The Leaders We Need, And What Makes Us Follow Read online

  9 Jay Greene and William C. Symonds, “Gates Gets Schooled,” BusinessWeek, June 26, 2006.

  10 http://www.KIPP.org. Steven F. Wilson of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government evaluates the charter schools in Learning on the Job (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). As of 2005, there were 240,000 students in 535 charter schools, far fewer than the over one million who are home schooled. However, some KIPP schools are public schools, contracted with school districts. Examples are Tulsa, Oklahoma; Oakland, California; and Memphis, Tennessee.

  11 The main funding for the KIPP Foundation has come from Donald and Doris Fisher, cofounders of Gap, Inc. They have worked closely with the KIPP founders to create a national organization.

  12 “Seeking Success with Students,” American Educator (Summer 2006): 7.

  13 Spherion’s 2003 Workplace Study, http://www.spherion.com.

  14 Wilson, Learning on the Job, 12.

  15 Personal communication, July 13, 2006.

  16 Ravitch writes, “We need independent teachers unions to protect teachers’ rights, to sound the alarm against unwise policies, and to advocate on behalf of sound education policies.” Diane Ravitch, “Why Teacher Unions Are Good for Teachers,” American Educator (Winter 2006–2007), 8.

  17 These statistics were provided by the superintendent, Dr. Gary Smuts.

  18 For a description of my work with AT&T and CWA, see Charles Heckcher et al., Agents of Change Crossing the Post-Industrial Divide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

  19 A different kind of union response to the challenge of charter schools is a UFT Charter School in Brooklyn. In contrast to KIPP’s emphasis on strong leadership, the UFT school emphasizes teacher participation in decision making on curriculum, discipline, and staffing. Rita Davis, who would be called a principal in other schools, holds the title of instructional leader. This elementary school, which serves 150 students in a middle-to-low-income Brooklyn neighborhood, makes parental involvement and student discipline operating principles. The seventeen teachers are enthusiastic, but they’ve only been in business for a year, and it’s too early to evaluate the results of this model, which deemphasizes the role of the leader,

  20 http://www.nphi.org.

  21 At the beginning Father Wasson had the policy of only accepting children whose mothers were no longer alive. He reasoned that if she were alive, the children would never feel fully part of the new family. Also, she might come to claim them. The tie to the father, especially in Latin America, is weaker. In fact, we have found that when the mother is alive, the children usually do want to be reunited with her.

  22 Dr. Paul Farmer is another noted medical leader in Haiti. While still a student at Harvard Medical School, he founded Zanmi Lastane, a clinic in the central plateau, where he showed that health could be improved with clean water and by training villagers to treat their neighbors. In Haiti, however, the limits to success aren’t a matter of health and education but are imposed by poverty, violence, and the lack of jobs. That’s why Father Rick Frechette is now trying to establish businesses for the NPFS graduates. Their future depends not only on their formal education but also developing entrepreneurial skills and finding the resources to get started.

  Chapter 9

  1 Donald Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 9.

  2 Norman R. Augustine, chair of the National Academies committee that produced the report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing American for a Brighter Economic Future writes that “between 50 and 85 percent of the growth in America’s per capita over the last half century is attributable to science and technology, much of it having roots in basic research performed either by the government’s funding or by the government itself ”; “Competitiveness: Late but Not Too Late,” Research Technology Management (January–February 2007): 9.

  3 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 281, 283.

  4 Quoted in Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 80, 82.

  5 They all share a family constellation common to male narcissists: a weak, failed, disliked, or absent father and a powerful and supportive mother. This explains the absence of the strong superego, produced by internalized identification with the father, which is found in the obsessive type.

  6 Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

  7 Cited by Newt Gingrich in “Transformational Leadership,” The James E. Webb Lecture, November 21, 2003, Washington, DC.

  8 Thomas W. Evans, The Education of Ronald Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

  9 This took place at Villa Miani on May 20, 2006.

  10 This is described by David Frum in The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (New York: Random House, 2003).

  11 Michiko Kakutani, “Critic’s Notebook: All the President’s Books,” New York Times, May 11, 2006.

  12 CNN Late Edition, November 19, 2006.

  13 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Anchor Books, 1969).

