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

It’s the rare leader who is, simultaneously, a theoretician and practitioner. Most are one or the other, as it takes a certain kind of genius to be as good at deciding what is to be done as doing it.  In fact, the phrase “What Is to Be Done?” brings to mind one such leader, Lenin, whose pamphlet by that name, published in 1903, foretold the revolution he later led, in 1917.

Kramer’s first most important contribution to the gay rights movement was his insistence that in order successfully to fight “gay cancer,” AIDS, gay men would themselves have to fight. As in “1,112 and Counting,” Kramer continued to argue that gay men would have to become angry and assertive enough first to organize, and then to take on the establishment, primarily but not exclusively the medical establishment.

Kramer’s second most important contribution to the gay rights movement was his willingness to put his money where his mouth was – his willingness to act on what he believed to be right and good and true. Kramer was one of several men who founded the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), established in the early 1980’s to assist those stricken by AIDS, providing them with supports, including financial, medical, legal, and social. It was the first organization of substance and size to represent this particular population, which of course had up to then been marginalized.

But Kramer was not content with what he had crafted. Congenitally demanding and impatient under the best of circumstances, he quickly grew dissatisfied with GMHC, considering it too careful and conservative in the face of a health crisis that each year was more catastrophic. So Kramer quit the group he had helped to found, subsequently to establish a more militant one, ACT UP.

ACT UP became famous, infamous, for tactics that were, to put it politely, histrionic, in your face, rude to the point of being outrageous. To realize its primary purpose – to force the pharmaceutical industry and, more importantly, the Food and Drug Administration to develop and distribute drugs to fight AIDS – the group was prepared to risk all, including ridicule and arrest. Kramer himself was typically front and center. He was perfectly capable, for example, of standing in the street, megaphone in hand, screaming “President Reagan, your son is gay!” Just as he was perfectly capable of joining ACT UP when its members tried to dump the ashes of a young friend on the south lawn of the White House, or when they shut down the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, or when they chained themselves to the gates at the headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche.

Kramer never however surrendered his pen. In fact, as the 1980’s dragged on, drugs made available only at a pace that he considered criminally sluggish, his pen and his protest merged, became one. In 1988 Kramer wrote an open letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci, a leading AIDS researcher and high ranking official at the National Institutes for Health. It read in part:

I have been screaming at the National Institutes of Health since I first visited your Animal House of Horrors in 1984. I called you monsters then… and now I call you murderers. You are responsible for supervising all government-funded AIDS treatment research programs. In the name of right, you make decisions that cost the lives of others. I call the decisions you are making acts of murder.

No wonder Kramer was never the most popular guy in town. No wonder Kramer is a leader whose name will endure.

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

Seven years ago I developed a course at the Harvard Kennedy School titled “Leadership Literacy.” The idea behind the course was that contrary to the evidence of recent decades, there is a leadership literature that is great. Great as in seminal, timeless, and universal. Great as in Confucius and Plato, Machiavelli and Carlyle, Weber and Freud, Paine and Stanton, Lincoln and Lenin, Carson and King, Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela. Every reading in the course was unquestionably in this category – in the category of a classic of the leadership literature.

Though every reading was at least two decades old, a few were relatively recent. One of these was by Larry Kramer, a man who even seven years ago was not nearly as well-known as he is today. Now, finally, his name has become widely familiar as that of the single most impactful gay rights activist ever. Now, finally, at the end of his unexpectedly long life (he has been seriously ill for years), he is being given his due. Now, finally, he is being recognized as a great American leader not only of the gay community, but as a great American leader period.

One of the most remarkable things about Kramer is that he was as strikingly effective a writer as he was an activist. At least one of his book, Faggots, continues to be one of the best-selling novels ever about gay life. At least one of his plays, “The Normal Heart” will indefinitely be part of the American theatrical repertory. And at least one of his essays “1,112 and Counting,” is widely regarded as a watershed. It was a clarion call to his own kind, gay men, Kramer sounding an alarm about the most devastating crisis ever to decimate them – the crisis of AIDS. In the early 1980s it was not yet fully understood or widely accepted that gay American men were being ravaged by an epidemic tantamount to a death sentence. In fact, gay people were like straight people: they continued to avert their eyes, ignoring or trying to a lethal disease that was attacking them in particular.

It was left to Kramer – fearless, furious, and ferocious – to issue the warning. “1,112 and Counting” was written in 1983. His use of foul language and invocation of repetition were intended to get the attention of gay men – and they did. Here is an excerpt.

