decade ago – women at the top tend to be new in their posts. This certainly applies to Magill, Gay, and Shafik, each of whom was inexperienced at being president. Magill was quite new even to the Penn campus, having moved there from the University of Virginia, when she became president, just 18 months before she resigned. Gay had been president of Harvard for only six months when she resigned. And as of this writing Shafik has been president of Columbia for all of ten months.

Finally, there is the larger context, the larger context that is the United States of America in the third decade of the 21^st century. Americans are still unfamiliar with women in top posts. We still have never had a woman president. We still have only ten percent of Fortune 500 companies whose chief executive officers are females. And out of 50 governors only 12 are women.

No wonder female presidents of colleges and universities might be more vulnerable to activist followers than their male counterparts. No wonder women find it hard to navigate between being sufficiently proactive and seen as excessively assertive, even aggressive. No wonder Magill and Gay were so quickly on the chopping block. No wonder Shafik has been so rapidly besieged.

Could this all be happenstance? A coincidence that these three presidents, these three women, were so personally, politically, and professionally endangered in such short order? Of course, it could. But is it?

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*Tim Shipman, No Way Out: Brexit, from the Backstop to Boris.  

**The quote is from a review by Nick Pearce in the Financial Times.

In my previous post on leading on college campuses I suggested that – given the recent turmoil at Columbia University – the president of the university, Nemat Shafik, was likely to have only two choices. One of these was to quit, to resign from her post as president. Just 48 hours later this option was being openly discussed. Yesterday morning, the New York Times informed its readers that “the university faced a swirl of doubts over the future of its president.” And yesterday, no less than the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, visited the Columbia campus and called for Shafik to resign unless she could “immediately bring order to this chaos.”

This is not to say that President Shafik will resign or should. It is, however, to point out how remarkably quickly her position became strikingly, humiliatingly, tenuous. It is also to stress how vulnerable campus leaders are to their followers. Ten days ago, the president of Columbia University seemed reasonably secure in her post. Now her power has been greatly diminished, her authority has been reduced to near vanishing, and her influence is no greater than that of many other Columbia stakeholders who a couple of weeks ago would’ve been expected simply to follow where she led.

Having leaders so easily and frequently undermined is a recipe for disorder. But guess what. People don’t like disorder. We might briefly be interested and even amused by it, but in short order disorder wears thin. It wears thin even on college campuses where issues such as free speech have suddenly become fraught.

It’s no accident that even as some American colleges and universities have been unsettled by unrest, most have not. Most campuses are quiet despite what is happening in Gaza, with administrators, faculty, and students each playing their designated parts. They are quiet not because their leaders are so remarkably effective – though some are – but because in the main disorder is distasteful, especially if it is prolonged or threatens to turn violent. So, overwhelmingly, campuses are peopled by administrators who want to administrate, by instructors who want to instruct, and by students who want to study at least enough to graduate.

If there is a single wise man in higher education, it’s Derek Bok. He was president of Harvard University from 1971 to 1991 and again, on an interim basis, from 2006 to 2007. Now 94 years old, he is widely respected by those who know him, and know of him. Therefore, in the wake of the abrupt resignations of the presidents of Penn and Harvard, late last year and early this one, he wrote an essay that was published twice.* It explored the “public shaming” of several university leaders, and the tide of antagonism toward some of America’s best schools, with Bok suggesting how some of the problems might be alleviated.   

He acknowledged that “changes in the larger society” played a role in what was happening. Specifically, elite universities became “more vulnerable to public opinion and government intervention,” making them liable to attacks from “both ends of the political spectrum.” He also pointed out that for years trust in all American institutions has been steadily declining. Hence his question, “Why aren’t elite leaders doing more to protect themselves?” He muses that perhaps they think that their “institutions are too valuable to suffer much harm.” Or perhaps they believe that the “danger will pass before real damage is done.”

