Monday, December 19, 2005

Sharon Needs to To Do Succession Planning Now

In ancient times, the people of Egypt were terrified that a growing population of Hebrew slaves would overtake their country. Fearul of this demographic time bomb, Pharaoh instituted a policy in which midwives were to kill off Hebrew boys at the moments of their births. The Old Testament book of Exodus tells us that the policy didn't work and that God secured freedom for the Hebrews, who eventually took up residence elsewhere, in a place that gained the name Israel.

Centuries later, people in the modern state of Israel, at least those who think it must remain a Jewish state, believe that their country faces a similar demographic dilemma. The Palestinian population within its territory is growing at such a rate that sometime in the twenty-first century, if Israel maintains all the territory it has conquered in recent decades, Palestinians will outnumber the Jewish population.

When Ariel Sharon first came to the prime ministership in Israel, many viewed it as the death knell for peace prospects in the Middle East. Sharon had always been a hardliner, the founder of the right-wing Likud Party. But like most politicians, Ariel Sharon knows how to count. He hears the timebomb ticking beneath the population trends he reads on neat demographic spreadsheets.

That's why Ariel Sharon has become a moderate, unilaterally ceding territory to the Palestinian Authority, and totally altering the political landscape in Israel by forming a new party of the middle.

Sharon's evolution as a poltical ideologue, from ardent conservative to ardent moderate, points out that to be a moderate is not to be a milquetoast, as some firebreathers in this country presume. Among Abraham Lincoln's compatriots in the Republican Party, for example, there were many firebreathers who disagreed with Lincoln's intention to be concilatory toward the South following the Civil War. But Lincoln was a moderate, ardently so. Had he lived, there's no way of knowing, but it seems likely as not that firebreathers in his own party would have tried to remove him from office, just as they did the successor who pursued Lincoln's policies, Andrew Johnson.

Sharon's gamble for peace, no matter what its motives may be, demonstrate that proponents of moderation too, can have fire in their souls and can be willing to gamble everything for a big idea. This is exactly what the Israeli prime minister has done by effectively dismembering Likud and creating a new political party. This makes Sharon unique in the history of democracies.

In America for example, it's difficult to imagine any sitting president bagging his or her own party and forming a new coalition in anticipation of the next election. In our own history, Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party in 1912, but that was four years after he left the White House as a Republican. Millard Fillmore ran as the nominee of the Know-Nothing Party after his tenure as President. But none of our Presidents has shown the same admirable cheek we see in Sharon, doubly impressive because the old party he's trying to kill off was his own brainchild!

Like numerous figures similar to him in history though, Ariel Sharon is a political genius who doesn't so much forge consensus by working with others--the conventional model--as he creates consensus. He does this by working things out in his own mind. In a way, he appears to be a loner, unafraid to take ten steps ahead of everybody else in the belief that through a combination of boldness and articulating a previously unformed consensus, others will come along.

This penchant of some leaders, the instinct for getting out front enough to lead, but not so far out front that you lose your constituency, will be a topic in a future installment of my Leadership Lesson series. Sharon seems to possess this ability. But the loner in him could create difficult consequences for his country.

All of which makes his stroke of yesterday and the frightening manner in which he has brushed it off after a daylong stay in the hospital rather frightening. Sharon is 77-years old, grossly overweight, inclined to overwork, and now a man who has suffered a stroke. Yes, he has built a coalition through a combination of his big idea and his big personality. But what happens if, God forbid, he should suffer another and now, fatal, stroke?

Leadership guru John Maxwell says, "There is no success without a successor." Great leaders and great organizations understand this and have succession plans in place. General Electric amazes me in this and other areas, for example. Succession planning is such a pervasive part of life at GE that they even do it for their signature programming franchises at NBC television: We knew for several years that Brian Williams would take over from Tom Brokaw on the evening news and we already know that a few years from now, Conan O'Brien will succeed Jay Leno on The Tonight Show.

Certainly assuring the smooth transition of leadership of a new moderate political movement in Israel, one that holds the promise of Middle East peace, is worth as much succession planning as the question of who will host The Tonight Show!

Yet, loner political geniuses have a tendency to deny their finitude or the very notion that the world might be without the leadership around which they create an aura of indispensability. Franklin Roosevelt was a frail 62-year old who had been through the fires of polio, the Great Depression, and the Second World War when he was re-elected President in 1944. Everyone around him knew it was unlikely that he could live out his term. But Roosevelt, who always kept his own counsel, never took his new Vice President into his confidence, endangering the world with the possibility that an unschooled new President would treat atomic weaponry like toys.

Sharon can insure his legacy by grooming a successor who will carry on his work of defusing Israel's demographic time bomb after he has left the political stage. In fact, it seems urgently necessary after his stroke: Even those inclined to vote for Sharon's coalition may now wonder whether it's safe to hang the future of Israel on the fragile health of Sharon and his embryonic political movement.

No comments: