Putin Likened Protesters to "Weak Birds"

At the conclusion of the 2012 Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Russia, the host president, Vladimir Putin, likened the birds that had not following his motorized glider south to the Russians who did not follow him. “Only the weak ones,” he quipped. “The weak ones didn’t follow me.” Elaborating, he added, “not all of the cranes flew, and the leader, the pilot, has to be blamed because he was too fast in gaining speed and altitude and they were just lagging behind; they couldn’t catch up.” In other words, the Russian protesters had been blaming him for what was in actuality their own weakness—not his. A leader must accept the inevitable misappropriation of blame because being erroneously blamed goes with being a leader.

Putin could not have been entirely objective on the protests against him.      

Source: Democracy Chronicles

The full essay is at "Putin Likened Protestors to Weak Birds."

Source:

David Herszenhorn and Steven Lee Myers, “For Putin, a Flight of Fancy at a Summit Meeting’s Close,” The New York Times, September 10, 2012.

On Nietzsche applied to power in business, see On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management (available at Amazon)

Leading at the Top beyond Appearances: The case of John Boehner, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives

In the wake of President Obama's mission to execute Osama bin Laden, Speaker Boehner issued a statement complimenting his rival in the White House. In contrast, Sarah Palin gave George W. Bush all the credit. The Speaker, too, could have gone with political expediency. Therefore, for the Speaker to have publicly acknowledged Obama's victory as America's more generally involved political self-discipline. Speaker Boehner had sought to apply self-discipline, moreover, to his decentralized leadership style from the moment of his swearing in. Given the consolidating nature of power, such a leadership style in the U.S. House of Representatives faced considerable head winds.

The full essay is at "Leading at the Top beyond Appearances."

On the Nature of Principled Leadership

What is principled leadership? Simply whatever a leader decides? Or even worse, believes? If so, does the content shift with the sands from one leader to the next? This would seem to invalidate any means of comparing one leader's rendition from another. That it to say, leaving the "filling in the blank" to any leader who wants to be principled opens the door to leadership by convenience under the cover, or subterfuge, of ethics as a means of self-restraint. Ironically, do-it-yourself principled leadership may actually be unethical. So it is vital that we ask ourselves, is a durable definition even possible?

Ethical codes of conduct easily get mired in miasma as they traverse from the finitude of personal ideology to the power that comes with  universality and even the absolute. As universally applicable as an absolute, principled leadership is seemingly a normative constraint even on leaders who do not value the particular principles. The greed, ambition, immaturity, and the associated selfishness that together run Wall Street may appear to hang in the balance.

Kant claims that principles that can be universalized without contradiction should be universalized. (Image Source: builddiscipline.com)

However, even old Kant would admit that universalizing an ethical principle, or maxim, to be binding on everyone is not a sure thing, for the moral law does not by its normative nature approach the force enjoyed by public legal justice. This distinction is all that an egregious ego needs to slip through the semi-permeable normative membrane of a puffed-up ethical principle claiming for itself the mantle of universalizability and even absolute value (as if the principle were the assigner of values in place of reason).

On leadership generally, see The Essence of Leadership, available at Amazon. 

Non-Positional Leadership: A Matter of Charisma?

The concept of non-positional leadership is typically associated with charismatic leadership.[1] The Hebrew prophets are a case in point, as none had any formal civic position.  To be sure, a non-positioned leader need not be charismatic; such a leader can be effective in utilizing persuasion to get his or her position (i.e., "vision") sufficiently adopted by followers to become the default.  Obviously, a positioned official, whether in the upper echelons of a large corporation, government, or religious institution, need not “stoop” to persuasion; power from authority can be sufficient for an official's will to be done. However, does that evince leadership or simply raw power?

Gandhi epitomized non-positional leadership. He never held a formal office in religion or government. Is the strength of non-positional leadership necessarily moral?  Image Source: Idleindia.com

Authorized power is typically also reckoned as leadership, especially if the official’s decision is unpopular at first, yet quickly implemented and effective in the end. In fact, merely the stature of “high” position can give a decision itself the semblance of leadership. Modern society lavishes an extraordinary amount of credence on organizational position itself, regardless of the particular occupant. Such positional power, as distinct from positional leadership, is excessive, even reckless. For example, Richard Fuld was able to inflict Lehman Brothers with an overwhelming amount of risk, and for so long, in line with a warped “vision” and without having to lead in the sense of persuading others of his vision. To assume almost blindly that CEOs are not only “natural” leaders, but also persons of high caliber in terms of skill and character, simply because of their position is foolhardy and yet this is typically done in modern society.

---

1. On “non-positional” leadership, see David Burkus, http://theleaderlab.org/

Steve Jobs: A Unique Societal and Organizational Visionary

Typically as a company transitions from an enterprising, creative new venture to a large organization to be managed, a staid CEO replaces a visionary founder. In the case of Steve Jobs at Apple, the very nature of the man’s vision was not only inherently at odds with the status-quo underpinning of a large organization with a budget, but also essential to the company’s business model. Hence, the company, including its shareholders, paid a price for years for jettisoning Jobs. The film, Jobs (2013), is centered on the distinctiveness of Jobs’ vision. Although the film also hints at why this distinctiveness is such that the company would (and did) lose as a large organization after making the typical founder-to-CEO transition.

