Chapter Nine

Does this mean that leaders should undergo some sort of therapy or psychological diagnosis in order to be effective? Not at all. The most relevant aspects of personality can be examined by applying leadership theory to that “Great Group” we call the individual organism. We could simply ask that leaders apply to themselves the same principles that they use in leading others. How, in other words, do prospective leaders lead themselves?

We like to think of ourselves as self-contained, even monolithic, units. But in real life there's no such thing, for our “individual” self actually consists of a host of disparate elements. An appreciable percentage of our own dry body weight, for example, consists of bacteria, some of which have simply taken up residence, but others of which are essential to our survival (Margulis and Sagan, 1990, p. 28).

Are We Together On This?

Our whole body is a complex factory in which millions of bacteria work as subcontractors to help us maintain life. Even within individual cells, the regions called mitochondria are widely regarded as the descendants of independent entities, still functioning on much the same basis as their remote ancestors, bacteria that were absorbed alive by primitive one-celled organisms to create the common rootstock of all Earth's plant and animal life. They provide the energy our bodies need to keep going, and the wherewithal to repair them. “Without our mitochondria we could not lift a finger. In fact, it is these swarms of ancestral bacteria, working night and day in all our cells, that keep us alive” (Sahtouris, 2000).

To make matters more confusing, we're also full of contradictory impulses, as well as mental creations such as dreams over which we have no control, body parts that rebel and produce symptoms we don't understand, and so on.

Sociologists used to work themselves into a tizzy whenever anyone compared society to an organism, because they thought it implied some kind of monolithic unity. But today we know how little unity there is in the human organism: how much internal conflict, how much “class warfare” between the mind on one hand and the lowly body on the other; how little “freedom of speech” for some feelings and impulses; how many rebellions and uprisings there are; how poor the communication between body and mind at times; how despotic the governing forces can be; and how much the poor proletarian body often suffers as a result.

Contradiction and inconsistency are the rule, not the exception, in human behavior.

A Miracle of Coordination

Yet any moderately healthy human organism is an astonishing enterprise. When we consider the millions of living entities that operate it, the amount of information it processes, the rich mix of conflicting impulses and beliefs it serves, it's a miracle of coordination. And if it manages to achieve anything at all in the world it's even more deserving of the appellation “Great Group” than the examples in Organizing Genius (Bennis and Biederman, 1997). Consider what even the most ordinary organism can accomplish in a single day: successfully making billions of subtle adaptations to its physical environment, receiving and organizing billions of bits of data, acquiring, ingesting, and processing several different types of fuel for itself—oxygen, water, food—healing itself when injured or attacked, generating new ideas, and so on.

But who “runs” this group? We like to think we run it with our minds, but this is like the authoritarian scientist who missed out on a great scientific breakthrough in biology because he was looking for a “boss cell” (Tannen, 1998, pp. 13–15). Most of an organism's functions are performed quite well before it can even be said to have much of a mind. With regard to 99.99 percent of what goes on in the human organism the mind doesn't have a clue.

I may notice I have an open sore on my tongue, for example. I have no idea how I got it. It looks, when I examine it, as if someone took a chunk out of it. It's hard to ignore, but I try, and finally, in sleep, succeed. Sometime during the next day I remember it and take a look. It's gone. How was this done? I don't remember giving the order.

While playing tennis an opponent dribbles a dink shot over the net. I rush desperately for the ball, thinking only of getting a racket on it. But when I do, it whistles crosscourt for my best shot of the day. I don't recall giving that order either.

Micromanaging the Organism

On the other hand the orders I do give playing tennis seem often to be ignored, and I'm not alone in this. My group of elderly tennis players is not known for powerful serving, and our second serves are viewed by the receivers much as a cat views a bird with a broken wing. Yet I've noticed that we win quite a few points off those second serves, and I know why. There's just too much time to think about all the things you can do to that weak serve—opportunity knocks so loudly it throws your timing off, and your return all too often ends up in the net. This is what comes of letting the boss get too involved in day-to-day operations.

