Table of Contents
Endorsements
Title Page
Copyright Page
A WARREN BENNIS BOOK
Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgments
THE AUTHOR
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE - HOW MUCH CAN WE HOPE FOR?
GOOD LEADERSHIP IS A NATURAL HUMAN BEHAVIOR
IS BAD LEADERSHIP PART OF THE HUMAN CONDITION?
LEADERSHIP IS DECISION MAKING, AND WE ARE DECISION MAKERS
PART ONE - THE LEADERSHIP BRAIN
CHAPTER TWO - A BRAIN DESIGNED FOR LEADERSHIP?
DESCRIPTION OF THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS IN ACTION
EVIDENCE OF THE DECISION-MAKINIG PROCESS
THE ROLE OF EMOTIONS
HELEN MAKES HER DEICISION
THE PREFRONTAL CORTEX
CONFLICT DETECTOR
TREASURES OF THE NEOCORTEX
THE DORSOLATERAL MODULE AND WORKING MEMORY
THE ROSTROMEDICAL AND ROSTROTER CORTEXES: WHAT I AM
CHECKS AND BALANCES AMONGST THE DRIVES
A COMPREHENSIVE TEST: THE ULTIMATUM GAME
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER THREE - DRAWIN REDISCOVERED
A LARGER BRAIN—WITH A PRICE TO PAY
A BETTER FOOD SUPPLY—WITH A PRICE TO PAY
PAIR-BONDING PAYS THE TAB
THE UPPER PALEOLITHIC TRANSITION
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORALITY
PEOPLE-W/O-CONSCIENCE
PART TWO - HISTORIC LEADERSHIP PATTERNS
CHAPTER FOUR - ALL ABOUT LEADERS
DEFINITIONS OF LEADERSHIP
EVIL LEADERSHIP: NAPOLEON’S RISE TO POWER BY ANY MEANS
MISGUIDED LEADERSHIP ON OFFSHORE OIL PLATFORMS
GOOD LEADERSHIP: DISPLACING MACHO CULTURE ON OFFSHORE OIL PLATFORMS
OTHER EVIDENCE OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF GOOD/MORAL LEADERSHIP
MORAL LEADERSHIP
PREVIEW OF CHAPTERS FIVE THROUGH SEVEN
CHAPTER FIVE - LEADERSHIP AND THE HISTORIC EVOLUTION OF POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS
THE FALL AND THE RISE OF LEADERS-W/O-CONSCIENCE
THE CULTURAL SHIFT TO CIVILIZATION AND THE RISE OF LEADERS-W/O-CONSCIENCE
THE DARK AGES AS AN AGE OF LEADERS-W/O-CONSCIENCE
MACHIAVELLI’S CLEAR VIEW OF LEADERS-W/O-CONSCIENCE
A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF LEADERS-W/O-CONSCIENCE?
CHECKS AND BALANCES
LINCOLN’S GOOD/MORAL LEADERSHIP
PROGRESS AND REGRESS IN THE TWENTIETH AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURIES
CHAPTER SIX - LEADERSHIP OF ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS
OVERVIEW OF ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS
OVERVIEW OF THE CORPORATION
THE RISE OFAMERICAN CORPORATIONS AND THE STRUGGLE TO REGULATE THEM
THE FIRST CORPORATIONS WITH NATIONAL SCOPE: THE RAILROADS
THE FEDERAL RESPONSE
STANDARD OIL
CORPORATE ABUSES LEADING INTO THE GREAT DEPRESSION
PROGRESS AND REGRESS SINCE THE GREAT DEPRESSION
CHAPTER SEVEN - LEADERSHIP IN INSTITUTIONS OF HUMAN MEANING
THE INSTITUTION OF RELIGION AND HUMAN MEANING
GOOD/MORAL LEADERSHIP AND THE GNOSTIC CHALLENGE TO ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY
THE INSTITUTION OF ART AND HUMAN MEANING
THE INSTITUTION OF SCIENCE AND HUMAN MEANING
POSSIBLE CONVERGENCE OFRELIGION AND SCIENCE ON THE MEANING OF HUMAN EXISTENCE?
THE CONVERGENCE OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE AS A LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE
PART THREE - LEADERSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY AFFAIRS
CHAPTER EIGHT - KEEPING ON TRACK
CAN CORPORATIONS EVER BE HUMANE? GOOD/MORAL LEADERSHIP OF CORPORATIONS
MEDTRONIC—A VALUES-DRIVEN COMPANY
MEDTRONC—A PERFORMANCE-DRIVEN COMAPANY
NUCOR: GOOD/MORAL LEADERSHIP IN THE STEEL INDUSTRY
ENRON: A COUNTEREXAMPLE OF OFF-TRACK LEADERSHIP
MISGUIDED LEADERSHIP: THE ROLE OF AGENCY THEORY
DESIGNING CORPORATE STRUCTURES TO ENCOURAGE GOOD/MORAL CORPORATE BEHAVIOR
THE ROLE OF GOVERNEMENT REGULATION IN KEEPING CORPORATIONS ON TRACK
CORPORATE CORRUPTION OF THE ELECTORAL PROCESS
REFORMING THE FEDERAL ELECTORAL SYSTEM
THE POTENTIAL ROLE OF SCIENCE IN KEEPING CORPORATIONS ON TRACK
CHAPTER NINE - A WORLDWIDE SWINDLE
WAS THE MELTDOWN REALLY A BLACK SWAN?
THE FLEECING MACHINE
THE ROLE OF THE BIG MULTINATIONAL BANKS IN THE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE MESS
LACK OF CONTROOL, LACK OF SELF-CONTROL
LACK OF EXTERNAL CONTROL: REGULATION
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER TEN - KEEPING A GLOBAL ECONOMY AND A GLOBAL COMMUNITY ON TRACK
THE GLOBALE CONOMY AS A CHALLENGE TO THE DRIVE TO BOND
KEEPING A GLOBAL ECONOMY ON TRACK
UNDERSTANDING THE MULTIPLE FORMS OF GLOBALIZATION
GLOBAL ECONOMIC REGULATION
WAR AND GENOCIDE AS CHALLENGES TO THE DRIVE TO BOND
KEEPING A GLOBAL COMMUNITY ON TRACK
FACING UP TO THE COMING CRISIS AT THE WORLD LEVEL
INSTITUTIONAL SUGGESTIONS AT THE WORLD LEVEL
CHAPTER ELEVEN - KEEPING ON TRACK BY PRACTICING GOOD/MORAL LEADERSHIP
LEADING ONESELF
INTERNALIZING THE RD THEORY CONCEPT OF GOOD/MORAL LEADERSHIP
LEARNING AND PRACTICING GOOD/MORAL LEADERSHIP
SIZING UP THE LEADERSHIP ROLE
SUMMARIZING WHAT LEADERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT GROUPS
PRACTICING GOOD/MORAL LEADERSHIP
ACTION IMPLICATIONS OF THE RD THEORY AT THE INSTITUTIONAL LEVEL
OVERVIEW OF THE PEOPLE-W/OCONSCIENCE ISSUE
ENDING THE NIGHTMARE
CHAPTER TWELVE - RENEWINGTHE STORYOF HUMAN PROGRESS WITH DARWIN’S HELP
APPENDIX - DARWIN MISUNDERSTOOD
NOTES
INDEX
Endorsements
“This is an inspiring book, filled with excellent examples, valuable advice, and warnings not to be overlooked. Every executive would be well-served to read this book cover-to-cover.”
—Robert Porter Lynch, chairman emeritus, Association of Strategic
Alliance Professionals
“Paul Lawrence tracks leadership qualities into the deepest recesses of the human brain. Listen up, business! Tapping into this scientific understanding of leadership is key to your company’s success or failure.”
—William C. Frederick, professor emeritus, Katz Graduate School of
Business, University of Pittsburgh
“Paul Lawrence proposes that nature has provided us with individuals of conscience who are capable of good leadership, but also with a small number of individuals whose lack of conscience typically makes them bad leaders. He refers to such individuals as free riders, psychopaths, or ‘people without conscience,’ and discusses in detail the devastating impact they have when placed in a leadership role, particularly in business, politics, the military, and religion. His thesis is brilliant and compelling, and in line with current research on the neuroscience of psychopathy. Driven to Lead is essential reading for anyone who hopes to gain some understanding of the scandals and disasters that result from bad leadership.”
—Robert D. Hare, professor emeritus of psychology, University of
British Columbia
Praise for Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices
“In this pathbreaking book, Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria show [that] ... the deep study of human nature does not justify Social Darwinism and gladiatorial commercial combat of the kind often portrayed in popular media. On the contrary, it offers formulas for a more harmonious and efficient conduct of human affairs. The approach .... is naturalistic, based on self-understanding and the cultivation of the strong cooperative instincts that have favored group survival for countless millennia.”
—Excerpt from the Foreword by Edward O. Wilson
Warren Bennis
A WARREN BENNIS BOOK
This collection of books is devoted exclusively to new and exemplary contributions to management thought and practice. The books in this series are addressed to thoughtful leaders, executives, and managers of all organizations who are struggling with and committed to responsible change. My hope and goal is to spark new intellectual capital by sharing ideas positioned at an angle to conventional thought—in short, to publish books that disturb the present in the service of a better future.
Books in the Warren Bennis Signature Series
| Branden | Self-Esteem at Work |
| Burke, Lake, Paine | Organization Change |
| Cleveland | Nobody in Charge |
| Cloke, Goldsmith | The Art of Waking People Up |
| Cloke, Goldsmith | The End of Management and the Rise of Organizational Democracy |
| Frohman, Howard | Leadership the Hard Way |
| George | Authentic Leadership |
| George | 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis |
| George | True North |
| George, McLean, Craig | Finding Your True North: A Personal Guide |
| Gergen, Vanourek | Life Entrepreneurs |
| Glen | Leading Geeks |
| Higgins | Career Imprints |
| Kellerman, Rhode | Women and Leadership |
| Kleiner | The Age of Heretics |
| Kohlrieser | Hostage at the Table |
| Lawrence, Nohria | Driven |
| Mitroff, Denton | A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America |
| Rhode | Moral Leadership |
| Riggio | The Art of Followership |
| Sample | The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership |
| Schein | The Corporate Culture Survival Guide |
| Townsend | Up the Organization |
| Zaffron, Logan | The Three Laws of Performance |
To Martha, my lifelong partner
FOREWORD
by Warren Bennis
This book is truly amazing—actually, a masterpiece. It tells the story of the human condition. It tells this story across human history, deep human history. Lawrence realizes that our understanding of leadership can be no better than our understanding of what makes humans, all humans, tick—what are the ultimate motivators of our behavior. This is true because leadership is all about relationships with others. So that is where he starts—with the basic few motives, the innate drives that have been essential to our survival and development into the dominant species on earth.
