Category: General

John Van Maanen, a professor of management at M.I.T. Sloan who teaches a course named “Leading Organizations,” isn’t so sure it can. “Even today, three-plus decades in, there’s no real definition of it,” he says. “We can make people more conscious of ethical dilemmas in business, of the difficulty of directing people in times of adversity, and the confidence and communication skills necessary to do so. But the idea that such skills can be transmitted so that you can lead anybody at any time, that’s ideologically vacuous.”

“It’s difficult not to be frustrated by the excessive focus on it,” he says, “but it’s become so popular that we apparently can’t teach enough of it.”  NyTimes 2015-07-29

As I suspected…

May you have been blessed to be a “Leadership Trainer” (or whatever you call someone who confers “leadership skills” upon the worthy acolyte).  I fall back on Karl Popper’s theories about knowledge, that in order for something to be “true” it must be possible to prove it false.  In other words, for someone to say they have acquired “leadership skills” it must be at least theoretically possible to prove they have not.

I’m not talking about self-proclaimed leaders.   I’m talking about what the marketeers try to sell you as “leadership skills”.  It is not possible, of course, in reality, to measure them, because every leader just kind of feels good about himself or herself and starts talking about “we leaders must…” blah blah blah as if they have some kind of objective proof that they have made the grade.

A leader makes decisions.  A leader has a vision.  A leader makes tough choices.  A leader knows how to motivate his foundlings or acolytes or whatever.  Any two-bit manager does or does not do all of those things but only the ones who have received medals and certificates start to think there is something special about their own decisions and visions and choices.  In my experience, the ones with the most auspicious claims about their “leadership qualities” are the most likely to postpone, delay, consult, and equivocate.   They are more likely to slow things down and to impose wasteful bureaucratic procedures on the decision-making process, have more people sign off on decisions, and get angry when people, who actually want to get things done, do things without waiting for the “process” to catch up to them.

They are the kind of people that spend $6 million on consultants who recommend that they sell a provincial asset for $6 million, but don’t recommend that they never again hire idiot consultants to advise them on how to do the job they are paid to do.

Why?  Because a single really bad decision can wipe out years of equivocation, evasion, and obfuscation.  Why take a chance?  You can always, given the vocabulary of leadership training, claim to be a great leader without actually having to prove anything.  There is no way to prove that any leadership training has worked.  There is no way to prove that a leader is a good leader because if things are going well, they probably would have gone well anyway, and if things are going bad, they could always have gone worse.

But if someone can prove you made a bad decision, the cat is out of the bag.  So you hire a consultant.  And if it proves to be a bad decision, you say, “oh, but the that’s what the consultant recommended.”   They don’t say, “I am the one who chose a stupid consultant.”

People who actually make good, quick decisions– and stick to them– tend to have a more prosaic view of “leadership”: you’re in charge — make decisions.  They feel less threatened by others taking some initiative.  They don’t feel that other peoples’ accomplishments are a threat to their own status.

[whohit]Leadership Training[/whohit]

As everyone knows, former British Labour Prime-Minister Tony Blair has never apologized for urging the invasion of Iraq on what we now know were false pretences.  Never never never.  Never never never never never!  Tony Blair will go to his grave insisting to anyone who will listen that invading Iraq was such a good idea that it was worth sacrificing thousands of lives and spending over a trillion dollars of taxpayer money.  (He wouldn’t call the deaths, in the invasion itself, of 100,000 Iraqis a “cost”, of course.  Perhaps they were complicit in Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime, some how.)

Most amazingly, he doesn’t look at Iraq today and see failure, even though the invasion has been a complete disaster in every single respect.  It did not bring democracy and prosperity.  It did not bring peace.  It did not open the door to democratic progress in the Middle East.  It did not improve the security of Israel.  It did not weaken Iran.

Blair must go to bed some nights weeping over the Nobel Peace Prize he should have won and imagining how great it would have looked hanging over the mantel, next to the pictures of him cuddling with George Bush or Cher, or kissing Bono, or schmoozing with Bill Gates.

If you think he might eventually succumb to facts and information, dream on.  The invasion of Iraq is what I call an “identity issue”.  If someone likes a movie that you think is garbage, and you say so, that is not an identity issue: everyone has different taste.   But if you say you are lousy father and you ruined your son’s life,  you have created an identity issue.  To concede that you are right is impossible because the issue goes right to core of a person’s self respect and identity.

Blair’s self-image, his identity, is tied up with this image of an enlightened, rational, successful, beneficent leader.  To admit to have helped cause a massive political and military disaster would be unbearable– it would be tantamount to admitting that you are a worthless human being.  He’ll never do it.

He cannot give quarter on this issue.  He cannot display one second of weakness on his major points: Saddam Hussein was an awful man who had to go.  The world is better off without Saddam Hussein.  Dick Cheney was right.  And if Iraq is now ten times worse off in terms of stability, law and order, prosperity, and hope, well, it’s not my bloody fault they wouldn’t do their share.

