Pfeffer - Leadership BS!

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organisational Behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. His interest in human resources, organisational theory and behaviour has led him to reflect on the nature of leadership and leadership training. He has written about evidence-based management in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management (2006) where he dismisses popular business wisdom in; leadership, strategy, change, talent, financial incentives, and work-life balance, often touted by consultants and training companies in favour of hard decision making based on data and facts.

Leadership

In Leadership BS (2015), Pfeffer eschews what he sees as the usual platitudes in Leadership theory and training, for a more realistic view of the world as messy and complex. He exposes what he sees as the nostrums, stories, fictions, anecdotes, promises, glib simplicities, bromides, romanticism and myth-making feel-good nonsense that passes for Leadership training, his solution being realism. The aim is to reject the normative wishes with evidence and the realities of the workplace.

Unequivocally, he claims that the Leadership industry has not only empirically failed, with study after study showing workplace discontent, but also that it contributes to that failure. As the cult of leadership has risen, its perceived effectiveness has fallen. Bullying, stress, discontent are the norm and he presents a huge amount of evidence to show repeated failures in so called ‘leadership’. What he uncovers is an almost wilful avoidance of evidence, measurement and data. Despite the $20-$40 billion spend, the results are depressingly disappointing. He goes as far as suggesting that the very construct of leadership, as presented in much leadership consultancy and training, was invented as a simplification to deliberately obfuscate the real complexity of the workplace. 

Leadership training

His arguments against ‘Leadership training’ are pretty damning. Many who offer leadership consultancy and courses have never led anything and if they have their track record is rarely one of substantial success. In fact, he sees too many compensation consultants and linked to the leadership industry and many with a woeful lack of actual expertise & knowledge. This leads to glib advice and recommendations that peddle inspiration not the realities of management. They often rely largely on storytelling and anecdote, and rarely include evaluation as part of the process (apart from primitive happy-sheet course data and self-evaluation). The leadership industry is therefore wholly unaccountable.

In the content he finds stories and anecdotes (as opposed to evidence) that are exaggerated, even fabricated. They also conveniently ignore actual successful leaders that don’t fit their neat model. These myths are counter-productive as they produce cynicism in employees. The rhetoric is not matched by actual action and behaviour. Worse, those who don’t conform to the out-dated leadership model don’t get promoted and may even get fired. Others, such as women and certain cultural minorities, that value modesty and collaboration, can also suffer. 

Leadership traits

A further critique centres around precise leadership qualities or traits. They are, he thinks, wrong-headed, as they focus on attributes not action and decision making. Given that the book was published in 2015, he was prescient in identifying Trump as a typical product of the charismatic leader cult. He played the leadership game and won. Pfeffer therefore punctures the idea that ‘modesty’ is an admired and effective leadership trait. He draws on Maccoby’s book The Productive Narcissist (2003), and his own evidence, to show that modesty, far from being a virtue, stops managers from thinking for themselves and being resilient in the face of adversity. It is energy, confidence and dominance that gets them where they are, not modesty. The Leadership industry may be holding back women and other potential managers by promoting false promises, such as modesty. He also accuses HR and talent management companies of being dishonest here in training for these qualities then recruiting the very opposite.

He also questioned that staple of leadership courses - authenticity - as a quality for leadership. He flips this to show that good managers need to do what people need them to do, not what they as managers simply want to do, not pander to their own views of themselves. Flight attendants, shop assistants, sales people and many others don’t operate by being totally ‘authentic’, neither do managers and leaders. He describes the “delicious irony” of leadership trainers who “train” people to be “authentic”, as if it is a trait that can be acquired in a classroom. Being authentic is for Pfeffer pretty much the opposite of what leaders need to be.

Much as trust would seem to be desirable in leadership, it may not be that simple. Bernie Madoff inspired ‘trust’. Trust, like faith, can lead one into real trouble. It may be desirable not to trust lawyers, competitors and politicking managers. True objectivity and realism may only be the result of not trusting everyone to tell the truth within an organisation, as you will be misled, even duped. You need to be on the mark, alert to deception, moves, protecting the organisation and that means distrusting some people.

Counterexamples

Rich in real examples of leaders who were less than ideal, he shows how leadership training misses the mark most of the time – especially with the titans of tech; Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. Political, sports and other leaders get a similar treatment. Most of the positive examples turn out to have serious flaws. So, when we look at what are called successful leaders, they turn out to be very different from what the leadership industry tells us. His recommendation is to get serious on the research, mainly what is effective, then hold so-called 'leaders' to account - not with happy-sheet nostrums but real accountability. It is not that he promotes immodesty, being inauthentic and telling lies, only to recognise that leaders and employees are people and that human nature always wins out. The remedy is to identify what you need from proposed leaders and then to make sure that they perform to those measures. This is where HR and remuneration committees fail. They pretend to be doing this when what they actually do is pander to an outdated cult of leadership, based on outdated concepts of the nature and value of leadership.

Complexity

Pfeffer’s challenge is to recognise reality and accept that the workplace and people are much more complex than the feel-good training courses suggest. In reality, leaders’ behaviours are often at odds with those of the organisation. Their interests in terms of rewards, promotion and progress are often at odds with those they manage and even the organisations they lead. There is a lack of definition, theory and practice around the concept and it often distracts from the real needs in workplace learning.

He recommends that you:

   Build your power base relentlessly (and sometimes shamelessly)

   Embrace ambiguity 

   When the situation demands change—adapt

   Master the science of influence

It is not that leadership training is wrong, just that getting things done requires trade-offs and tough decisions. The danger is that organisations handicap themselves by training leaders to embrace utopian behaviours and avoid bold decisions, innovation and the realities of organisational growth.

Critique

Pfeffer has been criticised for being too forceful in blaming learning and development for the ills of Leadership theory and training. They argue that complexity does not negate efforts to instill good practice in leadership.g 

Conclusion

The fundamental problem outlined in Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature (2016) is to confuse ‘ought’ with ‘is’. Just because you think something ought to be the case doesn’t mean it is. In fact, confirmation bias tends to produce the wrong solutions in this area, driven by moral and not organisational imperatives. The division of leadership into good and bad traits is a mistake, as it uses a problematic approach to human nature and ignores context. Quoting Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), he says it is sometimes necessary to do bad things to achieve good results. Leaders need to be pragmatists.

Bibliography

Machiavelli, N., 2008. Machiavelli's the Prince: Bold-Faced Principles on Tactics, Power, and Politics. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc..

Maccoby, M., 2003. The productive narcissist: The promise and peril of visionary leadership. Broadway.

Pfeffer, J. and Sutton, R.I., 2006. Hard facts, dangerous half-truths, and total nonsense: Profiting from evidence-based management. Harvard Business Press.

Pfeffer, J., 2016. Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature. McKinsey Quarterly, 1, pp.90-95

Pfeffer, J., 2015. Leadership BS. HarperCollins.

Pfeffer on Leadership BS

Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. His interest in human resources, organisational theory and behaviour has led him to reflect on the nature of leadership and leadership training. He has written about evidence-base management in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management (2006) where he dismisses popular business wisdom in; leadership, strategy, change, talent, financial incentives, and work-life balance, often touted by consultants and training companies in favour of hard decision making based on data and facts.

Leadership

In Leadership BS (2015), Pfeffer eschews what he sees as the usual platitudes in Leadership theory and training, for a more realistic view of the world as messy and complex. He exposes what he sees as the nostrums, stories, fictions, anecdotes, promises, glib simplicities, bromides, romanticism and myth-making feel-good nonsense that passes for Leadership training, his solution being realism. The aim is to reject the normative wishes with evidence and the realities of the workplace.

Unequivocally, he claims that the Leadership industry has not only empirically failed, with study after study showing workplace discontent, but also that it contributes to that failure. As the cult of leadership has risen, its perceived effectiveness has fallen. Bullying, stress, discontent are the norm and he presents a huge amount of evidence to show repeated failures in so called ‘leadership’. What he uncovers is an almost wilful avoidance of evidence, measurement and data. Despite the $20-$40 billion spend, the results are depressingly disappointing. He goes as far as suggesting that the very construct of leadership, as presented in much leadership consultancy and training, was invented as a simplification to deliberately obfuscate the real complexity of the workplace. 

Leadership training

His arguments against ‘Leadership training’ are pretty damning. Many who offer leadership consultancy and courses have never led anything and if they have their track record is rarely one of substantial success. In fact, he sees too many compensation consultants and linked to leadership industry and many with a woeful lack of actual expertise & knowledge. This leads to glib advice and recommendations that peddle inspiration not the realities of management. They often rely largely on storytelling and anecdote, and rarely include evaluation as part of the process (apart from primitive happy-sheet course data and self-evaluation). The leadership industry is therefore wholly unaccountable.

