Leadership as the Distribution of Loss

This is a big week for Obama. Vacation's over and so is the honeymoon. A lot is riding on his big health care speech to the Congress this week, not just about health care, but about the kind of President Obama will be.

He promised to be different, to deliver hard truths as well as inspirational homilies. On health care he's been heavy on the inspiration, not so on the perspiration. It is as if he has forgotten about the hard truths, or worse, has assumed that the righteousness of the cause would be enough to carry the day and that health care reform, whatever its shape, would somehow be good for everybody.

Naivete? Lack of courage? Anyone's guess.

He has failed to be convincing because his rhetoric doesn't sound real.

Intuitively, you and I know that there should not be health care reform on coverage without health care reform on costs, and there cannot be health care reform on costs without a lot of pain. That pain will have to come from some combination of: lower profits, different value propositions, and new ways of doing business for health care providers, medical equipment manufacturers, and drug companies; less lucrative practices for medical malpractice lawyers; higher taxes for the middle class; more personal responsibility for individual and family health; loss of individual freedom in the wake of governmental regulations influencing diet and exercise; and, yes, less access to free or nearly free high end medical services than many people, particularly the very ill and very elderly, now "enjoy", if that's the proper word when you are dying of cancer.

The inspiration part is easy and right in Obama's wheelhouse. What makes leadership on health care difficult (what makes leadership for any purpose difficult), is the distribution of loss. The opposition to change in the current health care system comes from people, organizations, interests and industries for whom the current reality, flawed as is, seems to them (and they may be right for themselves)a lot better than an unknown future.

The AARP is a good example of the link between leadership and loss. Sixty thousand AARP members have quit because of AARP's support for health care reform. To its credit, AARP understands that in the long term, the current realities, including particularly the costs of end-of-life care, are not sustainable for senior citizens or for the country, and will be even less so as the baby boomers, now in their 50s and early 60s start to face the inevitable breakdown of their bodies.

Read Jane Brody's column on the subject and ponder the statistics she cites. No more than 10% of those over 70 who are resuscitated survive. Thirty percent of all Medicare dollars are spent in the last year of life, 15% in the last 60 days.

This is getting to be a very personal issue for me. I am writing this as my 95-year old mother is going to he airport to fly to Italy to be with us. I have had more fun with her in the past fifteen years than in the 30 before that. I don't want her to die, of course, but she maintains that she has hidden away something to end her life during that window of time when she is aware enough to know the end is near but still capable of self-administering whatever it is she has hidden away. I hope she uses it.

And I am 69, loving my wonderful wife, three children, and friends and other family, working as hard and enjoying professional challenges as much as I ever have, feeling very lucky to be able to go for a 50-minute run this morning and cope with the pain in my leg from the stenosis in my back, tolerating the (I hope) temporary loss of hearing in one ear as well as various other aches that come and go. I love my life and don't want it to end. I want to stay around long enough to see my kids grow into their 50s, to enjoy our house in Italy, to make sure that we have socked away enough resources for my wife to continue to live her life well for whatever time she has left after I go, and, political junkie that I am, to see something of the other side of the global sea change we are now experiencing. But I know in my gut, that if the United States is going to catch up to the rest of the industrialized world and provide universal health care that I am not going to be able to be kept alive with very expensive, highly advanced medical care unless I am willing to pay for it all myself and erode our family savings. I need our President to inspire me to sacrifice some of what I might have had in terms of late in life health care, by acknowledging my loss, empathizing with it, and then but only then, moving me to do this for a greater good.

Obama has not Closed the Deal on Health Care

Sorry, but for me, Obama has not closed the deal on health care.

Real health care reform means both universal coverage and cost control. More people being covered is going to put more pressure on costs. And health care costs in the US are already way out of whack with the rest of the world.

