Bill George, the former Medtronic CEO who now teaches at the Harvard Business School, has just published one of the better books on leadership in a long time. Believe me, I know this territory, having once been associated with a leadership center.
It seems as though all the books on leadership I have seen are what I call paper pills�read this book and you will become a leader, just like if you take a pill it will lower your blood pressure. I have never believed in leadership. Instead I believe in “followership”–it is the values one follows that are important.
George’s book follows that principle. It’s title, True North, says it all. Based on interviews with 125 “leaders,” George argues that great leaders have values–a “true north”–that attracts other people in an organization to them.
I thought about George’s book in the context of our current group of Democratic Party presidential candidates. So give yourself an instant quiz. Can you in a sentence or two describe the “true north” of any of the current Democratic presidential candidates?
My guess is that if you can, you are probably on that candidate’s staff or are part of their campaign. If so, please pass on to your candidate the following message: the rest of us don’t get it.
I cannot name the “true north” of any candidate even after cruising their websites. If an ardent democrat like me can’t name the prime values of our candidates what does that say about their chances with uncommitted or independent voters? What does that say about our chances of winning?
I know, I know, it’s the war. Everybody hates the war and would vote for a groundhog to be president over any Republican. The current strategy seems to be that if the Democrats want to win they need to run the equivalent of William McKinley’s front porch campaign. Don’t say or do anything controversial and the keys to the White House are yours. Or to switch metaphors in mid-paragraph, the ball is on the one yard line and all we need to do is run a conservative play and score the TD.
This strategy is not only dangerous but misguided. First, I predict the war will not be as big an issue a year from now as it is today. Why? Virtually all the leading GOP candidates with the exception of John McCain carry little or no Iraq baggage. Romney is a governor and never voted on it. Giuliani is the hero of 9/11.
The candidate who wins the Republican presidential nomination will not be vulnerable on Iraq. So where does that leave the middle-of-the-road, don’t-rock-the-boat strategy? Squarely where it left Al Gore and John Kerry.
When historians come to write the history of George W. Bush’s administration in the next generation, Iraq will only be one of many sins. This administration has presided over the greatest transfer of wealth in this country since the days of the Robber Barons. Katrina represents a failure worse than Iraq because we did it to our own people! The list goes on. $4.00 gas. The largest budget deficit in history. College loan increases. Deliberately undermining voting rights. Approving media concentration unprecedented in this democracy. Mortgage defaults. Environmental rape. And when the Democrats and others finish investigating the misdeeds of this administration it will be revealed as the most corrupt since the days of the Teapot Dome.
It�s about equity, stupid. That’s America�s true north. The Naderites and some on the left have claimed for some time that the Democrats are in the pocket of the big corporations as much as their colleagues. To some Americans both parties represent Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. I am beginning to become a believer. There has not been a Democratic presidential candidate I could wholeheartedly support since Walter Mondale.
My worry is that the Democrats may become the Humpty Dumpty party, ending up smelling of rotten eggs. With so much on the table the election is shaping up as one of the most mediocre since Calvin Coolidge took on John Davis in 1924. We all know what happened less than eight years after that.
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