Yet we all try to micromanage our bodies. When we get the message from our body that we're tired we ignore it and drink coffee. When we get too jittery we have a drink. We push and prod, ignore messages we don't want to deal with, try to control our internal functioning with drugs, and so on. Until our “staff” has a sickout in protest.

Who's the Boss Around Here?

Who really heads up the human organism? And how does this CEO operate? Does it lead or does it manage? And how well? Clearly there's an integrative and adaptive element of leadership that exists below the level of human consciousness or we would die every time we took a nap. It may well be that this nameless—largely unconscious—coordinating function is our true leader. But when we think or speak about self we're usually referring to a conscious entity—to the mind, or to what is generally called the ego.

From a DNA viewpoint the individual's only function is to reproduce itself (“a hen is just the egg's way of making another egg”).

As individuals, of course, we take a different view of the matter—seeing our own survival as an end in itself. When people don't we think there's something very wrong with them.

To address this universal concern each human organism has a department assigned to deal with threats to personal survival. This bit of ourselves we call the ego, and most of us identify totally with it. But the human organism is very complex, and we're on automatic much of the time. While my ego is making plans, the rest of my organism can perform complicated tasks, process food, and balance itself internally in a thousand ways. A healthy organism may get out of bed, turn off the alarm, go to the bathroom, go jogging, wash, get dressed, prepare and eat breakfast, drive to work through crowded city streets, listen to the car radio—constantly making the most complex adaptations without any help at all from the ego, which may be entirely absorbed in security issues—that is, thinking about getting rich, powerful, famous, or loved.

Now the ego is a very simple mechanism compared to the organism as a whole. All its intricate thinking and planning is just an elaboration on one binary distinction—threat versus no-threat. Digital computers, which are also binary, are modeled on the ego.

Ruled by an Idiot

This may sound odd. What could be more complicated than the productions of logical thought? But the fact that the ego makes things complicated doesn't mean the ego itself is complicated, but quite the reverse. This is what we mean when we say a picture's worth a thousand words (an understatement if you've ever seen a picture digitized on a computer). The words make things complicated for us because they're too simple for the task of conveying what the picture shows. The picture is complicated, and therefore makes things easy for us to grasp.

Yet most of us are ruled, with varying degrees of tyranny, by our egos. How did this come about? How could such a simpleton gain so much control over something so subtle and complex?

The Despot

The reason is that in times of danger, binary simplicity is just what the doctor ordered. When a big rig is bearing down on us we want simple binary answers—run–don't run, left–right, forward–back. And the ego is superbly gifted at processing this kind of information quickly. In times of stress we give the ego dictatorial powers.

But who defines “times of stress”?

What the ego is not good at is deciding how severe a threat is, or when it's no longer serious enough to worry about. This, after all, isn't a binary question. And to make matters worse, the ego has a vested interest in not answering it.

In this respect the ego is no different from other despots. The Roman dictator Cincinnatus was famous because when the crisis he was called in to deal with had passed he gave up power and went back to his farm. In this he was unique. When the time comes for most emergency leaders to go back to the farm they start to hem and haw and find excuses. The state of emergency becomes a way of life.

There's always something to be nervous about if you're inclined that way, and how could you not be inclined that way if it was your job? How could you justify your existence otherwise? If the threat is gone you'd better find another one.

When the USSR—the prime excuse for forty-five years of bloated military budgets—collapsed with a pitiful groan, as Warren Bennis and I had predicted twenty-five years before, the Pentagon didn't say, “Oh, I guess we were wrong about that big threat, we won't be needing all this stuff now!” They invented new dangers.

The ego is no different. It says things like: “I know we have a hundred million dollars, but what if we lost it all? Better make some more!” Or, “I know the bully who beat us up in the third grade is a bank teller in Akron now, but what if he comes back? Better add to our gun collection!” Or, “I know I've slept with three different women this week, but what if tomorrow I'm all alone and unloved, or I become impotent or it turns out I'm gay? Better find someone new!” None of this is conscious, of course, for the ego, like all despots, keeps its operating maneuvers in the dark.

