FIFA’s President: Bad Judgment under the Subterfuge of Miscommunication

In the 1990s, I asked the CEO of ATT whether there is not a conflict of interest in him being chairman of the board tasked with holding the corporation’s management accountable. “The buck stops here,” Armstrong replied as the dean of Yale’s business school looked on, uncomfortably. Fortunately, I was a student in another school at Yale at the time. Fast forward to 2026. The board of FIFA backed up its president, Gianni Infantino in spite of the fact that he had overruled a red-card to favor the U.S. team in that year’s World Cup and then he proposed selling a minority share of FIFA to private investors—a plan that was almost universally viewed by the regional football (soccer) associations as selling out the world’s game to private financial interests so they might profit from the non-profit international organization. FIFA had Infantino’s back, which prompted regional associations, namely UEFA, CONCACAF, and AFC to publicly raise a red flag concerning the very credibility of Infantino for having tried to sell out a minority financial interest in FIFA. Albeit sheer speculation, given U.S. President Trump’s interest in financial transactions in relation to his political office, and Infantino’s having acquiesced to Trump’s request that the one-game suspension from a red card against a player on the U.S. team be revoked, I wonder whether the two men hatched the idea of selling off a minority stake in FIFA to private investors, which might have included Trump himself, his family members, and even the Trump Organization. Such is the nature of collusion in what James Burns refers to in his text, Leadership, as transactional, as distinct from transformational, leadership.

Evincing ethical leadership, UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, AFC president Salman Al-Khalifa, and CONCAFAF president, along with three general secretaries signed an open letter critical of FIFA as well as its president. In the letter, the regional presidents assert that Infantino’s proposal to sell a minority financial interest in FIFA instantiated a “fundamental breach of trust” with the three regional, constituent organizations whose president had signed the letter.[1] Rather than targeting the plan itself, the letter goes after the character of FIFA’s president, and thus indirectly the ethos of FIFA’s governing board in supporting its president in spite of the “red-flag” fiasco and the private-equity plan. Infantino’s judgment is also in the letter’s cross-hairs, for in addition to overruling the automatic one-game suspension for a red card and attempting to profit private equity investors, the man’s “apology” itself was rather pathetic. “The letter . . . slams his so-called apology, which failed to acknowledge that the idea to sell of the World Cup is innately wrong, but instead attributes the mistakes to miscommunication. . . . [The letter] treats this as a failure of communication, when what football witnessed was a failure of judgment.”[2] In the letter, the three regional presidents are claiming that the apology’s claim of miscommunication is actually a lie, and this renders the apology as a subterfuge rather than as a valid apology. Lying in apologizing is not only bad judgment, but unethical as well. So too, overruling FIFA’s own rule regarding the automatic red-card penalty at the behest of a political official with a vested interest in the matter can be regarded as a case of bad judgment and unethical decision-making.

In short, whereas the letter could have been written to castigate the private-equity proposal itself, and even to add in a critique of the authority of FIFA’s president to overrule a referee and FIFA’s own rule on red-card penalties, the focus is instead on Infantino’s leadership, and in particular his judgment and ethics. That FIFA’s board had given its president a full vote of confidence in spite of his lapses likely prompted the regional organizations to step up to the plate with their own letter firmly directed to Infantino’s character, and, by implication, those of the members of FIFA’s governing board. Looking at Infantino’s financial proposal, the three regional organizations, representing their respective members, wrote, “we speak collectively today” to point out regarding Infantino’s behavior, “It is not the conduct of a custodian of the game, but of one who believes the game is answerable to him.”[3] This damning accusation stands in juxtaposition to a photo of Infantino standing in front of a Roman Catholic bishop at the swearing in of Columbia’s new president at the time of the letter’s release. The Christian message of humility, manifested in leaders by serving, is antipodal to the sheer hubris of using an “apology” as a subterfuge by which to side-step rather than acknowledge responsibility for one’s judgment and unethical conduct.

