OnLeaders

UmairHaque is despairing at current leadership, but I don't think the problem is there. I'm playing with a different (perhaps unpaletable) thought.

He was right first time. And wrong in the article. Weak leaders aren't made from weak people. They're made by unleadable institutions. We've cleverly built up democratic systems which are immune from despots and the result is that they're now effectively uncontrollable by the people that we choose to put into power.

An American president is campaigning up until the election, after which, he is a) fighting Congress, b) running scared of the media, c) campaigning for the next election. And once he's won the second election he's almost immediately a "dead duck" and his staff are eyeing up their post-government jobs in the private sector.

Similarly, CEOs of companies are running scared of the shareholders, trained to maximize their own interests (and you can complain about "short-termism" but few will be given the leisure of long-term success in our Schlumpeterian age of CreativeDestruction and rapidly evolving technologies.)