My interest in the lives of executives goes back a long way. CEOs in particular, have always fascinated me. You might ask, why? Why do I study CEOs? Why donât I focus on other people? Is it that Iâm attracted to power? Do I get vicarious satisfaction from dealing with powerful people? Iâve no hesitation in stating that power isnât the reason. Power has never been important in either my personal or professional life. I believe my curiosity about people in leadership positions has other sources.
Of course, figuring out why we do what we do is always a challenge. We easily confuse Dichtung und Wahrheit
(poetry and truth)âthe title the writer and statesman Wolfgang von Goethe gave to his memoirs. As the clock of time ticks merrily along, weâre likely to mix up narrative truth with historical truth. Memory can never be wholly reliable and self-reports can be particularly misleading because there is always the risk that our defenses will go into overdrive. So, when we take a deep dive and try to understand our motives, we might not always like whatâs revealed. We might prefer to push the things we donât like to see out of conscious awareness. Whenever I wear my psychoanalytic hat listening to my clients, I am very aware that specific events can become confusing viewed through the telescope of time.
I have a very early memory of poring over newspapers with my grandfather, looking at pictures of famous people, including political leaders. While we looked, my grandfather made it quite clear to me that the rot starts at the topâas the saying goes, âfish start to rot from the head down.â Even though I was so young, he thought it was important for me to understand that if attention isnât paid to whatâs going on at the top, trouble was likely to follow. My grandfather also told me that knowing that something is rotten at the top is one thing but doing something about it is something else. It can be very hard to stop the rot, especially as most human beings are wary of change. They might want other people to change but changing themselves is a very different proposition. Even if they have the will to change, they may not have the skill to do so. With hindsight, I realize that if he had had the chance, my grandfather would have liked to be a lawyer or politician. Perhaps he thought that having a public or professional role would have given him the credibility to put things right in a world where he believed things were very wrong.
This was a short time after World War II ended and of course I was only a child, so although I took in what he was saying it didnât make much sense to me. Later on, when I had become an aficionado of detective stories, Sherlock Holmesâ famous statement, âYou see, but you do not observe,â rang a very loud bell.1 Detecting the strange dynamics that occur at the top of organizationsâand how they affect the lives of othersâhas formed a significant part of my work.
Generally speaking, we arenât very good observers. Nevertheless, what we need to know is often staring us in the face. As Goethe put it, âthe hardest thing to see is whatâs right in front of your eyes.â His words remind me of a story I heard about Professor Louis Agassiz, the founder of Harvardâs Museum of Comparative Zoology. Agassiz was well-known for his observational skills and he liked to transfer these skills to others. He gave one particular student an assignment to study a fish preserved in alcohol. After ten minutes, the student thought he had seen all there was to see but when he looked for Agassiz to tell him his findings, the professor was nowhere to be found. The student had no choice but to spend more time studying the fish. When Agassiz finally returned, and after the student reported what he had seen, the professorâs response was that he hadnât looked anywhere near carefully enough and had missed âone of the most conspicuous features of the animal. Look again; look again!â In the words of the student, âhe left me to my misery. And so, for three long days, he placed that fish before my eyes, forbidding me to look at anything else, or to use any artificial aid. âLook, look, look,â was his repeated injunction.â Frustrating though it had been, the student, after many hours studying the fish, learned how to look. He said later: âWhat I gained by this outside experience has been of greater value than years of later investigation.â2
Like my grandfather, my father also took pride of place in my inner world. He was CEO of a mid-sized company and I used to be fascinated by the way people responded to his ideas. If an idea resonated with him, he was masterly at ordering people about. And to me, a young child, his business exploits seemed magical, not least because of his many travels. He would come and go from the kinds of faraway places that I could only dream of. My brother and I were kept informed about where he was from colorful postcards, always with the terse message âGreetings from Papa.â These messages were even more charismatic because we didnât live with him. My parents were divorced and in my fantasy world my father was larger than life. This, and his position as a captain of industry, no doubt contributed to my interest in what happens at the top of organizations.
When I was little, the contrast between my grandfather, a lowly craftsman who was often victimized by decisions made by people at the top, and my father, who was a real mover and shaker, must have been baffling. How could I reconcile their respective positions in the world of work? Why was one successful, and the other a failureânot from a personal but from a work perspective? Now I am at a late stage in my life, I wonder how far my lifeâs work has been based on the fantasy that if I could modify the behavior of the people at the topâmaking them change for the betterâit would have a trickle-down effect on their organizations (at least for people at lower levels). Who knows, it might even help to make their organizations better places to work. Throughout my life, this desire, based on my early life experiences, has guided many of my activities in different ways.
In my various contributions to the management literature, I have pointed out the relationship between leadersâ personalities, their decision-making practices, and the way their actions affect organizations and societies.3 I have been privy to many situations where the leaders of both public and private organizations have had a devastating effect on their surroundings. Because I was born during World War II, I was highly attuned to dysfunctional leadership practices taking place on a grand scale. I knew from my mother that many members of my family had been killed by the Nazis. Most people now accept that political leaders like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao murdered tens of millions of people. But who doesnât find Stalinâs observation that âa single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statisticâ an indication of a very sick mind? Yet it is very disturbingâif the present political landscape is a signifierâthat so many seem to have forgotten what has happened in the past, increasing the likelihood of repeating the same mistakes. In my experience, only by mourning the past do we have a chance to start genuinely new beginnings.
Perhaps it was unusual for a child to be shielded so little from knowing what was happening in those early postwar years. Certainly, I remember being totally captivated by radio reports of the Nuremberg trials, when the senior German war criminals were brought to justice. At the time, their crimes against humanity were far too horrifying to comprehend. But as I grew older, and I became more aware of the gruesomeness of it all, I was deeply troubled by the realization that these despotic leaders were not exceptions. They didnât commit those atrocities on their own. They had many willing henchmen. It is a sad truth that our inner wolf doesnât need much encouragement to be set free and start devouring everybody who stands in its way.4 Later in life, I saw similar dynamics taking place in the world of organizations, albeit on a much smaller scale.
My awareness of the devastation that leaders can bring about compelled me to ask what motivates these people? Why do they behave the way they do? What happens to their values? And, most importantly, is there anything that we can do to preempt or tackle it?
These are not just historical questions. In present-day society we once again see too many second-rate hucksters in the limelight, manipulating the masses to foster their own narrow self-interestsâthe coronavirus pandemic not being an exception. Many contemporary world leaders behave like the Loreleiâthe enchanting, mythical siren whose song lured seamen to their death. Gifted in the art of make-belief, they relate fantasies to an unwitting public, while their reality is steeped in mendacity. They exploit humankindâs wish to believe in magic, with disastrous consequences. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell noted, âThe whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people full of doubts.â
Footnotes
1
Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Amazon Media.
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2
http://âpeople.âmorrisville.âedu/â~snyderw/âcourses/âNatr252/âagassiz.âhtml.
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3
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries and Danny Miller (1984). The Neurotic Organization. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries and Danny Miller (1988) Unstable at the Top. New York: Signet.
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4
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries (2005). Lessons on Leadership by Terror: Finding Shaka Zulu in the Attic. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
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