Worldly corruption seeking the spotlight in front of a Christian cleric (source: AP)

In 2025, I spoke with a former deputy Secretary of the UN at Harvard. I asked her if the UN’s political and enforcement impotence in the face of Russian and Israeli military aggression could be reformed from within. Could the UN reform itself? The answer I received stunned me. “The UN cannot be reformed from within because of the five veto-holding powers in the Security Council,” the former UN official said. Something similar could perhaps be said of FIFA in 2026 in that the abject failure of its board to hold its president accountable rendered the organization itself beyond reform from within. Accordingly, perhaps the three regional organizations could have taken the decision to form a new supra-organization and thus sidestep FIFA for the next World Cup.

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1. Associated Press, “UEFA, CONCACAF and AFC accuse FIFA of ‘Deception’ and ‘Breach of Trust’ over World Cup Plans,” APnews.com, August 10, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

Leadership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

The Quorum is a high-level governing body in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Quorum “helps set church policy while overseeing the many business interests of what is known widely as the Mormon Church.”[1] On December 27, 2025, Jeffrey R. Holland, “a high-ranking official . . . who was next in line to become the faith’s president,” died.[2] He was 85. To be at that age and yet next in line to lead a major Christian denomination is a sign of just how tilted toward the elderly the leadership of that Church was at the time. Almost exactly three months earlier, Russell M. Nelson, the then-sitting president of the denomination, died at the age of 101. Dallin H. Oaks, at the age of 93, became the next president. These ages make 75, the mandatory retirement age for Roman Catholic bishops, look young, though Pope John Paul II died at 84 and Pope Francis died at 88—both men while in office. Especially in Christianity, whose Gospels depict Jesus and his disciples as much younger men, the question of whether an aged leadership unduly foists conservatism on what in the Gospels is characterized as a radical religious movement.

The full essay is at "Conservatism in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles."

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1. CBS News, “Jeffrey R. Holland, Next in Line to Lead Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Dies at 85,” CBSnews.com, December 27, 2025.
2. Ibid.

The Master: Charismatic Leadership

In The Master (2012), Lancaster Dodd tells Freddie Quell, the man whom Lancaster wants to cure of alcoholism and mental illness, “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all I am a man.” Given Lancaster’s presumption of infallibility concerning knowing that every human soul has been reincarnated even for trillions of years, the end of the line would more fittingly be, “I am a man above all (others).” With regard to being a physician, Lancaster comes up short because he underestimates the medical severity of Freddie’s alcoholism and his likely psychotic mental illness. Upon being released from jail, Lancaster should realize that Freddie’s rage and temper-tantrum in his jail cell evince mental illness of such severity that it is lunacy to suppose that the patient can be cured by walking back and forth in a room between a wall and a window and being sure to touch both, and by saying “Doris” over and over again in a dyad with Lancaster’s new son-in-law. In fact, Lancaster actually encourages Freddie’s alcoholism by asking that Freddie continue to make his “potion,” which contains paint-thinner filtered through bread. It is not Lancaster, but his wife, Peggy, who puts a stop to the “booze.” From her sanity, both that of Freddie and Lancaster can be questioned. That Lancaster is the Master of a religious cult, or “movement,” renders his mental state particularly problematic.

The full essay is at "The Master."

Hindu Dharmic Leadership

At Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025, Ed Anobah spoke on dharma (right-acting) leadership as a means of making progress in solving societal problems using Hinduism’s spiritual tradition of bhukti (devotionalism).  Anobah based his talk on the book, Leadership for an Age of Higher Consciousness by D. T. Swami. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna says that what great people do, other people follow. What constitutes healthy, impactful leadership? The ideal leader in Hinduism is also a great sage, like Plato’s notion of a philosopher king. Leadership that deals wholistically with the human condition by exemplifies the character of a leader, which does not mean that only highly educated persons can or should be leaders. Rather, “everyone is a leader,” potentially, and “we are all leading our own life.” Each of us is a leader potentially for other people on the interpersonal level. Each of us can inspire other people. Anobah claimed that certain universal principles of leadership can apply across the board. I submit that this view is vulnerable to being too utopian when it is applied in the business world. Being realistic as to possible practical difficulties and even limitations in applying dharmic leadership in business (and government) is advisable. Even there being different metaphysical assumptions can get in the way, practically speaking, as compassionate leadership runs up against the profit-motive in business.   