In the content he finds stories and anecdotes (as opposed to evidence) that are exaggerated, even fabricated. They also conveniently ignore actual successful leaders that don’t fit their neat model. These myths are counter-productive as they produce cynicism in employees. The rhetoric is not matched by actual action and behaviour. Worse, those who don’t conform to the out-dated leadership model don’t get promoted and may even get fired. Others, such as women and certain cultural minorities, that value modesty and collaboration, can also suffer. 

Leadership traits

A further critique centres around precise leadership qualities or. They are, he thinks, wrong-headed, as they focus on attributes not action and decision making. Given that the book was published in 2015, he was prescient in identifying Trump as a typical product of the charismatic leader cult. He played the leadership game and won. Pfeffer therefore punctures the idea that ‘modesty’ is an admired and effective leadership trait. He draws on Maccoby’s book The Productive Narcissist (2003), and his own evidence, to show that modesty, far from being a virtue, stops managers from thinking for themselves and being resilient in the face of adversity. It is energy, confidence and dominance that gets them where they are, not modesty. The Leadership industry may be holding back women and other potential managers by promoting false promises, such as modesty. He also accuses HR and talent management companies of being dishonest here in training for these qualities then recruiting the very opposite.

He also question that staple of leadership courses - authenticity - as a quality for leadership. He flips this to show that good managers need to do what people need them to do, not what they as managers simply want to do, not pander to their own views of themselves. Flight attendants, shop assistants, sales people and many others don’t operate by being totally ‘authentic’, neither do managers and leaders. He describes the “delicious irony” of leadership trainers who “train” people to be “authentic”, as if it is a trait that can be acquired in a classroom. Being authentic, is for Pfeffer, pretty much the opposite of what leaders need to be.

Much as trust would seem to be desirable in leadership, it may not be that simple. Bernie Madoff inspired ‘trust’. Trust, like faith, can lead one into real trouble. It may be desirable not to trust lawyers, competitors and politicking managers. True objectivity and realism may only be the result of not trusting everyone to tell the truth within an organisation, as you will be misled, even duped. You need to be on the mark, alert to deception, moves, protecting the organisation and that means distrusting some people.

Counterexamples

Rich in real examples of leaders who were less than ideal, he shows how leadership training misses the mark most of the time – especially with the titans of tech; Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison. Political, sports and other leaders get a similar treatment. Most of the positive examples turn out to have serious flaws. So, when we look at what are called successful leaders, they turn out to be very different from what the leadership industry tells us. His recommendation is to get serious on the research, mainly what is effective, then hold so-called 'leaders' to account - not with happy-sheet nostrums but real accountability. It is not that he promotes immodesty, being inauthentic and telling lies, only to recognise that leaders and employees are people and that human nature always wins out. The remedy is to identify what you need from proposed leaders and then to make sure that they perform to those measures. This is where HR and remuneration committees fail. They pretend to be doing this when what they actually do is pander to an outdated cult of leadership, based on outdated concepts of the nature and value of leadership.

Complexity

Pfeffer’s challenge is to recognise reality and accept that the workplace and people are much more complex than the feel-good training courses suggest. In reality, leaders’ behaviours are often at odds with those of the organisation. Their interests in terms of rewards, promotion and progress are often at odds with those they manage and even the organisations they lead. There is a lack of definition, theory and practice around the concept and it often distracts from the real needs in workplace learning.

He recommends that you:

·      Build your power base relentlessly (and sometimes shamelessly)

·      Embrace ambiguity . . .

·      When the situation demands change—adapt

·       Master the science of influence

It is not that leadership training is wrong, just that getting things done requires trade-offs and tough decisions. The danger is that organisations handicap themselves by training leaders to embrace utopian behaviours and avoid bold decisions, innovation and the realities or organisational growth. 

Conclusion

The fundamental problem outlined in Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature (2016) is to confuse ‘ought’ with ‘is’. Just because you think something ought to be the case doesn’t mean it is. In fact, conformation bias tends to produce the wrong solutions in this area, driven by moral and not organisational imperatives. The division of leadership into good and bad traits is a mistake, as it uses a problematic approach to human nature and ignores context. Quoting Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), he says it is sometimes necessary to do bad things to achieve good results. Leaders need to be pragmatists.

Bibliography

Machiavelli, N., 2008. Machiavelli's the Prince: Bold-Faced Principles on Tactics, Power, and Politics. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc..

Maccoby, M., 2003. The productive narcissist: The promise and peril of visionary leadership. Broadway.

