I inadvertently excited my prof., Marty Linsky, this morning. I had read the course material – notably three chapters in a book co-authored by Marty (together with Ronald A. Heifetz) – and whilst I benefitted from a number of valuable insights, I couldn’t entirely agree with the underlying assumption. The subtitle of the book hints at the problem: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading. Leadership is dangerous for those doing the leading. Staying a leader is what counts. Losing leadership foolhardily is – well, foolhardy. Avoid foolhardiness and you can continue to lead and retaining leadership is the most important consideration because leadership is a good thing and if you retain leadership then you can continue to … lead. Now, I am the first to argue that leadership is frequently a public good, but surely not always and perhaps not even mostly. And I just couldn’t agree that all leadership is intrinsically good. One of Linsky’s own arguments, for example, is that false clarity wins over honest confusion every time (because people crave clarity and continuity in their leaders). So I tried to argue that the ethical dimension was also necessary. There was, I ventured, a trichotomy of immoral, amoral and moral leadership. (In the absence of such an ethical or normative motivation, leadership would, it seemed to me be primarily amoral leadership – coincidentally of precisely the sort so well portrayed by Jeremy Irons in Margin Call.) Marty feistily swatted my semantic distinction aside on the pretty reasonable grounds that everybody in the room was a moral leader because otherwise they would not have come to the Kennedy School to improve themselves. Fair dos.

It should have been the perfect moment to be in New England. Tonight the New England Patriots met the New York Giants in the Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis to see who would be the 2011 season National Football League Champion. Each team had won the Super Bowl three times, and there was a healthy New York-Boston rivalry. The match, which the Giants came from behind to win 21-17, was full of characters, incidents, brilliant athleticism and, from the commentators, superlatives. I won’t pretend I know all the ins-and-outs of the game but I found a bar with plenty of atmosphere and watched pretty much the whole match, including the famous funny ads and Madonna’s much-discussed half-time show. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  Maybe Hugo of New York could demonstrate his learning and explain, in a comment, why in the last minute or so of the match the Patriots let Bradshaw run into the end zone uncontested (actually, he appeared to pull up, turn around and sit down). The streets were very quiet as I walked home… Postscript: Hugo has since obliged and now all is clear. It was truly a cliffhanger!

And so, in the afternoon, down to business. I am here at Harvard to attend a leadership course at the Kennedy School of Government entitled, rather portentously, ‘Chaos, Conflict and Courage: Leadership in the Twenty-First Century.’ As an icebreaker we had to introduce ourselves and then recount a significant episode from our school days. There were plenty of moving examples. I’ll give just three. There was an American, now heading up a police department, who grew up in Chicago’s badlands but, despite all the temptations and violence, refused to get involved in the gangs and the drugs trade. There was a high-ranking civil servant, a permanent secretary, from a Caribbean island who was once embarrassed as a boy because he didn’t know how to eat with a knife and fork. The episode drove him to escape his poor social origins. And there was an Indian senior manager who, as a fourteen year-old, missed the train that would take him from the south to the north of the country in one day and so set off on a three-day epic journey involving bullock carts and overcrowded buses. The experience led to his whole philosophy of life, which is that the journey is more important than the destination. We are a rich mix and I am much looking forward to the week ahead.

I can’t believe my luck. Harvard’s weather is notoriously changeable and last year at this time there was snowfall after snowfall. But today it is, quite simply, a beautiful day. So once I’d settled into my temporary digs I got my running gear on and went for a run along the Charles River. This place is a joggers’ paradise. There are footpaths on both banks of the river and they just go on and on. I did a ten kilometre circuit out far beyond the boathouses. I thought about one of my favourite authors, Haruki Murakami, who wrote evocatively about running along these pathways in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

