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In their 2002 book, Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders, Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas identified and to an extent popularized (at least in the leadership literature) the word “crucible.” As they defined it, a crucible was “an often difficult event” out of which leaders made meaning in ways that “galvanized” them and gave them their “distinctive voice.”  Their claim for the crucible was considerable: that it was at the heart of their “new model of leadership.”

As I saw it then and continue to see it now there are at least four problems with the crucible at the center of the leadership narrative. The first is that not every leader has anything remotely resembling a crucible experience. The second is that some crucibles seem genuine – soul-searing experiences of dreadfully “difficult events.” But there are other crucible experiences even in Bennis’s and Thomas’s book that seem exceedingly tame in comparison, no more than the vicissitudes of lives fully lived. The third is the presumption that crucibles have a benign effect. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes difficult events have malignant effects. The fourth problem with the crucible at the center of the leadership narrative – no fault of Bennis and Thomas – is that the leadership industry has taken the word “crucible” and devalued it. The word and the idea that underpins it is tossed around far too freely and frequently, rather than being reserved for those instances in which it might authentically be applied. In this sense it resembles the word “charisma,” which, when German sociologist Max Weber claimed it, had a specific, strictly limited meaning – as in Jesus was charismatic. Now we use the word charisma constantly, more likely to apply it to some celebrity or someone we know with personal charm than to the real thing, an exceptional, even singular leader.

But…every now and then there is a leader to whom the word crucible genuinely does apply, who by every indication was forever changed, for the better, by an inordinate test, or trial, or tribulation. A genuinely great leader who served many years in prison, such Nelson Mandela, falls into this category, as does Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was felled by polio as rather a young man, never again to walk on his own.*

Vice President Joe Biden falls into this category as well. Decades ago he lost his dearly beloved wife and young daughter in an automobile accident. Months ago he lost his dearly beloved older son to brain cancer. This is a crucible. These are crucibles.

I do not claim that because of these crucibles Joe Biden ought to be the next president of the United States. All I am saying is that in the event crucibles, real crucibles, matter, Biden qualifies.

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*Adolf Hitler, who also spent time behind bars, presumably similarly had a crucible experience, though with outcomes rather different from those that are the focus of Bennis and Thomas.

My most recent book – Hard Times: Leadership in America – was published in October by Stanford University Press. The book explores the impact of context on leadership and followership.

Beginning February 3, I started posting in this space excerpts. They appear here in the order in which they appear in the book. 

Excerpt from Chapter 10 – Technology

“Let me state this as plainly as I can: leaders in the second decade of the twenty-first century are by and large disadvantaged by having been born before the information revolution. The revolution changed so much of such importance – how information is collected, disseminated, and stored; how plain people communicate from one to the next; how followers expect leaders to lead; how followers respond when leaders do something they don’t like; the nature of work and of the workplace – leaders across the board seem forever to be playing catch-up, trying to control a context that to them is as unknowable as it is uncontrollable. One might reasonably argue, in fact, that one of the reasons the leadership industry has exploded in the past few decades, in the United States in particular, has been a free-floating feeling that those responsible for leading and managing are, in at least one critical area, ill-equipped to do so.”

Stunning how scared they are! Stunning how scared are Chinese and Russian leaders of Chinese and Russian followers!

It’s the single persuasive explanation for why officials in China and Russia have consistently clamped down. For the last several years they have been frightened of nothing so much as plain people threatening their hold on power. Threatening to claim their own voice. Threatening to challenge persons in positions of authority. Threatening to trigger their fall from power.

Not a week goes by without evidence of the syndrome. In China just recently the authorities detained dozens of rights lawyers and social activists; dozens more were summoned by the police, admonished, and warned not to speak publicly or to take any action on behalf of the detainees. In Russia just recently the MacArthur Foundation made the difficult decision to shut down its operations in Moscow, bowing to Russian lawmakers preparing to ban groups deemed “undesirable” and purportedly posing a threat to Russia’s security. Similarly, last month in Hong Kong, which is in thrall to Beijing, legislators failed to approve a system that would have allowed citizens a measure of freedom in their selection of chief executive. (Recall just last year Hong Kong activists seized center stage, by occupying key parts of the city for weeks.)

The question is how long? How long will Chinese leaders be able largely to stifle Chinese followers? How long will Russian leaders be able largely to stifle Russian followers? Of course I have no answer to these questions. What I do know though is that the trajectory of history does not favor the politically powerful over the politically powerless.

