Leadership in the lean years

I read an interesting article in today's FT (16th August 2011) written by Max Hastings. Some of the points struck a chord with various discussions I have had recently across all our Management Innovation Networks. Some extracts are here:

"Hardly a day passes without public lamentation about the paucity of leadership in the western democracies. Where, cry a score of the nations' pundits, is a Churchill, Kennedy, De Gaulle, Adenauer for our generation?

Warriors are usually unsuited to addressing social and economic issues. Wellington, the great commander, was a disastrous prime minister, while Churchill's response to Britain's 1926 General Strike was histrionic and divisive.

Many contemporary leaders must suffer spasms of self-pity at being in charge during an era when exposure of the limits of power makes high office seem unrewarding. Today's economic problems are vast and intractable. Contrast the 1990s experience of John Major. Almost as inadequate a British premier as Gordon Brown, he faced man embarrassments and humiliations - recession, ejection from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the Balkan wars and Tory strife over Europe. Yet with hindsight, none of these were remotely as dangerous to Britain as recent events. Mr Major's shortcomings did not matter that much - on his watch, the country suffered no game-changing crisis on the scale of the 2008 banking collapse and what has followed.

Some national leaders also enjoy luck: Margaret Thatcher generated much of her own weather, but her exchequer benefited from the North Sea oil boom too.

But today's western leaders face difficulties that cannot all be attributed to their own inadequacy. Their fundamental task is to reconcile electorates to accepting less of everything than they have had in the past. It seems mistake to suppose that mere Churchillian rhetoric or Rooseveltian guile could achieve this."