The ¡¥real¡¦ world
crisis lays in a global deficit of leadership
Leaders today have to ask their people to share burdens, not just benefits.
That requires extraordinary leadership that has to start with telling people the
truth
By Thomas Friedman / NY Times News Service
Traveling in Europe last week, it seemed as if every other conversation ended
with some form of this question: Why does it feel like so few leaders are
capable of inspiring their people to meet the challenges of our day? There are
many explanations for this global leadership deficit, but I would focus on two:
one generational, one technological.
Let¡¦s start with the technological. In 1965, Gordon Moore, the Intel co-founder,
posited Moore¡¦s Law, which stipulated that the processing power that could be
placed on a single microchip would double every 18 months to 24 months. It has
held up quite well since then. Watching European, Arab and US leaders grappling
with their respective crises, I am wondering if there is not a political
corollary to Moore¡¦s Law: The quality of political leadership declines with
every 100 million new users of Facebook and Twitter.
The wiring of the world through social media and Web-enabled cellphones is
changing the nature of conversations between leaders and the led everywhere. We
are going from largely one-way conversations ¡X top-down ¡X to overwhelmingly
two-way conversations ¡X bottom-up and top-down. This has many upsides: more
participation, more innovation and more transparency. However, can there be such
a thing as too much participation ¡X leaders listening to so many voices all the
time and tracking the trends that they become prisoners of them?
This sentence jumped out from a Politico piece on Wednesday last week: ¡§The
Obama and Romney campaigns spend all day strafing each other on Twitter, all
while decrying the campaign¡¦s lack of serious ideas for a serious time. Yet at
most junctures when they¡¦ve had the opportunity to go big, they¡¦ve chosen to go
small.¡¨
Indeed, I heard a new word in London last week: ¡§Popularism.¡¨ It is the uber
ideology of our day.
Read the polls, track the blogs, tally the Twitter feeds and Facebook postings
and go precisely where the people are, not where you think they need to go. If
everyone is ¡§following,¡¨ who is leading?
And then there is the exposure factor. Anyone with a cellphone today is
paparazzi; anyone with a Twitter account is a reporter; anyone with YouTube
access is a filmmaker. When everyone is a paparazzi, reporter and filmmaker,
everyone else is a public figure. And, if you¡¦re truly a public figure ¡X a
politician ¡X the scrutiny can become so unpleasant that public life becomes
something to be avoided at all costs.
Alexander Downer, the former Australian foreign minister, remarked to me
recently: ¡§A lot of leaders are coming under massively more scrutiny than ever
before. It doesn¡¦t discourage the best of them, but the ridicule and the
constant interaction from the public is making it more difficult for them to
make sensible, brave decisions.¡¨
As for the generational shift, we have gone from a ¡§Greatest Generation¡¨ that
believed in save and invest for the future, to a Baby Boomer generation that
believed in borrow and spend for today. Just contrast former US presidents
George W. Bush and his father, George H.W. Bush. The father volunteered for
World War II immediately after Pearl Harbor, was steeled as a leader during the
Cold War ¡X a serious time, when politicians could not just follow polls ¡X and as
US president he raised taxes when fiscal prudence called for it. His Baby Boomer
son avoided the draft and became the first president in US history to cut taxes
in the middle of not just one war, but two.
When you have technologies that promote quick short-term responses and
judgments, and when you have a generation that has grown used to short-term
gratification ¡X but you have problems whose solutions require long, hard
journeys, like today¡¦s global credit crisis or job shortages or the need to
rebuild Arab countries from the ground up ¡X you have a real mismatch and
leadership challenge.
Virtually all leaders today have to ask their people to share burdens, not just
benefits, and to both study harder and work smarter just to keep up. That
requires extraordinary leadership that has to start with telling people the
truth.
Dov Seidman, the author of the book How, whose company LRN advises chief
executive officers on leadership, has long argued that ¡§nothing inspires people
more than the truth.¡¨
Most leaders think that telling people the truth makes that leader vulnerable ¡X
either to the public or their opponents. They are wrong.
¡§The most important part of telling the truth is that it actually binds you to
people, because when you trust people with the truth, they trust you back,¡¨
Seidman said.
Obfuscation from leaders just gives citizens another problem ¡X more haze ¡X to
sort through.
¡§Trusting people with the truth is like giving them a solid floor,¡¨ he added.
¡§It compels action. When you are anchored in shared truth, you start to solve
problems together. It¡¦s the beginning of coming up with a better path,¡¨ Seidman
said.
That is not what we are seeing from leaders in the US, the Arab world or Europe
today.
You would think one of them, just one, would seize the opportunity to enlist
their people in the truth: About where they are, what they are capable of, what
plan they need to get there and what they each need to contribute to get on that
better path.
Whichever leader does that will have real ¡§followers¡¨ and ¡§friends,¡¨ not just
virtual ones.
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