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Chief executive officers of even the largest oil companies in the world have failed to read the writing on the wall. So heavily armored are they against how the world now works, they did not anticipate this week’s defeats, each of which was inevitable.  

In the Netherlands, a court order will now force Royal Dutch Shell aggressively to slash its carbon emissions. In the U.S., ExxonMobil shareholders put on the board an activist investor who charged the company was facing an “existential risk” because of its continuing dependence on fossil fuels. And a large majority of Chevron’s shareholders voted for a resolution that called on the company to “substantially reduce” emissions from products it produces.   

It’s clear the chief executives of all three companies were brought up short, trapped in bunkers of their own making. Which is why on the all-important matter of climate change they were unable to lead, which is why on the all-important matter of climate change they are being forced to follow.

Who exactly are they following? First and foremost, they are activists, typically either climate activists or activist investors. But they are no longer alone. They are being backed now by some heavy hitters, for example huge investors such as BlackRock and Vanguard. They see climate change as a risk not just generally, but specifically to the businesses in which they invest their money. Most importantly, not far behind them are ordinary people. People like you and me able finally easily to see – all those hurricanes, all those wildfires, all those climate refugees – the planet changing in ways that threaten, if not us then our children.

Subsequent to this week’s events The New York Times reported that Big Oil had been dealt a “stunning defeat.” The Wall Street Journal said something similar – it said the “defeats” were “significant.” But this is not, of course, about “Big Oil.” Nor is it even about the three companies, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron. All these are abstractions. Instead the story is about three men, three CEOs, who are flesh and blood. Who are leaders in high places paid very, very big bucks – apparently to duck the single most important issue facing the companies for which ostensibly they are responsible.    

If he wants, China’s president Xi Jinping now has the right to be president for life.  If he wants, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin now has the means to be president for life. And when President Donald Trump was trying to be funny, he twice over said being president for life was “great,” and at least once suggested Americans “try it someday.”  

Leader tenure is sometimes assumed. For example, presidents of the United States can be reelected no more than one time – thus they can serve a maximum of two consecutive four-year terms. More often, though, leader tenure is not assumed. It is uncertain, not precisely determined or even determined not at all. In other words, most of the time when a person assumes a position of authority, when that person will vacate that position is unknown.    

Moreover, the norms associated with leader tenure are weak. The leadership industry nearly never addresses the subject. And most groups and organizations impose no restrictions on how long their leaders can stay where they are. In the United States, the average tenure for a US Senator is somewhat over ten years; similarly, and likely not coincidentally, the average tenure for a CEO is also somewhat over ten years. But a good number of senators stay in their posts for longer than a decade, as do a good number of CEOs.

One could reasonably argue that so long as leaders are doing a good job, why not leave them alone? Is there an inherent virtue to removing them from their posts so long as they remain good at what they do? It’s not clear. It’s not clear because the question is rarely front and center. It’s not clear because on this subject there is little or no good research. Above all it’s not clear because we are disposed to leave well enough alone, especially when well enough is really rather good – or even very good.

Jamie Dimon has been chairman and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase for over a decade and a half. He is worth nearly two billion dollars and, despite mistakes along the way, is widely considered among the best bankers of his generation.

Last year, Dimon, who is 65, underwent emergency heart surgery. For a brief time, it was not clear if he would return to his post and, if so, under which if any restrictions. Turned out before long he was back full tilt, without any appreciable signs of slowing down. Nevertheless, with an apparent eye to his succession, this week Dimon appointed two women to top posts, one of whom is likely someday to succeed him.

But when that “someday” will come remains entirely opaque. In fact, members of JPMorgan’s board, more than content with Dimon’s performance over the last decade and a half, have told him they want him to stay on for a “significant number of additional years.” How many years is that exactly – what is a number that is “significant”? Who knows? Reports are that Dimon is thinking another five years at least.   

I admit to being on shaky ground when suggesting that one leader in one place for fifteen years or more seems generally a bad idea. Though we do know that autocrats tend to cling to power for unconscionably long, the comparative research on this is as indicated, meager. Still, the world in which Dimon became JPMorgan’s leader is in a thousand ways different from the world in which Dimon leads now. Moreover, leaders are like the rest of us – they get more rigid, less nimble and flexible, more set in their ways. Finally, as history attests, over time power tends to corrupt or, at least, corrode.

