3/4 why great leaders are in short supply
We're living with something of an irony right now regarding leadership. On the one hand, the topic has never been more studied and written about; my recent Google search for leadership research by academies and institutes returned some 375,000 hits. On the other hand, we are experiencing a dearth of leadership in society. We see fewer prominent leaders who seem genuine and highly capable, and many who have been compromised, deposed, or defeated. Even more seem to have run out of ideas, or simply appear unable to craft the necessary consensus to lead. Perhaps it's really not so ironic that there would be this inverse relationship: the deeper we sink into leadership crisis, the more it shows up on the agendas of think tanks and conferences.
From my own perspective as someone who has had a front-row seat to leadership over a few decades, it isn't so much that today's leaders fall short of the capabilities or character leaders had in the past. It isn't that the visionary, principled, courageous type we would all prefer to follow was once common and is now a rarity. Rather, it's the context of leadership that has changed, so that people with just as great capability as their predecessors find it much harder today to lead. We could probably cite many factors that have contributed to this shift, but three are particularly important. As I see it, leaders in the past had the great advantages of:

Privileged access to information. People naturally look for direction from someone they perceive to be in possession of more information about an evolving situation. It used to be that leaders were in a unique position to gain information, and to dole it out on a need-to-know basis. Now the world is awash in instantly accessible information of all types and on all subjects. Human beings making ground-level observations can communicate them directly to others either around the globe or around the corner, while they walk down the sidewalk of an urban neighborhood or the dirt path of a remote jungle.
Is it any wonder that the Web became the greatest fear factor of every dictator? When even State Department communiqués become public knowledge and, in almost any realm, an impassioned nobody can be in greater possession of the facts than a leader in that same realm, information is decoupled from leadership. In fact the flows of information actively undercut leadership—both the practice and the perceived need for it.
The reflected glory of their institutions .Twenty years ago, a citizen might not know the name of a Fortune 500 CEO or NGO director, but they knew the reputation of the institution—and made an assumption that the person chosen to lead it must personify its good qualities. Two things have changed that: it is much easier to see leader and institution separately and there has been a significant decline in respect for the institutions themselves. Whether we're talking about multinational corporations, churches, or public treasuries, we are constantly reminded by Pew and Gallup that reputations now scrape the bottom. There is an increasing perception of incompetence, greed, and frivolity at the expense of the governed, the taxed, and the managed.
Are institutions truly less noble, or is it that they, as well as their leaders, are subjected to more relentless scrutiny? In my own years in the White House I vividly recall the media's clamoring for details about presidential habits and the daily life of the West Wing—only to find them all too ordinary and boring to report. Today the media churns out every minor indiscretion and then, in a rare act of community, the public blogs on it. Social media platforms give motivated critics, even lone voices, the ability to be heard. YouTube is a bargain-basement media buy for campaigning on any issue.
Whether it is a matter of perception or reality, we can only hope that respect for our institutions will rise again. Institutions are where