Barbara Kellerman is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. She was the Founding Executive Director of the Center, and a member of the Kennedy School faculty for over twenty years. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, Christopher Newport, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also served as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland.
Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A. M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. At Uppsala (1996-97), she held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books. Kellerman has also appeared on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters, and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.
Barbara Kellerman has spoken to audiences all over the world including in Beijing, Toronto, Moscow, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Munich, Seoul, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Berlin, Shanghai, Sao Paolo, Kyoto, and Sydney. She received the Wilbur M. McFeeley award from the National Management Association for her pioneering work on leadership and followership, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. From 2015 to 2023, she was listed by Global Gurus as among the “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.”
A Quote From This Episode
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
About The Boler College of Business at John Carroll University
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
Barbara Kellerman is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. She was the Founding Executive Director of the Center, and a member of the Kennedy School faculty for over twenty years. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Fairleigh Dickinson, George Washington, Christopher Newport, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also served as Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland.
Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A. M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. At Uppsala (1996-97), she held the Fulbright Chair in American Studies. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books. Kellerman has also appeared on media outlets such as CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, Reuters, and BBC, and has contributed articles and reviews to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.
Barbara Kellerman has spoken to audiences all over the world including in Beijing, Toronto, Moscow, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Munich, Seoul, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Berlin, Shanghai, Sao Paolo, Kyoto, and Sydney. She received the Wilbur M. McFeeley award from the National Management Association for her pioneering work on leadership and followership, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. From 2015 to 2023, she was listed by Global Gurus as among the “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.”
A Quote From This Episode
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
About The Boler College of Business at John Carroll University
About Scott J. Allen
My Approach to Hosting
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis podcast. Thank you so much for checking in. Today, I have Dr. Barbara Kellerman, and she is a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership. She was the founding executive director of the center and a member of the Kennedy School faculty for over 20 years. Kellerman has held professorships at Fordham, Tufts, Farley Dickinson, George Washington, Christopher Newport, and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. She also served as director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Leadership at the University of Maryland. Her full bio, by the way, is in the show notes with a whole host of other resources. But today's episode is a little bit of a happy accident. And Barbara, this is a bonus episode. I'm going to call our previous conversation ‘Wandering’ and then, in parentheses, ‘(with purpose)’ because I think I took us off track. (Laughs)
Barbara Kellerman 0:51
I don’t know that you took us off track, we were both having a fine time in a really interesting conversation. And then later, I said, “Did we get to what we really wanted to get to?” Which I think was a blog that I wrote a couple of weeks ago, ‘Leader of the Year 2023.’ And with a special emphasis on context, but some other things that we might want to touch on in the next few minutes.
Scott Allen 1:13
Yes, yes. And I would love to have a conversation about your Follower of the Year as well. And, for listeners, I think Barbara's work is really, really important. And this is where we got a little bit off track, with purpose, in our last conversation, because she really thinks about leadership as a system; a relationship between the leader, the followers, and the contexts. And so, we spent a lot of that conversation talking about contexts. And when she writes about leadership, she often will include all three of those elements because it's important to understand what was happening in a context that allowed Marion Barry, for instance, to be reelected, or any number of other conversations that we could kind of go down examples of leaders. So, let's start with Leader of the Year; who was your leader of the year? Last year, it was Vladimir Putin. And you define how you choose Leader of the Year in a very specific way. So, maybe we start there, and then let's see what you thought.
Barbara Kellerman 2:12
Yeah. I'm so glad you're allowing me to define it for us. But before I get into that, thanks for this extra conversation. So yes, it's very important because, when I say Leader of the Year, even the headline makes… This is for 2023, for the year we just finished. We're talking in early January of 2024, it's very important for people to understand that, as is typical of me, when I say the word leader, I do not have a value judgment. I think you can be an incredibly impactful leader [Inaudible 2:47] awful, bad, depending on how you wish to define the words. And I similarly think you can have an extremely impactful leader who was good, again. However, you define it, and the word… One of the problems with leadership is that people see it, but they have different values, and therefore, it becomes hard to agree on what is good and what is bad. But, in this case, yes, the single criterion, and it was Putin in 2022 because he had just, a few months earlier, invaded Ukraine, that was and remains a very big global deal. So, I came to 2023 with the same criteria. So, I had several candidates for Leader of the Year. Some Americans, such as Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, had a very good 2023. Shaun Fain, sort of at the opposite end of the spectrum, is another American leader who had an extremely good year as head of the United Auto Workers Union. Struck a very positive deal for his union members. And with the big three auto workers, I think we will hear much more of him in 2024. And I also thought of Sam Altman, who, despite his final fiasco at the end of last year, nevertheless, was and remains a very, very powerful, perhaps the single most powerful individual symbol of AI. And, needless to say, I also thought of splitting it between Netanyahu and the leader of Hamas, Anwar, but I decided against all of those, and I decided, in this particular post, to make a different point entirely. And I will simply make the point now, and then we can move on or explore this further. I picked up the point from an appreciation of Henry Kissinger, written by Eric Schmidt, former CEO and everything of Alphabet/Google, who was a close friend as well as a co-author, oddly, perhaps, with Henry Kissinger, and who in the Wall Street Journal noted about Kissinger, that he wondered where… He didn't really wonder, I guess, but he commented, “Where have all the leaders gone? Why are we living in a time in which great leadership…? And he meant it really positively, “Seems to be virtually nowhere in evidence?” And then, I kind of built on that point, and I asked myself, and I asked any readers of my blog, where have all the leaders gone, and why does it seem so difficult at this moment in time to find a really strong, impactful leader in the best sense of that word?
Scott Allen 5:35
So it was no one.
Barbara Kellerman 5:36
It was no one, and I analyzed why it was no one. I decided, maybe, to cheat my readers because I did. As I said, I did name some people, and then I tried to explain why, in this particular post, I'm choosing not to identify a leader of the year but to explore why great leaders seem so few and far between.
Scott Allen 5:58
And so, you start to… And I don't want to take us fully back into this conversation. Listeners, you can look at the most recent conversation with Barbara and listen to her explorations of that. But I do want to talk a little bit about how we got here. A partial list. And I think that's an important conversation for listeners to, at least, be aware of. And, of course, they can go to your blog post, and there's a link to it, and explore a little bit more in-depth. But how did we get here? What do you think?
Barbara Kellerman 6:30
Yeah. I actually printed it out, Scott, because I didn't want to omit… The list is partial, so if I omitted one or two of the items that I mentioned, that would be fine. And, as you said, people can read as long as they want you. But I thought, for this purpose, I'll print it out and actually tick off the items that I did name. And that's what I'm going to do at this point. I think the last time we did refer to my item one, and I talk about this and write about it all the time, which is the trajectory of history. This is because, again, confining this comment to liberal democracy is not autocracies, although there's a relationship between the two; why is it that leaders are so hard to come by? Because followers in liberal democracies are not very well-behaved anymore. They don't follow; instead, they scream and yell and complain. Even when somebody does something good, they are often not happy. They're often angry, and they take to social media. And you hear a lot of, I'm tempted to say bitching, and moaning, but it's very, very hard for a leader, not just political leaders, corporate leaders, leaders of education… We just saw two out of those three presidents who were grilled in Congress have now stepped down. It's just hard to be a leader these days. Very, very hard. And that trajectory of history explains a lot. Point number two I made: Leaders in liberal democracies are no longer protected by what used to be their mantle of authority. And I think, by the way, the presidency of these three institutions that I just referred to, educational institutions, Penn, Harvard, and MIT, used to be positions that were virtually unassailable. And within not too much of a timeframe, and not too much of a time span,e leaders everywhere, these positions have become lik vulnerable to attack. Who cares that you're president of Harvard, who cares that you're president of MIT or Penn? You are fair game, and changing the culture, making these people fair game for attack, dismantling the mantle of authority, again, has a lot to do with why it's so hard to be a leader. The depths of civics and civility, I don't want to take too much time on each of these as rather self-explanatory. Then I have the color of money. The fact that the pay discrepancies between… The inequity in the American political system, the failure, in some sense, of capitalism, meaning the incredible gap now between those at the very top, and those in the middle, and at the bottom, leaders in the private sector are making humongous sums of money. And on the one hand, we envy them, and on the other hand, we denigrate and deride them for being what we call filthy rich. And, by the way, Shawn Fain, the union leader that I mentioned earlier, has no trouble taking on the filthy rich. He's really very front and center on that. And again, I think we may see more of that in 2024. The ubiquity of social media is self-explanatory. And I also talked about the diminishment of the liberal arts. As anybody who knows, I don't know how you can be a thoughtful leader without having some sense of history, philosophy, politics, and even music leader, good arts, and literature. That escapes me, but the liberal arts in our day and age are generally derided and diminished. They don't play much of a part in educating anybody anymore; I think it's a great misfortune. God knows when Kissinger talks about great leaders; he is talking about men and women, and, in Kissinger’s case, mostly men, who were supremely well, in almost all cases, educated. And finally, the absence of shared values. In the old days, I'm old enough, God knows, to remember when, in the United States, and this is the single example that I use in the blog, not only were we taught not to lie, and we are still taught, generally, in the home and in schools not to lie, but somehow in our public officials, we dismiss it or excuse it as just another untruth. We fabricate it, we imagine things that are not, so definitions of reality differ, and it makes it very, very hard for a body politic or, indeed, any group or organization to settle on a single individual and bestow on them respect and admiration. Even if it's mixed, and many people disagree, great leaders nevertheless manage to accumulate large reservoirs of respect and admiration. And by and large, in this day and age, people in liberal democracies are reluctant to bestow that on any single individual.