If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get….I am sick of our electing officials who in no way represent us….I am sick of closeted gay doctors who won’t come out to help us fight to rectify any of what I’m writing about….I am sick of gay men who won’t support gay charities….I am sick of people who say “it’s no worse than statistics for smokers and lunch cancer”….I am sick of guys who moan that giving up careless sex until this blows over is worse than death. How can they value life so little and cocks and asses so much?…. I am sick of ‘men’ who say, “We’ve got to keep quiet or they will do such and such.”… And I am very sick and saddened by every gay man who does not get behind this issue totally and with commitment – to fight for his life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the ideas I tried to convey in The End of Leadership was the end of the expert as aristocrat. The cultural shift to which I point is not only about the diminishment of leaders, but about the diminishment of everyone in a position of any kind of authority. This applies as much to doctors, lawyers and teachers as to presidents and CEOs. It equally applies to anyone who presumes an expertise to which others can reasonably lay claim. For example, in the second decade of the 21st century I can reasonably claim to be as qualified to rate a restaurant as a seasoned restaurant critic. I can even reasonably claim to be something of a medical expert, just by going on line and reading the relevant research. However, I cannot reasonably claim that I am as able to build a space ship as a trained rocket scientist.

There are then some exceptions to the general rule. But not many. In the main my claim on your mind is as legitimate as anyone else’s. This democratization of just about everything was explored in a recent article in the Financial Times titled as is this piece: “Everyone’s a Tastemaker.” The author describes a “far-reaching cultural shift,” with taste having gone from being “the property of the aristocratic few to the province of the democratic many.” So Vogue’s editor and dominance grise, Anna Wintour, still exerts an outsized influence on the latest in fashion. But she is rivaled now by people we’ve never heard of, including young people with no claim to fame other than having equal access to the channels by which fame is made – social media.

Of course the democratization of taste-making is hardly confined to the world of what we wear. It applies equally to what we see and hear, to what we taste and touch, to what we seek out and attempt to avoid, to high art as to low. As the tagline to the FT piece reads, “The power to shape cultural trends is now in the hands of the many instead of a select few.”

No wonder leadership and followership now are different from just a decade or two ago!

 

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*Brendan Lemon, 6/20/15.

 

Ginny Rometty became IBM’s first female CEO in January, 2012. Since then, to lift a line from Forbes, it’s been “anything but smooth sailing.” Though the company’s stock price did slightly better in the first half of 2015, since becoming CEO Rometty presided over 11 consecutive quarters of declining revenues. Moreover, in 2014 IBM posed a shareholder return of negative 12.4%, and lower profits as well as lower revenues.

Still IBM’s board recently saw fit to boost her compensation 38.5 percent, to $19.3 million. In defending its decision the Board announced that the shortfall in IBM’s financial results were balanced against the “substantial strategic actions taken to balance the company.” Moreover, the board continued, Ms. Rometty’s increased package reflected its “strong confidence” in her “ongoing leadership.”

Ms. Rometty’s hike in pay is worth noting primarily because it is unusual these days to reward poor company performance. This is not to say that it never happens. It does. But the fact is that CEO pay is generally tied now to CEO performance. Chief executive officers do well when their shareholders do. According to the Wall Street Journal’s annual pay survey, “All 10 of the CEOs posting the best shareholder returns were paid more than they had been a year earlier, and all but two of the 10 worst performers got pay cuts.”*

So Rometty is clearly an outlier – her boost in pay in spite of IBM’s poor performance during most of her time at the helm is out of step with current corporate norms. The question is why. I have no reason to doubt the Board’s official statement: there are reasons for the nearly steady decline in IBM’s stock price and revenues; and the Board does continue to have confidence in Rometty’s “ongoing leadership.” But still I wonder if part of the explanation for Rometty’s significant raise in pay – up by over a third – in spite of her lackluster performance is reverse discrimination. To favor an individual – in this case the CEO of a computing giant who is female – who belongs to a group known to have been discriminated against previously is not exactly unheard of.

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* http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-much-the-best-and-worst-ceos-got-paid-1435104565

In arguing for a systemic approach to leadership – one that invariably involves 1) leaders, 2) followers, and 3) context, as opposed only to leaders – I never diminish the importance of the leader. Leaders obviously matter.

However just yesterday were two seismic events in American politics evidencing once again that to fixate on leaders at the expense of followers – at the expense of everyone else – is to misread how history happens.