Compared to the subject of leadership, the subject of followership languishes. While the contributions of good followers and the consequences of bad followers are more widely appreciated than they used to be, the impact of those who are other than leaders is undervalued and ununderstood. If leadership is the belle of the ball, followership remains the stepchild, languishing out of the limelight.

The foolishness, the obtuseness, of this view was driven home again this week by what happened at Toshiba, the Japanese industrial and electronics giant that was discovered to have overstated its profits by more than $1.2 billion over a period of seven years.

When the news about one of Japan’s biggest ever accounting scandals broke, several of Toshiba’s most highly placed executives, including CEO Hisao Tanaka, resigned, apologized, and bowed publicly in contrition. In further keeping with Japanese culture and custom, Tanaka admitted at a packed press conference that Toshiba had suffered under his leadership, “what could be the biggest erosion of our brand image in our 140-year history.”

There is no question that in their attempt to inflate profits, Tanaka and other top Toshiba leaders engaged in a multi-year cover-up. But there is equally no question that they were not the only ones guilty of wrongdoing. Other employees, numberless subordinates, were cowed by their superiors and the corporate culture into keeping quiet, into concealing information that ideally they should have made public. In their recently released report, independent investigators concluded that mid-level managers had, however reluctantly, colluded in the wrongdoing by helping to cook the books.

I do not for a moment minimize the situation in which these mid-level managers, these subordinates, found themselves. The context was such that resistance to their superiors must have seemed impossible, maybe even unthinkable. But there is a literature on followership that makes clear that ordinary people are not immune from responsibility for bad outcomes. As Ira Chaleff puts it in his recent book, Intelligent Disobedience: Doing Right When What You’re Told to do is Wrong, “we must develop the capacity to not only speak our truth… but to act on our truth … when authority is misusing power.” To do anything less is to join bad leaders by becoming bad followers – a truth about people without power no less important than similar truths about people with.

It has always had a strong appeal – being leaderless. There is something innately engaging about the idea that people might organize themselves in ways that are non-hierarchical, in ways that are totally democratic.  Imagine! Everyone is the equal of everyone else. Imagine! No single man or woman has more of a say than does any other single man or woman.

Since time immemorial utopias have been built on the idea of this ideal. And so have countless social movements including, most recently, the Occupy movement. Nor is the principle of being leaderless confined to the political sphere. It has found a niche in the corporate sphere as well. In their widely read book The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom argue that whereas in “spider companies power and knowledge are concentrated at the top,” in starfish organizations “power is spread throughout.”

But, almost always, the dream of being leaderless is just that, a dream, a fantasy not a reality, at least not for any prolonged period of time. A recent case in point? Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, who has wanted nothing so much as to take his successful company and turn it into a successful democracy. In his quixotic quest, Hsieh embraced “Holacracy,” a system in which hierarchy and bureaucracy are supposed to be abolished or, at a minimum, drastically reduced. A system in which everyone has a voice – even an equal voice.

However according to a detailed piece in the New York Times (link below), two years into Holacracy, Zappos is anything but a workplace utopia. Among several reasons, those who are supposed most to benefit from it, don’t like it. While the majority of Zappos employees are willing to go along, most are unenthusiastic. And some number actually hate Holacracy. They complain it’s complicated and time-consuming, inefficient and unconducive to innovation. When Hsieh sent a 4,700 word e mail to everyone at the company accompanied by an ultimatum – embrace Holacracy or get out – fully 14 percent of the workforce up and left!

Of course Hsieh’s ultimatum conveys the conundrum: for all the talk about Holacracy being non- hierarchical, at Zappos it was imposed on those below by a CEO from on high. Hsieh did not exactly practice what he preached.

But there is another truth that has nothing to do with Zappos. Which is that history suggests that being leaderless is inimical to the human condition. The overwhelming evidence is that human animals, like other animals, prefer having someone at least a little bit in charge.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/business/at-zappos-selling-shoes-and-a-vision.html?_r=0

For ten years Angela Merkel has been the undisputed leader of Germany. What has become clear during the Greek financial crisis is that Germany is now the undisputed leader of Europe. At every turn it has been primarily Germany leading the European Union, and it has been primarily the Germans with whom the Greeks are having to negotiate the terms of a bailout.

With Merkel at the helm Germany’s striking resurgence in recent years – especially in comparison with England and France – has not presented a major problem. Other countries in the European Union, and the United States, have been content to let Germany take the lead. Among other reasons, Merkel herself is low key, anything other than blustery and boastful; anything other than inclined in any obvious way to throw her weight around. Years ago she seems to have deliberately, if not necessarily consciously, adopted a leadership style designed not to give offense, either at home or abroad.

But even Merkel is mortal. What will happen when her days as chancellor are over is impossible to know. It’s not inconceivable however that her successor will be a different sort of German altogether, one whose style if not substance is more difficult for the rest of the world to swallow.

It’s been a bad week for women leaders. Two of the most prominent – Katherine Archuleta, Director of the Federal Office of Personnel Management, and Ellen Pao, CEO of Reddit – were summarily told to resign. (That’s leaderspeak for they were summarily fired.)

Only last Thursday Archuleta had rebuffed demands that she resign in the wake of revelations relating to a major breach of private information her agency was supposed to protect.  But by Friday morning the pressure on her grew too great – she went to the White House personally to submit her resignation to the president.

Pao, in turn, was in the news only recently for having filed a lawsuit against her former employer in a major gender discrimination case. While she lost the case, Pao was widely praised for having drawn nationwide attention to the perennial problem of diversity, specifically in Silicon Valley. Soon thereafter, however, over at Reddit, the social media site where she had worked for two years, Pao faced a revolt, supposedly for having dismissed an employee who was especially well-liked. Things got to a point where some 213,000 people signed a petition calling for Pao’s resignation! Finally she too had no choice but  to resign which, also on Friday, she did. For her to stay on as chief executive officer became impossible.

The two cases are more different than similar. But the similarities between them are worth noting. In both cases the women in question had been leaders of their organizations for brief periods of time – less than two years. In both cases the women in question could be considered dismissed for cause not directly of their own making. In both cases the women in question resisted the pressure to leave as long as they reasonably could. And in both cases the women in question  worked in a context within which women at the top were a rarity.

It is widely acknowledged that gender played a major role in what did and did not happen to Ellen Pao. It is less widely acknowledged that in virtually every other case in which there is a woman at the top – whether in government, business or anywhere else – gender remains a factor. So long as the number of women at the top of the greasy ladder remains so small they will have a harder time than men navigating the shoals.

Jimmy Carter, now 90, is reputed to have the best post-presidency ever. He has been enormously productive during the three and a half decades since he left the White House, fighting tirelessly for human rights, nearly eliminating at least one dreadful disease that most of us didn’t even know existed (Guinea worm), and writing a slew of books (at last count 29), a number of which are very good.

But for all his post-presidency accomplishments, what makes him great is not what he does, but who he is. Jimmy Carter is a man of such unimpeachable integrity, of such unusual modesty, of such simple tastes and plain habits that he seems to have dropped from another planet. If there is another American of his stature who has remained so determinedly what he was when he was young, a farm boy from Archery, Georgia (population 150), I can’t think who.

In most of the important ways, Carter’s life is little different from what it was before he entered politics. He has been married to the same woman, Rosalynn Carter, for 69 years. He and Rosalynn have lived in Plains, Georgia for 62 years. He and Rosalynn have lived in the same house in Plains for 54 years. Plains is only 2 miles from Archery, where in 1928, Earl Carter, Jimmy’s father, bought 360 acres of farmland on which Jimmy was raised.

By his own testimony Carter is a born again Christian. He not only professes his faith, he lives it. His life, his work, his demeanor, the content of what he says are all deeply informed by, influenced by, his Christian beliefs. Carter has long taught a Sunday School Class in Plains – and he still does. Go to the web site of the Maranatha Baptist Church and you will see that he is scheduled to teach Sunday school four times this August, and three times this September. He teaches whenever he’s not traveling, which he still does, regularly.

Finally while Carter is in some ways an intellectual – well-educated, deeply informed, and relentlessly curious – he is also, in the American tradition, a man who prides himself on working with his hands, on crafting things by the sweat of his brow. Both he and his wife have long supported, physically as well as financially, Habitat for Humanity, a Christian Housing Ministry dedicated to providing poor people worldwide with “simple, decent, and affordable housing.” And when he and Rosalynn are home, and he’s not at his computer, writing, he’s in his wood shop out back, painting and making furniture.

An extra-ordinary man who has chosen to live an ordinary life – which is extra-ordinary. Which is exemplary. Which is a welcome rejection of the restless materialism characteristic of our leadership class.

This is the last of four short essays about the man and his moment.  

