THE MYTH OF LEADERSHIP: WHY LEADERS DON'T LEAD, FOLLOWERS WON'T FOLLOW, AND EVERYTHING FALLS APART IN THE END!

THE MYTH OF LEADERSHIP: WHY LEADERS DON’T LEAD, FOLLOWERS WON’T FOLLOW, AND EVERYTHING FALLS APART IN THE END!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 18, 2010

* * *

“I can’t answer that question. I can’t recall. That’s a decision I was not party to. I don’t know. I’m not stonewalling.”

Answers given by BP CEO Tony Hayward on Capitol Hill on June 16, 2010, after 57 days of oil spurting into the Gulf of Mexico.

* * *

MANAGING AND LEADING

The day before President Barak Obama gave his first speech to the nation from the Oval Office. It was meant to be tough on BP and to placate the nation, especially people of the Gulf region, but reminded me how ineffective symbolic leadership can be.

We have a president-in-training more comfortable in the intimate confines of adulating students in an academic forum than from what Marshall McLuhan called “the cold medium of television” where the audience has to supply the warmth.

A chief executive officer is mainly a symbolic role.

Obama demonstrated finesse in running a campaign for election, which is logistical and tactical, whereas a CEO’s role is theatrical and strategic. As we have seen, Obama has failed on both counts as a CEO.

Put another way, Obama managed his campaign, but management is not leadership. Institutional America has long confused the two. Former ITT CEO, Harold Geneen, a quintessential manager, declares in “Managing” (1984), “a good manager can manage anything.”

We have had countless examples of this wrong-headed assertion. Geneen saw managing of things (e.g., Obama’s Internet campaign contribution drive) and leading people as interchangeable. They are not.

Management won WWII, not leadership, and management, not leadership, won the Cold War, as many historians continue to point out. Yet, management and leadership have been treated as synonyms ever since 1945.

Apple, Inc. nearly went under when Steven Jobs stepped down from Apple Computer, and installed John Sculley of Pepsi fame to take over. Different industries different cultures different histories and different people proved too monumental and almost ended in disaster for the company. Jobs came back and the company has been soaring ever since.

The culture, climate, politics and the idiosyncrasies of personnel are as indigenous to a company as DNA differs from individual to individual.

THIS THING ABOUT EMPATHY

CEOs are performers, actors on a stage. They are not doers. They are not even thinkers. They are an exaggerated presence not unlike the monarchs a thousand years ago. The “Divine Right of Kings” was no more a ploy than the infallibility of corpocracy in the modern era. It was the clergy and then the scribes who could write and think, and therefore manipulate illiterate monarchs, as techies are doing CEOs today.

As bloodlines ruled succession in monarchies, succession in corpocracy today is that of like-minded pyramid climbers. Power promotes what pleases power, which is another way of saying gross weaknesses in power are likely to promote entropy and therefore quicken organizational demise.

Empathy, then as now, is the mass hysteria of true believers. It was the leadership of monarchs in the feudal system. It is the leadership of CEOs in the capitalistic system.

Empathy on the campaign trail is orchestrated and thematically controlled like a well arranged television production by qualified hands behind the scenes while the campaigner acts as speaker-as-leader. Rhetoric is not leadership.

Empathy changes to a more demanding form once the CEO is in office. Behavior in crisis becomes dramaturgic.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin claims President Obama is quite empathetic at a personal level, but finds it difficult to project to a wide audience in the cold medium of television. She goes on to say, the role of “making empathetic” is largely that of an actor. She points out that Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could wax empathetic on cue while hardly feeling so. They understood the role and limitations of symbolic leadership.

On the other hand, President George W. Bush found it impossible to be empathetic and dropped the ball symbolically when he procrastinated with Hurricane Katrina. No one expected President Barak Obama to repeat his error with the BP Oilrig Disaster, but he did.

Goodwin says that when the oilrig exploded Bill Clinton would be down there in a rubber suit within hours, not days or weeks after the disaster. Jeb Bush, brother of President Bush, then Governor of Florida was at the Command Center before hurricanes landed with a full arsenal of methods, manpower and materials to meet anticipated needs. He was helpless to do much more than lead symbolically. Being there, on the spot, he rallied true believers in our mass marketing culture that respond so well to such leadership.

Empathetic leaders know there is little measurable influence with “I feel your pain,” but tremendous clout being found in the trenches when disaster hits. President Bush learned that lesson flying safely above the carnage of Hurricane Katrina, clearly distancing him from tens of thousands traumatized below. His administration never recovered.

THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR

This is the title of a new book by Andrew Keen. He disparages the rise of the amateur who has failed to appreciate his place in the scheme of things. Keen is the current darling of the media and has no trouble confessing his belief in elitism. I suspect there will be a spate of books on the same theme, given literally millions are now self-publishing books on demand (POD), creating blogs, and websites, and, yes, failing to know their place.

We are seeing the approaching demise of such elitism as the journalistic press in The New York Times and Washington Post. We are seeing our elite university system crumbling in its walls as on-line universities are taking students and capital from its coffers. We are witnessing the disintegration of major corporations such as General Motors and now once invincible Toyota

* * *.

No doubt the amateur is on the rise. Why not? More than a millennium ago he first gave us our science, history, literature, geography, geology, astronomy and philosophy. We have lost our moral compass and our way, while still attempting to solve our problems with the thinking that caused them. The amateur without credentials steps into the void.


* * *

The people of the Gulf and nation will survive British Petroleum and Tony Hayward. The Gulf of Mexico will regain its estuary health and the good people of the region will restore their culture and jobs.

We have had the best minds in America, indeed, in the Western world working the problem of the Gulf, showing just how far you can go with experts, which usually is backwards.

Experts are hindsight thinkers, finding safety in the infallibility of their disciplines and programming, and it has failed them. Despite their reminding us how smart they are it has been business as usual for them as well as BP. Indeed, Tony Hayward profiles the limits of CEOs as he has been returned to Great Britain where he perfects his corporate vision by immediately attending a sailing regatta.

* * *

Often I have found the columns of David Brooks informative and perceptive, but not his Sunday column (June 20, 2010) in the St. Petersburg Times. His column headline is, “Trim the ‘experts,’ trust the locals,” which doesn’t match the message. He calls attention to several “leaders” and “experts” in the column, and then offers this hiccup:

“We have vested too much authority in national officials who are really smart. We should be leaving more power with local officials, who may not be as expert, but who have the advantage of being there on the ground.”

Brooks claim of “really smart” national officials rings false with me, as I would like to have him define “smart.”

I would define it as what smart does, not what smart is. I also take offense to his patronizing and condescending claim that the fisherman, restaurateurs, citizens, workers “are not as expert, but have the advantage of being there on the ground.” Please!

* * *