First was a semblance of closure in Charleston, when President Obama delivered his eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, one of nine African-Americans killed a week earlier in an historic Charleston church. The events that followed the killings were as dramatic as unforetold. They swirled around the symbolism of the Confederate flag, which came overnight to be seen as offensive to the point of intolerable. Across the south political leaders joined to insist that it was time for the flag permanently to come down.  And across the country business leaders joined to insist that it was time for the flag permanently to be removed from the nation’s shelves.

How did this happen? Did the governors of South Carolina, say, and Alabama, simply wake up one morning and have a change of heart? Or did they in the immediate wake of the shootings call for the elimination of a symbol that many had long perceived as racist? They did not. They did not on their own have a change of heart, and they did not immediately after the shootings call for the flag to be taken down. Nor for that matter did the CEOs of companies such as Walmart, Amazon, and Google act on their own, out of a sudden impulse to do the right thing by refusing to sell Confederate flag merchandise.

No, what distinguished this moment in American history was not any leader but a group of followers, the victims’ families, who first charted the path toward forgiveness and redemption, toward peace and love not war and hate. By setting a tone of reconciliation in the immediate aftermath of the Charleston killings – “I forgive you and have mercy on your soul,” said the daughter of one of the victims to her mother’s killer – the families of the slain set the tone for everything subsequent. It was they, followed by the people of Charleston, who changed the nation’s history in a way that will forever be seen as significant.

Yesterday’s second event demonstrating the importance of followers not just leaders was, of course, the Supreme Court ruling that same-sex marriage was now legal in all 50 states. To the naïve it might seem that the five Supreme Court justices who came down in favor were leading the nation on equal rights. But anyone who knows anything at all about history knows that these five justices were not leading at all, they were following. They were following the American people, the majority of whom now believe that gay men and women should have the same right to marry as straight men and women. And they were following gay rights activists, who started organizing in earnest in the 1980s, and whose cause since then has steadily gathered momentum.

On the surface yesterday was about an impassioned eulogy delivered by the nation’s chief executive. And on the surface yesterday was about a transforming ruling handed down by the nation’s highest court. But only on the surface. Scratch beneath and you will find that both were in consequence of ordinary men and women doing what they believed to be right.

 

 

 

A couple of weeks ago, the president of Cooper Union, Jamshed Bharucha, announced his resignation. Whatever the circumstances surrounding his particular presidency, the fact is that like other American leaders, in the 21^st century leaders of American colleges and universities are having to navigate choppy waters.

In the old days presidents of institutions of higher education were removed from the exigencies of everyday life. They were sheltered by what then was the cloistered nature of the academy, and by the expectation that their leadership would be exercised primarily in the intellectual realm, not in the rough and tumble world that was beyond the ivory tower.

Now though that’s different. Just like other American leaders, leaders of colleges and universities are having to suffer the indignities of being closely scrutinized; are having to cope with constant demands from various constituencies; and are having to immerse themselves in the worlds of cash and commerce from which previously they were exempt.

The numbers tell the tale. In 2012 the average tenure of a leader of an institution of higher education was 7 years. Just six years earlier it was 8.5 years. In the Philadelphia region alone, during the three year period 2011-2014, 16 out of 36 four year colleges and universities saw either the exit or arrival of a new president.

The fact that leaders in higher education are not exempt from the pressures on leaders more generally testifies to the importance of the larger context within which leaders – and their putative followers – are located. The academy is no longer an armor against the larger forces that make leadership in America so difficult now to exercise.

 

Unlikely it may seem. But it is not. In the second decade of the 21^st century leaders emerge from the strangest of places. And in the second decade of the 21^st century leaders inhabit the most improbable of bodies – in this case that of a pretty and petit 25 year old, who makes her living singing.

Taylor Swift has chosen to use her platform constructed of fame and fortune to change the way the world works, or has. She has taken on, in quick succession, both Spotify and Apple, to try to oblige them to pay their artists what she thinks, or, more precisely, what they think they deserve. Apple caved virtually immediately, tweeting Taylor, “we hear you,” and agreeing to pay artists for their music even during the three month trial of its new platform, Apple Music.

But the point is not that a single company – even arguably the most powerful in the world – bent to Swift’s will. The point is that she is making a stunningly strong case for artists, insisting that they be paid for their wares just like everyone else.

Swift is as eloquent on the subject as she is forceful. In taking on Spotify she wrote in a 2014 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for….Music should not be free.”

