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NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. BLAME THE LACK OF TIME – AND ALL THOSE OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH I CHOOSE TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, THIS VERY SHORT COURSE CONTINUES.

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As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they will prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so convincingly making their case that people would feel compelled to act.

The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did – or at least they had an enduring impact. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.

Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Betty Friedan. Friedan was both singular and part of a tradition. She was part of a tradition of great women writers – such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – who fought for the cause of women’s rights with such immense eloquence and preternatural persuasiveness that they started or at least suggested a social movement. Friedan though was singular in that she identified a problem – a problem with no name – that most women of her time did not consciously even know existed. After all, in the 1960s women could vote, they could divorce their husbands without losing their children, and they could own property. In other words, unlike the women in Wollstonecraft and Stanton’s time, women in Friedan’s time, especially if they were white and reasonably well-off, had nothing obvious to complain about. Not to speak of revolt about.

But Friedan did it, changed the way women thought. Moreover, her classic contribution, The Feminine Mystique, which was, not incidentally, published the same year (1963) as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” hit a nerve almost immediately. Large numbers of women across the country identified with the issues that Friedan had raised, and they responded accordingly. It is not too much to say that The Feminine Mystique was the match that lit the movement. The women’s liberation movement that in the 1960s and ‘70s especially played a such a prominent part in the American political firmament.   

Friedan continued to be politically active to the end of her life. And she continued to write books. But The Feminine Mystique was her signal contribution. As the New York Times wrote in her obituary, the book “permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world.” In other words, a classic of both literature and leadership.

From Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique – 1963:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, and ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – Is this all?

…. If I am right, the problem that has no name stirring in the minds of so many American women today is not a mater of loss of femininity or too much education, or the demands of domesticity. It is far more important than anyone realizes…. It may well be the key to our future as a nation and a culture. We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says, “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.”

 In Part II of this series on America’s Leadership Culture, I listed the culture’s ten key components. I made plain that these were norms – indicators of how leaders were expected to lead. Each was, however, a reasonable expectation, not an unattainable ideal. Americans do, for example, expect their leaders not to compel compliance by using force. They expect their leaders not to violate the law but to abide by it. And they expect their leaders to respect their followers independent of station or status.  

But what happens when American leaders fly in the face of America’s leadership culture? Especially when they flagrantly and repeatedly violate its norms?

The answer is “it depends.” As always, it depends on who is the leader, who are the followers, and what is the context within which the norms are being violated.*

Elon Musk is a glaring example of an American leader who gleefully flies in the face of its leadership culture. No question he is a leader. A leader of several extraordinary companies. A leader on earth and in space. A trillionaire leader who, because of what is now his historically great wealth, will wield even more power in the future than he did in the past.

Musk doesn’t bother with authority or influence. He is so dominant that all he must do to get his way is to exert the power that already is his. Starbase, Texas, is an example. It’s a company town, built to accommodate people who work at, or are otherwise closely affiliated with Musk’s company, SpaceX. Musk controls Starbase as would an all-powerful king, or tsar, or emperor. The town is described by locals as having a “highly secretive environment overseen by a company-affiliated commission that rubber-stamps Mr. Musk’s vision, a place where even kindergartners are guided by his philosophies.”**  

What we have then are two truths – truths that would appear contradictory, but which nevertheless coexist. America has a leadership culture that consists of norms to which most leaders are expected to adhere. But to this general rule as with other general rules, there are exceptions. Musk is a genius – which is why he is one.    

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*I always think systemically. Specifically I conceive of leadership as a system with three parts that are equally important: leader, followers, contexts.

**https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/opinion/elon-musk-spacex-starbase-texas.html

In the post preceding this one I introduced the concept of leadership culture. I wrote that it consisted of widely held values, attitudes, opinions and norms as they pertained to leadership in a particular group or organization. I further applied the concept of a “leadership culture” to the performances of two leaders, both Americans, Donald Trump and Jamie Dimon. The former in disharmony with his leadership culture; the latter in harmony with it.

In this post I list the ten key components of America’s leadership culture. They apply across the board – to leaders in government and business; religion and education; the military and the media. To American leaders wherever they are located.

