The biggest
threats and dangers we face are the ones we don't see – not because they're
secret or invisible, but because we're willfully blind. By failing to see – or
admit to our colleagues or us. – the issues and problems in plain sight,
leaders can ruin private lives and bring down corporations.
Parliament's
Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, after its investigation into News
Corporation, has concluded that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to run an
international corporation. It said: "on the basis of the facts and
evidence before the committee, we conclude that, if at all relevant times
Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking,
he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in
his companies and publications. "
Whatever your opinion of Rupert
Murdoch's media outlets, this is a damning verdict on a man who has built one
of the world's largest and most powerful media businesses. It leads anyone who
runs a business to ask: have I, at all times, taken steps to be fully informed
about what is going on in my organization? What might be getting in the way of
my seeing what I most need to understand?
In Murdoch's case, my argument is
that one of the biggest problems he suffered from was not personal, but
structural: power. Power encases its recipients in a bubble. Some of that
bubble may attain a physical reality: encased in limousines, private jets, and
hotel suites, very powerful individuals rarely inhabit the same world as the rest
of the world. Protected from the knocks and bumps of daily life, the powerful
don't encounter the unscheduled question or unexpected mishap that shows where
things could be going wrong. Academic studies have shown that those with
power are more optimistic, more abstract in their thinking, and more confident
that they're right. So mentally they're in a bubble, too.
Perhaps
most potently in Murdoch's case, powerful people can't escape a trap. People
who tell them what they want to hear surround those who hold power, hiding or minimizing
what they imagine their bosses don't want to know. On one level, this is not
personal; it afflicts everyone. Ambitious executives want to please their
bosses, so they deliver the good news and bury the bad. It's assumed that
conflict is undesirable so anything that might provoke it mysteriously
disappears. Leaders themselves need do nothing to encourage this. The ambitions
of those around them is enough to ensure that they are surrounded by smiling
bearers of success stories.
Murdoch isn't the first and he won't be the last
to be caught in this power trap. John Browne, when he led BP, was famously
ensnared in it, blind to the dangerous operations, which led to accidents and
fatalities. His later memoir acknowledged as much. He wrote: "I wish
someone had challenged me and been brave enough to say, 'we need to ask more
disagreeable questions'. "
It takes enormous energy, fortitude, and
humility to see that power isn't just a privilege, but also a problem. To solve
it requires finding and protecting people whose job it is specifically to ask
the hard questions, to test assumptions, and challenge received wisdom. It also
requires corporate governance and directors to do likewise. Most of all, the
problem of power challenges all leaders–whether of billion-dollar businesses or
small companies–to appreciate that, however much they say they want to hear the
truth, no-one will believe them until they see the delivery of bad news
rewarded.
What is your opinion?
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