It has been a remarkable couple of weeks in New York. First, the financial system meltdown. Now, Meltdown Part II. Meanwhile, many of the world’s political, business, academic, and civil society leaders are in the city this week attending the UN General Assembly meeting, the Clinton Global Initiative conference and a smattering of smaller big-think events. It seems to be the end of the world as we knew it. And being on the edge of big and painful changes has put people on edge. There’s a sense of urgency. Also, anger.
I talked to Craig Barrett of Intel and Pramod Bhasin of India’s Genpact on Monday and Tuesday, and it was remarkable how frustrated they are—and how willing to express it. Barrett lamented that the US government has not responded to industry’s calls for long term planning and investing in national competitiveness. Instead our leaders stumble from crisis to crisis and play to the popularity polls. “The government is thumbing their noses at us!” he says. Bhasin bemoaned India’s corruption and lawlessness: “Private industry is trying to pull us into the 21st Century, but government is trying to keep us in the 18th Century!”
What’s going on here is we’re in the middle of a global leadership crisis. The US was once the undisputed world leader, economically, politically, and, after 9/11, morally. But the Bush administration blew that big time. In the past eight years, we have been diminished tremendously. When Bush gave his lifeless speech at the UN yesterday, he seemed to have shrunk to half of his former size. There was barely a ripple of reaction from the audience. He is not only despised; he’s now irrelevant. Meanwhile, the overheated and untruthful rhetoric of the US presidential election has diminished the stature not just of the liars but those they are lying about.
But the world needs leaders—individuals and countries with the authority, recognized wisdom, and clout to bring stability to global affairs and economics. And, right now, it doesn’t have any. Putin’s a powerful despot who commands no respect beyond his borders; China’s leadership is a faceless, self-absorbed bureaucracy; Britain’s Brown is a faded star; and Merkel is merely a competent technocrat. The only global political leaders who inspire respect and excitement (at least, from me) are India’s Singh, Columbia’s Uribe, and Rwanda’s Kagame. Unfortunately, Columbia and Rwanda are too small to matter except symbolically, and Singh governs a nearly ungovernable India.
Survey the business horizon, and you come to a similar conclusion. Only Warren Buffett commands almost god-like respect. What he thinks and says matters. Leaders such as IBM’s Palmisano and Intel’s Barrett are competently leading their large companies through the storm, but their influence is fairly limited beyond the borders of their supply chains.
In civil society, people expect a lot from Bill Gates now that he’s spending most of his time on his foundation. He has a ton of money, between his fortune and Buffett’s, and a bold strategy for attacking poverty and disease. I have a lot of hope for what he can do, too. In fact, I suggested to a couple of Gates Foundation people earlier this week that he should use his UN speech to try to calm the world. Their answer: It’s impossible to do that in the six minutes that have been allotted for him.
I have hope, though, for the state of leadership in the world and for America’s role in it. Think of the US in the early 1930s. We were in disarray, yet a great leader came in with a vision, a plan, and a commanding confidence that turned the tide and set us on the course that made America a positive role model and shaper of the course of world history for more than half a century. That sort of thing could happen again.
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