Who's in charge, anyway?

Thoughts on the state of leadership and leadership education.

Last week, I was in New Orleans to cover a trifecta of events: New Orleans Entrepreneur Week, the 3^rd Coast Venture Summit, and New Orleans Book Festival. The three events were interrelated, in part because the co-chair of the book festival was current Tulane professor and former chair of CNN Walter Isaacson, who has written several biographies of corporate executives. I attended sessions featuring founders of very small businesses, CEOs of global oil companies, and such business journalists as Isaacson and Ken Auletta of The New Yorker.

It got me thinking a lot about the nature of leadership. I went to business school. I am on email lists for several graduate schools of business, all of which want to highlight their unique approach to turning students into leaders. And yet, a lot of very successful politicians and executives do nothing that fits in with the models of Great Leadership.

Trust me, no one is going to hold Elon Musk out as a model. Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, was the country’s leading management guru for a while, until it turned out that all he had done was extensive financial engineering that fell apart shortly after his retirement.

Jared Dillian

discussed this in his newsletter this week. A lot of people are put into leadership positions and muddle through with a combination of modeling, intimidation, and incentives. They often do well, too, even if they annoy those who report to them.

Over and over in New Orleans, I heard people talk about entrepreneurs had to be relentless to accomplish anything, jettisoning family and friends and any semblance of a personal life in the hope of getting the Next Big Thing ready to ship. Furthermore, these people don’t have the time to read b-school newsletters on effective decision-making or to attend workshops on the importance of storytelling.

I don’t think these leadership programs are completely worthless; they help a lot of people who aren’t natural leaders do their jobs better. The problem is that the characteristics of people who can run a big organization tend to fit those who are born psychopaths, and actual research in places like Harvard Business Review and the CFA Institute bears that out. People who score high on measures of psychopathology are charming, thrive in chaos, act in their own best interest, and don’t feel remorse. They are willing and able to manipulate others to get things done.

Take, for example, Rupert Murdoch, who owns the money-losing New York Post mostly because it allows him to insult people in power, giving him more power.

The result is that I listened to Walter Isaacson, Ken Auletta, and John Huey, former editor in chief of Time Magazine—three giants of financial journalism--discuss whether it’s possible to succeed in business without being a jerk. The answer, it seems, is probably not. However, successful leaders need to have much bigger goals than money and dominance if they are going to make a difference in the world.

And so, on that note, let’s hear from another New Orleans Book Festival speaker, the city’s legendary bounce singer Big Freedia.