Being president ain’t what it used to be.
Being president of a college or university is no exception.
Which is why another president of another institution of higher education just bit the dust. The beleaguered president of Cooper Union, Jamshed Bharucha, finally had enough. He quit. Or, maybe better put, his followers had enough. They pushed him out. Either way, his position became untenable.
More on “hard times” for leaders in higher education in the next few days.
Good news out of Turkey!
In today’s national election, the oppressive, repressive president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, suffered his biggest setback in 12 years in power. Voters have just denied him his overweening ambition: to rewrite the constitution to establish himself as an all-powerful president. (He was prime minister from 2003 to 2014, and has been president since then.) To be sure, Erdogan’s ruling party won a plurality of the vote. But it lost 8 percentage points since the last election. And the existing numbers are not likely to be sufficient to form a government without entering into a coalition.
In some ways the results of the Turkish election resemble those of other recent ones in Europe, in which followers, voters, have trounced their leaders. In Poland, in spite of President Bronislaw Komorowski’s alliance with the centrist party that has successfully governed the country for the last eight years, he was beaten by a young, right wing upstart, whose main appeal seemed that he was other than the incumbent. Recent elections in Spain and also in Scotland suggest a similar trend – in which voters, especially younger ones, assert their right to be heard either by throwing the incumbents out of office, or by in some other way upending or threatening the status quo.
In Turkey this same voter restiveness is an inordinately welcome development. For anyone with any interest in democratic governance, what’s been happening in Turkey in recent years has been downright disheartening. So Erdogan’s comeuppance is cause for celebration … at least for now.
So far there are nine declared Republican candidates for President of the United States:
So far there are six waiting in the wings:
So far there are two standing by:
This means that as of this writing some 16 men and one woman genuinely believe, or are making believe that they genuinely believe, that both of the following are true: first that they are inordinately well qualified to be President of the United States; and second that on November 8, 2016 they have a reasonable chance of being elected President of the United States.
If all of them genuinely believe that they are inordinately well qualified to be President of the United States, and if all of them similarly believe that on November 8, 2016 they have a reasonable chance of being elected President of the United States, then at least some of them are delusional.
As to those who are making believe that they genuinely believe that they are inordinately well qualified to be President of the United States, and that on November 8, 2016 they have a reasonable chance of being elected President of the United States, they are debasing not only themselves but the office to which they claim to aspire. The perceived rewards of running without a snowball’s chance in hell of winning are further damaging an already damaged brand: leadership in America.
In the leadership literature – and in the English language more generally – there is a visceral loathing of the word “follower.” It is associated with being weak not strong, with being passive rather than active, and with being a loser as opposed to a winner.
Nevertheless, in English, “follower” is the obvious antonym of “leader.” Though most of the experts continue to shy from the word – preferring to use synonyms such as constituent, stakeholder, or subordinate – I continue to believe that “follower” is a useful, even necessary, designation.
To be sure, as I use the word, to label someone a follower is not to imply that they follow at every turn. To the contrary: just as leaders don’t always lead, so followers don’t always follow. They sometimes they go their own way, chart their own course. This then is my definition:
Followers are people without any obvious sources of power, authority, or influence. They therefore usually – though not always – fall into line. They therefore usually – though not always – go along with the prevailing norm.
According to this definition, when he blew the lid off the National Security Administration’s surveillance programs in 2013, Edward Snowden was a follower. Until that moment he was without any power, authority, or influence whatsoever. That he has been able to exert such a great impact on America’s political system – whatever the future of the various provisions of the Patriot Act, for the moment some have expired – is further evidence that leaders are anything other than all-important. Followers matter – and so do the contexts within which both leaders and followers necessarily are embedded. Whatever you think of the change that Snowden created, it is testimony not only to follower power, but to the 21st century technology that in this case enabled it.
Nearly no one was surprised that Sepp Blatter was reelected yesterday for a fifth term as president of FIFA. This in spite of the fact that a few days earlier the long-held and widespread suspicion that FIFA – the association responsible for governing international soccer – is riddled with corruption was at least preliminarily confirmed. Fourteen FIFA officials were charged by the U.S. Justice Department with racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. So far Blatter himself faces no legal charges. Nevertheless, at a minimum, he has presided for seventeen years over an organization that has scandalized and degraded the world’s most popular sport.
