The Roman caesars were the rulers of the Roman Empire, beginning in 27 BC with Julius Caesar’s heir Augustus, from whom subsequent caesars took their name, and lasting until around the fall of the Western Empire in 476 AD. The caesars transitioned the Roman Republic to autocratic rule, consolidating vast territories under centralized authority and shaping Western governance, law, and culture. Their reign marked one of history’s most influential periods, laying the groundwork for modern empires and enduring legacies in political and architectural innovation.

They also left behind some instructive leadership lessons, in both what and what not to do.

Here to unpack some of the Roman Empire’s most significant caesars as both histories and leadership case studies is Barry Strauss, who is a classicist, professor, military historian, fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and the author of numerous books, including Ten Caesars. Today on the show, Barry shares how Augustus consolidated power by initially cleaning house, a redeeming quality of the otherwise infamous Nero, the strategies Vespasian and Severus used to gain legitimacy as outsiders, why Marcus Aurelius was an insightful philosopher but struggled as an emperor, the emperor under whose rule the empire began its decline, what Constantine understood about the idea that if you want things to stay the same, everything must change, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Barry’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #487 — Leadership Lessons From the 3 Greatest Ancient Commanders
• Barry’s forthcoming book: Jews vs. Rome — Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire
• AoM Podcast #346: The Fall of the Roman Republic
• AoM Podcast #969: The Making of a Stoic Emperor

Connect With Barry Strauss

• Barry’s website
• Barry’s faculty page
• Barry on LinkedIn

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The Roman Caesars were the rulers of the Roman Empire, beginning in 27 BC with Julius Caesar’s heir Augustus, from whom subsequent Caesars took their name, and lasting until around the fall of the Western Empire in 476 AD. The Caesars transitioned the Roman Republic to autocratic rule, consolidating vast territories under centralized authority, and shaping Western governance, law, and culture. Their reign marked one of history’s most influential periods, laying the groundwork for modern empires and enduring legacies in political and architectural innovation. They also left behind some instructive leadership lessons in both what and what not to do. Here to unpack some of the Roman Empire’s most significant Caesars as both histories and leadership case studies is Barry Strauss, who is a classicist, professor, military historian, fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and the author of numerous books, including ‘Ten Caesars’.

Today on the show, Barry shares how Augustus consolidated power by initially cleaning house, redeeming quality of the otherwise infamous Nero, the strategies Vespasian and Severus used to gain legitimacy as outsiders, why Marcus Aurelius was an insightful philosopher but struggled as an emperor, the emperor under whose rule the empire began its decline, what Constantine understood about the idea that if you want things to stay the same, everything must change, and much more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/caesars. All right. Barry Strauss, welcome back to the show.

Barry Strauss: Thank you, Brad. It’s great to be back.

Brett McKay: So we had you on last time, this is in 2019, to talk about your book, ‘Masters of Command’. And it’s about leadership lessons from some of ancient history’s greatest commanders, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Caesar. You had a book out that came out a while back ago called Ten Caesars, where you look at the age of Caesars and you highlight 10 significant ones in that history. What made the particular emperors you focus on in your book stand out as the most influential or instructive for modern readers?

Barry Strauss: A great question. So on the one hand, I wanted to focus on change agents and emperors who were consequential, who were, to use modern terminology, not just transactional leaders, but transformational leaders. And then to a certain extent, just basic showmanship, I wanted to choose emperors that were interesting to write about and that would be fun to read about. And I decided to set chronological limits. I began with Augustus, who we typically call the first of the Roman emperors. And I ended with Constantine, who’s the first Christian emperor. And who establishes the city that was destined to outstrip Rome and become the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople. I could have started earlier with Julius Caesar, as Suetonius does, and I could have gone on later at least to 476, the last of the Roman emperors in the West. I do have a coda about that in the book, or even to the Byzantine Empire to 1453, as Gibbon does, but I decided that it would make a nicer and more compact and coherent story if I went from Augustus to Constantine.

Brett McKay: And going back to that idea, you’re looking for transformative figures. This is one of the things I love about your books. They’re kind of Plutarchian in a sense.

Barry Strauss: Oh, thank you.

Brett McKay: You show the history, but then you subtly extract lessons that even someone who lives in the 21st century and they’re not an emperor, you can learn something about character and how to lead or how to deal with change or how to deal with setbacks. And you do this in this book. And I hope we can flesh out some of those ideas you talk about in the book. But let’s talk about you mentioned you started with Augustus. He’s considered the first emperor. But you mentioned Julius Caesar. All the other emperors that followed him took their name from this guy. He never was officially an emperor, yet he laid the groundwork for the Roman Empire. So let’s talk about him a little bit. How did his actions and innovations set the stage for the age of Caesars?

Barry Strauss: It’s a great question. Caesar didn’t see himself as an emperor. He saw himself as a Republican Roman politician, the first man in Rome, the greatest of the Romans in his day. And from his point of view, as a result of the opposition, the unfair opposition he faced in his quest to hold the consulship for a second time, he was forced into a civil war in which he was such a successful commander that he defeated all his enemies and ended up being the supreme power in Rome, the dictator eventually the dictator in perpetuity. So Julius Caesar, I’d see him rather as the last of the Roman Republicans than the first of the emperors. After he had won the civil war and defeated all his enemies, he was at a loss as to what to do and how he would govern in Rome. How would he work with what was left of the Republican institutions? And it’s clear that he toyed with different possibilities. He famously toyed with the idea of being known as a king, as a rex, and he explicitly denied that he wanted that title.

And in some sense, it’s a sign of his uncertainty of what to do that he decided to leave Rome and go off on a grand expedition to the east to conquer Dacia, what’s now Romania, and then to make war on the Parthian Empire and perhaps conquer a part or all of it. But, of course, he was assassinated on March 15th, the Ides of March, 44 BC, before he could ever go off on this expedition and before it could become clear how he was going to rule in Rome, how he was going to govern within the framework of the Roman Republic or whether he was gonna change that framework. There were many things up for grabs. And that was the situation after his death that in not too long time, in short order, led to another civil war. And when the smoke finally cleared about 15 years later, it left Octavian, his adopted son, his great nephew, his grand nephew, his sister’s son, it left Octavian as the last man standing as the supreme leader in Rome. And he had to figure out now what? Now how are we gonna put the pieces together again?

Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s talk about Octavian. So he’s now known as Augustus.

Barry Strauss: Yes.

Brett McKay: He’s basically the guy, he transformed Rome from a republic to an empire.

Barry Strauss: That’s right.

Brett McKay: What did he do to make that transformation?

Barry Strauss: Well, the first thing he did was to deny that it was even happening. He said that Rome remained a republic and he issued coins and other propaganda, the slogan of which was “res publica restituta”, which can either mean the republic has been restored or the republic has been renovated. He learned his lesson from Caesar, who had offended some of the old guard by his flirtation with being a king, and he denied that he was a king. He insisted that he was nothing more than the first citizen. This is a title that had not really existed before, but he called himself the first citizen. And he ruled through holding a series of republican offices. Now, these offices were not designed to be held in perpetuity much less to be combined in the purview of any one man. But Octavian did this. He had the power of a Roman tribune. He had the power of a Roman consul, the power of imperium, of command, as it was called. But he also ruled informally. And he was able to do this because he had a very bloody rise to power.

In these years of civil wars between 44 and 30 BC, he’s responsible for a number of battles and for the execution of about 100 Roman senators. The Roman elite suffers greatly in these civil wars, and Roman masses do as well. But one of the reasons for Octavian’s success, is that he’s killed off a lot of his enemies. And there’s a lesson here. It’s a lesson that Machiavelli would write about a long time afterwards in ‘The Prince’. And that is, if you wanna be a successful ruler, start hard. Start by coming down on your rivals and enemies hard. God forbid you have to kill them, as Octavian did, but make it clear who’s boss and make it clear what you will and won’t tolerate. And then after that, become generous and become more gentle. So Octavian, once he achieves supreme power, he has himself given a new name, a new title by the Senate, and that is the reverend or the revered one. And in Latin, that’s Augustus.

That’s a title that had never existed before in Rome, just as princeps, first, from which we get our word prince, and it only existed within the Senate. There was an unofficial prestigious person called the princeps senatus, the first of the Senate. But Octavian is experimenting. He’s working out a new constitution that can rule Rome while trying to create the legal fiction, maintain the fiction that Rome is still a republic, and it’s not a monarchy at all. This is a way to win friends and influence people, as we might say. And it’s quite successful. A scholar famously called it legal revolution, legal revolution. It’s a revolution that looks to the past. It claims to be merely preserving or renovating the past rather than innovating. And it works quite well.

Brett McKay: And he also dramatically expanded the reach of the empire as well.

Barry Strauss: Yes. He added new territories to the empire. Now, a successful Roman politician was expected to be a military commander as well as a figure in the forum, a speaker, a negotiator in Roman politics. Augustus himself was not a great general, but he had great generals working for him. And he was able to add Egypt to the empire, a very wealthy, prosperous and important place. He was also able to extend Roman rule in Europe. He conquered northwestern Spain, and he also added roughly Switzerland to the Roman Empire as well. He attempted to add Germany, Western and Central Germany to the empire. And that’s a famous failure. His armies are defeated in a brilliant ambush, probably the most successful act of resistance by those the Romans attempted to colonize, the most successful act of all time, or one of the one or two most successful ones.

And in the year 9 AD, the Roman legions are defeated at the Teutoburg Woods by a man named Arminius. Three legions are decimated. That’s about 1/10 of the legionary manpower that Rome had. So very significant loss. And Augustus is reduced to crying, give me back my legions. So yes, he expands the empire, but it’s not as successful as he had hoped.

Brett McKay: Why did he take on the name Caesar?

Barry Strauss: Well, he took on the name Caesar for a variety of reasons. Now, Caesar was an aristocratic name. It was the name from a Roman patrician family. It was as Roman as Roman could be. Octavian himself, his father was not a member of the Roman nobility. Instead, he was a member of the provincial elite. He came from a town that was about 25 miles south of Rome. And through his mother’s side, Octavian was part of the family of the Caesars. But from his father’s side, he was not all that noble and important. And the Romans were a very elitist society, extremely conscious, acutely conscious of social status. And they would have looked at Gaius Octavius as this man was born. Augustus was born with the title of Gaius Octavius. He’s coming from a second-rate background, not really one of us, as the Roman nobility would have said. So he is adopted posthumously by Julius Caesar. When Caesar’s will is opened, it says that he offers adoption to his grand nephew, Gaius Octavius completely illegal by Roman law, by the way.

There’s no such thing as posthumous adoption. But this is a time of civil war when people are willing to bend the rules and end some. Taking on the name of Caesar gives him nobility. It makes him a member of the inner circle of the Roman elite. So he’s very eager to have this title. And then he marries up. He ends up marrying a woman who comes from the absolutely bluest of blue blood, Livia Drusilla. That’s his prize. He has made it now. Little Gaius Octavius from the second-rate nobility of Italy is now as blue-blooded as any Roman could be. At least that’s the legal fiction.

Brett McKay: Okay. So I get the takeaway there from sort of like if you wanna be a change agent in an organization. So this is a philosophy of go hard in the beginning, be brutal in the beginning, and then be generous. So like, if you come in as a new boss, right away, maybe you have to just like, here are the rules that we’re gonna do. Here’s how we’re gonna do it my way. And if you’re not on my way, then you’re out of here. Get out of here. And then afterward, you can be a little bit more generous.

Barry Strauss: Yes. You have to be more generous afterwards. But you have to start out tough. You can’t start out nice.

Brett McKay: And then also, I think the takeaway from him is you have to think about PR, public relations. You have to say, hey, he was saying, we’re still gonna be a republic, but really you’re actually making an empire.

Barry Strauss: Absolutely. It’s legal revolution, its change with a friendly face. Augustus was a master of that, and the Romans were extremely good at propaganda. The other thing about it is that even when Augustus was generous, it was always the iron fist beneath the velvet glove. There was a velvet glove, but he was always willing to use force when necessary. He just tried to use it very, very sparingly so he wouldn’t make enemies unnecessarily.

Brett McKay: The Caesar that followed him was a guy named Tiberius. How did Tiberius differ from Augustus?

Barry Strauss: Well, Tiberius, like Augustus, was a man of vision and a man of immense talent. But unlike Augustus, he didn’t have the gentle touch. He wasn’t great at propaganda. It may be significant that unlike Augustus, he does not come from the Italian nobility. He also is an utterly blue-blooded member of the Roman nobility. And he faces life with a certain amount of arrogance, my way or the highway. He doesn’t start his reign by cleaning house the way Augustus had done. He tries to be a kinder, gentler emperor. And it doesn’t work. He meets resistance from the Senate. After all, there are still many people in the Senate who at least remember the name of the republic, if not the reality of the republic. They’re too young for that. And they were hoping that after Augustus things would go back to the way they had been in the late republic, that they wouldn’t have a monarch. But they were rudely disappointed. They had a rude awakening under Tiberius. And Tiberius finds himself forced to engage in treason trials. He expands and abuses the Roman law of treason to get rid of his enemies in the Senate.

Brett McKay: So yeah, he started out loved, but he ended his reign hated, basically.

Barry Strauss: Yes, hated. He also has a hatchet man named Sejanus. And Sejanus, not a member of the nobility, but Sejanus has very high hopes of becoming a member of the nobility and even becoming emperor. And he turns on Tiberius. He’s plotting against Tiberius. And it’s only through the help of members of his extended family that Tiberius is awakened to the danger at the 11th hour. And he has Sejanus purged. So he maintains his power. But he is hated, as you say. He’s a bitter old man. He’s no longer living in Rome. He lives on the island of Capri. We call it Capri and he’s ruling from a distance, he’s ruling a long distance. So it’s not very successful. It’s a pity because like Augustus, he’s a man of vision. And Tiberius’ vision is, to put it in contemporary terms, if I might, to end endless wars. So he pulls back from Germany and he makes it clear that under his rule, Rome is a satiated power. Rome is no longer going to expand.

And that was probably good advice for Rome at the time. The Romans needed to pull back. They needed to have peace on the frontier. And they also couldn’t afford to have the political challenge of having generals going out winning victories, and then marching on Rome and wanting themselves to be emperor. It was a recipe for instability, as they had seen under Caesar, Sulla, Marius, and Pompey. So it’s a pity that Tiberius with his vision for how Rome should rule abroad, fell afoul of the Senate and fell afoul of domestic politics. So in a sense, it’s a lesson in what not to do.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So Nero was one of the emperors that followed Tiberius. He’s one of the most infamous Roman emperors.

Barry Strauss: Yes.

Brett McKay: What’s the actual story behind that old adage, Nero fiddled while Rome burned? I think everyone’s heard that. Did it actually happen?

Barry Strauss: Not technically. Nero did not fiddle. The fiddle hadn’t been invented yet. There were rumors that during the great fire of Rome in the summer of 64 AD, that Nero stood on the terrace of his palace overlooking the fire, and he took out his lyre, this instrument, this harp-like instrument that he played, and sang about the fall of Troy. Nobody knows if this rumor is true or not. It certainly is true that when the fire began, Nero was at a seaside villa outside of the city, and he was in no particular rush to come back to Rome and oversee the relief efforts and the effort of putting out the blaze. It was also rumored that Nero had actually set the blaze because he wanted to engage in a massive urban renewal project. We don’t know if this rumor is true or not, but there are certain scholars, some of my colleagues believe it is true. We just don’t know. When he came back to Rome after this infamous fiddling episode, he did throw himself into the relief efforts, making sure the fire brigades did their job, making sure that Romans were fed and cared for and those that lost their houses had a place to live. And then he engages in this amazing building boom, remaking the heart of Rome. A large part of it becomes this enormous palace. We call it today Nero’s Golden House. It’s not what it was called in antiquity.

It’s a huge palace or set of palaces. It’s a campus really, with parks that were open to the public, an artificial lake, so on and so forth. It was very grand, but there were many people who were suspicious that Nero had either set the blaze or winked at it in order to have the excuse to rebuild the city.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like he did make some positive contributions to the Roman Empire, the rebuilding process. You could say that was a good thing.

Barry Strauss: It was a good thing. Also, like Tiberius, he was opposed to starting new wars. Rome had perennial rivalry in the east with the other great empire of the ancient world in this period, the Parthian Empire. It is a new version of the older Persian Empire and early Iranian Empire. And the Romans and the Parthians had fought. They’d fought several wars already. And Nero, through strength, through a show of force in the east, without actually going to war, he is able to reach an agreement with the Parthians, a satisfactory agreement that saves face on both sides and keeps the peace. So to that extent, Nero is a good emperor. On the other hand, he is squeezing the provinces and the provincial misbehavior by governors, who he encouraged to abuse the provincials and squeeze money out of them. That leads to a great revolt in Judea. It becomes known as the Jewish war, the great revolt that ultimately ends up with Nero being forced from office, having to commit suicide, and it’s only settled… The war’s only settled in a later reign. So in many ways, Nero is a failure. His personal life is scandalous. The worst part of it is that he arranges for the murder of his own mother. So he is a matricide, a truly terrible man in many ways.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about the way that Nero differed from some of the previous emperors like Augustus or Tiberius. He didn’t really have like a bigger vision for the empire itself. It seems like he was more interested in like just the personal celebrity of being the emperor. And he did some kind of weird things to promote his own celebrity.

Barry Strauss: Yes. He was supremely egotistical and he was very vain about his singing ability and also about his ability to race chariots. And so unlike some emperors who would travel around the empire, in Tiberius’ case, when he was a younger man, to fight for Rome, and Tiberius was a great general. In Augustus’ case, both to fight, but also to tour around the empire to make sure that he showed the flag, to examine provincial conditions, Nero instead goes on this grand tour of Greece. He was a philhellene, he loved Greek culture. And the Greeks had these famous Panhellenic games. Every year there was a different one, but they were festivals of athletics and of poetry and singing. And Nero forced the poor Greeks to have all the games in the same year. He competed in every event or in many events. And guess what? He won every event in which he competed. It is a supreme act of irresponsibility and egotism that he does this instead of governing the empire.

Brett McKay: It reminded me of some business owners or startup founders who, yeah, they’re working on the business, but I think they enjoy just the celebrity of being a founder more than actually working on the business. That’s what it reminded me of.

Barry Strauss: Absolutely. Yeah, no, I agree. That’s how he comes off.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. An overlooked emperor is, make sure I get his name right, Vespasian?

Barry Strauss: Vespasian, yes.

Brett McKay: Vespasian, he’s overlooked often, but you argue he was one of Rome’s best emperors. So let’s talk about that. What did he do during his reign?

Barry Strauss: I’m not sure I’d say he’s one of Rome’s best, but he’s certainly one of Rome’s most consequential. So he comes to power in a civil war. He is a military man who, like Augustus, did not come from a noble family. In fact, unlike Augustus, he had no connection to a Roman family. He’s the first completely non-noble person to become emperor and he starts a new dynasty. So he’s sent by Nero to put down the revolt in Judea and he’s relatively successful when in the middle of it, Nero is forced out in a coup. He commits suicide. There’s a new emperor and Vespasian decides to cease military operations until the smoke clears. Then that new emperor is forced out in a coup and then there’s another coup. There are three different emperors while Vespasian is still in the east, biding his time, seeing what’s going to happen. And then he decides that if they can be emperor, so can he. And so he has the troops declare him emperor and he sends armies off to Italy to fight in this civil war, to fight his way to the throne.

And ultimately they’re successful. And he goes back to Italy and he becomes the emperor, the first emperor who does not come from the dynasty, the family of Augustus’ family. So he has a real tough job. How can he have legitimacy in the eyes of the Romans and in the eyes of the Roman elite? And part of the importance of the Roman elite, the Senate above all, but also the equestrians or the knights as they’re called, these are the people who have the talent, the ability, the education, the experience to actually run the empire. You need them on your team. You can’t throw them all out. And so Vespasian wants to show to them, as well as to the Roman people, that he is worthy of being emperor. And like Augustus, he started hard. He started in a bloody civil war, fighting his way to the throne. But now he wants to show that he is soft and that he will give the Romans good government.

So he does what Augustus had done. He becomes a great builder. He builds all sorts of things in the city of Rome to brand the city of Rome, to rebrand it as a monument to his dynasty. One of the reasons he becomes emperor is that he conveniently has two sons. That means that although he himself is not a young man, it means he will be succeeded by competent men who will replace him and ensure that there is a period of stability. His most famous building is the most famous building from ancient Rome, the Colosseum was built under Vespasian to be this grand arena for gladiatorial games and for the beasts, as the Romans called them, for the killing of animals for sport and for executions. Grim sorts of stuff that the Romans did, immensely popular, but it’s also built as a victory monument. It’s a victory monument to his success in Judea. Vespasian and his son Titus put down the revolt.

They destroy the rebels, they destroy the rebel capital of Jerusalem, they destroy the Jewish temple, and they bring loot, an enormous amount of loot back to Rome, and the Colosseum dedicated as a victory monument to this. Originally, above the entrance, there is a sculpted relief of Vespasian in his chariot that he rode in the triumph that he celebrated in Rome after his success. So there are many other things that they build in the city, but this iconic Roman monument, as I said, probably the most famous monument from Roman antiquity.

Brett McKay: What do you attribute his effectiveness to?

Barry Strauss: Well, again, he starts out tough. He had gotten rid of all his enemies and made it clear, don’t mess with me. FAFO, as they say nowadays. And then he brought a period of peace and stability and prosperity. He was actually a good manager and he had very talented people on his team working for him. He knew that he was building a dynasty. He also was in many ways a humble man. He didn’t suffer from the problems that Tiberius or Nero did. He was not a member of the nobility. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon, far from it. He had to prove himself to the Roman people and he understood what it was to be relatively humble. There’s a famous story that Vespasian levies attacks on public latrines and his younger son, the future emperor Domitian says to him, “Father, this is beneath our dignity to raise money from public toilets.” And Vespasian is said to have replied, Son, money has no smell.” I think it’s a sign of the kind of down to earth person that he was and his ability to be pragmatic and do what was necessary to be a successful ruler.

Brett McKay: Well, speaking of that tax on the urinals, there’s a bit of trivia and you mentioned this in the book, urinals today with the romance languages, like Italian or French, they call them Vespasianos in Italy. They’re named after him.

Barry Strauss: Yes. It’s called the Vespasianos in Italy and Vespasien in French. So yeah, it’s ironic the poor guy is remembered in connection with public toilets. Maybe not what he had in mind.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about Marcus Aurelius. I know our listeners are familiar with Marcus Aurelius, thanks to his stoic meditations that he wrote. But what was he like as an emperor?

Barry Strauss: Well, he’s a great philosopher and not such a great emperor. He comes to the throne with a disability and that is that his predecessor Antoninus Pius basically confined him to quarters. He had grown up and become a mature man with virtually no experience outside of Italy and virtually no military experience. He reminds me a little bit of George W Bush. He comes into office saying, “I want to be a domestic emperor. I want to use my term to give Rome good government and to dispense justice in a philosophical and equitable manner.” Instead, the poor guy is stuck with a series of crises, external crises. Rome has two great enemies. As I mentioned, in the east, there’s the rival Parthian Empire and in the west, there’s the series of Germanic peoples who had kicked Rome out of most of Germany in the year nine at Teutoburg Woods. And since then, they had become more organized.

They had consolidated some of the tribes into smaller ones. Marcus Aurelius’ reign begins with the enemies on both of the frontiers kicking Rome in you know what? And putting Rome in a very difficult situation. On top of that, there is a tremendous epidemic that strikes the empire. It comes from the east and it is devastating. It’s quite devastating. So Marcus Aurelius has to deal with these two wars and he has to deal with the plague, people call it. It’s not plague. It’s some kind of virus. We’re not entirely sure what, but devastating results. And Marcus Aurelius has to deal with all of this, restore order on the frontiers, which he’s able to do, but this is not his wheelhouse. It’s a tremendous strain for him to do this and he’s not able to become the domestic emperor that he had wished.

I think that a more experienced general would have been able to handle these crises much better than Marcus Aurelius did and more rapidly than he did. He’s also faced with a rebellion in the east. One of his generals rises up in rebellion against him, a very competent man. Luckily for Marcus, the general is assassinated by one of his subordinates relatively early in the day. Otherwise, he might have been in great trouble. He was in such trouble that his wife did business with the rebel general and supposedly she wrote compromising letters to the rebel general saying as long as you promise that my son can one day succeed his father, I will not stand in the way of you becoming emperor. So Marcus Aurelius had a lot on his plate. He has to spend a certain amount of his reign on the northern frontier, much of it in what is today Budapest, a charming city nowadays, but in the second century AD, not such a great place.

Kind of the back of beyond, miserable climate from the Roman point of view and it’s there on the frontier that he writes what becomes known as the Meditations, where he writes his thoughts about life. A man who was devoted to his duty, he had hoped to annex two new provinces in what is nowadays the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, but he fails. He dies on the frontier, perhaps a victim of the epidemic himself. It keeps coming back and he is unfortunately replaced by his son, who turns out to be one of Rome’s worst emperors.

Brett McKay: Yeah. We’ll talk about his son here in a bit. I think it’s interesting that he wrote the Meditations while he’s out on the frontier in these wars. And if you read the Meditations, it’s just a lot of him… He wasn’t writing this for the public. It was like personal diaries, but it’s him struggling with the burden of power. You can tell this guy really didn’t like being emperor.

Barry Strauss: No. He was a man of philosophical bent, but he also was a Roman who had a strong sense of duty. It’s interesting from that point of view that he doesn’t write the Meditations in Latin. He writes them in Greek. Now, Greek was the philosophical language of antiquity par excellence, but there had been Roman philosophy in Latin. There’d been Cicero and Seneca and the very philosophical poem of Lucretius on the nature of things, ‘De Rerum Natura’. But Marcus Aurelius writes it in Greek, partly because the Greek language was very much in fashion in his day and perhaps partly because, as you say, he wasn’t entirely happy as emperor, he wanted to draw a line between his rule as emperor and his thought as a philosopher. So this very famous book of a Roman emperor, the Meditations, is ironically written in Greek.

Brett McKay: What would you say is the takeaway lesson for Marcus Aurelius if you look at his career as an emperor?

Barry Strauss: The takeaway lesson is, first of all, it is not a good idea to hand the reins of power over to someone who has no experience ruling. I think this is one of the problems with the Roman system, that many emperors are jealous of prospective successors and they do not train them. I think another lesson, to put it the same thing in a different way, is you have to prepare for the succession. You really do. There have been many rulers in history who have been very, very successful, but they are afraid of what their successors might be. They kill off all potential successors. Nero is one of them. He killed off anyone in his extended family who might possibly be competent to replace him because he was afraid of being killed in a coup d’etat. And Marcus Aurelius’ predecessor, perhaps not so much out of fear of being killed as out of rank jealousy, he does not prepare Marcus Aurelius for the reins of power.

I think it is also a bad idea to think that you get to choose whether you are going to be a domestic leader or a foreign leader. Events, as a British Prime Minister once said, events get in the way. And Marcus Aurelius is a prime example of how events get in the way. You’ve got to be prepared on all fronts and for all things.

Brett McKay: So after Marcus Aurelius, isn’t he considered the last of the good emperors?

Barry Strauss: Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So the empire begins to decline. Do you think he played a role in that decline or would that have happened even if there was another good emperor in his place?

Barry Strauss: Well, the empire was going to be faced with these frontier problems on the east and the west. The Roman Empire was a balancing act. It was a huge empire about the size of the continental United States. Very complicated with the Mediterranean Sea in the middle and various different terrains and people speaking different languages. And it had these two great rivals in the east and the west. So it had a huge military burden. That meant high taxes, but it also meant the danger of political instability. And the only way you could pay for all of this was inflation. So there was constant inflation in the Roman Empire. And then there were these series of epidemics that would come through.

One of the worst ones under Marcus Aurelius, but certainly not the only one. So it’s really tough to keep the empire going. Marcus Aurelius’ mistake was that he was too devoted a father and he gave the reins of power to his son Commodus. Commodus is the first man in Roman history, after 200 years of the empire, who was born to the purple. He was born to be emperor. His father was already the heir to the throne when Commodus was born. So there was never any doubt about it. His mother was the daughter of the previous emperor Antoninus Pius. And as you might expect, Commodus grows up, what is the word, arrogant, entitled, irresponsible. He is not someone who’s learned in the school of hard knocks. So unlike Octavian Augustus, unlike Vespasian, he doesn’t know what you need to do to rule.

He expects he’s going to have it all his way. And so he becomes a very irresponsible emperor. The first thing he does is he gives up the war. War is boring, not interested in war. War is hard. He makes peace on the German frontier. He gives up his father’s dream of annexing two new provinces and he goes back to Italy. He’s popular because he spends a lot of money on bread and circuses, as a Roman poet once called it, on popular entertainment. But he’s a tyrant. He kills a lot of senators. He is violent. He is undignified from the Roman point of view. He competes as a gladiator. He portrays himself as the second coming of Hercules and it drives the Roman elite crazy. They’re also afraid for their own necks with this tyrant in power. And ultimately they depose him. They have him killed as a plot in which he is executed by an insider. And then civil war breaks out again. This is not a year of four emperors, but it is several years of five emperors.

A series of pretenders to the throne, war east and west and all over the empire. And in one particularly humiliating incident, one claimant to the throne is forced to auction it off before the Praetorian guards. There were actually two claimants who are auctioning off the nod from the Praetorian guard. These armed troops on the edge of the city of Rome who protect the emperor and the Praetorian guard gives the nod. He’s not the one who gets the throne in the end. In the end, it’s a lawyer turned general from Roman North Africa who gains the throne and starts a new dynasty. A man named Septimius Severus.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about this guy because he’s interesting. He’s an outsider. So he’s from North Africa. He married a Syrian woman.

Barry Strauss: That’s correct.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So he was not from Italy, not from Rome, but he’s able to assert himself. So how was an outsider like him able to rise to Rome’s highest position?

Barry Strauss: Well, he’s very much an outsider. He comes from North Africa, from what is today Libya. He is partly descended from Italian colonists. He may also be partly of African descent. It’s unclear. The sources are unclear about this. Certainly the Romans called him an African, but they also called anyone from North Africa an African. There’s other reasons to suspect he may be partly of African descent. As you say, he marries a Syrian and their children are part Syrian, part North African. Wow, this is wild. How does he do it? Well, partly like Augustus or like Vespasian, he does it in a civil war. He’s as nasty as you can get. He kills off a lot of people, and he makes it clear who’s the boss. But once he comes… And also he kills off a lot of senators. He’s not a friend of the Senate. He rules with an iron fist, but he pays a lot of attention to the military. He’s one of Rome’s most military leaders. And under him and his successors, Rome is well on the way to becoming a military dictatorship. Even less of a republic that had been under the earlier emperors, with the Senate having even less power and respect than it had previously.

That being said, Septimius Severus was also a builder, as was his son Caracalla. Unlike Tiberius, he is one of these emperors who wants to be a conqueror, and he does so both in the east and the west. In the east, he conquers what is now more or less Iraqi Kurdistan. So northern Iraq and part of Turkey and part of Syria, and he adds it to the Roman Empire as a new province in the east. This is a real feather in the Roman cap. It’s a very wealthy place, very important on the trade routes, the Silk Road from the east, and also very prestigious to have a… Win a victory against the Parthians who had formerly controlled this area. And it would go back and forth in later years. In the west, he’s not as successful. He attempts to conquer Scotland and he fails. He dies in Northern England in what is now the city of York. And he is said to tell his sons on his deathbed, “Be good to each other and always pay the soldiers. Above all, pay the soldiers.” And that is partly the secret of his success. He’s a military man and he uses the military to stay in power.

He and his successors create a garrison south of the city of Rome on the Appian Way. They create a legionary garrison. They establish a legion outside of Rome. And this is sending a message to the Roman political elite. We will not hesitate to use the legion to crush any opposition. So it’s turning the empire into a more brutal… It’s turning Roman government into a more brutal, more military form of government than the Romans had known before. And Gibbon, I think it’s Gibbon who said this is the beginning of the decline and fall of Rome, this real step away from a combination of military and civilian government to a purely military government.

Brett McKay: Something that stood out to me about Septimius was his wife played a pretty big role in his reign. You talk about this throughout the book. Women, while they didn’t have official positions in the empire, behind the scenes, they were pulling levers. Nero’s mother was a perfect example of that. But this guy’s wife, she actually played a pretty influential role. And it was obvious to people that, okay, this lady, she’s kind of in charge too.

Barry Strauss: Yes. And especially after his death, when the empire passed to his son, the rule passed to his son, Caracalla, she held an official position. She was basically in charge of his correspondence. So enormously powerful. And this would not have sit well with a lot of Romans. They were male chauvinists, let’s face it, though not as much so as some ancient empires or some ancient civilizations. But there had been very powerful women before, but they tended to sugarcoat it. And in her case, her name was Julia Domna, which is a name redolent of power. She didn’t even sugarcoat it.

Brett McKay: All right. Let’s talk about the last emperor you discussed, Constantine. And it’s funny, you mentioned this in the book that… I do this a lot. I always forget that Constantine was an ancient Roman emperor. I always think of Constantine as like a medieval. But he wasn’t. So Constantine, he converted to Christianity famously. How did his embrace of Christianity change Roman society?