Now he bemoans the Labour Party’s interest in a far-left candidate, Jeremy Corbyn.  He’ll spoil everything, he thinks.  He’ll make it look like the rich have been ripping off the working classes all along, even while I was prime minister.  He’ll make the rich pay taxes.  He’ll invest in infrastructure.  He won’t go to war.  Worst of all, he’ll lose the election, and, for Tony Blair, that is the unforgivable  sin, the identity sin, the one that makes him want to flee politics altogether: if it’s not my party, I won’t come.

[whohit]Tony Blair’s Miraculous Self Delusion[/whohit]

In almost every Hollywood movie, some characters will do bad things. They will be ill-mannered. They will be mean to a child or a pet. They will be sneaky and dishonest. The purpose of these incidents is so the viewer can enjoy seeing this character dismembered, tortured, or killed later, guilt-free. It’s not much fun to watch terrible things happen to people at random– they don’t deserve it. So first, we must establish that the character deserves it. Now we can enjoy the violence.

In the same way, the Greeks must be perceived as lazy, self-indulgent, greedy, reckless, and sneaky, before we get to enjoy watching their economy destroyed by the troika (the EU, the IMF, and various European governments). Otherwise, we will feel as though we should help them. That Greek pensioner crying on the sidewalk because he can’t get any cash from the ATM to buy food? He voted for a government that pays people not to work, that hires commissioners to take care of lakes that have dried up, that lets people retire at the age of 40, and so and so on.

I’m not inclined to join the brow-beating because I keep circling back to the same question over and over again: what idiot banker would lend money to an insolvent government?

We know that the banks in North America do not make loans so that they can be paid back. Where’s the fun, and profits, in that? They make loans to increase your indebtedness to the point where you cannot pay off your loan. Instead, you pay high interest rates, in perpetuity, on that loan. That is the banker’s wet dream. The fact that the average American owes about $8,000 on his credit card is proof that the strategy has been widely successful.  The fact that 50% of the population do not actually have any “wealth” (read Thomas Piketty) proves that most of us don’t understand how the economy really works.

So the banks were not lending money to Greece so they could improve their economy and then pay them back. They were lending insane amounts of money to Greece in the hope that they would not be able to pay the loans back, but would have to make large payments, year after year, for decades, generating enormous profits for the banks.

In Iceland, the bankers who developed this kind of strategy were fired, arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned. Iceland told the banks, this is a capitalist, free enterprise society. You intentionally made bad loans. Your customers can’t pay them back, and you knew it. You lose. Iceland declared bankruptcy and the banks were wiped out. Iceland started new banks to facilitate cash flow and started over.  The prison sentences were given because the bankers knew full well what they were doing.  Lending enormous sums of money to people or institutions that cannot pay it back is not the result of carelessness, but of careful, conscious planning.

Greece is not the same. But the result should have been the same. Banks, trying to make big money, loaned the Greek Government billions of Euros. Did they check to see if the Greek Government would be able to pay them back? Evidently not. But employees of the bank made millions of Euros in commissions by arranging these loans. In a capitalist system, when Greece could no longer make payments, the banks should have lost their money. The bankers would have been fired. And Greece would have had to start over. Maybe the banks would have collapsed. Well, that’s free enterprise.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the European governments led by Germany bailed out the shareholders of those banks. Now they want their money back. They did not require the banks to do their due diligence before making their loans, so they have just done an enormous favour to the banking industry.  They didn’t punish the bankers for making fraudulent loans and failing to perform due diligence: they rewarded them.

But they don’t tell you that the Greeks must pay them for this favor to the banks’ shareholders.

They say, you selfish, lazy Greeks. You took all our money and now you won’t pay it back. And they act like Alex Tsipras has been ruling the country for 20 years, creating all that debt.

The story continues.

[whohit]Hollywoodizing Greek Debt[/whohit]

The ending of “The Graduate” is a legend now.  And I suspect it’s about time someone made the traditional attempt to “debunk” the mythological greatness of it and attack the whole strange sequence as mediocre, confusing, or trivial.

Personally, I think it holds up extremely well.  In fact, I dare say, it seems stronger and more allusive today to me than ever before, while the rest of the second half of the movie does, at times, seem aimless and rote.  The uncanny momentum of the first half, up to when Elaine learns about the affair, suddenly deflates and wanders, until it seems to gather itself up again into some kind of  raucous crescendo with the wedding.

But it can’t be denied that part of the marvelous impact of that last scene on the bus  is due to the expectation of the Hollywood ending, the happy music, the smiles, the suggestion that all is now well.  With expectations like that in place, the first encounter with that long, lingering, ambiguous take is rather stunning.  And it shifts the viewer’s perception from that empty, trivial, inauthentic kitsch to the rich complex authentic possibilities of their relationship– not all unicorns and hazy meadows.

Some commentators feel that the ending is therefore sad and pessimistic.  I don’t think it goes that far.  I don’t think we encounter a fateful, tragic mistake.  What we have is the real possibility that they will work things out but only after actually learning to cope with life beyond the magic hysteria of their escape from stultifying bourgeois conformity.  Maybe Benjamin becomes an environmental activist.  Maybe Elaine becomes a feminist.