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The presidential campaign of Jeb Bush has not been helped by his logo – especially not by that ridiculous exclamation mark, which is completely out of keeping. Jeb is not, decidedly not, an exclamation mark sort of guy.

I can say this now with a modest measure of authority. For not only have I watched him on the campaign trail, I saw him live and in the flesh yesterday, speak at the Council of Foreign Relations. It was weird. He was not weird, but the experience of watching and listening to him up close and personal was.

In almost every respect, he was everything I thought Jeb Bush would be – only more so. He really was tall and handsome. His really did have a deep, resonant voice. He really did have no more than an embryonic sense of humor. He really was more serious and socially awkward than his older brother, 43^rd president of the United States. His really did have a slight problem with the English language.  And, as advertised, he really was strong on substance. Jeb is known as a policy wonk and he did not disappoint.

But here’s what was weird. The part about substance. Jeb was not only substantive, he was very substantive, highly substantive. His familiarity with both domestic and foreign policy was impressive. He spewed facts and figures without missing a beat. He knew whatever there was to know about public policy. And he demonstrated a feel for governance that was powerful and persuasive. It’s easy to see why the early money was on Jeb Bush. It’s easy to see why for so many months he was the establishment favorite.

What’s striking then about this presidential campaign is not only the rise of men like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, but the fall of men like Jeb Bush. Of course they are inseparable, two sides of the same coin. But our focus is on stars in the political firmament, not so much on stars that have fallen from favor. So what was weird about seeing Jeb in the flesh was the palpable response, including my own. Regret that we live in a time in which a candidate like Jeb can’t get no satisfaction or traction. Which, of course, says much more about us than it does about him.

 

 

OK, OK, OK. I know, I know, I know. I’ve been beating this same drum now for at least three years, publicly since the publication of The End of Leadership (2012).

Here to repeat is the point: to obsess about leadership to the exclusion of followership is to turn a blind eye to the 21^st century.

Try these on for size, all ripped from the headlines in the last 24 hours.

• From the Wall Street Journal: “Investors Gain More Clout over Boards.” What’s the story about? It’s about how large investors have been stunningly successful forcing companies to change their bylaws to give shareholders more power to oust directors and shape corporate strategy. In 2014 about 1% of companies had adopted proxy access. Just one year later the number had skyrocketed to 21%. In other words, power in corporate America is being distributed far more widely than previously.
• From the New York Times: “The Age of Protest.” What’s the column about? It’s about how public protests have become as constant as ubiquitous – people are protesting everything everywhere. Tom Friedman writes that various forces are joining, accelerating to create “an engine of disruption that is stressing strong countries and middle classes and blowing up weak ones, while super-empowering individuals and transforming the nature of work, leadership and government all at once.”
• From any American media at any hour yet another story about how Donald Trump has torpedoed Republican politics by his charismatic appeal to ordinary American voters. What’s the story about? It’s about resistance to the Republican establishment. It’s about how every time Trump appears in person we vote with our feet wildly to cheer him on. We, we the people, we followers, have driven the Trump phenomenon. Last night he appeared in Pensacola, Florida in the city’s largest stadium. It seats 10,000 and was packed to the rafters with bodies, many of whom had waited long hours to erupt in cheering and clapping every time the man opened his mouth.
• From any American media at any hour yet another story about how Bernie Sanders has torpedoed Democratic politics by his anti-authority appeal to ordinary American voters. What’s the story about? It’s about resistance to the Democratic establishment. It’s about how a large swath of plain people refused to be cowed by the mainstream narrative, which anointed Hillary Clinton Democratic presidential candidate before the 2016 campaign even got going. It’s about how resistance won out over obedience, at least to the point of leveling the playing field. Here’s how resistance played out in the last 24 to 48 hours. As Clinton’s attacks on Sanders escalated sharply, the public responded by escalating sharply donations to the Sanders campaign.

We’re not in the land of the leader any longer.  We’re in a land in which the leader is one among others.

OK, so I was wrong. I thought she was toast. But, contrary to expectations, my own and those of many others, she has succeeded. She has succeed very well, thank you, and under difficult circumstances.

In the immediate wake of Mary Barra’s appointment as Chief Executive Officer of General Motors, the car company faced the gravest safety crisis in its long and storied history.* It’s why Barra was thought on a so-called glass cliff – a woman appointed Chief Executive Officer precisely because the company was in trouble, vulnerable not only to a downturn but even a crisis of confidence.

For all I know she was. For all I know Barra did get to the top of the greasy pole because her chances of failure were especially high. But, she proved us numberless naysayers wrong! General Motors announced on Monday that in addition to being Chief Executive Officer, Mary Barra would henceforth serve as Chairwoman of the Board.