Barry Strauss: Well, it changed it enormously. So we have to understand Constantine as a response to the 50 years of crisis that bedevil Rome in the mid third century AD. This is between about 235 and 285. Series of invasions, epidemics, inflation, urban collapse, things go really badly and a series of revolving door emperors and assassinations, instability. And these emperors are mostly soldier emperors. They come from the military ranks. They are not civilians by and large. The day is saved by a series of military reformers and economic and political reformers as well. And the basic conclusion that they reach is that for the empire to survive, it’s got to change. It’s got to fundamentally change. It’s got to become more military. It’s got to become more rigid. People’s status has to be fixed in a way that it hadn’t been before. It’s got to collect more taxes because the military is going to be more expensive, the new military. And it’s got to be more tyrannical, more dictatorial in the way that it rules. The emperor is truly going to have to become a dominus, a master who’s recognized in ways that previous emperors hadn’t been.

Now, the Romans were very religious people. They really were. They were pagans, but they believed that to have a successful country, you had to have what they called “pax deorum”, the peace of the gods. You had to have the gods on your side. And they were convinced that the reason the gods were not on their side, the reason Rome had this years of crisis was the gods were no longer on their side. So what are you going to do? Ceres the Empress had different solutions. One of them, a man named Aurelian thought the solution is to get a new god, the sun god. We’ve got to worship the sun. And Constantine’s father and young Constantine himself were initiated into that religion. It was the religion of their commander, the emperor. His successor, a man named Diocletian, said, no, it’s not the sun god. We’ve got to do two things. First, we’ve got to reinstate the Olympian gods, Jupiter and Juno and all the traditional Roman gods. We’ve got to double down on our worship of them. And secondly, we’ve got to get rid of the atheists who are getting us in trouble with the gods. And they considered the chief atheists to be the Christians because the Christians denied that the Olympian gods even existed. They only recognized one god.

And so Diocletian starts the great persecution, the great persecution of the Christians. It’s infamous and it’s a flop. It doesn’t succeed. He is not successful in wiping out Christianity. If anything, the staunchness of Christian resistance on the part of some and the creation of martyrs makes the church stronger than ever. Enter Constantine, who comes to the conclusion that Diocletian had it backwards. He was right. You needed a new religion. You needed to reestablish peace with the gods. But the way to do it is to become Christian and to encourage all Romans to become Christian. So he wins power in a civil war, actually, in a series of civil wars. And he’s the first Christian emperor. And under him begins the process of Christianizing the empire. It takes about a century till most of the empire is Christian because Christianity is a minority religion and some pagans hold on to their own old faith for a long time. But ultimately Constantine is successful in doing this.

Brett McKay: How did he do make that transition? Because, okay, he’s a pagan and pagans, violence was part of their worldview. It was like kind of might makes right. But with Christianity it’s like, well, nonviolence. You are supposed to turn the other cheek. And he was a guy who understood the power of violence and force and he would use it. So how did he kind of fuse his Christian beliefs with the realities of the…

Barry Strauss: Constantine, as you know, is a saint of the Orthodox church. So one wants to approach him with a certain amount of respect and dignity. And I think in a way he compartmentalized. On the one hand, he is an old Roman pagan who’s all about conquest and violence and force and using the levers of power. One of the ways that he spreads Christianity is in the western part of the empire, he has issued the Edict of Milan, this edict of toleration of all religions. But he never issues that in the eastern part of the empire. And what he does is he starves the temples. There’s no longer government support for the pagan temples. So they can’t put on their festivals. They can’t have all their expensive sacrifices. If you want to have a religious experience, you now have to go to a church, which he is now richly endowing. He’s using imperial resources to support the church. I think that from the Christian point of view, Constantine is a good Christian, A, because he’s a believer, and B, because he spreads the religion. He is a great advocate of the church and plays absolutely the key role in Christianizing the empire.

Constantinople, the new eastern capital, is going to be a largely Christian city. And even Rome, Constantine realizes that he cannot rebrand downtown Rome as a Christian city. It’s simply too pagan. So instead, he rebrands the suburbs of Rome as a Christian city. And he builds, for example, great churches on the site of martyrdoms, where there were martyr shrines. And the two great ones that he builds are the Lateran Church, which is the metropolitan church of Rome on one side of the city and on the other side of the city, St. Peter’s in the Vatican. And by design, they’re not built downtown because that’s pagan land. They’re built on the outskirts of the city to have a new Christian Rome. Constantinople is different. You can make it Christian in the center.

Brett McKay: How did his reign set the stage for the medieval era?

Barry Strauss: Well, that’s a good question. In the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History, it ends With this image of Constantine at the Council of Nicaea, this general church council that he establishes to try to settle some disputes about Christian doctrine. And the Cambridge Ancient History ends with saying, “With the scene of Constantine at the council surrounded by his bishops, the Middle Ages begins.” It’s wonderful drama. I think it’s exaggeration. But with Constantine, we have this image that the state is now going to establish itself with a different ideology, a non-pagan ideology. It’s still gonna be Roman, but it’s gonna be Christian. And this is a revolution. It’s one of the major revolutions in human affairs, it’s an enormous historical revolution. It was a long time coming. Christianity had been around for 300 years about when this happens. But Constantine is one of these visionaries, one of these decisive visionaries who says, in effect, and here I’m quoting one of my favorite lines from the novel, The Leopard, “If we want things to stay the same, everything has to change.” And Constantine understands that, that in a way underlines his philosophy. If you want things to stay the same, everything has to change.

So we have to have a new religion. We’ll still be Roman, but we won’t worship the gods in the same way. We’ll have radical change in the way that we worship the gods. And this ends up creating radical changes in Roman society as well, changes that in some ways do represent the Middle Ages. Now, the Middle Ages are a lot more complicated than that. But this is a very crucial change that undergirds so much of what happens in antiquity and in the Middle Ages. And the idea that an empire needs to have an imperial religion, that’s not new. The Romans had an imperial religion. It’s called the cult of the Caesars, the worship of the emperor. And there are other attempts at imperial religions. But with Christianity and with the creation of this new infrastructure with the bishoprics, and I guess I’ll use the word infrastructure again, this elaborate and immensely effective infrastructure of churches and bishops and charitable institutions and educational institutions. Wow. It’s just an immense, immense change.

Brett McKay: So the Western Roman Empire lasted about 500 years, give or take. And that’s like one of the longest running empires ever in human history. What do you attribute its longevity to? And are there any lessons there for would-be institution builders and maintainers?

Barry Strauss: Yeah. It lasts even longer, really, if we say that it was established under the Republic. And it’s certainly in place by the year 200 BC. You gotta give it more like 700 years. So there are a number of lessons. First of all, Roman culture is extremely pragmatic. And if you wanna be a successful empire, you can’t afford to be hidebound and ideological. You need to be pragmatic. You need to embrace change. By the same token, you need to have a set of doctrines that you live by. And these doctrines have to be portable, but also non-negotiable. So there are core Roman values, but there’s also the willingness to make change and to learn from other people, to learn from the people you conquer. Christianity is not invented by the Latin-speaking elite of the city of Rome. Christianity begins in Judea, a rebellious province, and it spreads in the Greek East before it ever comes to the west. And I think the adoption of it is just a sign of Roman pragmatism. But there’s so many other signs of Roman pragmatism over the years. Another reason for the Roman success is they’re great engineers. They are great road builders. They’re great city builders. They’re great bridge builders. And they are very disciplined.

And they’re also tremendously good at militarism. They are one of the most successful examples of a military in human history. And that is no small part of their success. Let me also give a nod to Roman openness. The longevity of the Roman Empire would have been inconceivable without the willingness of the Romans to open the doors and bring new people into the elite. Sometimes it’s only done kicking and screaming, and it takes centuries for it to happen. But the elite that Rome starts out with is nothing like the elite that it ends up with. Julius Caesar is a member of an old Roman patrician family that goes back centuries. Constantine has a father who came from what is now Serbia and a mother who now came from what is now Western Turkey. And supposedly she was a barmaid in her father’s hotel when Constantine’s father met her.

We don’t know if that’s true, but that’s a story that’s told. It’s only a society that’s very self-confident and willing to open the door to outsiders, to newcomers that will succeed. But by the same token, a society that doesn’t say, hey, anything goes, anything is okay. No. They have Roman values. And if you wanna be a successful newcomer, you have to adopt some of those values. You have to assimilate to certain Roman norms.

Brett McKay: Well, Barry, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Barry Strauss: So I have a website, barrystrauss.com. They can find out about me and my work there. You’re reminding me that I have to update it. And let me say that I have a new book coming out. It’s gonna be coming out in August. It’s called ‘Jews versus Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire.’ And it tells the story of these two centuries of revolt, Jewish revolt against Rome that are tremendously exciting and bloody and awful, but also very productive because these are the centuries in which Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are both born. So out of these revolts come enormously consequential changes for human history. They also show a long-term role of Iran and Iranian civilization in what we now think of as the Mediterranean world. So I’m very excited about this book, and I hope my readers will be as well.

Brett McKay: All right. Well, Barry Strauss, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Barry Strauss: My pleasure. Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Barry Strauss. He’s the author of the book, ‘Ten Caesars’. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, barrystrauss.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/caesars where you can find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Reminding you to not only listen to AoM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Are leaders born or made? Judging by the 50 billion dollar leadership development industry, the answer is definitely the latter. From schools to workplaces, everyone is seen as a potential leader and expected to become one by undergoing leadership training.

My guest questions the assumptions underlying this phenomenon, which he calls “the leadership industrial complex,” and says that the cult of leadership, and its idea that everyone can and should become a leader, can create burnout and unhappiness.

Elias Aboujaoude is a Stanford professor of psychiatry and the author of A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference. Today on the show, Elias describes the state of the leadership industrial complex, the mathematical impossibility it forwards that everyone can be a leader and no one is a follower, and the primary presumption it makes that leadership can be taught. Elias argues that, in fact, a lot of what makes for good leadership is innate and potentially unchangeable. We discuss the implications of this fact, and why it’s actually okay not to want to be a leader.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #838: Can Virtue Be Taught?
• AoM Podcast #923: Leadership Is Overrated
• AoM Article: Don’t Just Lead Well, Follow Well
• AoM Article: Are You a Strategist or an Operator?
• AoM Article: The Best Kind of Leader to Be

Connect With Elias Aboujaoude

• Elias’ website 
• Elias’ Stanford profile page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Are leaders born or made? Judging by the $50 billion leadership development industry, the answer is definitely the latter. From schools to workplaces, everyone is seen as a potential leader and expected to become one by undergoing leadership training. My guest questions the assumptions underlying this phenomenon, which he calls the leadership industrial complex, and says that the cult of leadership and its idea that everyone can and should become a leader can create burnout and unhappiness. Elias Aboujaoude is a Stanford professor of psychiatry and the author of A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference. Today on the show, Elias describes the state of the leadership industrial complex, mathematical impossibility [0:00:50.9] ____ that everyone can be a leader and known as a follower, and the primary presumption it makes that leadership can be taught.

Elias argues that, in fact, a lot of what makes for good leadership is innate and potentially unchangeable. We discuss the implications of this fact and why it’s actually okay not to want to be a leader. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/leadership. All right, Elias Aboujaoude, welcome to the show.

Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much.

Brett McKay: So you are a psychiatrist, and you’ve taken a deep dive into what could be called the cult of leadership in America. And what kickstarted this exploration of leadership development in the United States is you got a request to write a letter of recommendation for a medical student. So how did that request for a letter of recommendation lead you to exploring our country’s obsession with leadership and developing leaders?

Elias Aboujaoude: Indeed. So one of the best medical students I ever supervised, I’ll call him Tim, approached me for a letter of recommendation in support for his application to get into a skin cancer program. Tim had really shown exemplary performance on the wards where I supervised him.

So I wrote the most, probably the strongest letter of recommendation I had ever written. And in it, I praised his bedside manner, his clinical productivity, his conscientiousness, his research contributions, really the kinds of things that every program wants to see in an application and in a prospective applicant. To sort of make him feel better and hopefully less stressed out about this process, I shared the letter with him and I watched as he read it in my office. And I was surprised to see his facial expression sink into a deep depression and deep sadness. So for a second, I thought I had mistakenly given Tim another student’s evaluation, the evaluation of a student who had been failing the rotation, but it turned out I hadn’t. What was missing apparently from my letter is any mention of leadership qualities and leadership potential. And Tim was convinced that as strong and outstanding as the letter was, he wouldn’t get into any competitive program without a supervisor predicting a brilliant future for him as a leader.

So that got me thinking about how we’ve come to really prioritize leadership over any other quality in our medical field. But also as I started looking and exploring way beyond medicine, I started paying attention, for example, and noticing daycare centers with names like Future Leaders of America or Leadership Academy, the kinds of things that suggest that we’re planting this leadership seed and inculcating people into this cult of leadership, leadership literally with breast milk. And I started noticing also that college applicants now have an entire section where high school students are expected to talk about their leadership experience. Who wants a shy violinist or an introvert when you can get the president of five clubs kind of thing. So all this speaks to a real leadership obsession in our society, and it speaks to very high demand for all things leadership. Now, this demand is being met, met and then some, by what I’m calling in my book, a leadership industrial complex. There’s a $50 billion leadership industry that’s now available to really convince us that leadership is something that’s within reach for practically anyone.

All you have to do is take the right course or sign on the right executive coach. So it’s a very sort of unhealthy combination between this kind of demand and this kind of supply. And as I see it, it may explain the failures of leadership that we see every direction we look and on every front, whether political, corporate, academic, really everywhere and anywhere. We’ve created a system where we have so much product out there that the only way for leaders to stand out and actually make it to leadership positions is to be unscrupulous, to have traits that are closer to sort of the narcissistic or even the antisocial end of the spectrum. And we don’t want that in our leaders, but this is the system that we have created. And this is what this unhealthy balance between exuberant demand and exuberant supply has created.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s one of the big points you make in the book is there’s this paradox that we’re seeing in the past, maybe 50, 60 years, this emphasis on developing leaders. We’re going to develop leaders and very be systematic about it, take courses, but it seems like there’s a dearth of leadership despite all the leadership development we’re doing.

Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. This is the biggest, one of the biggest paradoxes of the leadership industry that there has never been more opportunities to develop and train leaders. And yet leaders have never performed worse than they are today. So, one way to look at this is to think, well, we need more training. We need the industry to be even bigger, but another way to look at it and the position that I take in my book is that the leadership industry and this approach to leadership is actually contributing to leadership failure.

Brett McKay: And another point you make too, is that this emphasis, overemphasis on leadership in college students, in your career, it could be leading to burnout and just feeling inadequate. Tim, he was disappointed that you didn’t talk about his leadership skills, but did Tim want to be a leader like personally?

Elias Aboujaoude: That’s the thing. Tim had no interest in being a leader. All he wanted to be is the best skin cancer doctor he could become. And that’s what he eventually became. But Tim was also convinced that without coming across as having leadership qualities, he had no chance of actually making it. When I touched base subsequently with Tim, a few years down the road, I found out that some leadership opportunities had actually come his way, but he was all too happy to ignore them and turn them down.

And yet in his application process, he felt forced to, if you will, pretend to be interested in leading. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made it into the program that he was eventually accepted into.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve encountered that too with letters of recommendation. So I mentor teenage boys at church and they’ll ask me sometimes to fill out letters of recommendations. And there’s always a thing on there about leadership, like what leadership skills does this person display? And some of these boys, they’re smart, they’re bright, but they’re not really leaders and they’re not really interested in leadership. But I feel like I got to come up with something because if I don’t, it’s not going to look good for them.

Elias Aboujaoude: It’s not going to look good. It’s going to count against them. And it speaks to a bigger problem in academia and in college and university life. Less than one in 10 students now major with a degree in the humanities. We’re shutting down English and history departments left and right. And yet there’s this curious rise of the leadership major and the leadership minor and leadership studies everywhere you look. So it’s a curious development and feeds into this cultural obsession and academic obsession with leadership that I was talking about.

Brett McKay: I want to talk about these courses, but before we do, when you’ve looked at the leadership industrial complex as a whole, what do they mean by leadership exactly? Because leadership can mean lots of different things. There’s lots of different definitions. So how is it described in the leadership industrial complex culture?

Elias Aboujaoude: What goes along with this leadership industrial complex, of course, is intense marketing. And to understand what leadership means to these programs, it’s interesting to look at the messaging and the marketing. So you’ll find words, really buzzwords like transformative, catalyst, a change driver, unleasher. You’ll be empowering people across many verticals and across many tipping points. You’ll almost certainly disrupt.

If I had the nickel for every time I came across the word disrupt in my leadership research, I’d be a very rich man. So these buzzwords add up to the leadership industrial complex’s definition of what a leader means today. And through these courses and through this coaching and through all this “development”, they sell the message that all these qualities and traits are perfectly teachable.

Brett McKay: So I mean, what skills or traits do they purport to teach would-be leaders?

Elias Aboujaoude: I don’t have a problem really with purporting to teach a skill. Where it becomes very problematic for me as a psychiatrist is where they start pretending or communicating that they can teach things like EQ, emotional intelligence, or even charisma, qualities and traits that are linked to personality. And if we know anything as mental health providers, as psychiatrists, as psychologists, is the difficulty changing people’s personalities.

People’s personality tends to be stubborn, not super malleable. If you want to make long lasting personality changes, it’s a long-term commitment that involves potentially years of psychotherapy. It’s not the kind of thing that you can pick up over a bootcamp or a weekend workshop. And yet this is the message that a lot of these trainings are selling. And this is the really misleading, no pun intended, notion that accompanies so much of the leadership industry’s offerings.

Brett McKay: Okay. So leadership in the leadership industrial complex, a lot of buzzwords, you’re a change maker, catalyst, disruptor. So it’s kind of an amorphous thing. It can kind of mean whatever and because it can mean anything you want, like you can create your content that you’re teaching however you want. Let’s dig into the actual content, these courses. I thought this was really interesting. You talk about what colleges and other businesses are doing to make money on leadership courses. You mentioned, I think you said a $50 billion industry overall?

Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah, it’s a $50 billion industry. And it’s an industry that’s been fully embraced by our top business schools, entities and institutions that know a thing or two about making money. And this has helped really transform this leadership development field into a full blown industrial complex. And when you check out something like Harvard’s program for leadership development, for example, you’ll be surprised to see that there’s an 800 number available for applicants to call. There’s an entire program advising team that’s waiting to take your call. You’ll also be, you might be surprised to see that really there’s no formal educational requirements to join. There’s this amorphous sort of leadership potential.

That’s pretty much the only requirement. The program is advertised to people at whatever role or career stage. Again, not really just meant for senior executives or folks already in the C-suite, but marketed as something that’s much more open and accessible than that. So the acceptance rate into it seems much higher than the 4.5% or so that undergraduates applying for Harvard usually face. What’s unquestionably exclusive though about the program is the price tag, $52,000 for the basic four modules of blended teaching. But if you want a lifelong Harvard email address, and if you want alumni status, then you can get that for an additional module and an additional $27,000. So strategies that to me feel very sort of marketing and business oriented in a way that to me fits uncomfortably within the educational model.

Another example that I talk about in the book is Wharton. Wharton is the premier, the oldest business school in the country. And I was checking out a program they have, a nine month, mostly self-based or largely self-based program called Global C-suite. And I read about it and then I wanted to close the window. And I had this very interesting pop-up show up offering me $1000 off the $20,000 tuition if I hurry up and apply in the next nine days. Again, marketing gimmicks and marketing strategies that have no place in education as I see it, yet this is what so much of the leadership industry and the leadership educational opportunities, this is the direction they take.

Brett McKay: Okay. So for $60,000, I could become a Harvard alum. I could put that on my CV. Yeah, that’s crazy. And then it’s not just colleges that are doing this. There’s also many businesses that offer leadership development courses as well.

Elias Aboujaoude: Oh, absolutely. If Harvard and Wharton are offering these kinds of opportunities, then you can imagine the Wild West out there and programs with names like Leadership Express Series or a workshop for $18.99 that promises to teach you how to become a charismatic leader. I mean, any number of such offerings that I review in my book.

Brett McKay: What’s the content of these courses? Like what exactly, when you sit down to through these modules, what are you learning?

Elias Aboujaoude: Well, a lot of the content is not research-based, certainly. There’s very little by way of long-term research results in terms of success that these programs can point to. There’s also a ton of mnemonics that I came across as I was researching. And this heavy reliance on mnemonics suggests that leadership is easy, literally as easy as ABC. One popular mnemonic is the so-called three Rs, three Rs.

But depending on which program or which professor of leadership or which coach you consult, the three Rs stand for different things. It could be reflections, resiliency, and relationships, but it could also be respect, recognize, and reward, and so on and so forth. So all this suggests a very sort of unscientific, make-it-up-as-you-go process that unfortunately takes up a lot of these offerings.

Brett McKay: Is there any research that’s been done on these leadership development programs that they actually work, like that people who go through them come out as better leaders? And how would you even measure that if you did research on that?

Elias Aboujaoude: Well, it’s not easy to measure, which highlights the need for good quality, large-scale, long-term research. And when you look for good quality, large-scale, long-term research that has assessed their success, there’s very, very little indeed that you can point to.

Brett McKay: Okay. And that’s interesting ’cause businesses are probably paying for their employees to go to these things. They don’t even know if it works or not.

Elias Aboujaoude: Oh, to the tune of $50 billion.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And what’s interesting too, you talk about how this is also creeping into middle schools and in high schools. I mean, I grew up in the ’90s, late ’90s. I was in high school then. And I saw that stuff. I was involved in student council, and we did this leadership development stuff. And typically, what it was like the school district was paying some organization to do the teaching.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes. The leadership bug has fully infected our high school and college systems. And this is manifested in the place that leadership now takes up in college applications, but also it’s manifested in how so many schools seem to be changing their mission statements to emphasize leadership. Everybody wants to teach the future leaders of America. Nobody seems interested in teaching and informing the educated citizenry of the country.

And the downside, of course, of all this is the inferiority complex that it gives those who are not interested in leading, those who have the self-awareness to acknowledge that, so they’re not interested in pursuing leadership, who don’t succeed at leading. But there are real psychological consequences to that and a real inferiority complex that doesn’t get talked about as we send the message that all can be leaders and as we ignore the reality that the world also needs followers. And mathematically speaking, not everyone can be a leader.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So the idea that everyone can and should be a leader and that everyone can develop into a leader with the right training is everywhere these days. And I think the big thing we need to talk about, and you mentioned this before, is that the whole idea and what the leadership development industry relies on is the assumption that leadership can be taught. And there are certain skills that can be taught and people can improve on a little bit body language, getting a little bit better with public speaking, getting better at strategy, but you talk about, if you actually look at the scientific research that’s been done on leadership, it suggests that a lot of leadership ability just comes down to inborn temperament. So what does the research say there about leadership ability and temperament?

Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah. So I talked earlier about how there’s very little long-term, long-term high quality research in terms of the success of leadership training. But there’s quite a bit long-term, high-quality research when it comes to people’s personalities and how people’s personalities evolve over time. And what this long-term, high quality research tells us is that personality is pretty sticky. I’ll just quickly mention a couple of studies. One involving a cohort of Harvard graduates who are assessed at age 22 and again at age 67, and you can imagine all the ups and downs and all the upheaval that can happen in a person’s life over the course of four decades or so.

And yet when this cohort was reassessed, the fundamental traits and their personalities were essentially unchanged. The fingerprint, their personality fingerprint was essentially the same. Another study looked at an even younger cohort, students aged 6 to 12 and assessed them on 39 personality traits and re-interviewed them again 40 years down the road. And what the researchers found was their personalities were essentially largely stable. So this is what a high quality long-term research from mental health and from psychology teaches us, and yet when you look at a lot of leadership offerings, there is this idea that we can teach you EQ and we can do it pretty easily. Now, nobody would dispute the importance of EQ in how leaders emerge and how leaders succeed. Up to 90% of leaders success has been attributed to EQ when other skills and when IQ is otherwise the same.

So the importance of EQ is pretty fundamental and pretty established. But the notion that you can teach EQ and transform EQ is highly problematic because EQ is pretty tightly linked to personality. And what the studies I mentioned about personality show is that it’s largely fixed over time.

Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, when we typically think of a leader, with this idea, he’s charismatic, they take risk, they’re bold, they know how to manage people, they’re detail-orienting, and that kind of lines up with those big five personality traits, conscientiousness, extraversion, low on neuroticism. And let’s say you’re a person, you’re like, Okay, I’m kind of neurotic, I’m not very conscientious. I’m not a big risk taker. Can a course, a weekend course actually move the needle on that? And the answer looks like it’s probably not.

Elias Aboujaoude: The answer is probably not, because personality, again, is largely fixed and when psychoanalysis try to affect meaningful long-term personality changes, it was a year’s long endeavor, not for the commitment phobic. So to the extent that EQ is linked to personality and we know it is, it is not something that you can easily impart or teach.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And this idea of can leadership be taught, this reminds me, this goes back, this is like a couple of thousand year-old question. Like Plato is asking the same question. He was asking that can virtue be taught?

Elias Aboujaoude: Very interesting. Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And he actually tried to figure it out. He actually had this theory that, yes, virtue can be taught. Like if you teach people about the good and they know the good, they’ll start conforming themselves to the good, then they’ll be good leaders. That was the idea. And then he had the chance to test it out. He got to go to Syracuse and be a teacher to this king guy who was having lots of problems and he was teaching him philosophy and teaching him about the forms and everything. And it ended in complete disaster. The guy did not change at all. And Plato was like, Okay, maybe this idea that I had that if you teach these philosopher kings to be good leaders, it’ll… Teach them the forms, they’ll become good leaders. It’ll work, and he actually had to take a step back and say, all right, that’s actually not gonna work. We have to try something else.

Elias Aboujaoude: Well, this is a vignette that clearly belongs in the book, Brett. Thank you for sharing that. You know what the Greeks were also interested in is charisma. In fact, the word charisma comes from a Greek root, that means a freely given gift like something that God endows you with or the gods endow you with. And again, it’s interesting how many people to this day when they try to define charisma will resort to religious sort of metaphors and religious terms. And yet this hasn’t stopped us from pretending we can easily teach it in a way that makes us look like we’re playing God.

Brett McKay: Okay. So a lot of these leadership attributes that we think of when it comes to a good leader, charisma, high EQ, lot of it is based in personality and a lot of that you can’t change. If you do change it, it’s gonna take a long time to do and you’re probably not gonna change it too much.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes, indeed.

Brett McKay: So when companies or organizations are thinking about leadership, should it be less about leadership development and you know, this idea that you can develop anyone and everyone into a leader and more about leadership finding? Like is it better to focus on filtering for and selecting good leaders? Should that be the strategy?

Elias Aboujaoude: The subtitle of my book is Why Psychology Personality and Character Make All the Difference. And I think one shift that needs to happen for the health of our leadership culture is for us to start paying more attention to these things and ease up on the development, ease up on the steps and hacks and tips that supposedly guarantee good leadership. Basically go back to the basics and put psychology front and center where it belongs in leadership culture. And remember that there’s only so much planning and prepping and strategizing that one can do. And some of the most meaningful and significant leaderships that the world has seen, leadership found the leader not the other way around. So there’s a humbling message in this for leadership culture and it should be humbling for the leadership industry as well.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s a… Something that I’ve taken away as I’ve studied… I’ve read a lot of biographies of great leaders and one thing I have discovered is what made them great leaders is like, yeah, they rose up to the occasion, the leadership found them and they leaned into their unique personality. They weren’t trying to conform themselves to this ideal leader. That’s charismatic and bold and visionary. And even guys who weren’t that, like they were still good leaders. I mean, here’s an example. Patton and Eisenhower had kind of different personalities. Patton’s very bombastic, led from the front, was very flamboyant and that worked for him. He leaned into that. And Eisenhower was more of a like a people person. Like he did a lot of the, I’m gonna be in the background working on alliances. When you look at football coaches, I love watching how different football… American football coaches coach. You have some coaches who are very just high energy, just on the sidelines. Rah rah rah. And then you have those coaches who just arms folded, never say a word.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes.

Brett McKay: And they’re winning football coaches.

Elias Aboujaoude: Yes, yes. I think you’re talking about people basically aligning with their psychology and leaning with their psychology and not pretending to be someone they’re not. Winston Churchill is another great example of a transformative, truly transformative and truly disruptive maybe figure who was found by leadership and rose to the occasion as opposed to self-consciously and deliberately in a step-by-step fashion strategized to reach the heights that he reached.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another one, Abraham Lincoln. Like he was not your stereotypical leader. He had depression, he was severely depressed. He would just lay on the couch and read the book of Job and just be like, I’m the saddest guy in the whole world. But Lincoln was still one of the most eminent and effective leaders in history.

Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. Absolutely. So all this is to say that we lose by limiting the profile of who we support in rising to leadership positions the way we are doing right now.

Brett McKay: Well then, I wanna go back to this point you made that this everyone is a leader culture that we have can contribute to maybe burnout, depression, inferiority complex, amongst particularly young workers, young students. Flesh that out a bit more for them. How have you seen that manifest itself?

Elias Aboujaoude: When we live in a culture that only values leaders and when we are subjected to endless marketing that all that counts is leadership and that leadership is yours to have for just a little bit of training and little bit of development. Then those of us who don’t become leaders, either because they’re not interested or they’re not successful, can be left with an inferiority complex and be left thinking, well what is wrong with me when it should be so easy. Where did I go wrong? And that’s an unhealthy state psychologically speaking, and it’s totally unnecessary because the marketing itself that’s driving it and the leadership obsession that’s driving it are what’s faulty with society, not the individual who doesn’t become a leader or isn’t interested in pursuing leadership.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And it also sets people up if they do pursue leadership because they feel like they have to, to feel like, I actually hate this. I am not suited for this. I am miserable, but I gotta do this because I have to advance my career.

Elias Aboujaoude: Right. I got the position that supposedly is what matters in life, but I’m absolutely miserable leading.

Brett McKay: So I think the takeaways from what we’ve talked about are leadership development, probably not a thing. I mean there are certain skills you can develop a little, but as far as those ineffable qualities that we think of when it comes to leadership, that comes down to personality. And that’s either… It’s kind of either you’re born with it or you’re not. So maybe organizations of all kinds should focus more on leader finding, filtering and selecting instead of leader development. At the same time though, I think we can expand on our idea of what makes a good leader. It doesn’t have to be the stereotype. So maybe you don’t have those qualities of a stereotypical leader, but you can still be a good leader in your own way. But let’s say whether or not you do have potential for leadership, you’re just not interested in it. It’s not something you wanna do. What advice would you give someone who they’ve got the self-awareness to know that they’re not a good fit for leadership positions, but they still feel this pressure to get on that track to advance their career?

Elias Aboujaoude: Yeah. What I would tell them is to do what aligns with their psychology. Don’t tie your self-worth to leadership positions. It’s okay to be a leader, but it’s also okay not to be one. And certainly don’t look down on followers including yourself if you happen to be one.

Brett McKay: Okay. And that could be tough ’cause you’re just told from a young age, you gotta be a leader.

Elias Aboujaoude: It is tough and that’s why the change has to happen on many fronts. It has to happen at the level of parenting. It has to happen at the level of schools and universities and it has to happen at the corporate level. I mean, this is not an easy change to make, but it’s a necessary change to make to the extent that we need good leaders. And our approach to leadership today is almost guaranteed to leave us with unimpressive leaders.

Brett McKay: Yeah. But I feel like it just comes down to being okay with being a follower and that maybe will require reframing what it means to be a follower some, right? ‘Cause it has… The word has a lot of negative connotations and baggage. Being a follower doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you or you’re deficient. You just have a different disposition or maybe you just different kinds of work. And actually this reminds me something we talked about on the site, this goes back to Patton and Eisenhower, is that some people are strategists and some people are operators, right? So like some people like to be the manager where they’re setting the agenda and other people they just like to be on the ground, in the field, doing the work. It’s like some people like to plan the action and some people just want to take the action. So it’s okay not to want to be a leader and just want to be an operator. That’s okay. Maybe you won’t get as much clout and money, but you’ll be happier.

Elias Aboujaoude: Absolutely. Leadership is not the only path to happiness and self-worth.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Elias, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much. They can go to my personal website, eliasaboujaoude.com or find the book on Amazon or any of their favorite venues.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Elias Aboujaoude, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Elias Aboujaoude: Thank you very much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Elias Aboujaoude. He’s the author of the book, A Leaders Destiny. It’s available on amazon.com. You learn more information about his work at his website, eliasaboujaoude.com. Also, check out our show notes at AOM.is/leadership where you find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When people think of the plays of Shakespeare, they tend to think of his comedies and tragedies that spotlight interpersonal dynamics like love and jealousy, pretense and reality. But my guest would say that many of Shakespeare’s plays, especially his sometimes overlooked histories, are also unmatchable in revealing the dynamics of power.

Eliot Cohen is a military historian, political scientist, professor of international studies, and former State Department counselor, as well as the author of The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall. Today on the show, Eliot takes us through what Shakespeare’s plays can teach us about navigating the three-part arc of power: acquiring power, exercising power, and losing power. Along the way, we discuss how these lessons in leadership played out in the lives of real-life historical figures as well.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Plays discussed:
  • Richard II
  • Henry IV, Part 1
  • Henry IV, Part 2
  • Henry V
  • Richard III
  • Julius Caesar
  • Coriolanus
  • King Lear
  • Macbeth
  • The Tempest
• AoM Podcast #853: The Real Rules of Power 
• AoM Podcast #792: How Power Corrupts
• AoM Article: A Lesson From TR & Taft on Pursuing a Life You Like
• AoM Article: There Is No Indispensable Man
• Robert Caro’s biographical series on LBJ
• All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
• Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime by Eliot Cohen

Connect With Eliot Cohen

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

For the last 15 years, William Vanderbloemen has run an executive search firm that helps non-profit organizations find leaders. Over the course of conducting tens of thousands of interviews with top-tier candidates, he’s tracked and recorded what qualities the best leaders — the people he calls “unicorns” — possess that set them apart from everyone else in the field.

