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??!

Leadership training – cause of credit crunch?

Leadership – the egos have landed
When I asked the Head of ‘news-presenter training’ at the BBC to give me a pithy statement describing what it was like training TV presenters, she said just four words, ‘The ego has landed’. What she meant was that taking a journalist and turning them into a TV star puffs them up so much, they become almost unbearable, assuming God-like qualities and knowledge on subjects they know nothing about.

Has the cult of ‘leadership’ contributed to megalomaniac behaviour that ultimately led to the financial crisis? All of this leadership lark is quite recent. For years we got by with management training, good old sensible stuff about being nice, clear and organised. Then, around the Millennium, the training world went all evangelical about ‘Leadership’.
Now the last thing you want to do with a bloated ego is feed it a diet of hubris. These guys (and it’s mostly guys) lap it up – it turns them into Ken Low-like monsters. When you over-inflate a balloon it floats away and is no longer grounded. They think they’re omniscient and omnipotent.

Leadership training
Leadership training may be partly to blame. With no solid core of theory it’s a potpourri of ideas. The cult of leadership, a relatively recent phenomenon, was grabbed with glee by the training community. A mishmash of management theory, culled from a few airport management books, they put their slides together and became leadership zealots, simply padding out the word ‘Leadership’ into a course, a miscellany of mumb-jumbo. No end of half-baked leadership consultants, who couldn’t lead a dog up a garden path, came on strong. Suddenly, it made trainers feel that they were at the leading edge of the organisation, training the leaders of tomorrow. In fact, they were goading their leaders to act even more irresponsibly.

First there was massive confusion in the field, with theories covering almost every logical possibility. We have Charismatic, great man theories (born not made), Trait theories (key qualities), Contingency theories (look at the environment), Situational theories (choose differently for every situation), Behavioural theories (one can simple learn how to lead), Participative theories (collaborative and inclusive), Managerial theories (organise and reward), Transformational theories (leaders inspire followers). You pay your money and take your choice.
Complex behaviours and skills are reduced to simple geometric diagrams, a pyramid here, an interlocking circle here, a four quadrant typology there. Leadership training became a byword for contradictory theories and over-simplification. A few choice quotes are thrown in, preferably from historically famous leaders, some interactive exercises, straight out of traditional management courses and you’re off.

Leadership and risk
An insidious feature of some gurus and courses was that leaders were encouraged to be uber-risk-takers. Risk taking (sometimes under the guise of innovation) became a badge of honour. The slightest hint of weakness was frowned upon. This led to Leadership programmes that weren’t big on managing risk; that was left to Boards and governance bodies, packed with their chosen friends. Non-executives are largely the personal friends of executives in the UK, and the risk register seen as rather old-fashioned and quaint management method, given cursory treatment at board level. Actually the main risks sometimes don’t appear at all. In practice, leaders in banks couldn’t manage risk, because they couldn’t work out what risks they were running.

Leadership gurus: a culture of narcissism
Tom Peters, Marshall Goldsmith, Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins.... they are certainly part of the problem. (Funny how you don’t get women leadership gurus, a credit to their gender and good sense.) I‘d call these false prophets, as they are basically song and dance men, all performance and no substance. It’s good old fashioned preaching with stories, parables, miracle cures, and live performance.

Tony Robbins, a narcissistic Neanderthal, is typical. A tax cheating (convicted), plagiarising (convicted) fraud. His ideas on health are stupid, but harmless. What’s harmful is his use of bogus studies – he quotes a ‘Yale study’ that shows that the 3% of Yale students who wrote down financial goals became richer than the other 97% put together (actually an urban myth). His leadership nonsense is based on training’s shameful cult – NLP, and James Randi has famously exposed some of his techniques as snakeoil scams. This is what passes as high quality corporate motivational and leadership training.

