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.