How would Dimon respond to the concerns I raise? I’m supposing he might grant my argument – and then point out that to every rule are exceptions.

The Financial Times recently conducted a survey of chief learning officers (CLOs) from companies around the world. More than a quarter said they intended to increase their executive education budgets in 2021, while over half planned to keep their spending at current levels. In other words, though the CLOs insisted they wanted less “fluff” in the future than they had in the past, as well as a proven return on their investment, executive education remained high on their list of priorities.*

The survey further revealed that under the rubric of executive education “leadership” was the top learning priority. Fully 82 percent of respondents cited it as important. Moreover, another 57 percent of respondents cited “change management” as important. In other words, “leadership” and “change management” – terms often thought of as synonymous – far outstripped in importance other executive education priorities such as diversity and inclusion, and digital transformation.

Ironically, it is far from clear that courses in “leadership” and “change management” will avoid the “fluff,” and provide the “return on investment” that CLOs profess to be looking for. What remains opaque, as inevitably it does, is what exactly is meant, particularly by the word “leadership.” What, more precisely, does learning leadership imply to the 82 percent of chief learning officers who deem it of greatest importance?

Are they imagining that leadership is different from management? If so, how? Are they conceiving leadership as a certain set of skills? If yes, which ones? Or are they thinking that leadership is character? If no, how is leadership distinct from character; and if yes, how is character taught? Or is character something that is innate, or instilled in early childhood?

In other words, so long as the leadership industry dodges the question of what exactly is leadership, and so long as the leadership industry skirts the issue of what can reasonably be learned about leadership in a very short period of time, so long will chief learning officers be destined to question their investment – and fret about fluff.

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*Andrew Jack, “What Employers Want from Executive Courses,” Financial Times, May 9, 2021.

My colleague (Todd Pittinsky) and I wrote a book about leaders who lust. It’s titled, Leaders Who Lust: Power, Money, Sex, Success, Legitimacy, Legacy.

We defined lust as a psychological drive that produces intense wanting, even desperately needing to obtain an object, or to secure a circumstance. When the object has been obtained, or the circumstance secured, there is relief, but only briefly, temporarily.

Bill Gates is one of the leaders featured in the book. But his name does not, as recent headlines would suggest, appear in the chapter on lust for sex. It appears in the chapter on lust for legacy.

This is how the two different lusts are characterized:

• “Leaders who lust for sex go on constant, countless hunts for sexual gratification.”
• “Leaders who lust for legacy long, effectively lifelong, to leave an imprint that is permanent.”

I ask you, which better describes Gates? Is he really a leader who lusts for sex? Or is he instead a leader who lusts for legacy?

No one has accused Gates of going on “constant, countless hunts for sexual gratification.” Nevertheless, the recent headlines on Gates and sex have, for the moment at least, stained his reputation and tarnished what up to now has been his stellar name.

What exactly has Gates has been charged with?

• That “in some circles” he developed a “reputation for questionable conduct in work-related settings.” (The quote is from the New York Times, though what exactly was his “questionable conduct” was not clear.)
• That his wife, Melinda French Gates, from whom Gates is getting a divorce, was unhappy with how he handled a sexual harassment charge against one of his longtime money managers.
• That on “at least a few occasions” Gates pursued women who worked for him either at Microsoft or at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Of what this “pursuit” consisted was also not spelled out – though it seems to have been no more than asking a woman out for a drink or dinner. Gates was said as well to have tried at least once to have an “intimate relationship with an employee.” But his try seems to have gone nowhere, possibly, obviously, because the woman said no.
• Gates did admit to having one “affair almost 20 years ago that ended amicably.”  

“Small beer,” as the Brits would say.

I’m aware that by global standards Americans are particularly puritanical about monogamy. However, even in America for a male leader of such enormous prominence and worldliness to have stepped outside the bounds of what is conceived of as a conventional marriage is not exactly shocking.