Whatever the answer to his question – which now anyway is moot; we know for a fact that President Shafik, for example, has been sensitive for months to the political climate both on her campus and in Washington – Bok had some suggestions on how “elite leaders” might respond to the challenges they faced. These included: immediately correcting mistaken impressions, hiring conservative faculty to correct for the liberal bias of current faculty, identifying instructors who try to indoctrinate their students, providing students with a civic education, and helping them to become proficient in moral reasoning.

Impossible to quarrel with any of the wise man’s wise ideas, several of which would, however, take years to have an effect. Moreover, implementing each might be necessary, but whether they would be sufficient to address the problems he himself idenifies is another matter.

Of course, Bok is hardly the only one to address the question of how campus leaders should lead. Steven Brint, for instance, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California, Riverside, pointed out that in the old days college and university presidents were expected to be superior scholars and competent administrators. Now, though, they must, absolutely must, be good communicators. They must be able to “provide the public with straight talk and with concrete examples illustrating why their institutions make a difference and are worthy of public support.”

Because context matters, leaders with predecessors who were pushed out are given a period of grace. Case in point: Harvard’s interim president Alan Garber, who succeeded Claudine Gay after her sudden resignation in January. Garber served as Harvard’s provost for many years, so he is deeply familiar with the university he now heads. Still, he has his work cut out for him, including on issues of extreme contentiousness such as free speech, institutional neutrality, and antisemitism. But at least for the time being, most, not all, but most, of Harvard’s stakeholders – the majority of faculty and students among others – have had enough. Tired of constant tensions, and leery of persistent disruptions, they are likely to bestow on their interim leader time to help their campus heal. Which does not of course – as President Shafik would be the first to testify – obviate the larger issue of how to lead on campus in the third decade of the 21^st century.  

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*Bok’s essay first appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education and then in Harvard Magazine.

Within a day of my posting Part I of this series about leadership in higher education, which focused on Nemat Shafik, the president of Columbia University, the situation over which she presided went from bad to worse. In just in the last 24 hours tensions at Columbia escalated considerably. Largely pro-Palestinian students continued to refuse to back down. In person classes were suspended for at least the Passover holiday. All students who did not live on campus were told not to come in. And Jewish students were advised by a resident rabbi to go home and stay there until things cooled down. The campus was so roiled that the White House felt compelled to comment that “blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous,” and to warn that “silence is complicity.”

President Shafik was of course the lightning rod, she got it from all sides. Predictably, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik – who appears hellbent on being the bane of women leaders, specifically those of large Ivy League institutions – demanded that Shafik resign immediately, charging that she had “clearly lost control of the campus.” Protesters in turn thought just the opposite – that Shafik had not been too weak in response to their continuing disruptions but too strong.

Their view was most remarkably expressed not by them but by a group of untenured faculty who sided, unequivocally, with the protesters.  In a letter to the student newspaper, The Columbia Spectator, they wrote: “The behavior of university administrators that has created this atmosphere of fear is not normal or acceptable. We are working to overturn the student suspensions that have been issued and ensure that administrators are not allowed to summon [the New York City] police on a whim.”

To say that Shafik is caught between a rock and a hard place doesn’t quite capture it. On the assumption that other campus leaders – other presidents, deans, and trustees – don’t want to fall into the same trap, is there anything to be learned from this case?

I will have more to say about this in a future post. For now, just five quick leadership lessons. 1) Take a clear, unambiguous position early on and stick to it. Flexibility in a prestigious post is not generally a strength. 2) Ground your positions in both morality and legality – simultaneously, not sequentially. 3) Keep your allies close and your close allies even closer. Keep your enemies at a distance. 4) Never allow anything or anyone bad to persist. If left to fester bad has a malevolent habit of getting worse. 5) If you reach a point where too many followers refuse to follow, and neither their numbers nor their levels of resistance show signs of abating, recalibrate. Consider your options, which likely are only three. The first is somehow to restore order before the spring semester ends. The second is to do little or nothing until the spring semester ends – which is soon. The third is to resign.