Dharmic leadership begins from the inside out: leading oneself by “working on oneself.” This can result in “random acts of kindness.” A leader is someone who understands that real leadership is by being lived, hence by example. People see the effects of the example of a leader. Bhukti yoga, whether meditation on Krishna or other ways of devotion to the deity, is a practice of inner-discipline that can bring out a person’s better nature, by which a person can lead by example in random acts of kindness. Our better nature is not desire, and thus not greed: the desire for more. Practice of inner-discipline, as for example by chanting the many names of a deity, can not only bracket or strengthen mental control of desires, but also give a person a clearer “lens of reality.” Perception with clarity (and compassion) is an asset in terms of inner-led leadership. Therefore, finding some way to nourish the best within us is vital to being able to exemplify compassion, as per that of Krishna and the devotee thereof. That is, by loving devotion to a deity, especially if compassion is in its nature, a person is better able to instantiate dharmic (right-acting) leadership.

As per Krishna’s teachings to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita, a leader is a person of action, but without worrying about whether one’s leadership is successful or not. Even encountering detractors can be useful in strengthening a leader’s self-discipline, similar to a butterfly’s struggle to get out of its cocoon strengthens the wing muscles. In Christian terms, encountering hateful people can be an important means of exercising selfless benevolence, which Samuel Hopkins argued is the essence of the kingdom of God.[1] The metaphysical basis of such compassion is agape, which is divine love as self-emptying (in God being incarnate in the world in Jesus Christ). In Advaita Vedanta, by contrast, the metaphysical basis of compassion is that each person’s realization that each person’s true or underlying self is identical with brahman, which is infinite being. In the Bhukti Yoga tradition, the metaphysical basis is reality being ultimately in the form of a Supreme Person, which is Krishna in the Gita.

I submit that being aware of whatever metaphysical basis supports even very practical exercises of leadership not only in religion, but also in the worlds of business and government, and grounds a person’s notion of leadership. Even in exercising fiduciary duty to stockholders as an example for managers within a corporation, a CEO’s underlying metaphysical assumption is that of materialism. Profit-seeking as an end in itself presupposes a reality of materialism, which can be contrasted with a reality that is deity that is known as the Supreme Person, whether that be Jesus or Krishna. Such different metaphysics can account for why the sort of leadership that is oriented to profit-seeking does not exemplify compassion as an end in itself, whereas dharmic leadership does. To superimpose the latter sort of leadership on the metaphysic of materialism is like throwing seeds on rock rather than soil. Put in practical terms, a CEO, such as that of Ben & Jerry’s in 2025, could legitimately be fired for putting the stockholders’ wealth in the company to use in the company promoting certain political activist stances that do not directly contribute to profit. The same can be said of programs of corporate “social responsibility,” which do not generate profit and thus dividends in the short- or medium-term. Therefore if “consciousness-raising” leadership based on dharma is to be applied in the business world, limitations should be acknowledged because that world is founded on a very different metaphysic. “Keep your feet on the ground and reach for the stars” is preferrable to drifting off into a utopia that really only exists in the mind’s eye.

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1. Samuel Hopkins, An Enquiry into the Nature of Holiness (New York: William Durell, 1710).

 

Jimmy Carter: Non-Positional Symbolic Leadership

The linking of leadership with a position, whether atop a government or a corporation, is so well established that it is easy for us to overlook U.S. President Carter as a leader because he was such a micromanager while in office. Carter’s steady leadership by example, and thus by acting as a symbol, began after he had lost re-election. Nelson Mandela of South Africa had led as a symbol in civil rights before he was elected president, and Gandhi effectively exercised ethical political, moral and religious leadership without holding any office. The reductionism or, at the very least, the mere association of leadership with holding an office biases how we evaluate leaders, as distinct from governors.  

During his presidency, Carter was recurrently labeled as a technocratic micromanager. This proclivity was no doubt formed from his vocational background as a nuclear engineer in the navy. A perspective does not get more micro than that. Such a perspective is at odds with being atop of a large organization, not to mention the U.S. Government in occupying its presiding office. Whereas President Reagan could be criticized for too much of the “the vision thing” at the expense of being the chief executive of federal agencies, at least visionary leadership fits very well with the office, whereas a technocratic orientation does not.