• All American leaders are expected to rely far more on authority and influence than on power.
• All American leaders are expected to be checked by constitutional, institutional, or organizational constraints.
• All American leaders are expected to abide by the American creed which includes, among its virtues, adherence to the rule of law.
• All American leaders are expected to, at some point, agreeably and gracefully surrender their posts.  
• All American leaders are expected to behave in ways that conform to the norms of their groups or organizations.
• All American leaders are expected to communicate both within their groups or organizations, and without.
• All American leaders are expected to protect and defend their followers no matter any risk to themselves.
• All American leaders are expected to respect their followers independent of their station or status.
• All American leaders are expected to leave their groups or organizations better off after they served than before.

I am not of course claiming that all American leaders conform to these norms. I am claiming that they constitute a template for what leadership in America is supposed to look like.

Just as there is such a thing as a national culture, or an institutional or organizational culture, there is such a thing as a leadership culture. Broadly speaking leadership cultures are composed of two parts – the general and the specific. So, for example, the leadership cultures of the president of the United States and the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase are both rooted in American soil. In this sense they are similar. However, at the same time these two leadership roles are rooted in the specifics of their institution and organization. So, President Donald Trump’s leadership culture is that of the United States and of the American presidency. While Jamie Dimon’s leadership culture – he is CEO of JPMorgan Chase – is that of the U. S. and of his bank, JPM. As a result, while the leadership cultures in which Trump and Dimon are located have some things in common, they do not have everything in common.

Moreover, the two men are different. Dimon has led in harmony with his leadership culture. Under his leadership his company has thrived in virtually every aspect. Additionally, after more than two decades at the top, Dimon remains widely regarded as one of the most admirable and successful CEOs in American history. He looks, acts, and plays his part perfectly.  Perfectly in keeping with the leadership culture in which he is situated.

Trump in contrast has led in disharmony with his leadership culture. There is a reason a scant 16 percent of Americans approved his having held a cage match on the grounds of the White House. It’s because it seems to them inappropriate. Out of keeping and character with what we think of as properly belonging in this time at that place. The occasion – celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States – would seem to demand a sense of history and modicum of propriety. Trump was not, after all, elected referee or ringmaster. He was elected president, chief executive of a country with a flawed but, still, fabled history.  

We should conceive of a “leadership culture” as akin to a “national culture” or “organizational culture.” While the concept of culture is somewhat vague – it cannot be precisely defined or easily quantified – we know it has substance. The national culture of China is obviously radically different from that of Argentina or Canada.  Similarly, the organizational culture at Meta is obviously radically different from that of Mercedes or Merck.  

The components of culture are nowhere written or otherwise enshrined. Still, there is broad agreement that they include loosely but nevertheless widely shared values, beliefs, attitudes and opinions.  We similarly know that they include norms and habits that, while not codified, are nevertheless understood widely to apply.

In general, then, all American leaders are expected to abide by, for example, traditional American values such as democracy, and they are expected to act accordingly. At the same time while it is expected of some American leaders, notably those in the private sector, to make a lot of money both for themselves and for followers such as shareholders, other American leaders, notably those in the public and nonprofit sectors, are not expected to make a lot of money, not for others and assuredly not for themselves.

The accumulation of wealth, certainly of great wealth, is, ostensibly, one of the things that most obviously distinguishes the leadership culture of the American president from the leadership culture of the chief executive officer of JPMorgan. The first is expected to be wholly uninterested in personal financial gain. The second is expected to be highly interested in personal financial gain if only because their wealth is inextricably tied to that of the companies they lead.

Trump has seemed to pride himself on shattering presidential norms, on breaking with the leadership culture that for generations has been associated with America’s chief executive. Dimon has done the opposite. He appears to pride himself on perfectly conforming to his company’s leadership culture – which is why, while history will treat Trump poorly, very poorly, it will treat Dimon kindly, very kindly.    

Every year that Xi Jinping has been president of China – starting in 2013 – he has tightened the screws further. His government has more assiduously than the year previously monitored the Chinese people – which of course makes dissent more dangerous and therefore more infrequent.

Those of us who’ve never experienced living in full out autocratic state have a hard time conjuring what it’s like. Even the Orwellian conception of Big Brother does not do what’s happening in China full justice. For China continues to take the most advanced monitoring technologies – now obviously enhanced by AI – to new levels of surveillance.    