William shares what he’s learned in his new book Be the Unicorn: 12 Data-Driven Habits That Separate the Best Leaders from the Rest. Today we talk about what some of those twelve distinguishing habits are, and how people can use them to move ahead at work, as well as improve their relationships outside of it. We discuss the nearly 100% difference it can make in your business to respond to people right away, the least common trait among unicorns that the general population mistakenly believes they have in spades, how mastering the art of anticipation will make you stand out, a way to use eye contact to build strong connection, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: The Myth of Scarcity — 12 Stupidly Easy Things That’ll Set You Apart from the Pack
• AoM Podcast #865: How to Win Friends and Influence People in the 21st Century
• AoM Article: How to Make Eye Contact the Right Way in Life, Business, and Love
• AoM Podcast #644: How to Develop Greater Self-Awareness
• AoM Article: The Best Kind of Leader to Be
• NYT article: “What Do You Do With the Brilliant Jerk?”
• Sunday Firesides: Never Criticize Without Offering an Alternative
• Sunday Firesides: Don’t Let It Petrify
• AoM Podcast #923: Leadership Is Overrated

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript 

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. For the last 15 years, William Vanderbloemen has run an executive search firm that helps nonprofit organizations find leaders. Over the course of conducting tens of thousands of interviews with top tier candidates, he’s tracked and recorded what qualities the best leaders, the people he calls unicorns possess that set them apart from everyone else in the field. William shares what he’s learned in his new book, Be the Unicorn: 12 Data-Driven Habits that Separate the Best Leaders from the Rest. Today we talk about what some of those 12 distinguishing habits are and how people can use them to move ahead at work, as well as improve the relationships outside of it. We discussed the nearly 100% difference it can make to your business to respond to people right away, the least common trait among unicorns that the general population mistakenly believes they have in spades, how mastering the art of anticipation will make you stand out, a way to use eye contact to build strong connection, and much more. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/unicorn.

All right. William Vanderbloemen, and welcome to the show.

William Vanderbloemen: Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you founded and run an executive search company, but you focus on helping churches find pastors. So I’ve heard, I think a lot of people probably have heard of executive search companies for corporations, but not for churches. How’d you end up doing what you do?

William Vanderbloemen: Well, that’s probably a multi podcast question. I am a recovering preacher, so I’ll try not to ramble on and on. But a lifetime ago, I was leading a very large church, and that church, First Presbyterian, Houston, which is an amazing church, wonderful people. It’s where Sam Houston went to church. So they took about three years to find me, and that’s like par for the course. Nobody saw that as abnormal. I was there about six years. It took them about three years to find my successor, which was par for the course. But my departure from there, I left there partially as a result of a divorce, which by the way, I would not recommend to listeners, but it wasn’t anything the tabloids would’ve picked up, it was just kind of a tragic thing. And I found myself as a single dad with four kids and like, wow, what do I do now?

I went and got a job in the oil and gas industry for a very large company. It’s Fortune 200 company, upstreaming the gas industry. The CEO had been there nine and a half years, which I didn’t know at the time. For a company that size, usually you look at three, three and a half years for a CEO. Nine and a half years, and he said, it’s time to find my successor. And I was going through like a management rotation, like do a year here, do a year there, learn the business. My first year, this particular year was in the HR department. So yeah, I could be ambitious and say I was on the team that helped with that succession. The reality is I was more like the third string water boy for that team. [laughter]

Fairly inconsequential role, but I got to watch what they did. And they did this thing I’ve never seen before. They hired what they called a search firm, and 90 days later they had their new CEO and it went great. So dropped back to First Presbyterian, Houston, been around for a long time, kind of a great job to land. They spent 12 years and six of those years they were looking for a pastor, and six, they had one. And that just made me go, that’s… And nobody saw that as abnormal. That’s kinda crazy. So I came home, now I’m leaving out a big gap in this narrative, but I’d just gotten married to Adrian. We’d just blended our family with six kids, just bought a house that we could barely afford. And I came home and said, you know what, babe? I think I’m supposed to quit my job and start something new for churches.

And she just looked at me and said, total deadpan. Oh, oh, that’s because churches love new ideas, right? Which no one has ever said in the history of ever. So she should have said, I love you. Go back to work. I love your vision and your dream, but we got six kids to feed. And instead she said, let’s give it a shot. And the kicker is, it was the fall of 2008, which Brett, I don’t know if your listeners are too young to remember, you might Google 2008 economy. [chuckle] Not the best time to quit your job and start something new. But we just kind of fell into right place, right time. And now 15 years later, we still help churches find their pastor, but we help nonprofits, we help schools, we help for-profits that are sort of values driven, where people are like, we want somebody who matches how we do things, our culture, our vibe, our why. And and it all started with that simple little question of could we build something better for churches that need a pastor? So that’s a very condensed version of a very long story.

Brett McKay: In your experience as yourself as a pastor and also dealing with not only putting pastors in churches, but also putting leaders in nonprofits, how is leadership different in the nonprofit sector compared to leadership in a business? And do you think there are lessons people can take from the volunteer nonprofit world into the corporate world?

William Vanderbloemen: 100%. First of all, I think leadership is leadership. So to inspire people to go where you see they ought to go, that’s leadership, whether you’re in a for-profit or non-profit or what have you. Years ago when I was a younger pastor, I was in Montgomery, Alabama. So the Maxwell Air Force Base is there, it’s all officers. The Air War College is there. And I got asked to come teach a class and I’m like, what can I teach about leadership? You guys are defending the country. And they said, yeah, but your volunteers don’t have to say yes sir. And we want you to talk about that. So I developed a course called Leading When No One Has to Say, Yes, Sir And that’s a whole different art of collaborating, of bringing people along, being far enough ahead of the crowd that you’ve got a vision for where to go, but close enough to the crowd that you’re not just taking a walk by yourself.

And I think that the skills that I learned over that career, like how do I talk people into volunteering their time? How do I train them to be on the team? How do I keep them on the team? That’s all amazingly germane to right now when you’ve got millennials starting to really take over the workforce, which is a beautiful thing to see happen. But they’re much more interested in collaborative spirit. Don’t tell me what to do, convince me this is the right thing to do. So there is a whole dimension to leadership in the business world right now that really is leading when people don’t have to say yes. And I think there’s just a treasure trove of parallels there.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think I’ve gotten my best leadership lessons leading in volunteer organizations because people don’t have to say, yes, sir, to you. And also you can’t use like payment or a paycheck as a bludgeon.

William Vanderbloemen: That’s right.

Brett McKay: You can always be like, if you’re in a corporate world of like, well, if you don’t do what I say, you’re fired.

William Vanderbloemen: Yep.

Brett McKay: You can’t do that in a volunteer organization. So you have to really learn these people skills to motivate people who are just volunteering and they can step back anytime they want. There’s not gonna be any repercussions. And that’s really useful. That’s a really a baptism by fire.

William Vanderbloemen: Well, and the flip side of that is the people who are really good at leading volunteer organizations know how to hire their volunteers. ‘Cause it’s one thing to inspire people to follow you, but it’s another thing when you’ve got a volunteer who’s a real problem to the volunteer team and you gotta fire ’em and you’re not paying them. Like how do you fire a volunteer? [laughter] So the emphasis on soft skills that you learn in any kinda nonprofit or volunteer role is gonna help a whole lot in leadership, particularly in the here and now in the corporate world where people aren’t staying at companies 25 years and they can take it or leave it with a job and they’re jump jumping around. Career spans are shorter, stays at jobs are shorter. And I think leaders that learn how to motivate and inspire people to get on board and then to stay are gonna be kinda the new gold standard in leadership. So I’ve been studying like, what are those soft skills? What are the things that make that kind of leader just stand out in the crowd and you wanna follow ’em?

Brett McKay: And so that’s what you’ve done in your latest book. You’ve taken your 15 plus years of experience at your executive search company where you all have interviewed tens of thousands of people. And then in the process, you all have been tracking the traits of these different people you’ve been interviewing and you’ve been trying to be very systematic and scientific and data-driven as possible to figure out what qualities do those people you were just talking about. They have those soft skills that make them almost like irreplaceable as a leader ’cause you call them the unicorns, that’s the name of the book, Be the Unicorn. And so you have honed in on 12 data-driven habits that separate the best leaders from the rest. Just kind of big picture, what do unicorns have, like unicorn leaders? What do they have that non unicorns don’t?

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think most of them have… I don’t know, Brett, you ever sit down with somebody, it doesn’t happen very often, but within five minutes of meeting them, it might be at a dinner party or at a social function or work or maybe even a job interview. But within five minutes, you’re just sitting there going, this one, this one’s a winner, this one’s different. But like, that’s what unicorns do. You’re immediately ready to sign up for their fan club or whatever. The flip side though is really interesting ’cause I’ve wondered for 15 years, like I’m not the smartest guy in the room, but I’m not the most gullible. So why in five minutes does this person have my attention? What are they doing? Could you figure out what it is they’re doing and then be able to spot it faster?

And by the same token, I’ve had some very quiet, humble people that I’ve met, and in the first five minutes they didn’t impress me very much, they turned out to be amazing leaders. So the flip side is, what is it that these amazing leaders all do, and could we look for that and try and spot it? And in the pandemic, nearly every one of our clients was shut down indefinitely, which [chuckle] frees up your calendar a lot. And that’s when we realized we’ve now done 30,000 long format interviews with the best talent we’ve ever seen. We’ve done hundreds of thousands of interviews on some level, but 30,000 top, top, top people, what do they have in common? That was the question that we attacked from a research standpoint during the pandemic and the shutdown that led to us figuring out they do have things in common. It’s very different from what I expected. I expected the list of things that unicorns have in common to be like, they all have an IQ of 160 or better. Nope. They all have a full head of hair and amazing teeth. Nope. They all went to a really great school. No, no, no, no. Wasn’t anything like that. Wasn’t pedigree. It wasn’t even as simple as he was the quarterback and she was the head cheerleader. No.

Brett McKay: What about personality? Like big personality, small, like would that…

William Vanderbloemen: Neither one mattered.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Vanderbloemen: Any kind of personality type, any socioeconomic, any racial, ethnic, all those lines went away. What emerged as the patterns that these unicorns seem to repeat and share in common were 12 habits, not even traits. Traits are something you’re born with. These are habits these are things that they practice that were almost solely focused on. How do I treat the person across the desk from me? How am I treating that person? 12 habits that we found that were stunningly common among unicorns and amazingly uncommon among the rest of us. And it’s not like a a rocket science list, it took rocket science to get to the list, but you read the table of contents. I almost, it’s like, duh, who wouldn’t have thought. I almost titled the book, So I Guess Mom Might’ve Been Right. ‘Cause a lot of the 12 habits are things mothers try and tell their young boys to do when they’re approaching others or treating someone in a relationship or at work.

But it’s not just 12 simple ruminations, this is 12 habits that we’ve seen through a careful study of how these unicorns behave. And I thought we were doing this so that I would learn how to spot unicorns faster and I’d be better at search and our firm would be better and all that. What we discovered was actually these are 12 habits that can be taught, that can be learned and adapted, that anyone, if they take the effort to apply these 12 habits can become one of those people that stand out in the crowd. That within five minutes you’re ready to be on their fan club. Those kind of things. So we thought we were doing something for ourselves. We realized this is a roadmap that could help a whole lot of people. And that led us to say, okay, fine. We’ll do it as a book.

Brett McKay: So these 12 habits, do you have to develop all these habits? Do these unicorns have all these habits or do they have one or two and they just specialize in those one or two?

William Vanderbloemen: That’s such a good question. That’s so good, Brett. I think that what we found was the unicorns have usually about two or three that they’re better at than the rest. And then they have 12 that… Of the 12, maybe they’re one or two that they should probably work on some. But across the board, the unicorns were higher than average at each of these habits. So they’re better at all of them, but they’re really good at a few. And some of that may be personality-driven, and then there are a few they really need to work on, but they’re just stunningly consistent in being well above average in each of these 12 areas.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Well, let’s talk about some of these habits. The first one is the habit of being fast. What do you mean by that?

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah, this is one where I may have… Okay, true confessions. That chapter title might be a little bit of click bait ’cause like, Brett, I’m not fast. I’m Dutch. We are built for wind resistance and solidness. [chuckle] So speed is not my thing. If I were probably being more precise, I probably would’ve said responsiveness, not just fast.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Vanderbloemen: So the bottom line of our research showed humans are really terrible at getting back to people. We’re horrible at it. We put it off for tomorrow, we wait too long. Unicorns are almost obsessed with getting back to people and clearing their inbox and getting a response to someone that’s meaningful and not just a chat bot kind of thing. And it really sets them apart. Frankly, it sets businesses apart when they show crazy intentional responsiveness.

Brett McKay: So what do these unicorns do? What kind of practical brass tacks practices do they incorporate in their lives to maintain this responsiveness?

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah. Yeah, I remember, I’ll call him a unicorn. He was a board member of the very first church I was a senior pastor of in Montgomery and we were relocating. And so our new property, we were looking for a place to meet on Sundays while our building was getting built. And there was a YMCA kind of across the street from our property. It was a pretty good location. And I was riding around with Todd and he said, I know the chair of the board of that YMCA. I said, really? He said, yeah. And so we got back to the office, walked to my office. He said, here’s the number of that chair of the board of YMCA. I bet he’d let us use the facility, if you’ll call him. They don’t use it on Sundays. I’m like, okay, thanks. And we stood there for like, I don’t know, felt like forever, probably a few seconds.

And Todd said, why haven’t you called him yet? I said, Todd, what are you talking about? We’re standing here right now. He said, I just gave you the number. I told you to call him. Why wait till tomorrow? Why wait till this afternoon? That’s how unicorns behave. And I did call him and we got the facility, but I’ve never forgotten that. It’s kinda like, I don’t know if you’re ever at a intersection where you have to turn left out of a parking lot and you got to go all the way across the road. It seems like right when I pull up to pulling out into the road, there’s an opportunity to go and I wait and then end up waiting forever. And the reality is, your first chance to respond is usually your best one. So brass tacks is simply just get back to people. And what’s scary is how bad the rest of us are at this. So on the one hand, scary on the other hand, makes for an easy win. Do you have time for a story about this?

Brett McKay: Yeah, sure.

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah. So we use, we call it inbound marketing and probably everybody knows what this is. It’s where you go to a website, maybe it’s you’re looking at a car, a Jeep or the new Bronco. And they say, would you like more information? Fill out this form, give them the email address, and then it goes into the internet and you wait to hear back from whoever you just filled out the form with. So when we started our company, when people wrote in, I had six kids to feed, I had a house to pay for and we were trying something new with a group that doesn’t like new things. If somebody wrote me and said, would you get back to me about… I got back to them like immediately. And I remember people saying, wow, you actually got back to me. So fast forward. Many years later, the platform that we use for our inbound marketing ran a very large study of all companies they could find that use any kind of this sort of fill out a form and we’ll get back to you marketing.

And they asked the question, how much does it matter when you get back to somebody after they fill out a form? In other words, if you get back to ’em faster, do you have a better chance of talking to ’em on the phone and making a sale? They found that if you get back to people within 60 seconds of them filling out that form, you have over a 98% chance of talking to that individual. You wait 20 minutes, it drops to a 60% chance, still good, but nowhere near 98. You wait 24 hours, you have a less than 1% chance of ever talking to the person that filled out a form. Now, the punch line to the study was, they went on to find out what is the average response time for all these companies taking this survey. Average response time, 42 hours.

So the companies that are paying for amazing marketing software, paying sales teams, they get leads in their hand and they wait too long to get back to people, and the leads die. People who get back right away, have a 98% chance. That’s good news for everybody listening today, it’s just… If you will immediately and intentionally get back to people, you will find yourself rising up above the crowd. You’ll separate yourself from the field. And, of course, you gotta have some discernment about, are you gonna respond to every little thing that comes your way, well no, then you wouldn’t have a life. But can you figure out what are the things that are really gonna move the ball forward and how do I respond really quickly and intentionally to those opportunities when they come along?

Brett McKay: Yeah. I like the idea of calling a responsiveness not fast. ‘Cause I think one problem that leaders have is they might be juggling a lot of different balls and they just forget which balls they even have in the air, and so they’re not able to respond. And one thing I admire about my wife is she calls them open loops. So any task that’s undone, she’s constantly thinking about it. For me, it’s out of sight, out of mind. But because my wife is constantly thinking about all these open loops, she has this incentive to get things done as fast as possible. And I’ve learned to get better about that from her, so I appreciate that. She’s super a responsive.

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah, my wife is the queen of the… What’s the rule called? Only touch it once.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Vanderbloemen: That’s her. If it’s male, I’m gonna deal with it and then it’s gonna be gone. And if I can’t do it, I’m gonna put in a stack and then I’m gonna sit down and deal with everything in the stack, and it’s gonna be done in one fell swoop. For me, I’ve had to learn, like I have about five different email accounts of people that will email me, my wife, a few others, and the software that sends in any lead that comes to the company and they come across through my lock screen. So this is the only five that come through on my lock screen. So I see one of those five, it’s like those are the ones I have to get back to right away. And so I’ve had to build a system for discerning, like what is super important that I get back to right away, wife being first priority, and then new leads for our business, a little further down the list? But I think probably everybody here listening is smart enough to figure out how to filter what needs an immediate response, what doesn’t, and the things that need it. If you will give an immediate and intentional, not an auto-respond, but an immediate intentional response, you will act differently than nearly everybody around you.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I hate the auto-responder. I’d rather not get a response than an auto-responder.

William Vanderbloemen: Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so related to speed or responsiveness, I like responsiveness. Related to responsiveness is the habit of agility. What do unicorns who are particularly agile, what do they do differently from the non-agile.

William Vanderbloemen: Everything. Everything differently. Agility atrophies. I think I kinda always knew that, but some years back, I’d gotten to the age where I like to run, it’s probably more like a jog than a run. But I got to the age where if I’m gonna keep doing this, I’ve gotta start doing some stretching. And the stretching, honestly, Brett, it was harder than the run itself. I’m just stiff. And I was done running one day, my youngest of our seven kids came in the room and she was probably, I don’t know, two or three years old. And I’m sitting there stretching and sweating like crazy and kinda struggling just to touch my toes. She looks at me, sits down next to me, she ties herself in this kinda human pretzel that only little one, two and three-year-olds can do. Looked up at me, untied herself, stood up, laughed out loud and left the room. I’m like, oh my gosh. [laughter] And then it dawned on me, William, every day you’re alive, you get less flexible, like that’s a biological fact. You’re most flexible the day you’re born, you’re least flexible the day you die. It’s a natural calcification that just happens unless you fight it like crazy.

And so the unicorns are constantly challenging themselves to stretch. That might be as simple as literally stretching after they run, it might be as complex as I need to learn a new skill set this year, I’m gonna learn a new language, I’m taking on how AI is gonna affect our job in the next five years. But the unicorns are the ones who are constantly looking for ways to stretch. And somewhere in them, they know that if they don’t do that, they’re gonna atrophy, they’re gonna calcify, they’re gonna become rigid, and that’s not cool. And if you think back to the pandemic, whatever job you had for people listening today, I bet that in your workplace, the people who really stood out during all that mess were the people who were able to pivot, who were able to move, who were able to make a change on the fly. And if they did that, it marked them as different and valuable. And I think this trait as we move into a new age of disruption, particularly with AI, this trait of being agile, of adapting to a new reality, man, that’s gonna be just gold. If you wanna elevate your career, start stretching, trying different things, and you’ll see yourself move up.

I was talking yesterday with a managing partner of a very large law firm here in Houston, one of the biggest ones, and I said, what’s your big challenge? He said, oh, AI. And I said, how? And he said, well, it can write closing arguments, you can… It’s amazing what can happen. I said, well, then why is that a challenge? He said, well, I’m in charge of starting the first year associates after they graduate law school, and I sat him down last week and looked at him and said, you were trained for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. So he said, and I’m watching to see who sees that as a challenge to rise to and who gets deflated. The challenge to rise to, those are the agile, those are the ones that wanna stretch, wanna find a new way. It’s absolute goal. It’s very common among the unicorns we spotted, very uncommon among the rest of us. Most of us just give up on stretching.

Brett McKay: You have these three questions you ask candidates to find out how agile they might be. I like this. And the people who are listening can use this as maybe some self-reflection. What new skill are you learning right now? What new hobby have you developed? And this is interesting, what part of history do you like to study the most? What’s with that third question? I can see the other two, why they show agility, what about that third one?

William Vanderbloemen: Well, Brett, I just don’t think it’s that hard to see the future. I think if you study the past, you’ll see the future. And if you ask people what they like as the most meaningful part of history and they say, oh man, I love watching Band Of Brothers. Okay, well, that’s super fun, and I’m guessing it’s pretty popular among your listeners, but that doesn’t tell me anything. You get somebody that says, oh my gosh, the Renaissance, there were so many new things happening. Or right when the printing press happened, or when we landed on the moon or some explorative like when Columbus took off. Lewis and Clark go over into the Rockies not having any idea what’s coming next. You hear people start to give those answers, you get a window into what motivates them and how they think. And then you can start to see whether agility is something they’re naturally practicing or maybe they’re artificially working on it and it shines through. And then others, maybe they got a fun movie they like to watch, but there’s no reason behind the affinity for that era in history.

Brett McKay: Another habit you talk about is the solver mentality. What does the solver habit look like?

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah. Yeah so I don’t know, I’m old enough that Winnie the Pooh was part of my childhood. And I don’t know why, but I always loved Tigger and Heidi or… I know you’re supposed to be sorry for Eeyore and all that. But there’s something about solvers that they come to a challenge saying, I think we can fix this, not, oh no, look what happened. You hear the difference? Like Tigger was like, okay, let’s figure it out. Eeyore was so sad. And you don’t need just all optimists in company, but people who solve are people who are like, okay, what do we do about that? Not, what is the problem? And human nature is just to name the problem and shift the blame, that’s just our human nature. Like you go back to the very beginning of the Hebrew Scriptures or the Bible, Adam and Eve in the garden. Probably most people have heard this story somewhere, and humans screw up for the first time, and God comes and says, what did you guys do? And Adam being the manly man that he was, said, well, that woman, the one you gave me, she made me do this. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Pass the buck.

William Vanderbloemen: Exactly. The solvers are ones who are like, okay, we’ve got a problem, how do we fix it? And I had an old mentor who used to say life is an equation, and most people live on the problem side of the equation pointing out what’s wrong. Very few live on the solution side of the equation. How do we fix it? When you see people who are constantly saying, how do we fix it? How do we make lemonade out of lemons? Then you found someone who’s uncommon and has one of these 12 habits that unicorns have. So it’s the old, don’t come to a meeting just naming problems, come with a suggested solution. And it is incredibly uncommon among people and incredibly common among those who stand out in the crowd and really become irreplaceable.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Solvers have high agency.

William Vanderbloemen: Yes.

Brett McKay: They look at the world, they say, I can get things done in the world. Even though it might be hard, I can do something about it.

William Vanderbloemen: That’s right.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Vanderbloemen: That’s right.

Brett McKay: And some of that’s probably personality, but I think it is a skill you can learn. The more you start trying to solve problems, the more you start trying to take action, you’re gonna develop a bias towards solving problems instead of just being like a [0:29:04.7] ____.

William Vanderbloemen: I think I agree with everything you said in the second half. 100%. The more you do it, the more you’ll start doing, it builds momentum. I don’t think it’s a personality trait, I think humans in general are on the problem side of the equation. What stops traffic more than anything, people stopping to look at a wreck. What clickbait works if you’re trying to gen up web traffic, negative disastrous headlines. We are so wired to look at the problem, that if you can rewire yourself to start looking for solutions, you’re immediately gonna separate yourself from the field.

Brett McKay: Another habit is the habit of self-awareness. So how does self-awareness help someone stand out in a group and be more effective in an organization?

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. We found our unicorns and then we surveyed them about these 12 habits. One of the things we did was ask people to force rank, what’s your best of these 12, what’s your worst? That sort of thing. So when we did that with the unicorns, self-awareness was the least common habit among the unicorns. It was common, but least common as a number one trait. Had fewer people say, that’s my number one than anything else. Alright, so hold that thought. After we found the unicorns and surveyed them, we also surveyed a quarter million people, and got answers from them about what they think about these 12 habits. And one of the things we asked about each of the 12 was, would you rank yourself as average at this, above average, well above average, below average, well below, kind of a one to five thing.

So the general population, 93% of the people we surveyed said that they were above average in self-awareness. I’m not like a mathematician, but 93% of a group is not above average, 50% is. So it’s the least common trait among unicorns, and the biggest blind spot that people have about themselves. Oh, I’m more aware than I think. I think back, Brett, when I went to that job at First Presbyterian, Houston, I was so far in over my head. I had no idea. And really, the church probably should have used a search firm and found a better candidate, but the only thing I had going for me, I was 31, so I knew everything.

Now I’m 53, and I’m realizing how much I don’t know and how much I need to learn myself. Where am I good? Where am I not? What job am I gonna be good in? What job am I not gonna be good in? I have been a fairly talented guy in a job that didn’t match my wiring and was miserable. It was that HR stint in the oil and gas company. A great company, paid me well, is not how I was wired. Man, I was miserable. And that’s not their fault at all. But those who develop enough self-awareness… And what an amazing age we live in to develop self-awareness. You can go online and take a DiSC inventory or the Enneagram or any number of things. In fact, we built a software tool as a companion to these 12 habits to let you see how you measure up against the unicorns and everyone else who rate themselves. And that’s a hope that that’s like a first step for people. Okay, let me figure out what I need to work on. What are my top three habits, what are the bottom three?

Brett McKay: Now, I’ve noticed in the people I’ve experienced who are in leadership roles, the leaders, I’m drawn to the most. I’m like, this guy is great. Are the ones who are self-aware about their personality or their strengths or their weaknesses, and then they lean into that. Even if the person’s quiet, they have like a quiet type of demure, quiet leadership, that’s fine. If that’s your personality and that’s what you feel comfortable with and that your strength… It’s frustrating when there’s a leader who doesn’t really know themselves and they’re trying to act like how they think a leader should act, and then there’s a disconnect. And you can tell he’s having a hard time, and then because he’s having a hard time, makes everyone else have a hard time.

William Vanderbloemen: Yes, 100%. And I think it’s that insecurity of not knowing who you are that causes you to act with more bravado than you should and be a little louder than you should. The question, what would you tell a younger version of you? That’s a pretty fun interview question. I think what I would tell a younger version of me is, I don’t know if I like you very much. [laughter] ‘Cause how is that guy that you just described and it’s no fun to be around him. But hopefully, I’m starting to learn myself well enough to know the good parts, the parts that need work, and use that knowledge to do my job better and to help others. Super interesting. As a recovering preacher, I’m always saying, oh wow, that’s a new way of looking at that. And there’s this verse that Jesus taught when he was talking about criticizing others, and he said, look, before you worry about the splinter in your brother’s eye, get the log out of your own. And I used to think he was just saying, judge not, lest ye be judged. Don’t go waving a finger at people. And maybe that’s part of it. But what this study of self-awareness and the unicorn traits has made me ask is, I wonder if you wasn’t also teaching, until you figure out your own weaknesses, you’re really not gonna be able to help anybody.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Vanderbloemen: And it’s inspired me to do more self-work, more understanding of what makes me who I am so that I can be a better help to the people around me and my family and friend circles and at work.

Brett McKay: Another habit is the habit of anticipation. What do you mean by that?

William Vanderbloemen: Well, I didn’t see that coming. I’m kidding. Anticipation. This is a simple habit, but nobody practices it. I don’t know, Brett, do you play golf at all?

Brett McKay: No, I don’t play golf. I’ve played golf a few times, I don’t like it. So don’t play.

William Vanderbloemen: Okay. Well, I grew up playing a little bit. And the really great golfers, if you ask Tiger Woods where he’s gonna hit his tee shot, he’s gonna say, well, it depends on where the pin is. And he said, well, there’s a par five there, you gotta hit three shots before you ever get to the green and the pin. He said, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I wanna know where the pin is, and then I’m gonna plan backwards from there. It’s like the Stephen Covey, “Begin with the End in Mind”. Or if you’ve ever played a pool player in billiards, that’s really good, they’re not thinking about the shot they’re making, they’re thinking about the fourth shot after that. And very few people do that. Most of us look down, not up. Most of us think about what’s right in front of us, and then we look up and say, oh man, the day just went away. But those who are unicorns anticipate the things that are about to happen and take a step just a little quicker than everybody else. You don’t have to see the future, you just have seen a little bit ahead and take a proactive step toward that future, and that will set you apart in amazing ways.

My favorite anticipator story actually comes from someone that I used to work with here. She was just the most amazing exec assistant. And she wasn’t my exec assistant at first, I had one and she left, she had three babies in three years and decided I need to be a mom. And so she left and she was good. I’m like, oh, what am I gonna do? And we just hired this young woman who we hired because her friend worked with us and this would be great. She was a little different, very artistic. Her previous employer was a Gothic wig shop. But hey, we interviewed her, we give her the job and I’m like, look, could you sit in the desk of my EA until I figure out who I’m hiring? ‘Cause she was just gonna help in the office, however she could. Okay, fine. So this was the days of… This was pre-iPad. So I don’t know if you remember the little plug-ins that you plug into your laptop to get a 3G signal so you could send email. Yeah. So I have those. And ridiculous responsiveness, people are writing in and we’re getting back to them within 60 seconds. So I’m sitting on a plane and one of these forms comes in and I’m gonna get back to ’em in 60 seconds, but we’re about to take off, and it’s in Spanish.

And I don’t speak Spanish, but I knew enough to know I was Spanish. So I sent Bethany a quick message. I said, a lead just came in in Spanish. See if you understand what they need. I’ll call you when I land. So plane takes off, I’ve got no signal, there’s no Wi-Fi on the planes then. But I go back and re-read this form that had come in and realized that’s really not Spanish, that’s Portuguese. And so then my mind goes to, okay, this is an organization in Brazil. And if you know the Brazilian culture, they really appreciate people knowing the difference between Spanish and Portuguese. So we land and I called Bethany frantically. I’m like, don’t do anything. She said, oh no, no, no. Are you gonna tell me it’s not Spanish? I said, yeah. She said, yeah, it’s Portuguese. I said, how’d you know that? She said, well, I don’t, but I know Spanish and I knew it well enough to know that’s not Spanish. Now, remember, this is pre-iPad, pre-a lot of software. I said, okay, well, don’t do anything. She said, well, actually, I’ve figured out it’s Portuguese. I found this thing online, it’s a translator thing, it’s kinda new. So I translated what he wrote in into English. He wanted some guidance on how pastors should plan to find their successor.

I went through our archive of our website and I found a pretty good white paper you wrote on this very thing. So I ran it through the translator and it’s in Portuguese, and then I went ahead and branded it, and then I converted it to a PDF so nobody could mess with it. And I went ahead and sent it to him. And I hope I’m not in trouble for doing all that without asking. And I was like, okay, you remember how I said, can you sit here till I find my new EA, can you just be that? ‘Cause she thought like five steps ahead of me before I ever landed and had it done. When you find people like that, you go, how did they do that? Well, they just anticipated. They thought a couple of steps ahead of what everybody else thinks. And when you find those people, they are worth gold.

Brett McKay: Another habit is the habit of likeability. What do you mean by likeability?

William Vanderbloemen: That’s such a term that gets tossed around, it’s not popularity, it’s not who wins the most votes, it’s the… You ever hear in hiring the beer question? Who’d you wanna go have a beer with?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Vanderbloemen: That’s it. And way too often we hire people that can produce but aren’t likeable. I’ve got a friend that wrote an article, you can probably still find it on the New York Times, wrote it years ago, it was one of their best ones ever. And the title of the article was, What Do You Do With The Brilliant Jerk? And you don’t even have to read the article after you hear the title, ’cause everyone has had to work with that guy that can produce, but is a total rear end. The unicorns are people who find a way to create likeability. The interesting thing I found was likeability hinges on people’s ability to shift the focus of the conversation away from themselves and toward the other person. The most successful people I’ve ever dealt with, I can’t get them to talk about themselves. They wanna know what I’m doing, they’re showing genuine interest in me, they’re making a real eye contact. And all of a sudden I’m like, wow, they’re making me feel like I’m the only person in the room and I like ’em. I might even wanna go have a beer with them. That’s highly uncommon.

Brett McKay: What do the unicorns that have that habit, what do they do on a daily basis for practices to develop that?

William Vanderbloemen: One of the things I mentioned it already is find a way to shift the conversation with an individual toward them and away from you. How many times do you talk about me and I versus you and what’s your situation? It’s pretty amazing. Some of these are intertwined. Likeability and curiosity, oddly enough, go together. People who are likeable are always asking other questions about themselves, or asking questions like, what do you think about this? What would you suggest we do? When people feel like they’re heard and valued and recognized, they like you. Make real eye contact with people. No one does this now, nobody. My kids that are in college right now FaceTime their mother almost every day, and they say hi to me too, but they’re just the nicest, they FaceTime all the time. And yet when they FaceTime, I’m looking at their nostrils most of the time. They’re looking around the room, they’re not looking at me. Did you know 90% of all humans are right-eye dominant? So if you wanna increase your likeability, here’s a simple hack, now, you can’t look at people in a mean domineering way, but in an interested, curious, you’re important to me kinda look. Look ’em dead in their right eye, not both eyes, not in between, just dead in their right eye. I bet you’ve got a 90% chance to them walking away saying they were really listening to me, and that generates likeability.