The mystery is not that Blatter is, at the least, miserably incompetent. The mystery is that he was reelected in spite of his screamingly obvious failings. We should not, in other words, be astonished when a bad leader is hell bent on remaining in place. We should be astonished when a bad leader’s followers make the deliberate decision to keep him in place, even when their motivations for doing so seem on the surface to be apparent.
Of course any student of history knows how dreadfully difficult it is to dislodge even the most evil of people in positions of power. Once leaders and yes, managers as well, have secured their status, somehow disposing of them, getting them out, pushing them aside, is dreadfully difficult, no matter how malevolent their transgressions or the extent of their incompetence.
What pains me particularly is how little the leadership industry has to say about all this. How fixated it is on developing good leaders – how ignorant it is about stopping or at least slowing bad leaders. This is not to say that no one has studied bad leadership; some have. But our numbers are woefully small, which is one reason why bad leadership is as little understood now as it was then, at the inception of the leadership industry some forty years ago. We should be embarrassed – even ashamed.
They both led organizations that presided over iconic sports.
They both led organizations that by many measures were stunningly successful.
They both transformed the sports over which they ruled.
They both were ultimately corrupted by the color of money.
They both were enabled by numberless followers – who themselves contributed to the corruption and cronyism.
They both were protected by numberless followers – who themselves contributed to the corruption and cronyism.
They both were Europeans who led in a limbo in which no individual or institution held them accountable.
They both operated in a context that shrouded them in secrecy.
They both led their organizations for far too long – about two decades.
They both got away with being bad leaders until they were some 80 years of age.
Finally they both had to be pushed from their perch – neither walked willingly away from the positions of power that they seemed to feel rightfully were theirs.
Put directly, Sepp Blatter, the tarnished president of FIFA, the governing body of soccer, has a predecessor in the world of global sport, another leader who not long ago started strong and ended humiliated.
His name is Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1980 to 2001. In my 2004 book, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, I wrote extensively about Samaranch, concluding that:
“As the years went on, as Samaranch presided over the nearly complete transformation of the IOC from sports movement into commercial giant, the original Olympic ideal faded…. The negative impact of the infusion of corporate capital on the Olympic movement and its parent figure, the IOC, became increasingly evident. For all his early accomplishments, Samaranch was unwilling to check the growing costs of his relentless drive for more money and greater expansion. And so by the time he resigned as president, the reputation of the IOC had become badly tarnished, many of his IOC colleagues had been discredited, and the games themselves had become no more, if no less, than global sports extravaganzas.
Over time Samaranch had grown careless. His increasingly exclusive focus on financial expansion caused him to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to problems ranging from enveloping commercialism to … growing corruption. His ignorance of these problems gradually evolved from inattention to rank mismanagement and incompetence. His refusal to address the IOC’s increasingly long list of troubles bespeaks a man whose insatiable ambition ultimately intruded on his capacity for good decision making and sound judgement.”
Sound familiar?
In his nine years as Prime Minister of Macedonia – a country now riddled with failed institutions, ethnic tensions, and murderous conflict – Nikola Gruevski morphed from a man once considered reticent and insecure to a megalomaniacal tyrant. It remains unclear how to explain this miserable metamorphosis.
What is clear is that it is not unusual. Tyrants, dictators, the most atrocious of autocrats, seem at a distance to be made not born. This is not to say that rigorous biographical analysis does not yield a childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood that in some ways foreshadows the murder and mayhem yet to come. Rather it is to say that to all outward appearances even the worst of the lot tend to start life in ordinary, and in some number of cases even promising, ways.
Adolph Hitler wanted to become a fine artist. He turned to politics only after being rejected twice from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. Nor was he the only member of the Nazi elite with other, early ambitions. Joseph Goebbels, for example, Hitler’s acolyte and notorious Minister of Propaganda, studied history and literature and wrote his doctoral thesis on a 19th century German romantic writer.
Joseph Stalin published poetry and won a scholarship to the leading Orthodox Seminary in Tbilisi.
Mao Zedong originally studied to become a teacher.
Radovan Karadzic received his degree in medicine and went on to become a practicing psychiatrist, with a subspecialty in depression. He was also, like Stalin, a published poet.
And Bashar al-Assad, held largely responsible for the deaths of some 300,000 Syrians and for the largest refugee crisis in a generation, was also a practicing physician, in his case with a specialty in ophthalmology.
