In September the University of Toronto Press will publish my next book. It’s titled Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. These are the four questions to which the book provides answers. First, what are our rewards for following? Second, what are our punishments for not following? Third, what are our rewards for not following? Fourth, what are our punishments for following?
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This post is to the point. Here are four books – all published in the last few months – that are all about followers, not leaders.
*The first is about resistance – about how followers who refuse to do what they are ordered to do and, or supposed to do and, or expected to do, can defy both the system and those who are leading it. The book is by Gal Beckerman and is titled How to Be a Dissident.
*The second is about the absence thereof – the absence of resistance. It’s about how (most) Germans who lived in Berlin from the beginning of World War II to the end followed. They conformed to and accommodated the Nazi regime. The book is by Ian Buruma and is titled, Stay Alive: Berlin 1939-1945.
*The third is a memoir by one of those rare birds who defied or tried to the second administration of Donald Trump – specifically, the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development. The book is by Nicholas Enrich and is titled, Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.
*The fourth is about how corporate scandals can end in backlash. About how when wrongdoing is uncovered – specifically about companies that are behemoths – they can and sometimes do provoke people to protest. The book is by Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee and is titled, Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy.
I lament that for every billion books about leadership there’s just one about followership. Books about followers though abound. We just need to look in the right places!