Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

The Three Deficits

Times like this call out for inspired (and inspiring) leadership, but we haven’t been so lucky. Paul Volcker was right: Of the three deficits, the budget deficit and the trade deficit are relatively easier to handle than the arguably more acute leadership deficit. As Volcker wrote in 2005, long before financial crises were on most people’s radar: “Altogether the circumstances seem to me as dangerous and intractable as any I can remember, and I can remember quite a lot. What really concerns me is that there seems to be so little willingness or capacity to do much about it.”

Unfortunately the steps required for someone to get promoted or elected to a top leadership role in government, business, or civil society today have little to do with the qualities actually needed to be an effective leader, including personal courage and the ability to articulate a vision of the future that inspires and unites for effective and purposeful action.

The importance of this point cannot be underestimated during a period in which most observers feel that bold political action could solve—or at least mitigate—many of the developed world’s most pressing challenges, with the alternative—indecision and inaction—able to make them immeasurably worse. One is reminded of the quote by Luxembourg Prime Minister and sometime European Council President Jean-Claude Junker, highlighted at the beginning of this chapter, about how we know what we need to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected ...