The question of leadership is cropping up more and more as people react out of fear to changing circumstances. They look to their leaders like daddys wanting them to fix the problem instantly with no thought of consequences or long term affects. Leadership has become a simple equation…Am I getting more back than I put out? Return on investment… ROI in terms the boys downtown would understand.
But now every issue, not just business decisions but everything in our shared societies, small and large, are framed along this short term and narrow viewpoint. Leaders constantly feel compelled to give short term fixes, to have answers, to quickly make a decision in order to validate the stories going in; everybody gets a hand job and on goes the TV after the trip to the fridge.
The best example of this type of get off now approach has been George Bush who followed an outmoded and out of touch business leadership model based purely on these return on investment considerations. Bush came to this model honestly. It is essentially the only one that is being taught in business schools and since most thinking about leadership these days uses business as the primary context for decisions then it is no surprise that we get a George Bush who likes to say “My gut tells me to go for it” “I am the decider” ” Wanted Dead or Alive”.
Those are statements that a caricature of a leader makes, what you say when you are playing guns as a kid. It confuses leadership with decision making. It’s how cartoon leaders deal with cartoon problems solving them with easy feel good black and white solutions. It’s the image of leadership that the baby boom children of the “greatest generation” carry around with them and have now passed along to their equally protected and spoiled children. Having never actually been to war, they crave the idea of it. They make it into yet another fetish of the tough guy shoot from the hip, masculinity that they grew up with on TV. It makes most men feel inferior, easily manipulated by images of heroism matched up against their own reality of a really really hard spin class.
Real leaders however, effective leaders rarely if ever, grab onto the lowest hanging fruit in order to just make a decision but instead use their influence to keep people headed to an objective that is engendered by that group’s own values; not an objective that is imposed by some off the cuff decision that is made to appease rather than to lead.
Making a decision is easy. Anybody can do it. In fact I just made one. There I made another. Leadership is more than that. It’s about finding out what the group values, figuring out a way to go and get it, and then keeping everybody focused on that goal until it has been achieved. The downside to this form of traditional leadership is that to even have an objective you need to bring in value; what we hold dear, what we want, how we see the world; the inner story, how our own particular background, culture, assumptions etc are influencing how we are viewing reality. It is only then that effective decisions can be made, because it is only then that the broad brush strokes of our own perceptions can be recognized and acted upon. To have an objective, a group, small or large, must agree on what is important to them and what they want to accomplish. The great leaders seem to tap into a collective understanding of value not through some mystical connection with the zeitgeist but instead with the resolve and inner self confidence to let the group find its own value and therefore its own way to an objective.
In contrast to Bush this has been Obama’s style and it has brought him a lot of grief but also a lot of victories. In the health care debate, for example, no matter how desperate people were for him to give them a story, to impose a solution, to make them feel better; he did not give in to that news cycle temptation and instead kept the entire country’s focus on the problem no matter how ugly and how confrontational it got, stepping in only to remind everybody what the objective actually was; to give people health insurance who didn’t have it.So the public option among other things was jettisoned because the objective was not to have health insurance with a public option but to have health insurance period.
Again in his primary campaign against Hillary this was also the the Obama’s team mantra. What is the objective here? To get more delegates. Anything else is just noise and gets in the way.
In the Egypt and Libyan crises Obama did the same thing. No quick reaction without diagnosing, no imposed story to make his citizens feel better, no hanging onto assumptions that aren’t working. He allowed the situation to play out looking for his opportunity much like a running back waits for the hole to open up in the line in front of him, constantly adjusting; aware of the things in the moment and not imposing a prearranged plan which would blind him to what was actually happening.
This is a hard slog because we don’t really want to go into those areas where our values might be questioned and we certainly don’t want to think about anything but a short term hand job. People get angry about paying taxes because they don’t get any immediate benefits. Concepts such as long term planning or things that are held in common are no longer even worth considering in the popular media.