In a Chronic State of Siege

The ego keeps excellent records of life-threatening situations. Unfortunately, its filing system makes no distinction between situations that are truly life-threatening today and those that may have felt life-threatening in infancy but are life-threatening no longer. Alienating a parent, for example, feels life-threatening to a toddler, and whatever strategy the child stumbled on to avoid losing a parent's love may continue to get the nod from the ego long after the child reaches adulthood. The strategy may be overachieving, underachieving, being meek, being aggressive, being tidy, being a slob—whatever made the child feel safe.

We learn through mistakes. We learn to avoid major errors by making small ones and incorporating that experience. Such learning is deeper and more permanent than any warning, advice, or instruction. Pediatricians say that a toddler with no bruises is overprotected. Bruises are the way we learn to sense our way in the world. An organism that takes risks doesn't need to send every little piece of information through Central Processing before acting.

But the ego doesn't like this. Its job—the justification for its existence—is to anticipate threats. It's not interested in learning, creating, exploring, adventure—only in avoiding mistakes.

When egos become despotic they censor information—a process psychologists call denial, or repression. Only “relevant” data gets past the censors—information that justifies the ego's control. Like other despots, the ego hates negative feedback, because it always includes the message that it's arrogating too much power to itself.

Internal Memos Ignored

The ego doesn't like to hear, for example, that it's driving the body too hard, or subjecting it to too much stress, or harming it with addictions. It doesn't want to hear messages from the unconscious, in the form of dreams or unbidden thoughts, that it's propelling the organism on a life course that will cause untold misery.

It doesn't even want to hear intuitive messages that the organism is entering life-threatening situations. People who have been beaten, shot, or raped often report that just before entering a dangerous situation they had a feeling of foreboding that they ignored or dismissed. In other words, the scouts did their job and the message was delivered to the despot but the despot ignored it.

How can it be that the ego, whose sole function is to protect the organism from danger, sometimes—in its obsession with control—fails to do even that?

First, the ego is often forced to choose between two dangers—an old chronic one and a new acute one. The old chronic one is the danger of losing parental love. It's the one that says things like “Don't be a wuss, guy” or “Be a nice, sweet girl and do what the nice man tells you.” And this old chronic danger often gets the nod, because it's familiar and the ego knows how to deal with it. Furthermore, the ego, like all despots, makes no distinction between threats to the organism and threats to itself. Responding to intuition feels like a challenge to the ego's position, so intuitive reports are routinely ignored.

Despots maintain their power by incessantly warning of potential dangers: “The enemies of our nation are everywhere! We must be eternally vigilant!” The ego uses the same strategy. It manufactures threats, and claims that if it were weakened the organism would be plunged into chaos.

What's Good for Me Is Good for the Country

The ego's fear of losing its grip on the organism is what we call anxiety. It feels the same as fear of an external danger but no real danger is present. We feel we ought to be doing something to protect ourselves, but we don't know what it is we should be guarding against. This is the function of anxiety: to encourage us to give more power to the ego, just as all dictators drum up war scares to shore up their position.

At this point the ego can scarcely be called a capable leader for the organism—acting against many of the organism's best interests and probably hastening its demise. It has become blind and rigid, to the point where not only is the organism in constant stress and misery, it is also in increasing danger. The ego's rigidity makes it unable to adapt to changing conditions and its narrowness makes it unable to absorb necessary information. As is so often the case in life, the protector becomes the most serious threat.

In some cases the ego becomes so dictatorial that it's unwilling to allow the organism to sleep. Normally an organism will pull the plug on the ego for a third of each day, so that the populace can get its work done without constant government interference. But many egos are so tyrannical they're willing to sacrifice the health of the organism to their own obsession with control.

Many people find themselves in this condition today. At some point early in life they called in the Marines and now can't get rid of them. They're kept in a state of chronic mobilization by being continually reminded of obsolete dangers. The ego may claim that safety lies in being uptight, punctual, and reliable, or that it lies in being slovenly, disorganized, and helpless. What reveals the despot is the consistency—the use of the same strategy in all situations, protecting us from dangers that have long since vanished.