To be sure, Carter was hardly a failure in office, despite the general sense of the country during his last year in office as Reagan was campaigning in part on government being part of the problem. Even though Reagan strongly backed Paul Volker’s strong anti-inflation “medicine” at the Federal Reserve Bank even as its high discount rate exacerbated the unemployment part of “stagflation,” which had pummeled Carter’s popularity during his years in office, Carter had achievements that lasted well past his presidency.

As per one journalist’s analysis at the end of 2024, Carter’s “administration pursued the antitrust case vs AT&T which led to its break-up early in [the Reagan] administration. That, and the deregulation of telecommunications that followed in the 1990s, helped to lead to technological advances for the US economy, including personal computers and the internet. And he passed and signed bills to deregulate both the US airline and trucking industries, which significantly lowered the cost of moving both people and goods, also making the US economy more competitive. But most of the effectives of those policies weren’t felt during his one term in office, and thus, most people don’t associate them with Carter.”[1] He also deregulated the energy sector, which opened up market-incentives for exploration which would make the U.S. energy-sufficient. This is no small feat, considering the leverage the oil-producing states (OPEC) had over the U.S. in 1974 and 1979 as reduced gasoline supplies resulted in long lines at gas stations and thus frustrated voters.

In foreign policy, Carter anticipated his work at the Carter Center by successfully negotiating a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, which bore fruit decades later when Egypt did not attack Israel amid the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza beginning in 2023. Even Carter’s successful negotiation to bring the American hostages home from Iran was not generally evident before Carter left office because the Iranian government held off the release until Reagan had been sworn in as president; Carter had angered the Iranians by having given permission to the Shah of Iran to get medical treatment in the United States.

The long-term benefits of some of Carter’s most significant work as president may seem ironic, given that president’s micromanaging approach at the expense of exercising paradigmatic visionary leadership. Even in running for re-election, Carter simply could not compete with Reagan’s orientation to enunciating a new paradigm as an ideal vision not only of the U.S, but of the world as well (e.g., peace through strength in dealing with the U.S.S.R.). Fortunately, long-term benefits from Carter’s work did not end on the day that Reagan because the 40^th American president. For Carter was instrumental in knocking out some hitherto intractable diseases in Africa and in furthering the reputation of democracy internationally by monitoring elections in vulnerable countries. His labor in constructing houses in the Habitat for Humanity organization was a symbol that drew attention not only to poverty, but to shelter as a fundamental human right—something virtually unheard of in American culture. Moreover, his forty years of post-presidency work steadily etched humanitarianism in an otherwise occupied American consciousness, and perhaps even globally as well—certainly in Africa. From his example, a vision is evident of the salience that humanitarianism and honest democracy can have even in government policy. To be sure, his self-discipline in office following Nixon and Ford so as not to present the American people with another dishonest (Nixon) and enabling/corrupt (e.g., Ford’s pardon) president sent a message that government can indeed be led honestly, which has doubtless long-term benefits. There was no day of national mourning either for Nixon or Ford—or even Reagan, whose emphasis on visionary leadership fit the presidency so well. Indeed, praises for Carter upon his death were bipartisan—something that was clearly not the case when Reagan died.

In short, it is shortsighted to evaluate former heads of government based only on what they did while and office, and especially on the impacts from the decisions before the next election. This is not to say that the American people were wholly misguided in handing Reagan a landslide victory, for Reagan, unlike Carter, was willing to give Americans the hard economic medicine necessary to end first inflation, then recession. Moreover, Reagan’s orientation to the job of presiding by enunciating a societal (and world) vision rather than by micromanaging by taking small decisions meant that he was the more fitting candidate for office.

