Nice guys come second and the winners we should admire are sociopaths. I might be paraphrasing, but all too often that’s what we’re fed. From celebrity chefs to autocratic CEOs, society has accepted the lie that you have to be a despot to succeed.
Jon Ronson touches on it in The Psychopath Test – and history bears him out – this idea that the most ruthless people also share an ability to mesmerize and charm as well as bully to get what they want. And if not everyone all the time, then they at least build enough impetus to get what they want.
Whether from business or politics, strip many leaders of their veneer of success and you’ll find someone who is perfectly intelligent and extremely charismatic but also bullheaded and completely unwilling to listen to anyone else’s point of view. Is that what it takes to succeed? Perhaps we need to re-examine the way we define success in the first place.
Leadership styles and the Invisible Hand
Take a look at the lampooning of Donald Trump and the very modern saga of Martin Shkreli’s downfall, and you will see two things. First, that the higher someone climbs a ladder, the better you can see their backside (and oh how we delight in pointing that out). Second, that it doesn’t matter if you think someone is talking rubbish, they’ll always find someone to agree with them.
And with this alchemy of persuasion comes a strange mutation of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand theory. Originally this described how the self-interest of an individual (and with it free market capitalism) unwittingly benefits the whole of society. More so in some ways than direct intervention.
I’d quite like to believe that things were simpler back in the 1700s when Smith first put quill to parchment, but they probably weren’t. There’s nothing more complex than humanity’s desire to clamber of the shoulders of its rivals. But I think with modern wealth distribution as it is, what self-interested individuals want is increasingly separated from what benefits society.
There are notable exceptions. Bill Gates for one, who has put $20bn behind solving climate change (short version: since there’s no commercial imperative, he’s creating one). Perhaps the exceptions don’t get enough press – ‘nice’ doesn’t make the right sort of headlines. And it is possible to push people too far – as Iceland’s response to the banking crisis shows.
Groups of all types will excuse shoddy treatment from the big man and happily file it under ‘Great Leadership’ so long as it Gets The Job Done, particularly in times of crisis.
But when the job done isn’t a good one, and it’s not in our best interests, then the simple truth is that we’re worshipping false idols – accepting behavior that’s less than equable without an exchange of care or protection. And the simple lesson for would-be leaders? Well it’s the same it’s always been: Don’t screw it up.