Not half bad for a former plant manager. Not half bad for a past crisis manager. Not half bad for a woman seemingly teetering on cliff made of glass. How Barra succeeded against high odds will be the subject of countless case studies, most of which will focus on her in particular. I would argue though that the explanation for her duration has less to do with her and more to do with the context, which was conducive to car-buying; and more also to do with others, especially GM’s customers who were prepared to keep buying in spite of the company’s stained reputation.

Still Mary Barra’s mettle was tested and it turned out she is the real deal. She is a leader.

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*Millions of small GM cars were sold with defective ignition switches. While precisely who was culpable remains uncertain, what is certain is that 124 deaths have been tied to the defect. Ultimately the company agreed to create a compensation fund, which awarded some $600 million in damages to some 400 people.

 

 

 

• Failure of the Year – Leaders and Followers Adrift

It was a political miracle. Subsequent to centuries of contention and conflict, and out of the ashes of the Second World War, was forged the European Union. 19 countries came to use a common currency; nine others signed on as members. But, in 2015, for the first time since its inception, the union was seriously threatened with disunion. Nearly undone by a series of crises – the Greek debt showdown; Russian aggression in Ukraine; the infusion of a million refugees; terrorism and the threat of it in some of Europe’s greatest cities; and a surge in right wing nationalism –  Europe struggled to cling to a semblance of unity. This is not to prognosticate the EU’s final fracture. Rather it is to point out that in 2015 the EU was seriously weakened, its member states unable in common to take on their common enemies.

• Success of the Year – Leader and Followers Align

Everyone sees it as an embarrassment, as dysfunctional. The “it” is the U.S. Congress – once an august body highly esteemed by the American people, now a national joke, an institution that for decades has been in decline and disrepute. Until Paul Ryan – until Paul Ryan became Speaker of the House in October. For weeks Ryan postured, insisting that he had no interest in the Speakership, did not want a thankless task that would take him away from his young family. In spite of his feigning disinterest – or, better, because of it – Ryan’s first two months in office have been studded with successes. Yes, successes! The most obvious among them a bipartisan budget deal that his predecessor, John Boehner, was unable to push through. It’s true that Ryan is on a honeymoon that soon will be over. Still, for 2015 he gets an “A” in Political Prowess. In scoring a personal victory he scored one also for Congress – which desperately needs a leader to restore its wretched reputation.

• Political Leader of the Year – Bernie Sanders

Who knew? A Jewish Democratic Socialist from Brooklyn threatening Hillary Clinton?!  He is not in the end likely to upend her. Nevertheless, of all the improbable political successes of 2015, none was more improbable than the sturdy, steady, ascent of Senator Sanders. Our fixation has been on Donald Trump. But while Trump and the media climbed into bed together, Sanders mounted a stunningly successful challenge to the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Sanders is either leading or within the margin of error in the first primary state, New Hampshire. And, more remarkable, has been his fund-raising effort which during 2015 surpassed all expectations. By the end of last year his campaign had tapped more than 2.5   million individual donors – a number that, stunningly, surpasses any in any previous presidential election. But the numbers do not fully capture how remarkable his presence on the national stage. The idea that a nearly unheard of Vermont Senator, a self-proclaimed life-long socialist who makes no bones about his progressive political agenda, could possibly give Secretary Clinton a run for her money was laughable just six months ago. But, while the media refuses to give Bernie Sanders the time of day, so obsessed is it with Trump,  Sanders seizes the day nevertheless.

• Corporate Leader of the Year – Jeff  Bezos

He stays out of the limelight. Far less of a public persona that others of his ilk such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, Bezos has chosen for decades to remain behind the scenes, letting Amazon, his behemoth of a company, speak for itself. But 2015 was something of a turning point. While some analysts consider Amazon’s stock price frothy – in the last 12 months its market value more than doubled – the company’s performance in 2015 has been so obviously remarkable it’s impossible not to credit Bezos with wizardry. But that’s not my point. My point is that 2015 was a remarkably successful year for Bezos in at least two other ways as well. First, under his ownership (Bezos bought the paper in 2013) the venerated but failing Washington Post seems to have turned a corner. It has mounted a serious challenge to the New York Times online, and it is far outstripping its own previous online performance. Second Bezos is not content to rule on earth – he appears intent on ruling in space as well. In November, his privately funded aerospace company, Blue Origin, successfully launched its new space vehicle, the New Shepard. The New Shepard reached its planned altitude, and then executed an historic landing at its West Texas launch site. Stay tuned. Bezos’s almost inhuman ambition is not earth-bound.

