Category: Digital Article

The pollsters did a lousy job of forecasting yesterday’s British general election. Instead of a close race between the Labour Party and its leader, Ed Miliband, and the Conservative Party and its leader, Prime Minister David Cameron, the incumbents won a decisive victory. As I write and tradition dictates, Cameron has already met with the Queen. And as I write and convention suggests, he has already returned to 10 Downing Street and reiterated his intention. He will govern as prime minister of “one United Kingdom.”

Just one problem. It’s not clear that this can happen. It’s not clear that Cameron can continue to preside over the United Kingdom as we have known it – which includes Scotland.

On the face of it he has defied the odds. By winning another electoral victory he has gone against the conventional wisdom, which is that in the 21^st century democratic leadership is not only notoriously hard but famously unrewarding. But … what kind of prize is it that Cameron has actually won? Will yesterday’s victory turn out historically hollow?

Setting aside the numberless uncertainties that plague every head of state, for sure Cameron’s capacity to lead is threatened twice over. First is the mounting pressure in Scotland for independence – in spite of his constant conciliations and concessions. Labour was nearly wiped out yesterday in Scotland precisely because of the surging Scottish National Party. Which is why it cannot possibly be confidently predicted that when Cameron finally leaves office he will still be presiding over “one United Kingdom.”

Second is that Cameron has committed himself to conducting an in-out referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union. Again, this is not a circumstance of his own choosing. Just as he would wish away surging Scottish nationalism, so he would wish away the referendum on participation in the European Union. But he cannot. He has been unable in both cases to control the momentum for change, which is precisely why his remaining tenure as prime minister is likely to be more sobering than uplifting. Yes, David Cameron has won reelection. But his moment in the sun will be short-lived. Odds are good that by the time he leaves office England will be a country further diminished.

Until now Sheryl Sandberg – COO of Facebook, author of the blockbuster hit Leaning In, and activist– had it all. At least she seemed to. She seemed to have led a life of unvarnished good fortune: great success from an early age; material wealth beyond imagining; good health and good looks; and recognition, even adulation, and love. In fact, as she became in recent years not only a leader in American business but a leader in America more generally – especially of women who were professionally ambitious and similarly intent on having a family including children – Sandberg became something of a household name, familiar to anyone with an interest in issues relating to women and leadership.

Sandberg though had a flaw. She was too perfect. Everything about her was perfect – her professional life and her personal life. If there was even a single fly in her ointment it was not apparent. And so her activism, especially on behalf of women in the workplace, was somewhat suspect. She was or so she seemed an elitist – how could she possibly know anything about the travails of mere mortals? How could she – flanked on the one side by her immediate superior, the iconic Mark Zuckerberg; and on the other by her model husband and the model father of their two young children, Dave Goldberg – possibly relate to the rest of us, beset as we all were, we women particularly, by typical travails of everyday life?

All this has now changed. With Goldberg’s sudden death last week at age 47, Sandberg’s apparently perfect life has been shattered. At least for now, and for years to come, her purpose in life will be to stitch a new life – for herself, and for her son and daughter.

It is impossible to predict the ultimate impact of this tragedy on Sheryl Sandberg. But here is what we do know. Great heroes, great leaders in life and legend, endure trial by fire. As Joseph Campbell wrote in his classic, The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

“The hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

This then is not to say that Sheryl Sandberg will eventually emerge triumphant from her descent into Hades, into the underworld, or other world. Instead it is to point out that heroes, heroines, great leaders, are frequently familiar with having had to achieve “a decisive victory” over “fabulous forces.”

 

 

Published hard on the heels of the Second World War was one of the most influential books of the post-war period. Titled “The Authoritarian Personality,” it was co-authored by a group of social scientists, led by the preeminent Theodor Adorno, intent on exploring and explaining how Hitler had happened.

The book essentially concluded that there were certain personality characteristics that comprised authoritarian types. It further concluded that these types had long been prevalent in Germany, even in the Germany family, which had made the German people especially vulnerable to an authoritarian, even tyrannical, leader such as Hitler.