Pfeffer, J. and Sutton, R.I., 2006. Hard facts, dangerous half-truths, and total nonsense: Profiting from evidence-based management. Harvard Business Press.

Pfeffer, J., 2016. Getting beyond the BS of leadership literature. McKinsey Quarterly, 1, pp.90-95

Pfeffer, J., 2015. Leadership BS. HarperCollins.

Leadership BS - why the leadership industry is a Ponzi scheme

Leadership BS is as good a management book as you’ll ever read. It eschews the usual platitudes for a view of the world as messy and complex. It deals in realism, not idealism. Professor Pfeffer, of Stanford Business School, confirmed much of what I already thought about leadership and management… and much more, but it’s his candour and realism that impresses. As he exposes the nostrums, stories, fictions, anecdotes, promises, glib simplicities, bromides, romanticism, myth-making feel-good nonsense that passes for Leadership training, he also offers a solution – realism. He replaces normative wishes with evidence and the realities of the workplace. That’s pretty refreshing.

The Leadership industry has failed

Unequivocally, he claims that the Leadership industry has not only empirically failed, with study after study of workplace discontent, but also that it contributes to that failure. As the cult of leadership has risen, its perceived effectiveness has fallen. Bullying, stress, discontent are the norm. A huge amount of evidence is presented to show failure after failure in so called ‘leadership’. What he uncovers is an almost wilful avoidance of evidence, measurement and data. He questions the very construct of leadership, suggesting that it was invented as a simplification to deliberately obfuscate the real complexity of the workplace. So despite the $20 billion spend, the results are depressingly disappointing.

What happened?

Pfeffer’s challenge is to recognise reality and accept that the workplace and people are much more complex than the feel-good training courses suggest. In reality, leaders’ behaviours are often at odds with those of the organisation. Their interests in terms of rewards, promotion and progress are often at odds with those they manage and even the organisations they lead.

His arguments against ‘Leadership training’ are pretty damning. Here’s just ten, he has dozens more:

1.     Most who offer leadership advice have never led anything

2.     If they have, they were notoriously unsuccessful

3.     Too many compensation consultants linked to leadership industry

4.     Woeful lack of actual expertise & knowledge

5.     Peddle inspiration not realities of management

6.     Rely largely on storytelling and anecdote

7.     Evaluation rarely beyond hours of training delivered etc.

8.     Stuck in primitive ‘happy-sheet’ evaluation

9.     Over-reliant on self-evaluation

10. Totally unaccountable

In the content he finds no-end of stories and anecdotes (as opposed to evidence) that are exaggerated, even fabricated. These myths are counter-productive as they produce cynicism in employees. The rhetoric is not matched by actual action and behaviour. Worse, those who don’t conform to the out-dated leadership model don’t get promoted and may even get fired. Others, such as women and certain cultural minorities, that value modesty and collaboration, also suffer. These are his general criticisms but the strength of the book comes in the precise qualities he sees as being quite wrong-headed.

Modesty

Given that the book was published in 2015, he was prescient in identifying Trump as a typical product of the charismatic leader cult. He plays the leadership game and is winning. Pfeffer punctures the idea that ‘modesty’ is an admired and effective leadership trait. He draws on Maccoby’s book The Productive Narcissist, and his own evidence, to show that modesty, far from being a virtue, stops managers from thinking for themselves and being resilient in the face of adversity. It is energy, confidence and dominance that gets them where they are, not modesty. The Leadership industry may be holding back women and other potential managers by promoting false promises, such as modesty. He also accuses HR and talent management companies of being dishonest here in training for these qualities then recruiting the very opposite.

Authenticity

It may surprise many that anyone would question ‘authenticity’ as a quality for leadership – but he does. He flips this to show that good managers need to do what people need them to do, not what they as managers simply want to do, not pander to their own views of themselves. Flight attendants, shop assistants, sales people and many others wouldn’t last a day by being totally ‘authentic’, neither do managers and leaders. He also mentions the ‘delicious irony’ of leadership trainers who ‘train’ people to be ‘authentic’, as if it is a trait that can be acquired in a classroom. Being authentic, is for Pfeffer, pretty much the opposite of what leaders need to be.

Trust

Much as trust would seem to be desirable in leadership, it may not be that simple. Bernie Madoff inspired ‘trust’. Indeed, many L&D Ponzi schemes work on ‘trust’ – NLP, Myers-Briggs. Trust, like faith can lead one into real trouble. It may be desirable not to trust lawyers, competitors, politicking managers. True objectivity and realism may only be the result of not trusting everyone to tell the truth within an organisation, as you will be misled, even duped. You need to be on the mark, alert to deception, moves, protecting the organisation and, truth be told, that means distrusting some people.

Examples

Rich in real examples of leaders who were less than ideal, he shows how leadership training misses the mark most of the time – especially with the titans of tech; Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison. Political, sports and other leaders get a similar treatment. Most of the positive examples turn out to have serious flaws. So, when we look at what are called successful leaders, they turn out to be very different from what the leadership industry tells us. His recommendation is to get serious on the research, mainly what is effective, then hold so-called 'leaders' to account - not with happy-sheet nostrums but real accountability. This is an important point. It's not ghat he promotes immodesty, being inauthentic and telling lies, only to recognise that leaders and emplyees are people and that human nature always wins out. The remedy is to identify what you need from proposed leaders and then to make sure that they perform to those measures. This is where HR and remuneration committees fail. They pretend to be doing this when what they actualy do is pander to an utdated cult of leadership.

Ponzi scheme

I have a similar but stronger position than Pfeffer on this, as I think the whole ‘Leadership’ narrative and training is misleading, harmful and Pozies out traditional management training as ‘Leadership’ courses. There is a lack of definition, theory and practice around the concept and it has become a Ponzi scheme, distracting from the real needs in workplace learning.

Conclusion

Near the end of the book he quotes the movie A Few Good Men, “You want the truth?... You can’t handle the truth!” Only read this book if you are willing to open your mind to the possibility that most of what you’ve heard about Leadership training is BS.  It’s a hard pill to swallow for the L&D community – but the more we delay the cure, the bigger the epidemic of BS will become. It has already infected our schools, our politics. Let's ban the word 'leadership'. It's BS.

Musk, Zombie leadership and diversity - why they're picking on the wrong guy...

Plenty proselytise about inclusion, diversity and neurodivergence – yet go out of their way to demonise Elon Musk. What’s their beef? That he says a few odd things on Twitter? Doesn’t er… almost everyone on Twitter… say odd things on Twitter, especially the Musk-haters?
I’ve read two biographies of Musk and maybe it is because I’ve known and worked with lots of different types of people (I actually hate the word neurodiverse) that I like and admire him, this is the norm in the tech world. I don’t have to agree with everyone I like. In fact, the people I like best are those I CAN disagree with.

Authenticity

I liked Isaacson’s book, as it is readable and unpacks the man ‘warts and all’. He clearly has an over-active, at times troubled mind – don’t we all? His attack on the divers trying to save the Thai kids was bizarre. Like many autistic people he has difficulty in seeing boundaries. But, like many, his weaknesses are often his strengths – his intellect, drive and risk taking can mean he lacks other qualities. It is because he transgresses boundaries that his ideas work and are transformative. But what do people expect – some perfect PR-driven, suited manager full of faux platitudes (I've seen a lot of those) or someone who is honest about who he is and true to himself. Who is more authentic? Musk or the so called leaders we see daily in politics, business, the professions, media and the arts? We demand that people be perfect – no, it’s the imperfections that make us different.

Zombie leadership

Pfeffer warned us in his book Leadership BS, as did Barbara Hellerman, that the whole 'Leadership industry is quite simply wrong-headed. Businesses are complex and there are no glib solutions or ideal leaders. Zombie leadership lives on not because it has empirical support but because it flatters and appeals to elites, to the leadership industrial complex that supports them, and also to the anxieties of ordinary people in a world seemingly beyond their control. It is propagated in everyday discourse surrounding leadership but also by the media, popular books, consultants, HR practices, policy makers, and academics who are adept at catering to the tastes of the powerful and telling them what they like to hear.

These are the people who proclaim, with a trumpet Tweet that they’re going to leave the country or Twitter or Facebook or whatever, if X happens – and they never do? Or they pop off to mastodon or whatever irrelevant system and true echo chamber they seem to despise, in the sense of having no one you disagree with. Why make a big song and dance about it on the very medium you hate! If they do leave, you never hear of them again, which I count as a blessing.

In a rather brilliant paper just published on Zombie Leadership, eight flaws are recognised in leadership training:

1. Leadership is all about leade
2. There are specific qualities that all great leaders have
3. There are specific things that all great leaders do
4. We all know a great leader when we see one
5. All leadership is the same
6. Leadership is a special skill limited to special people
7. Leadership is always good and it is always good for everyone
8. People can’t cope without leaders

Haslam, S.A., Alvesson, M. and Reicher, S.D., 2024. Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. The Leadership Quarterly, p.101770.

