Where have all the leaders gone?

Many readers would have probably received E-mailed excerpts from an April 2007 book titled "Where Have All the Leaders Gone", written by Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney and published by Scribner.

Lido Anthony Iacocca (born October 15, 1924) is an American businessman most commonly known for his revival of the Chrysler Corporation in the 1980s. At that time he did not ask for government billions to save the prestigiuos auto company but instead he applied himself to rebuild the entire company from the ground up, laying off many workers, selling the loss-making Chrysler Europe division to Peugeot, and bringing in many former associates from his former company - Ford Motor Company. While some have said that Congress lent Chrysler a significant amount of money to "bailout" the failing corporation, the government, in fact, only guaranteed the loans. No money came out from the taxpayers' pockets.

This book was inspired as a reaction to the disastrous Bush Administration. However, those E-Mailing some excerpts from his book are presenting them as a direct criticism of the Obama Administration. Not only that, but these E-mailed versions of these excerpts from Iacoca's book have been altered through the insertion of denigrative passages referencing Barack Obama that were not written by Lee Iacocca and were not part of the original work. Nevertheless, such a measure of bad faith and distortion was not necessary to make the point because his insights could easily be applied to recent Obama's policies.

Iacocca was a corporate leader. A real leader in fact. He understands political leadership from the administrative vantage of a CEO. In America such perspective is right because Americans do not like to see their President as a supreme chief of government but as an administrator of policies and people's mandates. Therefore, it is quite understandable that Iacocca says bluntly in his book that "We've got a gant of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when politicians say, 'Stay te course'. Stay the course? You've got to be kidding! This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!".

At the time he was refering to Bush and his clique. But given what we are seeing today and how the Obama Administration is "solving" Bush's mistakes and mismanagement, what Iacocca underlines in these excerpts is still quite relevant now: "Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us. Who Are These Guys, anyway? Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them, or at least some of us did. But I'll tell you what we didn't do. We didn't agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers." And he forcefully adds further down: "And don't tell me it's all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That's an intellectually lazy argument, and it's part of the reason we're in this stew. We're not just a nation of factions. We're a people. We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together. Where are the voices of leaders who can inspire us to action and make us stand taller? What happened to the strong and resolute party of Lincoln? What happened to the courageous, populist party of FDR and Truman? There was a time in this country when the voices of great leaders lifted us up and made us want to do better. Where have all the leaders gone?"

Where, indeed! Real leaders are problem-solvers with a special gift for convincing others to follow them and trust them. Problem-solvers do not build populist expectations but find the causes of the problems in hand and candidly relate to their followers what needs to be done, no matter how hard or unpopular the solution might be.

Instead, what we are seeing is a huge waste of resources aimed at keeping afloat big corporations that failed. The cost is an unprecedented multiplication of public debt and a sort of festive money-printing spree that cannot possibly be sustained without an eventual collapse of monetary value. America is spending the money that it does not have at an increasing pace. In fact it is spending beyond its future economic and financial perspectives. Banks are receiving billions so that they may "help" consumers and enterpreneurs, but small and medium sized business do not see any reprieve and mortgage holders keep losing their homes. On the other hand, loan and credit card interest rates remain high and banks keep enticing on consumers loans approved with very low or practically no equity requirements. In addition, there are no plans for public works that would improve the aging and deteriorating infrastructure with a real goal of building and rebuilding as a national heritage for the good of future generations, with the same foresight of previous generations.

On the excerpts we are examining, Iacocca considers that a leader must be "competent". Of course. He adds that "Bush brags about being our first MBA President. Does that make him competent? Well, let's see. Thanks to our first MBA President, we've got the largest deficit in history, Social Security is on life support, and we've run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq. And that's just for starters. A leader has to be a problem solver, and the biggest problems we face as a nation seem to be on the back burner." America's tragedy nowadays is that the next elected problem-solver is promoting huge expending policies that make all these problems worse. Iacocca was right in demanding that "Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening." I would add, do we have any viable answers today?

Every problem that Iacocca underlines is worse today: "We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way."

And for those getting billions of dollars from our pockets, where is their creativity? Where is their capacity of innovation and growth? Iacocca said in 2007: "Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when "the Big Three" referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, what are we going to do about it?". Well there are nowadays many innovative leaders trying to survive in middle sized and small companies. But they do not get the millions to improve, grow and contribute to the march of progress. No one in government seems to care about them.

I would finish this brief analisys with the words of Iacocca himself in 2007: "You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it's building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That's the challenge I'm raising in this book. It's a call to action for people who, like me, believe in America. It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close. So let's shake off the horseshit and go to work. Let's tell 'em all we've had enough"