Poor Paul

Poor Paul, about to succumb to his enemies at the World Bank on unwarranted ethics charges. The charges really are unwarranted, but there's a lesson here about leadership that links the World Bank and Harvard University.

Both are elite world institutions that hired pugnacious CEOs with White House backgrounds they would eventually feel constrained to fire. Unlike the White House, Harvard and the Bank are institutions that depend on consensus -- on leaders like Derek Bok (formerly Harvard) and Jim Wolfensohn (formerly the World Bank) who know how to lead through consensus.

Both institutions were seduced by the can-do credentials of pushy DC types more concerned with their own reputations than the institutions they had to govern, but who in return promised to break log jams and get stuff done in a hurry.

In reality, however, Larry Summers -- a Clinton administration tough guy -- blustered into Harvard with the idea that a university was a corporation defined not by faculty and students but by administration and donors, and that his job was to impose his will; just as Paul Wolfowitz -- an aggressive Bush II architect of the disastrous Iraq policy -- blustered into his job to confront corruption and to reform the staid colossus that is the World Bank by dint of pure will.

Neither Summers nor Wolfowitz understood that process was as important as principle and that having worthy objectives was no substitute for cultivating effective leadership. Larry Summers fell technically because he said politically incorrect things about women and science (baby-makers can't be scientists), but that remark was just a peccadillo used to get the CEO who had shown such deep disdain for academic process and the vital (if sometimes obstructive) role of the faculty in a university community.

Now Wolfowitz is enduring the same "unfair" treatment, pilloried for a "mistake" in judgment concerning Shaha Ali Riza, his companion whom he helped place for big bucks at the State Department, though only after instructed to do so by the Bank. The wolves are after the Wolf, however, not because of this peccadillo, or Wolfowitz's campaign against corruption (many deem it worthy), but because he has placed two political allies in high advisory office and has paid little heed to collegiality and common wisdom in an institution that depends on them for its effectiveness. Wolfowitz will go down in the next week or two, not because of Ali Riza and ethics but because of ego and arrogance.

The lesson? Within the next eighteen months we will see still another world-class CEO go down and take his Party with him, not per se because of Iraq or Gonzales or Guantanamo, but because he has disdained the national community he was elected to lead and prefers stubborn talking to careful listening. Leaders take notice: democratic leadership is a two-way street; you need those you lead, and must listen to those you lecture.