The most extreme example of Chinese repression is of the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic group of about 12 million people who live in northwest China. For more than a decade they have been forcibly “reeducated” to be assimilated. While China predictably denies “eliminating Uyghur language and culture,” the government’s own messaging contradicts the claim. What Beijing regularly and relentlessly emphasizes is “ethnic unity” and “love of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Mainstream Chinese fare better, of course. But by no means are they free of Xi’s iron fist. The government uses artificial intelligence, biometric tracking, and obligatory digital tracking to operate by far the world’s largest and most sophisticated mass surveillance network. As the New York Times put it, China’s near perfection of the surveillance state has resulted in “Mao-era policing on steroids.”

Lest you think this suffices, it does not. China is using AI to develop a predictive model. A model intended not to identify who poses a risk to the authorities today – but who will pose a risk to them tomorrow!

Sounds like sci-fi but it is not. According to researchers at Vanderbilt University, a Chinese company called Geedge Networks is developing new surveillance and censorship software that will allow the regime to predict who is likely to say or do something critical of it in the future.     

So, those of us who live in a democracy that we benignly neglect better shape up. Lest we live in an autocracy that deprives us of that luxury.   

Jill Biden’s new memoir, View from the East Wing, will sell well. She’s tirelessly promoting it. The interest in “what happened to Joe Biden and when” remains strong. And the appetite among Democrats – as well as many independents and some Republicans – for blaming someone, anyone, for Donald Trump’s reelection remains unslaked.

But for those of us with a particular interest in how leadership is exercised – or not – the mere fact of the book is a reminder of the power of the pillow, specifically of pillow talk, especially in the American presidency.

My use of the term “pillow talk” is to indicate an intimate relationship between husband and wife. Not every president and first lady have pillow talks, not for example, so far as we can tell, Donald and Melania Trump. Nor Richard and Pat Nixon. But they are the exceptions, not the recent rule. In the modern American presidency, most presidents are politically and personally heavily dependent on their wives. Which explains why their relationships are intimate – in different ways they are extremely close.

Presidents share with their wives the pleasures of the White House and the burdens of the office. Similarly, presidents share with their First Ladies information and ideas, duties and responsibilities, values, beliefs, and opinions. Think Gerald and Betty Ford, Jimmy and Roselynn Carter, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, George H.W. and Barbara Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton (no eyerolling, please!), George W. and Laura Bush, and Barack and Michelle Obama.  

From everything we know, Joe and Jill Biden have had, from the beginning of their marriage up to now, a relationship that was intimate. Given their shared triumphs, tribulations, and tragedies, we can even surmise that it was unusually intimate. Joe Biden was senator from the state of Delaware when he and Jill married. He stayed in the senate for about thirty years; then served eight years as vice president; and finally, four years as president. Every step of the way his wife Jill was close by, right by his side.   

At the same time Jill Biden made a point of claiming her own identity. Specifically, as an independent woman with her own, separate and distinct, professional life.  Having received an Ed.D. degree in educational leadership, she insisted on being called “Dr. Jill Biden,” which some thought pompous and others just a sign of the respect she was anyway due.

The one time in Dr. Biden’s life when, by her own account, her roles conflicted was when her husband, president of the United States, showed serious signs of serious aging. One the one hand she continued to be the independent woman who was the first First Lady to hold a paying job outside the White House. On the other hand, she continued to be the dutiful wife, consort and consigliere to the president. But, as it turned out, it was not possible for her responsibly to play both parts at the same time.

In her book, the portrait she paints of her marriage is in one all-important respect curiously, even weirdly, old-fashioned. When it came to her husband’s health, Jill Biden claims that an open and honest exchange, pillow talk, was unimaginable. It just wasn’t done. In an interview she insisted that her extreme discretion on such matters was “generational.” It was, she said, “the way we grew up.” In her book she asserted the same thing – that she never, ever, discussed her husband’s health with him. “It’s always been the nature of our relationship,” she wrote, “that we’ve maintained a veil of discretion around personal health.”      