Scott Allen 11:39
Well, it's interesting. I was saying to you before we started I'm listening to a book by Barbara Walter, ‘How Civil Wars Start.’ And it's interesting because she's a political scientist, she does a brilliant job of, in some ways, just kind of laying out the playbook of some of these leaders, these individuals who… There's a very simple playbook that is used by individuals in kind of populist, fascist factions. And my mind has been going to, even since our conversation, and my conversation with Dennis Tourish, what is the antidote? What is the other side? And I mentioned in our previous conversation, you have these individuals who are kind of forces. They’re forces of nature; they just are. A lot of history in that realm of academia. They don't necessarily elevate the individual, they kind of elevate more of the context. But there are these individuals who come along, whether it's a Steve Jobs, or an Elon Musk, like them or not, or Roosevelt, who they are forced to be dealt with. Trump is a force. You've written about these individuals. And sometimes they're a force for, quote-unquote, ‘good.’ And I know that you say that kind of depends on how we're defining that, but, in a general sense, we're trying to make the world a better place.
Barbara Kellerman 12:59
Yes.
Scott Allen 13:00
And better for more individuals, access for more individuals to at least provide that. So, I'm thinking about that anecdote because I think, in some ways, I love your point of view here. Who is that individual? And what is that recipe for someone to be a force, but the playbooks there on how to do it the other way? I use identity politics. It's a very simple playbook in many ways. What's the antidote for that? And I don't want to take us in some long conversation again, but that's where my mind is right now.
Barbara Kellerman 13:31
No. And I think it's, arguably, you're raising the most important question, certainly for Americans. Now, we're in the year of our next presidential election. 2024. I think it's the most important question that can be raised. And I actually think, Scott, you're framing it very well because, even I think, since our past conversation a few days ago, I have come to think that we focus too much. I touched on this a little when we last, but it’s even sort of crystallized a bit more since we spoke. I think we're focusing too much on Donald Trump, and the Republicans, and everything that he represents. And many Americans, many of us, I'll speak for myself, are not happy with that as an alternative and think it would damage the tradition of American democracy. So, I'll take that as a given. So, I say to myself, kind of exactly what you just said, what's the antidote to that? Now, I think, in our last conversation, I mentioned a countervailing leader.
Scott Allen 14:37
Mmm. I'm sensing a book title, Barbara.
(Laughter)
Barbara Kellerman 14:39
Well, I don't have to do that right now, I hope. I'm just going to speculate, Scott, that…
Scott Allen 14:49
It's needed.
Barbara Kellerman 14:51
If you're thinking of a team that's an extremely strong offensive team, how do you counter that? You counter it with a strong defense. And I think what we lack right now is a Democrat, a leader in the Democratic Party, who seems to us strong enough to be -- and I'm going to just plagiarize, oops, I better be careful using that word, borrow your word, antidote. I like that word. How do we counteract this? If you consider some elements of American politics and culture of toxic, what is the antidote for that toxicity? And I would say it is, very possibly, a leader, or a group of leaders, who seems to represent the brighter side, the optimistic side. I feel like Ronald Reagan here, but America is a shining city on a hill, almost a throwback to when individuals could represent the best of the United States. And whether the Democrats are mounting the strongest possible offense at this moment in time, I wouldn’t suggest to you, is an open question.