Tom Peters is not far behind with his little parables and maxims. He’s an all too common type in this field - a man devoid of theory. His first book In Search of Excellence with its 7 ‘S’s and 43 excellent companies turned out to be complete rot. Over a third of these companies were in serious financial trouble within five years of the book being written. There was even a book called In Search of Stupidity that satired his approach. Peters had simply picked large behemoths that were dominant in their stable markets, as soon as these markets changed they were too big and stupid to change. He also confessed to having faked the data in the book.

Robin Sharma, lawyer turned leadership guru, with his little poems on the fridge door. The more expensive the speaker, the more fatuous the content. If you’re in any doubt as to the phoney, hokey nature of this guy, watch this.

Why are so many people suckered with this stuff? David Hume explained it all in his masterpiece essay On Miracles (1748). Firstly, we all have an overactive sense of wonder which means we are easily drawn into aspirational ideas, the more miraculous the better. Secondly, our gullibility is increased when we actually want to believe something, and the people who pay to see these guys talk, and buy their books, are believers before they start. Hume was talking about Jesus and religious superstition, but the parallel with leadership training is obvious.

Leadership gurus: a culture of celebrity
An offshoot from the culture of narcissism, leadership training became the last refuge of washed out celebrities and sports people. I can’t tell you how many dull sports stars of yesteryear I’ve heard mumbling out platitudes between their schoolboy anecdotes. Football players rarely play this game as they barely made it through high school. So we’re left with an assortment of oddball sport people. The problem here, is that many sports, such as golf, tennis, swimming, track etc. are devoid of key management skills. These are obsessive, solitary creatures, who spend much of their lives training in isolation. It’s a solipsistic world. Even in team sports, there’s a coach or manager who has to make the strategic decisions and get them organised.

Leaders: Type 1 Megalomaniacs
Fred Goodwin, ex-CEO of RBS, refused to use the word ‘learning’, insisting on ‘training’. This was the man who insisted on staff at the Clydesdale wearing the company tie, an egomaniac, proud of his ‘Fred the shred’ moniker. His bank, now 60% in public ownership, he managed on fear, with the HR department that could be best described as a casualty department. This is the leader who took out a writ against a Sunday newspaper because it had the temerity to question the wisdom of his megalomaniac monument building around the new HQ. In the end he turned out to be the leader who couldn’t calculate risk and took RBS’s share price from 442p to 50p, made £15.5 million in salary in four years, and walked away with a £8.4 million pension pot. Is he contrite and has he shown any remorse? No , Good-win is a bad loser – thankfully now shredded.

He’s only one of a whole rack of ‘bankers’ (you know what I mean) who trousered £54 million in just five years, others include; Adam Applegarth (Northern Rock), John Varley (Barclays), Stephen Green (HSBC) and Andy Hornby (HBOS).

Leaders: Type 2 Barrow boys
Is anyone seriously suggesting that Alan Sugar is anything other than an ill mannered boor? Do we really want to hang on his every bad word about making money? The Leader who said, about women, "You're not allowed to ask, so it's easy, just don't employ them”. The whole ‘Apprentice’ thing looks decidedly grubby in this climate, with Sugar playing the bully and the participants devoid of intellect, talent and even good sense. If these are the ‘Leaders’ of tomorrow, god save us. This type will do anything to make money.

Leaders: Type 3 Crooks and hucksters
What about those four automobile CEOs who immediately after stating that they’ve laid off tens of thousands of workers and demanded billions in support, refuse to give up their fleets of private jets (yes fleets). These guys have annual salaries in the tens of millions and they only travel in private jets and some have negotiated that their wives will only travel in private jets. These guys had so little management insight that they continued to produce gas guzzling SUVs while foreign car makers decimated their market share. These leaders are self-indulgent crooks.

But the King of the hucksters is Ken Low or Enron fame. These guys deliberately set out to steal from customers and shareholders. It’s all about amassing personal wealth and nothing will stop them and their well-paid advisors (Andersons – remember those crooks?) from achieving their goals. I admire the US’s approach to this type of fraud – they haul them off in cuffs. In Europe, they get away with it.