For the record, Bill Gates did make one serious, related misstep. On a few occasions he spent time with Jeffrey Epstein – including at his palatial Manhattan home – the notorious, now deceased, sex offender. Moreover, Gates first met Epstein only after he had already been convicted of sex crimes. No excusing this relationship – and I do not for a moment minimize what in this instance was Gates’ dismal lack of judgement.

But Bill Gates does not now, and never did, lust for sex. His lust is now what it has always been – to leave an imprint that is permanent. This explains why he became one of America’s greatest innovators ever. This explains why he became one of America’s greatest businessmen ever. And this explains why he became one of America’s greatest philanthropists ever.

Given this and given we do not have great leaders to spare, seems to me we ought not be profligate with those we do have. The few who qualify should be brought to their knees only for mistakes far graver than the ones outlined above. It does not serve us well to have perfection as a standard for great leadership – lest only saints need apply.    

As I write Liz Cheney is the most talked about woman leader in America. It’s not clear that her sudden fame will last. But there is no denying that her decision to launch a full-throated attack on Donald Trump has catapulted her into the national spotlight. In consequence of her relentless assault on the former president, she has been booted out of her leadership role in the House of Representatives. And she has decisively and possibly permanently split from nearly all her Republican colleagues.  

Liz Cheney’s last name is, yes, Cheney. So, on one level it’s understandable that the congresswoman from Wyoming is invariably introduced as Dick Cheney’s daughter. Dick Cheney was, after all, vice president of the United States for eight years (2001-2009), and a leading Republican long before that. In fact, Dick Cheney was one of the most influential leaders in recent American history, including, by all accounts, in his post as Vice President during the two-term presidency of George W. Bush.  

Still, it is not Dick Cheney who birthed Liz Cheney. Liz Cheney has a mother. Liz Cheney was delivered of Lynne Cheney who, it happens, has long been a highly accomplished and prominent figure in her own right.  

Long before it was fashionable or even normal for women of a certain class to work outside the home, Lynne Cheney did. She had an extremely successful career – or, better, plural, as in careers. For example, she was chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993. She was a CNN television host from 1995 to 1998. And over the years she has served on a range of entities from corporate boards to the Readers Digest Association.

Moreover, when time came for Lynne and Dick Cheney to leave Washington to return to their home in Wyoming, her work did not stop. Remarkably, she became a successful and prominent writer, with a focus on early American history. Her most recent books are James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (2015), and The Virginia Dynasty: Four Presidents and the Creation of the American Nation (2020). Both were very well reviewed and received, and both have become a highly respected part of the vast literature on America’s Founders.     

I admit it’s economical to describe Liz Cheney as Dick Cheney’s daughter. However, it’s both inaccurate and unfair. She is also Lynne Cheney’s daughter. And Lynne Cheney merits a place in the nation’s firmament every bit as much as does her husband.

Approximately 60% of American women who gave birth in the last 12 months were in the labor force. About one in four American women who are mothers are single mothers. And women still make up most of the nation’s caregivers. While in most families every adult works, when a child is added to the family, or when a child for whatever reason has to stay home from school, as well as when an aging parent suddenly needs help, the caregiver tends to be the female of the species.

It’s why during the pandemic more working women paid a professional price than working men. In the last fifteen months over a million women went part time or gave up their jobs altogether, mostly to stay with children now home from school. (In September 2020 four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force.) Hundreds of thousands of women reported feeling burned out to the point where they considered quitting their jobs. And women’s level of professional ambition declined: according to one survey, in March 2020, 54% of women described themselves as being “very ambitious.” Twelve months later the number had dropped to 42%.   

But this is a story not just about gender but about class. Women on lower rungs of the economic ladder have fewer choices than do men, especially as they pertain to childcare. Women higher up can, if they want, outsource childcare; women lower down do not usually have that option. They do not have the money to pay caregivers of any kind – which largely explains why Covid-19 has impacted women unequally.

But most of the reports about how the pandemic has had a greater impact on working women than men are about women who are not in upper-level management. They are about women who are in the middle and at the bottom of the organizational ladder.

Women higher up are, though, likely to have a different experience – a very different experience. They are likely to be advantaged by the pandemic, not disadvantaged, specifically by the hybrid model that is the future of the American workplace.

The pandemic will create more work-from-home opportunities for more people. Still, in the United States at least, assuming Covid-19 numbers continue to decline, most people in most organizations will be pressured to return to the workplace, if not full time then close to it.