Scott Allen 16:02
I want to make something super clear for listeners here as well. I don't think either one of us -- call me out if I'm being incorrect here because when an individual really explores your reading, you pick on all sides. And I think what I'm sensing from you, and what's getting more clear for me, is this isn't about Republican or Democrat; this is about how we are engaging, how we engage in the process of doing democracy. There are some individuals and some factions that are taking moves from playbooks that are not the playbook we want to be playing from. Now, again, Bill Clinton: Terrible character flaws. John F. Kennedy: Terrible character flaws. Donald Trump: Terrible character flaws. And I don't think it's about whether it's a Republican or a Democrat, or it's what they think is best for the United States, per se. That's up for debate. Let's have that conversation. Let's go there. Let's do that. Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill. Clinton and Gingrich. Let's collaborate and work… And I think that's what we are both landing on as what's being degraded here. I think the conversation comes down to Trump a lot of the time, but it's really about how we are doing the work here. And how does that work? How do we save that?
Barbara Kellerman 17:23
Well, I agree with every word except, maybe because I'm, in the end, a leadership person, and, as you said, I'm always interested in the system, not the individual, but I think the other side that you're talking about, the Joe Biden, Kamala Harris. Those of us who are interested in leadership do acknowledge that much of humankind bestows on a handful of individuals the capacity or the authority to lead us. And, in this case, we’re likely to be faced if we're talking about American presidents, with Donald Trump and some unknown vice presidential candidate on the one hand and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the other. And I guess what I'm concluding, and this is a little bit what I said before, that our fixation on Trump, I wouldn't say it's misguided, but it's inadequate, it's insufficient. We ought to be equally fixating on the countervailing force, presumably the Biden-Harris ticket. And if that strikesus as insufficient or weak as an antidote, again, to use your word, then we need to look as much at that as we do with Donald Trump. And this incessant fixation… I do watch MSNBC, for example, and they are simply fixated. They will not acknowledge, people on that network will not acknowledge, at least, not yet, the weaknesses of Biden-Harris because they are so fixated on the liabilities and deficits of Donald Trump. But that's not going to cut it in 2024. We need to be, dare I use the term, fair and balanced, and look with an equally critical eye at our leaders on the Democratic side as on the Republican side. And I don't think Americans are sufficiently doing that, and we see it in the poll numbers, which are not great. And in lots of young people who are leaving the Democratic ticket and say they won't vote, and then lots of African American, men and lots of Hispanics. And that's not a strong recipe for success in November for those who are anti-Trump.
Scott Allen 19:40
Okay. Switching gears a little bit here with Follower of The Year. Now, that's going to be a new thing for any number of listeners, but I love it. And let's talk a little bit about that. Why a follower of the year, and then, who is your choice?
Barbara Kellerman 19:55
Well, again, I defined follower in a very, very particular way. I wrote this a long time ago in a book called ‘Followership,’ which so many of these words in our field and our shared field, Scott, it's about semantics. And people have hated the word ‘follower,’ even though it's the natural entrant into a leader because the assumption has always been the followers follow. But I define followers not by behavior but by rank. Followers are people with little or no power, little or no authority, and little or no influence. And they can sometimes play… Even though on paper, and they seem like ‘who cares,’ they can play an outsize role. And the person that I chose for follower of the year has zero power, and has zero authority, and has actually very little influence because not a lot of people are doing what he wants them to do, and the person's name, and some of your listeners will know the name, many of us will not, but it is a Russian dissident. probably the most famous Russian dissident. Has been famous for many years, at least 10 or 15 years. And his name is Alexei Navalny. And as we sit here comfortably ensconced in our studies, you and I, he is, dare I say, rotting away in a Siberian prison because Putin has decided in recent years… Putin was not, let's say, ten years ago, as authoritarian or dictatorial as he is now. He is much, much worse now. Leaders do go from bad to worse unless they are stopped; title of my forthcoming book. Putin is a great example. He is much worse now than he was even five years ago, not to speak of 10, or 12, or 20 when he first came to power 21/22. And he is now just, effectively, he tried to murder Navalny. Navalny came close to being poisoned to death. He has tried every which way to eliminate him. He finally has decided the attempted assassination did not work, and he has locked him away. Navalny, as we're sitting here, is sentenced to something like 10 or 20 years in prison. The prison sentences always get longer, and the prisons themselves get harsher and meaner. And Navalny is a martyr. He was taken to Germany when he was poisoned. He could have chosen to stay in Germany, but he has made a very deliberate attempt, self-conscious attempt to be murdered at the hands of Vladimir Putin. And, indeed, that seems to be what is happening with no sense of change here unless Putin somehow leaves or has an incredible change of heart, both of which, for the moment, seem extremely unlikely.