Brett McKay: So what’s great about these habits, they not only apply to work or your work in a non-profit or volunteer group, this just helps you have good people skills that will make you attractive to anybody. Make you attractive in the dating world, to your spouse. You develop these qualities, you’re gonna be a person who other people wanna be near.

William Vanderbloemen: Well, and I’ll say, Brett, it’s interesting. A lot of these habits are ones that if you master them, you can still be a guy and be manly as all get out. And yet people are gonna say, man, but they’re really good with people, and they broke all these stereotypes that I had of what a manly man is, who doesn’t pay attention to anybody but himself and is arrogant and conceited. No, this was a dude and yet he treated me so much better than nearly everyone does. So it raises your stock in the company softball league, it raises your stock on the dating scene, it certainly raises your stock as a dad. If you will apply these 12 habits to how you’re interacting with your kids, particularly if you have teenage kids, it’s just… Like I said, I almost titled the book, So I Guess Mom Was Right.

Brett McKay: Well, this has been a great conversation. If people are interested in learning more about that strengths assessment, you mentioned they can go to theunicornbook.com. But besides that, where else can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah, Brett, my last name is so messed up that really all people have to do is try and type Vanderbloemen into Google or Amazon, and it really doesn’t matter how you spell it, it will circle back to me.

Brett McKay: Okay, just look up Vanderbloemen.

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah. And by the way, if it’s helpful to your listeners, if you go to vanderbloemen.com, there are about 4000 free resources there on how to build and run and keep a great team, particularly when they don’t have to say yes sir, or yes ma’am.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, William Vanderbloemen, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

William Vanderbloemen: Hey, thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed this and you’re good at what you do, man.

Brett McKay: Well, thank you. I really appreciate that. My guest today was William Vanderbloemen, he’s the author of the book, Be The Unicorn. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, vanderbloemen.com. Also, check at our show notes at aom.is/unicorn, where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you’ll find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The first general put in command of American troops during the Mexican-American war was Zachary Taylor. “Old Rough and Ready” didn’t care much for garrison discipline and military formality. He was steady and unruffled and spoke laconically, choosing his words carefully and using as few as needed to get his point across. Taylor didn’t mind getting his boots dirty and mingled freely with the enlisted men. Indeed, it was hard to distinguish him from them; rather than wearing the uniform of a general, he dressed in blue denim pants and a rumpled linen jacket. 

As biographer Jean Edward Smith describes, he had an “easy, disarming manner,” and “when reviewing troops or watching maneuvers, he would usually sit sideways in the saddle, both feet dangling on one side, chewing tobacco—looking like a man watching field hands harvesting a crop.”

For political reasons, President James Polk transferred many of Taylor’s troops to the command of General Winfield Scott during the war. Scott was very much Taylor’s opposite. Known as “Old Fuss and Feathers,” he kept himself apart from his men and loved pomp and ceremony. He wore every piece of the general’s uniform he could and insisted that his staff dress smartly too. He wrote his orders with rhetorical flourish, referring to himself in the third person.

Similar divergences in leadership style can be seen in other pairs of generals throughout history. 

Ulysses S. Grant, who served under Taylor during the Mexican-American War, admired how Old Rough and Ready comported himself; “No soldier could face either danger or responsibility more calmly than he,” Grant said of him. Grant modeled his own career off Taylor’s example and led the Union army in an understated and buttoned-down way. 

Robert E. Lee, on the other hand, emulated Scott and embraced, as historian Bruce Catton put it, “The business of living and looking the part of a great soldier, with splendor worn as a familiar cloak about starred shoulders.”

The divergence in the men’s style is well illustrated in their meeting at Appomattox. As Grant remembered in his memoirs:

When I had left the camp that morning I had not expected to see so soon the result that was then taking place, and consequently was in rough garb. I was without sword, as I usually was when on horseback in the field, and wore a soldier’s blouse for a coat, with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army who I was. When I went into the house I found General Lee. . . . General Lee was dressed in a full uniform which was entirely new, and was wearing a sword of considerable value, very likely the sword which had been presented by the State of Virginia . . . In my rough traveling suit, the uniform of a private with the straps of a lieutenant-general, I must have contrasted very strangely with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high and of faultless form.

During World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton offered another study in contrasts.

Eisenhower was modest and restrained in both his appearance and operating style. Besides his famous waist-length “Ike jacket,” which he appreciated for its functionality, there wasn’t much to distinguish his dress. He spurned publicity and managed his responsibilities in subtle, diplomatic ways. His time as the country’s chief executive is known as the “hidden-hand presidency” for the way he outwardly seemed to lead more passively while secretly pulling levers behind the scenes. 

In his memoirs, Eisenhower expressed his belief that:

Professional military ability and strength of character, always required in high military position, are often marred by unfortunate characteristics, the most frequently encountered and hurtful ones being a too obvious avidity for public acclaim and the delusion that strength of purpose demands arrogant and insufferable deportment. A soldier once remarked that a man sure of his footing does not need to mount a horse!

Eisenhower might have been referring to Patton, with whom he sometimes clashed.

Patton was attention-seeking and bombastic. Known as “Old Blood and Guts,” he operated with outsized bravado. Patton did everything he did with intentional showmanship and theatricality, believing that doing so would help his men see themselves as part of a great drama and motivate heroic effort. His speeches were profane and colorful, and as professor Edgar F. Puryear describes, his dress was flashy and deliberately chosen for dramatic effect:

As a general officer he wore a magnificently tailored, form-fitting battle jacket with brass buttons. Above the left pocket were four rows of campaign ribbons and decorations and on each shoulder and shirt collar were pinned oversized general’s stars. His trousers were whipcord riding breeches. He wore high-topped calvary boots, shined to a mirror-like finish, and spurs. Around his waist was a hand-carved leather belt with a gleaming brass buckle. On each side rested a pearl-handled pistol ornamented with the stars of a four-star general. In his hand he carried a riding crop. His helmet was shellacked to a lustrous finish, and it too had stars. One officer in describing General Patton’s dress said, ‘The first time you see him, boom!’ There is no doubt that his appearance in uniform attracted attention. His dress seemed to say, ‘I’m Patton—the best damn general in this or any other army.’

Patton also rode around in an open, well-polished Jeep that was emblazoned with stars denoting his rank, decked out in red upholstery, and equipped with a 50-caliber machine gun and a French horn, which emitted a distinct sound that unmistakably announced the general’s arrival.

Patton not only comported himself with a high degree of spit and polish, but demanded that his men do likewise. He was a stickler for rules and regulations, believing that “Sloppy soldiers don’t win battles.”

What’s interesting about all of these contrasting pairs of generals is that despite the significant differences between them — in some cases they were truly polar opposites — they were all effective leaders. Each had their distinct flaws, but each was a gifted commander.

The very same phenomenon can be seen today amongst the coaches of college and professional sports. 

You’ve got coaches like Pete Carroll, a student of Stoicism who leads with a calm, understated demeanor. And then you’ve got coaches like Deion Sanders — Coach Prime — who heads his program with bombast and off-the-charts swagger. Both approaches win player loyalty, and games.

Oftentimes, we think that there’s just one way to be a leader, some ultimate archetype or mold that we have to fit ourselves into.

But the truth is that you can find success as a leader who’s casual and laid-back, or strict and demanding; controlled and humble, or flashy and confident. 

Leadership is less about adopting a certain set of traits, and more about honing and amplifying the attributes that are most instinctive to you. Lean into and heighten those qualities that are part of your unique disposition and allow the ways you speak, act, and dress to be a natural outgrowth of your own well-developed philosophy.

Don’t act like somebody else. The best kind of leader to be . . . is the kind of leader you are. 

Listen to our podcast about why conventional leadership wisdom is overrated:

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When an organization wants to get more productive and better reach its goals, it typically looks to retool its leadership, trying to find lone figures who can apply more effective top-down control. But my guest says there’s a much more effective strategy for getting things done: creating and empowering teams of self-starters.

Kyle Buckett is a retired Navy SEAL, an executive consultant, and the co-author of

Leadership Is Overrated: How the Navy SEALs (and Successful Businesses) Create Self-Leading Teams That Win. Today on the show, Kyle first unpacks the problems with the conventional model of leadership. He then explains what the self-led team-oriented model looks like and some of the ways to create effective self-led teams, including “killing the leader” and establishing a ritual-laden culture. We also talk about the role a leader can still play in an organization. Along the way, Kyle shares stories both from history and his experience as a SEAL that illustrate why self-led teams are so effective at getting things done.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Belgian Antarctic Expedition
• AoM Article: What the Race to the South Pole Can Teach You About How to Achieve Your Goals
• AoM Podcast #695: Sisu, the Finnish Art of Strength
• AoM Article: Got Sisu? Essential Guerrilla Tactics from the Finnish Winter War
• The Navy SEAL Ethos

Connect With Kyle Buckett

• Culture Force/Leadership Is Overrated Website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. When an organization wants to get more productive and better reach its goals, it typically looks to retool its leadership, trying to find lone figures who can apply more effective top-down control, but my guest says there’s a much more effective strategy for getting things done, creating and empowering teams of self-starters. Kyle Buckett is a retired Navy SEAL, an Executive Consultant, and the co-author of Leadership Is Overrated: How the Navy Seals and Successful Businesses Create Self-Leading Teams That Win.

Today in the show, Kyle first impacts the problems with the conventional model of leadership, he then explains what the self-led team-oriented model looks like and some of the ways to create effective self-led teams, including killing the leader and establishing a ritual-laden culture. We also talk about the role a leader can still play in an organization. Along the way, Kyle share stories both from history and his experience as a SEAL that illustrate why self-led teams are so effective at getting things done. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/teams. Alright, Kyle Buckett, welcome to the show.

Kyle Buckett: Thanks for having me, Brett.

Brett McKay: So you and your co-author have recently published a book with a provocative title. When I saw the title, I was like, “I gotta talk to this guy.” Leadership Is Overrated. Before we talk about the book, let’s talk about your background ’cause I think it’ll help our listeners understand where you’re coming from with this idea.

Kyle Buckett: Sure. Well, back in high school, I really wanted to serve our country in a unique way, in an elite way, and I grew up right across the river from West Point, so what I had access to in high school was going to Army games, football games, basketball games, hockey games, and I didn’t have any Navy in my background other than my grandfathers who had served, but they wouldn’t talk about it that much. So the only thing I really had access to was the Army, and this is the 90s, and Chuck Norris movies were awesome. I fell in love with Chuck Norris and I wanted to be Chuck Norris. And so one day I’m like, in my senior year of high school, I’m 17, and my dad comes home and he has this book and he’s like, “Hey man, there’s this group called Navy SEALs. You love being in the water, you love being around lakes, rivers, oceans, pools, you just love the water, you’re a water man through and through, you were actually swimming before you were walking and you love the water and you should check these guys out. I know you wanna join the Army, but you should really check this out.”

Dude, I stayed up till five o’clock in the morning that night reading the entire book, I think it was Dick Marcinko’s Red Team book. And I was like, “I wanna do that. That’s what I’m gonna do.” So I’m 17 at the time, my parents would not sign on the dotted line for me to join because as a minor, you need parental consent. And so literally, Brett, the morning of my 18th birthday, I’m sitting on the steps of the Navy recruiter’s office to sign the dotted line. I’m like, “I need to be a Navy SEAL. That’s what I wanna do.” So I signed the dotted line and 20 years later and I retired from a wonderful career. And I got to do a lot of fun stuff during those 20 years, I got to do everything from doing some single-man lone operations on three separate continents all the way up to running, what I like to joke and kid about, which is the world’s most elite university, where we train Navy SEALs to be snipers, to be communicators, to be free fall tacticians, to be free fall jump masters, intelligence courses, and on and on and on.

It’s an awesome school, and I’m very proud of that. And then my largest operation was leading tactically an 800-man Marine element through Southern Afghanistan in Korangal Valley, and then a lot of things in between, being part of the team that initially implemented in the early 2000s Palantir into SOCOM, bringing new weaponry to the force, getting to consult on other technologies, both classified and unclassified, so a lot of things in between. And what a lot of people don’t know, it’s really interesting, the Navy SEALs you see on TV, you see on the movies as running and gunning and blowing stuff up, which we obviously do do that, but we also run the enterprise, which is really interesting. We don’t really talk about it that much, but I find it pretty fascinating, especially now that I’m retired and I moved on and I’ve been in corporate America for almost five years now. And it’s pretty interesting to me that we don’t really talk about that because it translates pretty well.

And what I mean by that, let me just real quickly, is we did a big military construction project where we moved the SEAL teams from one area to seven miles away in San Diego, California. That’s a $1.6 billion military construction project. There’s no green men running around doing this, it’s us, we’re overseeing the design, we’re working with the GCs, we’re working the sub-vendors, we’re working through the entire process to make sure everything goes smooth, we’re dealing with environmental impacts to the land and so on and on and on. It’s not sexy. Everyone wants to talk about the Navy SEAL stuff, and I get it. My point is, is that through that career, which I’m forever grateful for the Navy and all it did for me and for others, you get to see a whole world of execution, operations, supply chain, global logistics, you name it. So it’s pretty exciting. So anyway, needless to say, I became a student of organizational culture, what you can do to build and improve and design a culture, and then what you can do to scale it and sustain it, but yeah, that’s a little bit of my background.

Brett McKay: So what you do in this book is you help, along with your co-author, help readers understand the culture that’s in the SEALs teams of what you call self-leadership, and we’re gonna talk about what that is exactly, but let’s talk about this title of this book, Leadership Is Overrated, what’s wrong with the conventional way we think about leadership, you think?

Kyle Buckett: Well, a couple of things. I’ll give you kind of like my top five. I think a lack of adaptability, there’s rapid changes in tech, in the markets, in global dynamics, and they require, especially nowadays, quick adaptability. And in my opinion, I think there’s no one better than the Navy SEALs in reacting quickly and being able to adapt. And a top-down leadership approach can really hinder agility as decisions may take longer to flow through the hierarchy, whereas when you have self-led teams, especially in the SEAL team situation, as a ground force commander, you’re overseeing an entire operation, but a fire team, which is an element of four individuals, four to six individuals might be dealing with a situation and they just have to take matters into their own hands.

And so when you have that conventional way of thinking, it really makes it challenging to have adaptability and make rapid changes in the moment. And nowadays, it’s 2023 as we’re recording this, and the markets are moving so fast, global dynamics are shifting so fast, we all just lived through COVID, how much changed so fast. So the lack of adaptability is a big one for me, and because of that, that kind of trickles into my next point, which is innovation suppression. Hierarchal structures might really stifle innovation and creative thinking, and when you have ideas from lower level teams or individuals, they might not reach the top or be acted upon properly. My next point is employee engagement, command and control style can really lead to disengagement and reduced morale amongst your employees as they might really feel undervalued and disempowered.

Limited ownership is another one. An hourly employee, for example, might not take full ownership of their work when decisions are solely made at the top, and this can really impact accountability and performance. Slow communication is another big one, information can get distorted, it might delay or it moves through layers of management leading to misalignment and misunderstanding. And then at the end of the day, risk adversion, right? Leaders at the top might hesitate to take calculated risks fearing negative consequences for their position or their reputation. And so all of these things that I just mentioned intertwine and really become challenging for the conventional way we think of leadership. Does that make sense?

Brett McKay: Yeah, that makes sense. And another thing you talk about too that stood out to me is that when we focus on the top-down idea of leadership, it puts too much emphasis on that leader, like he is some sort of hero and that he can change, he can turn a company around. And I’ve read studies before where basically it’s not true, you hire a rock star CEO, he did well in one company, he goes to another company and they think, “Well, this guy did great at that one company, he should turn this other company around.” And then the rock star CEO just, he fumbles, he doesn’t do it, and it’s because they think it’s the leader. The leader plays a role, but when it comes down to it, and we’re gonna talk about today, it’s the culture and it’s the people in that organization.

Kyle Buckett: That’s right. Well said.

Brett McKay: So instead of helping leaders become better leaders, you and the people you work with at Culture Force help people become self-led teams. So what does it mean to be a self-led team?

Kyle Buckett: Well, it means, back to the SEAL analogy, our missions often involve decentralized decision-making, where individuals closest to the situation have the autonomy to make quick and informed choices. So what we preach and what we practice and try to empower teams and leaders to do is, “Hey, have you built in your organization a structure, a decision-making process, whatever you wanna call it, policies, procedures, your organizational structure, etcetera, etcetera, have you built it into the culture and also your structure? I understand there’s legal ramifications for every organization, but have you built it into the organization that the individual closest to the situation has the autonomy to make a quick and informed choice?” And then that goes back to where are you at with training, where are you at with education and on and on and on. But at the end of the day, can this leader at the lowest level make a decision, or is that individual just gonna get hammered because they made a decision and it, “Oh well, we had to have John make the decision. Jane’s not allowed to make the decision, John has to be the person to make the decision.”

And so where we dive into with our teams, our leaders is, “Hey, at what point does this have to go all the way to the top? Can they make a decision here, can they make a decision here?” And it’s interesting because we all take that for granted, sometimes we don’t really deep dive into that, but at what point and where can you make these decisions? Do you have decentralized decision-making, are the groups empowered? Is it a group that’s empowering trust and ownership and responsibility, is it adaptable? Back to what I was saying earlier, and then how does the communication work? Is communication enabled across all team members for a rapid exchange of information and understanding and on and on and on. So it really goes back to, though, at what level can you make a decision?

Brett McKay: And you give an example, it was the Belgian Antarctic expedition to show what a self-led team looks like. This was a ship in 1897, it was The Belgica, and the explorer Roald Amundsen was a part of this crew. What can this expedition teach us about being a self-led team?

Kyle Buckett: So in The Belgica, if you’re not familiar, this was one of the first expeditions to the South Pole, and when they get down there, basically they get stuck in the ice for months on end, and the shipmates, if you will, start developing obviously a slew of issues, depression, anxiety, all of the things start setting in. People start getting sick, including the Captain and Commander. And so the Captain and Commander is bedridden for a month and leading up to before he gets bedridden, basically one of the individuals, and it was the doctor who says, “Hey, we should start eating penguins.” And he’s like, “What? We can’t eat penguins, that’s disgusting.” And the doctor’s like, “No, they’re full of protein. Our men need penguins.” So sure enough, the commander gets sick, his orders of don’t eat penguins kinda now fall flat and the crew starts taking matters into their own hand and they start eating penguins.

And the doctor says, “Hey, start playing board games,” and they start playing board games while they’re dealing with isolation, scurvy and harsh weather, and the morale improves slowly over time, now they’re starting to get fed, they start making fires on the ice and they actually come out of it months later, they start nursing the captain back to full health, and they actually come out of it and make the trip and the journey back home, all because of the team just started taking ownership of the situation and started working together, even though the captain, the leader, was down for the count as you would. And then later on, Roald Amundsen, he becomes very famous for reaching the South Pole, and it’s pretty incredible to hear how that impacted him and what he then went on to do at his next expedition and how he prepared for the next expedition. It was pretty cool.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you did a contrast between Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott. Robert Falcon Scott took the sort of top-down, he thought he knew the best way to do things. And Amundsen, he looked at the teams like, “What do you guys know?” And so I think Falcon Scott, he was like using horses down in the Antarctic for trudging and getting the sleds, and Amundsen was like, “That’s dumb.” Was talking to these Inuit guys, “Let’s use dogs sleds, that’s probably more efficient.” It’s things like that.

Kyle Buckett: Right, right.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You have this chapter that something you guys do in the SEALs is an exercise where you kill the leader, not literally, but it is a training exercise where you kill the leader, and you recommend the groups that you work with they do the same thing with their organization, like do an exercise where you kill the leader, what can killing a leader reveal about a group?

Kyle Buckett: Yeah. So what I mean by that is, we will be doing a training scenario and maybe the SEAL platoon or SEAL troop is taking down a village in a training scenario, or they’re in the middle of the desert and all of a sudden they start taking on enemy fire. And maybe even early or mid-operation, a training cadre will walk over to the troop commander or the troop chief or the platoon commander or the tac lead, and just say, “Hey,” simulating a training situation, “Hey dude, you just took a gunshot to the chest, you have a fatal chest wound. You’re down, you’re out.” And so the platoon or the troop now has to react to the leader is now down, he’s out, okay, and then we get to watch as the next person in the train steps up into that role. The individual who’s now “killed” he gets to sit there and watch and not say anything, just sit there and take notes, and he gets to watch to see how the next guy steps up into that role and how he does.

And it does two things, right? Obviously, it really, really sheds light, a spotlight on how well he, the dead guy, has prepared his replacement. And for both of them, it’s an incredible situation where they now get to go back after the operation or the exercise is done, and they can debrief amongst themselves and kinda do a 360 peer review of each other of, “Hey, how well did I prepare you, replacement, for this position, to step up into this role, to step up into the position, or how well did I not prepare you?” Or on the flip side like, “Hey man, I really thought you were prepared. I thought you were ready for this. I thought we went over this numerous times, obviously, you weren’t prepared, let’s dive back into X, Y and Z, how can I support you? How can I ensure that you’re trained and ready to go if this should ever happen again, or the next time this happens in a training situation,” and on and on and on.

Or many times there’s the great success story too, right? The guy steps up and he crushes it, and he does a phenomenal job, and you’re like, “Oh great, okay, now I’ve already replaced myself, now we can start working on a second individual to start getting ready to be a replacement,” and on and on and on. So it’s really incredible from multiple standpoints on killing the leader, if you will. And so what we talk about is, “Hey, if you’re ready to actually try this, why not just try it on a vacation? Go take a vacation for four or five days and turn your phone off and just stare at the ocean and enjoy life in Mexico or something and see how your organization or your team or your department does without you being accessible for just a couple of days. I think it’s an incredible opportunity to just see what happens, see if you’re ready to do that and see if the next person in line is ready to rise to the occasion.”

Brett McKay: And it’s gonna show if you have a self-led organization.

Kyle Buckett: That’s right.

Brett McKay: And you could apply this as well in a lot of other places besides work, if you belong to a church group, a civic group, you can even do this in your family, like just say… Tell your kids, “You know what, kids, I’m not doing anything.” And let’s see what happens, let’s see if they’re able to keep things going. And you might be surprised, you might find out that you are infact dispensable, which is good, that’s the goal of parenting. You wanna make yourself… They don’t need you anymore at a certain point.

Kyle Buckett: That’s right. We actually have a funny kinda joke around the house right now that I’m trying to practice what I preach, which is, I’ve become the… My kids are still fairly young, they’re five, eight and 10, and my wife, who I love dearly, she’s a rock star, she’s a rock star, but she is technologically challenged, very, very challenged and she wouldn’t mind me saying that. And so I have become… Especially nowadays, where there’s all these devices, I’m the family IT guy sometimes. [laughter] And so I’m trying to remove myself from being that family IT guy.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so instead of focusing on the leader, what you guys focus on is developing a culture, the groups you are focused on developing their culture.

Kyle Buckett: That’s right.

Brett McKay: So how do you define a culture in a group?

Kyle Buckett: Yeah, so real quickly, what we really focus on is, hey, you have a culture, no matter what. It’s there, it exists. What do you want it to be? Do you want it to be energetic, do you want… Are you striving for a calm environment, are you striving for a knowledge based, whatever it is, it’s… To me, it’s irrelevant what kind of culture you’re desiring to build. What matters though is everything we’ve already talked about, are you gonna empower the self-led teams? Simultaneously, what is the culture that you want to build? And do you have buy-in from your team on set desired culture? Or if you’re one of one, okay, it’s you, right? It’s you, it’s bouncing it off your mentors, it’s doing self-assessments, etcetera, etcetera, but if you do have a team already, it’s, do you have buy-in and what is that desired culture that you’re trying to build?

Okay, once you understand what that is, now let’s define it, let’s put it to words, let’s put it to values, let’s put it to purpose. And then we go, “Okay, now let’s build it.” And we talk about… These are mainly the three sections in our book, is define what you want, then let’s build it and then let’s scale and sustain it. And by working by, through and with your teams, your self-led teams, we believe we have a great recipe to actually do that. Culture really refers to the shared values, beliefs, the norms, behaviors and practices of any group or organization or community, it’s really that collective identity that shapes how people within the group interact or make decisions, back to what we were talking about earlier, like decentralized decision-making processes and how they work together. And culture influences the way that we all perceive our roles, how we communicate the overall atmosphere within the group, and so we talk about the components of really defining it.

Brett McKay: I think an important point you made is that every organization, every group has a culture, even if they are not…

Kyle Buckett: That’s right.

Brett McKay: Proactively creating a culture, like you have a culture, you have a way of doing things that just passes through tacitly, you don’t have to think about it, it’s there.

Kyle Buckett: 100%. So well said Brett, no matter what, you’ve got one, so thinking, “We don’t really have… ” Oh, you’ve got one, trust me. I’ll walk in and feel it in two seconds. A couple of years ago, I think it was 2017-ish, I got a unique two or three days up in Silicon Valley where I went to and spent three hours-ish, two to three hours in some of the following organizations, I went to DropBox, Facebook, Instagram, Oracle, Google, Airbnb, and a couple of others. My point is, I got to feel in a matter of 48 hours all of the cultures. And if you ever have the opportunity to do that, regardless of the name of the company, my point is just go and bounce around a couple of organizations in a matter of two days, you’ll feel what I’m talking about, you’ll feel it, you’ll feel it in two seconds, you’ll feel the different types of culture at those organizations. So my point of it is to you and what you just said, Brett, is no matter what, it’s there, it exists. If you walk to five or six organizations or companies in a matter of a day or two, you’ll feel it, and then you can go back to yours and you’ll feel yours too ’cause it’s there, it’s there.

Brett McKay: All right. So you’re saying if you’re gonna have a culture, you might as well shape it so that it can get stuff done.

Kyle Buckett: That’s right.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And you’ve seen the power of culture in your SEAL career. You can go into a SEAL team and there’s a culture there that people know just what to do to get stuff done and they just fall in line and they do it ’cause that’s what you do.

Kyle Buckett: That’s right. We have an incredible ethos, it’s called the Navy SEAL Ethos, and it goes into in times of war or uncertainty, there’s a special breed of warrior ready to answer our nation’s call, and I won’t cite the entire thing, but at the end of the day, forged by adversity, they stand alongside America’s finest special operators to serve the country, the American people and protect their way of life, and everyone, all of us say the following two sentences, which is, “I am that warrior, and it is a privilege that I must earn my Trident,” which is the Navy SEAL insignia, “I must earn my Trident every day.” And so that’s ingrained from the day one that you sign up to join till even today, ’cause we also say, “I’m never out of the fight, my training is never complete,” and we believe that, we totally believe that.

Every single Navy SEAL, every single Navy SEAL will believe and agrees that their training is never complete. Till the day that we retire, we are non-stop learning and improving, and the training’s never complete and we’re never out of the fight, and we’re trying every single day to earn our SEAL insignia or the Trident, we’re trying to earn that every day by keeping up with the ethos and our creed and our brothers, and being… My late buddy Brad Cavener had an incredible, incredible saying that said, “Lord, let me not prove unworthy of my brothers.” I never wanna be unworthy of standing along shoulder to shoulder of any of my fellow men. That’s powerful, it’s really powerful.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about what we can do to develop that culture, so what’s the process look like? How do you figure out what a group’s culture should be so that it becomes the self-led team?

Kyle Buckett: Well, first, like what we’re saying is like, first and foremost, you gotta define it, what do you want it to be? What do you want your values to be, what are your core principles and beliefs, what are gonna be your norms, your unspoken rules and expectations that govern within the group? ‘Cause these norms really define what’s considered acceptable and appropriate in various situations, and what are you gonna allow? What are the behaviors, what are the observable actions and interactions, what are gonna be… And we talk about this at length. What are gonna be the traditions and rituals, like what are gonna be your ceremonies, your repetitive actions, your rituals that hold symbolic meaning within the culture?

I remember years ago, I talked with Garry Ridge, who’s the CEO Chairman of WD-40. And they have an incredible biannual ritual where they basically come together, sit around a fire and write stuff on a note pad, and then whatever that commitment is as an individual, they share it with the team and then they throw it in the fire. And they do it and people love doing that ritual and coming to that camp fire, that bonfire every year. My point is, you don’t have to do WD-40’s ritual, you just do yours, you do what’s symbolic within your culture, within your group, whatever is gonna reinforce the values and creates a sense of identity.

Brett McKay: What sorts of rituals did you have as a SEAL? What did you guys do to keep reinforcing the values you had in your team?

Kyle Buckett: I mean, that’s a good one. We had a bunch. On Fridays would be a lot of times if we are in America, Friday afternoon would be a barbecue, maybe you have some beer, maybe not, but we’d have a barbecue every Friday and sit down and just be with one another before everyone goes and spreads to the winds for the weekend. On deployments, one of my favorite rituals of all time is the AAR, the after action review. So after a long day or a long night, excuse me, the sun’s just coming up ’cause we work at night, the sun’s just coming up, everyone kinda grabs… No one grabs coffee ’cause we’re all gonna go to bed, but after a long night of operating, everyone puts all their gear away, takes care of all the gear, puts everything away, and then we sit down in a circle and we do an AAR, an after action review, where before you walk into that room, you leave all rank, all experience, to a degree, but you leave rank, especially, outside the door.

And what I mean by that is we walk in, we get in, we sit down and we go over the operation before everyone goes to sleep, or everyone goes to go eat some food or whatever, we just sit down, grab a water and we just go through it. And so this is what it would sound like, here’s me, Sam, the tactical lead, and I go, “Hey guys, so here’s what I did wrong, here’s where I jacked up. Everyone learn from my mistakes. We went to this building, we should have went to that building. I went in this room, I should have went left, instead I went right, learn from my mistakes. This is what I did, I read the door wrong, I read the opening wrong, I’ve read the hallway wrong,” whatever it might be, right? And everyone’s sitting there and we’re all just taking notes on our note pads and no one’s casting judgment. In fact, we’re doing the exact opposite, we’re trying to learn from everyone else’s mistakes so that we don’t make the same mistakes, because there’s gonna come a time where that situation is gonna present itself again, and you don’t wanna make that mistake.

So you’re listening intently, you’re not casting judgment and you’re sharing, “Hey, this is what I did, this is when I made a mistake.” No one’s giving anyone too much… Like we’ll josh with each other, we’ll joke with each other, but we’re not giving anyone serious grief, like we’re really trying to just focus on learning from each other, and we’re not reprimanding in that moment, we’re just, “Hey, let’s focus on sharing our mistakes.” And that’s a really powerful moment in time where the senior guy all the way down to the junior guy is at the same level in that moment and just sharing what we could have done better. And then at the end, we’ll talk about what we did do great and give everyone a pat on the back as well.

Brett McKay: Something you talk about too is that in order to have that self-led team, you need to have a group of people who are able to lead themselves. Can you inculcate that in another person or is it something you kind of find through a filtering process?

Kyle Buckett: So our culture in the SEAL teams, I like to call it, it’s a magnet culture, meaning it really draws in those types of individuals who are self-led. And so what I like to focus on is, “Hey, how can you make your team, your organization, a magnetized culture?” Meaning you’re gonna draw in those types of individuals who are self-led who are gonna help improve the culture, how do you make your culture a magnet to the types of individuals that are gonna be driven by the opportunities that you’re giving them? So let me explain a little further. We talk about the different types of ways that individuals are motivated, right?

And many times leaders these days just completely ignore that, and this is hard, it’s simple, but it’s hard, and I get that, but if you never pay attention to it, you’re never gonna be able to address it. So what I’m talking about is every individual is driven by something different, some individuals are driven by compensation, some individuals are driven by time off with their friends and family, some individuals are driven by challenging work that’s meaningful and challenging that allows them to utilize their skills, their knowledge and creativity, some are really motivated by workplace flexibility, “Hey, can I be remote, can I have a job sharing agreement or arrangement?” And that’d be very motivating for some people.

Some people are really, really motivated by recognition and appreciation that they’re valued for their hard work and achievements. The point of when I go through all these is like, everyone is… One of these is number one for you, and one of these is number one for me, and one of these is number one for Jane Doe and John Doe, and on and on and on. My point is, if your culture can feed into those big motivations, you can turn it into a magnet that’s gonna draw the individuals who are now gonna be self-led because they’re driven and they’re motivated by the opportunity and the motivators that you have built into your organization.

Brett McKay: Right. And the SEALs do this, they have this culture that everyone knows about, and they know about the training, BUD/S. And so it’s gonna attract a certain type of person, it’s gonna attractive a guy who’s gonna wake up on his 18th birthday and sit on the stoop of the recruiting office so he could become a SEAL.

Kyle Buckett: That’s right. And we’re not gonna attract the same type of individuals that a hedge fund in Manhattan is gonna attract. Like you’re really, really driven by competitive compensation, well, I’ll be the first one to tell you, the Navy SEALs, you’re not getting paid a lot, right? [laughter]

Brett McKay: Right.

Kyle Buckett: So we’re not gonna attract that type of individual that’s really self-led by, “Hey, I wanna really have a high comp.” But to your point, yeah, purpose and meaning, challenging work, we’re gonna attract those guys in spades.