• Followers of the Year – Syrian Refugees

Everyone wanted to stop them in their tracks, get them to turn around and go home. But they refused. They refused to do what where they were told. Huge numbers of refugees from the Middle East, especially from Syria, chose to defy the odds and the authorities. They traveled first by sea and then by land to Europe, to where they saw themselves as being safe from harm or, at least, safe in comparison to the ravaged land from which they fled. By the end of 2015 their numbers had topped one million. One million people without any power, authority, or influence capitalizing on the changing times in order to change their lives. Let’s be clear here – the fact that the context is different now from what it was is critical to understanding how such a thing was possible. How it was possible for so many non-Europeans in so short a time to lay claim to living in Europe. First was the changing culture, especially in Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel concluded that in light of Germany’s 20^th century history it was not morally defensible or politically possible in the 21st to prevent asylum seekers from receiving refuge in Germany. Second was the technology. However dispossessed the refugees, they did, or enough of them did, possess smart phones. Smart phones enabled those on foot to track their trails, to trace from where they were, say someplace in Greece, to where they wanted to go, say someplace in Sweden. Technologies helped refugees in other ways as well: they documented their desolation and despair; they facilitated their connection and communication; and they recorded for the world to see the sights and sounds of aggression on the one side, and compassion on the other.

• Slogan of the Year – “Black Lives Matter”

Every now and then the English language changes, it adapts. For example, it adds to the lexicon a word or a phrase to incorporate or accommodate a new thing, or a new fashion, or a new idea.  “Selfie” is one such recent word. So is “manspreading.” So is “crowdfunding.” Most of what is new in the English language are words like these, meant to name or describe something either new (“selfie”) or old (“manspreading”), but something in any case that is simple to see and easy to identify. But when old words are strung together in new ways they can, on occasion, take on entirely different, more complex meanings. And so it is with the politically powerful new slogan “Black Lives Matter” – which became in 2015 part of our national discourse, integral to America’s lingo. On the one hand is nothing new about the idea that black lives matter. Of course they matter, just like white lives matter, just like all lives matter. But on the other hand is everything new about the idea that black lives matter. In 2015 “Black Lives Matter” became a nationally known slogan with a life of its own. In 2015 “Black Lives Matter” became emblematic of the endemic tension between people in positions of authority and at least some who are not. In 2015 “Black Lives Matter” became symbolic of a racial divide that persists into the 21^st century. In 2015 “Black Lives Matter” came to represent a class divide worse in the early 21^st century than it was in the late 20^th. And in 2015 “Black Lives Matter” became a social movement that will remain resonant long after 2016 has passed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                        

That leaders in America have been in decline is beyond dispute. Polls confirm that leaders in every sector are less admired and trusted, and perceived to be less competent, than they used to be. While all leaders have been vulnerable to this trend, some have been more vulnerable than others. The leadership class in Washington has been especially hard hit – executive, legislative, and even judicial approval ratings having steadily gone straight down.

Corporate leaders are not much better off. Big business is in disrepute, and despite the perception that corporate leaders are different, exempt from the downward trend, they are as vulnerable as other leaders to the contextual complexities over which they have little or no control.

We tend to equate wealth with power. As a result, we assume that leaders who earn ginormous sums of money are resistant to the vicissitudes that plague leaders who earn far less. (In 2013 median CEO pay among S&P 500 companies was around $11 million, 700 percent higher than in the 1970s.) The disparity between our perceptions of government and business leaders is especially striking, the assumption being that the former are enfeebled, unable to get much of anything done, whereas the latter are muscular, positioned to call the shots as they see fit.

The truth is more complicated. The truth is that though the earning power of chief executive officers remains sky high, their power and authority generally have been sharply reduced. This means that their room to maneuver, their leeway to lead, are notably less now than they were just a decade or two ago.