Scott Allen 22:57
You're making me think. I was just in Copenhagen for the International Studying Leadership Conference. And we went to the Louisiana Museum, and there was an exhibit on Pussy Riot. Oh, my gosh, just overwhelming is the word for that exhibit. But overwhelming also for kind of the activism that they havbeen engaged in for a strong decade. In and out of prisons, in and out of trouble with Putin. So fascinating, right?
Barbara Kellerman 23:33
Yeah. We should say that these are three women. I think it's three women who are a musical… Rock and roll, or a pop band, or whatever. And they decided to object to Vladimir Putin, and paid a great, great price for doing so. Yeah. Pussy Riot. Very apt group to raise. Exactly the same category….
Scott Allen 23:56
It's fascinating, they just keep coming back. And whether it's putting pride flags on governmental buildings, or playing their… It's kind of punk, right? They were playing their…
Barbara Kellerman 24:09
100% Yeah. Being a dissident in any of these countries, you look at them and say, “These are holy fools.” They're doing the right thing, but by normal standards of how we want to live our lives, they are foolish. They are foolish, but they are heroic fools. And Pussy Riot, and Alexei Navalny, are names that will go down in history as these descendants' names always do, but it can take a very, very long time for that to happen.
Scott Allen 24:43
Were there any others that you had on your list of potential followers of the year that you had considered?
Barbara Kellerman 24:48
I have to say that, in this case, with leaders, nobody lept to mind. I've been watching Navalny for years. I've been writing about him for years. He has stood out. There are certainly dissidents in other countries. In my new book, I mentioned some dissidents in China, but Navali is relatively quite well-known in the West. We were talking earlier about what makes a leader who stands out, or, in this case, a follower who… He's a good-looking guy. Even now, he’s got a bit of a sense of humor, his circumstances notwithstanding. He's a charismatic man, which is precisely why Putin feels he needs to lock him up and throw away the key. So, there you go. There you go.
Scott Allen 25:40
Well, staying in this circle here, we've got the chef, right? How about that? Putin’s chef, quote-unquote.
Barbara Kellerman 25:48
Well, I believe he's dead and gone.
Scott Allen 25:51
He is. He was a casualty.
Barbara Kellerman 25:53
He was a casualty, but he was widely known as an awful, awful man. We're talking about Yevgeny Prigozhin, a guy who led a brief, I don't know, some called it a mutiny against Putin. I'm not so sure that's an apt word. Putin allowed him, so to speak, to live for, let's say, half a year, and everybody is going, “Oh, my God, I can't believe it. Putin is allowing Prigozhin to live even though Prigozhin tried to go against Putin.” And, sure enough, one fine day or not-so-fine day, everybody who was on the plane, the plane that Prigozhin was on, exploded in midair and landed with everybody onboard dead. So he got rid of him. And Putin has been known for years to get rid of those that he considers his arch-enemies. Of course, always indirectly, with no obvious fingerprints, but there's no question that Putin has, ultimately, been responsible for everything that happens in Russia for the last, certainly, 15, but even longer years, 20/22 years. When he invaded Ukraine, people thought, “Okay, this can't last. It was such a big mistake. It can't happen.” But he, by the way, speaking of the leader of the year, ironically, he'd be a candidate again for 2023. He has survived 2023 in ways that most people, including in the West, Americans thought were not possible. And yet, Russia is doing relatively well now again in the war against Ukraine. So, he has shown survival instincts far more powerful than most.
Scott Allen 27:32
Hmm. And again, to your point from the playbook of a dictator. It's, “Kill your opposition, don't shift through your ideas and your brilliance.”
Barbara Kellerman 27:47
Kill them or lock them up. In any case, get rid of them in one or another fashion. Whether it's Pussy Riot, or Navalny, or a host of other people that we could talk about whose names are much less well known.
