Barbara Kellerman

The question was, what was it that he did with it? What he did repeatedly was dismiss it, punish the people who delivered it, and then continue the policy.

Which leads us to my favorite segment of the podcast, and that is Kellerman's framework of bad leadership and the types of bad leadership.

So I'm using Barbara Kellerman's framework in these series of cautionary tales and applying three categories to Mao.

There's evil, there's callous, and then incompetent in policy.

So let's take each one and dissect it together.

Evil, is the willingness to know and not stop.

Now Kellerman's evil type, as I had described in the previous podcast where we talked about Joseph Stalin, is not about cartoonish cruelty.

It's about knowing what you're doing is going to cause this catastrophic harm and you're still choosing to do it anyways because stopping it would cost you something that you're not willing to give up.

But I want to go a little bit deeper of why he was a bad leader.

More from Barbara Kellerman's analysis.

Barbara Kellerman makes an important distinction, which is bad leadership isn't just about bad outcomes.

It's about the quality and the ethics of the leader's behavior.

So a leader can fail and not be a bad leader in Kellerman's sense.

Uh, forty-five million resources come up in less than half a second if you Google church leadership resources, and they tend to look quite a lot like secular leadership resources.

Barbara Kellerman has written a book called The End of Leadership.

She's at Harvard Business School, and she refers to what she calls the leadership industry.

There are, uh, more programs, centers, institutes, classes, seminars, blogs, conferences, retreats, webinars, TED Talks, consultants, coaches who can guide you into leadership than ever before.

About that same time, seventy-seven percent of all Americans said that we are in a leadership crisis.

And in the corporate front, it's actually worse.

Barbara Kellerman says that only seven percent of employees said that they could trust their employers, leaders, and managers.

And all this, of course, raises the question, where can you go to find a leader? What does it mean to be a leader? Is everybody a leader? How do we know? There's, uh, fifteen hundred different definitions of leadership in the leadership industry, forty different theories.

And it's absolutely no surprise to me that they couldn't live with themselves because of the consequences of their actions years later.

And that's interesting because Adair, in terms of the logic of this, perverse logic, If you apply an academic framework of understanding to this, which I always try to do, it's an example of what the Harvard academic Barbara Kellerman calls bad leadership or evil leadership.

When you think about some of the evil leaders.

leaders in history there is a process and a mechanism by which they can radicalize other people or they can convince other people to do their bidding and that dynamic is something I think is it's a live issue to me in all of my work and terrorists today regardless of where they are in the world have to motivate their followers if they're going to carry out terrorism it's a human based activity and I think Adair knew that he knew the psychology of it more importantly he knew how to get people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise have done conditioning of mainly young men in the art of killing.