Brett McKay: We’ve been talking about how leadership is overrated, the top-down command is overrated, but you have a section talking about how leadership is still important, you have to have a leadership position for accountability or legal reasons. In the SEALs, there’s gotta be someone who the buck stops with. So if something goes wrong, they can go to that guy and say, “Hey, what went wrong?” But also you need a leader in an organization to just get the self-led team going in the first place.

Kyle Buckett: That’s right.

Brett McKay: So what role does a single leader play in creating a self-led team?

Kyle Buckett: Being aware and a desire. Being aware of where you’re at, starting on the branch you’re on, and then really it comes back to desire. If you don’t have a desire to make an impact or improve things, it’s just not gonna happen, it just doesn’t… It goes back to, you’re gonna have a culture but is it gonna be a positive one, is it gonna be an empowering one, a trusting one, or is it just gonna become a mess? Is it not gonna be a positive environment, no team collaboration, no education or learning, and all decisions have to keep coming to you and you just get bogged down and bogged down and bogged down with decision paralysis. So it’s really that desire and an awareness to actually do it. And to your point, you can do this at any single level, you can do this at your level with the individuals that are around you. Listen, I was at a grocery store a couple of weeks ago, and the individual was just incredible, you could tell he was… You know how they have those attendees at the self-checkout area, there’s always like one attendee. You know what I mean?

Brett McKay: Right.

Kyle Buckett: And this individual, you could tell this guy was a rock star, and the self-checkout area at a grocery store, which is eight different stations, was just like… You could feel the vibe, the energy, the positivity that this individual was having on all eight people that were just checking out of a grocery store. It was incredible. And I went up to that guy afterwards and I told him, and I gave him a big old pat on the back, my point is, ’cause you can have it at any level.

Brett McKay: You don’t need authority to be a leader that gets a self-led team going.

Kyle Buckett: That’s right.

Brett McKay: I think a lot of times we confuse authority with power, you can have power, but not… And by power, I mean like influence, I’m not talking about… But you can have that influence even if you’re not in a position of authority. You can get the ball rolling.

Kyle Buckett: Yeah. So well said.

Brett McKay: Well, we gotta end this with one of my favorite stories, you talk about the Finnish Army during World War II as a great example of what happens when a group organization becomes self-led. So this is the fight against the Soviet Union, this is like the largest military force at the time, and I think they had, if I remember correctly, like…

Kyle Buckett: Like 200,000.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and the Russians had three times more soldiers than the Finnish, five times more artillery, 30 times more aircraft, 100 times more tanks, and yet the Finns were able to hold these guys off for a long time. This is kinda like these basically farmers who put on their skis and used iron-sighted rifles to hold these guys off. So what can we learn from the Finnish Army during World War II about creating a culture of being a self-led team?

Kyle Buckett: Yeah. So they had… In the face of their limited resources and very, very challenging terrain, they had to make quick decisions on the ground. They’re buttoned up in skis and dressed in all white and they’re skiing around making quick decisions, and it really enabled them to have decentralized decision making, back to the earlier point, but the commanders placed a trust and competence in the expertise of their soldiers, even though they didn’t necessarily have great training like obviously the modern day Navy SEAL, but the officers really respected the skills of their subordinates, they respected what they brought to the table, and then they fed into that using guerilla tactics, reading off of, “Hey, this farmer or that mountain man knows this about the terrain, let’s feed into that, let’s exploit the strengths of our team and enable the culture to really encourage these soldiers to think creatively and adapt to the situation.” And so obviously they were extremely clear on their mission, they had trust, decentralized decision-making, empowerment, collaboration, all of it. It was incredible to read and learn of the story of how they were just cutting through the opposition, left and right, and they wouldn’t even see ’em coming ’cause they had never faced anything like this.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So yeah, I think it’s a great example of self-leadership, there wasn’t anyone telling these guys what to do, there was some top-down command, but the top-down command basically let these Finnish guys do things according to what they thought fit the situation. It was very decentralized.

Kyle Buckett: Yeah. And the Red Army, they thought this was gonna be like a week. [laughter] They thought this was gonna be a week, and then three and a half months later after the initial invasion, they’re just still getting hammered, right? They’re just getting hammered. So the numbers vary but if I remember correctly, the Finns suffered I think 25,000 deaths, and the Russians lost around 135,000.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Kyle Buckett: And another 150,000 wounded. So it’s pretty remarkable.

Brett McKay: And they also had this culture in Finland, they had this value called Sisu, which is, the best translation is, it’s like grit, determination, and they all shared that, and I think they inculcated that value… I mean, I’m sure their culture already inculcated that value but them being the Army and trying to do things on a shoe string and being economical and efficient, those types of things really probably reinforced that Sisu value of grit and hardihood and determination.

Kyle Buckett: Yeah, incredible, incredible.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, Kyle, this has been a great conversation, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Kyle Buckett: Thanks so much, www.leadershipisoverrated.com. Please check us out, you can learn more about our services and offerings and products. I appreciate your time here, Brett, this has been wonderful learning from you as well.

Brett McKay: Well, fantastic. Well, Kyle Buckett, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Kyle Buckett: Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Kyle Buckett. He’s the co-author of the book Leadership Is Overrated. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere, you can find more information about his work at his website, cultureforce.team. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/teams where you can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AoM Podcast, make sure to check on our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you, please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think could get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you all who listen to AoM Podcast, to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When Daniel Zia Joseph decided to join the Army at the unusually late age of 32, he solicited advice from his buddies who had served in the military on how to succeed in the experience and become a good officer and leader. Today, he passes on these leadership lessons to us.

Dan is the author of Backpack to Rucksack: Insight Into Leadership and Resilience From Military Experts, and he first shares why he decided to join the Army at an older age and what he would tell other guys who keep thinking about doing the same thing. We talk about how he prepared himself to be a leader and how getting his masters in organizational psychology helped deepen his development. We then discuss the lessons his military mentors imparted to him, including why you should pursue attrition, the importance of command climate, using psychological jiu-jitsu, and the difference between garrison and field leadership.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Dan’s video about joining the military after age 30
• AoM Podcast #875: Authority Is More Important Than Social Skills
• AoM Article: Are You a Strategist or an Operator?
• Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer

Connect With Dan Joseph

• Dan’s website — Combat Psych

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When Daniel Zia Joseph decided to join the army at the unusually late age of 32, he solicited advice from his buddies who had served in the military on how to succeed in the experience and become a good officer and leader. Today, he passes on these leadership lessons to us. Dan is author of Backpack to Rucksack, insight into leadership and resilience from military experts. And he first shares why he decided to join the army at an older age and what he would tell other guys who keep thinking about doing the same thing. We talk about how he prepared himself to be a leader and how getting his masters in organizational psychology helped deepen his development. We then discuss the lessons his military mentors imparted to him, including why he should pursue attrition, the importance of command climate, using psychological Jiu-jitsu and the difference between garrison and field leadership. After the show is over check out our show notes at aom.is/militarymentors.

All right, Dan Joseph, welcome to the show.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Hey, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you got a new book out called Backpack to Rucksack, where you share insights on leadership and resilience that you learned in the military and in your work in organizational psychology. But before we talk about the book, let’s talk about your experience joining the Army because you did so at the age of 32, which is unusually late in life. A lot of guys aren’t joining the Army at age 32. So what’s the age limit for joining the Army? Were you pretty close to the the upper end?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yes. So as a commissioned officer, I needed to commission by the age of 33. And I signed up at 32. So the recruiter definitely had my back against the wall saying you either sign the contract or you’re going to miss your window. So I jumped in. But yep, definitely pushed against that that age limit for the Army. Each branch has a different age limit. But I tell people to… I receive a lot of questions from people asking if they’re too old. And I tell them always ask a recruiter because those numbers do change depending on the needs of the government and military, what branches need.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about your life before you joined and like then what led you to signing up at age 32. So what was going on before age 32? So you’re 18. That’s when most guys, when they’re thinking about joining the army, they join right at a high school or maybe in college. What were you doing? And then talk about what was going on right before you joined at age 32.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah. So I have a pretty, pretty unique story, I guess, to myself. I worked in biotech for quite a while here in San Diego and a lot of genetic research companies out here. I’ve worked with companies that were genetically modifying specific organisms to create industry, new industry products, some wild stuff. And it led into a job involving machine learning algorithms and borderline AI back then a few years back, to basically enhance genetic codes to optimize genes and snip out disease markers from humans, from animals, a lot of really cool stuff happening. But I was essentially working initially in the laboratory and then I moved towards business development. And what really pushed me to join the military was when ISIS was actually attacking civilians and the populace in Iraq. My family is from there. My parents escaped barely with their lives back in the ’70s. And I had a lot of friends that I made here in San Diego who were on the SEAL teams, different branches who were deploying to go fight those guys.

And as I was over here, working in a world where we were literally using computer software to design genetic code and enhance the human species in a way that’s just absolutely mind blowing, My friends were in this primal fight in a war zone that they had nothing to do with. They were entering into that fight selflessly to go save people. And they came back with these stories that were just… They were literally fighting in the villages my parents grew up in. And I felt this deep desire to put on a uniform and contribute in any way possible. I just felt it was my duty because America saved my family. They gave us a place of refuge and that just really weighed heavy on me. So as I’m working on my company, I eventually started my own company and was making pretty good money, but then my friends would come back from these deployments telling me about some of the stuff they got into. And I just felt so compelled to let go of what I had here and to join the military, just to be able to tell myself before I’m on my death bed someday, like, hey, I did it.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about in the book during that time when you were working, you’re working hard, making good money. There’s also a hint of you felt kind of restless. There was drinking and you hang around the wrong kind of crowd and you just felt like you weren’t going anywhere either.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah. So, especially if you’re the child of say immigrants and you grew up in the United States. So, I was born in the US my parents, like I said, they left Iraq in the ’70s. I was really trying to discover myself in a way here that… Yeah, it involved the wrong crowd, for sure. I got involved into what I thought was sort of popular behaviors, a lot of drinking, and then that quickly moved into a crowd that use drugs, partied pretty hard, play hard, work hard. And I got caught up in a lifestyle where it was just… It was driven sort of by how cool people thought you were based on this persona. And it felt… It was extremely superficial, very high quantity, low quality with the relationships. I made some good friends, but it definitely didn’t require discipline. It just required showing up, getting drunk and trying to have as much fun as possible. But when I started meeting friends in the military, I noticed a stark contrast between their behaviors, their level of discipline, their presence, their physicality, how they approached life. And I was drawn to their mindset. They were super sharp, super driven. And they definitely had goals far beyond what I was doing, which was just basically going from hangover to hangover. And these guys were getting after it, training all the time. And it was really inspiring to me.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you joined up at age 32. Did you face any challenges joining at that age?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Honestly, no, I didn’t. I have a lot of friends who were in the military at the time. And they their number one piece of advice to me was stay physically fit. Because regardless of age, when you show up, your body is… It’s your resume to the guys around you, especially as an officer. People want to be led by somebody who inspires them. And when you show up in good shape physically, and you can do the rucks, you can do the runs, pull ups, push ups, everything that they test you in, the guys are going to follow you, they’re going to want to be a part of your group. And age was never an issue for me. The biggest thing I was told was to never use my age as a way to talk down to anybody or be condescending. Basically, if people wanted to tap into whatever life wisdom I had, then I would allow them to ask for that. But I was definitely schooled on, Hey, just show up, keep your mouth shut, be present, and just stay physically driven. That’s going to motivate people.

Brett McKay: So what did you end up doing in the army?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I was a combat engineer. So I was a platoon leader for 19 months. It was a separate platoon is what we call it. And essentially, we would simulate combat exercises with minefields and wire obstacles, tank ditches, basically, simulating what World War III may look like.

Brett McKay: So like, what advice would you give to older guys who… They keep thinking about, should I join the military? What should I do? Am I too old? What advice you have for them? Would you just recommend to just go for it?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, I mean, I definitely tell people, if you’re thinking about it, at least start training for it. Because here’s the thing, even if you don’t make it into the military, the fact that you got up and trained yourself and started running and started doing the dieting and all of that, that’s required to just be at your top shape, it will progress you to becoming a better version of yourself. So I don’t see any downfall to pursuing that there’s a lot of people that reach out to me saying, Hey, I don’t know if I’m going to get cleared for some some medical things, or maybe some past criminal activity or whatever it is that happened in their life. And I say, don’t close the door on it, there might be a recruiter out there who’s going to find a waiver for whatever it is you’re dealing with. And don’t ever let age or any sort of negative self thought hold you back. Don’t limit yourself. And it’s amazing to see what people have. I mean, I’ve talked to guys who’ve lost over a 100 pounds just training for a military gig. That’s phenomenal.

Brett McKay: All right. So there’s the big thing. If you’re older, just stay in shape. Like if you’re fit, they’re going to take you. If you, even if you’re at that age limit.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Absolutely. Yeah. Fitness is like the number one thing because you just, you have to be able to pass those fitness tests. Yeah.

Brett McKay: I think what I heard is that it’s something like 70% of young people wouldn’t be able to qualify for military service.

Daniel Zia Joseph: I’ve heard that.

Brett McKay: A lot of that is because of obesity. That’s why they’re having recruiting problems. So how did joining the army change your life and what are you doing now?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Well, so I’m out now. I was in for three and a half years. I’m actually thinking about signing another contract. I have a MEPs appointment coming up to go in and get medically screened again. But being in the military really changed my life in ways that I never thought. I definitely was close to the troops. I loved being around them. It taught me a lot about leadership. It taught me a lot about how to relate to others in an organization that’s just constantly under high stress, high op tempo, just back to back training. It really left a mark on me that I didn’t expect. So I don’t know what to say. I could talk a lot about that.

Brett McKay: And also while you were in the military, you got your… That’s where the work in organizational psychology came in, correct?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah. So the lockdowns impacted a lot of our training and during the downtime I thought to myself, what can I do to optimize? I didn’t want to just survive the lockdowns. I really wanted to thrive during the lockdown. So I thought, well, work out three times a day, don’t drink a drop of alcohol and get a master’s degree. And I lived by that. That was my day in and day out. And I wanted to come out of the lockdowns better than I ever was. And getting the masters was eye opening to me, because as I’m leading these soldiers, as I’m seeing the impact of mental health, as I’m talking to dudes that have been to war, the first and second waves in Fallujah and Iraq and dealing with all these issues. And, I’m working with them, I’m seeing the physiological response of what happens to them at work, based on what they experienced. Simultaneously, I’m writing these articles and doing my research for my master’s, it was just an amazing connection that I was realizing between the human brain, interpersonal relationships, organizational dynamics, and it definitely added a lot of depth to my understanding of what was going on.

Brett McKay: When you got out with your initial contract, did you go back to the corporate world or what was going on then?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So that was actually pretty recent, like a few months ago. So I’m currently working on another master’s degree and I can tell you that… I’m 36 now, And I can tell you that all the training I did in the military left… It put a fire in me. I’m in the best shape of my life right now, and I cannot sit still. I mean, I’m working out multiple workouts a day, still doing ruck runs, still staying physically active. And I thought that when I got out of the military, I would be totally okay with a much more sedentary life, back into an office environment. And that’s… Yeah, that’s definitely not what happened. It’s really shocking to me. So I’m currently doing some training with a group of guys that are working on some amazing pipelines in the military. They have some tough pipelines ahead of them, and I’m working side by side with them right now at the gym, doing some runs with them. And they’re motivating me a lot more than I thought I could ever be motivated. So that’s why I’m kind of looking into some additional contracts in the next few months, actually.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about your book. So Backpack to Rucksack, what you did is leading up to you trying to figure out whether you’re gonna sign up with the Army. And also during that time when you were going through the process of training and whatnot, you got a lot of military friends and that you were talking to them, asking them for advice. Like, what do I need to know when I’m going through this process and becoming a commissioned officer? How do I handle this situation? And what you did in the book is you shared these insights you got from these various friends of yours in the military from all branches of the military. And then you combine that with your research that you’ve done in organizational psychology. And so each chapter highlights a different concept or topic. And in the first part of the book, the first chapter, you talk about this bit of advice you got from… I think it was a Green Beret friend of yours, about pursuing attrition in life, but also in the military world. What did he mean by that?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So his advice was to pursue pipelines in the military that people complained about. Pursue… Basically his philosophy is that any route you want to take in life that other people are afraid of or that they’re being just really critical or negative about it’s a filtration mechanism. It’ll stop the wrong people from pursuing it and it’ll filter for the stronger candidates. And he was just saying, make sure that… When you join the military, if you do want to find group of brothers around yourself that are just operating at a level that is far beyond your own perceived limitations, you need to go down some hard pads that remove the guys who just tap out early. And he said, next thing you know, you’ll be rubbing elbows with other people that are like-minded who sort of keep their mouth shut and just work really hard.

Brett McKay: And this is applicable outside the military too, in work, in your physical fitness. If you want to rub elbows with the best, just top-notch individuals, do the hard stuff ’cause that’s gonna filter out all the riff-raff.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Essentially, that was exactly how he approached life, yep.

Brett McKay: So let’s talk about another concept you learned from a friend of yours who’s a marine named Will, and he taught you the importance of command climate. What is command climate?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Essentially, it’s culture. It’s work culture. In the military, it’s really unique because the person at the top in whatever unit you’re looking at tends to… They set the temperature for the entire unit. So if you have someone who is super physical and super into fitness, you’ll see that everyone below them, all the subordinates suddenly begin to really invest in fitness. They suddenly become really gym oriented. But on the converse side of that, let’s say you have someone who is really negative and really, it’s an overused word, but if they say they’re toxic or have certain insecurities or they have a shame-based orientation towards their leadership style, you’ll see people below them begin to treat others the same way. And you can’t really change command climate in the military. You can’t walk into a unit and go up to somebody at that rank and say, hey, sir, hey, ma’am, I need you to conduct yourself differently, so we can all experience a whole different climate. What you get is what you get. And Will’s advice was you gotta make the most of it. If it’s bad, it’s gonna be bad, but you gotta just figure out how to handle it until that leader leaves and you get someone new. And if it’s good, then definitely count your blessings and just… You’re gonna have a blast in the job for sure. They’re gonna make the job awesome.

Brett McKay: Did you have any experiences of really bad command climate in the corporate world or the military?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I mean, definitely I’ve seen good and bad. I mean, as we all have, I’m sure, so definitely have seen the impact of it. And what’s astounding to me is the way in which it compounds the stress around us, because, I tell people attack problem sets, don’t attack people. If something sucks, if something needs to be enhanced or optimized or modified, whatever it is, the military and the corporate world, look at the problem set before you. You don’t have to make it personal. You don’t have to bring emotions into it and attack others and involve ego. So what I’ve seen good leaders do is when there is an issue that needs to be addressed, they are enablers of people. They enable subordinates. They enable everyone around them to find solutions. And if you fail, then okay, so be it, but pick yourself up and find the next solution that’ll work. Own it and make it great. Figure out a way to make the situation better. But what I’ve noticed toxic leaders will do is they will have a more fixed mindset as Carol Dweck talks about growth versus fixed mindset. They’ll sort of approach the situation as, hey, nothing’s gonna change. This is the way it is. Shut up and fall in line. I don’t care what your opinion is. I don’t care what data you have from your perspective.

I don’t see a viable solution and I don’t care that you think there is one. Just carry on, keep everything status quo how it is. And it’s stifling. And it’s not just on the job. We take it home with us. It follows us home, that stress, that level of… That feeling of not having a voice. It’s really repressive. And it feeds a lot into the personality of the leader. So again, if it’s a great leader, if there’s somebody who’s open-minded, you’ll feel that. There will be a sense of levity, even amidst highly stressful conversations or situations.

And one thing I will say, there was an EOD that talked to us about his experience in Iraq. There was a guy that got blown up, and there was a body on the ground. And I mean, definitely the dude was jacked up. And the medic started panicking. And the EOD ran up to him because in those situations, the medic takes control, right? Takes over. A lot of the guys who survived the blast, were looking at the medic starting to lose control. So this EOD ran up to him and grabbed him and said, look, man, I need you to take a breath, and I need you to focus. Do what you can to save this guy. If you can’t, fine. But do what you can, but everyone’s watching you right now. And what he was telling us as new officers, he said, look, your attitude is everything in the military because calm is contagious, just the same way that panic is contagious. So whatever type of leader you’re going to be, the men around you, the women around you are going to pick up on that. So be sure to lead and conduct yourself in a way that you want other people to pick up. Because good or bad, they will pick up on whatever vibe you’re putting out into the unit.

Brett McKay: Okay, so yeah, in order to be a leader that creates a good command climate, it’s just… It’s a lot of self work, right? It’s working to learn how to control your emotions, working on your own discipline, working on those social and people skills, those soft skills, it’s a full-time job. It’s not just something that happens, it’s something you have to be intentional about.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Absolutely, and I learned that in the corporate world. When I started my own business, I had a mentor, George. He was like a father figure to me. And I was struggling with some high-power executives that were… I was in some negotiations that were just absolutely intimidating to me. And George pulled me aside in sort of a coaching seminar that we had together, a discussion we had. And he let me know. He said, look, basically, the man that you are privately, it’s going to come out in the room when you negotiate. And he said, the other men you’re dealing with are sharks. I mean, if they smell blood in the water, you’re dead. They’re going to tear you to pieces in a negotiation. So he said, you got to work on yourself. You got to know who you are outside of the business world, outside of the office, who you are privately, when you put your head on the pillow at night, when you look in the mirror, who are you? Once you figure out who you are, and you have a grasp on that, and you ground yourself in that, you can then approach the negotiations with that level of confidence that is gonna allow you to have better leverage, and other people will not take advantage of you. Situations that suck won’t take advantage of you.

They won’t change you. You will bring light into that dark situation. And that was one of the most profound pieces of information I received because I realized that, if I don’t work on myself, the guys around me are gonna suffer. My ego issues, my insecurities, my personal private hangups are gonna come out at work in the way that I speak to others and the way that I treat others. And then all of a sudden they have to manage my emotions for me. And the job’s stressful enough, especially in the military. Training can be life and death. And if I’m bringing my own ego issues and the guys around me have to manage that, man, I’m doing them a disservice. So yeah, absolutely. I encourage every leader, pick up books, read, study yourself because you’re gonna benefit the organization, you’re gonna benefit your relationships, your marriages, your relationship with your kids. Everything will benefit when you grow yourself privately and personally.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So in the military, you have to deal with all sorts of personalities, especially big personalities. Did you have any experience dealing with difficult people with big egos when you were in the military?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, I mean, the… It’s common to see people… And again, this happens in any organization, but when you see someone use their rank as a way of trying to stifle others, trying to sort of demand control… And psychology, they call that positional authority. You can have moral authority, you can have positional authority. Moral basically means when you walk in a room, regardless of rank, people, they trust you, they know that you know things, they see that confidence in you. Positional authority means, hey, do you know who I am? Do you know where I am on the hierarchy. Okay, cool. So fall in line, they rely on their rank. And yeah, I mean, I’ve seen that and I’ve had to manage that, absolutely.

Brett McKay: Did you have any military friends who gave you any advice on what to do with those big egos? People who were trying to use their positional authority to get things the way they wanted?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the biggest pieces of advice on that was my buddy Brad, he’s an EOD commander now, but he was deployed in Afghanistan. And he told me about some situations where guys would try to pull rank, and he would let them know… I mean, and this would happen in the battlefield, as he’s dealing with an IED. And he had to tell people, some people who’re very high rank to shut up and sit down, because if they continue to distract him, there could be fallout that’ll kill everybody around them. So what he taught me was, when you know something is correct, there’s a way to present it to somebody who’s an authority with a respectful attitude, yet assertive. Assertion is really important when you know something is right. So it is important to stand by what you know. However, depending on what personality you’re dealing with, you got to manage it in a way that they will be receptive to it. And at that point, it’s really dependent on the person that you’re dealing with because sometimes direct is the best approach. Other times you got to stroke their ego a bit. You got to find a way to… I don’t want to say play the politics of it, ’cause that can get really dirty, but you got to find a way to get them to have an open mind.

And this is where… I mean, I could talk for days about this, but this is something we learn in Jiu-jitsu as well. We call it working the angles, basically. Jiu-jitsu is all about having the right angle. Approaching leadership dynamics, it’s the same way. Certain leaders, again, hit them head on. They’ll respect that, they’ll respond to it. Other leaders, you can’t do that, because once you do it, it’s fight mode, and the discussion’s completely derailed.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you gave some examples in the book of… I think when you were in basic training, you had some guys who were kind of big dogging, right? They just kind of… They kind of walked around like they were the stuff, right? They had the stuff and they were just annoying. And they would do these things where they kind of confront you and try to assert themselves over you in the dominance hierarchy. And you talked about how you’re really tempted to just… I’m gonna punch back or I’m gonna push back, I’m gonna get angry about it. But like you said, you did some like psychological Jiu-jitsu on these guys to, instead of them being enemies or a liability, they actually ended up being an asset. Like what did you do to turn those guys from… Like you weren’t best friends with them, but they became guys who you could collaborate with and get things done.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, I think in retrospect, maybe they were trying to size me up to see if I would stand up for myself. And in any case, I was very direct when I approached them. I maintained eye contact. I was very direct, but I also did it privately. I didn’t do it in a way… So they would… There’s a situation where I was being called out in front of the entire platoon. And this was in training, not my actual platoon, but back in the schoolhouse. And so what I decided to do is control my heart rate, control my breathing. It’s the same way like on the mats when I’m getting smashed by one of the black belts that I train with. I need to gain physiological control of my body, calm myself down. And then what I did is I directly approached one of these individuals and I let them know, hey, we’re going to have a conversation about this, but again, it’s not going to be emotional.

This is just gonna be man to man, we’re just gonna have a quick talk about this. And he quickly realized that I wasn’t there to start a fight, I was there to learn. I let him know that, I said, look, I know I’m new, I know you’ve been in the military for a while, I’m not here to be disrespectful. I’m not here to flex on anyone. I’m here to learn. So if you have something to teach me, I’m all ears. But I’m not gonna play this game of one-upmanship, that’s just not how I roll. And I learned that because of my high school friend, Tim, who introduced me to Jiu-jitsu. He told me that if you’re ever dealing with somebody who just absolutely wants to tear you to pieces on the mat and wants to smash your face into the mat, you need to tell them, I’m not here to fight. I’m here to learn. So if you’re here to fight, that’s not why I’m here. And it really has tremendously had an impact on the mats. So I started taking that principle into the military and it had the same impact. It was amazing.

Brett McKay: All right. So yeah, be direct, do it in private. You can be assertive, but not a jerk about it. I guess is the key. Let’s talk about the politics of military life. So you mentioned that that military can be political and by political, we mean that you do… The people who do and say things, whatever it takes to advance their career. Well, you talked about, you learned this from your military buddies that politics can get in the way of effectiveness. How so?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So, and again, this is highly applicable to the corporate world, to any organization. Some people will use their rank and authority to get their agenda done. Whatever their agenda is, usually I’d say to promote their own sort of resume, but they’ll do so at the expense of the well-being of those around them, not wanting to hear about inconvenient pieces of information about the organization, but that can quickly get dark. So what’s really important and the advice I received is listen to the people around you, give everybody a voice so you know what exactly needs to be improved to help others and any rank that… As you rank up, the higher rank you get, the more people you serve. It’s not the other way around, because a lot of people commonly think that with more rank and more authority, you have more power over more people. But if you look at it inversely, it really helps add a healthier context to the relationship. The more rank you have, the higher up you are, the more people you are actually serving as a leader.

And the way you serve those people is… And I get it, you can’t have a perfect solution that everybody’s happy with. But the more conversations you have, the more incremental improvements you can have throughout the organization by removing red tape wherever you can remove red tape, allowing people to get the schools that they want to get, to work towards the credentials, to pursue the education they need, to have time with their family, with their kids, if they need medical help, whatever it is, just allowing rank to be used to improve the unit and not to just demand sort of respect authoritatively.

Brett McKay: So take a servant leadership approach instead of thinking about, well, how can I advance the hierarchy and improve my own status and rank?

Daniel Zia Joseph: Right.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And for a book, I don’t know if you’ve read this book. It’s a great book that highlights the difference between a military leader who is very political and one who has that servant leadership approach. It’s a Once an Eagle. Have you read this book?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So that book is definitely the Bible to a lot of my friends. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, so this book is written in 1968. It follows these two officers from World War I through Vietnam. One guy is Sam Damon, career army officer, started off as a private, and then he rose up to general officer rank and he was honorable. Like he was all about his soldiers. He was like the epitome, like he was the guy. And then the other guy who was the more political officer was this guy named Courtney Massingale. No honor, had no concern for his troops. All he cared about was going up in the rank. And it’s a great book if you want. It’s a beast of a book, but a lot of great lessons on leadership, especially about that dichotomy between being a political leader and a servant leadership type leader.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Definitely. We’ve had a lot of talks about that book. Yep.

Brett McKay: So a lot of the advice in the book is about just how to stay calm, right? Even when things are going just crazy around you. What was some of the best advice you got from your military buddies on staying calm during chaos?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I mean, essentially, just have an awareness of your physiological response to kind of zero out your own emotional impact in a situation. Because oftentimes, when, let’s say, a mission set suddenly changes, so we have a movement. We’re trying to get the convoy from one location to another. And everybody’s been briefed on it. And then suddenly a wrench gets thrown in. Because we were simulating combat as realistically as possible. And there’s tempers flare. People get real mad real quick when it’s 125 degrees and you’re in your full kit. And we’re talking about some dangerous terrain, some night movements. Things can get real sketchy real fast. And as a leader especially, if I were to feed into that angst with that same level of anger and frustration as I’m trying to brief the change in the mission, I mean, it would be horrible. It would just turn into this cluster of egos and sparks would fly. People would just be yelling at each other and I never wanted to do that. So the advice I received was, hey, look, when things suck, you just gotta calm yourself down, find your center. Again, remove the emotionality out of it, the primal limbic response of the brain. Get back into your prefrontal cortex. And I’m talking psychology here, but essentially get into your higher mind and come in there with a sense of awareness and transparency.

Like, hey guys, this is gonna suck. I know it’s gonna suck, all right, but here’s the change. We’re gonna do it, but let’s just… Let’s get it done. We know what needs to be done. And having that open and honest, that truthful approach, it helps kind of quell the anxiety of those around you. Because then they realize, you’re not leaving things undiscussed. Everything can be talked about. And then, yeah, we just kind of get over it. Like, all right, cool. Yeah, you acknowledge it sucks. I acknowledge it sucks as well. All right, let’s do it. And let’s do it safely. And let’s do it in a manner that’s efficient. But when people come in and say, hey, something changed. You’re going to do it. Don’t talk back. Get into the vehicle. Do this. Do that. Whatever it is that needs to be changed. Oh, man, there’s going to be some resentment that builds quickly.

Brett McKay: So you have a chapter on knowing the difference between garrison and field leadership. What’s the difference between the two?

Daniel Zia Joseph: So yeah, my artillery officer buddy told me that, Jazz. So, okay, so in the field, you deal with… Like let’s say desert terrain or whatever. It could be in the woods, it could be… I don’t know, wherever you are. But you’re dealing with more kinetic factors of the job. You’re dealing with weapons systems, you’re dealing with, adverse weather conditions, rough terrain, and if you’re a leader who… So in garrison, it’s on base. That’s more of the office side. That’s more the paperwork and stuff like that. So let’s say you’re great at the paperwork. If you go out in the field and you suck, then you could lead your convoy off a cliff. Conversely, if you’re really good at the tactics in the field and you’re good at moving people around and getting things done out there, but you come back to the office life and you don’t know how to work a computer or write a memo, then your guys are going to suffer because you’re not able to put in the awards for them. You’re not able to get them to the schools that they need to get to or help them with anything else that’s related to their personal lives.

So my buddy was telling me you could be two of three things in the military. Good at two of three things. You could be either a good officer in the field, you could could be a good officer in garrison or a good person. You can’t be all three, you’re always just two of those three. But he said always default to being a good person. ‘Cause whether you suck in the field or you suck in garrison, your guys are gonna have your back. But if you’re not a good person, then it doesn’t matter that you’re good at the other two, ’cause everyone’s gonna suffer. So that’s kind of the short and sweet.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think we wrote an article a while back ago about this difference between Garrison and Field, between Eisenhower and Patton. So Patton was probably… He was probably the better tactical officer. He loved being out in the field, being with the men and being in the muck and just being in the action. Eisenhower was more of a strategic officer, the Garrison. He was really good at people skills, negotiating, dealing with administrative things, things like that.

And because I think their personality suited those different things. And I think a lot of leaders, they get into trouble whenever they… They might be better as a field officer, but they get stuck in a garrison position or the opposite, like a garrison leader gets stuck in a field position. And I think the trick in leadership is finding out what you’re good at. And so this applies to the corporate world as well. You might be a guy who… Say you’re in sales or something. You’re really great being out in the field and talking to customers and dealing with other salesmen and encouraging them and motivating them. And maybe you get the promotion to manage a whole region, or maybe you’re at the office headquarters and you’re just miserable because it just doesn’t suit your personality. So I think that’s another trick of leadership is trying to figure out what you’re good at and leaning into that and not being tempted to go to something else because it might seem more prestigious or they might have more status.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. And I would say the best way to handle that situation when things seem sort of out of sync with who you are is to rely on those around you. And again, being a leader is being an enabler. So enabling those people around you to compensate for those deficits, to use their strength to, as a team, build a better unit. So that’s huge. So if ego gets in the way and a leader says, no, I got this, I know the book on this, I know the solutions and I’ll fix it, I’ll figure it out. Everyone’s gonna stand around and just watch that leader fail. So it’s really important to just admit, hey guys, look, I’m great at this stuff, this stuff right here, I need your help. So let’s do it. And with that open honesty and that mindset, it really helps shift everything around for that unit.