Perhaps had Carter volunteered to build houses and engaged foundations to eradicate stubborn diseases in Africa while he was in office, he might have been more in line with the use of symbol to sketch a vision both for American government and society, but this is doubtful because the perception of his weakness relative both to OPEC (and Iran, given the failed rescue attempt and no follow-up attempt) and “stagflation” was based on something actual. In contrast, Reagan proffered a strong state in tackling inflation, which happened, and U.S. budget deficits, which did not happen, and peace through strength in dealing with the U.S.S.R., a Communist dictatorship with nuclear weapons. It is important in remembering a former head of government to look realistically at not only what one did both before and after holding office, but also what things were like while the person had formal power. This is especially so in looking at leadership, which does not depend on being exercised in a formal office, even if the office is tailor-made for leadership as distinct from management. Carter was too much of a manager while in office, and he excelled at leadership vision via symbol (and example) outside of office.

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1. Christ Isidore, “Analysis: Jimmy Carter’s Economic Legacy Is Stronger Than Most Remember,” CNN.com, December 30, 2024.

On the Reputational Capital of a Business Leader on a Societal Stage

Is it better that companies be publicly or privately held? Such a question is of such magnitude that glossy, simplistic answers should be eschewed. This is not to say that the answer is situational in nature. Rather, it is more likely that each comes with pluses and minuses from the perspective of an economic system as a whole. As business “leaders” give their advice, it is important to keep in mind whether any personal or institutional conflicts of interest exist and thus could warp the space itself of the advice. Yes, I am intimating Einstein’s theory of general relativity here. Rather than provide an answer without having studied the matter sufficiently, I will provide a way to look at the advice given by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.

In 1996, the number of publicly traded companies in the U.S. peaked at 7,300; less than 30 years later, that number stood at 4,300.[1] Companies were increasingly staying private. Jamie Dimon was not happy. “The total should have grown dramatically, not shrunk,” he wrote in his 2024 shareholder letter.[2] Private equity funds were behind the trend of taking or keeping a company private. Although it is true that such institutional investors can “boost their profits as quickly as possible for a quick sale down the line,”[3] it is also true that private companies do not face stakeholder pressure to maximize quarterly profit reports. Neither system is perfect, but the orientation of the managements of publicly traded companies to their respective quarterly earnings reports is legion.

For his part, Dimon wrote, “This trend is serious.”[4] He pointed to “intensified reporting requirements, high litigation expenses costly regulations, overbearing board governance, shareholder activism, heightened public scrutiny and ‘the relentless pressure of quarterly earnings’” as reasons why a publicly traded company might go private.[5] If these factors are so onerous,  perhaps being privately-held is better, economically speaking. Nevertheless, Dimon was concerned. But rather than assume that his warning is the result of business expertise, we should be prudent by noting that “Dimon’s company, of course, makes a huge amount of money from taking companies public, so he’s not exactly an impartial observer.”[6] So even though “Dimon said his concerns are broader than JPMorgan’s bottom line,” we should not be so naïve as to take him at his word.

To be credible societally,  business CEO seeking to be a business leader on the societal stage cannot simply advise that which is in one’s company’s financial interests. If it is, then unless the CEO has enough reputational capital on the societal stage from having given advice for the good of the economy at the expense of one’s own firm’s interests, then the public is wise to be skeptical.

The gravitational pull on his analysis (from his orb, JPMorgan) can be detected from his statements on the quarterly earnings reporting of publicly traded companies. “There is something very positive about detailed and disciplined quarterly financial and operating reporting,” he wrote in his statement to shareholders. Is it to be supposed that managements of privately held companies owned by institutional investors face no pressure to maintain accurate accounting? It seems to me that making quarterly reports public would only increase a management’s orientation to quarterly performance at the expense of long-term profitability—excessively so. Yet Dimon only notes that CEOs and boards of directors of publicly traded companies “should resist the undue pressure of quarterly earnings, and it is clearly somewhat their fault when they don’t.”[7] Any financial person on Wall street would easily dismiss any moral sway of “should resist” and admit to us that Dimon’s reliance on ethical responsibility would only be dead on arrival on the street. Dimon’s straw-man assurance that moral suasion is sufficient to eliminate excessive focus on quarterly profits of publicly traded companies is evidence of his bias in favor of publicly traded companies doubtless because JPMorgan makes money in taking companies public. 