Women in the top tiers of management will however prove an exception to the general rule. When they return to work they will have more choices. Men with power will not now dare challenge women with power on the issue of working remotely. This means these women – women leaders – will feel newly entitled to work from home part of the time, and to maintain flexible schedules.

Happy Mother’s Day… at least for a chosen few.      

Rarely but sometimes I repeat myself. As in when I repeat that I never write or speak anymore simply about “leadership.” Instead, I’m forever invoking the leadership system.

The leadership system is simple – though it is less simple than just focusing, laser-like, on the leader. Fact is that leaders are no more important than their followers, and that these are no more important than the contexts within which they, leaders and followers, are located. The leadership system, then, consists of three parts – leaders, followers, and contexts – each of which is equally important.*  

This truism comes to mind specifically in the case of India, where Covid-19 has, just in recent weeks, redrawn the political map. Until recently Prime Minister Narendra Modi was riding high. Whatever his flaws – and they were considerable – his political standing within India, notably among the majority Hindus, seemed as impregnable as impermeable. However, once the context changed – once India proved massively, tragically, vulnerable to the pandemic – so did Modi’s political standing. To be sure, he remains popular. But the situation now is dire, which suggests that he will, in time, be held personally and politically responsible for the disaster.

What happened in India is what Americans might call, as in baseball, an unforced error. For India had been doing rather well, certainly in comparison with other countries – many of whom performed more poorly as it pertained to the pandemic – until just a month or two ago. But then, Modi, restless to restart the admittedly decimated economy, and, like other (though not all) populist leaders, distrustful of science, opened the country in too much of a hurry. The Indian people paid, are paying, the price. India continues, every day, to break world records for new cases.

Though Modi went into the crisis a man made, apparently, of steel, it has become improbable his armor will hold. Liberals especially have been lying in wait for him for years, deeply disappointed that though he showed early promise as a democrat, what he became in time was an unmitigated autocrat.

My real point though is that in March and April it was not Modi that changed. It was the context that changed. India became the global epicenter of the pandemic – a turn of events for which the prime minister will pay. Even he  – who up to now might well have remained in office indefinitely, given India has no term limits on prime ministers – is not impervious to the tempest of the time.                  

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*For more on this see my 2016 article in Daedalus, titled, “Leadership – It’s a System, not a Person!” daed_a_00399.pdf (silverchair.com)  

As dramatic an example as any of changing relations between leaders and followers unfolded last week in, of all places, the world of sport. In just forty-eight hours was a bloodless revolution that sundered an unholy alliance of American financiers, Russian oligarchs, European tycoons, and Middle East royalty. And it brought to a humiliating end their greedy grab to take control of the world’s most popular sport – known in the U. S. as soccer but everywhere else in the world as football.   

The short ugly life of the so-called Super League was more than a disgraceful display of hubris run amuck. It was testimony to the idiocy of leaders who, in the third decade of the 21^st century, ignore their followers – who pay them no mind, treat them as if they didn’t exist. Such callous indifference to people without power works when people with power are willing and able to exert total control. But such control is impossible to exercise on a global level – especially in an arena in which public passions run feverishly high, as they do in soccer.   

Though soccer has become a multi-billion-dollar global business, the game remains closely connected to the cities and communities where clubs originated. The Super League threatened to sever this connection. It would have uprooted the sport from its native soil and make it something different. An elite enterprise much less about playing the game and much more about making money. Big money. Very big money.

The Super League fell so far so fast because the powerful misread the powerless. Well, not so much misread as not read at all. It seems the financiers, the oligarchs, the tycoons, and the relevant royals did not even consider the possibility that their plan would meet resistance so fervent and fierce it would prove impossible to surmount.

Who exactly resisted the plan for a Super League, and how exactly did the resistance manifest itself? The screaming and yelling, the protesting and demonstrating, the rebellion and yes, the revolution started the instant the news leaked, and it was real as well as virtual. Some resistors were from within the world of soccer; some, most, were from without. First were the fans, especially but not exclusively in Britain who in no time flat made their anger known. In turn followed players and coaches; lawmakers and commentators; presidents and prime ministers; and even a British royal – Prince William. Prime Minister Boris Johnson quickly followed suit, licking his chops at what he saw as a political opportunity, threatening to drop a “legislative bomb” on any English club that joined.            

