Leadership from Bad to Worse

By Barbara
Posted on Updated on
2 Comments

Leadership from Bad to Worse is the title of my forthcoming book. The subtitle is, What Happens When Bad Festers. *

As it pertains then to the crisis in the Middle East, I quote from David Grossman’s recent piece in the Financial Times, “Israel Is in a Nightmare.”

“What’s happening now is the concrete price Israel is paying for having been seduced for years by a corrupt leadership which drove it downhill from bad to worse; which eroded its institutions of law and justice, its military, its education system; which was willing to place it in existential danger in order to keep its prime minister out of prison.“

Grossman, one of Israel’s most distinguished men of letters, does not let Hamas off the hook. He writes plainly that the “horror” was “effected by Hamas.” But in this piece his rage, and his grief, are directly primarily at his own people who allowed the slide, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “corrupt leadership,” to continue unimpeded and interrupted. Catastrophe, tragedy, were the inevitable result.

It’s what happens: When leadership and followership are bad, unless they are stopped they get worse.

———————————————————–

*The book will be published by Oxford University Press on March 1, 2024. Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers can be preordered now on Amazon and other outlets.

Posted in: Digital Article

Published by Barbara

Barbara Kellerman was Founding Executive Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a member of the Harvard faculty for over twenty years, and a Fellow at the Center for five years. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, Uppsala, and Christopher Newport Universities, as well as at Dartmouth, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also served as Director of Graduate Studies at Fairleigh Dickinson, and as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland. Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. At Uppsala University she held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books including Bad Leadership; Followership; The End of Leadership; Professionalizing Leadership, and Leadership from Bad to Worse. Kellerman has appeared on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters, and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Harvard Business Review. She has spoken to audiences all over the world including Berlin, London, Moscow, Melbourne, Sao Paolo, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Toronto, Kyoto, Beijing, Buenos Aires, Sydney, and Seoul. The title of her next book is Why We Follow Leaders – and Why We Don’t. It will be published in September 2026 by the University of Toronto Press. Kellerman regularly posts at https://barbarakellerman.com/articles/

2 comments

  2. I love your declaration that “It’s what happens: When leadership and followership are bad unless they are stopped they get worse”. Corrupt leadership corrupts the follower’s ability to become good stewards over their followership. The creation of such corruption has changed the world of followership behavior and perception from Baby Boomers to Gen Z’s. The crisis in the Middle East is a result of systematic failures within workplace environments that connect leaders and followers at the top and bottom of the organization. Furthermore, cultures have placed emphasis on position and power rather than morality and ethics while using such elite status to channel corrupt followership through high pay, bonuses, pay increases, benefits, and lavish lifestyles. Effective leadership and followership roles are in crisis, and if there is no groundwork on changing the mantra of leadership so that positive followership is transcended within the organization, leadership roles will continue to hold power but possess no change within the world.

Comments are closed.