To do this, Lawrence had to rediscover Darwin’s insights about humans in Darwin’s second epic book, The Descent of Man, which evolutionary biologists have, strangely, ignored. This reveals a new Darwin that turns the public’s assumptions about Darwin upside down. The key is Darwin’s revolutionary observation that the most important difference between humans and lower species is our innate moral sense, our conscience. What an observation—and now we have evidence that it is a valid observation—except for the very few people who are missing the key mutation in their brain.
But this is enough of the story for me to tell here. Read on and you will find explanations of key turning points in human history, explanations of good, bad, and misguided leaders, and even evil leaders like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Lawrence provides an explanation of the greatness of America’s governmental form as well as the nature of its current crisis, and the same is true of the greatness and the current crisis of our vast corporations.
And, finally, Driven to Lead offers a path toward a better future for all.
ACKNOWLEDMENTS
Over the years that I have worked on this research project I have benefited greatly from the many scholars and friends who have studied various drafts of this work and helped me develop its strengths and avoid its pitfalls. The following people have read and provided insightful comments on one or more drafts of the work: Louise Ames, Oakes Ames, Max Bazerman, Michael Beer, Robin Ely, William Frederick, Benjamin Freidman, William George, Joshua Greene, Boris Groysberg, Ranjay Gulati, Marc Hauser, Linda Hill, Rakesh Khurana, John Kotter, Anne Lawrence, William Lawrence, Hans Loeser, Jay Lorsch, Robert Porter Lynch, Joshua Margolis, Kenneth Miller, Lynn Paine, Steven Pinker, Joseph Platt, Jo Procter, Robert Simon, Scott Snook, Renato Taguiri, David Thomas, Andrew Towl, Michael Tushman, Andrew Van de Ven, Charalambos Vlachoutsicos, and Richard Wrangham.
In addition, I wish especially to recognize the help of the following:
• Nitin Nohria, my coauthor of Driven, who throughout the work on this follow-on book has been a steady and wise advisor to me every step of the way.
• Warren Bennis, the general editor of the Jossey-Bass series on leadership, for his unwavering support of the merit of this work.
• Kathe Sweeney, our senior editor, and Rob Brandt, our associate editor at Jossey-Bass, for their wise guidance and hard work throughout the publication process.
• Fred Dalzell, who provided valuable historical consultation, especially on the U.S. Constitution.
• Janice Simmons, who provided secretarial assistance and good humor with printing and copying numerous drafts of the book.
• John Elder, for all his splendid editing and his insightful comments on the several rewrites.
• Ed Wilson and Ernst Mayr, the deans of evolutionary biology who have generously guided my biological education.
• Martha, my wife, for her constant support and her amazing patience with my many years of preoccupation with this project.
Especially because this book is pushing on the edges of knowledge in a diverse set of fields, it is by no means perfunctory for me to add that I take full responsibility for any errors and other shortcomings of the text.
Bedford, Massachusetts
May 2010
PAUL R. LAWRENCE
THE AUTHOR
Paul R. Lawrence is Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School. He grew up in Michigan, where he did his undergraduate work in sociology and economics at Albion College. After serving in the Navy in World War II he finished his masters and doctoral training in organizational behavior at the Harvard Business School. He was the cofounder of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. His research, published in twenty-five books and numerous articles, has dealt with the human aspects of management, organizational change, organization design, human nature, and leadership. His best-known titles (with coauthors) are Organization and Environment, The Changing of Organizational Behavior Patterns, Renewing American Industry, and Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices.
INTRODUCTION
Humans have studied human behavior and leadership behavior for as long as we’ve had written records. In the past four centuries or so, the methods of systematic science have been applied to this study, at both the individual and collective levels. But it has been a somewhat messy pursuit.
As this book will show, the truly scientific understanding of human behavior began with the work of Darwin, published some 150 years ago. Since that time, however, the study of human behavior has become a story of fragmentation. Each of the disciplines shown in Figure 1.1 was launched and carried forward primarily by the intellectual leadership of the persons named beneath each discipline. The prominent newer fields are also named. Figure 1.1 illustrates not only the fragmentation of the effort to understand human behavior scientifically but also the nature of the task of integrating these various fields in order to develop a unified theory of human behavior and leadership. The repetition of the question “only?” at the bottom of the figure indicates the limitations, as I see it, of each discipline’s approach to human behavior.
Specialization, as illustrated, is an essential phase in the advancement of knowledge, but it needs to be balanced with continual efforts to integrate and unify our ever-growing understanding. This integration process has been badly neglected in the human sciences, largely, I believe, for institutional and organizational reasons. University departments compete for funding, personnel, and attention. A scholar who hopes to advance within a discipline is expected to make noteworthy specialized contributions for his or her “team.” Who can afford to collaborate with the competitive teams? Perhaps a senior professor, such as myself, whose career struggles are over but whose intellectual life is not.