When Obama talks about reducing costs, I feel like I am on a used car lot. As my colleague Jeff Lawrence says, "There's no such thing as a dysfunctional system because every system is perfectly aligned to produce the result it is currently getting." And the current reality is working well enough for medical malpractice lawyers, for people with private coverage (like me), for drug companies, for insurance companies, and for folks on Medicare and Medicaid. None of us well-situated folks want to take any real losses.

There's no real cost reform Obamacare.

Where is the requirement for service consolidation and elimination of overlap, where are the generic substitutes, where is the cap on malpractice suits, where is the middle class tax increase, where is the employer mandate, where is the ban on unnecessary procedures, where is the effort to shift services more toward younger people and prevention and, yes, away from people my age well into their AARP years?

Obama has not distributed enough pain to have any meaningful reform on the cost side. The evidence? There aren't enough of the right people people whining.

The protesters are middle class folks who are scared that either their coverage will go down, their costs will go up, or their taxes will rise. They have good reason to be fearful. The drug companies are all for Obamacare. That's a very bad sign.

If we are going to have universal coverage, with or without a public option, someone has to pay for it. Obama's feelgood administration is falling into the leadership failure traps of, gulp, his predecessor, failing to deliver bad news, failing to take the heat from his own constituencies, failing to try inspiring all of us to take a short-term hit for some larger, longer term goal.

Pain-free health care cost reform is an oxymoron.

Do you agree?

Immelt's GE: Reset's Poster Child

Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, is fast becoming the poster child for Reset in the US corporate community.

My friend Jon Hoch from Connecticut was the first to point this out to me. He sees Immelt's GE (and Ford Motor Company as well) as looking at the current turmoil and uncertainty as an opportunity for adaptation and Reset, rather than hunkering down and waiting out the storm.

If you are wondering what Reset looks like in practice, look at Immelt and GE.

In February, he refused an $11.7 million bonus to which he was contractually entitled.

Then, he cut the treasured annual GE dividend, a symbol of GE's consistent growth and stability, for the first time since 1938. The next day, as the stock dipped to its lowest point since 1993, Immelt personally invested in the company buying 50,000 shares.

He has shrunk GE Capital (GE's finance unit) by 30%, both to reduce volatility in the company and in recognition of the fact that the financial industry will be much more highly regulated than it has been in the past. He has made it clear that more cuts are coming.

In his letter to shareholders, dated early February and released with the GE Annual Report in March, he took full responsibility for the bad news, but also challenged his GE colleagues to be energized, not frightened by the challenges facing them. If they are frightened, he told them, they should leave. If, however, they are energized, the opportunity to transform GE should be "thrilling." He also confirmed that the company would be pumping $10 billion into technological research and development.

Then in his mid-April speech at the annual shareholders meeting, Immelt predicted that GE would Reset, but so would capitalism with government permanently playing a more robust role as industrial policy advocate, financier,and partner.

So, let's tease out the Reset principles here.

First, Immelt has recognized that the future is unknown and unknowable, except that it will be very different from the past.

Second, he has chosen between the expendable and the essential. Reset is a time to make hard decisions about what to preserve of all that is valued and created success(i.e. manufacturing), and what to leave behind in order to survive and thrive in the new world (i.e. GE Capital and the 50 years of never cutting the dividend). All this while taking responsibility for each decision and for the pain they are causing those involved.

Third, model the behavior you are asking of others, so that people see you, too, feeling pain and taking risks (ie invest your own money).

Fourth, be simultaneously brutally realistic and unflaggingly optimistic.

Fifth, run some experiments, make some big bets, invest in the future.

Sixth, practice interdependence by challenging and inspiring own own people to take responsibility for joining you on the journey and reinventing the future.

These are ideas that can be applied to any business, non-profit, or government agency. What is required is courage and skill.

Immelt is making big bets and taking big risks. If he is right more often than he is wrong, GE will be even stronger in the future than it has been in the past. If he is wrong more often......

Obama's Leadership and the CIA memos

My favorite definition of leadership: leadership is about disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb.