The London cabbie is famous (do I mean notorious?) for his self-opinionated wisdom on everything. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, they do things differently. I had to swap to a hall of residence so I hailed a cab. The driver was nice and talkative. When he heard I was from Europe, he told me that ‘You’ve got to get that Eurozone stuff sorted and pretty damned quick.’ I agreed that there was urgency. ‘Mind, we can’t give you no lectures,’ he continued. ‘We are all in this together. The way I see things, only the Chinese can save us and I reckon that pretty soon they’re going to realise that they don’t really have much choice.’ So you’re optimistic? I asked. ‘In the short-term,’ he replied, ‘but we’re not creating real wealth at the moment. Sure, we create jobs, but how many of them are in burger bars and pizza joints? We need to create real wealth; jobs in manufacturing industry, that’s what we need.’  All on a Sunday morning in sleepy Cambridge.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a frosty, blue-skied Sunday morning. In New England there is always this feeling that history is not too far away. Just around the corner from my hotel is a monument to the field where in 1775 George Washington took command of what was to become the U.S. Army (indeed, the hotel is named after the event and has a scale model of it in the lobby (see picture). War booty, in the form of British cannons, surround the monument. A little further along is an atmospheric old (1635) burial ground where some of the earliest settlers, landowners, slaves, soldiers, presidents of Harvard and ‘prominent men of Cambridge’ were laid to rest. In such places at such times America still feels like a very young country proud to have fought for, and won, its freedom.

This was a timely in-flight film to set me up for a week-long seminar on leadership. Over a thirty-six hour period in 2007 we see Wall Street risk analysts and trading desk heads passing bucks and blowing whistles to floor heads and senior executives and division heads and chief risk officers and, finally, the amoral, world-weary CEO, played very well by Jeremy Irons. Basically, his trading firm (said to have been modelled on Lehman Brothers) is horribly over exposed to toxic assets. Fire sales, mass layoffs, sacrificial lambs and rolling heads are the only solutions. Irons’s figure, John Tuld, is unmoved. He has seen it all before. Survival is the name of the game. The next bull market will surely be along sooner or later. In the meantime, though… Well, we all know what happened next.

This afternoon I took a flight to London Heathrow, prior to flying out to Boston Logan. It was chronicle of a delay foretold time. I had an evening flight. Snow was forecast for the evening. Would my flight get away before the snow? Answer: no. At least the flight wasn’t cancelled but by the time we had queued up for de-icing we had lost ninety minutes and were probably one of the last flights out of the airport. Zen. Om. Inshala. Oh, and, er, fingers crossed…

On the Eurostar, heading back to Brussels, I opened today’s Economist magazine and learned from an editorial that there will henceforth be a weekly section in the magazine devoted to China, just as there is one devoted to the US and one to Europe. It is, says the editorial ‘the first time since we began our detailed coverage of the United States in 1942 that we have singled out a country in this way.’ The principal reason, the editorial continues, is that ‘China is now an economic superpower and is fast becoming a military force capable of unsettling America. But our interest in China lies also in its politics: it is governed by a system that is out of step with global norms. In ways that were never true of post-war Japan and may never be true of India, China will both fascinate and agitate the rest of the world for a long time to come.’ At least as far as the Economist is concerned,the future we have been hearing so much about has arrived.

This afternoon and evening I made a quick in-and-out to London, to the London School of Economics, to give the opening lecture for Michaelmas term  in a seminar series, The EU in Practice, organised at the European Institute and designed to allow practitioners to give  insights about developments in their particular part of the EU’s universe. My talk and the ensuing discussion was about the concept of participatory democracy and the way its popularity seems to have ebbed and flowed. Was the concept, as it was developed during the Convention on the Future of Europe and consolidated in the various versions of the Treaty that followed, prescriptive or descriptive? Was it a luxury item in the good times or an essential item in the not-so-good times? Naturally, I also spoke about my own institution’s role in that context.  The talk was followed by an excellent sixty minutes of questions and answers. In the picture I am flanked by the seminar’s organisers, Maurice Fraser, Senior Fellow in European Politics, and Anthony Teasdale, Visiting Senior Fellow.