It’s easier and more satisfying to get people angry and juiced up at a transparent government than it is a faceless corporation which have black boxed most of their transactions. It is more satisfying for the mind in its infinite capacity to make up stories, to see wrongs and rights, insides and outsides, black hats ,white hats, oppressed and oppressor and on and on…
For without these dual poles we have no drama, we have no linear through line to make sense of what is essentially random in appearance, and therefore a terrifying experience to a mind that craves order and equilibrium. That look of fear in the face, in the eyes of anybody who has lost their job, gotten seriously sick, left a marriage, had someone close to them die; in short, all of us; unites us all in an unspoken conspiracy of bedrock understanding, usually hidden, maybe some times taken out and examined late at night but in the main put away to be dealt with at a later date. And as all of us find out…it will be dealt with one way or another…
So in the face of this fear of the inevitable unknown we distract ourselves with an orgy of external things, consuming the stories of others the way we eat snacks in front of the TV; slack jawed with a no look reach back for the bowl. USA Today has 27 reporters assigned to entertainment and 7 to politics and congress. Amusing ourselves to death with bread and circuses twenty four hours a day. Essentially the political process has been reduced to spectacle, some kind of kabuki dance giving us a show while backstage power and wealth are amassed on scales that rival ancient monarchies. A small group of nobles with most of the stuff make decisions that will enable them to get even more stuff. Everybody else works way too fucking hard and with each inebriated and inured breath they get more and more indentured to this ever and ever smaller and smaller group of nobles. Welcome to the new world. Same as the old world.
In the history of civilization no system other than this early 21st century brand of capitalism has gotten the little guy to work for the enrichment of others with such dedication with such vehemence, and with such passion. Usually you have to threaten to kill people, or beat them but the genius of capitalism is that coercion becomes unnecessary.The delayed and rather limited response to the latest financial collapse speaks volumes in the lack of an expected questioning of capitalism’s structures. But there was none of that. No thirties style backlash, no rebellion of the intelligentsia which was a hallmark of the depression. Nope. Not a peep until a handful of students pitched a tent, three years after the collapse and even that movement was not so much a critique of the structure but was instead an argument over the share of the spoils. Regardless it is already fading as each encampment was forcibly removed without nary a protest from the very citizenry that the movement was supposed to save and energize.
China’s recent adoption of capitalism has cemented any doubt that in terms of oppression and obedience, in terms of allowing others to make decisions for you, no other system that we have seen on earth works as well as capitalism. The great carrot of a future…The promise of better…of happy good good times will make everybody fall in line and to turn on each other. Instead of people saying:” wow why don’t I have one of them there unions? They say: “Fuck them. I don’t have one so why should they.” We rat each other out for not working, take pictures of each other when we are sleeping on the job, rant about how lazy or easy some other group or person or country has it compared to us. We are building the pyramids and instead of being angry at the guy with the whip, we are pissed off at all the other assholes who like us are carrying bricks in the hot sun.
But actually even monarchy, or totalitarianism in the end failed at getting people to willingly except a great deal less than their fellow man with relatively little complaint. Over and over again man has risen up against the inevitable greed of the oppressor. Over thrown them and then behaved no better. But now that cycle ends when greed itself is used as something that is enabling not restricting, ennobling not debasing. Russian capitalism, Chinese capitalism, American capitalism, different in content to be granted but structurally still the same.
Its a great irony that the already ironic words on concentration camp signs “Arbeit Macht Frei” “Work makes Freedom” (who says those Nazis didn’t have a sense of humour) …has come to pass. People are afraid of losing their jobs because it means essentially losing their lives. They are compelled to work and the harder they work, the more perks they are allowed. The more freedoms they can enjoy. Meanwhile their overseers don’t work at all but instead live lives of mind blowing opulence, gambling the life savings of those same workers, losing and winning the equivalent of a million people’s yearly wage on a flip of an electronic currency market fluctuation.
But how can we be expected to even notice any of this given the constant chatter in the media which drowns everything else out including itself. We have so much information; so many avenues for distraction, multi tasked and plugged into such an extent that the present moment; what is actually happening, is constantly obscured by noise from inside and outside. The chatter in the media is the same as the chatter in our brains. Constantly comparing, judging, measuring, sampling, envying, wanting, regretting, making up stories about the past and pointing either hopefully to a candy land future or cowering in the face of a coming nightmare that none of us, not one of us, rich or poor, tall or short, fat or thin will ever actually experience. Both poles, orgasms forever on one hand, or apocalypse on the other, only exist in our minds and in the media.
In fact, in real life, in grownup land, at a certain point hopefully, you begin to see that the bad stuff happens in ways we could never have guessed and that the good stuff finds its way to us through an even more magical and pathless land. It should dawn on us that life exists actually out on the edges, in the world of black swans and 911’s not in the world of the bell curve and a fictitious Gaussian universe peddled to us by advertising agencies. Life does not fit into the mean, no matter how much we yearn for it, and no matter how much we try to jam it in, closing our eyes, covering our ears and hammering : “It does it does..” hysterically onto our smart phone keypads.