Evaluating Your Internal Leader

While all egos show tendencies toward micromanagement and excessive control, they vary widely from person to person. This raises an important issue for leaders in tomorrow's world. It will be hard for them to function as flexible, democratic leaders in tomorrow's fluid organizations if their egos are behaving like yesterday's rigid despots.

Since the world is moving too fast for the cumbersome rigidities of authoritarian control, and since a leader's most important tool is the leader's own personality, all potential leaders need to ask leadership questions of their egos.

Consider the following examples:

• “Effective leaders are willing to make decisions, but they typically allow members of the group to work as they see fit” (Bennis and Biederman, 1997, p. 20).

Does your ego allow your body, your impulses, and your intuition to function as they were designed to do? Or does it attempt to limit and constrain them? Is it only comfortable when it feels that everything the organism does is a result of its own conscious control?

• “Leadership is not so much the exercise of power itself as the empowerment of others,” and the idea that “the leader controls, directs, prods, manipulates … is perhaps the most damaging myth of all” (Bennis and Nanus, 1985, pp. 224–225).

Does your ego empower the rest of you? Does it allow the organism to pursue its own optimal functioning or does it push, prod, and manipulate it? Does it give free rein to your unconscious to divulge its creative imagery? Or does it dismiss such imagery as irrelevant and pointless? Does it allow your musculature to express itself in nonutilitarian activities? Or does it restrict it to boring, monotonous tasks? Does it express gratitude for the wonders that the body accomplishes in maintaining, healing, and balancing this complex organism, rewarding it with release, rest, and whole-body gratifications? Or does it simply demand more and more of it, noticing it only when it fails in some way or breaks down?

• “The leader must be willing and able to set up reliable mechanisms of feedback so that he can not only conceptualize the social territory of which he is an important part, but realize how he influences it” (Bennis and Slater, 1999, p. 127).

Does your ego respond to feedback? Does it listen to your intuition—that is, to right-brain, holistic insights? Or does it shoot the messenger? Does it respond to pain, fatigue, and other physical symptoms with attention, care, and concern for the afflicted area, or does it shout down these messages with painkillers, stimulants, and other forms of symptomatic relief? Does it listen to messages from the unconscious or dismiss them as the ravings of cranks? Is it ever quiet when information is flooding in from all parts of the organism, or is it continually talking or looking at its watch?

Does your ego have an adequate understanding of the enormously complex system of which it is a part, and on which it depends entirely for its continued existence? And does your ego have an adequate awareness of the impact its demands and preoccupations have on the organism as a whole?

Why It's Important

Democratizing your ego is important today because of the way the world is changing. For thousands of years we've lived in a global culture that was authoritarian and hierarchical—a culture obsessed with exercising control over nature, other people, and our own emotions. Today we're moving at an accelerating pace toward a democratic and synergistic global culture—one more comfortable with spontaneous process, more accepting of what looks like chaos; a culture in which control is something that emerges, not something imposed. This is what Mary Parker Follett called “self-creating coherence” (Metcalf and Urwick, 1942, p. 200).

Modern writers such as Kevin Kelly (1998), Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer (1998), William Knoke (1996), Virginia Postrel (1998), and Thomas Friedman (1999) often use organic metaphors in talking about the new economy. It behaves like a biological community, they say—evolving and developing without centralized control. People are beginning to visualize organizations in the same way.

But how do people who have grown up with a more mechanistic concept of the world deal with this changing environment? Will those who've been schooled in the belief that their world—or their organization—will unravel without the exercise of their conscious control be able to adapt? Who will find this new world congenial? Who will find it oppressive, frustrating, terrifying?

Fresh Eyes

When change occurs, those who are uncommitted to the status quo—the outsiders—are in the best position to take advantage of it. Outsiders have fresh eyes—they haven't been indoctrinated with obsolete assumptions. It was the untaught child—uncommitted to the etiquette of authoritarianism—who saw that the emperor had no clothes.