Brett McKay: So Dan, we talked about some great concepts in your book. Is there anything that we missed that you’re really passionate about that you hope people will get out of it?

Daniel Zia Joseph: The biggest thing that’s on my mind is the suicides that happen with veterans and with active duty service members. Leaders can do so much to just approach the job with a sense of humanity, a sense of kindness, a sense of love for their troops that doesn’t stop their tactical abilities. It enhances it. And this isn’t something I’ve necessarily just come up with on my own. This is something people who’ve been to war have told me. They said the purest feeling was being in a war zone, where the number one concern is, did everyone make it back from that movement, from that patrol? Is everyone intact? Is everyone here? Are they present? Are they okay? These service members that I got to work with and these friends that I’ve just… I’m so pumped that I was able to learn from them. And they just… They told me to focus on the relationships, because when you do that, you give people the resources and the tools to handle all the struggles in life that come home with them, where they’re not around their buddies, they’re not connected with others necessarily, but they understand how to handle it. They see their value, they see their capacity to overcome and that resilience stays true. So I would say the biggest takeaway is if you’re a leader, please don’t be afraid to look into what we consider the softer side of human relationships.

Because counterintuitively, it will not stop you from being a savage tactically, to being able to crush whatever physical feat is before you. But I just see sort of this trepidation about approaching leadership that way, because people don’t wanna seem vulnerable and weak. And I understand that, but do the research. Look at the psychological implications of connecting with people in that deeper level because it will save lives.

Brett McKay: Well, Dan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Daniel Zia Joseph: I have a website, CombatPsych.com, they can go to. And the book is on Amazon, Backpack to Rucksack, insight into leadership and resilience for military experts. And they can just put my name on there, Dan Joseph.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Dan Joseph, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Daniel Zia Joseph: Thank you, appreciate it.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dan Joseph. He’s the author of the book Backpack to Rucksack. It’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, CombatPsych.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/military mentors, where you find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at ArtOfManliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code Manliness to check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You heard about The Art of War, and it sounded pretty cool. So you picked up a copy to read. But you found that, beyond a few of its famous maxims, a lot of this text attributed to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu was hard to understand, much less incorporate into your life.

My guest offers a tripartite framework that can help you get a lot more out of The Art of War. His name is Jim Gimian, and he’s an editor of one of the text’s translations as well as the co-author of The Rules of Victory: How to Transform Chaos and Conflict—Strategies from The Art of War. Today on the show, Jim argues that The Art of War is a holistic, interconnected text that’s about how to approach conflict and obstacles in a holistic, interconnected way. Underlying this approach are three dynamics: Heaven, Earth, and General, which correspond to View, Practice, and Action. Jim and I talk about the importance of constantly orienting and reorienting yourself to an ever-changing world, working with the shih, or energy, in the landscape you’re navigating, using action to further refine your perspective, and more.

Resources Related to the Episode

• The Art of War: The Denma Translation
• Professor Andrew Wilson’s Great Courses course on Masters of War
• AoM Podcast #664: The Masters of the Art of War With Andrew Wilson
• AoM Article: 43 Books About War Every Man Should Read
• AoM Article: Lessons from The Art of War — Good Leaders vs. Bad Leaders
• AoM Article: The Tao of Boyd — How to Master the OODA Loop

Connect With Jim Gimian

• The Rules of Victory website
• Jim on LinkedIn

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art Manliness Podcast. You heard about The Art of War, and it sounded pretty cool. So you picked up a copy to read. But you found that, beyond a few of its famous maxims, a lot of this text attributed to the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu was hard to understand, much less incorporate into your life.

My guest offers a tripartite framework that can help you get a lot more out of The Art of War. His name is Jim Gimian, and he’s an editor of one of the text’s translations as well as the co-author of The Rules of Victory: How to Transform Chaos and Conflict-Strategies from The Art of War. Today on the show, Jim argues that The Art of War is a holistic, interconnected text that’s about how to approach conflict and obstacles in a holistic, interconnected way. Underlying this approach are three dynamics: Heaven, Earth, and General, which correspond to View, Practice, and Action. Jim and I talk about the importance of constantly orienting and reorienting yourself to an ever-changing world, working with the shih or energy, in the landscape you’re navigating, using action to further refine your perspective and more. After the show is over check out our show notes at aom.is/artofwar. Alright, Jim Gimian, welcome to the show.

Jim Gimian: Hey, thanks Brett. Thanks for inviting me. Good to talk to you.

Brett McKay: So you co-authored a book called “The Rules of Victory: How to Transform Chaos and Conflict.” And this is basically, you and your co-author have taken the things you talk about in your consulting work, leadership consulting, about lessons from Sun Tzu’s, The Art of War. I’m curious, how did you end up teaching leadership programs based on this Chinese text of war strategy?

Jim Gimian:Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s a long story, and I’ll give away a little bit of my age here, you know, it really started, like a lot of things we discovered that are helpful and valuable in our lives, it started with an experience of being disappointed and being disillusioned, and having a feeling that things should be better than this, and that happened to be in a number of different areas simultaneously, and it goes back to the years I was in college, I was at Stanford in the late ’60s, and it was a great small college at that point with a great reputation, and I went full of pep and looking to become one of the great leaders as everybody does at 17.

It was possible in those days to get to know your professors very well which I did. They were arguably the leaders in their field. And part of getting to know them is you get invited to their houses and meet their families and observe close in and what became evident really quickly is, there was no transfer between the wisdom that they attained as their big heroes in their field of expertise, and the way they treated their family at home, and I just thought, “I don’t think I wanna wind up where this road leads.”

And this was also the time of tremendous amount of disruption and disillusionment, and disintegration of structures in our society in the late ’60s, the anti-war, civil rights, counter-culture, psychedelic era, and I was able to witness first-hand the anti-war movement very close up, and it soon became clear that neither side really had any kind of insight into how to overcome aggression. And as a young guy who kind of reverted to force and aggression to solve my problems, I just again, saw there was no real insight. So the final look, I think part of it was, this was the psychedelic era, and there were opportunities to take classes in using Hallucinogens to understand more about your mind, and I took a couple of those classes, speaking metaphorically here, of course.

And it was tremendously eye-opening. It showed that reality was not something that was fixed, and more than that, my version of reality wasn’t always the only one. So those kind of propelled me out of the college scene and really took me into the Art of War, among other things in the early ’70s. And that started me on a long course, I found a group of friends and colleagues, other men who were studying it, so we kinda had a men’s group over a number of years, and little by little, we saw that there was a lot of profundity that was not coming through in these older translations. So at the time, I had a good friend who was doing his PhD in Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, so I said to him, one day, I said, “So look, man, there’s a lot of stuff in here that these other translations aren’t bringing out, let’s do a translation with the men’s group and you.” And he looked at me without any hesitation, and he said, “You’re crazy, we can’t do that.”

So I left that conversation kinda with my tail between my legs and went back to the men’s group, and a couple of years later, I was at a conference, and I was standing in the lunch line, and this friend, this guy who’s just finished his degree in Asian Studies and got a job at Bowdoin College butts into the line, he looks at me and he says, “Okay, Jim, I’m ready.” So I say, “Well, Ready for what?” And he says, “You know, translate the Art of War.”

And without skipping a beat, I looked at him, and I said, “We can’t do that. That’s crazy.” Well, we did. We started, and we started very simply. We took the parts of the text that really were most meaningful for us, often the sort of maxims or slogans that everybody knows, and we translated those, and little by little, they showed that there was a lot of profundity in those parts that were more opaque, and that we didn’t really make a connection to.

Well, before too long, we had the whole thing translated, we submitted it to publishers, signed a contract, and now sold over a million copies in 11 languages. And that is called The Art of War, The Denma translation, that was the first book, which has essays and commentary that we wrote on the lines. So when that came out, I got asked to teach to people who were saying, “This is great stuff, but how do I actually do it in my life and in my leadership capacity?” So I responded to those requests over five or years and “The Rules of Victory,” is an attempt to summarize what I learned in responding to those people who asked the question, “How can I do this in my life?”

So it’s been a long journey. It’s never been like a franchise or a full-time gig, but it’s been constant, it’s been continuous and spread by natural connections, people like you who somehow connected to the book, saw some insights there that they thought would be helpful for them and had a genuine connection to it, and that led me to more work. Now that I’m kind of scaling down my work in the non-profit sector, I’m able to engage more with the teaching and the coaching around The Art of War, and it now leads me to this conversation with you.

Brett McKay: So The Art of War, I think, it’s a book that threw, I think young men, I remember in high school, I picked up a copy from Barnes & Noble thinking that it would provide some sort of insight on how to be effective and conquer the world. And as you said, I think as a young man, I was really drawn to those maxims or slogans, but what I hope this conversation does is it susses out, it really flushes out that bigger view, the profundity that you were talking about. Before we do, let’s talk about The Art of War itself, the history of it. It was authored, the author, you often see there is this guy named Sun Tzu. Who was Sun Tzu? Was it a real person? More than one person. It’s kind of like asking, “Who was Homer? Who wrote the The Odyssey?”

Jim Gimian: Yeah, yeah. Well, by way of background, the Art of War comes to us from what’s called the Warring States Period of China, roughly speaking 500 to 200 BC. It started in this period. What we know as China on the mainland was maybe 75 or more small kingdoms and fiefdoms spending a lot of time either repelling invasions from the North mostly or trying to take over each other. So there was a lot of ongoing battles between them and over some time, it sort of settled into about 15 larger kingdoms. And at the start of this time, there were no standing armies. If the king wanted to declare war, he challenged the opposing King to a kind of almost a dance in decked out chariots and someone would be declared the winner, and that’s how they take over the adjoining kingdom. But little by little, this need to develop standing armies when the king wanted to go to war, the King would conscript farm workers, and these were largely untrained, ignorant young men, and the King would hire a mercenary General.

And the role of this mercenary General was… By mercenary, meaning he might work for one kingdom, one campaign, and another kingdom the next. But what this mercenary King had to do was to take this band of ignorant farm boys and train them as an army. And largely, what we come to know as The Art of War now, is the means by which the mercenary General did that. The Sun Tzu, we refer to the text as the Sun Tzu because it is a body of work that probably emerged over several generations during this period, scholars themselves are mixed on the issue of, “Was there a real historical character?” Some say yes, some say maybe. Some say, no.

I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that, but I can tell you from our point of view, this represents a kind of a lineage, a conversation that went on over that period, and from our point of view has continued to this day. Because if you read the literature, you will see not just the text itself, these 13-scanned chapters that are left, but oodles of commentaries by military leaders across the centuries who are joining in the conversation. So when we do a workshop, most often in a corporate setting, we actually described this as continuing that conversation, we’re grappling with these same issues of “How does one deal more effectively with conflict that’s all around us in human existence? How can we do that better? What means, what views, what methods lead to a more successful engagement with conflict?”

Brett McKay: So it was written, kinda came out about and during The Warring States Period, and because of that, that shapes the strategies or the insights that you find in the Art of War. So it’s a period where there’s lots of different kingdoms and they were constantly jockeying for position, one guy could be in charge for a little bit, then another guy, so it’s very uncertain. Conflict was always happening, and that shapes what we get in the Art of War.

Jim Gimian: And what does that remind you of? Is that a description of anything else in the modern day?

Brett McKay: Yeah, today. Yeah today, yeah.

Jim Gimian: That’s right, yeah.

Brett McKay: I mean, like, someone who owns… Who is a business owner, you’re competing, it’s constantly shifting, guys who are on top five years ago can be out of business today.

Jim Gimian: Exactly, exactly. And that’s one of the reasons why the lessons and the methodologies that were honed over hundreds of years in that setting in China, are so applicable and valuable because it emerged in a time very similar to ours. And so the view, the elements that created successful, and skillful techniques lead to the same now. The ability to respond to uncertainty, to be able to shift quickly, to respond to the changes. And I think one element that we emphasize is that during that time in China, the world view was that the world was not separate entities, but it was one interconnected, interdependent, constantly changing whole thing. And that’s another way in which our view has shifted over the last 40 or 50 years.

We used to see the world as individual things that we could act upon. Well, as things got more complex, as the whole uncertainty, and the emergence of complexity as a kind of foremost way of looking at the world took over our view, it didn’t work anymore. People had to throw out their strategic plans because they became useless within hours of being completed, because everything had changed already.

So the kinds of trainings of how to respond that come out of that time of seeing the world interconnected, now it’s a little easier for us to see the interconnection, social media, the internet, the weather patterns that are changing constantly. The way in which… Look at the supply chain issues in terms of inter-connectivity. So we’re able more genuinely to adopt a view, the least the skillful actions, it starts with that interconnected view.

Brett McKay: And we’ll talk more about that ’cause that’s a big important point from the Art of War that you’ve flushed out. But before we do, before we flush out this profoundity you want people to take away when they read your book, when you talk to people about the Art of War, ’cause I think a lot of people have maybe read quips of it. What do you think a lot of people get wrong or miss when they read The Art of War?

Jim Gimian: Well, first of all, I think we have to admit it’s a tough read. It can often be opaque and dense, and difficult to understand it. It doesn’t give up its treasures easily. So… And then a lot of people just dismiss it out of hand, ’cause it’s all about war and war-like and people wanna think they can deal with conflict in a whole different way. But I think, in my view over the years, the main thing is that as I just said, the skillful actions actually arise from seeing the world as an interconnected whole and the part that most people miss is that we as leaders are an integrated part of that interconnected whole.

So the mistake people make is they think they can extract a few of the lessons and then use that to sort of get over on others, they’re apart from that interconnected whole. They can act upon others, they can conquer and one up others using these little tricks. And the magic of those skills, which appear as tricks to people, comes from that view of interconnectedness, and if you don’t have that, then there’s a power in things like employing shih, this great sort of central view of working with the energy that’s in systems in the world, is not possible. It’s like any kind of discipline where you see somebody dip in, quickly learn some of the language and then start teaching it. You kind of have a feeling that they’ve never genuinely learned the deeper discipline, they’ve never really integrated the deeper lessons, and therefore the maxims, and the tricks, don’t have the profundity, you can kind of feel it.

Brett McKay: So I think you argue that to really understand The Art of War, you have to understand this framework, it’s a tri-part framework of Heaven, Earth General. So let’s talk about Heaven first. What does Heaven mean in the Art of War?

Jim Gimian: Well, I think the first thing to take note of is the Heaven, Earth and General framework appears in a lot of places in Chinese philosophy and literature, and it appears in the very first chapter of The Art of War as the middle of what the first chapter calls, “The Five.” The first chapter is about an overview and how to take assessments, how to actually look at a situation and see, “Well, do you stand a chance of dealing with conflict in a victorious way?” What are the obstacles? What can you learn?

So The Five starts with the Dao, which is that sense of how things really are, the rules, the law. When you apply that to a situation, what the Dao means is, “Is there coherence between the leader and the army?” Or the leader and the team, if it’s a corporate setting. Is there a common culture, context, language and view that gives cohesion and strength? Then it goes into, number two is Heaven, number three is Earth, number four is a the General, and then number five of The Five is what’s called, Methods. And that’s the way a General actually organizes and orders, and develops an army.

So in the middle, you have these three, Heaven. Now, first, let’s talk about how a General regards these three. For a General, Heaven is the weather. Because if you’re gonna move an army, you have to know what conditions will you be facing that are weather-related. Earth in a military setting is terrain. So what’s the ground of the situation? What ground am I moving in the army through? What will that require? And the General, the General is literally the person who’s gotta make the decisions joining the realities of the weather and the terrain.

So really, if you take a step back and apply this principle to any leadership setting, leaders basically are faced with the same situation. Heaven can be aspirations, the vision, what you have to accomplish, the future that you’re trying to bring abrow. Earth is the conditions of the situation, the realities of whatever the setting is. If you’re talking about taking a team through a successful campaign to launch a new product, “Oh, what’s the ground of that? What’s the competition? What’s your capability to produce and market? What’s your capability to actually successfully launch? And then as the leader, you’ve got to assess how you have a goal, how you inevitably have obstacles or resistance, on this notion of the Earth.

And then how do you move forward? So I think it’s easiest to understand something like Heaven or Earth or General in the context of how it works as a system altogether.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And another way of looking at this framework is that Heaven is view, Earth is practice, and General is action. And it’s interesting this view part, right? So Heaven, view, how we see the world. It reminded me of another military strategist, John Boyd, who developed the…

Jim Gimian: Oh yeah.

Brett McKay: The OODA loop.

Jim Gimian: Yeah.

Brett McKay: The view part is the orient, right? And he said that orient part of this OODA loop thing of observe-orient-decide-act, orient is how you see the world. It’s all these mental models and your culture could contribute to it. And the goals that you had going into a decision and the orient phase that drove how you would act or make decisions. And then it would… It was a cycle. It would just cycle through. You’d make an action, you would see what happened with your action and then you’d put that back into the orient phase and then decide again and act and over and over again. And Sun Tzu was basically saying the same thing thousands of years ago.

Jim Gimian: That’s right. And of course, you know if you’re a student of John Boyd and the OODA loop, you know that he was a great student of The Art of War and integrated a lot of that into his development of fighter pilot training. I mean, he’s regarded as the founder of many of the basics of jet fighting strategy and action. And what you described is exactly what he taught.

Brett McKay: And he also talked about this idea, you have to see things holistically because like the stuff that he talked about was used later on in counterinsurgencies, right? And he said, “In order to be an effective counter insurgent, you have to… You can’t just think about the battles. You also have to think about, well, if we win this battle, that might have some negative consequences.” And so we have to do it in a certain way and we have to maybe win the hearts and minds of the people. That’s another way you could go about it. And so I think this is a great segue to talk about Sun Tzu’s idea of taking the whole. So we’ve been talking about that. When you’re viewing the world, you wanna see the world in a connected whole. But let’s flesh out, where else do you see this idea of taking the whole in The Art of War?

Jim Gimian: Well, I think the best, simplest way to understand that principle is, if you look back at that mercenary General’s challenge is king had conscripted soldiers from off the farms. And so in fact, the soldiers were farmers. And at a certain point in a world that was interconnected, if you conquer the neighboring land by killing all the soldiers, there’ll be no one left to produce food when you take over that territory. So there’s a lesson about the interconnectedness. We have to see all the implications of how we respond to conflict because that employee in the company you take over is somebody you’re gonna rely on to produce the products of value of the company that you just took over. We have so many examples from people in the workshops that we do where they have actually shown, we have a slide that shows farmer equals soldier with the circle in the line through it saying, kill a soldier, kill a farmer who’ve used that single slide to go to two of their reports, say one in production and one in accounting who are squabbling and fighting about when the report’s gonna happen and what’s the format.

And the leaders showing them that they need each other to be successful. So dealing with conflict has to include all the repercussions in order to have a meaningful, successful outcome. And that’s the taking whole, which goes right back to the most iconic lines in The Art of War about the 100 victories in 100 battles isn’t the most skillful, subduing the other’s military without battle is the most skillful. And that’s the kind of seed syllable of the whole notion of taking whole.

Brett McKay: What is… Yeah, what is the… People love quoting that line. But I think it gets misunderstood. ‘Cause I think it means like when people read that as, well, you gotta figure out a way with duplicity and some intrigue to beat the guy without actually fighting. But it sounds like there’s something more going on there, the way you describe it in the book.

Jim Gimian: Yeah, I think the most common way for us to understand it nowadays is as things have gotten to be more complex, we have to look at solutions as being more systemic actions. So for example, you have a team of 10-15 and there’s maybe a very problematic, challenging, difficult employee in that team. And the conventional way is to go at that challenge directly. Whereas in terms of dealing with a complex system, every one of the people has relationships with each other. So dealing with the shaping that team, putting certain sort of bumpers and goals, mutual goals in line, requires each one of those people to conform and work as part of the system. And that creates, as we’ve seen so many times, a situation where that difficult or problematic person sees that that’s not the place for them. The team is going in a certain direction, the company is going in a certain direction and they would be better off somewhere else. They decide to seek another place. Could be another place within the company, another department. It could be another company altogether.

But it’s an example that comes right out of the employing, sure, that is how to form and shape the ground of a situation to address a conflict or a difficulty and doesn’t really require subterfuge, but it’s kind of an indirect warfare. Something that The Art of War is very well known for, indirect warfare, but it’s just another way of saying dealing with the situation systemically. So I think that the issue of subterfuge is really a misconception. It does derive from the way The Art of War talks about deception. But [chuckle] deception is a whole range of behaviors and the extreme range that people often default to, the kind that may be required in dealing with an enemy that means you lethal harm is really not the situation most of us find ourselves in, in life. So there are a lot of more plastic ways of dealing with systemic change that don’t require those being trickier, deceptive in a way that’s calls into question ones moralistic behavior. I think that’s an exaggeration and unnecessary.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think it can mean something not as conniving as people think. I think people use it all the time without even knowing.

Jim Gimian: Yeah.

Brett McKay: So I think the big takeaway from the view is, so the view is just how you see the world. And I think an important thing to understand is for Sun Tzu, you gotta take the whole, you had to see the big picture and understand that you are part of that picture. So the decisions you make, you act on the world, but the world is gonna act back on you. And…

Jim Gimian: That’s right.

Brett McKay:The world is gonna change because of your decisions and as a consequence of that, you have to update your view. So there’s no… You really can’t have a static world of view. You can have guiding principles that can shape that big view, but you have to have some flexibility on just updating your mental models when you see the world change.

Jim Gimian: Well said.

Brett McKay: And I think we, basically what we did is we went to Earth next, right? We kind of connected Heaven to Earth, right? Heaven is view and Earth is the terrain, the situation, kind of the specifics.

Jim Gimian: Right.

Brett McKay: What we find ourselves and that will dictate what we do in order to bring about…

Jim Gimian: What your action is.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Bring about Heaven basically. Yeah.

Jim Gimian: Right.

Brett McKay: And an important part of this Earth component and you dig in deep in the book, is this idea of shih. Now it’s pronounced… It’s spelled S-H-I-H, I believe.

Jim Gimian: It is. That’s the… That’s the translator’s transliteration English, but it is pronounced, Sher.

Brett McKay: Shih. So this is a really important concept ’cause you really, you hammer this home in the book. So what is Shih, and why is it important to understand what Shih is?

Jim Gimian: Well, it’s a natural outcome of seeing the world as an interconnected whole that parts move other parts, it’s a wonderfully rich and helpful idea and it’s so rich, it’s why we didn’t translate it in our book. You know, it’s probably, if you look at the various translations of The Art of War, there are 20 different words used when Shih appears, words like energy or configuration or advantage or momentum, things that are familiar to us. But we just felt that to convey to the reader the richness of this concept, we would keep and retain its Chinese and carry all those meanings forward. But fundamentally, Shih is talking about how any system has energy within it and a pattern of how that energy moves and that energy can form a particular configuration of forces that affects effective power.

So that’s one way in which Shih describes a phenomenal world. And the text has wonderful images from the natural world that it uses things like how a meandering stream in the high mountain planes then turns into a tumultuous rushing river with such force that it can toss rocks about. That’s one of the lines right out of the text, it tosses rocks about, and then that same water becomes amassed behind a dam which is another way that power is accumulated in a certain configuration and can be released and focused and used for the leader. So the examples of this for us, in addition to the physical world are things like, football is a perfect example of trying to discern the weak spot on the opposition and amass the powers and the offenses configuration to strike that open and weak spot.

We have broad concepts like leverage or the tipping point popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, how alignment of forces within a situation make quick action possible that wasn’t before. One of our kind of thought partners in this is a politician on the national scale. And before finding The Art of War he used to talk about is the situation ripe to take a particular action? Are the forces aligned? And now he talks to his staff in the language of The Art of War, they talk about the Shih. And looking at the configuration depending on for example, at one point, not that long ago, maybe a little over a year, it was about when to start bringing the attack message about China into the national dialogue. Now there’s been a longstanding symbiotic relationship and close relationship whether we’ve admitted it or not in terms of, are iPhones made in China, or just a simplest example.

But at a certain point it became political advantage measured in how many dollars it would raise in fundraising to start bashing the Chinese. But the calculation for the politicians was if they came out too soon and it wasn’t the right timing, they wouldn’t get the donations back from that line. So they had to kind of calculate when was the right moment. Now that’s one possible way of sort of seeing about reading the situation, the alignment of the power in that situation. And as the text talks about in terms of employing Shih the good leader waits for the moment where the action is like rolling around rock down a steep hill, doesn’t take much effort because that’s what that rock wants to do, pulled down by gravity.

Brett McKay: So Shih, it’s hard to translate, but it’s the juice, it’s the mojo. When I was reading the book and I saw Shih, I was thinking momentum. It’s the momentum that shows up in the terrain in the Earth in the circumstances you find yourself in and you really can’t control it. But a good leader he can nudge it. He can recognize it and be ready to take advantage of it when it does appear. So we’ve talked about Heaven and Earth or view and practice, let’s talk about action. And you say that before you take action or skilled action, it’s important to engage in what you called knowing, which is a direct ongoing relationship and connection with the elements of your life.

And we can know by using our senses and picking up on patterns, but there are challenges and limitations to knowing, and I think everyone’s heard about cognitive biases and how they can hinder our view, and if our view is clouded, then we can’t take right action. What The Art of War says is that victory is created long before the battle arises. So before we take skillful action, we have to try to get our thinking, our view as clear as possible. But then I think too action is also the way to figure out if your view’s correct or not. Right? It’s like it’s feedback.

Jim Gimian: That’s right. It’s a feedback loop. Just like Boyd talked about too.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So you take action to see if it’s right and it might be right, it might be wrong. And then you just take that feedback and then you put it back into your view. You take a look at the terrain, the practices that you’re using, and then modify, and then you try action again. And that was a good point you made through the way you learn about action, a really effective way to learn about action is looking at the stories of other individuals, leaders who took action so you can see what worked and what didn’t work for them. So that’s one of the reasons I love reading biographies. It’s a way to see action in action.

Jim Gimian: Yeah, no, I think that’s really great. I think there’s nothing, nothing more powerful and we’ve learned this than the story and narrative to move people. Oftentimes, we’re asked for examples about parts of what we’re right about in the rules of victory. And when you give an example, if it’s not a story and it winds up being a sort of one directional, didactic, almost solid lesson that somebody either has to repeat or they’ll fail. And if you tell a story, a person can see themselves in that and they can see the possible skillful action that may arise for them in a similar situation. One of the great lines people will pick up on in The Art of War is that victories cannot be transmitted in advance. So you can’t tell somebody exactly what the best action in their story’s gonna be, but a story shared is an example that can widen the possible options for another person. So it’s about helping somebody discover insight rather than giving ’em a prescribed set of rules that they have to follow.

Brett McKay: So what’s one thing you think listeners can start doing today to better understand The Art of War and start implementing this view-practice-action mindset in their lives?

Jim Gimian: It’s interesting, you put it that way. When we do the workshops, usually they’re two-day workshops we do in corporate settings. One of the first things we say is you’re gonna hear a lot of new terminology and ideas. Don’t try to swallow it all. Just look for one thing, just one thing that speaks to you, that makes you go, “Hmm, that makes sense to me and I can see how it could have a positive benefit in my life.” And that one thing, in fact, in terms of the way The Art of War is structured, gives you access to the whole thing. We described the text as holistic and fractal, that it’s so integrated, it’s so repetitive that any part of it that speaks to you gives you a real genuine entryway to all of the rest of it.

So that’s what we encourage people to do. It can be one of the maxims that you described. You know what we describe them as slogans, because they’re simple sentences that can trigger deep meaning and connection. You know, it could be something like soldier farmer that triggers the ability to take whole when you’re confronted with a challenging situation rather than reverting to force to see how your solution can be inclusive of others’ aspiration. So I think the other thing, following along our discussion of how challenges and failed actions lead to more learning, I think one way of starting off with making The Art of War more a genuine part of your life is whenever that moment arises for you could be an obstacle, conflict, seeming intractable situation, be curious about your view. How are you seeing the situation?

What limitations is your view putting on the situation? Just kind of almost a contemplative curiosity. And as long as that’s done in a way that you have some kind of openness to the interconnectedness of the world around you, some kind of basic ongoing curiosity. And I think you know, a sense of making friends with yourself, learning how your emotions and your mind work, whatever means that is for you, then it’s possible to make a genuine connection to start being part of the dialogue, as I talked about earlier, to start entering into this lineage of people who are looking to find a different way of dealing with conflict, a different way of dealing with obstacles as a leader.

Brett McKay: Well, Jim, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jim Gimian: Well, there are two books. In fact, there’s The Art of War: The Denma Translation, and that, as I said, has a couple of background essays and some commentary. We do our own line by line commentary. As I said earlier, a lot of the literature has commentary by generals throughout history. And rather than reproduce those as most other translations, we just thought we’d add our perspective to what these lines in the texts could mean for us in our lives in modern day. Then of course, there’s Rules of Victory, the book and The Rules of Victory website, which presents both the way we approach the teaching of workshops and also the coaching that I do.

And there’s another resource out there that’s not ours, but I would recommend for someone, Professor Andrew Wilson at the Naval War College has relatively short, I think it’s called Great Courses available through Audible. And he does a wonderful job of presenting what The Art of War is historically. He doesn’t go where we go in terms of how can you actually do this in your life, but that’s not that’s not his job. But it’s a wonderful articulation of the meaning and the history and very, very user friendly. So that’s a resource that we recommend.

Brett McKay: We had Andrew on the podcast a while back ago.

Jim Gimian: Oh, you’re kidding.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It’s Episode 664, Masters of The Art of War.

Jim Gimian: Oh, that’s great. So you had this conversation before.

Brett McKay: A bit of it. We talked about von Clausewitz, we talked about the Peloponnesian War disidentes.

Jim Gimian: Oh, that’s terrific. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Well, Jim Gimian, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jim Gimian: A pleasure for me. All the best.

Brett McKay: My guest there is Jim Gimian. He’s the co-author of the book, The Rules of Victory. It’s available on amazon.com. You find more information about the book at the website, rulesofvictory.com. Also check at our show notes at aom.is/artofwar where you find links to resources. We’re gonna delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM podcast. Every week, Kate and I work hard to distill interesting and actual insights from the authors and leaders in a variety of fields and present them in an engaging fluff and filler-free episode that comes in under an hour. If you get something out of the show, please consider taking a minute to leave a review for it, helps more people discover The AOM podcast and we greatly appreciate it.

And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLINESS at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you not only listen to The AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You’ve probably heard of Ernest Shackleton, and his ill-fated Antarctic expedition. The Endurance, the ship on which he and his crew sailed, famously became trapped in ice, sunk, and set the men and their indomitable leader off on an arduous journey to safety and rescue.

But the Shackleton expedition wasn’t the only one to meet such a fate, and to become a crucible for leadership. The year before the demise of the Endurance, the Karluk, flagship vessel of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, became icebound and sunk, leaving its crew to trek 80 miles across dangerous ice floes to an island, and its captain to travel 1,000 miles more to obtain rescue for those marooned survivors.

Buddy Levy shares that compelling story in his new book Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk, and unpacks it for us today on the show. Along the way, he brings out the leadership lessons in planning, maintaining morale, and embodying endurance you can glean from the expedition’s two dominant figures: its ostensible leader, who abandoned the ship, and the Karluk‘s captain, who did all he could to save its shipwrecked survivors.

Resources Related to the Episode

• Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition by Buddy Levy
• Endurance by Alfred Lansing
• AoM Article: Leadership Lessons from Ernest Shackleton
• AoM Article: What They Left and What They Kept — What an Antarctic Expedition Can Teach You About What’s Truly Valuable
• AoM Article: Alone — Lessons on Solitude From an Antarctic Explorer

Connect With Buddy Levy

• Buddy’s Website

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. You’ve probably heard of Ernest Shackleton and his ill-fated Antarctic expedition. The Endurance, the ship on which he and his crew sailed, famously became trapped in ice, sunk, and set the men and their indomitable leader off on an arduous journey to safety and rescue. But the Shackleton expedition wasn’t the only one to meet such a fate and to become a crucible for leadership. The year before the demise of the Endurance, the Karluk, flagship vessel of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, became iced in and sunk, leaving its crew to trek 80 miles across dangerous ice floes to an island, and its captain to travel 1,000 miles more to obtain rescue for those marooned survivors. Buddy Levy shares that compelling story in his new book, Empire of Ice And Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk, and unpacks it for us today on the show. Along the way, he brings out the leadership lessons in planning, maintaining morale, and embodying endurance you can glean from the expedition’s two dominant figures, its ostensible leader, who abandoned the ship, and the Karluk’s captain, who did all he could to save its shipwrecked survivors. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/ice.

Buddy Levy, welcome to the show.

Buddy Levy: Brett, thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you just got a new book out called Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk. How did you learn about this story of the Karluk? It’s considered one of the last great voyages of the age of exploration, but I didn’t know about it until I read your book. So how did you learn about it?