Erik Erikson and Bruce Mazlish were pioneers in Leadership Studies. They had several things in common. Both were deeply interested in and informed by history. Both were deeply interested in and informed by psychoanalysis. And – notwithstanding their Freudian bias – both would never have looked at a leader separate and distinct from the context within which he was situated.*

Erikson and Mazlish were psychohistorians, a word now out of fashion. Still it accurately conveys my concluding point about Larry Kramer: that he cannot be understood separate and distinct from the context within which he was situated. Kramer’s success as a leader is not attributable only to him, to his persona in particular. It is attributable to the fact that he matched the moment. He was perfectly pitched and positioned to address a crisis – AIDS – that was dire in the extreme and that was especially threatening to men who, like Kramer himself, remained marginal, excluded from mainstream society.

When the “gay cancer” hit in the early 1980’s, Kramer was not a newcomer. He was already well known in the gay community as an irritant and provocateur, whose 1978 novel, Faggots, criticized the promiscuous lifestyle with which gay men had come to be associated. But while his particular persona was irritating when life was good, it was imperative when life was bad. The context had changed and so, inevitably, did leadership and followership. Kramer’s famously infuriating style of leadership was necessary and appropriate to the crisis of AIDS, and it was necessary and appropriate to those in Kramer’s community who were scared to death they might be next to die.

History is a trajectory. It is not too much to say then that the Supreme Court’s recent affirmation of same-sex marriage is in direct consequence of Kramer’s capacity to forge gay men and, yes, women, into a community. Kramer galvanized them into taking action, into becoming something they had never been before – activists. Activists protesting on their own behalf. Activists insisting that they had a right to be heard. Activists demanding that the government respond to their needs now, not later. Kramer used AIDS to unify the gay community and to give it a voice. Of course once that voice was registered, it was never again stilled.

Psychohistory teaches what the case of Kramer confirms: that great leadership cannot be understood by looking at leaders alone. Great leaders fuse with their followers. Great leaders along with their followers create change. It takes nothing away from Kramer to say that without an epidemic to eviscerate, he could not have done what he did.

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*I write “he” because Erikson and Mazlish wrote exclusively or nearly so about leaders who were men. Erikson famously wrote psychobiographies of Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi, both of which were, are, considered exemplars of psychohistory.

This is the third of four short essays about the man and his moment.  

A new, first rate film about Larry Kramer – “Larry Kramer in Love & Anger” – made its debut on HBO a week ago. The film focuses on Kramer’s adulthood, not his childhood. Still it makes reference to the highly contentious relationship between Kramer and his father, even early on when Kramer was a boy. His father, disappointed, perhaps even disgusted by what he perceived his son’s insufficiently manly behavior, would taunt him and call him a sissy. Though he was shy, according to Kramer he would fight his father back, even when he was young, until he went to Yale, where after a year he tried to kill himself.

It doesn’t take extensive armchair analysis to suggest that the wellspring of Kramer’s anger in adulthood was the anger he felt in childhood – from his father toward him, from him toward his father. It’s not a small matter. For Kramer’s regular raging, his legendary contentiousness, his infamous impatience are the hallmarks of the man. It’s not that he lacks other notable traits. Kramer is many things to many people – including being greatly admired and well loved. But what sets him apart – what fuels his furious drive – is his unquenchable anger.*

Rage is hardly rare among those hell bent on getting others to follow where they lead – especially if they are outsiders, battling what they experience as obtuseness and oppression. In fact, many of history’s greatest leaders were just that: furious. Furious at unfairness and injustice; furious at those they thought unfair and unjust.

Among the most interesting examples is Martin Luther King, precisely because he is usually seen as a man of peace, a centrist not an extremist whose strength emanated from his moderation. But if you deconstruct some of his writings, such as the iconic “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” you find a man nearly consumed by impatience and anger – an anger that threatened to become threatening. “We know through painful experience,” King writes, “that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” Think about his semantic choices: “painful experience” and “never voluntarily given” (italics mine) and “oppressor” and “demanded.” What does “demanded” denote? Clearly violence is on the table, not off it.

King and Kramer. Can we reasonably link them? Can we reasonably say their names in tandem?  I would argue that the answer is yes. I would argue that Kramer is not merely as HBO would have him: “one of the most important … figures in … gay America.”** I would argue, have argued, that he, like King, is one of the most important figures in America. Both King and Kramer used their righteous rage to effect change. Both King and Kramer used their righteous rage to liberate their own kind.  Both King and Kramer used their righteous rage to harness others to their cause.

This is not to equate them, to say they are one and the same. Rather it is to suggest that their similarities are as pertinent and powerful as their differences.

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*Not for nothing the name of the film.

** From HBO’s web site. The italicization of “gay” is mine.