In other words, in extolling the benefits of that system of business while nearly dismissing its major weakness with an inadequate fix, the gravitational pull on Dimon can be detected. Not owning up to it only deepens a CEO’s lack of reputational capital societally. It would have been much better had he owned up to the bias in his view and claimed that there was still some merit to some of his points than try to hide his real agenda.  

See: More on business ethics at JPMorgan Chase.

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1. Nicole Goodkind, “The Stock Market Is Shrinking and Jamie Dimon Is Worried,” CNN.com, April 9, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.
6.  Ibid.
7.  Ibid.

Leadership “Coaches” on Social Media: Utopian Ideologues

Leadership as a topic in business became popular in the 1980s. It was not enough, however. James Burns distinguishes transformational leadership from the mere transactional leadership in his book, Leadership. Servant leadership raised the ethical bar by applying the ethical model of Jesus in the Gospels to leadership in business. Leadership vision quickly became a buzz word, as was charismatic leadership. All of these renderings can be interpreted as business trying to escape its mundane terms for a loftier enterprise in which ideals are more salient or applicable. As valuable as efficiency is, it is difficult to get excited about it. The problem is that many (or some) leadership consultants on social media have gotten too caught up on their utopian platitudes that leadership becomes a mere subterfuge. Certainly the utopian ideologies do not define leadership or are attributes of it, and yet the "coaches" claim that platitudes are necessary to leadership. In other words, I contend that leadership gurus, or "coaches" (a mis-applied analogy that wrongly dismisses the word "consultant" as too boring), had by 2023 taken to social media to project whatever utopian ideology they value onto leadership. The term has become too vague as a consequence. In fact, the concept of leadership became a near synonym for goodness in human relations and excellence in terms of virtue ethics. As a result, the concept approaches being a tautology whose actual meaning has been rendered vacuous from the a projection of so many subjective, utopian ideologies. Relative to such lofty remakes of leadership, management has become almost a dirty word—certainly not as flashy as visionary leadership. In actuality, the "coaches" are evangelical ideologues. 

I contend that what a CEO says in representing one’s organization to the wider society and characterizing what the business stands for to the employees as a whole is distinct functionally from what a department manager does in coordinating worker schedules, ordering new product and supplies, and “doing the numbers” for accounting purposes. Vision does not apply to both levels; neither does charisma. 

In his book, Charismatic Leadership: The Skills You Can Learn to Motivate High Performance in Others, Kevin Murray dismisses the definition of charisma with disdain. In the book's description paragraphs on Amazon, he writes that charisma is not "widely-applauded magnetism or shallow charm." Apparently, leaders such as Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Gandhi and admittedly even Hitler did not have charisma. Murray presumes furthermore to redefine charisma, which literally means gifts of the spirit, as a skill applicable to mundane supervision. Never mind that Ronald Reagan, who had loads of charisma, was terrible in supervising subordinates in the White House; he trusted too much in delegation. From sacred origins, charisma has in Murray's book fallen to a banal skill in business. Spirit and skill represent the sacred and the profane; they are antipodal, as in the spirit of the law versus skill in observing the law. 

Transformational and visionary leadership go with charismatic leadership; charisma has no place in the transactional language of management. One need only consult Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy to understand that charisma and administration are like oil and water. 

Indeed, leadership as a phenomenon is distinct from management. To sketch the latter as the former is intellectually dishonest, even if done to motivate managers. In 1893, the University of Chicago’s law school renamed the undergraduate, for first, law degree, which at the time was the LLB (Bachelors in the Letters of Law), as the Juris Doctor even though a first degree (3 or 4 years) in a field of knowledge does not a doctorate make. Similarly, preaching that a department head in a Target retail store is a visionary leader does nothing to change the manager’s job description and actual tasks. Vision does not apply to coordinating worker schedules and keeping inventory. Nor does charisma. Rather, politeness should apply, as the mundane daily tasks of managing and working in a business characterized by specialization of labor can get boring. Hence the appeal of a leadership guru on the sidelines, who preaches—and it is preaching—that leadership is never giving up, being all one can be, overcoming adversity, looking at solutions rather than problems (yeah, right), being positive (as if negatives are not a part of human existence), and, of course, “success!”

