G2 On Leadership
Fenty’s way vs. Obama’s
Although D.C. residents give Mayor Adrian M. Fenty high marks for improving schools and city services, he lost his battle for reelection because he is seen as having ignored the traditional political process. President Obama’s popularity is also suffering, but because his patient working of a broken congressional process has limited his accomplishments, diminished his stature and alienated his political base. How should leaders balance the often conflicting demands of achieving dramatic results and building consensus?
EZ EE
KLMNO George Reed, a retired U.S.
Army colonel, is an associate professor in the Department of Leadership Studies at the University of San Diego.
This situation highlights the need to consider
leadership as both art and science. The inertia of organizations and the internal preference for incremental change over revolutionary change is well noted.When fostering change from within an organization, onemust be careful to maintain pressure without provoking an allergic response fromthose who are powerfully invested in the current order. A friend ofmine serving in Iraq recently toldme of an Arab saying: “He who tells the truth should keep one foot in the stirrup.” Adept political leaders should constantly assess the amount of support they can garner and the amount of opposition they can tolerate. It would be just as foolhardy to say that taking the time to build support and consensus from within the systemis always the way to go as it would be to advocate exclusively for sweeping grass-roots change fromthe outside. The art is in discerning the existing pattern and injecting oneself into that pattern in the way that ismost likely to produce a desired outcome.
Slade Gorton, a former
U.S. senator andWashington state attorney general, served on the 9/11 Commission. A losing incumbentmay be able to console himself if all
along the way he championed what he was convinced was the right course, but he can hardly do so if he loses even after compromising his principles. It now appears that an abnormally large number of incumbents will have that opportunity in November.
John Baldoni is a
leadership consultant, coach and regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review online.
Leaders are agents of change. We change, as Harvard professor Rosabeth
Moss Kanter has taught us, only when it hurts toomuch not to change. It is leaders who leverage the points of pain
to get people tomove forward.When the lever is first applied, the weight of resistance is mighty, and so leadersmust do it alone. They are sometimes out in front with few people to follow them. Leaders, however, cannot get too far in front
of their organizations.Many times leaders do fail because they do not bring others along with them. Failure to create followership is sometimes rooted in hubris, the attitude of “my way or the highway” that causes executives to keep their own counsel. This is what ultimately provoked HP to oust
Carly Fiorina. She had worked hard against corporate headwinds for themerger with Compaq earlier this decade. Eventually, however, Fiorina’s headstrong demeanor rubbed raw against HP’s culture that valued collaboration and consensus. In contrast, former CEO AnneMulcahy of
Xerox leveraged the corporate culture to support her plans to reorganize her then- struggling company. As a Xerox lifer,Mulcahy worked with her teamto develop the right plan and then spentmuch of her time communicating to all employees. Leaders ultimately do what the organization
needs themto do. In tough times, thismeans that leaders are out front and pushing for changes that initially are unpopular. But with persistence, and with a slowly growing consensus of people who agree and have a stake in the new order, leaders turn goals into results.
Excerpts from On Leadership, a Web feature exploring vision and motivation by Steven Pearlstein and Raju Narisetti. To see videos and read the entire panel’s comments, go to
www.washingtonpost.com/leadership.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010 Kathryn Kolbert, a public-
interest lawyer and journalist, is director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College.
Unfortunately, the first rule of politics is to cater to your base. That is precisely why our political systemis in shambles. The two political parties are too concerned with playing to theirmost ardent supporters (the Republicans who are adamant that Obama is not a citizen or who think we should repeal the 14th Amendment, and their compatriots on the Democratic side who are perennially dissatisfied despitemonumental changes in health care and stiff new regulation ofWall Street). This crowd could use a private concert with the Partridge Family for a serenade of “Come On Get Happy.”
I long for the days when reasonable discussion and disagreement was possible. I never thought I’d be pushing for the election ofmoderate Republicans and Democrats, but in fact that is what we need: People who will stand up and be proud to compromise. Only then will we be able to create solutions to the complex global problems that face us.
THE COLOR OF MONEY
Did we really stop charging it? Or are banks writing it off?
singletary from G1
consecutive month that revolving consumer debt decreased. But as the saying goes, the
devil is in the details. And that’s quite an appropriate saying when you consider the financial havoc credit card debt can cause. Odysseas Papadimitriou, chief
executive and founder of
CardHub.com, a credit card comparisonWeb site, had his doubts that a significant percentage of consumers were actually paying down their credit cards. So he took the Federal Reserve
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data and ran the numbers a different way.He looked at how much credit card debt the banks were writing off their books. Turns out, he discovered, that a lot of the decrease in credit card debt is coming from charge-offs, as opposed to a jump in consumers paying down their balances. Papadimitriou said his analysis shows that previous studies have failed to factor in the increasing rate of credit card charge-offs, which occur when the creditor declares the debt uncollectible. Typically, credit card debt is charged off when a consumer becomes 180 days delinquent. “I don’t think we should be
patting ourselves on the back and creating this false sense of good news and optimism for consumers when that is not what is happening,” Papadimitriou said in an interview. “Let’s get the message straight that we are still heading in the wrong direction.” I hadmy doubts, too. I work
closely with people in debt and I speak to a lot of groups, and, anecdotally, I wasn’t seeing what the reports were showing. There has not been a slowdown in the number of people I’mhearing from and talking to who are in credit card trouble.Many have been relying on credit after spending through whatever savings they had after a job loss. Others, who have had to take lower-paying jobs, are struggling
to pay credit card debt accumulated before and after their unemployment. CardHub’s analysis found that
credit card debt for the second quarter of this year decreased by about $12 billion compared with the previous quarter. But banks charged off $21.8 billion during the same period. Given that the drop in outstanding debt is smaller than the dollar amount that was charged off, the difference of $9.8 billion is the amount of debt consumers accumulated, Papadimitriou said. His findings give a more
realistic viewof how seriously the recession has crippled consumers. The charge-offs also indicate that many banks are continuing to experience deep losses, and this is one of the reasons why credit is still tight. It’s why many lenders have been cutting people’s credit limits, he said. “We need to keep remembering throughout this recovery that reverting back to where we were is the wrong thing to do, because we were in a bubble,” Papadimitriou said. “Holding the bar to where things used to be and expecting and wanting to get back there means just prolonging the same pattern of getting into another big recession a fewyears from now.” CardHub’s analysis of the
credit data is just the skeptical look we need. It’s too soon to declare that many American consumers are reformed spendthrifts who have not learned their lesson. Too many people are still leaning on credit in these lean times.
singletarym@washpost.com
Readers can write to Michelle Singletary at TheWashington Post, 1150 15th St.NW,Washington, D.C. 20071. Comments and questions are welcome, but because of the volume of mail, personal responses are not always possible. Please note that comments or questions might be used in a future column, with the writer’s name, unless a specific request to do otherwise is indicated.
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