And in 2015, in taking on Apple in a letter posted to her Tumblr page, Swift wrote that Apple’s policy was “shocking, disappointing and completely unlike this historically progressive company.” She went on to assert that she was by no means speaking only for herself – which presumably is why, in a New York minute, Apple reversed itself.

Swift is in a singularly strong position: she is a spectacularly successful singer. What makes her a leader, however, is that she has capitalized on this success. She has used it to create a change that many deeply believe long overdue.

 

 

I am always struck by the persistence and pestilence of bad leadership. It’s an endemic epidemic – a social disease for which we have no cure.

But some weeks seem worse than others, the last was one of them. Four examples – two of Callous Leadership and two of Evil Leadership.

In my book, Bad Leadership, I defined Callous Leadership as follows:

The leader and at least some followers are uncaring or unkind. Ignored or discounted are the needs, wants, and wishes of most members of the group or organization, especially subordinates.

Don Blankenship was, is, a callous leader. As a recent article in the New York Times documented, he ruled his business, Massey Energy, with an iron fist. (Link below.) He micromanaged to the point of demanding production updates from Massey Mines every 30 minutes. He fired those who worked for him without an apparent second thought. He was capable of behaving brutally to those beneath him, subordinates who ran afoul of exactly what he wanted. He was “quasi-dictatorial” in his overall management style. And, the evidence strongly suggests, he cut corners. He cut corners at the expense of the safety of those in his employ.

He will have his day in court – an opportunity to rebut the charge that in his efforts to minimize costs and maximize profits he bears responsibility for an explosion in a West Virginia coal mine that cost the lives of 29 men. Whatever the outcome of the legal proceedings there is this: the 2010 disaster was the deadliest in the coal mining industry in 40 years.

If Blankenship were alone or even in the small minority, no big deal. He would be an anomaly. The problem is that he is not. Callous leadership is endemic, and it is stressful, and it is bad for our health. A professor at Georgetown University, Christine Porath, reports that in 1998 a quarter of those she surveyed said they were treated rudely at work at least once a week. In 2005 this figure rose to nearly half; by 2011 it was over half. (Link below.) Bad behaviors by bosses include interrupting, being judgmental, failing to pass on important information, talking down to people, and neglecting the niceties. The point is this: bosses can be nice or at least reasonably civil at no great cost to themselves. Their frequent failure to do so is, however, costly to us, in the quality of our lives and our health. Being treated badly by bosses on a regular basis stresses our immune systems, and puts at risk our physical as well as psychological well-being.

In my book Bad Leadership I defined Evil Leadership as follows:

The leader and at least some followers commit atrocities. They use pain as an instrument of power. The harm done to men, women, and children is severe rather than slight. The harm can by physical, psychological, or both.

By almost any measure Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is an evil leader. In fact, the International Criminal Court has indicted Bashir on charges of genocide. Trouble is that he continues to elude capture, that his brutality goes on unabated, and that catching him and bringing him to justice appears low on everyone’s list of priorities, including the president of the United States. Just last week Bashir openly visited South Africa, and then flew back to Sudan before anyone could be bothered to hold him on the genocide charge. In other words, Americans along with everyone else lack the will to stop a leader who has been bad to the point of being evil.

Finally, there is this simple statistic. Nearly 60 million people – half of whom are children – have been driven from their homes by war and persecution. This figure, recently released by the United Nations, is unprecedented. It is that large. To what can we attribute these numbers if not to bad leadership – and bad followership? To leaders and followers – from Activists to Bystanders – who encourage this to happen, enable this to happen, allow this to happen?

Obviously it is an outrage. Less obviously it is a mystery. It is a mystery that over the millenniums we have managed effectively to eliminate a host of physical diseases. But we have not managed even to examine the worst of social diseases – bad leadership.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/business/energy-environment/the-people-v-the-coal-baron.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/is-your-boss-mean.html

 

 

 

 

My most recent book – Hard Times: Leadership in America – was published last 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.

“Our perception of corporate America in the second decade of the twenty-first century is in large part a consequence of what happened in and to corporate America in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Beginning with the ignominious collapse of Enron in 2001, American business has seemed ever since somehow, somewhat tarnished. One could, in other words, make the argument that it never fully recovered from this particular debacle, from the failure of a famously high-flying energy company previously thought virtually impervious, or from the criminal convictions of corporate officers previous thought virtually invincible….. While most Americans did not closely track [the] various corporate collapses [during roughly this same period], they did catch the whiff of failure, of greed, of corruption. They did understand that like some of their most vaulted political leaders…some of their most vaulted business leaders were other than what they were cracked up to be. Most were mere mortals and many had been, were still, overpaid and overpraised.