The full essay is at "Jobs."

Visionary Leadership at Zynga

Faced with a stock price down 75 percent since its IPO and conflict with subordinates throughout 2012, Zynga’s chief executive Mark Pincus had plenty on his plate as he met with Bill Campbell of Apple in September of that year. Zynga investor and venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers had brought Campbell in to advise the CEO. While it is tempting to play around the edges and work on “communication processes” and hand out more employee stock-options, the bottom-line in such cases is typically the need to improve the products either simply to be better products or better tailored to changing consumer tastes and habits. Product development that can transform companies may result from the vision of a leader for whom strategy is simply a matter of reaching a destination already known.

 Mark Pincus, CEO of Znyga. From this picture, it is hard not to like the guy.       Reuters

According to the Wall Street Journal, Pincus “revamped Zynga’s structure and reshuffled his executive team.” Additionally, he tried “to remake himself as its leader by ceding more control to deputies.” Prime facie, jargon like “revamped,” “reshuffled” and “remake” can have the smell of superficial jazz rather than having an intention to get at the core of the problem facing the company. Beyond the revamping and reshuffling, and even remaking, Pincus could have focused on changing his attitude or mentality, especially in terms of working with other people in the company.

Even closer to the core problem was Pincus’s decision to spend more of his time in product development meetings and putting mobile product application in every product-division. Optimally, these changes would go along with market research on what was behind the rapid change in video-game player habits and research into how to counter Facebook’s changes that made it more difficult for consumers to find Zynga’s games on the social network. According to the Journal, the change in player habits (and tastes) as well as the changes in social media technology, “dictated fundamental changes at Zynga.” As the key source of innovation, knowledge is where the real game is to be played at Zynga. The stock market may simply have been reflecting the lack of sufficient knowledge while being unimpressed by the “revamping” and “reshuffling,” and, moreover, “remaking.” Leaders are not remade and they do not spend away their time revamping and reshuffling. Rather, leaders lead on substance that is vital to their organization.

Steve Jobs led at Apple not by having a “touchy-feely” personality or granting lots of employee perks, but, rather, by having visionary ideas on products that would change our daily life in the modern world. In the midst of a lack of such ideas being fused with leadership at Zynga, Jonathan Liu, the product director, described a mere manifestation or symptom in telling Pincus, “People couldn’t articulate what the main strategy was, or why they were coming into Zynga on a day-to-day basis.” Firing the chief operating officer might have been easy, but the true source behind the muddled strategy was a wan of ideas concerning products and knowledge concerning the end-users, coupled with a lack of real-time awareness of what middlemen such as Facebook were doing.

Put another way, strategy itself is but a means by which visions of future products can be implemented; strategy itself is not the decisive point. As for “the vision thing,” either someone has it or not; one cannot simply “remake” oneself as a “new” leader and trust that the ideas will come. Ultimately, vision is more than even ideas; it is an ideal, and thus something capable of being believed in. The morale problems and related conflict, as well as all the talent being snagged up by Twitter and Facebook, the lack of strategy and even the sort of leadership in Zynga can all be interpreted as symptoms of a void in terms of vision that is oriented to products.

It might even be asked whether any passion for playing the computer games was left at the company. In terms of vision, not even such passion may be enough. Steve Jobs was surely passionate about computer technology, but this alone does not account for his vision that effectively transformed even staple products like the telephone and even the laptop. One cannot be trained to come up with a vision, much less be passionate about something; these must already be inside. The quest at Zynga could have been in trying to locate it in others and bring them in, even if it means, as Pincus said, “it’s inevitable that some people will choose to leave.” That could include the leader-founder himself.

Source:

Evelyn Rusli, “The Education of Zynga’s Founder,” The Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2012.

Ethical Leadership in the Roman Catholic Church: The Case of the Chilean Abuse Scandal

Leaders taking an ethical stance, even en masse, may find themselves risking their very positions, including the associated perks. In May, 2018, “all Chile’s 34 [Roman Catholic] bishops offered to resign en masse . . . after attending a crisis meeting with [Pope Francis] over allegations of a cover-up of sexual abuse” in the South American state.[1] The pope could have accepted all of those resignations. Instead, he accepted the resignations of three Chilean bishops, including Juan Barros of Osorno, Cristian Cordero, and Gonzalo Garcia, a month later. The ethical leadership, I submit, was not evinced in the pope’s decision to get rid of the three sordid clerics, but, rather, in the other bishops who had been willing to take a stand even at great personal loss. Indeed, the pope admitted he had made “grave mistakes” in the Chilean sexual abuse scandal. Had he been guilty of protecting his friends?

The full essay is at "Christian Leadership." 

See: Christianized Ethical Leadership, available at Amazon

---

[1] Reuters, “Pope Francis Accepts Resignation of 3 Chilean Bishops Following Sex Abuse Scandals,” The Huffington Post, June 11, 2018.