For over a decade I’ve been writing about how leadership has become more difficult to exercise. Specifically in liberal democracies and especially in the United States. Not by chance the titles of two of my books – The End of Leadership (2012) and Hard Times: Leadership in America (2015) – make just this point.

Relations between leaders and followers have become more strained because our ideologies have changed, and so have our technologies, and our culture. These changes cut across the board, impacting leadership and followership everywhere: in politics and business, religion and education, the media, and the military. In recent months college and university campuses have been among the most visible of the relevant battle grounds, with tensions between leaders and others who, for leaders to lead, must follow. Usually, the leaders are presidents and deans of institutions of higher education. Usually, their followers include 1) students; 2) faculty; 3) staff; 4) alumni; 5) parents; 6) donors; 7) federal, state, and local officials; 8) interest groups; 9) lobbyists; and 10) the public.

In December and January, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard were pushed from their posts on account of fallout from the war in Gaza. Last week the president of Columbia University, Dr. Nemat Shafik had her turn on the hot seat. In testimony before Congress, she conceded that Columbia had initially been stunned, even overwhelmed both by the virulence of campus protests in response to the crisis in the Middle East and, relatedly, by repeated incidents of antisemitism.

In her appearance before Congress, Dr. Shafik seemed to feel she had no choice but to respond to events on Columbia’s campus as strongly as publicly. She and Claire Shipman, co-chair of the school’s board of trustees, admitted they had a “moral crisis” on their hands, and they vowed that any violation of university policy would “have consequences.” One day later Shafik called in the New York City Police to arrest over 100 student protestors and tear down their encampment.  

But if she thought the furies would be mollified or at least chastened, she was wrong. For her troubles she was loudly and soundly attacked by those who virulently disagreed with what they considered her too conservative views. The campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors announced that it had “lost confidence in our president and our administration.” A pro-Palestinian coalition of faculty and staff called on faculty to boycott not just graduation but all academic events. A columnist writing for the New York Times, Lydia Polgreen, asked, “If universities can’t protect free speech, what hope is there for other institutions?” And, most problematically, there was no sign that protesters at Columbia were acquiescing to the administration’s demands. The Times reported that even after the arrests, students remained “defiant” and activists “showed little signs of losing steam.”  

To be clear, President Shafik had her defenders. An eminent professor of law at Columbia, Vincent Blasi, an expert on civil liberties, said the university had articulated a “reasonable” policy to govern protests and that it had the right to punish students who violated it. Still, no question that Columbia’s president had been caught in the cross hairs – damned if she did and damned if she did not.

Other colleges and universities have of course fared better. Either their campuses have not been so stressed, or the stress has been better managed. Moreover, this is hardly the first time that American students have taken on their elders. But it is the first time that leaders of colleges and universities have been challenged by so many different followers – different stakeholders, constituents, interest groups, parties and players – each of them convinced they are right, each of them convinced they have a right to have a say, and each of them with access to technologies that enable them not only to communicate but to connect.

In the old days, leaders, including those in higher education, were easily envied. For their power and perks, for their authority and influence. Now not so much. Whatever else can be said about President Shafik it cannot be claimed her last week was either easy or enviable.

It was the leadership sun around which the other planets pivoted. It was the crown jewel of centers of leadership learning. And it was the crown on the head of the king of America’s corporate leaders, Jack Welch. Welch, who in his time was the iconic chief executive of what in its time was arguably America’s most iconic company, General Electric.

The “it” to which I refer was Crotonville, a campus consisting of approximately 60 leafy acres not far from New York City, where for generations GE trained its managers or, if you prefer, developed its leaders. Both the up and coming, and the already arrived and anointed were rewarded for their promise and performance by being among the chosen few. The few who were chosen to spend time at Crotonville where they would be given the keys to the kingdom. The keys were tools for learning how to lead such as new-manager starter kits, training and problem-solving sessions, trouble-shooting guides, and lectures by among others the king himself, Welch, who was proud of nothing so much as his presumed prowess at growing leaders.

