tl;dr

There is a fundamental problem with leadership in the USA. They don’t seem to exist. The supposed national leaders like Trump and Musk aren’t. They destroy in the name of greed and corruption. They pose as leaders. Our supposed leaders aren’t honest or direct with people. In their own way, all of them lie to us. It is time to have leaders who deal with objective reality and fix problems. People are hungry for real leaders, and current events will only fuel that hunger.

“The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly.” ― Jim Rohn

The Problem

I had an entirely different topic teed up for the week. I was thinking about the balance between nostalgia and progress. Then the week happened. I needed to address the rampaging elephant in the room. We have a “leader” who is destroying our Nation through an avalanche of stupidity, raw power, and greed. On the other hand, I was locally offered an example of how current leadership fails. We get more toxic positivity and failure to directly address reality. Instead, we get a filter where only positive things are spoken openly.

“He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader.” ― Aristotle

I always worry when I’m writing from the heart and my heart is angry. I am definitely angry these days. This anger comes from the event we all see unfolding in the news. Trump and Musk are trampling the Constitution with impunity. The USA may not be a democracy in weeks if it still is. Our government is being fed into the chipper shredder. Cruelty, stupidity, ignorance, and incompetence are on display almost beyond bounds. I am also angry at the impotence of the Democrats in the face of this. I am angry at the cowardice and meekness of my work leaders. How anyone with a working brain can see business as usual today is beyond imagination. Yet, this is what I see. Work is just business as usual while a Category 5 Political-Hurricane is making landfall. Disaster and catastrophe are upon us.

It is very clear that most voters are fed up with the Nation’s direction. A clear majority thinks things are broken. I am among them. The whole secret to Trump’s success is that he is different. To many he seems strong and challenges all our norms. This is less about Trump’s qualities than the failures of existing leadership. Enough voters simply ignored his legion of faults and put him in charge. They ignored his endless lies and corruption along with a lifetime of criminal behavior. The reason they did this is a scathing indictment of our pathetic leadership class. A reality TV show star is seen as being better.

“Never confuse movement with action.” ― Ernest Hemingway

The Problem Up Close

“Failure doesn’t define you. It’s what you do after you fail that determines whether you are a leader or a waste of perfectly good air.” ― Sabaa Tahir

I got to see another example of how pathetic our institution’s leaders are recently. We had a great internal workshop that brought together one of our big programs. It was great to see the work and all the people. The program has many wonderful, smart, and talented people. The problem is that our leadership is pretty standard these days. Therefore they are shitty and weak. There is little honesty or courage to be seen. It mirrors all the issues responsible for putting Trump in office. It is worth taking a look at why. Once the carnage that Trump and Musk transpires we might get to rebuild something to be proud of. That is if we have leaders worth a shit.

Why is the leadership so shitty? One way of pointing to it is a habit of practicing toxic positivity. Basically, profound and obvious problems are simply ignored in public. The public face is unremittingly positive and any voice that speaks reality is refuted. You cannot talk about problems openly. If you do, you are criticized. The end result is a lack of credibility for the leadership. Whenever they talk about something you really know about, you see the lies. You see the omissions of problems. If you know the ground truth, the gaps with reality are vast. I remember talking to someone at a class I took who told me a story. They had an all-hands meeting where a certain program was lauded. In the afternoon that program was cancelled. Management credibility was too.

They are bullshitting people or they aren’t competent enough to see actual problems. I’m not sure what is worse?

I asked a specific question about an important topic, artificial intelligence. I pointed out that security issues have undermined all the greatest breakthroughs in information technology locally. Search is the primal example from the late 90’s. When Google came out and introduced it, their search was an epiphany. The internet opened up and became something magical. Conversely, our internal search sucks. It sucks because it can’t see the data that would make it work well. We’ve also blown the benefits of smartphones and social media. I wondered “Are we going to blow it with AI too?” It is a reasonable question. Given their track record, we should assume they will fuck this up too. They will certainly fuck this up if they don’t admit the faults of the past.