There are reasons for this change in their circumstance. The top 10 are:

• 10 – Activist Investors. Nothing threatens chief executive officers as much as shareholder activists with big mouths and deep pockets. But activists with appetites are here to stay. Around since the 1980s, in the last few years they have picked up their pace, the frequency and ferocity of activist attacks on public companies unprecedented. In the last half decade one company in seven on the S&P 500 index of America’s most valuable listed firms has been on the receiving end of an activist attack. Just last year activists mounted 344 campaigns against public companies, some large, some small. Moreover mutual funds and business schools are getting into the act: the former increasingly siding with activists they view as potential change agents; the latter developing new courses and case studies in response to recent student interest in activist campaigns. Of course where you stand on this new fact of corporate life depends on where you sit. While many shareholders think they have reason to rejoice, many CEOs think they have reason to feel beleaguered and besieged. They fear activists who threaten their power. And they loathe activists they perceive as outsiders hell bent on shaking things up and shaking them loose. Of course CEOs have had no choice: they have had to adjust. They have had to assuage the very intruders of whom they are weary and wary. But it’s not easy making nice to someone muscling in on what you think of as your territory.
• 9 – Bossy Boards. In the old days, relationships between chief executive officers and boards of directors tended toward the warm and fuzzy. Board members typically were cronies, the various relationships preceding the current connection. As a result, boards were disposed to leave CEOs more or less alone, feeling no particular pressure to pressure their hired hands. Now though things are different, not dramatically, but substantially. Now boards have more independent directors, and CEOs have less influence on how boards are run. Moreover the pressure on boards to give chief executive officers a hard run for their big money is, if not overwhelming, unrelenting. Experts, activists, journalists, pundits, ordinary shareholders and, occasionally, even the public at large push boards to play a more active role, to monitor more closely their top leaders and managers. Routine recommendations for strengthening public company boards now include: increasing board engagement, increasing the distance between boards and CEOs, and increasing the board’s accountability not so much to company leaders as to company shareholders. By and large both CEOs and their boards have adjusted to the new norm. The selection of chief financial officers used, for example, to be the purview of chief executive officers. No longer. As the cases of Google, McDermott, Avon, and Newell Rubbermaid all testify, boards have become increasingly involved in selecting CFOs.
• 8 – Split Governance. There is nothing that so infuriates people in positions of power and authority as the charge that they have too much power and authority. Yet that’s precisely what CEOs have had to put up with in recent years: the idea that shareholders would benefit from splitting the role of CEO effectively in two, with some powers to be retained by the chief executive, while others are transferred to a newly designated or empowered board chair. While the weight of America’s corporate history is on the side of retaining the current structure, in which the two roles are combined, pressures to give the board an independent chair have grown to where the combined format dropped from almost 75 percent of S&P 500 companies in 2004, to just under 60 percent a decade later. The jury remains out on this one, different companies making different decisions, the exact effects of splitting the roles depending, the evidence suggests, on the circumstances. Coca-Cola, for example, did not name a co-CEO. The title of both chairman and CEO is still being held by Muhtar Kent. However the board did mandate a major change this year: beginning last August it effectively forced Kent to share power with James Quincy, the new president and chief operating officer. It’s clear that the idea of separating the chief from the chair – or finding some other way of dividing governing – has gained traction. Which is precisely why CEOs are leery of the possibility, even the probability, in particular if their performance disappoints.
• 7 – Long Arm of the Law. The literature is replete with complaints that laws intended to reform corporate America have done little or even nothing to bring about change. Notwithstanding the griping, three truths stand out. The first is that just because hardly anyone was sent to jail for misdeeds leading to the financial crisis, does not mean that a law such as the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is totally toothless. It is not. There have been some significant changes in the area of financial reform, such as regulators requiring banks to hold higher levels of capital than they did previously. The second is that just because individuals by and large have not been prosecuted, does not mean that other sorts of legal agreements have not been reached. Some companies have agreed to institute new management practices. Other companies have agreed to being closely monitored. (Hence the pervasiveness now of huge legal fees, and the ubiquity now of compliance officers.) And still other companies have agreed to implement programs to transform their cultures. Meanwhile, to assure compliance, legal authorities retain the option of prosecution. The third truth is that just because executive pay has continued to climb an average of 12 percent a year – ironically, though Dodd-Frank mandates that companies let investors have a say on pay, shareholder support for current pay practices remains overwhelming – does not mean that there have been no relevant reforms. Supplemental pension plans, for example, which used to reward CEOS no matter how well the company did, are now largely a thing of the past. Now stock awards are more closely tied to CEO performance. Additionally, there is a recent SEC ruling, which mandates that beginning in 2017, most public companies will be obliged to reveal the ratio of the chief executive’s pay to that of the average employee.
• 6 – Small Investors. What? Small investors pose a threat to chief executive officers? No, not immediately, which is precisely why it was recently suggested that annual shareholder meetings are anachronisms: so few people even bother to show up that holding them is a waste of money and time. Of course there are some glaring exceptions to this general rule, such as Warren Buffett’s Berkshire bashes, in which large numbers of small shareholders gleefully participate. But most annual shareholder meetings more closely resemble the last such held by General Motors, which had fewer than three dozen in attendance, while the chair, Tim Solso, reportedly ran the meeting “looking agitated and rushing through the agenda.” Still, there are some situations in which small investors are invited to speak out, as was the case earlier this year when Du Pont faced a proxy battle between CEO Ellen Kullman and activist investor Nelson Peltz (head of Trian Fund Management). Both Kullman and Peltz aggressively courted small investors (at DuPont they hold one third of total shares), acutely aware that they could have determined the outcome. Moreover there are renegades out there, such as New York City comptroller Scott Stringer, who is spearheading a national campaign to empower shareholders at 75 publicly traded companies in which New York City’s pension system invests, asking them to agree to allow certain shareholders to nominate new directors. The point is that small investors constitute a crowd waiting to be organized, online and, or, off, and that someday likely they effectively will be.