By that measure, President Barack Obama is now facing the toughest leadership test of his 100-day old Presidency. He made an Obama-like decision, looking forward and not backward, to not investigate or prosecute those responsible for carrying out the "enhanced interrogation" methods on al Queda suspects in 2002 and 2003.

Curageously, he went to the CIA and faced those most worried about the backlash from the memos and his condemnation of the techniques they authorized.

As Obama surely expected, the release of the memos generated criticism on the right and a new wave of publicly expressed angst on the left from the usual sources, such as Senator Patrick Leahy and MoveOn. And then, inevitably, they were soon followed by a self-righteous column from NYT columnist Paul Krugman.

My assumption is that Obama assumed that predictable sources on the right and left would vent for a while and then it would all blow over, as happened with his selection of Reverend Rick Warren to particpate in the Inauguration.

But then he made a tactical error. Courting trouble, but presumablky to try to calm the waters hestirrede up on the left, Obama allowed for the possibility of prosecuting the authorizers of the now-banned behavior. (Presumably he would have to include those Members of Congress from both political parties on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees who, according to Congressman Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, had been briefed on the techniques and has approved the funding them.)

Obama is walking a razor's edge here. He has given those who seek a pound of flesh from the Bushies an avenue for doing so. He had been willing to take heat from both extremes for his release-the-memos-condemn-the-methods-but-no-retribution stance, to avoid what he believed was the worst scenario, a long, divisive, partisan, ideological, and diversionary series of investigations and prosecutions. Now, under pressure, he may have opened the door just enough to get that dreaded outcome as well.

As we learned from the ridiculous Clinton impeachment process, nothing can come from such show trials except taking the attention and energy of Congress and we the people away from the tough choices the country is having to face in order to get the economy moving again.

And as we learned from Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon (and have been reminded by Gerald Seib in his recent Wall Street Journal column), the political fallout from trying to avoid a long, drawn out show trial can be considerable.

This is not South Africa where a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was needed to try to heal the great decades-long scar of apartheid that had split the country in two.

Obama was right to balance government truth-telling with no looking backward, tactically wrong to throw a bone to his critics on the left. He may be risking his other priorities being sidelined if the Justice Department or the Congress start looking for scapegoats big time.

With his re-election still 3 1/2 years away and lots of other problems facing the country, there maybe enough time for Obama to get by this one.

But from a leadership perspective, it is not yet clear that he has figured out how to disappoint his own people at a rate they can absorb.

Reset Partisanship and Anger.....

Lots of anger out there. In the past days, I have received missives from four good friends of different ages, backgrounds, experience and communities (although all US citizens). They are all liberal Democrats and early Obama supporters, and all four of them sent angry, even furious diatribes against right-wing politicians, commentators, and George W. Bush.

Even the always cool Barack Obama is angry.

Less surprisingly, there is anger on the right as well, labeling Obama as "socialist". Yahoo has been documenting it. And the New York Times had a front page story Monday on Glen Beck, the new post-Lou Dobbs mouthpiece of angry conservative populism.

Nearly everyone's in a bad mood. You, too? I am especially curious about anger from the left because I would have thought that my liberal friends still would be euphoric over Obama's victory and exulting in his commitment to press forward on an ambitious domestic agenda on education, energy, and health care, even in the face of the current economic turmoil. My guess is that their anger is the tip of some iceberg and I wonder what is under the surface.

I have two theories The first was triggered by a conversation with my wife, Lynn Staley, and an e-mail from my friend Z.from Toronto. Perhaps my correspondents are disappointed in Obama, because he has not lived up to all the expectations they put on him. They cannot acknowledge that he is human after all, and they will not criticize him for fear that they will further undermine his popular support. So they have focused their frustration on the old familiar targets: Rush Limbaugh, W, Dick Cheney, and their fellow travelers.

But it was inevitable that Obama would let people down. They put him on the pedestal with many mutually exclusive expectations. They assumed naively that the Congress would stop being representative and would fall in line.

This explanation fits well with my favorite definition of leadership: leadership is about disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb. See, for example, Obama on Afghanistan, as a specific case in point.