Lions led by donkeys
‘Leadership training’ plays to a culture of narcissism and celebrity that feels the need to promote egos way beyond what is reasonable. It produces Type 1/2/3 leaders. It’s a world that says, ‘We’re all losers, so let’s worship the winners’. And where did these leaders take us? They robbed us and their organisations blind, with bonuses and share options disengaged from performance.

Cool, calm analysis and intellect was replaced by mission statements and hubris. These so called leaders had to behave like religious figures, exhorting others to strive for more, pushing everyone faster and faster. Missions replaced good sense and debt became a virtue, not a vice. Believe me these banks and investment companies all had ‘values’ and training on ethics. It would seem that it never got near their so-called leaders.

If we’re looking for academic leadership, we need look no further than Drucker, who hated the idea of ‘Leadership’ and ‘Leadership’ training, or Jim Collins, who took hard empirical evidence, from thousands of companies, to see what really made good leadership (not necessarily good individual leaders). Not surprisingly, his conclusions contradicted almost all of the ‘false prophets’. God leadership turns out to be good management. Steady, analytical, smart people who know how to deal with others. The good thing about Collins is his focus not on isolating good leadership but in seeing what makes a good organisation tick.

We could do worse than scrap ‘Leadership’ courses and all the hubris, and get back to simple, sensible management training.

Year of learning dangerously – my 15 highs and lows of 2018

So 2018 is behind us. I look back and think… what really happened, what changed? I did a ton of talks over the year in many countries to different types of audiences, teachers, trainers, academics, investors and CEOs. I wrote 65 blogs and a huge number of Tweets and Facebook posts. Also ran an AI business, WildFire, delivering online learning content and we ended the year nicely by winning a major Award. 

So this is not a year end summary nor a forecast for 2019. It’s just a recap on some of the weirder things that happened to me in the world of ‘learning’…

1. Agile, AI-driven, free text learning

As good a term as I can come up with for what I spent most of my year doing and writing about, mostly on the back of AI, and real projects delivered to real clients of AI-generated award winning content, superfast production times and a new tool in WildFire that gets learners to use free-text, where we use AI (semantic analysis) as part of the learning experience. Our initial work shows that this gives huge increases in retention. That is the thing I’m most proud of this year.

2. Video is not enough

Another breakthrough was a WildFire tool that takes any learning video and turns it into a deeper learning experience by taking the transcript and applying AI, not only to create strong online learning but also use the techniques developed above to massively increase retention. Video is rarely enough on its own. It's great at attitudinal learning, processes, procedures and for things that require context and movement. But is it poor at detail and semantic knowledge and has relatively poor retention. This led to working with a video learning company to do just that, as 2+2 = 5.

3. Research matters

I have never been more aware of the lack of awareness on research on learning and online learning than I was this year. At several conferences across the year I saw keynote speakers literally show and state falsehoods that a moments searching on Google would have corrected. These were a mixture of futurists, purveyors of ‘c’ words like creativity and critical thinking and the usual snakeoil merchants. What I did enjoy was giving a talk at the E-learning network on this very topic, where I put forward the idea that interactive design skills will have to change in the face of new AI tech. Until we realise that a body of solid research around effortful learning, illusory learning (learners don’t actually know how they learn or how they should learn), interleaving, desirable difficulties, spaced practice, chunking and so on… we’ll be forever stuck in click-through online learning, where we simply skate across the surface. It led me to realise that almost everything we've done in online learning may now be dated and wrong.

4. Hyperbolic discounting and nudge learning

Learning is hard and suffers from its consequences lying to far in the future for learners to care. Hyperbolic discounting explains why learning is so inefficient but also kicks us into realising that we need to counter it with some neat techniques, such as nudge learning. I saw a great presentation on this in Scotland, where I spoke at the excellent Talent Gathering.

