On leadership

I believe in the Wisdom of Crowds. And I also believe in the value and importance of leaders and leadership. In fact in many contexts good leadership is what allows the crowd to be wise (as opposed to idiotic; see JP’s critique of Freedman’s article here.) The problem is a paucity of good leaders, or at least good leaders who can be bothered to wade through the venal and cynical thicket that all to often surrounds positions of power or influence. History is littered with disastrous outcomes due to poor leadership, we’re not just talking about a bad quarter or a bottom decile share price performance…

In his excellent book Collapse, Jared Diamond quotes from Barbara Tuchman’s book “The March of Folly” :

Throughout recorded history, actions or inactions by self-absorbed kings, chiefs, and polticians have been a regular cause of societal collapses…Tuchman put it succintly: “Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as ‘the most flagrant of all passions.’ ” As a result of lust for power, Easter Island chiefs and Maya kings acted so as to accelerate deforestation rather than to prevent it: their status depended on their putting up bigger statues and monuments than their rivals. They were trapped in a competitive spiral, such that any chief or king who put up smaller statues or monuments to spare the forests would have been scorned and lost his job. That’s a regular problem with competitions for prestige, which are judged on a short time frame.

These are leaders that got caught up in their own press – that believed that the sun rose and set because of their genius and charisma. Leaders that eliminate dissent and fear change. Leaders that end up breeding a madness of crowds, crushing the wisdom under their iron determination.

I’m just in the process of re-reading Surowieki. And I can tell you I don’t really see him expounding on the virtues of blindly, and in all circumstances and contexts, trusting the ‘crowd’; and explicitly he underlines the fact that the wisdom arising from a crowd is not the same (indeed often just the opposite) as consensus.

(from “The Incredibles”

Helen (Dash’s Mom): Everyone’s special Dash.

Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

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