FIGURE 1.1. SCHEMATIC OF THEORY FLOW REGARDIND HUMAN BEHAVIOR SINCE DARWIN.
In 1991, when I moved to emeritus status at Harvard Business School, I started working full time (on a half-time salary) on the challenge of finding a more accurate model of human behavior and leadership. Although I had been a student of the full spectrum of the disciplines of human behavior since I was a young man, my primary motivation in 1991 was the rapid rise of agency theory, not only at Harvard Business School but also at many other business schools. Agency theory, as proposed by Michael Jensen and others, started with the axiom of economics that rational self-interest motivated all human behavior and built further on Milton Friedman’s argument that the sole purpose of business was to maximize shareholder (owner) returns. I deeply believed that this doctrine was seriously flawed and that it was generating many disturbing consequences. But such was the enormous appeal of agency theory that I felt it could only be displaced by a better theory of human behavior and leadership, one which took into account the (to me, obvious) fact that there is much more to human behavior than simply rational self-interest.
But there was more on my mind than the need to move on from agency theory. I and others had long been frustrated by the fragmentation and dissonance of the various human sciences. It seemed to be an outrageous case of the blind men describing the elephant. For these reasons, I felt strongly that the time to try for a better synthesis had arrived.
We continue to be mystified by much of our own behavior, both as individuals and as nations, races, and faiths. The historian Norman Davies, summing up the period of the two world wars, wrote,
At a time when the instruments of constructive change had outstripped anything previously known, Europeans acquiesced in a string of conflicts, which destroyed more human beings than all past convulsions put together .... What is more, in the course of those two war-bloodied generations, the two most populous countries of Europe fell into the hands of murderous political regimes whose internal hatred killed even more tens of millions than their wars did.... Future historians, therefore, must surely look back on the three decades between August 1914 and May 1945 as the era when Europe took leave of its senses .... In the course of the horrors, Europeans threw away their position of world leadership1
We can ill afford to remain such a deadly mystery to ourselves. The human race now faces more than one danger that (1) could end civilization as we know it and (2) is of our own making. Nuclear war, environmental collapse, and the spread of pandemics such as AIDS readily come to mind. And how can we account for the fact that people such as Hitler can cause so much damage to so many other people? A more adequate theory of human behavior and leadership would generate practical applications and would distinguish the possible from the impossible. Such a theory would surely be worth a mighty effort.
And although the fragmentation of the human sciences was discouraging, the sheer variety of findings was most encouraging. Amongst so many pieces, there might be enough to put together a unified picture. Particularly exciting were recently developed techniques such as brain imaging, which is giving us fantastic new insights into what happens in the brain during various kinds of normal human behavior, such as remembering and deciding. Gene analysis has also made tremendous advances recently and can throw a bright light not only on what makes us uniquely human but also on how we became uniquely human through the processes of evolution. Hard data on the wellsprings of human behavior were starting to accumulate and, to my mind, demanding to be brought together.
But most of all (and most surprising of all), the time was right because a scientific theory which could account for the new findings and provide understanding of the big questions we want to answer—about consciousness, ultimate motives, conscience, morality, the sense of self, emotions, and complex decision making—had been available for many years. As we will see in Part One, Darwin’s theory of evolution, formulated in 1842 and published in 1859 (Origin of the Species) and 1871 (Descent of Man), is quite up to the task. For the most part, all I had to do was (1) pay close attention to certain aspects of Darwin’s theories about humans that had largely been ignored since his time and (2) give Darwin’s insights the benefit of contemporary research.
This fortunate discovery came about when I collaborated with my Harvard Business School colleague Nitin Nohria on Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, published in 2002.2 In that book, we proposed a foundation for a new model of human behavior, based on four innate drives and a mechanism for keeping them in balance as a choice is made amongst possible actions. That is the one element of this book’s theories which is original work. The rest is pure synthesis of the work of others.
When Driven was published, our four-drive model of man was highly controversial. It bucked the prevailing paradigms of the major disciplines concerned with human behavior. Economics explained all behavior with the axiom of rational self-interest; sociology explained it all with social forces; psychology with the learning that filled the “blank slate” of the mind; anthropology with the teachings of the local culture; and evolutionary biology with natural selection and our “selfish” genes, as Richard Dawkins memorably called them. Since then, these oversimplified (in my opinion) positions have been rapidly changing. While the struggles over these fundamental assumptions about human nature are by no means over, the tide has turned. There can be no going back.
But neither could I stand still. Driven was a success as far as it went, but it was still not an adequate theory of human behavior and certainly not of leadership, my central focus. What was missing was the process by which the prefrontal cortex not only came up with all the options for action but also, by working back and forth with the four drives, made the final action decision that was reasonably balanced as regards to all four drives. This was the impulse/check/balance mechanism that was not addressed in Driven. More important, the theory in Driven was not yet applied to leadership.
I believe that the Renewed Darwinian theories presented in this book are stronger theories of human behavior and of leadership than any of the current alternatives. They are theories that are universal, testable, and actionable. Now it is up to you, the reader, to decide whether or not this outrageously bold claim is justified.
CHAPTER ONE
HOW MUCH CAN WE HOPE FOR?