5. Blocked by Tom Peters

The year started all so innocently. I tweeted a link to an article I wrote many moons ago about Leadership and got the usual blowback from those making money from, you guessed it, Leadership workshops.. one of whom praised In Search of Excellence. So I wrote another piece showing that this and another book Good to great, turned out to be false prophets, as much of what they said turned out to be wrong and the many of the companies they heralded as exemplars went bust. More than this I thought that the whole ‘Leadership’ industry in HR had le, eventually to the madness of Our Great Leader, and my namesake, Donald Trump. In any case Tom Peters of all people came back at me and after a little rational tussle – he blocked me. This was one of my favourite achievements of the year.

6. Chatting about chatbots

Did a lot of talks on chatbots this year, after being involved with Otto at Learning Pool (great to see them winning Company of the Year at the Learning technologies Awards), building one of my own in WildFire and playing around with many others, like Woebot. They’re coming of age and have many uses in learning. And bots like Google’s Duplex, are glimpses into an interesting future based on more dialogue than didactic learning. My tack was that they are a natural and frictionless form of learning. We’re still coming to terms with their possibilities.

7. Why I fell out of love with Blockchain

I wrote about blockchain, I got re-married on Blockchain, I gave talks on Blockchain, I read a lot about Blockchain… then I spoke at an event of business CEOs where I saw a whole series of presentations by Blockchain companies and realised that it was largely vapourware, especially in education. Basically, I fell out of love with Blockchain. What no one was explaining were the downsides, that Blockchain had become a bit of a ball and chain.

8. And badges…

It’s OK to change your mind on things and in its wake I also had second thoughts on the whole ‘badges’ thing. This was a good idea that failed to stick, and the movement had run its course. I outlined the reasons for its failure here.

9. Unconscious bias my ass

The most disappointing episode of the year was the faddish rush towards this nonsense. What on earth gave HR the right to think that they could probe my unconscious with courses on ‘unconscious bias’. Of course, they can’t and the tools they’re using are a disgrace. This is all part of the rush towards HR defending organisations AGAINST their own employees. Oh, and by the way, those ‘wellness’ programmes at work – they also turned out to be waste of time and money.

10. Automated my home

It all started with Alexa. Over the months I’ve used it as a hub for timers (meals in oven, Skype calls, deadline), then for music (Amazon music), then the lights, and finally the TV. In the kitchen we have a neat little robot that emerges on a regular basis to clean the ground floor of our house. It does its thing and goes back to plug itself in and have a good sleep. We also have a 3D printer which we’re using to make a 3D drone… that brings me to another techy topic – drones.

11. Drones

I love a bit of niche tech and got really interested in this topic (big thanks to Rebecca, Rosa and Veronique) who allowed me to attend the brilliant E-learning Africa and see Zipline and another drone company in Rwanda (where I was bitch-slapped by a Gorilla but that, as they say, is another story). On my return I spoke about Drones for Good at the wonderful Battle of Ideas in London (listen here). My argument, outlined here, was that drones are not really about delivering pizzas and flying taxis, as that will be regulated out in the developed world. However, they will fly in the developing world. Then along came the Gatwick incident….

12. Graduation

So I donned the Professorial Gown, soft Luther-like hat and was delighted to attend the graduation of hundreds of online students at the University of Derby, with my friends Julie Stone and Paul Bacsich. At the same time I helped get Bryan Caplan across from the US to speak at Online Educa, where he explained why HE is in some trouble (mostly signalling and credential inflation) and that online was part of the answer. 

13. Learning is not a circus and teachers are not clowns

The year ended with a rather odd debate at Online Educa in Berlin, around the motion that “All learning should be fun”. Now I’m as up for a laugh as the next person. And to be fair, Elliot Masie’s defence of the proposition was laughable. Learning can be fun but that’s not really the point. Learning needs effort. Just making things ‘fun’ has led to the sad sight of clickthrough online learning. It was the prefect example of experts who knew the research, versus, deluded sellers of mirth.

14. AI

I spent a lot of time on this in 2018 and plan to spend even more time in 2019. Why? Beneath all the superficial talk about Learning Experiences and whatever fads come through… beneath it allies technology that is smart and has already changed the world forever. AI has and will change the very nature of work. It will, therefore change why we learn, what we learn and how we learn. I ended my year by winning a Learning technologies award with TUI (thanks Henri and Nic) and and WildFire. We did something ground breaking – produced useful learning experiences, in record time, using AI, for a company that showed real impact.

