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Category: Rockefeller Center

Published on Leave a comment on The Leadership Implications of “Too Big To Fail”

This month, The New York Times in Leadership will be featuring a short post from me with some reflections on what we have learned about leadership in the six years since the onset of the financial crisis. It is based on a session I have done a couple of times for the Rockefeller Leadership Fellows program at Dartmouth. Here's the conclusion:

Ironically, the leadership lesson of “Too Big to Fail” is that we must lead proactively before a crisis so that leaders can remain comfortably on the sidelines when a large financial institution works its way into trouble.

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Published on Leave a comment on Some Pre-Election Pessimism

From yours truly, in this term's Rockefeller Center newsletter.  Key quote:

The propensity toward gridlock is a risk in any system with direct election of the President.  However, in the United States, this propensity is exacerbated by the low regard and low expectations we have for the Congress.  We seldom reward legislators with a promotion to the White House.  In the postwar period, for example, only John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama have been elected President directly from the Senate.  Quite the contrary, the American public tends to reward governors who make a bid for the White House, particularly when they run as Washington outsiders.  The elections of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush were all based to varying degrees on this strategy.  

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Published on Leave a comment on How Will Occupy Wall Street Become a Political Movement?

In my latest Direct Line column for the Rockefeller Center, I draw some parallels between the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and then consider the question posed in the title of this post.

As it transitions from a popular movement to a political movement, I will be most interested in how true the Occupy Wall Street movement can stay to its founding principles articulated above.  I see two particular challenges.  First, given the prominence of the “major banks and multinational corporations” that wield the “corrosive power over the democratic process” in our political system, I am curious to see what candidates the movement can draft.  Few incumbents have the purity demanded – look for challengers and outsiders to carry the Occupy Wall Street movement’s message into the political realm.  Second, the Occupy Wall Street movement has defined itself in part based on inequality – the 99% versus the 1% -- and in part based on injustice – the use of one’s current elite position to distort the political system into maintaining that elite position at the expense of those who don’t have it.  Not all inequality is due to injustice, and not all injustice is the result of the most fortunate 1% exerting undue influence.  Making those distinctions clear to the American public will be important if the Occupy Wall Street movement is to build a coalition large enough to gain control of political institutions.

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