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change.
—CHARLES DARWIN1
Helen’s boss, Peter, has just informed her that her unit is going to be eliminated and that, while she and some of her employees will be offered jobs elsewhere in the company (and possibly elsewhere in the country), she will have to lay off the rest of her team. What’s more, Peter doesn’t want her to let anyone know yet because the company needs her team to finish its current project ahead of schedule. Peter has always looked out for Helen, and now he says he is counting on her to manage this with as little damage to the company as possible. “We’re in enough trouble as it is,” he confides, “or I wouldn’t be asking you to do this.” He doesn’t say what the trouble is.
We can imagine that Helen has many conflicting motives. She wants to do her best for the company, or at least to live up to Peter’s expectations and to repay his past generosity. She wants to come out of this looking good, to protect her own career. There are a few of her people she could afford to be rid of, but she is anxious to be fair. She’d very much like to know what has made this layoff necessary, but she is reluctant to ask Peter for more information than he chose to give. She doesn’t feel right keeping the impending layoff secret from her team, yet she thinks that if she lets the cat out of the bag now, it would be very difficult to finish the current project, never mind speeding it up. Not that her team would deliberately sabotage the project, but keeping them extra motivated while waiting to be laid off would take some very skillful management on her part, and she’s not sure she’s up to that.
Clearly, some of her impulses are contradictory. She can’t let people know and keep it a secret at the same time—but there are good reasons for both. She can’t lay off a long-time-but-not-very-useful employee and keep a new-but-harder-working employee while appearing completely fair—but there are good reasons for both. It ought to be a mental train wreck, and yet somehow she will come to a decision of an acceptable course of action. She will not go crazy. Her head will not explode.
GOOD LEADERSHIP IS A NATURAL HUMAN BEHAVIOR
The poet John Donne noted that many everyday occurrences would seem miraculous if they happened only once.2 I think we can look at Helen’s eventual decision as just such an occurrence. Forming a decision out of such a tangle of motivations would seem miraculous if it weren’t something we all do regularly. In this book we will examine what makes human beings capable of this everyday miracle of leadership and how we can all make better and more consistent use of it.
If we saw a cow flying through the air, we would wonder how the cow did it. We don’t usually wonder how a bird does it; we know a bird is designed to fly. What I want to show you in this book is that human beings are designed to feel simultaneous conflicting motivations and to arrive at an acceptable decision—not in spite of the conflicting motivations but because of them. It is the very tangle of Helen’s motivations, we might say, that will enable her to solve them satisfactorily.
How can that be? All living things react to certain aspects of their environments, but no living thing can react in as many different ways to as many things as a human being can. There are several reasons for this, but the most important is the fact that more things strike us as significant or worth reacting to. You might say that more things can push our buttons because we have more buttons to push. Four, to be precise—the four basic drives that I will discuss fully in Chapter Two. Other animals have a basic drive to get what they need—food, shelter, a mate, and so on—and a basic drive to defend themselves against whatever threats they can recognize. Humans of course have these two drives, but we have two others equally important to us—a basic drive to bond, to trust and care for others and to be trusted and cared for by others, and a basic drive to make some sense of our lives. While these two drives sound “fuzzier” than the other two, we will see in the next chapter that they are just as real. It is because we have four drives—four buttons to be pushed—rather than two that we are so much more responsive to our environment. As far as we know, no other creature could have so many different and conflicting things on its mind as Helen has on her mind in the story after hearing Peter’s request.
But how does this responsiveness result in decisions and leadership rather than confusion and stalemate? It happens because our brains have evolved a way to let all four drives “have their say” and then to use our knowledge and experience to arrive at a solution that is acceptable to all four. This is not a metaphor; this is really what happens in the brain, as we will see in Chapter Two. And it is the need to accommodate such a variety of motivations—Helen’s predicament—that brings forth such a variety of responses. To put it crudely, for most creatures, the only problems are to feed and mate and to fight or flee enemies. There are only so many ways they can do those few things, amazing as some of those ways may seem to us. (We are amazed that a spider can make a web, but that’s about the only thing a spider can make.) Helen, though, has so many different impulses to take into account—so many more things that matter to her—that her solution cannot be the same thing that has already been done a million times.
She cannot just spin another web. She has to come up with a unique solution to an immediate situation. That is what humans are uniquely able to do, and that is a pretty good description of leadership. It is obvious from everyday life and from history that this decision-making process is not perfect, but it is also obvious from everyday life and from history that it does work pretty well much of the time.
Often our motivations are conflicting because various people are involved who have different—even conflicting—needs and desires. (This is what Helen faces—the needs and desires of her team differ from the needs and desires of Peter and his superiors; her own needs and desires are yet another variable.) But human beings are designed to take other people’s differing and conflicting needs and desires into account.
In short, we are designed to accomplish things in groups—to lead and follow (which, we will see, are not simple opposites), to learn from each other, to trust and protect and care for each other, to acquire what we need collectively even if we then enjoy it individually. We have evolved this way because it turned out to be a very successful means of survival.
And it still is. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a surprising transformation took place on two offshore oil rigs. Thanks to a deliberate management effort, an extremely macho culture that rewarded intimidation, recklessness, and a cocksure attitude, even when this resulted in injuries and deaths (not to mention inefficient oil drilling), changed into a culture in which these same tough men took their own and each other’s safety seriously, asked for and accepted help from each other, and would even admit out loud in front of visiting women professors that they were afraid or unsure. As one worker put it, “We went from living in one world to living in a good world.”3 Meanwhile, the drilling was accomplished more efficiently and more profitably.
Here, leadership took the role formerly played by evolution. In fact, leadership has become our primary means of adapting to changing circumstances, which Darwin cited earlier as the key to our survival. Since circumstances are always changing, we all have to lead ourselves. In addition, many of us lead others or would like to. This is not a glib comparison; we will see in Part One that the leadership most fit for a group is an extension of the self-leadership that is built into a normal individual’s brain. And as we will see in detail in Chapter Four, this was exactly the kind of leadership that altered the crews of the oil rigs.
IS BAD LEADERSHIP PART OF THE HUMAN CONDITION?
This book about good leadership will have a lot to say about bad leadership. Because humans survive and accomplish things in groups, and because groups always have leaders (often multiple leaders), a bad leader is a serious problem. Although bad leadership has always plagued mankind, we seem particularly aware now of political, business, and organizational failures all over the world—the financial meltdown on Wall Street, Bernie Madoff, the tolerance of child abuse in religious institutions, Osama bin Laden, the awful governments of Zimbabwe, North Korea, Sudan, Burma (Myanmar), and so on. Not only do we know much more about what leaders do and how they fail than would have been possible in previous times, we also expect better of them—a legacy of the Enlightenment. That is why it is so frustrating to see these bad leaders causing so much pain and suffering in so many people’s lives.
Many people are understandably skeptical that leadership as a whole can be improved. Although it has been studied and written about for centuries, has there been any improvement in leadership comparable to the improvements in our material well-being brought about by science, engineering, and medicine? You may expect me to say “no,” but actually my answer is, “Yes, but the advancements are too easily reversed.” The U.S. Constitution, for example, can be seen as a social technology that has been as beneficial since its invention as inoculation or the electric light. (This is discussed at length in Chapter Five.) But we have not been able to nail down our advancements in leadership so that they stay put, the way the advances made by Jenner or Edison seem irreversible. There are always big steps backward.
Is bad leadership an inescapable part of the human condition? My response is that once we understand what makes for good leadership, we can see that the potential for bad leadership is indeed part of the human condition, but not the necessity of enduring it. Consider pneumonia: it used to be a deadly disease, but today it is rare for anyone in the developed world to die of pneumonia unless he or she is already weakened by age or chronic illness. Our “human condition” has not changed; we have the same potential to die of pneumonia as ever. But it is no longer necessary for us to die of pneumonia because we finally understand it and know what do about it. I think we are now on the verge of understanding bad leadership and what to do about it.
LEADERSHIP IS DECISION MAKING, AND WE ARE DECISION MAKERS
Leadership is always associated with action. But to understand leadership and to practice better leadership, we will need to take a closer look at inaction. Think of all the things we don’t do—all the things we want but don’t buy (or steal), all the things we think but don’t say, all the people we don’t like but don’t attack, all the choices we consider but don’t take.
One way of looking at this is that, more than any other species, human beings are decision makers. Other animals make choices, but they do not choose from the infinite possibilities from which humans must choose. (At least, we don’t see the variety in animal activity that we see in human activity.) How is it that, in any particular circumstance, we are capable of so many different responses and yet manage to choose one—usually a workable one? It is possible because we make our decisions in a unique way. We are certainly not the machines of “rational self-interest” that leading economic theories imagine we are (which should be obvious by the frequency with which we undermine ourselves). But there is a logic at work. While in some ways it is non-negotiable, it is fantastically flexible. As I said earlier, it is designed to arrive at good decisions because of—not in spite of—conflicting motivations. The process is certainly not foolproof, but it is well-designed for self-correction and improvement.
This decision-making process—so familiar yet so surprising when we really examine it—is the basis of good self-leadership and good leadership of groups. We will learn about it in Part One; that will be the first step in learning to lead with your whole brain.
This book is organized into three parts:
Part One, “The Leadership Brain,” presents the biological underpinnings of leadership behavior.
Part Two discusses the history of leadership, examining critical turning points in the leadership of political institutions; the rise of corporations as the leading economic institution; and the leadership of religious, artistic, and scientific institutions.
Part Three focuses on modern (mostly twentieth-century) political and economic leadership. Chapter Eight is concerned with contemporary corporate leadership, including the contrasting leadership styles of firms such as Enron and Medtronic. Chapter Nine extends that discussion to the crisis of the 2007-2009 subprime mortgage financial meltdown. Chapter Ten moves to contemporary issues of multinational corporations and world-level political institutions. Chapter Eleven discusses the practice of good/moral leadership and ends with ideas for action on the high-priority issues of our time. Chapter Twelve provides a fresh look at the age-old question of the meaning of human life and the question of human progress.
PART ONE
THE LEADERSHIP BRAIN
CHAPTER TWO
A BRAIN DESIGNED FOR LEADERSHIP?
Man is a social animal endowed with reason.
—PARAPHRASED FROM ARISTOTLE
The small strength and speed of man, his want of natural weapons, etc., are more than counterbalanced by his intellectual powers through which he has formed himself weapons, tools, etc., and secondly by his social qualities which lead him to give and receive aid from his fellow-men.—CHARLES DARWIN1
What is leadership? It is a particular kind of decision making—decisions a leader makes in guiding and motivating a group of people in responding to a particular set of circumstances. The circumstances may be immediate or they may be something the leader foresees in the future, but in either case, there are choices to be made.
This is unique to human beings. For example, bees do what seem to be very complex things, but they do not have leaders who decide among competing courses of action. A queen bee is not a leader; she does not devise solutions to problems and convince other bees to do what needs to be done.
The human brain is also unique in many ways, some of which are directly related to this uniquely human type of decision making. We will see that the human brain is specifically designed to solve problems that must be figured out rather than handled by instinct, to solve problems facing a group, to solve problems through the efforts of a group, to consider multiple—even conflicting—impulses and options, and to arrive at pretty effective decisions. In the past two decades, new methods of neurological research have been showing us more and more (though we still need more) of what is actually going on in the brain when we react to our surroundings, consider choices, remember experiences, and make decisions. We are able to see certain parts of the brain “lighting up” while making certain kinds of decisions, and we are able to see people unable to make certain kinds of decisions when certain parts of the brain have been damaged. Many of these observations and results can be seen to build off of the basic insights of Darwin’s about human nature as reflected in his quotation at the beginning of this chapter. They indicate that leadership is an expression of the survival mechanism, which human beings have evolved. In plain terms, leadership is what we as a species do well.
I am emphasizing the brain because that’s literally where our capacity for leadership is lodged. When I speak of “leading with the brain,” I don’t just mean “using your head” or “being smart” in the ordinary sense; I mean, making full use of the structures in the brain that are specifically involved in—and have evolved for—leadership.
Every species on earth has, obviously, evolved to survive. Most species have evolved to survive by possessing and passing on to their offspring physical characteristics and instinctive behaviors, which give them a particular advantage in a particular environment. Within a limited range of circumstances, they can do exactly what it takes to survive. In most cases, each individual can do exactly what it takes by itself to survive. Humans have evolved to survive in a completely different way—by working together and by relying more on problem-solving skills than on instincts. This is a pretty good working definition of leadership. This unique way of surviving involves solving new problems as they arise and solving a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of ways. These are normally considered characteristic of good leadership.
Helen’s response to her situation, for example, would differ if any of a number of circumstances differed; if she did not feel loyal to her boss, if her team were not halfway through a key project, if she had a great job offer somewhere else, or if she herself had ever been laid off unexpectedly. No set of instincts could cover such a variety of circumstances. What Helen has instead is a brain designed to weigh her need to make a living, her need to avoid the anger and hostility of others, her need to trust others and be trusted by them, her desire not to hurt others, and her need to figure out what to do rather than letting events overwhelm her—and to come up with a solution to this particular set of circumstances.
People do have instincts, but they account directly for only a fraction of our actions. What is built into us is not what we will do in a particular situation, but how we will decide what to do. It is because we generally rely on a decision-making process rather than on instincts that we have both the need and the capacity for leadership. It could even be said that, for humans, decision making and leadership have replaced the earlier, simpler processes of biological survival.
DESCRIPTION OF THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS IN ACTION
People don’t necessarily see, hear, smell, taste, and feel more than other creatures, but we do react to much more of what our senses tell us than any other species. We make use of this flood of information by filtering it, so to speak, through a set of four priorities, which I call our “drives.”2 We have these particular four drives because, taken together, they constitute a very successful survival mechanism. (How this evolved will be explained in Chapter Three.) These criteria are not learned, they are innate—we are born with them. They are unconscious, although, as I will explain further on, we are conscious of the emotions that they generate.
A drive is not simply an imperative. We do not have a constant signal in our brain telling us to “eat, eat, eat.” What we have are criteria by which we judge our circumstances. For example, in order to survive, I need enough food. Will this particular circumstance help me get enough food, or might it prevent me from getting enough food, or does it have no bearing at all on my getting enough food?
Two of these drives, or criteria, are the obvious drives any animal species must have in order to survive as a species:
• The drive to acquire what one needs for one’s survival and the conception and survival of one’s offspring;
• The drive to defend oneself and, as needed, one’s offspring from threats.
The other two drives, or criteria, are unique to human beings (note Darwin’s quote earlier):
• The drive to bond; that is, to form long-term, mutually caring and trusting relationships with other people;
• The drive to comprehend; that is, to learn, to create, to innovate, and to make sense of the world and of oneself.
To say that we have these four drives means that these are the criteria by which our brain’s decision-making mechanism evaluates the circumstances it faces and, as we will see further on in this chapter, by which it evaluates possible responses in order to choose the “best available.” Put another way, these are the criteria by which well-adjusted people lead themselves and by which good leaders lead others. This means that good leadership is rooted in the inherent workings of a very successful survival mechanism, which makes me very hopeful.3
Now, of course, we’d like to turn back to Helen and see if the four drives tell us anything useful about her situation and what she’s going to do about it. But first, I need to say a little more about the drives themselves. The addition to the first two of the drive to bond and the drive to comprehend makes all the difference between human and nonhuman, between leadership and mere dominance of a pack:
• These two drives are not frosting on the cake. They are as much a part of our way of surviving as the other two. While other species survive by feeding, mating, fighting, and fleeing, our species survives by feeding, mating, fighting, fleeing, befriending, and figuring out. This means that, in any situation, we have many more factors to take into account. We could see that in Chapter One with the list of things Helen would have on her mind as she tries to decide what to do. But the fact that everything is so much more complicated for humans than it is for bees or horses is what makes us so versatile and why we can do so much more than just survive. Being a leader is much more complicated than being a queen bee, but (as far as I can tell) much more rewarding.
