Sleeping With Bears

When you find yourself in a leadership position, you have a choice: be a builder or a destroyer.  A builder of states, businesses, teams, dreams, lasting legacies and ways to improve on the world that hosted you for 70, 80 or 90 years.  Or a destroyer of what the world has gifted you because you come to believe in your own immortality and that you are smarter, wiser, and more capable than everyone else around you.  You would do everything in your power to reinforce this notion in your mind and on others.  It is a matter of time before the whole edifice and symbol of your power comes crashing down over you and many people around you.  Your last thought as you draw your last breath is to apportion blame on others.

Mark McCormack (1930–2003) realised early in his life that he was a mediocre golfer but, he loved golf too much to abandon the game entirely.  So, after qualifying as a lawyer, he set up a promotion company (IMG) in 1960 to look after the interest of star golf players where his first client was the legendary golfer, Arnold Palmer.  He soon added other star golfers, then racing drivers, tennis players, football players, rising sports stars, even institutions such as the Church of England and the Vatican.  By the time he died he was a billionaire.  Mark McCormack was more than a businessman, though.  He was a thinker, a writer, a human analyst, a leader and a great communicator.  Some of his many, many quotes were “Be the first to listen and the last to speak”; “Hire the best to teach you what you don’t know”; “People don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan”; “To be successful in business, you don’t have to be the best, just make sure you have the best people around you”.

In 1979 as the popular uprising took hold in the country, the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was saying his final farewells to his inner circle before flying out to Egypt, never to return to his homeland.  He asked one of his advisors “where did it all go wrong?” and safe in the knowledge that the Shah was no longer the scary dictator he once was, the advisor said “Sir, when your father was the Shah, no one dared to hide the truth from him.  Under your leadership, none of us dared to tell you the truth”.

It is astonishing how often we come across people in positions of power who truly believe they know better than all others around them, and while they may pretend to listen to them, they will always pay more attention to their inner voice that reassures them the advisors are wrong and they are right.  As time goes by, the conviction becomes stronger, the voices of reason around them begin to irritate and threaten their authority so, they listen even less than before and systematically, they get rid of those who offer honest advice and replace them with cheerleaders who always reinforce their feeling of greatness and never say anything that might contradict or upset ‘the leader’.

So, a government or a commercial organisation ends up with an autocratic leader who is intolerant of criticism or opposition, surrounded by people who are less qualified, less charismatic, but more ready to agree and reinforce bad ideas or decisions concocted by the leader.  There maybe individuals around who know better and could give constructive advice on alternative courses of action but, they dare not speak out fearing for their jobs, careers, livelihoods or in extreme cases, their lives may be at risk.  With this negative momentum, the organisation is steered along a disastrous path and the leader presses the accelerator towards oblivion.  As the whole set up comes crashing down, the leader busies himself looking for individuals to blame, without ever entertaining the idea that maybe he was at fault.

So, why do we have so many destroyers and not more builders?  I wish I knew the answer for sure, but I don’t.  I can only surmise that as humans, some of us don’t have a strong enough instinct that keeps us on the right side of self-confidence so we stray into the territory of arrogance; we enjoy the sweet taste of flattery and recoil from the bitter taste of criticism; we see the way forward more clearly than others around us; as a result, we conclude that the only voice worth listening to is our own and we are the only ones who can guide the group forward.

Here is an old allegory I learnt at school.

A huntsman rescues an ensnared wild bear in the woods.  The bear is very grateful to the huntsman and decides to follow him round and be his companion.  At first, the huntsman is irritated by this 400-kilogram powerful animal, but he slowly comes to realise the bear loves him and all it wants is to be with him so, they form a bond.  The huntsman wife and fellow villagers advise the huntsman to get rid of the bear as it is wild and unpredictable.  The huntsman laughs in their faces and accuses them of being jealous.  With an extremely powerful and over-protective wild animal by his side, the huntsman gradually assumed a position of authority and prestige in the village.  One day, the huntsman and his bear go to the woods looking for prey to kill/capture and take back to consume or sell to the other villagers.  Around midday, the huntsman and the bear sit under a tree for lunch and some rest.  As usual, the huntsman shares his lunch with the bear and soon falls asleep.  The bear remains alert looking out for danger that might threaten its master.  A fly lands on the huntsman forehead so, the bear waves it off.  The fly does a few circles and returns and lands on the huntsman’s mouth, the bear waves it off again.  This routine goes on for a while and finally, the bear patience runs out.  It gets up, looks around and finds a large boulder, it picks the heavy rock and returns to where its master is sleeping.  The fly shows up yet again and land right on the huntsman’s nose.  The bear lifts the rock and smashes it over the fly and its landing site, that of the huntsman head, who dies instantly.  The fly survived.