2011: the year leadership died.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: MARKETING SOLUTIONS

"At a time when, from India to America, democracies have never had more big decisions to make ... this epidemic of not deciding is a troubling trend."

--Thomas Friedman, "Who's the Decider" The New York Times, Nov. 16, 2011

IT IS GOOD TO SAY GOOD BYE TO 2011, which could surely go down as the year that leadership died. The litany of leaders who are not faring well is large and growing: President Barack Obama's job approval according to Gallup just dipped below that of former President Jimmy Carter and is now the lowest for any president at this stage in his tenure. The collapse of a long list of Republican presidential candidates, including Michele Bachman, Rick Perry and Herman Cain, has been breath-taking.

Related failures include the bipartisan Congressional Super-Committee charged with debt reduction. Certainly corporate CEOs as a group are rated at near all-time lows. American Airlines filed for Chapter 11 and their CEO resigned. Certainly, it is not just a U.S. problem. The leadership turnover and turmoil in places like Greece, Italy and Egypt fit a pattern where political leaders are failing and fleeing at unprecedented levels.

Just as telling is a group of leaders who are revered but are not available. The outpouring of adulation for the late Steve Jobs has surely caught everyone by surprise for a CEO whose company produced incredible products and profits but who by most everyone's assessment was a holy terror to work for, outsourced over 700,000 jobs to China and had more idle cash than God--or at least the U.S. Treasury. He and his were clearly a part of the reviled 1 percent. Then there is Hilary Clinton, who lost out to Barack Obama in the 2008 primary but is now viewed as all but sainted and a shoo-in for president if only she were running. And of course the group of Republican candidates who could not be arm-twisted into running like Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, Mitch Daniels, governor of Indiana, and Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, are now widely viewed as far superior to those actually running. It seems the wav to be really highly regarded as a leader is to, well, not be in a prominent role of leadership.

Has leadership fallen on hard times?

The question is: What have we learned that gives us hope that 2012 might be better? This is not an easy question and vet it warrants examination.

It is hard to explain why all of the leaders we have look so weak, while the ones we can't have look so attractive. Is there...