Now though Crotonville is no longer. More precisely it is no longer a leadership learning center. This week General Electric finally sold the site, tacitly if not explicitly acknowledging it had long since outlived its purpose.

Why did GE wait so long to dispose of a property that was under used, outdated, and a bit of an embarrassment? I have no idea. As I wrote in 2019, in a piece titled “Learning to Lead – Fiasco at General Electric,” years ago Crotonville was exposed as a learning center not good at teaching even the basics.*   

Jack Welch’s handpicked successor, Jeff Immelt, failed every which way effectively to run the company. During Immelt’s long tenure at the top, GE’s trajectory was straight down. The value of its stock price and assets plummeted, and the company was humiliated by, among its embarrassments, being booted from the Dow. Moreover, in embarrassingly short order the board dumped the man, John Flannery, it had chosen to take over from Immelt, replacing him, finally, with Larry Culp.  Given Culp was the first outsider to lead GE in its 126-year history, his selection was itself an unarticulated rebuke to its center of leadership learning – Crotonville.

In the five years since, it’s become clear that Culp was able to accomplish what the Crotonville crowd was not. He saved General Electric from its hidebound self, most importantly by splitting what had become a disastrously unwieldy, ultimately tottering corporate behemoth into three independent parts. Just this month, each of the three officially became separately traded companies: one in aerospace, one in healthcare, and one in energy.

None of this is to say that the experience of being at Crotonville was a total waste. It was not. But it was never what it was cracked up to be – a place where people learned to lead wisely and well. Instead Crotonville was a temple to a charismatic leader – Jack Welch. The fact that he could not teach how to lead even to his hand-picked successor is, though, less of a reflection on him than it is on the fantasy that leaders will grow smart and strong if put on a five-day diet of a secret sauce.            

Learning to Lead – Fiasco at General Electric

…. and also

Jack Welch. A Leader – But Not for All Seasons

We all make “the leader attribution error.” First, we attribute to leaders events whose geneses lie elsewhere. Second, we credit leaders for outcomes that are positive. Third, we blame leaders for outcomes that are negative.

Sonja Hunt, a psychologist who years ago wrote a chapter for a book I edited titled, Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, described the role of leadership in our construction of reality. “The emphasis on leadership may derive from a desire to believe in the effectiveness and importance of individual action, which is potentially more controllable and understandable than complex contextual variables.” In other words, we make the leader attribution error because leaders help us to make sense of a world that otherwise is disturbingly, distressingly, complex.

The phenomenon came to mind again recently as I read a long article in the Financial Times about “How Google Lost Ground on AI.” The focus of the piece was nearly entirely on Google (Alphabet) CEO, Sundar Pichai. Further, Pichai was compared, always unfavorably, to the man who is often seen as his major rival, Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella.

We tend to place them side by side, to compare them. Both are Indian in origin; both are at the forefront of American technology; both are leaders of one of the most iconic companies in America; and both are now, along with a handful of others, such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, running an all-out race to see who can first, and best, master AI.

Still, the degree to which the article focused on Pichai’s shortcomings – in contrast to Nadella’s lack thereof – was striking. It was especially striking because even in the recent past Pichai was highly esteemed, and because even the near future cannot possibly be predicted with certainty. This is not to say that Pichai is blameless for what appears to be Google’s recent sluggish performance. The buck does after all stop with him. It is, however, to say that blaming one individual for whatever has gone wrong is simplistic, reductionist.    

According to “multiple interviews” conducted by the FT, Google suffers from 1) “simmering tensions between rival factions”; 2) a “lack of clear leadership”; 3) “struggles to adapt from its position as the search market’s dominant incumbent”; 4) the absence of “wartime leadership,” that is, of a leader who can execute “under pressure”; 5) a leader who had to admit he was “caught by surprise” by the suddenness with which AI burst on the national scene; 6) “cultural and organizational problems” that “loom large”; 6) a lack of “clear leadership, particularly in the wake of recent rounds of lay-offs that have left staff rattled”; and 7) a “low key leadership style that may not be suited to a time when Google needs decisive change to close the AI gap with Microsoft and OpenAI”.