But it doesn’t matter, because at least we will have a future, and here comes Obama hawking hope the same way Bush and Cheney hawked fear. Twins forever bound. Desire and fear. Plato’s dictum that we invent a future in order not to die, manifests itself everyday on our computer and television screens. The beautiful thing about having to fix ourselves individually and collectively is that we get to imagine ourselves in a phony future instead of accepting the responsibility of today. Better the falsehood of personal sin and then redemption, than the truth of no future to be redeemed in and no past to be saved from; better the false gods of better bygone days, or the cracked parchment warnings of a scarier tomorrow than the truth of acceptance and effective action in the present.
The one thing that we can be sure of, that we are here now, that we only exist in the present, becomes instead an obstacle to a promise of false imagined tomorrows freed from the constraints of false imagined yesterdays; a panacea that clouds our servitude, and allows the Emperor to walk among us without clothes and without fear of anybody calling him on it.
Not all problems have answers, or at least answers that we already know and have used. Some do but most don’t. Not all problems are technical. Not all problems are readily solved by an off the shelf narrative. In fact most aren’t…Most problems in our own personal and collective lives we have never seen before. In our own lives catastrophes or triumphs come in through the side door, they are what Aristotle called an inevitable surprise and if that is true in the life of one then it is not a surprise, inevitable or otherwise that on a larger shared macro level the issues facing a complex interdependent modern world are so complex that they do not fit into a handy narrative, without stretching and blowing up the frame. Most of the time there is nothing in our collective experience that we can call up, point to, or evoke. No hammer to get.
So those comfortable tales of country and shared values, evocations of past triumphs, these hoary old chestnuts that our leaders have been providing invariably have a short shelf life and provide nothing more than a quick fix allowing everybody to breathe a sigh of relief and go back to that more comfy inner frame. Instead of shaking up that frame, instead of allowing the chaos of the moment to be, they instead quickly impose a story, a narrative so that everybody can just go back and cool out.
Unfortunately for us that is not leadership, because unfortunately for us it is actually in those moments of chaos where we find answers to these fresh dilemmas. Effective leadership holds us in that place and forces us to travel to new places to find creative solutions. It is true in our own lives, the moments that are recalled as life changing, trans-formative, and everybody has a few, are the moments when people’s eyes mist over with pride when they recount how they went for it and chose chaos over their fixed inner stories. It’s when people leave home to become dancers or actors or lawyers (yes some people do) with no idea about how to do it, or travel to a country where they don’t speak the language or know anyone, start a job or a school in which they feel overwhelmed and unqualified; those moments when they find the courage to leave a marriage or start one, to kiss a girl or see a friend through a terminal illness.
It is when we take that step off from the comfortable shores of an imagined known self, with its comfortable characters and well-worn story line. It is that step when our own personal truths become self-evident and seem to spring forth from a deep dark well of personal chaos. When a form dies away, it allows a space which we all recognize as deeper and more trustworthy and more lasting. It is here where creative solutions reside and it is here where the demands of our own contextual shadows on the wall are seen for what they really are…chimeras and projections, inner monsters, dancing around as false concepts and static ideas.
These tools will not work now; these stories have no resonance, they were made for a false imagined then, for a different context, a different now. Instead we need to be present with what is actually happening, how we actually live our lives on a moment to moment basis. We need to start asking fundamental questions of ourselves based not on some philosophical abstraction or partisan loyalties or media filter but to actually find out for ourselves what we value, what we as groups, as networks, as social organizations value now, who we are right now.
But first the old stories must die. First the myth of an individual somehow separate, somehow not in relation to something else must be forever grown out of, this fabrication that somehow we exist as these separate things to be categorized and labeled and therefore put in conflict, without regard for the truth in front of us, for the neighborhoods that spring forth from even the most cantankerous and solipsistic among us.
Who am I? What is happening now? Ask those questions the sages all preach and then follow the answers without labels and without stories wherever they may lead. Quiet the mind they say, and see what is really going on and who you really are. Look at it and say yes to it. Say yes to the is’ness, to the such’ness of life in this moment.
Leadership is at its best when its asks these questions, when it asks us who we really are and does not shrink from the answer, when it asks us to pay attention to what is happening in our lives without the spin or gauze that we habitually see everything through. A leader holds these mirrors up and allows us to see the truth of our interdependence and the constant change of things forming and dissolving without giving us even the smallest “out” to crawl through, the smallest story for even some cold comfort. Great leaders make us face up to the bitter sweetness of our lives, allowing us to take effective action out of awareness not out of conditioning; action that is not clouded by our own dreams of permanence, our own delusions of separateness, our own tall tales of false yesterdays and tomorrows.