Scott Allen 28:00
Yeah. And again, I think I just want to underscore that point. It's not about Republican, Democrat, it's about the process and how we engage in that process. And are we engaging in the process in an honorable way, in a fair and level playing field way? In a way that, to your point from earlier, tell the truth? That's our first indicator. (Laughs)
Barbara Kellerman 28:25
To me, that's the most basic and, in some ways, therefore, interesting question.
Scott Allen 28:33
I learned everything I needed to know about leadership in kindergarten.
Barbara Kellerman 28:37
Honestly, it's weird. It's just weird to live in a moment when the truth is so important in our private lives. We're supposed to tell the truth to our parents, and to our spouses, and to our friends, and to our bosses, but in our public life, boy, it's tough out there. Really, really tough out there. So, no wonder Kissinger lamented the decline of great leadership. He was onto something but for a good and sound reason. It's not, in other words, an accident that we are where we are.
Scott Allen 29:11
Well, and to our previous conversation, and then we'll kind of close out here, but when we say great leadership, I think the context has shifted. The context of when our liberal democracy is strong and locked in and is at a ten on those different scales that they talk about, that the political scientists talk about, then a certain approach works. But if we're at a five as a democracy, and we're closer to an anocracy, our approach to leadership probably needs to shift as well. And so, I think that's kind of an interesting thing that's emerged out of our conversation today, and that's why context in your writing is so incredibly important.
Barbara Kellerman 29:51
And, by the way, followers too.
Scott Allen 29:53
Yes, yes.
Barbara Kellerman 29:54
For anybody in our fields, for better and worse, Scott, 2024 is going to be a goldmine. A goldmine. But unless you follow or pay, I should say, pay may be a better word here than follow, pay attention to all three elements of the system… If we fixate only on the people at the top, don't pay sufficient attention to the American people, and don't pay sufficient attention to the context within which the people are at the top, and the rest of us are all embedded, we're not going to get it. At the very least, we may not be able to change anything, Scott, bt we can at least apply to the next year a level of learning and sophistication that may not be available to the average person. So, you and your podcast have a real role and, dare I say, responsibility over the next ten months. It's not just election, as you read, I'm sure, in the United States, but in many other so-called democracies around the world, including, by the way, in Russia, so it's quite a year for people who have an interest in leadership and followership. Quite a year.
Scott Allen 31:07
Lots of shifts in places like Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden.
Barbara Kellerman 31:13
100%. And speaking of contextual factors, we didn't mention any specifics, whether it's abortion, or I would say, at the top of the pile now is immigration, and the impact of immigration. And you made me think of it when you said Denmark, and Sweden, and the European countries, not to speak on what's happening in the United States. That is a monster issue. And one could argue that the Democrats have been paying insufficient attention to it, and now, it's coming back to bite them.
Scott Allen 31:48
Well. And again, back to the playbook, the fascist playbook, the other, whoever we can.
Barbara Kellerman 31:54
100%. 100%.
Scott Allen 31:56
Immigrants are always fair game, but since the beginning of the United States…
Barbara Kellerman 31:59
[Inaudible 32:00] One of them, but the other.
Scott Allen 32:03
Religion… Yep, exactly.
Barbara Kellerman 32:06
On that cheery note…
(Laughter)
Barbara Kellerman 32:10
But, as I said, Scott, for you and your field, and me and my field this year, never has there been a more urgent one, at least not in a very long time. So, in that sense, we are in our wheelhouse, for better and worse.
Scott Allen 32:24
Yes. And let's keep thinking about that, again, there's no better word that I have in my mind, but that anecdote. And again, it's not about the ideas that these individuals stand for, it's about the process in which we do the work and co-create our future. And there's an easy and kind of an unfair playbook we can be playing that is not going to take us somewhere good. There's a fair, I should say, more fair, it's never been perfectly fair by any stretch of the imagination, at least in the United States, but there's a better path forward. A more sustainable path forward, I would say.
Barbara Kellerman 33:04
I'm looking forward, Scott, to following you down that path. You lead, I'll follow. How's that?
Scott Allen 33:11
I think it's the other way around. (Laughs)
Barbara Kellerman 33:13
I don't think so. You came up with the path imagery, and I'm ready to follow up. Thanks so much for this conversation. I appreciate it.
Scott Allen 33:22
Be well, Barbara. Take care.
[End Of Audio]