This is perhaps why women today are making their greatest gains in cutting-edge industries. “If the male was the prototypical industrial worker, the information worker is typically a woman…. Of the people whose job title falls under the category of ‘professional’ … the majority are women (Naisbitt and Aburdene, 1990, pp. 220–226).

The “glass ceiling” that often keeps women from reaching the top of the corporate ladder may prove to be a blessing in disguise, as more and more women abandon these corporate dinosaurs to start new businesses of their own in cutting-edge fields. Women are starting their own businesses at twice the rate of men, their sales and workforces booming, and they're more likely than male business owners to have Internet access and Web sites (Jackson, 1999).

Pretrained

Another reason women adapt well to the new economy is that it demands just those skills women specialized in during the centuries they were locked into their traditional gender role—mediating, anticipating, negotiating, compromising, recognizing the needs of others. As a group women are better attuned to the demands of a democratic society. Men talk constantly about “being firm” and “standing tall” and “standing up to” people, as if working collectively on a problem were a matter of maintaining an erection. But rigidity is not a virtue in a democracy, and solving social problems is not a form of hand-to-hand combat.

Deborah Tannen finds that women often make better managers than men because they're more likely to involve employees in decision making, leading to more enthusiastic implementation (Tannen, 1998, p. 181). Men have traditionally tried to dominate the environment and make it predictable, but women have always had to live with confusion and chaos. Women are more compelled by their biology to recognize the limits of control. Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause are boundary-dissolving experiences that tie them to nature, and in traditional households they had to adapt daily to the unexpected, between active small children and the whims of demanding husbands. Women are used to being involved in several activities at the same time, of being a moving center in the midst of revolving chaos.

And being comfortable with chaos is just what Kevin Kelly says is necessary to function effectively in the new network economy (Kelly, 1998, pp. 113–114). But a despotic ego—male or female—is never comfortable in a turbulent environment. An ego obsessed with maintaining rigid control over its own organism will have trouble permitting the flexibility modern organizations demand.

In the past it was assumed that if a person acted in accord with certain leadership principles, good results could be obtained. But an effective leader in the future will need actually to be that way. The world is becoming too fluid and shifting for compartmentalized performances. In the old days you could be a flexible leader at work and a control freak at home. But splitting yourself in this way means viewing yourself, your organization, and the world around you as mechanisms—things that your ego can control, direct, manipulate—a way of thinking hopelessly out of touch with today's world.

Vision

Warren says one of the most important qualities in a leader is vision—a clear sense of where to go. A vision creates order without demanding it, just as a boat creates the order of a patterned wake by moving through formless water.

I've observed this quite strikingly in a very different setting—theater. Inexperienced playwrights often want to direct their own plays so they can make sure everything conforms to their vision. The result is usually sterile and often disastrous. If the vision comes through the writing, the director will see creative ways of enhancing that vision—ways the playwright never dreamed of. And so will the actors, designers, composers, and so on. I tell playwriting students never to write stage directions that tell an actor how to do or say something, since it limits the actor's options and encourages phony gestures. A good actor, I tell them, will have a dozen ways of creating the effect you want—ways you haven't thought of—and will choose the one most natural and the one that most powerfully expresses that vision.

The head of an organization is in the same position as the playwright. If the leader's vision is clearly articulated it will be most effectively realized by others who share it, and bring their own creativity to it. Any attempt to control and direct their input will reduce its quality.

But a despotic ego doesn't like sharing things. It feels very uncomfortable giving up control in this way. It's always willing to sacrifice the vision to the feeling of being “on top of things.”

A cliché of the Industrial Age was that it was lonely at the top. But it was only the need to control people that made it lonely. There's nothing in the world that makes you feel more connected and more understood than having other people creatively enhance your own ideas with theirs.

People don't need to be controlled and manipulated to commit themselves to a heartfelt vision, and being controlled and manipulated tends to destroy that commitment. Those trained to a mechanistic worldview often find it difficult to learn this. But it becomes almost impossible if you've never learned it in relation to your own organism.