15. Book deal

Oh and got a nice book deal on AI – so head down in 2019.

Why these best selling books on 'Leadership' got it disastrously wrong

I have two groaning shelves of business books. I used to read a lot of these – until I realised that most weren’t actually helping me at all. With hindsight, they tend to have three things in common – anecdotes, analogies and being hopelessly utopian. Even those that sa they rely on data, often get it all wrong. Worse still some of these early best-sellers not only got things badly wrong, they created the cult of 'Leadership'.

Good To Great

Take the lauded Good To Great by Jim Collins. It claimed to be revolutionary as it was based on oodles of research and real data. He claimed to have had 21 researchers working for five years selecting 6000 articles, with over 2000 pages of interviews. Out of this data came a list of stellar companies – Abbot Labs, Circuit City, Fannie Mae, Gillette, Kimberly Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreen, Wells Fargo. The subtitle to the book was Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't. Unfortunately some leapt of a cliff, many underperformed and the net result was that they were largely false dawns. 

Fannie Mae was close to collapse in 2008 having failed to spot the risks they had on their $6 trillion mortgage book and had to be bailed out. Senior staff, including two CEOs were found to have taken out illegal loans from the company, as well as making contributions to politicians sitting on committees regulating their industry. It didn’t stop there, since 2011 they have been embroiled in kickback charges as well as securities fraud and a swarm of lawsuits. It could be described as the most deluded, fraudulent and badly run company in the US, led by incompetent, greedy, liars and cheats.

Circuit City went bankrupt in 2009, having made some truly disastrous decisions at the top, dropping their large and successful large appliances business, a stupid exclusive deal with Verizon that stopped them selling other brands of phones, terrible acquisitions and a series of chops and changes that led to a rapid decline. It was unique in failing to capitalise on the growing technology markets, making decisions that were almost wholly wrong-headed. Its leaders took it down.

Wells Fargo has been plagued by controversy. The list of wrongdoing is depressingly long; money laundering, gouging overdraft payers, fines for mortgage misconduct, fines for inadequate risk disclosures, sued for loan underwriting, fined for breaking credit card laws, massive accounting frauds, insider trading, even racketeering and accusations of excessive pay. This is, quite simply, one of the most corrupt and rapacious companies on the planet, led by greedy, fraudulent fools.

I could go on but let’s summarise by saying that nine of the other stocks chosen by Collins have had lacklustre performance, regarded by the markets as journeymen stocks. Steven Levitt called the book out, showing that the stocks have underperformed against the average S&P. His point was simple, Collins cherry picked his data. So if you see this book recommended in Leadership courses, call it out, call the trainer out.

In Search of Excellence

In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters was another best seller that sparked off the obsession with Leadership. The case against this book is, in many ways more serious, as BusinessWeek claimed he had ‘faked’ the data. Chapman even wrote a book called In Search of Stupidity, showing that his list of ‘excellent’ companies were actually poor to indifferent. He had inadvertently picked companies that were dominant in their sectors but had then become lazy and sclerotic. It was a classic example of what Gary Smith highlighted as the famous Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. You shoot a bullet, then draw a line around your bullethole and claim you hit the target. Simply joining up already successful dots is not data, it’s cherry picking. Even them he picked the wrong cherries, most of which were rotten inside.
If anything, things have got worse. There's been a relentless flood of books on leadership that make the same mistakes time and time again. At least Collins and Peters tried to use data, many are nothing more than anecdote and analogies. Management is frustrating, difficult and messy. There are no easy bromides and simply stating a series of vague abstract concepts like authenticity, trust, empathy and so on, is not enough.

We have fetishised 'Leadership'. 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? 

