Leaders we Deserve

One of the books I’ve been glancing at is the very recent Corruptible – who gets power and how it changes us; Brian Klaas (2021) which deals with four very fundamental questions - 

·       First, do worse people get power?

·       Second, does power make people worse?

·       Why, third, do we let people control us who clearly have no business being in control?

·       How, finally, can we ensure that incorruptible people get into power and wield it justly? 

The author then goes on to say - 

For the past decade, I’ve been studying these questions across the globe, from Belarus to Britain, Côte d’Ivoire to California, Thailand to Tunisia, and Australia to Zambia. As part of my research as a political scientist, I interview people—mostly bad people who abuse their power to do bad things. I’ve met with cult leaders, war criminals, despots, coup plotters, torturers, mercenaries, generals, propagandists, rebels, corrupt CEOs, and convicted criminals. I try to figure out what makes them tick. Understanding them—and studying the systems they operate in—is crucial to stopping them. Many were crazy and cruel, others kind and compassionate. But all were united by one trait: they wielded enormous power 

But, very curiously in the light of all his travels and effort, he doesn’t appear to have done the basic thing – which is to look at how other people have dealt with these questions. The book lacks even a short list of useful or recommended reading – and his index ignores most of the literature on the subject – the most important of which, for me by a long chalk, is Leaders we Deserve produced almost 40 years ago by Alistair Mant and which I was delighted to be able to access on the Internet Archive. This actually tries to understand what it is in leaders which makes them generally so ineffective 

Mant is a fascinating character – originally from Australia but working in Britain from the late 1970s and producing a delightful little book The Rise and Fall of the British Manager in 1977 whose introductory comments already give us a sense of the author’s originality - "The book represents the confluence of four distinct streams of personal experience:

-       Hoving read history and never quite recovering from the force of the experience.

-       A long association with some of the great figures out of the post-war Tovistock Institute and thus, on association with those tenuous links between the human sub-conscious and the strange things people do at work.

-       A 'career' in industry and the inevitable fund of anecdotes arising out of this, from the surreal to the grisly.

-       A life-time's fascination with words and the uses and misuses to which they are put.

 

I count myself an amateur in history, social science, management and linguistics but the combination of all four provided, for me, a slant on the topic of 'management' which I have missed elsewhere".

At least this useful collection of articles from practitioners and academics recognised the usefulness of Mant’s work – in the introduction to Leadership and Management in the 21^st century  ed G Cooper (2005). But it makes you wonder – how on earth can KLAAS even imagine he can do justice to an issue when he demonstrates that he hasn’t even bothered to read some at least of the relevant literature? Predictably, Machiavelli gets only one entry in the Index – and Madoff (Bernie) two! And, equally predictably, Robert Michels who, arguably, started the modern interest in what power does to people with his “Political Parties” (1911) and “the iron law of oligarchy” doesn’t figure in the index – nor do Hitler, Lenin or Stalin – although, curiously, Mussolini gets 2 pages!

UPDATE - in autumn 2024, I came across this fascinating book which, rightly, challenges the way the literature tends to focus on good leaders when the reality most of us deal with is BAD leaders - Debating Bad Leadership – reasons and remedies ed Anders Oertenblad (2021)