• 5 – Shorter Tenures. CEOs in the present are more tenuously tenured than they were in the past. Between 1992 and 2007 the CEO turnover rate was 15.8 percent. Between 2000 and 2011 the CEO turnover rate climbed to 16.8 percent. In 2013 Bloomberg reported that U.S. corporations were changing chief executives at the fastest pace in five years, and in 2014 the pace picked up even further. In January 2014 turnover among U.S. CEOs surged 32 percent from what it was one month earlier, and 15.9 percent from what it was one year earlier. In 2013 Booz & Co. found that more companies than ever before were planning their CEO successions; in fact the numbers were as high as they had been in the 13-year history of the study. In January 2015 The Street reported that more CEOs were fired in 2014 than in any year since the 2008 market crash. (According to CEO Turnover Report, the total number of CEOs who exited in 2014, was 1,341. CEO turnover is higher in healthcare than in any other industry.) While the rate of CEO turnover in 2015 is likely to be lower than it was in 2014, and while the numbers are somwhat erratic, the overall trend is clear. American CEOs are more precariously positioned than they used to be: their average tenure now is only about five years. Some departures are voluntary; others obviously are not. Either way the point is the same. Prolonged periods at the top of the greasy pole are increasingly rare. I might note that corporate leaders are by no means the only leaders so beset. A 2011 survey of college and university presidents, for example, revealed that between 2006 and 2011 their average tenures similarly declined, from 8.5 years to 7.
• 4 – Constant Scrutiny. Technologies have changed leaders’ lives, complicated leaders’ lives, impinged on leaders’ lives by, among other things, increasing exponentially the degree of their scrutiny. We have much more information than we used to. We are much better able to connect with each other than we used to be. We are much more willing and able to act on what we know and think and feel. And we have no remaining compunction about invading the private lives of public figures. CEOs are being watched by old media and new, 24/7, and they are being watched by a range of stakeholders, all of whom are more numerous and clamorous than they used to be. These include in addition to the media, boards, shareholders, employees, clients, customers, and the public at large. CEOs are grist for our collective mill. We are prepared to nail them for sins ranging from personal wrongdoing to professional incompetence. Aggravated subordinates secretly record and then leak what their superiors presumed were private conversations. Social media enable ordinary people to keep tabs on extraordinary people – CEOs who misstate the facts, or stretch the truth, or cover-up their misdeeds, or are simply incompetent. Disgruntled customers can turn on CEOs and the companies they lead when their collective dissatisfaction reaches a tipping point – to wit what happened this year at Whole Foods. And disgruntled customers can register their views by posting them online, a weapon against the high and mighty. (Recent research from the Harvard Business School suggests that shoppers prefer retailers who pay their workers fair wages and rein in the wages of upper management.) Finally, when CEOs are celebrities, the scrutiny is relentless. Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer is an example of a CEO who is considered fair game by anyone with a long lens or sharp tongue.
• 3 – Flatter Hierarchy. Leading in the old days was easier. Chief executive officers sat astride their pyramidal hierarchies, able to command and control their subordinates more or less as they saw fit, no questions asked. Now, not so much. Now hierarchies are less pyramidal, less rigid and more fluid, flatter than they were, necessarily more hospitable to different voices from different places. Now CEOs are expected or even required to work in teams, teams they might lead but teams nonetheless, with the measure of equity this necessarily implies. Now CEOs are required by the exigencies of their circumstances to push the decision making process down, maybe to middle management, maybe even further down to get the work done. Now CEOs have fewer sources of power and authority, and they have much less or even no control over the data to which until recently only they were privy. Certainly in the area of technology, CEOs typically have no choice now but to subsume themselves to subordinates, usually of a younger generation, who are far more adroit than their nominal superiors at securing and interpreting big data. Chubbies is an example of a startup that according to the Wall Street Journal was “practically built on this devolution of power to its employees.” The company does not even have a CEO, at least not a single one. Instead, it has four co-CEOs, who share responsibility. None of this suggests the elimination of the leader, the CEO. But it does suggest the leader has been diminished.
• 2 – Contextual Complexity. The Corporate Research Forum – as well as my own most recent book, Hard Times: Leadership in America – described the context within which leaders now operate as more challenging than ever: more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. This would suggest that it is impossible now for any single CEO to be master of the universe – because the universe itself has become impossible to master. Think of it as a simple equation. On the one side is the inordinately complex context. And on the other side is the CEO, limited by the nature of the human condition. Even the smartest and most competent of CEOs are, in other words, constrained by their intelligence, which, however impressive, increasingly pales in comparison to the contextual demands to which they are expected to respond. Some of these demands are internal, from within their organizations and, or industries. But other demands, other challenges, are external. They emanate from outside. Consider this year’s hack attacks on JPMorgan Chase (83 million households and small businesses compromised), and on Sony (large internal data centers wiped essentially clean), and on Target (credit and debit card information stolen from some 70 million customers). Of course hackers from outside – from China? from Russia? from mischief makers elsewhere in the world? – are by no means the only external challenge. Climate change, for instance, will inevitably effect countless leaders of countless companies. But how much control can any single CEO possibly have on a problem as daunting as global warming?
• 1. Changing Ideology. No one doubts who’s ultimately in charge at Facebook – CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Nevertheless what’s interesting is the lengths to which Facebook goes to stress not the status of the superior, or superiors, but of the subordinates. Employees are given wide latitude in what to do and how to do it. And they are encouraged to participate in decision making, which is presumed cooperative and collective rather than hierarchical or unilateral. While some companies go even further toward democratizing the workplace, the real point is that in the second decade of the 21^st century even the most hidebound of businesses, large or small, cannot afford to resist altogether the mantra of modern management, which is to decrease workplace hierarchy and increase workplace equity. Buzzwords like “empowerment,” “engagement,” “collaboration”, “participation,” “networks,” “teams,” “Holacracy” and of course the very idea of the flattened hierarchy are all signs and symptoms of the transition to a workplace culture that is expected to be more democratic and less autocratic. Author and psychologist Daniel Goleman typified the trend, when he wrote that democratic leaders are “true collaborators, working as team members rather than top-down leaders.” While to some this ideological shift toward bosses who are more benign, more inclusive than exclusive, might smack of nothing so much as management jargon, a facade for a workplace structure that remains more similar to what it was a generation or two ago than different, it is not, or at least not entirely. There are two reasons why the ideological shift is, to a degree at least, real. The first is self-interest. In order to attract the best workers, particularly but not exclusively in technology, providing them with considerable autonomy is an essential recruiting tool. And second is the larger culture within which CEOs and those in their employ are embedded. Across the board plain people have become increasingly accustomed to demanding their rights, speaking their piece, and thumbing their noses at those in high places. Hence our demand on all leaders and managers – including those most highly paid and placed – that their power, authority, and influence be less narrowly concentrated and more widely distributed.

