The Crisis in Followership

The scenes from the Gulf of Mexico, of the devastation of our ocean and wildlife habitat, no less whole ways of life are crushingly heart breaking.  How did this happen?  Technical failures?  Yes.  Regulatory complacency?  Absolutely.  Corporate greed.  You bet.
But I see something else, that underlies all of these:
What we have here is a failure of followership.
There were plenty of managers involved:  BP's, the drilling company's, Halliburton's, and regulators.  But none of these managers were following any commanding or demanding vision.  Each operated on the basis of immediate, situational and expedient objectives.  There were plenty of opportunities for all of the managers involved to follow something significant:  environmental responsibility, operational safety, modesty, humility, precaution, preparation for disaster.  But none of these ideas were in play.  Instead, just the managerial imperatives for efficiency, speed, profit ad a place at the table.
We all need managers.  And we esteem, and reward the good ones.  This is not about managers, but about that lack of followership that engenders creative leaders.
I say this is a crisis in followership because a leader only arises when followers seek something that requires large scale collaboration on something large, long term, requiring vision or even sacrifice -- sharing of effort and commitment that can't be done individually. And by leader here, I mean someone that stands for bringing to fruition a vision of something more expansive and more encompassing than managerial objectives, or narrow successes in executing operations.
I've seen it time after time, no one asks for a leader when a short term objective will do.
 So it is in this case (and in the case of the financial meltdown, the crashing and burning of the health care and educations systems).  In the case of this disaster, no one sought anything to follow at all, they just wanted to get the job done according to the short-term demands of their immediate objectives (mostly quick turnaround and low cost).
This catastrophe is not a matter of improper risk assessment, as David Brooks states in his New York Times column today, this is not a problem in dealing with technology (think of the space program or the safe operation of nuclear power plants in France).  It highlights the lack of willingness to follow something more visionary and globally important, and thus yield to a leader who embodies those higher principles.  No leader of this kind was in evidence in this crisis, because none of the organizations involved saw the need to follow such a person. We have such people, those who offer their leadership that envisions large scale collaboration for our highest social, environmental and economic values, but their leadership is not called for by our corporate culture or paid for by willingness to fund effective regulation.
We have to be willing to follow something greater than ourselves if these crises are going to abate. I think this disaster is symbolic of the rampant propensity for pursuing self-interest that we have settled for as a way of life, especially in our business practices.
"No one raises their children to be followers," one of my clients said to me.  And with that attitude, there won't be leaders either.  And we can expect crises equal to the complexity and large scale that our technology allows to roll on, taking one bit of health, one stretch of shore line, one species with it, time after time.
We can ask, where were the leaders?  But I think first we have to ask, who were were willing to follow, for what ends, for what kind of a society, nation, world?  No followers, no leaders.  There you have it.