A second and related idea is that people are anxious and worried about their own futures, their shrinking retirement accounts, their job loss, their depleted available cash supply, and the general uncertainty that we all face, and have focused their anxiety on those same old and easy targets.

Of course, those on the right have the same personal worries, but they have an easier target in Obama and his Administration, and then there's the Congress, the historical target of choice for anyone, any time.

There is nothing wrong with anger. It is a normal human emotion. Question, of course, is what to do with it. Sudhir Venkatesh's provocative op-ed in the Sunday New York Times News of the Week in Review suggested that the the populist rage has not been more focused, constructively or destructively, because we angry people are also embarrassed about our contributions to the mess, our years of overextending our debt and consumption.

So what would constructive harnessing of our anger look like? On the left, it is about supporting Obama, realizing that he is only human, that he is trying lots of experiments and that he and Geithner are only guessing, and then hoping that he will have the courage to keep trying different approaches until he gets it right. Be patient. Give him time. Forget wanting to be able to say "I told you so," a la Paul Krugman as seen on ABC's Sunday news program. With friends like Krugman in an economy that depends for its recovery on a psychological confidence, who needs enemies?

For Republicans, it is about creating and pushing alternatives, and holding Obama's feet to the fire, not calling him names and, worst of all, not hoping he fails. For a look at what that might mean substantively, read Carlos Watson's clever take-off on the AIG resignation letter published on the Huffington Post imagining Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's resignation letter to the Republican Party or Hendrik Hertzberg's essay advocating temporarily suspending payroll taxes (a tax cut!) in a recent Talk of the Town piece in the New Yorker.

Look, I love politics. I am a junkie. But this is no time for politics as we know it. We are in a moment of fundamental change and opportunity. Take that anger and that anxiety and channel it into activity that will help change yourself and change the world.

Barack and Harvey: Hands on the Thermostat

I just saw "Milk". Pretty good movie, I thought. But also a pretty good leadership lesson.

The good news is that for the most part, in the movie at least, Harvey Milk was able to get off the dance floor and onto the balcony, take a distanced view, and realize that the movement was not about him, but about gay rights, the value that he represented and cared about. The bad news is that in the movie, at two crucial moments he was too anchored on the dance floor and lost that perspective.

People who are out in front, like Harvey Milk thirty-one years ago, or Barack Obama today, with constituents and followers, are expected to regulate the temperature in the system and in a position to do so, as if they had a hand on the thermostat.

Of course, when you are in that role, you are never acting completely autonomously. In organizational life, your most ardent supporters usually want you to turn the heat down, keep things calm. In social movement life, your most ardent supporters usually want you to turn the heat up, on others, of course. And often, in both cases, what is required is just the opposite.

Having the expectation on you that you will control the heat is a great resource for exercising leadership. You need to know when to turn it up in order to put enough pressure into the system to get people to face up to difficult realities they would just as soon avoid, and when to turn it down because the pressure cooker you have created is about to blow up.

That's what Obama is dealing with right now, and what the movie portrays Harvey Milk having dealt with in the 1970s.

Here's where in the movie Milk failed to get on the balcony and therefore misread how close he was to blowing up the system. First, his fellow San Francisco supervisor (and soon after his assassin), Dan White, confronted him about feeling humiliated by being the lone vote against the gay rights ordinance. White represented all those people who felt at sea because the world they knew was passing them by, but Milk didn't need them to pass his ordinance so he was deaf to their concerns. Then, soon after, there is a scene where Mayor George Moscone told Milk he wanted to re-appoint White to the Board and Milk threatened Moscone with political retaliation. Moscone represented all those people, including many who agreed with Milk and, as suggested by the film, many policemen, but who did not want to see the other side humiliated.

Shortly after Moscone told White that he would not be re-appointed, White assassinated both Milk and Moscone. The system blew.