The recent financial crisis did not change our opinion or help the situation. Corporate debacles ‘scorched’ the global economy, with the IMF calculating that they resulted in total bank losses of about $2 trillion. They also led to a ‘collapse of trust in business.'”

 

I’ve not blogged in the last week or so – still the world spins on its axis.  Leaders and followers dance, sometimes the one leading and the other following, sometimes the other way round.

Some recent reflections on the proceedings:

Michelle Obama

During her six and one half years in the White House, I have not generally been impressed by the First Lady. She has seemed both stymied and suppressed, a 21^st century woman of considerable accomplishment who, for whatever reason, reverted back to a 20^th century type – a First Lady who busied herself with woman’s work, such as eating well and being physically fit. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but she was muted in her concerns, more decorous than determined. Moreover, as I’ve written before, she did precious little to help her husband, to compensate for his introversion by helping to grease the wheels of Washington.

In recent weeks, however, Michelle Obama seems to have found her voice and her cause. Several times over she spoke to newly minted graduates, especially women and minorities at home and abroad, in a fierce but compassionate voice, urging them on no matter the odds against them. At Tuskegee University, for example, the historically black school, she described her early days on the national stage: “As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of … questions and speculations….Was I too loud or too angry or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?”  Each time over she was eloquent and inspirational, making palpable connections between herself and her audience. As importantly, each time she seemed at least to embrace the role of a leader who could get others to follow her difficult but finally famously rewarding personal and professional path.

James Billington  

When I was a graduate student at Yale in the 1970s, Billington was an intellectual idol. Author of The Icon and the Axe, a formidably impressive cultural history of Russia, he was widely considered one of the nation’s leading literary lions. It was no surprise, then, when in 1987 President Ronald Reagan nominated him to be the 13^th Librarian of Congress, one of the nation’s leading literary posts. It is a position that Billington, now age 86, still holds. But he has become in his dotage an embarrassment, testimony to the folly of permitting a leader to remain a leader for nearly thirty years.

Turns out that Billington has presided over what is widely agreed now to be a colossal mess – the New York Times described “a series of management and technology failures at the library that were documented in more than a dozen reports by government watchdog agencies” (6/11). So whatever his previous accomplishments, the evidence is that the length of his tenure has damaged his own reputation and, much more importantly, the institution that he claims to cherish.

To be clear: Billington agreed finally to resign only because of pressure from other people. Even at his advanced age, and with the evidence mounting against him, he resisted leaving, telling an interlocutor only a week or so ago that he had no intention of retiring and that criticisms of him came only from rivals and disgruntled former employees. A delusion. But the fault is not his. If we allow anyone to remain in a leadership role for nearly thirty years, we enable them, which puts the blame for what goes wrong on our shoulders, not theirs.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn  

His saga has been, simultaneously, sordid and sad. It has also, to all appearances, just concluded. After four years of tortuous legal wrangling both in France and in the United States, the man who once was presumed in line for the French presidency was cleared in a French court of all the remaining charges against him.

Both at home and abroad Strauss-Kahn ran into trouble because of sex or, more precisely, because of his apparent sexual proclivities. He has been accused of rape, of assault, of pimping, and of engaging in “unnatural practices.” He has been ridiculed and scorned, and banished (at least for the time being) from the polite societies in which for decades he freely traveled. His wife – (very) rich and famous in her own right – finally divorced him. And in four years he has aged ten years. A recent photo of him arriving at a French court shows him looking haggard and old, at least in comparison with the sharp and dapper figure that he cut not long ago.

Strauss-Kahn is nothing if not clever. But he is also, simultaneously, a fool. Assuming for the sake of this discussion that he did not deserve time in prison, there can be no question that for many years he did participate, on something resembling a regular basis, in “sex parties” held in several cities in several countries. While the French have long been known for being tolerant and even blasé about the private lives of public figures, times change. The culture has changed – especially women’s willingness to remain mute about such matters – and the technology has changed. The very idea that in this day and age Strauss-Kahn could count on keeping his lascivious private life indefinitely private is absurd. Neither we nor he should be surprised by the fact that in short order Strauss-Kahn morphed from a man who was widely esteemed to one who was widely mocked. Fact is that in the 21^st century followers are famously fickle.