on, the college history major has suffered the steepest decline (34%) of any field and is now under 2% of total enrollment, numerous publications reported earlier this year. English, religion, languages, philosophy, and humanities had declined by 20% or more.Growing the most? Exercise science, computer science, nursing, and six other STEM subjects, with public administration just slipping into 10th place. As a student of English, religion, history, and philosophy, this naturally dismays me, and I believe we are in peril when public administrators know little of the past.
Even if history never precisely repeats itself, past crises offer insights into what contributes to, worsens, or ameliorates them, as I’ve found exploring this latest round of reads.
War in Pieces
Ian Kershaw’s The End: Hitler’s Germany 1944–45 analyzes a tragic example of crisis leadership, the 1945 decisions of the German High Command prolonging World War II, when all hope of victory was lost, thus causing the deaths of tens of thousands of German soldiers and civilians, the notorious firebombing of Dresden, and the murder of large numbers of concentration camp prisoners and POWs. What failures led Germany to this suicidal denouement? Kershaw focuses on the unquestioning national commitment to an all-but-deranged Führer and the self-serving acts of the High Command, which was aware of the retribution they would face for their atrocities following surrender.In Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941, Kershaw broadens his scope, considering decisions across five nations that affected what followed. Among these are Britain’s refusal to surrender when it stood alone, Hitler’s decision to turn on the Soviet Union, and Japan’s seizing its “golden opportunity.” In each case, Kershaw examines the circumstances and consequences, positive or disastrous, of the decision it ramifies. Britain’s failure to surrender, for example, turned Hitler’s attention to Russia, whose system of “highly personalized rule” in the 1930s, including Stalin’s paranoid purge of the Red Army, prepared it for military disaster. Kershaw concludes, “The end was far away. But the path toward it had been laid out by the fateful choices made in 1940 and 1941.” He concludes that these decisions “reflect the political system that produced them.” Authoritarian systems “made the most dynamic, but also the most catastrophic, choices.” Among the democracies on the contrary, “there was little scope for arbitrary decision-making.” Even the quixotic/heroic British decision “had arisen from rational debate.”
Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 shows how the world-changing crisis of World War I resulted from actions taken and not taken by the protagonists over years. Despite the difference of scale, several of his cases have analogies to smaller organizations as well as to recent times. For one, crises tend to erupt when the signs of their arrival are ignored until too late. This is especially true when the status quo has endured so long that it seems permanent. Emperor Franz Joseph had ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire for more than eight decades in 1914, and though Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Queen Victoria had died earlier, they towered over their societies to a degree only exceeded by Franz Joseph.
Another factor, Clark observes, is “the stories [decision-makers] told themselves and each other,” which led to what we today would call silos, making the system as a whole “more opaque and unpredictable.” Crises flourish when leaders cannot obtain accurate information or do not trust information that challenges their fixed narratives.
The Sleepwalkers argues finally that the war was “not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol ... rather there is one in the hands of every major character.” The search for a single culprit was a dominant impetus leading to World War II as well as to many of the traumas in between.
Character and Ethics
Joseph Badaracco’s Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right begins with questions such as, “Do I have to leave some of my values at home when I go to work?” and “Do you think you can govern innocently?”Among his quandaries are allowing yourself to be the “token minority” in a leadership situation, balancing work demands with being a “family friendly” place, and acting in accordance with your organization’s mission when doing so promises severe practical consequences. Badaracco believes leaders can’t depend on intuitive “feels right” decision-making; they must have a clear sense of their own ethical system before a crisis arises. “A sound ethical instinct,” he maintains, “presupposes a thoughtful, mature person ... serious attention to the relevant facts ... [and] a sound ethical intuition [that] can be articulated and explained to others in ways that draw on important social and ethical practices.” As he puts it, “Defining moments compel people to arrange their values in single file and reveal the priorities among them.”
Chris Lowney’s Heroic Leadership: Best Practices From a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World echoes Badaracco’s case that effective leadership is a character trait. His “company” is the Society of Jesus, which operates nearly 600 schools and colleges around the world and believes that “Leadership springs from within. It’s about who I am as much as what I do. Leadership is not an act. It is … a way of living. I never complete the task of becoming a leader. It’s an ongoing process. … [L]eadership is defined not by the scale of the opportunity but by the quality of the response.” Along with this principle came a commitment to seek talent “from every quarter”—including the descendants of Jewish converts. As St. Ignatius of Loyola said, “we do not trouble ourselves as to the origin of a man, only his qualities.”
Balance of Power
From the Counter-Reformation to World War II, successful leadership through consultation appears in crisis after crisis. In The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Jonathan Alter notes that the new president “went beyond party to staff his Cabinet with the very best men (and occasional women) he could find.” Readers of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln will also recognize this leadership trait in Lincoln’s choice of a War Cabinet.Yet there seems a balance of opposites: In crisis, leadership requires the capacity to inspire and include others, along with the moral character to stand alone. David Von Drehle’s Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year examines even more deeply than Goodwin how Lincoln combined these traits during the crises of 1862. He built a team and worked with a Congress of rivals, who “when pressed to the wall … stood by the Constitution.” But when committed to an action, as to the Emancipation Proclamation, he relied on “the ability to keep my resolves,” which he felt was “the gem of my character,” as well as on his somewhat contradictory belief that “I am a man under [heaven’s] orders; I cannot do otherwise.” Years earlier he had told his law partner that he hoped to achieve something that would “link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man.” By combining equal and opposed strengths, he more than accomplished his goal.
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