So apparent was the dismay, and so widespread the anger, that the Super League did not so much gradually crumble as quickly collapse into an ignominious heap.  Manchester City was the first to break away from what rapidly became more Fantasy League than Super League – it released a terse statement saying it was out.

It was left to Joel Glazer, one of several billionaire American businessmen who were in on the plan – Glazer is part owner of the other Manchester team, Manchester United, as well as owner with his family of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers – to summarize the fiasco in an abject apology. “In seeking to create a more stable foundation for the game, we failed to show enough respect for its deep-rooted traditions – promotion, relegation, the pyramid – and for that we are sorry.”

“When will they ever learn?” When will leaders learn?  

I posted the article below, about Alexei Navalny taking on Vladimir Putin, in 2013. Moreover, even by then I had been writing about Navalny for years. In other words, Navalny has been driving Putin nuts for about a decade and, for about a decade, Putin has menaced his nemesis.

I have no better an idea in April 2021 than I did in September 2013 how the war between the two men will play out. But, in the interim, Navalny has secured his place in Russian, and in world history. So long as people tilt at windmills, so long as heroes have a thousand faces, so long will the name of Alexei Navalny live.

The Real Thing … or Putin Patrol Continued …. – Barbara Kellerman

Note: The Hero With a Thousand Faces is the title of a literary classic written by comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell.

Billionaire businessman Jamie Dimon is a Master of the Universe. He has been chief executive officer of JP Morgan Chase, the biggest of America’s four biggest banks, since 2005. And he is among the most powerful, and widely recognized of all America’s chief executives. This week though has been a bummer for Dimon. By week’s end he was badly embarrassed, his reputation certainly somewhat tarnished.

The slide started slowly. In fact, one could argue that early last week, when JPMorgan announced it planned to improve working conditions for those among its junior ranks, it was doing no more than doing good. But anyone who paid close attention knew that JPMorgan was not being suddenly magnanimous. Rather it was responding to pressure from below.

Five years earlier, JPMorgan had made a similar gesture, promising to ameliorate the hellishly demanding work lives of its younger bankers. But nothing much had changed. The reforms that were promised were never enforced. Why exactly? Because of the bank’s own, admitted, “laziness.”  So, this week, this time in response to angry complaints coming from those in Wall Street’s junior ranks, JPMorgan vowed once again to change its ways. In a major concession Dimon’s minions promised, for instance, to encourage all bankers to go home by 7 pm; to “force” bankers to take at least three weeks vacation every year; and to require group heads frequently to check on their subordinates “to find out what is working.”

Had Dimon’s backtracking ended there it would’ve been one thing. But it did not. For it was revealed later in the week that Dimon was a central player in one of the biggest fiascos – and abject humiliations – the world of sport has ever seen.  

In a letter to JPMorgan shareholders sent early this month Jamie Dimon wrote that “businesses must earn the trust of their customers and communities by acting ethically and morally.” He went on to add that “To a good company, its reputation is everything. That reputation is earned day in and day out with every interaction.” Did he read his own letter? Remember what he himself ostensibly had written? It would appear no. And it would appear no.

Plans for the European Super League – touted as football’s (soccer’s) future – were announced last Tuesday. By last Thursday, 48 hours later, the deal had collapsed. No, it crashed… spectacularly. I will have more to say about this in a subsequent post. Here I will simply point out that had the plan been realized, JPMorgan Chase stood to enormously to profit. Not just now, in the moment, but for the duration of the deal, which was 23 years. For in its original incarnation, it was as The Guardian put it, “probably one of the most lucrative sports financing deals in history.”

For the second time in less than a week, Dimon was obliged to kowtow. Not personally, of course. This time an anonymous spokesperson for the bank issued a short statement that read “We clearly misjudged how this deal would be viewed by the wider football community, and how it might affect them in the future. We will learn from this.”

In the shareholder letter referred to earlier, Dimon wrote, “We take great pride in being a responsible citizen at the local level – just like the local bakery.” Really, Jamie?