Yes, I politely asked this without any expletives. I’ll note in passing that this is another way Trump’s norm-breaking signals that he’s different.

Our leader’s response was “Well that was harsh”.

It’s amazing how incapable of taking any critique they are. If they were actual leaders this wouldn’t happen. Rather than welcome someone being honest and direct, they deflect. These “leaders” are more interested in making everything sound good and in control. This was followed by the usual chickenshit bullshit answer too. They’re always on top of things, yet things never get fixed. So, it was another plea for new leadership. It is another reason to think they’ll never make things better. In summary, these attitudes render capable people completely incompetent and unfit to lead. Our culture is prizing toxic positivity, and the comfort of institutions over actual leadership.

Suddenly, I looked at what was happening to the Nation and it became clear. The absolute failure of our usual leaders paved the way for our budding dictatorship. It is on the verge of triggering a Constitutional crisis that will end the USA as a functioning democracy. All because our leaders won’t lead and won’t deal with a reality teeming with problems.

The Solution is a Bigger Problem

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw

Because we have lived with these pathetic leaders for decades, we now sit at the edge of catastrophe. For years people have increasingly hungered for change and actual leaders. This has laid the groundwork for the horrible choice Americans made recently. People are so hungry for leadership that they chose a fake reality show CEO as President. Worse yet, someone devoid of deep ideas with an endless appetite for corruption, law-breaking, and cruelty. Instead of finding brave competent leaders who set an example and solve problems, we have the opposite. The cure is almost certain to be worse. We sit at the precipice of a catastrophe that may effectively destroy a nation.

This seems to be the desire for action and movement of any sort. Most of the leaders today simply cannot deal with the balance between good and bad news. Their collective approach of highlighting the good while ignoring the bad has fueled a slow steady decline. Problems are allowed to fester and grow without relief year after year. In my own institutions, I have witnessed the constant erosion year after year. People across the country see the same as a slow decline. We see the decline in our institutions and feel a growing malaise. It is this feeling and lack of action by traditional leaders that has brought us to the brink of disaster. It has become a habit and is accepted without complaint.

We have the problem of growing inequality and our leadership is drawn from those benefiting from it. They do not feel the weight of our collective problems. Their world is different from those they lead. The additional complication is that fixing things is really hard. The status quo is easy. Destroying things is also very easy. Since lazy greedy people have been in charge they take the easy route. The new easy route is destruction. Destruction is what we are going to get. For many Americans this destruction is going to look like action. This action will ultimately meet reality and that reality is going to be brutal.

Americans are well-to-do and generally prosperous. A big component of this is delivered by the stability of the governance. Without this stability we will start to see economic shocks and prosperity will begin to suffer. The tech base of the country is driven by science funded by the government. This is true of our computer-based tech and medical treatments. Without stability, the economic engines created will start to unravel. Without the government and stable infrastructure, the economy will begin to sputter. National security and defense provide safety and protection. This will begin to crumble too. All of this will begin to hurt people and support for the destruction will end. The better option would be to address problems carefully keeping stability and safety intact while fixes are pursued.

Reality-Based Leadership

What is the change in leadership needed?

We need leadership that deals squarely with objective reality. They need to stop thinking that they can wish cast reality into existence. Instead, they should step up and confront reality and challenge us to fix problems directly. This is the change we need. People are sick and tired of leaders who try to message success and the reality they want. Leaders should be honest and direct asking people to do the hard work and sacrifices to implement genuine repairs. For too long our leaders have pretended that things can fixed easily with minimal effort.

These leaders are rejected by institutions. They challenge the status quo and produce discomfort. For too long this has been rejected as unacceptable. Instead, the institutions should adopt a spirit of continuous improvement. Do not rest on past accomplishments, but seek new advances. If we were always seeking to be better, we might have avoided today’s crisis. Ultimately the thing missing is the sense of progress. The stagnation and decline are the seeds of destruction now being harvested. We need to have the opposite. If people know that things are being fixed and improvement is afoot they will go with that. Ignoring reality and wish casting success is not the path to stability.

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” ― Peter Drucker