  14 Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart, 1941).

  15 “The Real War,” Time, December 25, 2006–January 1, 2007, 162.

  16 Unlike psychiatrist Justin A. Frank (Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President [New York: HarperCollins, 2004]), I don’t try to get into Bush’s head. Rather, my personality diagnosis interprets patterns that anyone can see. However, based on Bush’s history, I have speculated that he has strong erotic or loving tendencies and that he defends himself from feeling soft and vulnerable by assuming an aggressive, macho attitude. This pattern is common among alcoholics. Bush recovered from his addiction admirably, helped by a combination of religion and a strong, loving wife. Like many marketing types, he suffered from a lack of a spiritual center until he found it in religion.

  17 Washington Post/ABC News Poll, “On Shaky Ground,” Washington Post, January 23, 2007.

  18 Michael Maccoby, Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007).

  19 David Rennick, “The Wanderer,” The New Yorker, September 18, 2006, 65.

  20 See Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2006).

  Chapter 10

  1 My adaptation; from Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, XVII, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Penguin Books, 1963).

  2 Gale Cutler, “Mike Leads His First Virtual Team,” Research Technology Management (January–February 2007): 67.

  3 However, in the Mexican village Fromm and I studied there were three types of social character: descendants of free farmers,descendants of hacienda peons, and the small group of entrepreneurs.

  4 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1995).

  5 Missing from descriptions of EI is a quality I do find in some narcissists who are neither particularly empathic nor self-aware. That’s a sense of humor, the emotional equivalent of a cognitive sense of reality. Life is often absurd and, as noted in chapter 9, some of the most effective leaders bring people down to earth, defuse tense situations, even puncture their own self-importance with humor. We should be wary of humorless would-be leaders. They tend to be the rigid ideologues or holier-than-thou moralists.

  6 Some questionnaires probe for behavioral strengths. The questionnaire I designed is based on psychoanalytic types, dynamic styles of relatedness which underlie both strengths and weaknesses. See Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Now DiscoverYour Strengths (New York: The Free Press, 2001); and Michael Maccoby, Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007), chapter 2.

  7 Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947), 27.

  8 1 Kings 3:5-15 (New English Bible).
/>   9 I first presented this discussion of head and heart in The Gamesman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), chapter 7.

  10 As a result of King Solomon’s asking God for a heart that listens, “all the world courted him, to hear the wisdom which God had put in his heart” (1 Kings 10:24 [New English Bible]).

  11 Recent research suggests females, more than males, are more observant of facial expressions and that this difference is hardwired in the brain. See Louann Brizandine, “The Female Brain,” New York Times, September 10, 2006.

  12 Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (New York: Times Books, 2003).

  13 Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (New York: Bantam Dell, 2006), 43.

  14 For a description of the difference between analytic, practical, and creative intelligence, see Robert J. Sternberg, The Triarchic Mind: A New Theory of Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1988); and Successful Intelligence: How Practical and Creative Intelligence Determine Success in Life (New York: Plume, 1997).

  15 Ann Louise Bardach, “Letters from Prison: Castro Revealed,” Washington Post, February 25, 2007, Outlook, 5.

  16 I first learned of this reading the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldûn, the 14th-century Moroccan philosopher and social historian (trans. Franz Rosenthal, Bollinger Series XLIII [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958]). I have taken off from his theory to develop my own interpretation of the discipline of the heart.

  17 Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005).

  18 Albert Schweitzer, Reverence for Life (New York: Philosophical Library, 1965), 34 and throughout the book.

  19 Maccoby, Narcissistic Leaders.

  20 They included: Richard Greene, Richard Margolies, Edith Onderick-Harvey, Mark Paulson, Mark Paulson Jr., and Gary Wolford.

  21 I first discovered this when I gave Rorschach tests to corporate managers for the study that became The Gamesman:The New Corporate Leaders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976). The systems thinkers saw ink blots as a whole, rather than as clearly distinct but unrelated parts. The most creative systems thinkers described action, a story about how the parts were interacting.