The contrast between Pichai and Nadella is implicit throughout the FT article – and sometimes explicit. As here: “Pichai’s incremental approach stands in contrast to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, who has made a series of bold bets on AI, including investing about 12 billion dollars into an alliance with OpenAI, a smaller investment in a French startup, Mistral, and rolling out AI in Microsoft products widely.”

The authors of the FT article took the easy way out. First, they assumed that something had already gone badly wrong at Google. Second, they assumed that blame for whatever went wrong rests solely with the leader of Google. If you believe the first, and you own Alphabet stock, I suggest that you sell it. If you believe the second, I’ve a bridge to sell you and I suggest that you buy it.

Presidents of the United States necessarily lead. Because decisions must be made, they have no choice. But once they are no longer president, they do have a choice. Especially if they are reasonably healthy, they can choose to be active in public life or entirely to withdraw. To have a different sort of life, one that avoids a leadership role of any kind.  

Barack Obama has chosen the latter. Though he was still relatively young when he left the White House – not yet 55 – in the eight years since he has been a purely private citizen. A citizen so private that you’re unlikely to know what he’s been doing all this time unless you look it up.

Obviously, this is his right. During his two terms in the White House the former president appeared to devote himself fully to being a public servant. But Obama’s near total disappearance from the political scene does raise the question of whether someone like him – a political rock star – owes the American people anything during what is widely perceived a time of national crisis. A time when democracy as the United States has known it for almost 250 years is in peril because the nominee of one of the two major parties has repeatedly made clear, in countless ways on countless occasions, his intention to destroy it. We the American people must take him at his word: believe Donald Trump when he says that if wins reelection to the White House in November he will seek to change the Constitution, engage in “retribution,” and radically alter America at home and its role abroad.

Trump is a threat to the nation’s well-being even if he loses the election. Our only hope of avoiding domestic chaos in the weeks and months after Election Day is not only to have Joe Biden win reelection but to win so decisively as to delegitimize, in so far as possible, the claim that the election was rigged.

There are signs that Obama gets the threat. Last week he visited the White House and last night he participated in a major Biden fundraiser. But these sorts of pro forma gestures are not nearly, not nearly, enough. This time around Barack Obama must, in contrast to last time Joe Biden ran for the White House, play a more active part. A part that lasts not weeks but months, that is as consistent as persistent, that is as lucid, unambiguous, and forceful.

Obama is obligated to do no less. Not legally, obviously. But because the American people not once but twice bestowed on him the honor of electing him president, he owes it to them, to us, to the United States of America, to do everything he reasonably can to reelect Joe Biden. To reelect as president the man who for eight years was his competent and constant vice president.     

It now appears this will be a close election. Biden’s approval ratings are middling at best; he still comes across as too old for the office; some of his domestic policies are demonstrably contentious; and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are continuing to rage. It equally appears that Biden is weak with traditional Democratic constituencies such as African Americans, Latinos, young people, and progressives. Which is precisely where, and why, Obama must step up. He must remind those who would constitute his target audiences that not only do he and the incumbent president now have a close political relationship that goes back many years, but that they share a world view, including on the economy and on key policies such as health care and reproductive rights.

When Barack Obama twice took the presidential oath of office, he swore to the best of his ability to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” It was a solemn promise that did not expire when he retired.   

A final note: I seem to recall that during Barack Obama’s two term presidency Michelle Obama was First Lady. I further seem to recall that she was enormously popular with the American people, an influencer if ever there was one. Wouldn’t hurt then for her to get out on the stump. For her between now and November similarly to make clear that Trump is a threat. Unless, of course, she thinks otherwise – prefers that Biden loses and Trump wins.