The Covid-19 crisis gives us an opportunity to think about a key aspect of leadership: how much can and should leaders rely on the input of experts to make decisions, and how much latitude should they retain for themselves to decide from a generalist perspective?[…]
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In an “always on”, digital age, the deadline – it so often seems – is now. Churchill famously called for “action this day”. Today’s demand is for “action this minute”. Why have you not replied to my email? Have you seen this tweet? What’s been happening to the S&P 500 in the last few minutes, or seconds?[…]
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The rats gave the first clue: they staggered onto the streets, emitted a drop of blood from their noses and died in droves. As their bodies piled up, newspapers agitated, and citizens complained – why was the sanitation department not removing them? The rodents were collected and cremated and the citizens returned to their preoccupation with working hard and getting rich.[…]
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After a hundred years, we are once again fighting a global viral war that is seemingly everywhere and ever voracious. As with the Spanish Flu pandemic, once again we’ve been found wanting in our response, and deficient in our leadership. What’s worked, social distancing and hand-washing, were relatively simple techniques born decades ago.[…]
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Crisis always shifts people’s attention abruptly to the quality of their leaders. We are seeing this now, as the appalling spread of the COVID-19 virus and the alarming collapse of economicactivity worldwide have people in all quarters looking to leaders for guidance—and often being left far from reassured by what they see.
Why do people give so much more attention to their anointed leaders in such moments?[…]
“People need leadership. Things need management.It is dangerous to get it the other way round.”– Charles HandyPeter Drucker, whose life spanned the twentieth century, labeled that time as the era of organizations and institutions. Ob-serving the dramatic rise of complex large-scale enterprises, he saw them as the new backbone of society and economy. As a consequence, he recognized the growing role of managers as fundamental to making these new legal, economic, social, and ultimately human constructs work[…]
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