 

 

 

Tuesday night’s Republic debate came and went. By now it’s been sliced and diced every which way – save one.

In his opening statement, designed to do nothing so much as gin up fear, Governor Chris Christie said this:

“America has been betrayed,” he began, not by our sworn enemies, but by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Then he went on to draw a dark and dire picture of life in America post San Bernadino. “Think about the mothers who will take those children tomorrow morning to the bus stop wondering whether their children will arrive back on that bus safe and sound. Think about the fathers of Los Angeles who tomorrow will head off to work and wonder about the safety of their wives and their children.”

What’s striking about these opening lines is not their fear-mongering. Fear and loathing have become commonplace. No, what’s striking is that the New Jersey Governor imagines the 21^st century family a 20^th century construction.  The woman stays home, minds the kids, and does the housework. The man leaves home, brings home the bacon, and returns when day is done in time for dinner.

Guess what, Governor Christie! The number of stay-at-home moms is less than one third. This means that more than two thirds of mothers are unlikely to be able to “take those children tomorrow morning to the bus stop.” And it means that you, Governor, are woefully out of step, stuck in the 1950s and early ‘60s, when “Leave It to Beaver” ruled the airwaves, and Ward Cleaver (Dad) and June Cleaver (Mom) presided as perfect couple.

This alone should disqualify you from being president. This alone should disqualify you from leading anything – given the demographics have departed dramatically from your archaic ideal.

If you haven’t seen it, you really must. A photo of Facebook icon Mark Zuckerberg cradling his newborn baby daughter, wife gazing adoringly alongside, a rhapsodic shot of domestic bliss!

