Having lived in or near Chicago for most of my adulthood, I am naturally disappointed at the International Olympic Committee’s decision to award the 2016 summer games to Rio de Janeiro. Yes, it will be good finally to have the Games in South America, but the world will miss an exquisite opportunity to see my own beautiful city.
Let's try to extract some lessons on leadership from yesterday's voting. Now that it has become clearer what happened and why, perhaps we can learn something from the experience about how leadership plays out in our day-to-day work.
Four cities were competing for the honors: Chicago, Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio. Each had some advantages and disadvantages. I like to think that Chicago’s advantages were overwhelming and its disadvantages minuscule. London’s bookies had laid odds on Chicago. The prevailing expectation was that Chicago would win. Yet our city was the first to be sidelined in the tiered voting.
The structure and process of voting was key. The IOC consists largely of former Olympians, the bulk of them from Europe and few from North America. Although representatives of the competing cities and countries do not vote, their loyalists do. The actual voting proceeds in rounds. Barring an outright majority, in each sucessive round, the city with the fewest votes loses. Then the surviving cities move on to the next round.
With 20/20 hindsight, we can now clearly see that it was in no one’s interest to let the United States survive the first vote. Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio could all hold out hope for their own bids only if Chicago lost early. Otherwise, the American city would prevail.
So they cooperated on that first round. Because it appeared that Tokyo would most likely be the first city to lose, enough IOC delegates who favored Rio shifted their first vote in Tokyo’s favor so that it could survive the first round. These were insincere votes, intended only to defeat Chicago. The gambit worked. The first-round tally was fairly even, but Chicago came up with the least support.
What meaning does this have for leaders and would-be leaders? Just this.
Leaders must never presume that their followers will fall into line, and they must never presume that their skeptics and rivals will be idle. Followers, both real and potential, will think and choose for themselves and align in their own strategic interest. They may or may not identify themselves in ways that the leaders presume. Their alliances may or may not reflect the assumptions of leaders. Their self-interest may or may not be apparent to leaders.
The support that leaders expect to enjoy may or may not materialize. Whether it does is not up to the leader. It is up to the followers. Indeed it is always the follower, never the leader, that determines who will lead and who will follow.
That is the lesson we draw. In the IOC voting, it was painful for us in Chicago. But that’s life.
One final note of unabashed civic boosterism. For the benefit of our readers outside the United States, you really do owe it to yourselves to discover Chicago.
Ours is a city of spectacular beauty and charm. We have incredible architecture, phenomenal museums and orchestras, two world-class universities, towering skyscrapers, impressive public sculture, a network of virgin prairies and forests, flower-laden boulevards, unrivaled ethnic diversity, and riveting dramatic theater and opera.
We have an inland coastline with beaches and an azure sea dappled with white sailboat masts to the horizon, extraordinary shopping, a river that flows backward and bridges that open to the sky, the best baseball park in the world, restaurants for any taste, a patchwork quilt of charming and livable neighborhoods, and—how can we put this?—endlessly intriguing politics.
On top of all that, in Lincoln Park, Grant Park, and now Millennium Park we actually have a front yard. In every respect, we are truly the quintessential American city.
Give me a call if you're coming. I would love to show you around.
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