I've also written about L&Ds failures on this front many times and a podcast.

Who cares if he loses money on Twitter – he has tens of billions and, as he’s shown before, has gambled bigger sums of his own cash than anyone on the planet. If you think Musk does what he does for the money, you’re on another planet, while he’s actually planning to get to one. The whole point of these big moves is not to shift the dial but change the very nature of what is being done. It is to redefine the concept of a cars in these days of climate change, redefine solar, redefine space travel, redefine brain interfaces, redefine social media, redefine robots and redefine AI. Few realise that it was Musk that kick started OpenAI - he was the first investor, he gave it the name.

Picking on wrong guy

Given Musk’s childhood traumas, family and school, you’d think people would cut him some slack. He has, after all, one-handedly kick-started the electric car movement, invested massively in solar and created OpenAI. That would be pretty impressive in itself but now add Neurolink, Starlink and Optimus. This IS Renaissance man. On top of this he wants to get to Mars, and you know what, odds on he does.

Conclusion

People love diversity until it comes to actual diversity of innovation, thought, forms of communication and futures. Then they want you to stick to 'their' script. They want you conform to their single set of cultural, ethnic, ethical and other specific group characteristics, which turns out not to be diversity at all… but uniformity and homogeneity.

How I got blocked by Tom Peters - you must bow to the cult of Leadership or be rejected as an apostate

Odd thing this ‘Leadership’ business. I’ve been writing about it for ten years and get roughly the same reaction to every piece – one of outrage from those who sell their ‘Leadership’ services, either as consultants or trainers. In these cases, I refer to the wise words of Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

But a far more interesting spat ensued when I criticised some of the best-selling books that got this whole Leadership bandwagon rolling, namely In Search of Excellence and Good to Great. Tom Peters himself joined the fray, as outraged Leadership consultants huffed and puffed. Some showed real Leadership by simply hurling abuse, accompanied by GIFs (showing outrage or dismissal), doing the very opposite of everything they claim to admire in all of this Leadership piffle. What I learnt was that there is no room for scepticism or critical thinking in the cult of Leadership – you must bow to the God of Leadership or be rejected as an apostate.

To be fair, Tom Peters retweeted the critical piece and my replies, so hats off to him on that front but his responses bordered on the bizarre.

So far, so good. But I wasn’t blaming him and Collins for the crash. What I was actually saying is that a cult of Leadership, sustained, as Jeffrey Pfeffer showed, by a hyperactive business book publishing and training industry, produced a tsunami of badly researched books full of simplistic bromides and silver bullets, exaggerating the role of Leaders and falsely claiming to have found the secrets of success. This, I argued, as I had personally seen it happen at RBS and other organisations, eventually led us up the garden path to the dung-heap that was the financial disaster in 2008, led by financial CEOs who were greedy, rapacious and clearly incompetent. They had been fattened on a diet of Leadership BS and led us to near global, financial disaster.

Hold on Tom, I wasn’t saying you two were singularly responsible. I was making a much wider point about the exponential growth in publishing and training around Leadership, like Pfeffer in his book Leadership BS, showing that it had, arguably, led to near disaster.

As the cult of Leadership took hold, I knew that something was awry when I dared criticise IBM at the Masie Conference. Elliot was chairing a session on enterprise training software and I pointed out that IBM had sold such a system to Hitler. In 1939, the CEO of IBM, Thomas Watson, flew across the Atlantic to meet Hitler. The meeting resulted in the Nazis leasing the mechanical equivalent of a Learning Management System (LMS). Data was stored as holes in punch cards to record details of people including their skills, race and sexual inclination and used daily throughout the 12 year Reich. It was a vital piece of apparatus used in the Final Solution, to execute the very categories stored on the apparently innocent cards - Jews, Gypsies, the disabled and homosexuals, as documented in the book IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black. They were also use to organise slave labour and trains to the concentration camps. He went apeshit at me. Why? IBM were sponsors of his conference. lesson - this is about money not morals.

I remember seeing Jack Welsh, of GE, pop up time and time again at US conferences and talk about how it was necessary to get rid of 10% of your workforce a year and a whole host of so called gurus who claimed to have found the Leadership gold at the end of the rainbow. There was just one problem. The evidence suggested that the CEOs of very large successful companies turned out to not to be the Leaders their theory stated they were. Indeed, the CEOs of financial institutions turned out to be incompetent managers, driven by the hubris around Leadership, who drove their companies and the world’s financial system to the edge of catastrophe. Bailed out by the taxpayer, they showed little remorse and kept on taking the bonuses, mis-selling and behaving badly.

In the 90s and the whole post 2000 period we then saw the deification of the tech Leaders – Gates, Jobs, Dell, Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. Who wants to be a billionaire? became the aspiration of a new generation, who also lapped up the biographies and Leadership books, this time with a ‘start-up’ spin. Yet they too proved to be all too keen on tax evasion, greed, share buybacks and a general disregard for the public good. Steve Jobs was a rather hideous individual - but no matter - the hopelessly utopian Leadership books kept on coming.

Jump to 2018 and Trump. How on earth did that happen? Oh, and before we in the EU get on our high horses, Italy did the same with Berlusconi. Even now, Andrej Babis, a billionaire businessman, has become the President of the Czech Republic in 2017. But back to Trump. He’s riding high in the polls but let’s look at how he got to become President. First the whole ‘I’m a successful business Leader’ shtick that gave him a platform on The Apprentice, then the campaign on the premise that he, as someone who was better suited to the role than traditional politicians, was the real deal, ‘the deal maker’. He even had his own sacred ‘Leadership’ text – The Art of the Deal.  The polling is interesting – his supporters don’t care about his racism and sexism, what they admire is his ability to get things done. They have elected, not a President, but a CEO. This is the apotheosis of the cult of business leadership, the American Dream, reframed in terms of Leadership BS, turned into a nightmare.

And on it went, our Leadership guru descending into sarcasm and abuse. This is exactly what I have been writing about for the last ten years, the hubris around Leadership. Is this what Leadership is really about -  going off in a hissy fit when you are challenged? It sort of confirms what I have always thought – that this Leadership movement is actually a Ponzi scheme – write a book, talk at conferences, make a pile of cash…. lead nothing but seminars, then take absolutely no responsibility when your data turns out to be wrong or the consequences are shown to be disastrous.

We have fetishised the word 'Leader'. Everyone is obsessed by doing Leadership training and reading 4th rate paperbacks on this dubious subject. You're a leader, I'm a leader, we're all leaders now - rendering the very meaning of the word useless. What do you do for a living? I’m a ‘leader’. Cue laughter and ridicule. Have you ever heard anyone in an organisation say, We need to ask our ‘Leader’? Only if it was sneering sarcasm. It was invented by people who sell management training to fool us all into thinking that it's a noble calling but is it all a bit phoney and exaggerated and often leads to dysfunctional behaviour. 

As James Gupta said, on this thread, “Leader, innovator… yes they are legit and important roles, but if you have to call yourself one, you probably ain’t”… then even wiser words from a guy called Dick “If your job title is a concept then maybe it’s not a real job.”

In the end Peters blocked me – even though I never followed him??!

We have fetishised 'Leadership', we're all leaders now, rendering the word meaningless

We have fetishised the word 'Leader'. Everyone is obsessed by doing Leadership training and reading 4th rate paperbacks on this dubious subject. You're a leader, I'm a leader, we're all leaders now - rendering the very meaning of the word useless. What do you do for a living? I’m a ‘leader’. Cue laughter and ridicule. Have you ever heard anyone in an organisation say, We need to ask our ‘Leader’? Only if it was sneering sarcasm. It was invented by people who sell management training to fool us all into thinking that it's a noble calling but is it all a bit phoney and exaggerated and does it lead to dysfunctional behaviour?

Weasel words

When I first started in the learning world over 35 years ago ‘Leader’ was not a word I heard - ever. There was plenty of good management theory and training, and most people who headed up companies were called Managing Directors and in Education Vice-Chancellors and Heads. Then the tech bubble came along in the 90s and we all went gaga for snazzy, new US terms and everyone swapped out the sober and descriptive MD for CEO (Chief Executive Officer) (I’m also guilty here). The word ‘Chief’ is an interesting choice. You were no longer someone who ‘managed’ others but the big chief, big cheese, a big shot. It was then that another word rose like Godzilla from the depths of the cess pit that is HR lingo – ‘leader’. Suddenly, managers weren’t people with competences but top dogs who ‘Led’ people towards victory. Brian the Head of Geography was now a leader. Mike, senior manager in accounts, was now a dog of war.