In addition to posing for this perfect picture, Zuckerberg commemorated daughter Maxima’s birth by sending her an open letter, in which he announced that during their lives he and his wife, Pricilla Chan, would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares to charity. The shares are currently worth more than $45 billion.

Zuckerberg further revealed that he would be taking paternity leave. Not just a week or two away from his desk, to hang with wife and child. No, fully two months, which is half of what Facebook now gives any parent, male or female, who wants to take time off during a child’s first year.

The big story is that Silicon Valley’s most successful and recognizable CEO made a big story out of his child’s birth. At a time when the number of men taking more than a week away from work after a child is born remains woefully low, Zuckerberg chose to send several messages. First, that parenthood is important. Second, that parenthood is important for men as well as women. And third, that he intended not only to play an active role in his own daughter’s life, but simultaneously to make clear that his company supports such parental involvement for all its employees. (Note: Feminist activist Sheryl Sandberg is Facebook’s COO.)

If truth be told, though, Zuckerberg is not a pathbreaker – not on this front. Tech companies have recently been joined by Wall Street firms, all competing furiously for talent, all now acknowledging that young professionals are more determined than were their predecessors to achieve a semblance of a work/life balance. Amazon, Accenture, Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley are just some of the companies that recently enhanced benefits to new parents – benefits ranging from more time off for primary caregivers, to more time off for secondary caregivers, to paying for (selected) employees who choose during baby’s first year to bring them and even their nannies along on business trips.

Whether these more generous company policies will dramatically change the equation – in particular whether they will encourage more women to take top leadership jobs – remains to be seen. I obviously have my doubts.* Still, Zuckerberg as doting dad is a welcome sign of the times.

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*See my recent posts on this subject, such as “Leadership and Lactation.”

Note: This is my last post until on or about December 20th.  

 

 

On August 31^st The New Yorker published an article by Evan Osnos titled, “The Fearful and the Frustrated.” The purpose of the piece was to explain why Donald Trump was morphing into a serious presidential candidate. Now, since those lazy, hazy days of summer, the political landscape has changed dramatically. Establishment candidates have lagged, while Trump defied the odds and confounded the experts. Not only does he hold the lead in the Republican field, his closest competitor, Ted Cruz, is fully 20 points behind.

As the title of Osnos’s article makes clear, even in August fear was the major motivator. Americans were attracted to Trump because they were scared, and because they thought he was the Republican most likely to provide safety and security. What exactly were, are, Americans afraid of?

• Of an alien and uncertain world as disorienting as it is complex.
• Of others, especially immigrants, who could crowd us out and steal our jobs.
• Of technology that might make us personally isolated and professionally irrelevant.
• Of income stagnation that could be permanent as opposed to transitory.
• Of politicians who seem irretrievably greedy for power and money.
• Of America badly divided and in steady decline.

Since then there is something else to be afraid of. A threat more dire and deadly, and much closer to home. I refer of course to terrorism. Terrorism hard on the heels of the massacre in Paris. Terrorism hard on the heels of the massacre in California. It is one thing to be scared of an abstraction – such as immigration or stagnation. It is quite another to be scared for your safety on a daily basis – scared of getting on a subway, of going to a store, of sitting in a stadium.

Frightened followers go in either one of two directions. Fear can make us saner, long for a leader who is steady, serious, and sensible. Or fear can make us crazier, long for a leader who is fervid, furious, and fierce. Fear can, in other words, turn us toward a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at the height of the Great Depression told Americans that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. Or it can drive us toward toxicity and demagoguery: toward leaders who promise impossibly simple solutions to complex problems; who exude unquestioning authority in the face of unnerving ambiguity; and who assure anxious audiences that they and they alone can decimate and demolish whoever the enemy.

Times like these provide rich soil for bad leaders.* This is not necessarily to claim that if he ever did get to the White House Trump would be a bad or even toxic leader. But it is to insist  that his shameless pandering to the fears of his followers is downright disquieting. Sad to say that so far at least there is not a shred of evidence that Trump will ever incline to the better angels of our nature.

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• For more on the relationship between bad leaders and fearful followers see Barbara Kellerman, Bad Leadership, and Jean Lipman-Blumen, The Allure of Toxic Leaders.

 

 

It used to be that Wilsonianism was associated with Woodrow Wilson’s vaulted views on foreign affairs. Because of this association Princeton University – of which Wilson once was president – named in his honor its School of Public and International Affairs.

It used to be.

But, because of the recent actions of a small number of Princeton undergraduates, this legacy is now threatened. More likely it has already suffered a serious blow.

Wilson is remembered primarily for his contributions to American foreign policy. While his proposal for a League of Nations suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of the U.S. Senate, the idealism that inspired it has lived on, perpetuating his vision of an ideology and institution that would promote and perpetuate world peace.

Wilson’s status as one of America’s most esteemed presidents – earlier this year he ranked 10^th among our 44 chief executives – has essentially remained unchallenged, until now. Now it has been challenged so powerfully and persuasively that the New York Times ran an editorial this week that said first that Wilson was “an unrepentant racist,” and second that in consequence Princeton should revoke the honor of naming after him one of its most prestigious schools.

How did this sea change come about? Credit a year-old student group, the Black Justice League, which a few months ago began exposing Wilson’s racist views. To start there were posters exposing some of Wilson’s more offensive quotes, such as his comment to an African-American leader that “segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you.” Next there were certain complaints, such as that only about 2 percent of Princeton’s faculty is black. Then there were various demands, for example, mandatory courses on “the history of marginalized peoples,” and also a joining of forces. These included not only other undergraduates but also faculty, some 54 of whom eventually signed a Black Justice League petition. Finally there was a sit-in in the president’s office. It dragged on 32 hours, and when it was over Princeton’s President, Christopher Eisgruber, had agreed to many of the students’ demands, including considering wiping Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the Princeton protest, it’s a striking example of how a powerless few, here a knot of undergraduates, can win out over the powerful many, here not only the Princeton establishment, but an American president who historians have judged near great.

Woodrow Wilson will never be discredited entirely. Nor should he be. He was in many a progressive, and in all ways an internationalist. His contribution to American foreign policy thought will endure. Moreover his racism must be placed in context – he was after all a man of his time, born in 1856. Still, because of a handful of activists at Princeton, it is now widely known that in accordance with his views, in some cases at least he engaged public policy to further white supremacy. It is why his estimable reputation will never be completely restored.  And it is why American history textbooks must again be revised – as they were with Thomas Jefferson, who similarly was transformed from marble icon to man in full.

 

 

 

Francois Hollande has spent most of his time as president of France mired in the depths of public opinion. Put precisely, he has been the most unpopular president in modern French history.

This will now change. Whatever the French people thought of their president before the attacks in Paris, in their immediate aftermath their opinion of him will go up. It’s a typical pattern, which in the US is called the “rally ‘round the flag effect.” The phrase refers to increased popular support for a president in a time of national crisis – especially war. By promptly declaring that “France is at war,” Hollande virtually assured that in the short term at least his level of support among the French would rise.

Who can say the right thing to do when terror strikes an iconic city – which happens also to be the capital of the country over which you preside? There is no handbook for such a circumstance, no handy-dandy leadership guide. Rather, as history attests, in such situations  leaders fly by the seat of their pants. At least to an extent, they improvise.

This is not to say that someone in Hollande’s position – president of a country that recently suffered a serious terrorist attack (in January of this year, the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo) – would not have given serious thought to what to do if terror struck again. But it is to say that the specifics of such situations remain unknown – until they are known. And so while leaders obviously do prepare for terrorist attacks, how exactly to respond remains unclear until after at least the initial attack has passed. How could Hollande have prepared for this particular complication – Turkey shooting down a Russian warplane just as he undertakes his major diplomatic initiative?

In the wake of the most recent terror in Paris, Hollande went into overdrive. His rhetoric has been strong and unyielding. His domestic policy has been fierce and persuasive. (He sought and secured parliamentary approval for declaration of a three month state of emergency.*) And in foreign policy he has played his level best, while holding a hand that’s quite weak.

France is a country widely perceived in decline. In the last decade it was Germany that surged to the forefront of Europe, while France lagged. Hollande understood then that if he was to declare that France was at war, far smarter not to have France stand alone. So he has been making the rounds – trying his damnedest to forge an international coalition against ISIS. On Monday of this week he met with Britain’s David Cameron. On Tuesday he flew to the US to meet with Barack Obama. On Wednesday back to Paris to meet with Germany’s Angela Merkel and, later, with Italy’s Matteo Renzi. On Thursday he’s off to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin. And on the weekend he’ll conclude his diplomatic marathon by hosting a dinner in Paris for China’s Xi Jinping.

Impossible to know now whether this abundance of activity at home and abroad will pay off. But if it does not, it will not be because Francois Hollande had a dearth of determination or imagination – or, for that matter, stamina.

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*Some have objected to this concentration of power in the hands of the French executive. But, then, during the American Civil War Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus.