Early Leadership Lessons from the Middle East and North Africa
No doubt many leadership lessons will emerge from the current turmoil across the Arab world, but few will be as compelling as the need for leaders to know when the end has come. A unifying theme that ties together failing autocratic regimes is an inability to know when to go. Egypt's Mubarak stayed too long, putting aside whether or not he should have been there in the first place, and now we see the same happening in Libya, except with more fatalities among citizens. The brutal combination of a sociopathic/narcissistic leader surrounded by sycophants creates an incapacity to hear, absorb, and comprehend the message from the streets.
Another leadership lesson comes from the failure of Western leaders to state clearly what should happen; e.g., that the dictator should go (and go now). To be sure, we hear Secretary of State Clinton saying that "the time has come for violence to stop," but she stops short, as do others in the U.S. administration of saying that Gathafi (Anglicized spelling of the name is taken from al Jazeera's English-language edition) is overstaying his welcome. Same, too, for the European Union, where much fretting is happening in the corridors of power about how a new Libyan political structure will affect investments by EU companies (and governments).
As Libya disintegrates, a third leadership lesson--and a geopolitical one as well--is that countries moshed together by outsiders frequently become problem states (same, too, with mergers and acquisitions between unwilling partners). Margaret MacMillan's book, Paris 1919, details how the modern Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia came to be; in short, an array of made-up countries that accommodated the interests of the great powers of the day. This is not the time to recapitulate the errors and hubris of the 20th Century; rather we should all cheer for the emergence of countries determined by those who live there. And for the immediate departure of those who stand in the way.