Last week, Obama faced rising populist anger and frustration. I received four e-mails from friends, left of center Democrats, full of fury, disproportionate particularly considering they had helped elect an African-American President who was trying to advance a domestic agenda they supported. I think that their fury at the bonus babies and the conservative commentators was a reflection of their frustration with Obama himself, not at his policies, but with his unwillingness to share and mirror their rage, to take revenge on the hated Bushies, and to respond viscerally to the injustices in the current situation.

Obama's uncharacteristic response last week, showing a flash of anger whether he felt it or not, and in spite of the reality that his Administration had more or less already signed off on the bonuses, was a way of calming down his own constituents, who were screaming for blood, before they did something foolish and undermined the whole mission. By railing against the bonus babies, he raised the heat, pacifying his angry constituents who were lusting for revenge and buying some time to address the substantive issues. The downside, of course, is that he legitimized and exacerbated the public humiliation of all the people who worked at AIG and other financial firms, whatever their role in the reckless risk-taking, and accelerated Congress' tendency to be easily diverted from the more troubling issues and tough choices around how to get out of this mess and focus on the outrage of the day. Not surprising that he has backed off from supporting the Congressional proposals which responded to his public anger.

Controlling the heat, keeping the temperature in a productive range, is an important tool of leadership for you as well as for Obama. My sense of Obama is that he understands the tool, but is not predisposed to use it. His coolness under fire has become, and maybe always was, part of his self-identity, and like any of one's own special gifts, it is also a vulnerability.

My sense is that this experience will reinforce his tendency default to his cerebral reflexes and he will have trouble in the future recognizing when to raise the heat when that is what is needed. I hope I'm wrong. Otherwise, he will never get us to face the trough choices we have to make to reset the system rather than live in the illusion that we can restore it to the status quo.

Reset Reading

I was disappointed to read David Brooks column this morning. The usually cool-headed centrist seems to have lost it, ranting about Obama's "transformational liberalism".

Brooks is right that The President has not chosen between his long term domestic priorities and the need to stimulate the economic recovery now. Obama is placing a big bet that the recovery will happen soon enough and steeply enough so that he can have his cake and eat it, too.

If he's wrong, policywise he will have to raise taxes on the middle class, postpone his domestic initiatives, or some of both. And politically, he is risking a Republican resurgence in the off-year elections of 2010 (see Clinton in 1994) and a one-term Presidency a la Jimmy Carter.

But Brooks falls into the trap of trying to understand Obama in conventional 20th Century liberal/conservative terms, when those labels now obscure more than they clarify.

There is the possibility that Obama's transformational politics do not fit into that old paradigm at all, that we are in a period of transformation, yes, but part of that transformation is that the rules of the game have changed on almost every dimension. Maybe Obama is just trying to catch up with what is happening in the world, rather than being out in front of it. Maybe he is just practicing Reset.

I have read two books recently (on my Kindle, which has changed my life, the Kindle not the books, but more on that at another time), which are Reset books: Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World and Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.

Zakaria posits a world in which the US is no longer the hegemonic power. As he says, "The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States." As an example of the consequences, see Obama's letter to Russia trying to make a deal to enlist Russia in the effort to control Iran. And see Hillary Clinton transparently sending two enjoys to Syria Obama understands Reset. Zakaria blogs with David Ignatius on the Newsweek/Washington Post's PostGlobal.

Pollan writes about taking responsibility for what we put into our bodies, with the interrelated goals of taking care of ourselves, saving the planet, and pressuring the food industry to a higher standard of quality, transparency, and scientific credibility. But what is exciting about Pollan's Reset, is that you and I can start our own version today. If each of us started insisting on eating only -or even mostly- what Pallan calls "real food" (locally grown, in season, unadulterated by chemicals) it would not be long before the food industry would start responding.

Here's an example of what Pollan is talking about. A good friend and former colleague, Karen Lehman, runs Chicago's Fresh Taste Initiative, a non-profit organization that fosters collaboration between farmers, for-profit entities and government agencies to bring fresh, sustainable products to consumers’ tables, along the lines of the “farm-to-table” movement that’s been taking off in the last couple years. It is Reset in action.

Pollan's blog through the New York Times is called On The Table.

What's your favorite Reset idea of the day? Send it to me.

I'd love to report these ideas in the blog as we collective try to understand how to actualize the idea of Reset in the real world. Post it as a comment on the blog, on Facebook or twitter, or send me an e-mail at marty@cambridge-leadership.com.

My favorite today? Courtesy of Lynn Staley, my wife: Doctors in Maine are being trained as dentists to address the scarcity in rural parts of the state.

And again, since Reset is a leadership idea, check out the Washington Post blog On Leadership as well. This week's question was whether Obama's refusal to spell out the details of a health care plan and force the Congress to do that work was an exercise of leadership or an abdication of responsibility. What do you think?

Obama, You and the Paradox of Leadership

Tuesday night Obama walked carefully along the razor's edge of leadership: trying to be both realistic and optimistic. It's a tough balancing act.

If the current and near term reality is pretty bad, reminding us of that is a downer. But if turning that around requires that we have faith and believe in the future, Obama has to be brimming with optimism. Many of the commentaries this morning tried to put him in one camp or the other, either praising (mostly) or criticizing (very few that I could find, except from the most predictable voices) his optimism or realism.

Done well, the optimism prevents the realism from becoming cynical. And the realism prevents the optimism from becoming naive.

It is a challenge many senior authorities are facing right now. How much bad news can I deliver to my people without being dismissed as The Prince of Darkness? How optimistic can I be if I am not sure myself that everything eventually will be ok or that I even know what ok will look like in the future?

To me, it sounded as if Obama decided, and rightly so, that what David Brooks and other commentators have been saying about the current condition is right: this is a psychological issue as much as it is a policy issue. The stimulus plan, the bank and auto bailouts, the mortgage relief program and all the rest will not break the economic gridlock (see what has happened, or not happened, so far)until you and I have confidence that things will get better, that in every way we stop selling short and make consumption and investment bets on the future.

Having sound policy is relevant but not controlling.

Another leadership skill in periods of uncertainty and chaos is buying time. The wolves are at the door, maybe even calling for your head, and you know that it is going to take time to turn the situation around. Throwing the wolves some red meat can be effective in calming them down.

Obama did that last night. He said that we should not make policy out of anger, but then he said he was angry at all those fat cats and their fancy trips, bonuses and jet planes and that none of that bad stuff would happen any more on his watch...or on our dime. Eliminating corporate jets or bonuses is not going to solve anything, but it might buy Obama some time by temporarily relieving some populist frustration and anger. Didn't it make you feel good that Obama said he was going to get those bad guys, just like it felt good when George W. Bush said that he was going to get those bad guys who perpetrated 9/11?

In Praise of Selfishness - Part II

Besides taking care of yourself, leadership requires selfishness in another, very different way. You have to believe in what you are doing, totally committed to your purpose, absorbed by it, willing to sacrifice other important, but not as important purposes in its behalf. It is easy to confuse unappealing over-weaning ego or sheer stubbornness with the confidence and commitment that is necessary to exercise leadership and mobilize people to face up to difficult issues. But if you are not steadfast in this way, you will be easily discouraged by the resistance that you will generate and you will undermine your capacity for mobilizing others, once they sense your own ambivalence.

When we talk about commitment to purpose in our consulting and teaching, some self-effacing folks will often ask, "How can I be so sure that I am right?" or "Why is my Purpose more important than anyone else's purpose?

Our response suggests the great paradox of leadership. One the one hand, you need to be totally committed. On the other hand, and at the same time, you need to be open to the possibility that you are dead wrong. Holding two inconsistent ideas in your head at the same time is not easy. For example there was nothing wrong in itself about former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's belief that a small fighting force could over throw Saddam and manage the transition in Iraq. He got the total commitment part right. But he failed to be open to the possibility that he was wrong, which he surely was.

There will be tremendous pressures on Barak Obama to display confidence, if not certainty, that his economic stimulus plan will do the trick. If he does not appear to believe in it fully, and actually believe in it fully, no one else will. But if he fails to retain his skepticism, he is likely to miss early warning signals and contraray data that will suggest the need for mid-course corrections.

In Praise of Selfishness as a Leadership Behavior - Part I

On the many friends and acquaintances who have been cut down by cancer, three good friends, two women and a man, stand out because they died fairly close in time to one another, relatively young, and sharing a way of being in the world which is pretty uncommon in my experience.

They were totally other-directed. Their satisfaction and gratification in life stemmed from the pleasure they brought to the lives of others, not to themselves. They were each known as a "people-person" with a wide network of friends and associates who they valued more than they valued themselves. They shunned attention and credit and found joy in the success of people they helped. They are the kind of folks Harold Kushner wrote about in his classic book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. They were Good People. I am well aware that a sample of three is evidence of nothing at all, but in my grieving after the third death I began to wonder whether there is a connection.

These thoughts came back to me yesterday when I read Samuel Freedman's weekly column in the New York Times on the systematic health problems of Methodist pastors.

People, like clergy, who are unusually other-directed have a difficult time taking care of themselves. And they have a difficult time letting anyone else take care of them. They are much better at giving than receiving. But for most people life is not always easy. And, for people exercising leadership, life is fraught with difficulty and danger. Living that way takes a toll physically, emotionally and mentally.

And in our work with people trying to exercise leadership all over the globe and in all kinds of situations, we often find that they have a hard time paying enough attention to their own basic needs.

Think of this continuum. At one end are people who see the world and live their lives only through their own lenses and are incapable or unwilling to see how it looks to anyone else. You tell them a story and their response is to tell you one about themselves. They are the center of the universe and the rest of the world revolves around them. Next are people who are focused primarily on meeting their own wants. Their satisfaction in life comes from satisfying their desires. They often conflate - or confuse - needs and wants and justify their acquisitions or their indulgences in the language of necessity rather than desire. If we think of those in category one as The Self-Absorbs, we think of these folks as The Merely Selfish. They think of themselves first, but not all the time. Neither of these folks think very much about trying to exercise leadership on behalf of a purpose that goes beyond their own individual aggrandizement.

Then there are people who are just self-absorbed enough to make taking care of themselves a high priority, even though they spend a lot of time and energy in the service of others. They try to exercise leadership, and take risks in doing so, but not without allocating time and resources to anchoring and preparing themselves physically, emotionally, and mentally. They are The Self-Carers.

Finally, there are those on the far end, like my three dear friends, who treat taking care of themselves as diversionary self-indulgence, taking them away from their purpose in life, rather than preparing them for longevity and sustainability. They are The Selfless.

Being selfless is no virtue. It gives away power to others who can make your life satisfying or not without you having a say. It forces you to suppress your normal human needs for affection, recognition, and identity. And it often results in your neglecting to take care of yourself in more mundane ways: eating well, getting enough sleep, and exercise.

In this vein, I was struck by the criticism of President-elect Obama for taking a family vacation at a plush house in Hawaii. Ridiculous. He is about to begin the world's most difficult job at an unusually challenging moment in history. I want him to be as rested as he can, as physically fit as possible, and as connected to his family as he has ever been before he takes on the really tough issues that lie ahead. And we all remember how Bill Clinton worked and partied to the point of exhaustion in the period between his election and his first few months in office, and the many missteps he made during that time.

When you are exercising leadership, trying to help people deal with difficult issues, being selfish enough to meet your own physical and emotional needs, to prepare yourself to operate well under stress, to be able to withstand the criticism and push back you will receive, is a noble effort. If you, or Barak Obama, scrimps on that work, you are likely to make mistakes and misjudgments in your leadership initiatives as well.

Obama is already delivering losses

My favorite definition of leadership, the one I am really addicted to, is that leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb. One of Obama's most attractive traits is that he has the capacity to stand back and see what is happening while he is in the midst of the action. He appears to be able to reflect in real time, unlike many people in public life who are so caught up in their public personae that they find it difficult to reflect at all, never mind while the action is still going on. So he understands and has acknowledged that he will not, can not, meet the multiple and grandiose expectations that we have placed on him. The process of "disappointing his own people" has already begun. I was on the phone yesterday with a colleague from Dubai, a Palestinian who teaches in and runs executive programs at the Dubai School of Government. He said that the headlines in every newspaper in the Gulf were about the fact that the father of Rahm Emmanuel, Obama's While House chief-of-staff to be, is an Israeli citizen. So much, they were saying, for an evenhanded US Middle East policy. Right or wrong, and my guess is that they are wrong and that my worried Zionist friends have reason for concern, they were expressing their disappointment with Obama based on their expectations, whether or not Obama himself had colluded in their fantasies. This is just a taste of what is to come. There will be disappointments delivered in other staff appointments and Cabinet positions, people and factions who will be denied what they think is their due. And there will be policy disappointments as well, as events, both in the economy and internationally will interrupt the pre-election plans for the post-election period. But in both of these realms, the hyperbolic expectations also provide Obama an opportunity for leadership. Because people all over the world as well as his supporters in the US are so invested in his success, he will have a window to try some experiments in the first six months or year or so that would not be available to most politicians. For him, the challenge will be how to use that precious political capital he has accumulated, but will start to atrophy if he does not expend it. He will need to choose wisely, and never to assume that because he is President and that so many people want him to succeed, that anything really important will be easy. Clinton made both mistakes, choosing unwisely and then not doing the necessary work. Instead of taking a smart risk smartly, he took a stupid risk stupidly when he used his political capital, such as it was given that he was elected with less than 50% of the vote, on gays in the military, an important issue to be sure, but not one that should have tackled first when the nation was facing a need for deep change in health care, education and welfare. By making that his first big initiative, and losing it because he never did the hard work of laying the foundation for it, he blew the opportunity to make real progress on his next initiative, health care. Hope that Obama takes his early risks on something at the top of his priority list and that he does so knowing that no important change will be easy to effect.

Obama and the race vote.....

Big conversation topic these days among my liberal friends is about what "those people" will do when they get into the privacy of the voting booth and no one else will know if they cannot vote for an African-American for President. I became a Republican in college because I thought my liberal Democratic friends were the least tolerant people I had ever met. They had no confidence in the voters. They thought they knew better what was good for people than the people knew for themselves and if only they and their kin were in charge, the world would be ok. So now they worry that the "hidden racist vote", not surfaced in the polls, will elect John McCain. I beg to differ. I have felt for over a year now that Barak Obama will win going away, ten points at least, 55-45 in the popular vote. People want to feel good about themselves when they leave the voting booth, and people will not want to feel as if they stood in the way of telling the world that this country was willing to elect an African-American to the Presidency. Those liberals who worry about the hidden racist vote would be better worrying about their own self-righteousness. The not-trusting-voters syndrome was at play on both the left and the right in the bailout vote fiasco yesterday. Those naysayers were unwilling either to stand up to uninformed and understandably anxious popular opinion, nor were they willing to try to educate their constituents. So they took the easy route and voted no. Safe and,I hope, sorry, they will be.

Leadership on the economy? Candidates? Fahgeddaboutit...

Ok. We are in free fall. Everyone I know that "knows" anything says it is going to get worse before it gets better, but no one, no one, knows what to do now. Don't look to McCain or Obama. They are in the business of getting elected not demonstrating leadership. Getting elected is the purest form of pandering in a democratic society. Here's what it looks like: finding scapegoats, like McCain suggesting Christopher Cox should be fired or blaming Wall Street executives; delivering good news that people want to hear rather than bad news that they need to hear, like Obama telling those folks who took out mortgages they couldn't afford that they should be bailed out, too. Watch them closely in the Senate. See if either of them is willing to do anything that is good for the country that will risk even one vote that they think they need to win....