While Germany’s political culture now is of course entirely different from Germany’s political culture then, the image of the German leader or even patriarch as authoritarian has never gone fully out of fashion. Last week, however, it was dealt what finally might be a fatal blow.

The chairman of Volkswagen, Ferdinant Piech, was ousted in what amounted to a palace coup. Why? Because in spite of his impeccable lineage (he is a descendent of Ferdinand Porsche), and in spite of his earlier excellence as head of the car company, and in spite of his long history of winning power struggles, this time, at age 78, Piech was hoisted by his own petard. He was ousted by members of his board who finally were fed up – fed up with his high-handed and arrogant ways, fed up with having to put up with his aloofness and ruthlessness, and fed up with standing by and saying nothing while he did what he wanted to do how he wanted to do it. When Piech tried unilaterally to dump CEO Martin Winterkorn, the board rallied to the latter and ditched the former.

As soon as key shareholders and stakeholders confronted Piech to say that they had lost confidence in him, he, apparently as stunned as he was infuriated and humiliated, promptly resigned.  He was, of course, not literally the last authoritarian German – but among leaders he was one of the most prominent. With Piech out of the picture the species  – the German leader as authoritarian leader – is further along the way to becoming entirely extinct.

 

Leadership types look at life through the lens of the leader. It is the leader who is said to create change. It is the leader who is said to control the action. It is the leader who is said to be the agent of historical causation.

How flimsy this is as an explanation for how history happens has been evident again in Baltimore – as it was in Ferguson, the site of the first in a recent series of violent protests against the persistence of racial injustice in 21st century America.

Dissecting these outbreaks in the usual ways – by pointing to leaders – is wholly and woefully inadequate. Who has been a leader in Baltimore? The Mayor? The Police Commissioner? The State’s Attorney for Baltimore City? The various legislators who sought to intervene? Sure, they’ve been the ones in positions of authority. But have they been in any obvious way leaders? Have they been in any consistent way able to frame the situation to enlist followers? For that matter, what about the followers – those without any obvious sources of power, authority, and influence? Have they been the ones controlling the action? Has this been a case of power to the people, power to the powerless? Have usual followers morphed into unusual leaders?

In fact they have – but likely only temporarily. Those who control the streets do for a time control the action – others respond to what they do. But their moment in the sun is usually – not always, but usually – brief. More often than not when the protesters have gone home, the situation reverts back to what it was before. Baltimore in the late 1960’s was a hotbed of racial unrest. And, in response, were in fact numberless government programs and private/public partnerships intended to create positive change.

But, in time, over time, it became clear that the changes were inadequate to the task at hand. The task was so enormous because the change that was required was systemic. It was not about a single individual or a single institution. It was not about developing good leaders or about enlisting good followers. It was, it is, about coming to comprehend that broken parts comprise a broken whole – and that enduring change requires that the whole, the system, be fixed.

Loss of jobs. Abandoned homes. High rate of poverty. High rate of single parent families. High rate of high school dropouts. High rate of crime. High rate of infant mortality. Low rate of life expectancy. Predatory banks. Mass incarceration. Limited access to decent housing. All these issues and then some have a disparate and disproportionate impact on certain groups, most obviously in Baltimore African-Americans.

What’s the lesson to be learned – by the leadership industry particularly? There are two. The first is that because these broken parts are integral to the broken whole, they all need repair. It will not suffice to tackle only education, or only health, or only housing. The second is that systemic repair is not amenable to leadership as we conventionally preach and practice it.

It is not that the problems are irremediable, immune to human intervention. Rather it is that in order to fix them we need to develop in our leaders a depth of contextual intelligence and expertise that far exceeds that which we typically think of as leadership development. What we are talking about here is educating for leadership in ways that are much more extensive and demanding than those that are conventionally conceived. What we are talking about here is learning Baltimore – and learning America. This will require not only acquiring skills, but information and insight into how the system has worked, historically, and into how it works now – politically, economically, and socially.

