Leadership Thoughts

leading in today's world

The Census, Hard-to-Count Populations, and Voter Suppression?

September 6, 2019 at 5:45 pm Add a comment!

The first census post discussed what is called “prison gerrymandering.” This post focuses on the census’s differential undercount. The term “differential undercount” refers to the long-standing bias in the decennial census that undercounts what are called hard-to-count populations (HTC). I discuss this now before returning to the 2020 Census and the citizenship question because this next post continues the HTC discussion.

Danahy and Lang start with the premise that the census count is a voting rights issue. Voting rights can be understood in several distinct ways. One can consider voting as participation, which is the right to cast a ballot that is counted.… Read the rest

Trump as Group Leader

September 12, 2019 at 7:03 pm Add a comment!

What may explain Trump’s powerful appeal to a segment of America’s population? What leadership characteristics or practices does Trump use to foster his appeal to his base followers?

In a recent paper, two practicing psychoanalysts, Marie Rudden and Stephanie Brandt, use social psychological literature on group formation and group functioning and their psychoanalyst experiences to try to answer these questions. Some of the literature they reference may be familiar to leadership students, faculty, and practitioners. For example, through my teaching about teams in the SL program, I reviewed material on teams and groups by William Bion. However, other scholars mentioned, such as Melanie Klein, P.… Read the rest