Well… each to their own. It’s not my place to question the ways of others. It is however my place to point out had Jill Biden had “the talk” with Joe Biden, the pillow talk, history might’ve turned out differently. It takes no great leap of the imagination to conjure a world in which Dr. Biden spoke with President Biden reasonably openly and honestly. In which she would draw on the power of the pillow to urge him to withdraw from, or better, not even to launch another presidential campaign. Hard to imagine a competent modern woman unable to see her husband as he was and, or, not wanting to use the power of the pillow to get him to leave the stage while there was still time.

Elon Musk is the richest man in the word. He is founder and chief executive officer of Tesla and SpaceX, two of the most iconic companies ever. And now he is undertaking the largest IPO (initial public offering) in history – SpaceX is set to go public next week. A single share will be priced at $135, which means the company aims to raise about $75 billion at a valuation of about $1.77 trillion. The numbers are astronomical which, given Musk’s ambition to colonize Mars, is the pitch perfect adjective.

However, those among you who are thinking of investing in SpaceX, in getting in on the action while the action is hot, might want to ask yourselves this. What happens to SpaceX if something happens to Elon Musk? Which is possible. He’s singular. But he’s also like you and me in that he is a mere mortal who is, therefore, vulnerable. Vulnerable to having an accident or to getting seriously ill. Vulnerable to – however much he tries to fend them off – the vicissitudes of aging.

I’m certain that Musk has some sort of succession plan. I’m equally certain that he is the axis around which everything in his domains turn – including SpaceX. SpaceX is betting its future on Elon Musk’s future. The prevailing assumption being – the assumption on which the IPO is based – that Musk is impermeable. Which he is not.

Leadership experts have forever disagreed about how important leaders really are. On the one extreme are those who argue that they are all important. On the other are those who insist that they are unimportant. That they are mere pawns on the chessboard of history. As Leo Tolstoy, an expert on everything, concluded in War and Peace, “A king is history’s slave.”

Let’s say though that Tolstoy was wrong. That while many leaders are no more than bit players, some really are stars. They matter – some even a great deal. In which case Musk is among the chosen few. Whatever his flaws, he is as wildly inventive, singularly brilliant, and ferociously ambitious a leader as he has been a successful one.

Space, moreover, is his dreamscape. Safe to assume that for the rest of his sentient life every fiber of Musk’s self will be devoted to the pioneering success of SpaceX.  So, if you’re inclined, and persuaded that he’s just getting started, you might want to throw some of your weight behind SpaceX. But if you’re nervous about Musk’s mortality and everything that this implies, you might want to put your pennies elsewhere.   

Nearly no one wants to hear it. But I surmise a link between our bodies and our lives – specifically, our work lives. Especially as it pertains to power. I refer to the apparently forever gap between the number of women in positions of leadership and the number of men.* The latter continuing to outrank women everywhere, by large margins.

The evidence that women’s bodies affect them in ways that men’s do not is ubiquitous. For example, a recent article in the New York Times that focused not on how some women have a hard time getting pregnant, and not on what many women experience during pregnancy, but on what happens to women in the year after. The piece points out that during this last especially vulnerable period – the twelve months or so after a baby is born – the mother is highly unlikely to get coordinated medical attention.  

Three pertinent points:

• Mental illness spikes in the months following delivery of a baby.
• Both the demands of caring for a baby and the lack of paid leave deter women from seeking medical care.
•  The “dominant obstetric care model treats postpartum recovery as a brief coda to pregnancy.”** It does not address the real and sometimes urgent medical needs of women in the aftermath of having a baby.

The questions that I repeatedly pose are not directed at men. They are directed at women.  At the top of the list are these: First, do you agree that many if not most women have issues relating to, for example, menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause that affect their lives at work? If yes, do you think it likely that this is one explanation, an important one, for why women are still so much less likely than men to be in top leadership roles? And third, if yes to this, do you think that anything can be done about it and if so, what?

Our continuing refusal to talk openly and honestly about how our bodies affect our lives at work, and our continuing temerity about demanding accommodation, explain more than anything else why we still are where we are. Far behind men who, years after the latest iteration of the women’s movement, still have vastly more power and authority than do we.

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*Here are some of my previous posts on the subject.