 

Today’s the Big Day – the day that some 40,000 people who flocked to Omaha to hear the Great Man will get their great reward.  Warren Buffett along with his indispensable sidekick Charlie Munger will regale the throngs with their words of wisdom about Berkshire Hathaway – and about whatever else comes to Warren’s still fervid and fertile mind.

It’s easy enough to poke fun at this ritual – Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. The so-called “Oracle of Omaha” is sometimes now windy, and the event itself is not only jam packed, but expensive to attend and substantively mostly sparse. Some of the goings-on are, moreover, sort of dopey – like the newspaper toss context and the mini-parade led by two Texas Longhorn steers.

Still, there is this. There is Warren himself – as remarkable an individual as corporate America has ever produced. And there is the annual meeting itself: notable this year for its celebration of Buffet who has been 50 years at the helm but, more importantly, notable for decades for engaging shareholders to a degree and in a manner that is unrivaled.

One of the problems with corporate America is that those who own it – shareholders – are nearly never informed about or involved in the companies that they, we, own. Most of us sit on our stocks and hope they’ll go up. We do not take the time or the trouble to discover or uncover much of anything about that in which we’ve invested some of our presumably hard-earned money. Nor do most of those who lead and manage America’s businesses take the time or the trouble to bring us in any meaningful way into the process.

Warren Buffett though has long been different. For at least the last ten years he has made his annual event something of a cross between a seminar, a carnival, and a revival meeting. It’s intended as a learning process, and as fun, and as a way to engage and re-engage stockholders both in the company and in buffing the legend of Buffett himself. It’s been a win-win game in which everyone and everything involved – corporate leaders; corporate followers (mostly but not only Berkshire Hathaway shareholders), and the corporation itself – have come out ahead.

Buffett can get away with being an unmitigated ham because his performance has been brilliant. But his performance must be measured in ways other than the most obvious – Berkshire’s stock price. It must also be measured by Buffett’s singular ability to pull into his orbit those around him, including those legions of us who never have had, and will never will have, any association whatsoever with Berkshire Hathaway.

We know that leaders are less likely than they used to be to last long. For systemic reasons – reasons pertaining to the nature now of followers and the nature now of the contexts within which leaders and followers are located – the tenure of those at the top has been abbreviated. In 2000, for example, CEOs stayed in office an average of 10 years. By 2012 this number had shrunk to 8.1.

It’s one thing, however, for ordinary organizations to change leaders more often than they used to. It’s quite another when these organizations are precisely those that supposedly specialize in teaching leadership. Put directly, when you see an article headlined, “Short Tenure of Deans Signals a Leadership Gap,” and when you realize that the deans to whom the article refers are deans of business schools, you know something’s gone wrong.*

What an irony! Given that on the one hand teaching leadership and management is the mainstay of virtually every business school, and given that on the other hand fully one quarter of all business school deans remain in place for a measly three years or less, it’s clear there’s a disconnect. I’m the last person to argue that leaders should stay in place for too long – ten years is generally the optimum maximum. Still, to cycle in and then out of a business school deanship in five years or less is nearly never good. It’s too short a time in which to do what leaders generally are expected to do: envision change, mobilize for change, create change, and finally manage change.

There’s no shortage of explanations for why so many business school deanships amount to revolving doors – the enticements of money among them. But, before professing to teach leadership, the relevant players might want to model it by, among other things, staying in place as long as it takes to get good work done.

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*Della Bradshaw, Financial Times, April 27, 2015.

Joseph Schumpeter was an eminent Austrian-American economist best known for his work in the first half of the twentieth century. “Schumpeter” is also the name of a regular column in the British news magazine, The Economist, dedicated largely (though not exclusively) to the coverage of corporations, to big business.