Buddy Levy: Yeah, well, that’s a great question. I guess the short version is I went to Greenland in 2003 to cover an expedition race in which this blind adventurer named Erik Weihenmayer was doing a week-long multi-sport competition. And while I was there in Greenland, I met a Norwegian woman who… She was a really amazing adventurer in her own right, but she handed me a book called The First Crossing of Greenland by a Norwegian explorer, and he talked about this incredible voyage that had happened in the 1880s or ’90s. And I got really enthralled by Arctic exploration. And just also being there, it was so amazing and remote and brutal. And as I started reading, I began to come across these voyages in history that were really remarkable. And I ended up writing a book called Labyrinth of Ice about this Greely Expedition that was 1881. And during my research for that book, I bumped into this story of the Karluk and the Canadian Arctic Expedition. But I was so busy with the Labyrinth of Ice book that I just filed it into this folder, and so I saved it and came back to it later.

And I have to say that there was another sort of interest that I had based on my upbringing. My father was a Nordic ski racer. And he competed in the 1956 Winter Olympics in ski racing, which is really, really an amazing feat. But it was more remarkable because he was from Louisiana, and I think at the time he was the first Louisianan who had competed in the Winter Olympics ’cause he didn’t see snow until he was about 18 years old. But later on, he moved us to a ski town called Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1970. And I spent a lot of time in the mountains, and it’s at 6000 feet elevation. It’s really a cold place much of the year. And he used to take us out duck hunting in blinds that were like minus 25, 30 degrees. And so I kind of got this just interest in cold, cold places and the kinds of people who can survive there.

Brett McKay: Okay, so returning back to the Karluk. The story of the Karluk happens at the sort of tail end of this age of polar exploration that started in the late 19th century and then ran into the early 20th. The Karluk gets shipwrecked in 1914, and that’s about a year before the sinking of Shackleton’s Endurance, right?

Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And do you think that’s why it gets overlooked? ‘Cause the Shackleton story seems to get all the attention.

Buddy Levy: Yeah, that’s a great question. Actually, nearly all Arctic and Antarctic stories get overshadowed by Shackleton’s expedition. And I think it’s probably because in Shackleton’s voyage of the Endurance, miraculously, everyone lives. In the expeditions that I write about, and frankly, in most other expeditions of the period, folks aren’t so lucky. In fact, for most Arctic and Antarctic exploration, the mortality rate was about 50%. So if you went, there was a good chance you weren’t coming home. And also, the Endurance is just a really well-written book, and it’s the one that comes to most people’s mind. But that said, there are so many other great stories.

Brett McKay: No, yeah, this is a great one. I couldn’t put this book down. I was enthralled by it. So the Karluk, its expedition started in 1913. And it was kick-started by this guy. I’m gonna let you pronounce his first name ’cause it’s Norwegian, but his last name is Stefansson. Tell us about Stefansson.

Buddy Levy: Sure. A lot of people say Vilhjalmur, but he pronounced it Vilhjalmur. Vilhjalmur Stefansson was… I say he’s an unlikely explorer because of his upbringing and the series of events that led him to the north. He was originally born in Manitoba, Canada, but a series of disasters, floods and smallpox killed two of his siblings. His family moved by oxcart to North Dakota when he was just three years old. And they lived a really hard-scrabble existence of subsistence farming. And he attended a one-room school house. He was really smart though, and he had this active mind and a considerable intellect. And by his late teens, mostly reading by lamplight in this little cabin, he had enrolled at the University of North Dakota. And he was sort of a ne’er-do-well in certain ways. He was always getting in trouble. In his junior year, he got expelled for missing three consecutive weeks of school at North Dakota. And in fairness, he had been filling in for a high school teacher as a tutor.

But within days after expulsion, he was accepted at the University of Iowa. And he finished there in his undergraduate degree within a year. He was a really quick study. And he ended up being accepted to Harvard on a paid fellowship to do a PhD program in the Divinity School. And there he created his own curriculum, studying religion as a branch of anthropology. But even at Harvard, there was some controversy around him already. He’d borrowed money from undergraduates and he became involved in a scandal for selling exam questions to students. But his mind was really restless. And he didn’t like teaching, and he resolved to do anthropological field work in Equatorial Africa. And this is why I say he was kind of an unlikely Arctic explorer because he was all set to go to Africa.

But while he was preparing for that expedition, he received a telegram from an American explorer and geologist named Ernest Leffingwell. And he had been organizing a polar expedition. This is about 1906. And he had seen an article written by Stefansson that piqued his interest, and he sent a telegram to Stefansson and invited him along. And Stefansson went. And then he spent 1906-8 and then 1909-1912 almost full-time in the Arctic surveying and living among the Inuit peoples. So it was really kind of a series of just events and just doing the next thing that came up that propelled him to become an Arctic explorer.

Brett McKay: And the other way you describe him, the impression that I got, he was incredibly, incredibly ambitious. He wanted fame or glory.

Buddy Levy: Absolutely. Before the Canadian Arctic Expedition, as an example, he organized all of these publishing rights. And he was writing a book about his time living among the Inuit people even on the ship heading to his 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition. So he was always thinking ahead about how he could monetize his expeditions. And in that way, his character… I view him as kind of a chameleon or like a shape shifter. He could just change the course of his life in a moment and then go with it. And he was also really… I think he was egocentric and what we would now call a narcissist. And this, of course, would have profound implications on the members of the Karluk, eventually.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea of him being chameleon-like. You quote him as saying, “I am what I want to be.” And so he’s able to suss out what people wanted in a person, and he was able to become that to get what he wanted.

Buddy Levy: Yeah, and that proved to be really useful for him in terms of, let’s say, fundraising for the Canadian Arctic Expedition because these expeditions were really expensive. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1913 money, which is millions today. And so he had to be very persuasive and compelling. And he was able to get organizations like the American Museum of Natural History and the entire Canadian government. He even met with the Prime Minister of Canada. And he got him on board, pardon the pun, to finance the expedition because it was Canada’s first major foray into Arctic exploration. So Stefansson, yeah, he was really charismatic and persuasive and also thinking about how this was gonna benefit him.

Brett McKay: So before this expedition in 1913, he had been on Arctic expeditions. It’s not as if he was inexperienced. But this was… Was this the first time he planned one on his own, like he was in charge of it?

Buddy Levy: Well, the previous one that he did with this guy named Rudolph Anderson, they shared the leadership of it, and it was smaller in scope. And I think that’s the major difference is that Stefansson was really good at planning and organizing modest expeditions that were manageable in terms of numbers of people, and he was good at that. But the Canadian Arctic Expedition was a whole different animal. It was much more ambitious and had more moving parts, and that’s where things began to kind of fall apart.

Brett McKay: So what was the aim of this expedition? What was Stefansson hoping to do with it?

Buddy Levy: So the Canadian Arctic Expedition’s stated goals were to explore the seas and ice north of Alaska and Canada searching for new undiscovered lands including this place called Crocker Land that American explorer Robert Peary… Who claimed to have been to the North Pole and claimed the North Pole. On a previous expedition, Robert Peary said that he saw this land mass from the shore of Ellesmere Island in Canada, and he named it Crocker Land after this bank financier. So they were looking for this place called Crocker Land, if it existed, to expand the Canadian archipelago and to expand land holdings, essentially. And they also were going to engage in anthropology, biology, oceanography, and geography, marine and terrestrial study. So it was a pretty big and ambitious undertaking. And then there were two parties, the northern and southern party. And the southern party was gonna do land-based anthropology and geography in the Coronation Gulf region among the islands off of Canada’s northern coastline.

And it was really a big expedition. As I said, it was Canada’s first major foray into Arctic exploration. And Stefansson brought along 16 international scientists, which at the time was the largest staff of scientists ever carried on a polar expedition. And they were from all over the place. They were from Canada, France, Scotland, New Zealand, Norway. And Stefansson even brought along this photographer and cameraman from Australia named George Hubert Wilkins to document the endeavor. So he was really thinking about the media possibilities when he returned. That was the plan anyway.

Brett McKay: So this was a big expedition. And you’d think, well, a big expedition like this would take a year, maybe two years to plan. But this guy, it was in a few months. He had the idea, I think, in early 1913 and by June, July 1913, they were off to the races.

Buddy Levy: Yeah, well, Stefansson attempted to organize this expedition in a matter of months. And normally, as you say, it takes a year or more. He bought this ship called the Karluk, which is the Aleutian or the Aleut word for fish. And it was an under-powered ship that was ill-suited for dealing with the Arctic ice pack. And he picked up two more ships along the way. This is like after they had already left from Esquimalt, British Columbia, so he’s getting ships en route. And he did a bunch of his pre-organization in the late months of 1912 by going to Europe and talking it up. And it was at that point he actually met Robert Peary and Peary told him about this Captain Bartlett that he should hire. But his planning was rushed, I will say. And he ultimately had three ships that were the armada of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, the Karluk being the flagship.

But the problem was, he ended up having the wrong men and equipment on the wrong ships because the plan had been to meet at Point Barrow at the northern tip of Alaska, get all their stuff kind of organized temporarily there, and then head to the east to this little island above Canada called Herschel Island where they were going to rendezvous and re-organize everything. But the problem was that a massive winter storm in August of 1913 blew that plan to smithereens. And he had been acquiring skins and furs for winter clothing just days before leaving Point Barrow, which is quite late and unprepared since much of the clothing still had to be sown from those skins. It’s one of those expeditions where everything sort of went south immediately, you know?

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, that was the common refrain. A lot of the scientists and the crewmen were concerned about the slapdash preparations. And they’d bring it up to Stefansson, and he would just say, “Well, we’ll take care of it at Point Barrow. We’ll take care of it then.” And it just kept on getting pushed further and further back until it was too late.

Buddy Levy: Yeah, actually it becomes a joke for some of the members. “We’ll sort it out at Herschel Island,” they keep saying. And they never even get to Herschel Island. The other scientists, you’re right, they were concerned about a number of things, not only that things were a little haphazard, but Stefansson made them sign contracts that said they couldn’t publish anything within a year of returning because Stefansson himself wasn’t drawing a pay for the expedition. He was gonna get all his money on the back end on publishing rights. And the other members were hired by the Canadian government, so they were actually drawing pay. But also, at the time they were moving north from Esquimalt, British Columbia, and up to Alaska, when they would make land, Stefansson was actually doing interviews with newspaper reporters. And he was saying things that were really disconcerting to the scientists, like the mission itself and the expedition is more important than either the ships or the members of the expedition, ’cause he knew that it wasn’t uncommon for ships to get beset or nipped in the ice and then drift, maybe for 1000 miles. So the members of… These scientists are thinking, “Well, wait, what have I signed up for?”

Brett McKay: So Stefansson for the most part his planning was very poor. He picked an… The Karluk wasn’t really suited for what it was about to do. It was underpowered. But he did do a few good things, and one of them was hiring Robert Bartlett to captain the Karluk. Tell us about Robert Bartlett.

Buddy Levy: Sure, yeah. Bartlett surfaces as kind of the hero of this story to me. He’s really amazing. He was a proud Newfoundlander from a pretty famous family in Brigus, Newfoundland. They were called the Bartletts of Brigus, and they were… His father, grandfather and uncles had all been involved in the whaling and sealing industry and exploring for generations. And Bartlett had been at sea since he was 17. So he’s 37 at the start of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, a couple of decades of life on a ship almost exclusively. He’d sailed all over the world. And most important to Stefansson and to the members of the Karluk, Bartlett had been with American explorer Robert Peary on three North Pole attempts, including as captain of this specially built steel-hulled ship called the Roosevelt on the final, controversial North Pole attempt.

And Bartlett had actually made it. He was off the ship and helping lead Peary in 1909 on the final approach to the North Pole. And Bartlett made it to within 150 miles of the North Pole. But at any rate, Bartlett at the time was known as the world’s greatest living ice navigator. And so he had learned to move a ship through these weaving labyrinth of leads that you encounter in pack ice. And he was an excellent leader too. He was severe if you were lazy or made mistakes, but he was also kind and friendly and fair and generous. And he put his crew first. He was devoted to his ship, its members and to getting everyone home. And so that’s why he was a great choice to captain the Karluk.

Brett McKay: And he was like a perfect contrast to Stefansson. That’s the impression I got. Bartlett was very… He was very methodical. He was always thinking of contingencies all the time and he was always just thinking about his crew first. Stefansson, the complete opposite.

Buddy Levy: Yeah, they’re sort of opposite sides of a coin, really, Bartlett and Stefansson.

Brett McKay: All right, so the Karluk, it sets out from Nome in July, 1913 and starts making its way up the Alaskan coast. It’s gonna head east basically over Canada, but then in August it’s just north of Alaska and it becomes icebound. I think this year the Arctic had a really, really cold winter. So it is icebound earlier than usual, and I loved how you described navigating through Arctic Sea ’cause it just, you painted as this incredibly treacherous experience where the landscape is constantly shifting. So how did the Karluk do this without being equipped to plow through ice? ‘Cause I think most Arctic ships, they had the horsepower just to kind of steam through and barge through ice. The Karluk couldn’t do that. So what did Bartlett do?

Buddy Levy: Right. So yeah, I’m glad you described that because a lot of people think of polar ice as being this static frozen sheet of ice that’s flat, kind of like a gigantic rink. And it’s not anything like that, you know? It’s comprised of these flows, what are called ice flows, and they’re relatively flat masses of ice that move and drift independently across the polar seas. And if you compare those to say icebergs, which are often really high and jagged and sharp, but smaller in volume and size. So these ice flows are kind of, some of ’em are massive, they’re many miles wide and long and some are smaller, just a few hundred yards wide or long. And they drift along the current and wind sometimes binding together to form larger flows. And they’re propelled by wind and current. And the trick of navigating through them is that sometimes as they shatter and break up, they create what are called leads and leads are open water between flows, and the ship has to kind of weave and snake its way through the water that is between these giant flows of ice.

So it is rarely straight, right? And so Bartlett was very good at finding his way. It’s kind of like you get up in the crow’s nest and scan with binoculars way out and you sort of can see where openings are and then you yell down to the helmsman to go this way or that way. But like you said, that August of 1913 was a severe winter and so they began to encounter massive snow storms, big gale force winds and fog, and they were no longer able to see where they were going. And so that made it really difficult. And at this point, like I said, they were trying to move east above Alaska and Canada along the shoreline to this place called Herschel Island, but they ended up getting what’s called beset or nipped meaning stuck in the ice or icebound.

Brett McKay: And the way you described this was a common occurrence. It wasn’t like… I mean, they didn’t wanna be icebound, but it was expected that this could happen. And so they’re prepared for that.

Buddy Levy: Well, right. So sometimes you get icebound and then you wait it out and a few days later there’ll be a change in the weather and the flows will begin to shift and then leads will open up and then you go for it, you know? You fire up the steam engines and you go. But on this particular journey, they got hammered by storms and the ice was not cooperating and Bartlett made a decision with Stefansson’s permission actually to go north farther offshore to try to get away from some of these flows. And it turned out to not solve the problem. The flows were just as thick 10 or 12 miles off of shore and they ended up becoming stuck.

Brett McKay: And what happened too is that they started drifting west, the opposite direction from where they wanted it to go.

Buddy Levy: Right. So [chuckle] it’s kind of amazing, they try a number of times to get out of the situation that they’re in, that leads will open and then Bartlett will try to go for them, but ultimately they get so beset that they’re just not under their own power anymore. And so they’re at the mercy of the drift, and at that point winds shift and you’re right, they begin drifting north and west, so away from the mainland. And at this point Stefansson starts to get kind of nervous or he starts acting like he wants to be anywhere but on this ship. And I should say that there was a library on board the Karluk which had the logs of a number of other expeditions that had gone and become encased in ice in a similar spot. And they’re reading by lamplight these stories of the Jeannette and stuff where these ships got encased in ice and then drifted for months and months and ended up getting crushed, and most of the people die. So there’s a kind of palpable nervousness and edginess on board. Stefansson certainly knew about those previous voyages. And so while they’re drifting along there’s just kind of this sense of unease.

Brett McKay: And in the process, at a certain point, Bartlett, because he’s this experienced mariner and he read these logs and he understood what could possibly happen, there was a chance that they might get crushed and the ship will sink, he started making the contingency plans, he’s actually started establishing a camp outside of the ship in the event they had to abandon ship.

Buddy Levy: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, Bartlett was… He understood from other expeditions too, the one that I wrote about in the 1881-1884 Greely Expedition, Greely learned a lot about what so-called cabin fever and what happens to members on a ship when they are not doing much. So Bartlett, you know, and also you’re experiencing what’s called the long night. At a certain point the sun sets up in those regions and it doesn’t return for a few months. And so Bartlett understood that he needed the men to keep busy to have regular routine. And that included sometimes going off the ship and doing exercise when they could, when the conditions on the ice were safe enough. And also to practice fire drills in case the ship caught on fire. There were a couple of mini coal stoves and so there was a danger of fire.

So he had like periodic fire drills where everyone had a job, he had a structure to the day, including when to get up, when to eat, when lights were out. And this was all complicated by the fact that Bartlett wasn’t… I mean, he was the ship’s captain, but it wasn’t a military expedition. So there was a little disgruntlement among the scientists who were still on board because they were thinking, well, I’m not… I’m really… Stefansson’s my boss, but I’m doing what Bartlett says. Some of them were really cooperative and then others were kind of reluctant. But it really made a difference because like you say, Bartlett also had them practice moving thousands of pounds of gear, coal, food off the ship and then bringing it back on board. And people were wondering why he was doing that, and he was thinking ahead about the eventuality that what if the ship gets crushed?

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s the one thing whenever I read about these Arctic mariners and Arctic explorers, the really good ones had a keen understanding of human psychology and the need for, to keep busy, to keep working, to have a schedule, to exercise. I mean, sometimes I’d laugh when they’d talk about their exercise. They’d go out and run around the ship when it was negative 30 degrees outside or, oh, we’re gonna go skiing. They’d build like ski jumps and they’d have a day of skiing. And Bartlett encouraged that ’cause this is good for them. This will keep them mentally healthy.

Buddy Levy: Yeah, I mean, that’s great you point that out because two of my favorite characters, one is William McKinley, who’s a Scottish school teacher and he was really into it and he created like a course that he ran around the ship, like up the stairs from the cabins up onto the deck around the ship, down onto the ice. And he had it down to like, one lap was a mile and he would do this every day. He was training just so that he would be fit and ready when disaster struck, if disaster struck. And there was another guy, a young man named Bjarne Mamen from Norway who was like you said, he was an excellent skier. He had actually won some competitions in Norway and he brought skis along and he built poles and he got everybody out there on the ice, including Bartlett.

And he built jumps and Bartlett seemed to understand that everyone having physical activity and also mental activity was really important for their overall wellbeing. He encouraged McKinley to start this like weekly tutoring session. They had brought along an Inuit family from Point Barrow, Alaska, the man Kuraluk, the father was brought along to run the dogs and also hunt seals. And he was really, really amazingly instrumental in the survival of a lot of these people. And also he brought along his wife and two kids. His wife, Kiruk, ended up being really, really, she was an excellent seamstress and so she was sewing constantly these skin and fur clothing for the men. And McKinley ended up doing a language course with them. So he would learn their native language and they would learn English so they could communicate better and be more efficient as a group.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So you mentioned that Stefansson, he was getting nervous and he was basically giving off the impression that he wanted to be somewhere else and not on the ship. He decides to finally leave. How was he able to do that without raising the alarms of the scientists and the other crewmen?

Buddy Levy: Yeah, well, that’s one of the more controversial elements of the book. And so in the third week of September of 1913, Stefansson announces that he’s gonna go on a caribou hunt. He’s gonna cross the ice to the Alaskan mainland and go hunt caribou with a couple of the scientists and two of the Inuit hunters that he had hired, these are different than Kuraluk and his family. And he wrote a letter or he wrote instructions to Bartlett saying, “I’m gonna be gone for 10 days to two weeks. We need fresh meat. If no accident happens I’ll be back. So you should build coal fires outside the ship on the ice so we can see where the ship is.” And then he takes off. And it’s really amazing, there’s a photograph of him that he took Wilkins, that photographer with him. And there’s a photograph in the book of him striking out in front of these other folks with a dog sled team.

He brought the best 12 dogs and he’s just taking off and it’s kind of like, oh, what are you doing bro? [chuckle] Because he had said to some of the members before that there weren’t very many caribou left in the area that they were gonna go to. And I actually discovered that he had a secret Inuit wife named Fanny and he had a son with her who was three years old from his previous trip. And he ends up going to see them. So it doesn’t look too good for Stefansson because he takes off ostensibly to hunt caribou, but maybe to go see his Inuit family, which he ends up doing within a few weeks. And then this massive storm hits, and Stefansson and the others are stranded on this little island off the north coast of Alaska. And by the time the weather clears and he’s able to climb up onto this little observation tower that they build out of driftwood, the Karluk is now careening at like 30-60 miles a day out into the middle of the Arctic Ocean towards Siberia.

Brett McKay: So Stefansson, he’s on the island. Does he go get help? I mean, you think that’d be the first thing you do? I’m gonna let people know there’s this ship that’s stuck and drifting away. Does he go do that?

Buddy Levy: That’s another problem with Stefansson is that he makes it to land and he ends up… So a couple of the other ships got separated from the Karluk early on and they ended up making it to wintering bays that they’re able to just anchor in. And so Stefansson ultimately finds the leader of the Southern Party and he tells him that he’s lost his ship, which is kind of an embarrassing moment, [chuckle] you know, to have to say, “Yeah, I am on shore but my flagship Karluk is somewhere out there.” He points towards Siberia. And then he doesn’t immediately go get help. And he explains this away by saying, well, we don’t really know where the ship is. I mean, there’s no radio on it, there’s no way to just go after it. But he dawdles for a while and, you know, he left the ship in mid-September and he ends up sending a letter back to the Canadian government knowing that that letter isn’t really gonna get there for a few months because of how hard it is to get mail anywhere. It has to go by like dog sled team first. And he ends up just re-outfitting what he calls the new Northern party and commandeering some of the ships and gear from the Southern party and then setting out on the ice on his own with a couple members not to be really seen or heard from again until 1918, 5 years later after World War I is over. So it’s a pretty dubious number of decisions that he makes that make him seem a little self-seeking or villainous if you wanna lean that way.

Brett McKay: Yeah, when he did explain, he’d basically be like, well, there’s nothing we can do about it, so I’ll just keep doing my thing. [chuckle] And people are like, what?

Buddy Levy: Yeah, I mean, he says some things that are really kind of shocking. Like either the ship or its wreckage is going to surface somewhere and we won’t know the results of that until spring or summer, which in some ways is actually true. But he also doesn’t say like, we should immediately begin planning for rescue once the ice breaks up in summer and have that all set up and ready to roll. He just goes about his business and his assumption is that Bartlett will figure it out. Bartlett will get these people to safety one way or another. And then he sort of washes his hands of it.

Brett McKay: So the Karluk continues to drift towards Siberia. It’s still stuck, can’t get out of the ice. In January 1914, it sinks. And I guess what happens is it just got smashed by the ice flows pressing up against each other?

Buddy Levy: Yeah, so Bartlett, like you said, he had known about the contingency that the ship might get crushed. So he ended up like getting all this stuff out off the ship and having members get thousands of pounds of food and coal and also liquid fuel and dog sleds and everything in case. And then of course in January of 1914, the shifting ice pack has encroached to such a degree on the hall of the Karluk that these jagged fangs of ice pierced the sides of it and water just begins rushing in. And it’s really incredible. There’s a scene in which Bartlett, I mean, he kind of had a flare for the dramatic because he’s up in the galley, he’s got a photograph and he got everybody else down off the ship when it first got crushed and water started coming in. There’s maybe a day or two where it’s going to stay floating, but he knows that the end is near. And he ends up like playing record after record until at one point he puts on Chopin’s Funeral March as the last record and then he sort of dramatically and cinematically steps off of the side of the Karluk as it’s going down and they’ve raised the Canadian flag to full mast and the steam spout is sticking up and then the ship just sinks in the water and there’s this puff of steam smoke and everyone else is standing on the shore line.

Well, it’s not really a shoreline, it’s on this flat ice surface that is a stable place where they put all this stuff and they just watched the ship sink. And they have named this place Shipwreck Camp. And Bartlett was really clever because he organized the building of a big igloo, which Kuraluk and his family built. There’s like 30 dogs still, so they have kennels for the dogs and they have this box house that they used crates and gear to make the walls of this box house. And at Shipwreck Camp they end up living for six weeks on the ice while they’re drifting, waiting for the light to return so that they can potentially make a break toward land, this place called Wrangel Island.

Brett McKay: And that was the other thing that impressed me. So their ship sank, but they have this camp and you describe it, most of the crew, they were in pretty good spirits despite their ship sinking ’cause they had this nice camp and Bartlett was generous with rations, eat lots of bacon, we’re gonna make sure everything is good. And it was kind of nice for a while, which I was surprised, I thought, oh, if your ship sink you’d be just despondent and depressed.

Buddy Levy: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I mean, if you imagine yourself on a floating cake of ice that’s about a mile and a half square being buffeted by winds and sometimes fracturing at the edges. And also, if you’ve ever been on the Arctic ice or if you haven’t, it’s really, really noisy. It can be terrifyingly loud and it shears and creaks and groans and splits. But at Shipwreck Camp they had shelter, they had warmth, they had a ton of food, more than they were gonna be able to bring across the ice to Wrangel Island, this place they had spotted, which is now, when they first saw it, it was maybe 150 miles to the west, but they’re drifting generally toward it. But yeah, they were quite comfortable for that six weeks. And Bartlett was really smart because he started having them practice going toward Wrangel Island and building kind of an ice trail with dog sled teams and then building igloos like a series of igloos along the way that they would be able to use when the sun returned. And they could go in small teams toward Wrangel Island. And by the way, Wrangel Island is about a 90 mile long, or actually 90 mile west to east and maybe 50 miles top to bottom, north to south island above the northeastern coast of Siberia.

Brett McKay: So yeah, this planning of creating caches along the way before they even made the push for the island, it’s another example of Bartlett’s mastery of planning, thinking about contingencies. So at a certain point, they decide to make the push towards the island. But again, it’s not just that the ice is just flat like a skating rink. There is a changing landscape, and you talk about these pressure ridges that could just form in front of you and block your way. That happened to him, correct?

Buddy Levy: Yeah, I’m glad you bring that up. That was one of the most dramatic journeys in the book, and actually that I’ve ever read about. So when the sun comes back in March of 1914 now, Bartlett has made all these contingency plans. And they start going in teams, and there’s all sorts of drama that happens en route. I mean, it takes a few weeks to finally get toward Wrangel Island, to within striking distance of it. But all sorts of things are occurring, like they’re getting lost. Some of the members get lost and go to the wrong island. There’s this other really small island called Herald Island. It’s only four miles long. And a few of the members end up there by accident because navigation is really difficult out there. There’s no landmarks, really, and wind blows and it shifts. And also the conditions are… The ice is buckling all the time, and there are these giant drifts where wind blows formations.

But more problematic, they come to these… What you mentioned were pressure ridges. And it’s if you take these giant floes, some of them can be 15 miles long, and they crash into each other and into land masses like Wrangel Island. And it’s like tectonic plates of ice that ram together, and then they rupture where they meet and create giant ridges of ice that some of them are over 100 feet tall. And they come to this wall, like a mountain range of ice, and Bartlett realizes that… He sends people a couple of miles either way to see if they can go around it, but it just extends for many miles. And so he decides the most efficient way and the quickest is to cut their way through it. So they build like a four-foot-wide ice track using ice picks and shovels, and they hack their way through these massive pressure ridges. It takes days and days, and he calls it the hardest thing he’s ever done.

Brett McKay: And along the way, weren’t some of them getting attacked by polar bears at the same time? Or am I thinking about something else?

Buddy Levy: Absolutely. So it’s funny ’cause people always say, “Well, why didn’t they just hunt polar bears?” Well, it turns out the polar bears were hunting them because they’re getting some seals along the way, and then they’re dragging the seals in their sleds. And the polar bears, of course, eat seals, and they’ve got amazing sense of smell. So they start tracking the members of the Karluk, the survivors, and they’re following them. And sometimes they’ll be in their igloo sleeping at night. So they’ll have like a 12-15 hour slog during the day, build an igloo or use one of the igloos that they built when they were getting ready to build the trail across, and then they hear the dogs going crazy. And all of a sudden, they’d crawl out the igloo, and there’s a giant polar bear like swiping at the dogs, and they have to shoot them. And so the rest of their journey is, not only are they dealing with the ice cracking under the igloo sometimes in the middle of the night, and they have to get out and re-group. And they’re always sleeping fully clothed. But then, of course, there’s this spectre of polar bears. You’re looking over your shoulder like, “Are we being followed?” And they were.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And we have to remember they’re in the Arctic, so it’s cold. It’s negative 30, negative 40, negative 50 degrees. And that just adds to the complete discomfort of the situation, not only they have to hack through ice or be afraid that the ice is gonna break underneath them, but the cold just grinds you down.

Buddy Levy: Oh, it’s incredibly cold. And they fall in through the ice a number of times. And different members have to crawl into an igloo, and then another expedition member or scientist will strip them out of their wet clothing and put them in dry-ish clothing. But yeah, you’re right, the temperatures range from minus 20 to minus 50, and that’s without the wind chill factor, which was ever present.

Brett McKay: So they finally make it to the island. They hacked through that pressure ridge, which seems awful. They make it to the island. And then Bartlett decides, “Well, I gotta plan a rescue mission here.” ‘Cause I think at this point he’s like, “I don’t think Stefansson’s doing anything.” So he has to make this 1000-mile trek back to Alaska via Siberia. So he gets to the island, continues west ’til he gets to Russia. Then he goes south along the coast of Siberia so he could cross over to Alaska. He took an Inuit crewman with him to help him with this, but he had to leave most of the crew behind. What happened to the crew after Bartlett left? ‘Cause it seemed when Bartlett’s there, he was a leader. He was providing… There was organization, things were happening. Things might have been hard, but Bartlett was there to figure things out. What happened when Bartlett left?

Buddy Levy: Right, well, that’s a great point because they get to Wrangel Island in early March of 1914. And Bartlett realized within two days… It was so hard to get to Wrangel Island that the marooned that were there were in really bad shape when they got there. He sees that they’re hypothermic and frostbitten. They’re really, really in terrible shape. And he decides that because no one else in the world knows where they are, no one is coming there, the whaling industry is sort of in decline and it’s a remote place anyway, so he understands that the only way that anybody’s gonna get there is if he makes this go of it himself, right? So he leaves a dozen members on Wrangel Island and tells them to separate into different camps by a number of miles so that each camp can hunt on its own and try to get subsistence food. So he knows that there’s arctic foxes around. There are some polar bears. There are birds that are gonna be coming in the spring. And there’s a lot of walrus, but they won’t be there until the spring either. And so he tells them to try to subsist until he brings help, and it won’t be until maybe mid-July to late summer the following summer.

And so he leaves them there, but they’re separated across Wrangel Island in these small groups. And he has left William McKinley in charge of the stores of food. And he’s told one group to go all the way to the south because that’s where he will eventually send help if it can come. But they grow malnourished pretty quickly. And they begin to suffer from this mystery sickness that in the end is probably a kidney disorder as a result of eating only pemmican, the mixture of fat, dried meat and berries that Arctic travelers took with them. But surviving on that for great lengths of time can be problematic, and is for them. And then also, it sort of becomes a little bit like The Lord of the Flies on a frozen icy landscape because they are remote. They get anxious and depressed, many of the members. And so things begin to devolve on this island pretty quickly. But a number of the members end up kind of keeping things together. McKinley is one of them, and then Bjarne Mamen, that Norwegian fellow is one of them. But yeah, things are pretty grim.

Brett McKay: So Bartlett, all the while, he’s still on this voyage, and it’s pretty much by foot. There’s a few instances where he’s on sled, but he’s walking this. This is about a 700-mile trek. It takes him… He leaves the island at the end of March, and he’s back near Alaska is it, I think, May, late May 1914. Is that right?

Buddy Levy: Right. He and Kataktovik make this mythic quest voyage across what’s called the Long Straight, which is no easy feat. They almost get engulfed by the ice numerous times. They have a few dogs, and they’re able to… It’s an ordeal. I really, really was impressed by this journey. And then they’re aided by these different indigenous people in Siberia that they run into called the Chukchi. And so they end up making it back to Alaska after this massive ordeal. But Bartlett needs to organize rescue ships via the American and Canadian governments, when he finally gets back and is able to send a telegram to the Canadian government and say, “Look, there are 15 or so members of the Karluk marooned on Wrangel Island. We need to rescue them.” And the problem he has is that, in that part of the world, there’s a very short window of navigable waters where the ice moves off and you can make your way there in a ship that is not an ice breaker. But the ice is so thick most of the year that it’s really difficult to get there, and the weather and the ice conditions have to cooperate, and everything has to line up. And so you need the right ship, plenty of coal, and good weather, and a hell of a lot of luck.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and so he had a small window. There’s a lot of hurry up and waiting at this period, and you can sense the frustration Bartlett had. People just… They had other stuff they had to do. There wasn’t a sense of urgency. He would reach out, “Hey, I got… There’s people up there.” And they’re like, “Oh, well, I gotta go up to this place and drop some stuff off. If I have time, I’ll go do it.” And I imagine that was really frustrating for him. So he finally does get a rescue mission going. And we’ll save the details of what he finds back on Wrangel Island when he gets there, for readers of your book. But overall, what was the legacy of the Karluk, and what happened to some of the survivors of this expedition?

