Public ideas
Leadership
Most writings on “leadership” are based on the assumption that “the leader” is the person who occupies a designated position and exercises authority in an organization.
It’s a limiting assumption, because as Ronald Heifetz of Harvard’s Kennedy School points out, leadership and the exercise of authority are different. While authority is attached to a position (CEO, Head of School, Sergeant etc), leadership can be exercised from any position.
This distinction is illustrated in an article on the ABC website by retired Major General Mick Ryan: Leadership is Ukraine's secret ingredient in war with Russia.
Outside Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has no assigned authority, but in terms of mobilizing the governments of NATO and other countries (including Australia) to provide his country with material support he has exercised extraordinary leadership. Understanding that these governments could face domestic resistance to diverting resources to help Ukraine, he has paced that work carefully, and has helped governments and their citizens understand the nature of the challenge as a threat to the post-1945 world order.
The equally important work of exercising authority, Ryan explains, falls to Ukraine’s generals.
You can see Heifetz articulate his framework of adaptive leadership, where he makes the clear distinction between authority and leadership in a YouTube video Adaptive leadership in 12 minutes. Zelenskyy’s approach to his country’s challenge seems to have been right out of Heifetz’s textbooks.
“Conservatives” – all ready to combat a non-existent enemy
I was intrigued by the headline in an Atlantic article by Helen Lewis – Why so many conservatives feel like losers. Surely, when you consider the extraordinary success of far-right parties in Turkey, Hungary and India, and of centre-right parties in Japan, Sweden, the UK and Italy, you could hardly classify them as “losers”.
But Lewis’s point is that they feel like they are on the defensive in a war, where there is an omnipresent threat from an imagined “left”, determined to impose a woke order on society, determined to flood their countries with immigrants, determined to “cancel” those whose views do not align with the left’s narratives, and determined to pervert children’s minds about sexuality.
If only they knew just how conservative the so-called “left” social-democrat and labour parties really are, and how small and unrepresentative the “woke” movement is, they might start dealing with real issues in public policy.
Impunity
David Miliband, former UK Foreign Secretary and now president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, describes the present world situation, with a war in Ukraine, a flood of refugees and asylum seekers, climate change, and economic uncertainty, as a “polycrisis”. Different countries are dealing with this constellation of problems in different ways. Writing in Foreign Affairs – Crime and no punishment: how impunity fosters instability – he suggests that “impunity” is the most fitting indicator of countries’ capacity to deal with such problems. He writes
In thinking through the causes of and appropriate responses to the current polycrisis, debates about democracy versus autocracy, north versus south, and left versus right are not very helpful. Each crisis is complex, and its interaction with other crises is even more so. There is, though, one common denominator: imbalances of power that lead to abuses of power. Impunity, in other words, is the rising global danger.
He refers to the Atlas of Impunity which reports on five indicators of impunity -- conflict and violence, human rights abuse, unaccountable governance, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation. Why the last – environmental degradation? It’s about our responsibility to international treaties and standards, and to future generations.
Of the 163 countries assessed, the Nordic countries and Germany come in the top positions. Down the bottom are the usual suspects – Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Myanmar. Russia comes in at position 135 surrounded by a cluster of Middle East and African countries. Australia is at position 17, behind the UK, Japan and New Zealand.