The Intoxication of Power

Interdisciplinary Insights

Graham Robinson, Peter Garrard, Graham Robinson, Peter Garrard

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349576043
  9781137439642
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137439666
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The Intoxication of Power is a collection of contributions by thirteen authors from various academic disciplines sharing a concern for the development of understanding of the nature and origins of leadership hubris. The book originated at conferences held by the Daedalus Trust, which fosters research into challenges to organizational well-being.

1

Making Sense of Hubris

Graham M. Robinson

1.1

Introduction

References to “hubris” appear to have been increasingly apparent since the second Iraq War in 2003 and the recent (current) global economic crisis. Yet it is a strange choice of word as a description of the behaviours of previously highly respected individuals in the wake of actions or decisions that later turned out to have disastrous consequences. Hubris, therefore, seems to be a malaise of the powerful, the successful and the intelligent which causes them to over-reach themselves and leads them, their reputations and, worse, their dependants, organisations and even nations to humiliation, disaster and ruin. The media and former friends and colleagues of the victim all enjoy the luxury of retrospective wisdom, citing hubris as having caused the fall of one so previously admired. Explanations focus on over-confidence, excessive ambition, an inability to listen to advice, or to be too ready to hear the contributions of sycophantic subordinates and advisors – or simply that they have grown “too big for their boots”. But these are not explanations; they do not provide us with meaningful insights as to why apparently highly able, successful and respected individuals should, so frequently, commit themselves (and others) to courses of action that turn out to have been reckless, foolish, illegal or simply stupid.

As previously suggested, the second Iraq War and the global financial crisis that followed the 2007 credit crunch have given the notion of leadership hubris much greater prominence of late. Both President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair were widely castigated for the hubris of their actions before, during and after the war that they declared on Iraq. It has also been claimed that the near collapse of the global banking system and the world economy may be considered to have been largely a consequence of the hubris demonstrated by many of its leaders, including Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers and Fred Goodwin of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

These recent examples and the disastrous consequences associated with them suggest that an understanding of the nature and origins of hubris and the development of measures to mitigate its negative effects is a matter of great importance. It is also of more general importance as conditions of unprecedented global interdependence become the norm and the potential for the results of hubristic decisions continue to be increasingly catastrophic.

1.2

Variety in emphasis, meaning and attribution

It should be noted, however, that “hubris” – with a variety of apparent meanings – has also been seen to be a problem in a number of other, widely different, contexts over a similar period. For example, in 2005, Dee Hock, founder of Visa International, commented on the growth of university departments specialising in the new discipline of Complexity Science: “The hubris of science is astonishing. It would come as quite a surprise to countless poets, philosophers, theologians, humanists and mystics who have thought deeply about such things for thousands of years that complexity, diversity, interconnectedness, and self-organisation are either new, or a science.”1 Around the same time, the actress and socialite Elizabeth Hurley was said by sections of the media to have displayed hubris when she described people without her celebrity status as “civilians”, while the misdemeanours of Premier League footballers on and off the pitch have been variously attributed to hubris, alcohol, drugs or a combination of all three.

Authors from a wide variety of academic disciplines have paid increasing attention to the topic of leadership hubris in recent years. The historian Peter Beinart has, for example, written The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris,2 while his compatriot Mathew Hayward at the University of Colorado has provided Ego Check: Why Executive Hubris is Wrecking Companies and Careers and How to Avoid the Trap.3 In 2015, economist Meghnad Desai published the cryptically titled Hubris, in which he suggests that what he labels “the two tribes” of Neoclassical and Keynesian economists failed to predict the global financial and economic crises of the early twenty-first century because of their dismissive contempt for alternative, non-mainstream approaches to economics, their arrogance and their hubris.4

In a very different context, the founder of the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre’s mindfulness-based stress reduction programme, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has suggested5 that

if you are a strong willed and accomplished person, you may often give the impression that you are invulnerable to feeling inadequate or insecure or hurt. This can be very isolating and ultimately cause you and others great pain. Other people will be all too happy to take in that impression and to collude in propagating a ‘Rock of Gibraltar’ persona, one which does not allow you to have any real feelings. In fact, you can all too easily get out of touch with your own true feelings behind the intoxicating shield of image and aura. This isolation happens a lot to fathers in the nuclear family and to people in positions of relative power and authority everywhere. (Italics added.)

Writing beneath the shadows cast by Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and other dictators of the first half of the twentieth century, George Orwell probably expressed a view of leadership in which hubris is seen as being at its most extreme when, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he wrote:

Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.6

Hubris as arrogance, vanity, contempt for others or overweening self-belief is now quite frequently perceived to be a common characteristic of the behaviour of leaders, prominent individuals and nations in modern society. But we lack a clear understanding or even a widely accepted definition of what exactly hubris is, or just what is meant when we pronounce that so-and-so was suffering from hubris when they did such-and-such. The use of the past tense here is important because, as suggested earlier, it seems that the word is usually employed only when one is being wise in the wake of a disaster. Such examples suggest that the specific meaning of hubris may well be determined by the context within which it is employed. If we are to make sense of what seems to be or have been a particular instance of hubris, then we need to develop our understanding of the context of the act to which it is attributed. In agreement with Karl Weick7 we shall argue that all “sensemaking is about staying in touch with context” and that the study of apparent acts of hubris in the absence of an in-depth appreciation of their wider context makes little or no sense. Indeed, we would go so far as to suggest that leadership hubris may be a direct consequence of the leader having lost touch with the wider context of his or her actions. This is a theme to which we shall return.

1.3

Origins

A number of the contributors to this volume make reference to the ancient Greek origins of the word “hubris”.

In early Greek tales and myths, Hybris was said to be the goddess or spirit of “insolence, violence, wantonness, reckless pride and outrageous behaviour”.8 Aesop tells us that she was married to Polemas, the god of war, who was so besotted with her that he followed her wherever she chose to lead him. Humans, therefore, needed to be constantly on the lookout for Hybris, for a visit from her would surely be followed by war. Hybris’ behaviour is described as being deliberate and gratuitously nasty. Thus when Aristotle used the word “hubris”, he did so in order to describe the behaviour of someone who sets out with the deliberate intention of bringing shame and dishonour to somebody else – not as an act of vengeance to repay that person for a perceived slight or wrongdoing but simply in order to demonstrate their own superiority. The Aristotelian sense thus introduces an association between hubris and power. This association is of crucial importance.

The plays of Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy also serve to shed light upon the way in which hubris was understood in Ancient Greek society.9 The fate of Oedipus and his children serves to demonstrate that a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Making Sense of Hubris
• 2 The Psychopathology of Power
• 3 Hubris in Business and Management Research: A 30-year Review of Studies
• 4 Pathologies of Power and Cognition
• 5 The Hubris Factor in Leadership
• 6 It’s Not Just Others: Conquering the Hubris in Yourself
• 7 Tales from the Road – Encounters with Hubris?
• 8 On the Linguistics of Power (and the Power of Linguistics)
• 9 The Social Neuroscience of Power and Its Links with Empathy, Cooperation and Cognition
• 10 Doctors, Power and Their Performance
• 11 Do Successful Adult Leaders Share Common Childhood Experiences?
• 12 The Role of Leader Hubris in the Decline of RBS and Lehman Brothers
• Index