Followers

Using the word 'Leader' creates a sense of us and them, a sort of feudal relationship. Leaders are now the aristocracy in an organisation, everyone else is a kulak, working serf or follower. In a sense the word infers that the people you lead and manage are followers. It sets you apart from other people, not a great quality in management within an educational institution. In fact, it is the exact opposite of most qualities you need to manage an organisation or school. Of course, leadership trainers will tell you that it’s not about creating followers, but in practice this is the effect the word creates and management trainers jump through hoops to reconcile this leader/follower dilemma. We need to connect with people not lead and follow.

Leadership courses

When the language changed, so did the training. HR bods and teacher trainers were suddenly the leading thinkers on leadership. HR and training departments saw an opportunity to big-up their status by breeding, not managers, but leaders. Middle managers went on ‘leadership’ courses run by people who had never led anything, except flipchart workshops. In practice this meant cobbling together stuff from existing management courses and adding a veneer of specious content from books on leadership. Winging it became a new course-design methodology and every management trainer in the land suddenly became a leadership trainer.

Standford Professor Pfeffer’s book Leadership is BS should be required reading for all Leadership trainers and consultants. He puts the blame for all the hubris around Leaders and Leadership firmly in the world of training, a confusion of nostrums, stories, fictions, anecdotes, promises, glib simplicities, bromides, romanticism, myth-making feel-good nonsense, His solution – realism. The real world is much more complex and messy than the Leadership theorists and trainers would have you believe. The reality of most Leadership training is that it peddles inspiration rather than real competence. Worse still, those that value a quieter approach, with some modesty and humility, are seen as not having the right qualities. Competence gets bowled away by confidence.

Leadership books

At the theoretical level, the idea that there is a body of knowledge and practice called ‘Leadership’ is laughable. It’s the word that launched a thousand bad books. Middle managers and senior teaching staff went crazy for books they’d never dreamt of reading. I’ve seen everything from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius to Clausewitz touted as serious management texts. I knew it had all gone seriously wrong when I saw a commuter, with a bad suit and combination lock briefcase, on the 7.15 from Brighton to London, reading ‘The Art of War’ by Sun Tzu. What next? Hitler, Stalin… How to reset your company to Year Zero by Pol Pot?

What we find is an astonishing lack of evidence and valuation. Leadership has the characteristics of a cult or creed rather than competences. It is what gave us Trump and the Art of the Deal. Witness the greed that enveloped Vice Chancellors, when they were awash with cash from student fees. This hasn’t gone away.

Led to the abyss

Managers loved their new found status as little generals, leading the troops. They responded to the training as narcissists respond to flattery, with gusto. I don’t think it’s an accident that this coincided with the megalomaniac behaviour in the banks where ‘leaders’ fed on a high-octane diet of ‘leadership’ training, ‘led’ us into the abyss of financial collapse.  I well remember the managers at RBS getting ‘Leadership’ training and turning into the monsters they became, mis-selling, stupid strategies on acquisitions, losing touch with reality, and a huge vacuum in competences. These ‘leaders’ adopted delusional strategies based on over-confidence and a lack of reality. There’s a measurable price to pay for believing that you’re destined to ‘lead’ – it's called realism. Managers who now saw themselves as ‘Leaders of the pack’ engaged in behaviours that flowed from the word. They became driven by their own goals and not the goals of the organisation or others. It also led to greater differentials between leader and follower salaries, witness the gross gaps in income between our new 'leaders', in business and education,and the rest. Leadership has led to rising inequalities.

Conclusion
It's the language of narcissism and excess. We have seen leaders in every area of human endeavour succumb to the tyranny of ‘leadership’, in business, politics, newspapers, even sport. In finance, for example, rather than focus on competences and sound management, fuelled by greed, they focused on personal rewards and ‘go for broke’ strategies. So what happened to these ’leaders’? Did they lose their own money? No. Did any go to jail? No. Are they still around? Yes. Have we reflected on whether all of that ‘leadership’ malarkey was right? No. In education we saw Vice Chancellors and their sidekicks, on so-called Remuneration Committees, balloon up senior salaries. Let’s get real and go back to realistic learning and realistic titles. The Academy system has seen obscene salaries and an increase in corruption, all in the new 'Leadership' class. In politics (Trump. May, Boris, Corbyn), finance (most of them), sport (FIFA), entertainment (Weinstein et al) and education (Vice Chancellors, Academies), we have fetishised leaders and there has been a disastrous loss of faith, as the greed, corruption, self-aggrandisement and narcissism went through the roof. Time to call it out.