Conclusion

Back in the day, before ‘Leadership’ became a ‘thing’ in business, it was fuelled by these key books. They went beyond the normal best-seller status to cult status. Everyone bought them and read them. These seminal, and actually fraudulent, books were the foundation stones for an industry that led to the financial crisis in 2008, that nearly took the world’s entire financial system down. We’re still in the shadow of that disaster, and many of the word’s current ills can be traced to that event – decades of austerity and increasing inequality. The trait that both the authors of these books and the so-called leaders we've ended up with, in politics, sport, entertainment and business - is integrity. The tragic end-point of this cult of Leadership is Trump with his Art of the Deal. Worse still, corporate training is still in thrall with this nonsense, with ‘Leadership’ courses that pay homage to this utopian idea that there are silver bullet solutions to the messy world that is management.

Fully Connected by Julia Hobsbawn – I wish I hadn’t

Having seen Julia get torn to pieces by an audience in Berlin, I decided to give the book a go. But first Berlin. After an excruciating anecdote about her being in the company of Royalty in St James Palace and meeting Zak Goldsmith (it made no sense, other than name dropping), she laid out the ideas in her book describing networks as including Facebook, Ebola and Zika –all basically the same thing, a ridiculous conflation of ideas. “All this social media is turning us into sheep” she bleated. Then asked “How many of you feel unhappy in your jobs?” Zero hands went up. Oh dear, try again. “How many of you feel overloaded?” Three hands in a packed room. Ooops that punctured the proposition.... 

She then made a quick retreat into some ridiculous generalisations about her being the first to really look at networks, that Trump should be thrown off Twitter (strong anti-freedom of expression line here.... bit worrying). Basically playing the therapeutic contrarian. The audience were having none of it, many of them experts in this field.

Then came the blowback. Stephen Downes, who knows more than most on the subject of networks, was blunt “Everything you’ve said is just wrong” Wow. He then explained that there’s a large literature on networks and that the subject has been studied in depth and that she was low on knowledge and research. He was right. Andrew Keen on Stephen Downes accusation that Hobsbawn was flakey on assumptions and research "Good - glad to see someone with a hard hitting point..." Claire Fox then joined the fray.... pointing out that this contrarian stuff smacks of hysteria – it’s all a bit preachy and mumsy.

So, fast forward, I’m back from Berlin and bought the book – Fully Connected. To be fair I wanted to read the work for myself. Turns out the audience was right. 

Fully Connected

The Preface opens up with a tale about Ebola, setting the whole ‘networks are diseased and I have the cure’ tone of the book. “Culture, diseases, ideas: they’re all about networks” says Hobsbawn. Wow – she’s serious and really does want to conflate these things just to set up the self-help advice. What follows is a series of well-worn stuff about Moore’s Law, Stanley Milgram, Six Degrees of Separation, Taleb’s Black Swan, Tom Peters, Peter Drucker… punctuated by anecdotes about her and her family. It’s a curious mixture of dull, middle-class anecdotes and old school stuff without any real analysis or insights.

Ah, but here comes her insight – her new term ‘social health’. All is revealed. Her vision is pathologocal, the usual deficit view of the modern world. All of you out there are wrapped up in evil spiders’ webs, diseased, and I have the cure. Her two big ideas are The Way to Wellbeing and The Blended Self. All of this is wrapped up in the pseudo-medical nonsense; Information obesity, Time starvation, Techno-spread, Organisational bloat. It’s like a bad diet book where you’re fed a diet of bad metaphors. Her ‘Hexagon’ of social health is the diagnosis and cure, as she puts herself forward as the next Abraham Maslow – replacing the pyramid with a hexagon – we’re networked geddit?

Part two is even worse. The usual bromides around Disconnecting, Techno-shabbats, Designing your honeycomb, The knowledge dashboard. Only then do you realise that this is a really bad, self-help book based on a few personal anecdotes and no research whatsoever.

The postscript says it all, a rambling piece about the Forth Road Bridge. I grew up in the town beneath that bridge and saw it built – even I couldn’t see what she was on about. There are some serious writers in this area, like Andrew Keen, Nicholas Carr and others, Julia is not one of them.