Buddy Levy: Like many Arctic stories, the legacy of the Karluk is one of survival, of travail under the harshest of circumstances imaginable, both weather and human. But I will say there was also a great deal of fellowship and camaraderie and selflessness too, or else none of them would have survived. Many of the members who survived, they actually… And particularly some of them like William McKinley, who I mentioned, they grew as a result of these tests, becoming more than they ever believed they could as leaders. McKinley, he started out as a school teacher, and he ended up learning to ski, to build igloos, to hunt seals and walrus and birds, and to become a leader. Some people diminished and resorted to stealing food from others and lying for self-preservation. Many of the members immediately… World War I breaks out like right as Bartlett is organizing the rescue attempt. And so to add insult to injury, most of the men who survive end up going off to fight in World War I pretty soon after their arrival. Some of them needed surgery immediately for amputation of their frostbitten hands and feet.

Ironically, or maybe it’s a lesson we should really take away from us, is that the Inuit members who survived returned home to Alaska and lived out their lives normally, almost as if nothing had happened. It was sort of like daily life for them. They were quite accustomed to it. And so yeah, I think it’s kind of a cautionary tale. But we can also learn a lot about what humans are capable of, I would say. The endurance that they go through. There are certain times where members are awake for three days consecutively and travel over 100 miles on foot in severe conditions. And you start to realize that people are capable of much more than you think.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you mentioned some of the men who survived, they went off to fight in World War I. I think one of them described… He said World War I was awful, but he said it didn’t compare to anything like it was on the Karluk. That was even worse than that. Did Stefansson suffer any repercussions for his abandonment of the crew?

Buddy Levy: Well, that’s a good question. Not necessarily in terms of being sanctioned in any formal way. Bartlett actually underwent a commission inquiry into his choice to sail farther off coast. But more Stefansson in his reputation. I mean,2 he ends up going on to become… And I make this clear. I have no qualms with Stefansson as a scientist. There’s a library with all of his holdings, and Stefansson is a… He’s a major figure in polar exploration. But I think the Karluk episode wasn’t really great for his PR.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So you mentioned some of the life lessons you took from this, the ability for humans to endure more than you think, the perseverance. What are some leadership lessons, perhaps? I was kind of reading this book as a leadership book.

Buddy Levy: Yeah.

Brett McKay: It’s a great story, action story, but I think it is a book on leadership. Are there some leadership lessons that you took away from researching and writing this book?

Buddy Levy: You bet. Yeah, I think one would be to learn to work with others, and to listen, and to work together. Certainly to plan for the worst, plan for disaster. Plan for things to go wrong, and if they don’t, well, great. You over-planned. But I think small teams are generally better than large ones. And also, learn to relish problem solving. This book really is a series of problem solving, and Bartlett is masterful at that. He’s constantly being confronted with new challenges on the daily basis. And his ability to not panic and just solve the problem as it comes to you is really crucial. I think it’s a… We can all take something away from that. I’ve mentioned not to underestimate people because they’re capable of much more than you think, and much more than they think they’re capable of. One thing that I’ve learned from studying Arctic expeditions is that it helps you know how to do a lot of things, and that many of the tools we’ve lost is in our convenience-based society. So reading maps to navigate, building fires, building shelters, finding water, not relying on technology all of the time to solve our own problems are really things that are like personal takeaways.

And also, because a lot of these stories have to do with food debt, is that we sort of need a lot less food than we typically consume. And it’s not so much that we become weaker or less tough as people, but I think we’ve socialized toughness out of ourselves by disuse. And the other leadership thing I would say is, as a leader, pick your directors and managers really carefully. Bartlett was excellent. Look, Stefansson picked Bartlett, which was a stroke of genius. Bartlett ended up picking McKinley and Bjarne Mamen, and these two were really, really useful. And without them, there would have been more carnage. And then last, I think, is lead by example. Bartlett leads by example. He doesn’t shirk responsibility. He’s right out there at the front of the fray. And he thinks of others before himself.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well Buddy, where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Buddy Levy: Oh yeah, great, I appreciate it, www.buddylevy.com. And my books can be found at independent bookstores and everywhere that books are sold.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Buddy Levy, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Buddy Levy: My pleasure, Brett. Really appreciated talking with you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Buddy Levy. He’s the author of the book Empire of Ice and Stone. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, buddylevy.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/ice, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code MANLINESS to checkout for a free month trial. Once you’ve signed up, download the Stitcher App on Android, iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Most leadership advice says the same thing: to be a good leader, you need to be generous, humble, and authentic.

My guest, professor of organizational behavior Jeffrey Pfeffer, would say that kind of advice may make us feel good and represent the world as we’d like it to be, but it doesn’t actually work in the world as it really is. What the research shows does work is what he lays out in his book: 7 Rules of Power: Surprising—but True—Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career.

People often have negative associations with power, but Jeffrey would argue that power, and many of the techniques involved in getting it, are morally neutral, and can be used for ill or for good. So if you have a worthy aim and want to grow your influence and move up in your job, you have to get comfortable going after something that may make you uncomfortable. Jeffrey shares how to do that as we take a quick and dirty dive into the real rules of power.

Resources Related to the Episode

• AoM Article: How to Dress to Convey Power
• AoM Article: The 3 Elements of Charisma — Power
• AoM Podcast #403: A Better Way to Network
• AoM Podcast #837: The Cues That Make You Charismatic

Connect With Jeffrey Pfeffer

• Jeffrey’s Website with links to his podcast — Pfeffer on Power

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Most leadership advice says the same thing. To be a good leader, you need to be generous, humble, and authentic. My guest, professor of organizational behavior, Jeffrey Pfeffer, would say that kind of advice may make us feel good and represent the world as we’d like it to be, but it doesn’t actually work in the world as it really is. What the research shows does work is what he lays out in his book, 7 Rules of Power: Surprising but True Advice on How to Get Things Done and Advance Your Career. People often have negative associations with power, but Jeffrey would argue that power and many of the techniques involved in getting it are morally neutral and can be used for ill or for good. So if you have a worthy aim and want to grow your influence and move up in your job, you have to get comfortable going after something that may make you uncomfortable. Jeffrey shares how to do that as we take a quick and dirty dive into the real rules of power. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/rulesofpower.

All right, Jeffrey Pfeffer, welcome to the show.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: It’s a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for having me on.

Brett McKay: Well, so you are a professor at Stanford and you spent a lot of your career researching, writing, teaching about business organization, but particularly power. You’ve written a few books about human power. What led you down that path?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: I think two things led me down that path. The first thing that led me down that path is one of the things I’ve tried to do in my career is to find topics that have the following two qualities. Number one, they’re important. And number two, nobody’s talking about them. If you can talk about something that is important and other people aren’t doing, that puts you in a pretty good niche. Empower for a long time and really still to this day is something that’s very, very important in social life, but many people are unwilling to teach about it or to talk about it because it makes people uncomfortable. So that I think is the reason why I got into this.

Brett McKay: And you make the case that you’re in the world of a business organization, leadership, things like that. And you make the case that a lot of the literature out there about leadership in the business world isn’t actually useful. What do they say about how power works or doesn’t work that you think they get wrong?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Oh, God, we could spend hours talking about that. I think many people describe human behavior and human psychology as they would like it to be rather than as it is. So the recommendations about leadership are to be authentic, to tell the truth, to be modest, to be self-effacing, to be generous, all of these things. But if you look at the world, the difference between frontline and CEO salaries are higher than they’ve ever been. The research on lying indicates that people lie all the time. So the narcissism, not modesty, is reliably and predictably related to getting and then holding leadership positions. So much of the social science research, what does it take to be successful? What are the behaviors that we actually reward? They’re almost no resemblance to the aspirational platitudes that much of the leadership literature puts forward.

Brett McKay: Whenever I go on LinkedIn, I check out what people are posting. A lot of this stuff is very aspirational. Here’s an example of this leader that was modest and is humble and blah. And I’m like, “Is that really how it works?” And you’re saying no.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: No, that isn’t how it works. Of course not. And I think you used the right word. The word is aspirational. I think many people… There’s a lot of virtue signaling on LinkedIn and Twitter and holding that aside. There’s also a lot of writing about how people would like the world to be. And what the position that I take is that it’s fine to have aspirations, but if you’re going to get from where you are to the aspirational world you would like to see, you need to understand number one, where you are, and you need to understand why you are where you are ’cause otherwise you just put out these platitudes and nothing ever changes.

Brett McKay: And power is that ability that allows you to make that change that you want.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: That’s exactly right. Power is the ability to get things done against opposition. The Stanford Business School motto is change lives, change organizations, change the world. And if you’re going to change anything, you need influence.

Brett McKay: All right. So power is the ability to get things done in opposition. But if power is the ability to get things done, why are people uncomfortable thinking about and going after power, being effective? Why are people squeamish about that?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: I don’t know. It could be how they were raised. You’re not supposed to seek power. You’re supposed to do good work and work hard and keep your head down and everything will be okay. And so I think how you’re raised and the literature to which you’re exposed causes you to, I think, step away from power. And my friend Deborah Liu, who is now CEO of Ancestry.com, and prior to that, worked at Facebook, wrote a book, and I love the title, Take Back Your Power. And the reason why I like that title is because the opposite of taking back your power is giving away your power. And I think in a hundred ways, people lean away from being powerful rather than leaning into it.

Brett McKay: Well, you mentioned earlier a lot of these things that, if you look at the research, how we reward influence and power to people, people who are narcissistic tend to have more power, deception. These are some negative things. But in this book, The Seven Rules of Power, you make the case that you don’t have to be an unethical person to want power ’cause if you want to do good, if you want to do… You have a moral, this good thing you want to do in the world, you have to think about, “Well, how am I going to do that?” And you have to think about, “Well, how am I going to get power?”

Jeffrey Pfeffer: That’s exactly correct. And by the way, the seven rules, number one, getting out of your own way. Number two, breaking the rules. Number three, showing up in a powerful fashion and building a powerful brand and networking. I don’t think networking is unethical. I don’t think putting a brand forward or showing up in a powerful fashion is unethical. I certainly don’t think getting out of your own way and losing the descriptions that hold you back are unethical. So I don’t see.

Much of the stuff that I talk about in this book as being unethical or bad in any way. Of course, you ought to get out of your own way and you ought to lean into your power and try to show up in a way that makes a positive impression on other people.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s dig into these rules a little bit more. So you said the first rule of power is getting out of your own way. What do you mean by that? And how do people get in their own way when it comes to power?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Oh, my God. That’s a great question. People get in their own way in a number of ways. Number one, I think they apologize too much. So I call this kind of the pre-emptory apology. Pardon me for interrupting. I see people at meetings or even in my classroom. I’m not sure the comment I’m about to make is worthwhile, this kind of modesty thing. Pardon me for taking your time. No, do not engage in pre-emptory apology. And if you’re going to make a comment that nobody wants to hear, don’t make it in the first place. Don’t apologize for it in advance. I think that’s one way in which people give up their power. And I think people carry in their heads descriptions of themselves. I’m not that good. This idea about self-handicapping or this idea that you’re not worthy and deserving. If you go into a situation and you don’t think you’re worthy and deserving, the odds are nobody else is going to think you are worthy or deserving either. So I think you need to come into situations with a sense of your own competence and confidence. And you need to come into situations using a set of adjectives about you that empower rather than disempower you.

Brett McKay: Well, another way that people get in the way of themselves that you talked about in the book that I thought was really interesting is this emphasis on authenticity. And you call this the authenticity a curse actually when it comes to power. Why is authenticity a curse?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Well, it’s way too self-referential. People think that you ought to be true to yourself. I don’t think that’s what leaders need to be. Leaders need to be true not to what their own feelings are, what their own preferences are, or what their own ideas are. They need to be true to what the people around them need. So if you’re running a startup and you come in one day and you’ve had setbacks ’cause startups invariably face various kinds of setbacks and challenges, and you say to your team, “I’m not sure what to do. I’m not sure how we’re going to get out of this.” You’re going to lose the team. You’re going to lose your investors. You’re going to lose your customers. You have to sometimes display confidence that you don’t feel. You have to sometimes display certainty that you don’t feel. And certainly if you show up, my friend Gary Loveman used to run Caesars, the casino company, if you show up in the middle of the night and you’re tired and you’re not, and maybe your family has done something bad or your children have gotten into trouble or whatever, the people in the casino don’t want to hear about this and they don’t want to hear that you’re tired.

You need to show up with energy. You need to show up with a dedication to and a focus on the people who are around you and what do they need from you. And I think what they need from you is they need energy and they need the sense that you care about them and you’re going to devote your efforts to making them more successful.

Brett McKay: Well, as you’re describing that idea of being authentic with the example of, you know, if you’re… It’s late at night, no one wants to hear that you don’t know the question or you’re tired. There’s just all this, a lot of talk lately in the past decade or so about being vulnerable as a leader. And I think people are like, “Well, if you don’t know, and if you’re tired, like you should let people know that ’cause then they’ll trust you more or whatever.” And you’re saying, it sounds good, but that really people don’t respond well to that.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: That’s research that suggests that, you know, it’s fine to be vulnerable to your significant other or maybe to your children or to close friends, but in a work situation, people want to know that you’re going to lead them to victory, that you have the confidence and you are going to tap into their energy and you’re going to give them energy ’cause we know emotions, including energy is contagious. And then at the end, you’re going to lead them to success. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Another thing that gets in the way of how people get in their own way is this wanting to be liked. But the problem is if you want to wield power, sometimes you’re going to do things that people don’t like and they’re not going to like you. So how do you overcome that desire to be well liked by everybody?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: I think you need to focus on results. You know, again, my friend Gary Loveman, who ran Caesars for many years as a CEO, has this lovely saying, “You want to be liked a dog, a dog will love you unconditionally.” But your job as a senior leader is not to win a popularity contest. I mean, people are looking to you to make sometimes tough decisions. Maybe you need to lay people off because of economic circumstances. Maybe you need to fire people because they’ve underperformed or they let you down in various ways. You know, maybe you need to make decisions about strategic direction for the organization that not everybody is going to agree with. And you’re paid as a leader. Your job as a leader is to help people become more successful. And sometimes that involves making pretty tough decisions.

Brett McKay: All right. So this first rule of getting out of your own way, it seems like it’s a mindset shift. You have to just start getting comfortable with the idea that to be a leader, you’re going to have to do things that might go against what you feel is authentic or natural if you actually want to get stuff done.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: I think that’s exactly right. I mean, if you think about Jeff Bezos of Amazon or Elon Musk of Tesla, you know, I’m not sure they’re going to win popularity contests or people are going to like them. I think most entrepreneurs, most many CEOs leading successful organizations, they are focused on accomplishment and they are focused on making things happen. And sometimes that involves, you know, not necessarily behaving as everyone would want you to behave.

Brett McKay: Well, related to that is a second rule, and that is, Break the Rules. What do you mean by break the rules? What kind of rules are we breaking here?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Breaking almost all rules. My friend, Jason Calacanis, the angel investor who wrote a book talking about how he turned a hundred thousand into a hundred million dollars when he was applying to Fordham, he would drop in on the admissions office, the admissions officer without an appointment. When he got admitted to Fordham, he dropped in on the Dean without an appointment to get a better job in the computer lab. You know, I think breaking the rules, there’s a, Malcolm Gladwell has a 2009 article in the New Yorker, how David beats Goliath. How does David beat Goliath? Then we’re talking about the biblical David and Goliath. You know, if David puts on all of the armor like Goliath has and has a sword like Goliath has, poor David is a little, is much smaller than Goliath, isn’t going to be able to move. So David says, “I’m not going to fight Goliath on Goliath’s terms. I’m going to fight Goliath using my tools, the tools of a shepherd. I’m going to use a slingshot.” So David beats Goliath by basically engaging in what the technical term would be asymmetric warfare. And it’s true, not just in warfare, it’s true in business strategy.

I think the most successful business organizations are ones that change the rules of the game to favor what their particular capacities and capabilities are.

Brett McKay: So what does that look like on a day-to-day basis? Like, you know, let’s say you just got hired at a company and you want to make a mark. I mean, like what kind of rules should you start breaking and what does that look like?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Well, you know, so I have a friend, the former student named Tristan Walker and Tristan Walker wanted to get a job at Foursquare. He sent emails and resumes to the CEO at the time at Foursquare and the CEO was busy running the startup. And so Tristan Walker began, basically he didn’t get the job of being the head of business development. He started doing the job of being the head of business development. And when he landed a contract with Starbucks, the head of Foursquare, the CEO said, “Wow, maybe I ought to hire this guy because he was already doing the job for which he wanted to be hired.” Now, that’s an extreme example, but it’s an interesting example. And I see this inside organizations all the time. People take initiative. You know, I believe this organization ought to do a strategic review. Okay. I can’t get anybody’s attention. I will do it myself. I think we ought to reach out to the following potential customers. I can’t get the sales team to do it. I’ll do it myself. In other words, you take initiative and do what you think needs to be done without waiting for permission to do it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s interesting. A lot of times we tell people to take initiative. You know, we tell our kids that you got to take initiative, but when you get in an organization, taking initiative is seen as, well, you don’t do that, that you’re a renegade if you take initiative. But you’re saying you need to do more of that. You need to keep doing that when you get in an organization.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: And you know, if you land a contract for Foursquare with Starbucks, nobody’s going to say you shouldn’t have done that. If you reach out to a potential customer and you’re successful in landing that customer, nobody’s going to say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that.” You know, if you undertake a strategic review that leads to some great insight that makes the organization successful, nobody’s going to say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that.” You know, at the end, it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. That’s the basic principle.

Brett McKay: And you use the example of Robert Moses, who he did this a lot when he was doing his thing in New York City. Instead of going through the typical bureaucratic rigmarole to get something approved, he would just do it.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: He would just build it. He would absolutely. He would, you know, instead of asking for permission to do something, he would do it. And then, you know, once the park was built or once the playground was built or once the swimming pool was built, what are you going to do? You know, people are enjoying it. You’re not going to say, “Well, you shouldn’t have done that.”

Brett McKay: Well, then you also bring in research. Like all this stuff isn’t… You’re not just pulling the stuff out of your hat somewhere. There’s research that shows that we actually, when we see someone break the rules, we kind of like, “That guy, I want to listen to that guy ’cause he’s, I don’t know, he’s like above the law in a way. So maybe we should pay attention to him.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Yep, yep. Rule breaking, you know, because, because it’s heuristic association between, you know, but the powerful people get to break the rules. So if you break the rules, people will think you have more power than maybe you have.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. All right. The next rule is about appearing powerful and you use the example of two CEOs to highlight this rule. It’s a Lloyd Blankfein and Tony Hayward. What can these two guys teach us about the importance of appearing powerful?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: People, you know, I think people respond to how you look, you know, and so if you show up and you speak in a powerful voice and you show up and use powerful gestures as opposed to hunching over, you know, people pay more attention to you.

You could look at Oliver North and his testimony years ago for Iran-Contra, you know, he shows up in his military uniform and he is assertive. People respond to others, how others look and how they appear. Body language is important. My colleague at the Berkeley, Dana Carney, has done a ton of research. She’s writing a book on the importance of body language. We know this and we see this. Next time you watch a political debate or something on TV like that, turn off the sound and you can tell who’s winning just by the body language.

Brett McKay: Well and you talk about these two guys, they both got called up to, you know, I think Congress to give testimony or something ’cause of wrongdoing that their companies were accused of taking part in. And one of them went there and there was… He’s very conciliatory, like, “Oh, you know, we’re really sorry.” And he was talking about, “It’s been so hard for me and blah, blah, blah, blah.” And the other guy was just… He didn’t really talk about what he’s being accused of. He’s like, “Well, here’s, you know, I’m running this company. We’re trying to get this done. And as a consequence, something like this happened. It’s just, that’s just part of doing business. And, but we’re doing this, we’re creating more, so much more value because we, that thing happened or something like that.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Yep. That’s exactly right. I mean, Tony Hayward for BP, you know, reads a statement, which of course prevents him from making eye contact, which is already a bad thing. He’s all hunched over. He doesn’t use forceful arm gestures. And he certainly apologizes a lot for the BP Gulf oil spill. Lloyd Blankfein, representing Goldman Sachs, which has been accused of shorting securities that it sold to his clients, comes up and says, “You know, we are the other side of what our clients want to do. So we buy what we, you know, if they want to sell to us, we buy from them. If they want to buy from us, we sell to them. And then we cover the risk by taking the other, by perhaps making shorts or, you.

Know, buying derivatives or whatever they do. And yes, we are the other side of what our clients want to do. And by the way, we’re a 140-year-old firm. And this is what market making is. Market making is being the other side of our clients’ transactions.” And completely unapologetic.

Brett McKay: All right. To appear more powerful think about body language it’s important. Look people in the eye, stand up straight. We’ve had people in the podcast talking about those. Those are powerful social cues that signal competence and effectiveness and power to other people. So you might think that’s just dumb stuff, but it actually is really like those little small details are important.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Absolutely…

Brett McKay: Okay. So another rule is if you have power, you have to use your power to increase your power. Why does using your power increase your power?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: People want to be associated with success. People want to be associated with other people who are able to get things done. So to the extent that you’re able to get more done, more people are going to support you. I mean, think about yourself as a startup or think about yourself as, you know, maybe Robert Moses being parks, building parks, grounds, there’s swimming pools, or think about yourself as Lyndon Johnson passing all that great society legislation. The more stuff you get done, the more effective you look. The more effective you look, the more people want to support you because, you know, while Don Quixote is a nice figure in literature, nobody wants to be associated with people who are tilting at windmills. They want to be associated with people who are actually making things happen. So the more you’re able to get done, the more people want to invest in you and to work with you.

Brett McKay: Well, I think FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he understood this principle. You know, as soon as he got in, this is where the whole idea of, you know, the first hundred days of a president, right? How much are they going to get done? Well, as soon as he got in, he established all these agencies and was doing all this different stuff to help alleviate the depression. I think what he was trying to do, he’s trying to give confidence to the American people that we’re in charge, we’re going to get stuff done, and that only increased his power.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Yep. That’s exactly right. That’s another good example.

Brett McKay: Yeah. LBJ did that too. And you talk about as soon as after the assassination, like immediately he was setting out, here’s what we’re going to do to get the great society going, education, civil rights. He had a plan like within that first day to get stuff done.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Yep. And the more bills he passed, the more people then say, “Wow, here’s somebody who can actually get the civil rights legislation that Kennedy tried to get through and was never able to.” And the more effective you look, the more people want to be associated with you and to work with you. I mean, you think about this, if you’re working in a company and you’ve got two leaders, one leader is getting stuff done and making stuff happen, and the other leader isn’t, who do you want to work with? You want to work with people… You want to work in the unit that’s making things happen.

Brett McKay: Well, so yeah, and I think a lot of, I’ve read business advice where if you’re put into a new leadership position, well, you maybe what you should do is just kind of embed yourself in the organization, see how things are run, and then you make your changes. You’re saying, no, you need to go in there and just start making things happen right away.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: People are looking to you and they are trying to evaluate, is this somebody who’s going to be successful or not? And the sooner you show that you’re going to be successful, the more support you’re going to get.

Brett McKay: Okay. And what this also does by exercising power, it also, it’s fights, it helps you fight off would-be pretenders as well to your leadership position.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: That is absolutely correct. And you see this with outside succession and CEO roles and obviously on political roles. You know, when a new CEO comes in from outside, oftentimes there’s a lot of turnover in the top management team. Jim Collins, good to great, the great management thinker and writer, talks about getting the right people on the bus. And that’s exactly right. It’s very hard to get things done if you don’t have the right talent and skills working with you. And by the way, getting the right people on the bus oftentimes means getting the wrong people off the bus. So yes, you want a team who can execute. You want a team who can get things done. I mean, think about a football team. You come in as a coach, look at Lincoln Riley at USC. One of the things Lincoln Riley did when he came to coach USC is he said, “I’m going to apparently, according to the, what I read in the newspaper, have the largest number of transfers almost in the history of college football because I want to try to get the best talent on this team, so I have the best chance of winning.”

Brett McKay: Lincoln, I’m from Oklahoma. I went to OU. He is persona non grata here. We don’t like Lincoln Riley. Okay. So, and another rule is success excuses almost everything. What’s behind that rule?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: What’s behind that rule is that once you are successful, once you are rich, you can, and there are a bunch of psychological dynamics behind this. People will forget or forgive what you did to get into that position of power. You see this all the time with wealthy business people, you know, once you’re rich and successful, you can put your name on a lot of pieces of concrete and auditoriums and concert halls and etcetera, and people are happy to take your money and you can buy legitimacy. Once you become rich and successful, people want to be associated with power, with that rich, with that wealth and success and they will forget or forgive or both what you did to get there in the first place.

Brett McKay: So going to like a more, you know, down to earth example, right? So you talk about someone taking initiative to start a thing that they, you know, maybe they didn’t get permission to start a development thing within their business. Well, if it’s successful, people aren’t going to care. Like the boss is going to care that you didn’t follow protocol ’cause it was successful.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: That’s correct. The saying is always failure is an orphan and success has many parents.

Brett McKay: And one of the things you talk about in your previous book on power too, is that the just world fallacy contributes to the way people will allow success to excuse almost anything. How does that work?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: The just world idea is an idea that started by the social psychologist, Melvin Lerner, who says that people want to believe that the world is a just and fair place that you get what you deserve. But the dual of idea of that you get what you deserve is once you get a lot of stuff, once you’re successful and powerful, people will say, “Well, you must have deserved it in the first place.”

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s a double-edged sword though, because we figure someone who is successful, you know, they deserve their success. So he’s a skillful, good person and we want to be associated with them. But when it comes to be, you know, when it’s related to ourselves, we can get caught up into believing that our good actions will always be rewarded. And then we’ll, you know, we start to feel frustrated and resentful that we’re not being adequately rewarded or, you know.

You, you see someone at work who’s getting something using nefarious means or they’re just kind of just not a pleasant person. And we think, “Well, they don’t deserve that.” But you have to accept that, you know, good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, but regardless, you have to keep trying to be proactive and make things happen in the world with your own actions, right? You have to like, you know, exercise your agency.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, I used to believe that the big contribution of my class was to teach people a lot of social science and a lot of social psychology around power and influence. And I’ve now come to believe that while I am teaching them social psychology and social science and everything I talk about in Seven Rules of Power, of course, has a lot of research behind it. The biggest effect of my class is to cause people to be bolder than they were before, to take more risks than they thought they could, to break the rules, to step out of their comfort zone and to try stuff and to be, and to be, and you use the word, I think is exactly the right word, to become more proactive, to become more agentic. And you know, if once you become more proactive and more agentic, you’re more likely to get more stuff done. The more stuff you try to do, the more stuff you’re going to get done.

Brett McKay: I had this conversation with, I coach flag football, a bunch of 11 year olds. And sometimes that games, you know, they’re like the rep, you know, this is like, this is flag football. So there’s one ref, you can’t see the entire field. There’s no playbacks. And sometimes the ref will miss a penalty and there’s like, “Oh, that’s not fair. Oh,” they just get really, I’m like, I always tell like, “Guys did all that yelling. Did that change the call?” “No.” It’s like, “Well, you gotta, well, the only thing you can do is go out there and play harder and try to do better. That’s complaining and whining about, you know, they that’s not fair. It’s not doing anything.” It happens every game, but like for some kids it’s landed. Some other kids are still, I still have to try to pound into their head.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Sounds like a great coaching idea. You know, I mean, it is a great coaching idea because the question that you asked in the comment you just made is exactly the right question. Does your complaining, does your whining, does your this, that, or the other thing, does it change anything? And if the answer to that question is no, then let’s do something that’s way more productive than doing things that don’t make a difference.

Brett McKay: Another rule is you gotta to expand your brand or develop a personal brand. What role does that play in acquiring power?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Well, I think narratives are important. And I think you will… You just as you know, products need a brand. I think you, people need a brand, you know, and they need, not only do they need to build a brand, which is a short statement that summarizes, you know, what they’ve done in their lives and who they are and how that makes them uniquely qualified for the job to which they aspire, or the job that they hold. And then you need to promulgate that brand through social media. And the example I use in the book is Tristan Walker. He’s a graduate of Stanford, African American, was an executive in residence at Andreessen Horowitz and, you know, thought about doing the same stuff that everybody else thought of doing, you know, FinTech or, you know, social media. But as an African-American man, he understood, number one, that there weren’t a lot of personal grooming products and, you know, that many of the shavers left him with razor bumps or, you know, were hard on his skin. And he said, “Well, you know, instead of doing what everybody else is going to do, I’m going to basically build grooming products for people of color, which are a large growing segment of the population completely underserved.”

And if you think about it, that is a product and that is a brand that fits him. I am a black man and I am going to build products for black men and for Latino and African-American women, for people of color. And I know that market because I am that market and I’ve lived that experience. And so that’s a brand that fits him and suits him. And he built Walker & Company Brands, which was then bought by Procter & Gamble. So, you know, you need a brand that somehow integrates your life experience with your competence and capabilities in a way that says you are uniquely qualified to do what you’re doing.

Brett McKay: Well and you also say sometimes you got to be appropriately controversial. What do you mean by that?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Well, you know, there’s, what is the saying? There’s various forms of publicity. There’s good publicity, there’s bad publicity, and then of course the worst is no publicity. You need to stand out. And one of the ways of standing out is by saying things and doing things that catch people’s attention. I mean, if I said to you, I want you to bring out a personal computer, the last thing you would do was bring out another Windows machine that’s black because there are like a zillion Windows machines that all look alike. I mean, you know, Apple had at one point these kind of pastel-colored machines and they have different operating system. I mean, you need to do something to stand out and to differentiate yourself so that people notice your product, so that people notice you. No one has ever been hired into a job for which nobody knew them or thought of them. The first thing you need to do if you’re going to be hired, if you’re going to be promoted, somebody has to know who you are.

Brett McKay: And thinking for a lot of people, again, this goes back to this idea of getting out of your own way, right? Some people are like, “Well, it’s just, I’m a modest person. I don’t feel authentic when I’m talking about what I do.” And you say, “No, if you actually want to get stuff done, you have to get comfortable talking about how effective you are.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer: That’s exactly right. I mean, you should not assume that your boss is watching you every minute and is noticing everything you’re doing. So maybe you ought to let you help your boss understand your accomplishments.

Brett McKay: No, that’s a good point ’cause someone else is probably taking credit for the, that team effort you did and it’s not you, but it’s some other guy.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Could be.

Brett McKay: So another important part of gaining more power is networking. So how does networking increase your power? What type of network are we talking about here?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Well, if leadership is getting things done through other people, it seems pretty obvious to me that the more other people you know, the more you’re going to be able to get done. Organizational life, social life, is in fact social. And so the more connections you have, and particularly the more connections you have with people who can help you be effective, the better off you’re going to be.

Brett McKay: You also talk about this importance of focusing on weak links. What are weak links and why are they important to building power? Yeah.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: So many people spend most of their time with people who are close to them. They are their family, they are their close friends, they are the people they work with all the time. And the problem, there’s not a problem, the issue with spending most of your time with people who are close to you is people who are close to you probably know the same things and the same people that you do. And the people to whom you’re weakly tied, people that you may have met only once or twice, people who are casual acquaintances, is they are going to diversify both what you know and who you know. And just as diversification is good in financial markets, it’s good in social markets as well. The more different ideas you’re exposed to, the more different people you are exposed to, the more different sectors of the economy you’re exposed to, the more creative you’re going to be and the more you’re going to be able to get done because you’ll know more different people and things.

Brett McKay: I think one issue that might happen with people who are proactive, like to get things done, they might think, “Well, man, networking just takes a lot of time and it just takes me away from my core competency, which is like why I’m here to increase whatever profits in this sector.” But you still got to network. So how do you make time? Have you found any good advice on making time for networking?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: I think you need to write down the people who you need to meet in order to advance your and your organization’s agenda and then figure out how you’re going to meet them and then literally make lists and hold yourself accountable and use your phone or use something to keep track of how you spend your time and say to yourself, I’m going to spend a certain amount of time networking. People say to me, I don’t spend enough time exercising or I don’t spend enough time taking care of my physical body. How do you do a better job of that? You make a certain time in the day every day to run or to do whatever exercise you’re going to do. Similarly, I think you want to set a time and a certain amount of time each week to build the relationships. They’re going to permit you to get things done. In a world basically of interdependence.

Brett McKay: You know, for me doing stuff like building your personal brand or networking, even though I know they’re either effective in building power and influence, these are stuff… It’s just stuff I don’t like doing. I can’t bring myself to do. So I guess at the end of the day, people have to learn these rules of power and influence and then they got to decide if they want power enough to be willing to do the things they may not… Do things they may not like or be comfortable doing or they got to decide, “Well, maybe I just don’t want that much power and influence ’cause I don’t want to do all that stuff.” So that’s something they got to think about. Well, Jeffrey, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Well, I have a personal homepage, www.jeffreypfeffer.com. I have a podcast myself called Pfeffer on Power, which is www.pfefferonpower.com. So between the podcast and my personal homepage, or you can read Seven Rules of Power, those are all ways to learn more about this. And you know, I’m happy to send people my course outline or, you know, whatever. I think there are a variety of ways to learn about this.

Brett McKay: All right. Well, Jeffrey Pfeffer, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jeffrey Pfeffer: Thank you.

Brett McKay:My guest today was Jeffrey Pfeffer. He’s the author of the book, Seven Rules of Power. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about Jeffrey’s work at his website, jeffreypfeffer.com. And that’s Pfeffer with a P. Also check out our show notes at Aom.is/rulesofpower. Where you can find links to resources where we you delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you could do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code “manliness” at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.