  22 See examples in Maccoby, Narcissistic Leaders.

  23 Honda is an exception with a culture that emphasizes cross-functional teamwork. Many of the attempts to copy the Toyota system have been partially successful at best, because the copiers have only focused on the economic and technical elements of the system and ignored the social and human element. See Michael Maccoby, “Is There a Best Way to Build a Car?” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1997, 161–171.

  Appendix

  1 Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950).

  2 See Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1964); Margaret Henning and Anne Jardim found that those women who succeeded in management in the 1970s were almost invariably close to their fathers (Margaret Henning and Anne Jardim, The Managerial Woman [New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1978]). The father-daughter transference often went both ways, as father-fixated women became the protégés of paternalistic bosses.

  3 Carol K. Sigelman and Elizabeth A. Rider, Life-Span Human Development, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Thomas-Wadsworth, 2003).

  4 “Employment Characteristics of Families in 2006,” BLS report, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.toc.htm

  5 Mauricio Cortina and Mario Marrone, eds., Attachment Theory and the Psychoanalytic Process (London: Whurr Publishers Ltd., 2003).

  6 Sigelman and Rider, Life-Span Human Development, 382. According to Department of Labor Statistics about 30 percent of infants of working mothers are cared for by their parents, 30 percent by a relative, 20 percent in family day-care homes (typically run by a woman in her own home), 10 percent in large day-care centers, and a small percentage with hired nannies.

  7 Mary Eberstadt, Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs and Other Parent Substitutes (New York: Sentinal, 2004).

  8 “Psychology at the Intersection of Work and Family,” American Psychologist 60, no. 5 (July–August 2003): 400.

  9 Judith Warner, “Kids Gone Wild,” New York Times, November 27, 2005.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Ibid.

  12 E. E. Maccoby, The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  13 Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (New York: The Free Press, 1965 (orig. Le Jugement Moral Chez l’Enfant [Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Editions Delachaux & Niestlé, 1932]).

  14 Sigelman and Rider, Life-Span Human Development, 382.

  15 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950).

  16 Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child.

  17 W. Michael Cox, Richard Alan, and Nigel Homes, “Where the Jobs Are,” NewYork Times, May 12, 2004. These knowledge worker jobs include financial service sales, recreation workers, nurses, lawyers, teachers and counselors, actors and directors, architects, designers, photographers, hair stylists and cosmetologists, legal assistants, medical scientists, and electronic engineers.

  18 Bradford C. Johnson, James M. Manyika, and Lareina A. Yee, “The Next Revolution in Interactions,” McKinsey Quarterly no. 4 (2005).

  19 Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

  20 Ibid.

  21 “The New School in Alternative Learning,” Financial Times. November 7, 2005, http://search.ft.com/nonFtArticle?id=051107000791.

  22 “Breeding Evil?” The Economist, August 4, 2005.

  23 An example was Devon Moore of Fayette, Alabama, a teenage minor who killed three policemen in a way that seemed to mimic what he did in the game. After his capture, Moore reportedly told the police, “Life is like a video game. Everybody’s got to die sometime.” However, Moore, who was brought up by various foster parents and was a poor student, had the risk factors that predict criminal behavior. 60 Minutes, March 6, 2005.

  24 Michael Maccoby, Narcissistic Leaders: Who Succeeds and Who Fails (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007).

  25 According to a survey of Washington, D.C., area teens, 60 percent of whites and 81 percent of African Americans say it’s likely that they’ll someday be rich. Richard Morin, “What Teens Really Think,” Washington Post Magazine, October 23, 2005.

  26 Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950).

  27 “One thing for sure,” writes Dylan, “if I wanted to compose folksongs I would need some kind of new template, some philosophical identity that wouldn’t burn out.” Bob Dylan, Chronicles, vol. 1 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 73.

  28 “Spirituality in Higher Education: A National Study of College Students’ Search for Meaning and Purpose (2004–2005),” www.spirituality.ucla.edu/reports.

  29 Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life:What on Earth Am I Here For? (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002).

  30 I have described these needs in Why Work? Motivating the New Workforce, 2nd ed. (Alexandria, VA: Miles River Press, 1995).

  31 Eric Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Bantam Books, 1963; orig. pub. 1956).

  32 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905; New York: Scribner, 1958), 182.

  33 Erik H. Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (New York: Norton, 1998), 114.