Is there a lesson to be learned here? Not about individuals, maybe, but about groups. Clearly we cannot predict with any certainty which individuals will evolve from being apparently ordinary to obviously fiendish. What we can say for certain is that this evolution does not take place in a vacuum. It is allowed by others who, for whatever constellation of reasons, tolerate and even enable it.
Yesterday I posted a blog lamenting the leadership industry’s single-minded focus on single individuals. I argued instead for a more holistic or systemic approach, one that takes into account those who are other than the leader, and also the contexts within which the relevant players are situated.
Later in the day I was reading the Financial Times and came on a piece titled, “Horses for courses that gee up working relationships.”* The article described part of a two-week executive training course that had been organized by the London Business School for partners from the consulting firm AT Kearney. The idea was for these executives to earn the trust of selected horses so that they might lead them around the arena. Why? “For participants to learn about themselves and the unconscious signals they send to clients or colleagues, or indeed horses.”
I have nothing against horses. Or for that matter against equine “guided learning.” Rather the question is this one. How is the time for learning leadership allocated?
The course described in the article is two weeks in duration. Does two weeks of executive learning even make sense? Is two weeks enough time in which to accomplish anything that will endure and is somewhat substantive?
Even assuming that the answer to these questions is yes, how best to use the two weeks? Has it been demonstrated that spending some of this precious time on equine guided learning is optimum? Might this same amount of time be better spent another way? Better spent thinking not about the self or about the “unconscious signals” we send, but about the other? Better spent learning about complex problems that defy simple solutions?
Just asking.
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*http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7fcee4e8-e83d-11e4-baf0-00144feab7de.html#axzz3aIrpLzGJ
As anyone who knows my work knows by now, I am disenchanted with the leadership industry’s single-minded focus on single individuals.
Why? Because the results of this approach have been disappointing. We have not succeeded in developing leaders equipped to meet the demands of the 21st century.
Why? Because the problems of the 21st century are more complex than the education and training that we provide. In other words, a systemic approach to leadership development would be better, far better, than simply training our lens on select individuals.
Thinking about the world as a system comprised of different parts – rather than as a place in which only one part (the leader) pertains – is not new or original to me. What is different is the idea that this systemic approach should be embedded in, embraced by, the leadership industry.
The leadership system as I describe it is simple – it has only three parts. The leader. The followers – or the others to whom the leader in any way relates. And the context – or contexts (plural), within which both leaders and followers are located.
I do not argue that every systems approach should mimic mine. What I do argue for is a clearer understanding of the ways in which power is shared, and of the ways in which the system itself determines how.
To wit, this excerpt from a recent article by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker, titled “The Milwaukee Experiment.”*
“One of the difficulties of criminal justice reform is that power is spread so diffusely though the system. ‘Criminal justice is a system, and no one person or group is in charge of it,’ Alfred Blumenstein, a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, told me. ‘You have legislators who decide what’s a crime and establish the range of penalties. You have judges who impose the sentences. You have police who decide whom to arrest and you have prosecutors who have wide discretion in what cases to bring, what changes to call for, and what sentences to agree to in plea bargains.’ Each of those participants has contributed to the rise in incarceration.”
I rest my case. For now.
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*http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/the-milwaukee-experiment
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 8 – Law
“Though it is little noted and even less understood, it seems obvious that the ubiquity of the law in twenty-first century America must have an impact, does have an impact, on leadership in twenty-first century America. It is not too much to say that the long arm of the law reaches leaders in government, and in business, and in nonprofits such as schools and hospitals, and in virtually every conceivable area of American life. Even religious leaders, who until relatively recently were generally immune to prosecution in the nation’s courts, are now vulnerable.
This emphasis on, dependence on the legal system as, so to speak, the court of last resort is a peculiarly American phenomenon. Americans have more adversarial legalism: we depend more than other people in other countries on lawyers and lawsuits, on tort actions, and on legal actions against administrative agencies. This explains why so many American leaders think that they have no choice but to “lawyer up,” to make certain that they have their own legal experts to protect both them and the institutions for which they are responsible, against legal liability.
America’s uniquely litigious culture is directly responsible for complicating and constraining the lives of leaders – if only because it takes time and consumes resources …. Attending to litigation or to the possibility thereof, or both is an important part of what leaders are paid now to do.”
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