Well, Hitler never gave up. He nearly wiped out European Jewry in being all that he could be. He overcame the adversity of the Communists by exterminating them. He turned his attention to the final solution rather than stayed fixated on problems. He was positive about the future of the Aryan “race,” and thus of a Jew-free and Communist-free Germany. He was successful in getting Germany out of the Great Depression by rearming the country, and freeing it of the shackles of the humiliating treaty that ended World War I. He had charisma; even his enemies admitted that. He had a vision of a blood-pure and economically prosperous Germany.  The self-labeled “leadership coaches” that began springing up on the sidelines of the American business world since the 1980s are too ideologically-bent to admit that their utopian notions of leadership can include Hitler if his value-set of ideals is assumed.

Furthermore, efforts to define leadership ideologically as a virtue or utopian world that goes beyond leadership cannot define the term. For example, to say that leadership is success ignores or leaves out instances of success that do not involve leading an organization (or other people). Leadership is therefore not success per se. Similarly, a person can be tenacious in overcoming adversity without being a leader. A person can be a leader without necessarily overcoming every obstacle, or always being positive rather than negative.

In fact, President Reagan campaigned in 1980 against the stagflation (i.e., inflation and low economic growth) and the federal government, which he labeled as part of the problem rather than the solution. He led with that vision, and enough of the American people followed that he won in a landslide. Hitler, too, included negatives in his vision as he campaigned for his party in 1933. Germany was in an economic quagmire, and so too was its democracy. Hitler did not minimize scapegoats: the Jews and Communists. It is not uncommon for a leader to go negative on the problems that justify the positives in a vision, whether for an organization or a country. To claim that leadership is always being positive is simply incorrect, as is the conflation of leadership with management.

Leadership has been practiced by good and bad people. Of course, just who are the good ones and the bad is to some extent debatable among reasonable people. This is another problem with insisting that a given ideological value is necessary for leadership to be leadership. For example, to claim that leaders appreciate diversity ignores Japan and China, whose populations are more homogenous than those in the U.S., where diversity itself has become an ideological weapon as well as an ideal. Subjecting leadership to a particular definition of the good is overly constraining, and dogmatic in the sense of being arbitrary. To define leadership in terms of the content of an organizational or societal vision conveniently excludes many instances of leadership. Leadership involves convincing people to accept a vision, which we can treat as a black box.

The self-proclaimed leadership “coaches” go even beyond human utopias on social media in telling us about leadership qualities. This is often done by showing videos of other species. In one instance, a large herd animal is racing across a river as an alligator is in pursuit. Just as the predator pounces, the prey reaches the banks and leaps out of the water just in time. Leaders don’t give up. Well, actually, human leaders are not at all like prey running for their lives so not to be killed and eaten. The anthropomorphism here is out of control. Even CEOs in competitive industries, in the proverbial “jungle,” are hardly in anything even remotely like a real jungle. The CEO of a company that buys another company at a great price does not make a killing in any sense like an allegator does in a river. The military language often used in the business world is also far-fetched.

In actuality, leadership “coaches”—and business is not a (blood) sport either—preach their personal ideologies in the hope that even managers who do not actually practice leadership will accept and value the respective ideological utopian ideals. These gurus that preach under the veneer of business leadership are like the business ethicists who use thou shalt not to get managers to behave as the ethicists want. It is a power-grab of a Nietzschean sort wherein those on the sidelines are driven by an instinctual urge to have power over the “players on the field,” whose uses of strength are not necessarily appreciated and may even be resented.[1] The “coaches’” will to power is evinced in using the concept of leadership as a subterfuge by which to tacitly impose an ideological value or ideal concerning human nature and relations on society by beguiling powerful opinion-leaders in the business world. It does not concern these new birds of prey that the concept of leadership is warped, distended, obfuscated, or rendered vacuous as a utopian tautology in the process.  “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” the Wizard says as Toto pulls the it back to reveal an old man manipulating Dorothy and her friends by fire and brimstone in the film classic, The Wizard of Oz (1939). People are not always what they lead on.

See also: The Essence of Leadership

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[1] Skip Worden, “A Genealogy of Business Ethics: A Nietzschean Perspective,” Journal of Business Ethics 84 (2008): 427-56.