...."Recalling an early
experience of powerlessness seems to work for some people—and experiences that
were searing enough may provide a sort of permanent protection. An incredible study published in The Journal of Finance last
February found that CEOs who as children had lived through a natural disaster
that produced significant fatalities were much less risk-seeking than CEOs who
hadn’t. (The one problem, says Raghavendra Rau, a co-author of the study and a
Cambridge University professor, is that CEOs who had lived through
disasters without significant fatalities were more risk-seeking.)
“Hubris syndrome,” Owen writes, “is
a disorder of the possession of power.”
But tornadoes,
volcanoes, and tsunamis aren’t the only hubris-restraining forces out there.
PepsiCo CEO and Chairman Indra Nooyi sometimes tells the story of the day she got the news of her appointment to the
company’s board, in 2001. She arrived home percolating in her own sense of
importance and vitality, when her mother asked whether, before she delivered
her “great news,” she would go out and get some milk. Fuming, Nooyi went out
and got it. “Leave that damn crown in the garage” was her mother’s advice when
she returned.
The point of the
story, really, is that Nooyi tells it. It serves as a useful reminder about
ordinary obligation and the need to stay grounded. Nooyi’s mother, in the
story, serves as a “toe holder,” a term once used by the political adviser
Louis Howe to describe his relationship with the four-term President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, whom Howe never stopped calling Franklin.
For Winston
Churchill, the person who filled that role was his wife, Clementine, who had
the courage to write, “My Darling Winston. I must confess that I have noticed a
deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be.”
Written on the day Hitler entered Paris, torn up, then sent anyway, the letter
was not a complaint but an alert: Someone had confided to her, she wrote, that
Churchill had been acting “so contemptuous” toward subordinates in meetings
that “no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming”—with the attendant danger
that “you won’t get the best results.”
Lord David Owen—a
British neurologist turned parliamentarian who served as the foreign secretary
before becoming a baron—recounts both Howe’s story and Clementine Churchill’s
in his 2008 book, In Sickness and in Power, an inquiry into the
various maladies that had affected the performance of British prime ministers
and American presidents since 1900. While some suffered from strokes (Woodrow
Wilson), substance abuse (Anthony Eden), or possibly bipolar disorder (Lyndon
B. Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt), at least four others acquired a disorder that
the medical literature doesn’t recognize but, Owen argues, should.
“Hubris syndrome,”
as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the
possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming
success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.”
Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact
with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In
May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen
founded for the study and prevention of hubris.
I asked Owen, who
admits to a healthy predisposition to hubris himself, whether anything helps
keep him tethered to reality, something that other truly powerful figures might
emulate. He shared a few strategies: thinking back on hubris-dispelling
episodes from his past; watching documentaries about ordinary people; making a
habit of reading constituents’ letters.
But I surmised
that the greatest check on Owen’s hubris today might stem from his recent
research endeavors. Businesses, he complained to me, had shown next to no
appetite for research on hubris. Business schools were not much better. The
undercurrent of frustration in his voice attested to a certain powerlessness.
Whatever the salutary effect on Owen, it suggests that a malady seen too
commonly in boardrooms and executive suites is unlikely to soon find a cure."
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