This week’s column (link below) is titled “Twilight of the Guru’s.” Which gurus are being eclipsed, according to The Economist?  Management gurus, men, and the occasional woman, who years ago held such sway that they could leap across buildings and, more importantly, sell millions of copies of their books in a New York minute. What we have now, Schumpeter writes, is a “far cry from the glory years of the 1980s and 1990s, when ‘In Search of Excellence,’ by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, sold 3m copies in its first four years and ‘Re-engineering the Corporation,’ by James Champy and Michael Hammer, touched off a global re-engineering craze.”

Assuming that the claim is true – that the “guru business is reaching the end of a long cycle of creativity” – the question is why? Why is that the “thought leadership industry” has entered into what Schumpeter suggests could be a permanent drought? Is it that we’ve become stupider, that the thought leaders of a generation or so ago were simply smarter? Or, has something else changed, something that makes it harder for single individuals to be thought leaders now, at least in the same way, than it was say twenty, thirty years ago?

For my own answers to my own question, stay tuned.

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http://www.economist.com/news/business/21649478-management-pundit-industry-shadow-its-former-self-twilight-gurus

 

 

Note: As some of you will have noticed, for the last two weeks my blog was shut down. It’s now… not shut down! As of today I’m resuming posting, though the piece below was written a couple of weeks ago, before I realized I had been muzzled. Subsequent to today, all blogs will again have their previous immediacy. 

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In the just published Epilogue to her year old memoir, Hard Choices, which focused on her years as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton reinvents herself. Rather than providing a pertinent postscript to her original volume, Clinton chose this time around to speak in a different voice – an altogether feminine one.

We know why. We know that she and her advisors made a deliberate decision to soften her image, to embrace her womanly side rather than shy away from it. They presume that in order for a female to win the White House she will have to shed some of the masculine, or more typically leader-like characteristics that got Clinton to where she is in the first place, and instead don the mantle of femininity.

Like the good student she famously is, Clinton has shed her old skin nearly entirely. Her Epilogue is nothing as much as an ode not only to her role as a mother and grandmother, but also, if you can believe it, to her role as a wife.

She writes adoringly – yes, adoringly – of husband Bill, who spoke on the night of the 2012 Democratic convention. “I had to smile when I saw him take the stage in front of the enthusiastic crowd…. He still loved the excitement of a great political moment…”I was full of pride for the former president I married….”

She writes adoringly of memories of daughter Chelsea: “When Chelsea was born I was full of nerves…. I was unprepared for the sheer wonder and responsibility of parenthood. I prayed that I would be a good enough mother …. It was magical and terrifying all at the same time… When Chelsea was little, Bill and I read to her nonstop….Goodnight Moon was a particular favorite.”

But mostly, by a wide margin, Hillary Clinton writes adoringly about granddaughter Charlotte. When Charlotte was born, she and Bill sat quietly, “holding hands, trying to process the rush of emotions. I looked over and saw a tear in Bill’s eye.”

In the weeks subsequent, Bill and Hillary “spent as much time as we could visiting and helping” the new parents. She watched glowingly as Bill carried Charlotte “around our house, stopping at nearly every book on the shelf to explain the plot and how much she will enjoy reading it one day.”

Every day with Charlotte, Clinton writes, is “a miracle.” Charlotte’s every gesture “sweeps” her off her feet. Charlotte, she continues, “has already helped me see the world in new ways.” And so it goes. The topper though is the connection between Charlotte and her grandmother’s decision to run for president. It is Charlotte who has made Clinton think “deeply about the responsibility we all share as stewards of the world.” It is Charlotte who, instead of making her want to slow down, has “spurred” her instead to “speed up.”

It is no accident that while Clinton writes freely and gladly about being a wife and mother, the role she focuses on is that of grandmother. A lot of words have been spilled about why even in the second decade of the 21^st century so few American women are in positions of leadership. This applies across the board – in business and politics, in the military, even in the larger nonprofits. I have written about the virtues of androgyny – adopting an androgynous style of leadership – as a way for women who want to be leaders to get around the double bind of being perceived as either too feminine or too masculine. What Clinton clearly has concluded is that tethering herself to Charlotte is a way for her to be seen as very much a woman – but as a particular kind of woman. An old woman – or, at least, a relatively old woman. To be a grandmother is, to put it bluntly, to be generally perceived as past your feminine prime. As a woman you are no longer threatening in a way you might have been twenty years earlier.

