RUNNING ALONE, A NEW BOOK ON LEADERSHIP
BY
GEORGE MacGREGOR BURNS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 2006
There is a certain frustration when you, as a writer, perceive a situation, are lucky to be published widely, and yet sense your ideas have died on the vine.
For more than a decade, I have been writing about leaderless leadership. It is a central theme in Work Without Managers (1990), The Worker, Alone! (1995), Six Silent Killers (1998) and Corporate Sin (2000).
Additionally, Leadership Excellence, The AQP Journal, National Productivity Review, The Journal of Organizational Excellence, The Wall Street Journal, and Industry Week, to name a few, have published my ideas on "leaderless leadership." Clearly, the boldest of these publishers has been Leadership Excellence, which, over the years, has published scores of my articles on this and related subjects.
I mention this because I have had the temerity to publish, only to feel like a single tree falling in the forest, which nobody hears.
This is not the case with James MacGregor Burns. He has made leadership his professional turf, writing about historical figures, and publishing many books on the subject, among them, Leadership (1982), which I found inspiring.
Now, he has published a new book on the decline of presidential leadership. He exposes the pusillanimity of leadership at the highest levels. My take on this pusillanimity has been from the perspective of the ordinary Joe, looking up.
I claim in Work Without Managers, for example, that the source of the problem occurred immediately after W.W.II. In fact, my subtitle is: A View from the Trenches. Boxed on the front cover of the book is this statement:
A shocking look at American Business; why it operates in ‘1945’ nostalgia,’ as six silent killers threaten to destroy it; and how only American Leadership can still save the day!
Burns concurs.
In his new book, RUNNING ALONE: PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP JFK TO BUSH II: Why It Has Failed and How We Can Fix It (2006), he asserts that the imperial presidency of George W. Bush is the culmination of a half-century of crisis management in American democracy. Kennedy doesn't fair any better.
Beginning with Kennedy's decision to turn his back on the Democratic Party and rely instead on charisma and wealth to win office, Burns charts the decline of genuine leadership across the board in American society, but especially in the Oval Office. He then offers a stirring vision of what the presidency can and should be.
The problem with his analysis is that its focus is on the president and people within the Beltway of Washington, DC. Leadership is never only about leaders.
I have written critically of the Camelot presidency of JFK. finding charisma no index to leadership, but only the pretence of it. Burns is equally critical of the present White House for its imperial nature and disconnect with reality. We only have one president and a weak or misguided president, whatever our politics, does not serve the nation. My problem has been with the lack of moral clarity. Moral authority without moral clarity equals amorality, which I feel is rampant. It is apparent when the separation of church and state becomes cloudy.
I agree with Burns that the two major parties have lost their way, but this is not new to anyone anywhere in this great country. Only the zealots are sure but they represent the extreme and only a sliver of the general population. Ask the pollsters.
When moral authority lacks moral clarity we have the scandalous headlines, which personify leaders in moral chaos in government, education, commerce, industry, the military, and the community. What is sad, when the leadership is corrupt, is that good, honest and hard working people in these institutions are likely to say or do nothing because they see themselves as followers, not leaders.
I speak as someone who has the time to observe and write down what he sees. Not everyone has that luxury as they have been programmed to have their foot to the floor on the accelerator and brake at once burning up rubber and going nowhere. Why? Because we are a society always on the move, afraid to slow down, or stop, for fear of what we might discover.
George MacGregor Burns in an earlier iteration attempted to penetrate this.
During the Jimmie Carter presidency, Burns was an advisor to the president. He was responsible for president Carter’s disastrous “crisis in confidence” speech to the nation. To make matters worse, he chose to speak from the Oval Office in an open collar shirt and cardigan sweater while suggesting there was a national crisis in confidence.
Some of you may recall that speech.
At the time, we had double-digit inflation and double digit unemployment, and the president was implying, on the advice of Burns, that we, as a nation, had lost our optimism and identity, and had retreated into fear.
Well, you don't tell citizens of the United States of America that they don't have their shit together; you don't level with them about how things really are or why; you don't address the nation as "one of us," because we don't want our president to be too much like us, or too much different from what we are. We want our president to stand tall, but not too tall.
We loved the fairy tale presidency of JFK because we had, for a period, our own royalty, our own Camelot. But we also had to endure his little clique, the Harvard, Yale, Princeton Elite (what I call HYPE), driving us further into NOWHERE LAND and making us more like members of NOWHERE MAN.
NOWHERE LAND, incidentally, is another name for utopia, a place that doesn’t exist, an idyllic state Burns was trying (in the “crisis in confidence” speech) to break a national trance and usher us all back into reality. The backlash proved the nation was not ready.
My only problem with his quest is its limited perspective. I feel if everyone isn't a leader, then no one is. It isn't the president or the Congress or the CEO or the pope or the governor, or whoever the authority figures happen to be that determines the future. We do.
Rome fell apart in the fifth century AD when the political, ethical and moral foundation of society collapsed, and the barbarians from the North, the Visigoths and the Germanic tribes took over. The Dark Ages followed.
That is not to suggest that we are approaching our own “dark age.” On the contrary, I see promise in looking to our past. Leadership Excellence (September 2006) carries my article, "Leadership Matters." In the article, I profile president Andrew Jackson, who was not about pomp and circumstance, nor about impressing this or that interest group.
Jackson took on the Eastern Establishment and the banks, which, at the time, was thought impossible. Imagine this country bumpkin with little education, but with the spirit of the frontier nation behind him, being so effective that this period is now known, as “The Age of Jackson.”
Jackson was not pretty, not articulate, indeed, he was quite flawed. He could hardly write a grammatical sentence, but he was real, and the people he led were real, and the nation was real, and the nation and the people faced real problems, and didn't wait for them to bite them in the ass before being addressed.
So, my hope is that the new book by Burns gets read widely and encompasses more than simply concern for the presidency and his sphere of influence; and that we become more cognizant of ourselves as leaders.
It is no accident that we are adrift. It is not because we are not all in the same boat. It is because few of us have our own oars in the water to pull our weight.
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