‘Stale leaders’, or, a rumination on the 11-year rule

Napoleon was crowned in December 1804. Eleven years later, in June 1815, lost the Battle of Waterloo. In these 11 years, he had united much of Europe — for the first time since Charlemagne a thousand years ago, in 804. Napoleon achieved this through battlefield victories against the great military powers of his age, such as Prussia and Austria.

Deng Xiaoping was already an old man of 74 when he took charge in 1978. Eleven years later, he stepped down in 1989, the year of Tiananmen Square. Many people, including Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew, thought of him as the greatest man they had ever known — because of the ambitions he set out to achieve and then went about achieving over these 11 years. To do this, Deng had to discard the Marxist views he had held for more than half a century. That reformed China of his making was set on a path it is still rolling down today.

Eleven years is a long time. Or rather, let us say, it is sufficient time for a leader to make an impact.

In fact, it is hard to find a person anywhere on the planet and, indeed, at any point in history, who made a difference after his or her first decade in a leadership role. At best, they may continue doing what they were doing; but more often, they take on a tired look. And sometimes, they produce terrible outcomes as they grow a little long in the tooth.

Deng’s predecessor Mao is a good example of this last phenomenon. After his first decade came famines induced by policy and violence.

All of Indira Gandhi’s key achievements — from nationalisation of banks and the abolition of privy purses to the Bangladesh war — whether they are classified as good or bad, were implemented in her initial years. Then came the Emergency, and in her very last years, the violence in Punjab.

In our own times, consider Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has been in power since 2003, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who has hung around for 25 years.

Russia’s per capita GDP when Putin took over was USD 1,700. Eleven years later, in 2011, it had risen to USD 14,300. Today, another 14 years after that, it has fallen to USD 13,800, according to World Bank data. Putin remains in office, having presided over no economic growth for a decade and a half — and an ongoing war that has already eaten up the flower of Russia’s youth and its future.

Erdogan took over an economy that was at USD 4,600 per person in 2003 and took it to USD 12,500 by 2013. Today, Turkey is still more or less in the same place. He hangs on, nonetheless.

Jawaharlal Nehru spent his first decade building institutions that we still have around us. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) came in 1950, starting with IIT-Kharagpur; the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in 1954; the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in 1956; the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) in 1961. In this period, Nehru also put up a string of public-sector enterprises that still live. The steel giant SAIL (1954), ONGC (1956), NMDC (1958), Indian Oil (1959), and so on and on. His key contributions to global affairs were also of this period, from Panchsheel (1954) to Bandung (1955).

Whether you admire Nehru (as people my age were compelled to do when we were young) or you dislike him (as is fashionable today), his legacy is alive and breathing in the institutions that he conceived and built — all of them more or less completed over 11 years.

Pakistan’s Gen Ayub Khan was likened by Samuel Huntington of the Clash of Civilisations fame to the lawgivers of ancient Greece. Ayub seized power in 1958 and lost it 11 years later in 1969. His initial years were promising in terms of economic growth, leading to that praise from Huntington, even though the numbers were modest by the standards of Japan and South Korea and Taiwan. But the war against India in 1965 and the agitations that were stirring in the East finished him off.

Even the more wicked leaders of history completed their own arcs in this period. Hitler came to office in 1933 and by 1944 was in his bunker awaiting the forces of Gen. Zhukov, who had defeated the Germans in Stalingrad the year before. All of the achievements that history lists for the German tyrant — from what he did to the economy and the Autobahn, to the persecutions of minorities, to the manhandling of the French and British forces and the conception of the ‘blitzkrieg‘, to the development of the first modern rocket, the V2 — all of these came in 11 years.

There is a reason this 11-year phenomenon is a rule as much as it is an observation.

It speaks to the nature of humans, what we are like. We have a limited number of original ideas to offer, and that store exhausts itself with time. Most of us do not have much power or agency over the world. The few who do have power show the rest of us what is possible and for how long.

In his book The 10 Rules of Successful Nations, Ruchir Sharma writes under the heading ‘Stale leaders’ that ‘One simple way to think about this rule is that high-impact reform is most likely in a leader’s first term, and less likely in the second term and beyond, as a leader runs out of ideas or support for reform and turns to securing a grand legacy’.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘In the end, every hero becomes a bore.’

Views are personal. More of Aakar Patel’s writing may be read here