INVEIGHING AS I GO -- NUMBER FOUR -- THE FRAILTY OF LEADERSHIP!

 INVEIGHING AS I GO  -- NUMBER FOUR -- THE FAILTY OF LEADERSHIP!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 16, 2011

Twenty years ago in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1991), I wrote that leadership requires the capacity to see (vision) and the ability to serve.  I added that service is either self-aggrandizing or beholden to the traditional power structure.  I did not envision the power of megalomania on leadership although I experienced it quite directly in my work.

This power is brought home in THE STORM OF WAR: A NEW HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR (2011) by English historian Andrew Roberts.  What I did indicate in WORK was the frailty of organizational resistance or challenge to that leadership because of the dominant personality of the leader. 

My first taste of the power of leadership was when I was a white hat sailor (enlisted man) in the United States Navy on the flagship of the Six Fleet operating in the Mediterranean.  Admiral “Cat” Brown was like God to us, and whatever he ordained we followed to the nth degree.  I saw that repeated when I was with Nalco Chemical Company, and again with Honeywell, Inc. and Honeywell Europe Ltd. 

Leadership, in my experience, creates little Turks, and everyone follows their “leadership” no matter how asinine it is, and with nary a protest, that is, with the exception of a few.  

Roberts has a wider perspective than mine on leadership in his new book, but he implicitly and explicitly develops a case for why the West won the war and Germany lost.

The essence of his case is the maniacal hatred of Adolph Hitler of the Jews.  Roberts argues the war ended very largely because of the Jewish scientists that created the atomic bomb.  The under secretary of Winston Churchill once said, “We won the war because our German scientists were better than Germany’s scientists.”

The great brain drain of Germany was largely because of Hitler’s insane desire to exterminate the Jews.  He invaded Russia failing to learn from Napoleon’s Great Russian defeat because half the European Jewish population existed in Russia, and he was bent on destroying that population.

To give you a sense of this from a scientific point of view, between 1921 and 1932, the year before Hitler came to power in Germany, Germany won 25 Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry and the United States won five.  From 1950 to 2000, or after WWII, and the reign of Hitler, which ended in 1945, the United States won 67 Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, many of Jewish ancestry, while Germany won only 16.  This indicates the size of the brain drain caused by Hitler’s obsession with the Jewish Question.

Moreover in 1936 Germany had 39 million workers in war production and only 29 million by the end of the war.  At the same time, Hitler was eliminating six million Jews, known to be the hardest working, intelligent and best-educated segment of the German population.  Adding irony to this, the German officer who awarded Hitler the German Cross in WWI was a Jew.

Nearly seventy years later, when books such as this come out, we say, “How could this happen?  How could such an insane megalomaniac come to power, and reduce a great people to his will?”

If your answer is, “It could never happen here?” I suggest you read Sinclair Lewis’s book IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE (1935), which was written before the Second World War. 

I read the book as a boy after the war, and it sent shudders through me, so much so that I’ve never forgotten the book or its impact on me.  Perhaps that is why I have been suspect of rhetorical leadership from a personal, professional or citizen perspective. 

Germany needed a scapegoat to explain why it had lost the First World War, and Hitler gave them the Jews. 

Look at us today.  We have a plethora of scapegoats created by media, distancing us from the reality of our own experience, and the frailty of our resolve. 

The last person we want to blame for our predicament is our individual self. We prefer to blame the banks, Wall Street, Washington, the President, Congress, industry, the church, failing to realize we are implicitly or explicitly responsible by the choices we make.  We create our leaders.  They do not create us.

Politicians get elected by appealing to our frailty, not our strengths, to what we can get, not what we might need to give up.  They know how to manufacture and exploit our fear and ignorance of minorities.  They drift from our concrete world of experience into the abstract world that they see threatening us.  For the second half of the twentieth century it was the Soviet Union, now it is China and India or even possibly Brazil.  It is always something lying in the shadow of our mind.    

Fear is the operational word when leadership approaches the abyss.  I’ve read many books on how the Roman Catholic Church and the German people were implicitly or explicitly involved in allowing the Jews to be exterminated.  I’ve read only one book that puts President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in that mix.  Yet, logic tells me that rational arguments took precedence in the United States as well as in Rome and Germany over morality during that terrible time. 

The subtitle to the Lewis book is, “What will happen when America has a dictator?” 

That is always a danger in leadership.  It is so simple to have a philosopher king, as Plato suggested, making all our decisions so that we never have to blame ourselves for our failed lives. 

New York Times columnist, David Brooks, a man I often agree with, wrote a recent column protesting that he had to spend the next sixteen months following and writing about the presidential campaign for 2012. 

Brooks pointed out how pathetic the participants, how pusillanimous the issues, and how boring the expected discourse. 

Well, Mr. Brooks, given the alternative, I thank God that men and women in America still have the courage to suffer the abuse of pundits, the catcalls from audiences across the nation, and still have the courage and energy to put their hats in the ring, and attempt to run our republic as best they can. 

Leadership that takes hold is leadership that the majority subscribes to implicitly or explicitly because everyone is a leader or no one is.

*     *     *