Call it a double standard. No man running for president would dream of going on about being a grandfather as fulsomely as has Hillary Clinton about being a grandmother. But, if it helps get her to the White House, who cares? Certainly not Hillary, or Bill, or Chelsea, or, presumably, Charlotte.

 

Barbara Kellerman teaches Women and Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Her most recent books is, Hard Times: Leadership in America.

 

One of the defects of the Leadership Industry is that it is isolated from the arts. Notwithstanding some exceptions, it is separate and distinct both from the fine arts and the liberal arts.

This apartheid was brought to mind by a recent article on Bob Dylan. The author, Richard Woodward, emphasized Dylan as a musical trailblazer, as a leader of other musicians who followed him in droves. Woodward writes, “Bob Dylan’s ‘Bringing It All Back Home,’ 50 years old on Sunday [March 22^nd], has as strong a claim as any album of its day to be called the spark that ignited the music of the 1960s…. Lyrics with jagged edges, enigmatic visions of America adrift accompanied by dark, cynical laughter, were not common until Mr. Dylan’s surrealist poetry entered the mainstream of popular song.”*

But Dylan’s leadership was not limited. He led not only other musicians, but large swaths of the American people. Dylan played Pied Piper to a whole generation of mostly (though by no means wholly) young Americans thrilled to have found a troubadour they thought their own. Here is where came into play not so much Dylan’s music as his lyrics – that peculiar, particular, protest poetry that people have found perpetually powerful and persuasive.

“Blowin’ in the Wind,” arguably the most iconic of his tunes, has spoken as eloquently to those involved in civil rights movements – “Yes, ‘n’ how many years can some people exist, before they’re allowed to be free?” – as to those involved in antiwar movements.

“Yes, ‘n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly

Before they’re forever banned? …

Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows

That too many people have died?”

Is this man, then, Bob Dylan, not a leader? A leader of his own kind, other musicians? And a leader in addition of countless numbers the world over who yearn to be emboldened by his art, so that they too can find their voice and speak truth to power?

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“Dylan’s Double Personality,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2015.

 

Mostly the incumbent president is loath to get his hands dirty. Mostly he seems to believe that a good idea, a good policy, should sell itself, Mostly he has avoided the wheeling and dealing, the personal politicking, that is necessary to get things done in Washington.  To this general rule there has been one exception – the Affordable Care Act – but only one or, at least, only one that stands out.

Now it appears that there is a second exception. It appears that President Obama intends to go all out during the next three months to try to sell to the American people, and to the American Congress, and to the world at large the virtues of moving from a draft nuclear deal with Iran to a permanent one.

The most striking indicator so far of Obama’s investment in this arrangement is his extended one on one interview with New York Times foreign affairs columnist, Tom Friedman. The interview, conducted in the Oval Office on Saturday afternoon, was wide-ranging and far-reaching, and clearly targeted at a large audience not only at home, but abroad. The full text was promptly posted on line, as was a video. Moreover Friedman was quick himself to write an extended piece about the substance of what the president said – which Friedman framed as the “Obama Doctrine.” What is the Obama Doctrine? It is Obama’s conviction that “engagement,” in combination with meeting America’s strategic needs, better serves the national interest than the endless sanctions against three countries that have long been isolated from the international community: Burma, Cuba, and Iran.

My point though is not about what precisely the president will be saying. It is about how precisely he will be saying it. How will Obama try to sell the agreement with Iran in a context that is so inhospitable?  In a context in which so many of his political opponents – and even some of his political allies – are questioning not only the substance of the deal but the legality of trying to secure it without Congressional approval?

I will say that the president seems to get it. That the president seems to get that he has no choice on this one but to pitch his wares as persistently and persuasively as he knows how. Even if it means getting his hands soiled in ways that he typically finds personally and politically distasteful.