Women and Leadership – Our Bodies, Ourselves

Women and Leadership – Our Bodies, Ourselves (Continued)

**The present post was prompted by this piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/25/opinion/women-childbirth-postpartum-care.html

NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. BLAME THE LACK OF TIME – AND ALL THOSE OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH I CHOOSE, IN VARIOUS VENUES, TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, THE VERY SHORT COURSE CONTINUES.

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As indicated in my post of August 21, 2025, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the earlier post for how “classic” is defined.)

The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they will prompt you to dig deeper.

The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.

Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so convincingly making their case that people would feel compelled to act.

The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.

Today’s writer as leader – or, if you prefer, leader as writer – is Rachel Carson. She is appropriate to write about on Memorial Day 2026 maybe not in the conventional sense – but certainly in the larger one. Carson was a great American who fought tirelessly for her country, for those who then peopled it, and for the generations of Americans yet to be born. For she was among the angriest – and most influential – environmentalists ever. Carson was angry at all the soiling and spoiling of the air we breathed, and the water we drank, and she was angry at the harm being done, some of it irreparable, to irreplaceable flora and fauna.  

To her anger she harnessed her formidable powers – two in particular. First, she was an expert. As I wrote in Leadership: Essential Selections, “this was no mealymouthed, ladylike lady, shedding wasted tears over the loss of what once had been.” No, this woman was, atypically in the 1950s and 60’s, a highly trained scientist (marine biologist) who marshalled her great knowledge on behalf of her great cause.

Second, Carson wielded her pen with the power and passion of a poet. Her gorgeous yet harrowing descriptions of what had already been lost, and her frightening depictions of destructions yet to come, were impossible to deny. As to many – though tragically not to all – they were impossible to resist.   

While her immediate concern was over the indiscriminate and reckless use of synthetic chemical pesticides (especially DDT), her worries and warnings were much more expansive. Hence her classic, her contribution to the great leadership literature, Silent Spring.  

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Excerpt from Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checker-board of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where in the spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half-hidden in the mists of the fall mornings….

Then a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families…. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours. 

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone? …. On the farms the hens brooded but no chicks hatched…. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire…. Even the streams were now lifeless….

In September the University of Toronto Press will publish my next book. It’s titled Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. These are the four questions to which the book provides answers. First, what are our rewards for following? Second, what are our punishments for not following? Third, what are our rewards for not following? Fourth, what are our punishments for following?

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As I frequently point out, for every billion books and articles about leadership there is one about followership. Imagine my surprise then when, in just the last few days, two items that made news were not about leaders but about followers.

Both were articles about work done by academic researchers. In one case the research was based on followers in Nazi Germany. (Germans during the Nazi era – the many who supported Hitler and the few who resisted him – have been grist for academic mills since the 1950s.) And in the other case the research was based on followers during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War, in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Researchers at Harvard found that those of Hitler’s followers who joined the Nazi Party before he became chancellor (in 1933) tended to be committed Nazi ideologues. In contrast, those who joined only later tended to do so less out of conviction and more out of convenience. They joined because everyone else was joining. So, they were doing no more than, but also no less than succumbing to social pressures. Conforming to what had become social norms.*

The two German social scientists who focused on what happened in Argentina found that middle or low-level bureaucrats were especially vulnerable to following orders that “violated professional obligations, fundamental norms, and even basic morality.” Why? Because if they were willing to do what their superiors told them to do – notwithstanding their superiors might be corrupt or malign – their chances of being promoted or in some other way professionally rewarded were significantly improved.**  

Though they made news, neither of these findings were surprising. In fact, they were completely in keeping with earlier research on followers, especially though not exclusively of Adolf Hitler’s.

This is not, however, to diminish their importance. Expert research on followership remains all too rare. Moreover, it has special resonance in a time such as this one when the United States has a president who is a would-be strongman. When the second largest party in Germany is far-right, so far right that just a few years ago it was seen as extreme. And when the number of democracies has been in decline while the number of autocracies has been on the rise.  

Of course, for someone like me who’s convinced it’s impossible to grasp leadership without followership, studies like those mentioned in this post are catnip.  

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*This research was reported by Sy Boles in “Who Joined the Nazi Party?” in The Harvard Gazette, May 15, 2026.

**This research was reported by Amanda Taub in “Why Autocracies Love Loyal Losers” in the New York Times, May 20, 2026.