• These two drives make us able to work in cooperative groups according to the needs of a particular situation rather than relying on instinct as social insects and schools of fish must do. These are the drives that make leadership, as opposed to sheer dominance, possible and necessary. As Darwin noted, we were never the strongest or fastest species, but we work together more effectively under more different circumstances than any other species, as many a harpooned whale could attest.
• These two drives make us able to survive mostly by figuring out what to do rather than relying entirely on instinct. But whereas any member of a particular species has the same instincts, humans do not all have the same problem-solving capabilities. There are innumerable different kinds of knowledge and ability, not to mention inherent differences in intelligence. We cannot instinctively take on the roles of drones and worker bees; at all levels we need to lead and be led.
• These two drives enormously expand the meaning of the first two drives. (Which is why the brief descriptions earlier may not have seemed very applicable to actual leadership.) Because we have a drive to bond and a drive to comprehend, the human drive to acquire goes far beyond the drive to acquire food, water, warmth, and a mate. For example, we have a drive to acquire things which interest us or which give us a sense of who we are or which would please other people whom we care about—even future generations. The drive to defend goes far beyond the drive to remain alive and well. We have a drive to defend groups to which we belong, even when there is no direct threat to ourselves. We have a drive to defend ideas and beliefs. We have a drive to defend our pride and hope and self-image as well as our physical well-being. We have a drive to protect strangers and future generations from danger and harm—that’s why we fill in potholes and build hospitals.
Having four drives, or four criteria for evaluating our circumstances, opens up enormous possibilities. It’s like judging a figure skating routine as opposed to judging a shot-put event. For the latter, there is only one criterion—distance. There can be little doubt about who won. For the former, there are multiple criteria, such as form, difficulty, errors, and beauty. This creates a problem for the judges, but it creates opportunity for the skaters.
It is obvious that the drives can conflict with each other. Indeed, the observant among us have always known that humans are a mysterious bundle of drives which often conflict with each other inside our heads. As the poet Stevie Smith wrote:
Only human beings feel like this,
It is because they are so mixed.4
Helen’s desire to further her career by carrying out her boss’s wishes, an expression of her drive to acquire, conflicts with her desire to be honest and compassionate with her subordinates, an expression of her drive to bond. Her desire to know what trouble the company is in, an expression of her drive to comprehend, conflicts with her fear of aggravating Peter by pushing him for an answer, an expression of her drive to defend.
How is it, then, that these four drives—these four different criteria for judging the same situation—can constitute a successful survival mechanism? How can they produce anything but discord and stalemate? How can they add up to leadership? If an Olympic figure skating event were judged by one Form Judge, one Difficulty Judge, one Error Judge, and one Beauty Judge, there would be many a standoff. Instead, each judge has to weigh all the criteria, and as we will see, that’s what the brain does, too.
The drives are something like four lobbyists meeting with a senator, each alert to a certain category of what matters and making sure the senator takes that priority into account. Imagine a meeting in the senator’s office before a vote on a climate change bill. One lobbyist is insisting that reducing greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible is the single goal. One is insisting that economic growth matters. One is insisting that good relations with China matter. One is insisting that scientific certainty matters.
The senator profits from hearing all four of these points of view. For one thing, all these concerns really do matter. A country that poisons the air can’t survive. A country that lets its economy stagnate will be weak. A country that can’t get along with China is vulnerable. A country that embraces scientific fallacies will be in error. On the other hand, each point of view would bring disaster if it were the only one taken into account. A country whose only priority was clean air would revert to the Stone Age. A country whose only priority was economic growth would create environmental havoc. A country whose only priority was appeasing China would become a vassal state. A country whose only priority was scientific certainty would be unable to act on most of the issues it faced. Only when all four priorities are evenly matched can they provide the basis for a sound decision.
But that is all they can do—provide the criteria for choice. It is the senator who must weigh these conflicting demands and make a decision that does as much good and as little harm as possible. In the same way, our drives are alert for what matters according to their particular criteria. They provide a foundation for a sound decision, but a different part of the brain has to come up with multiple options and propose the “best” decision. As we will see, there is a part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) that does exactly that. (Which, of course, is why a senator or an Olympic judge or Helen can do it.)
I pointed out in Chapter One that we can make good decisions not in spite of conflicting impulses but because of them. Our four drives give our brain a picture of the world that is much more complete—multifaceted rather than one-sided—than it could be with only the two animal drives to acquire and defend. This four-drive picture can be complex and perhaps conflicted and confusing, but it has also been underlined and highlighted, so to speak, in terms of what we human beings need to survive (sustenance, safety, community, and understanding). Put another way, it is not only a snapshot of what’s going on, it is also a blueprint for deciding what to do—a blueprint for leadership.