Abstract
Introduction and Background
“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared for that which could have been their finest hour.” ― Winston Churchill.
Selecting an organization’s leader who is relatively ‘unqualified’ for a position to handle a major crisis might seem the height of folly or irresponsibility. But that is exactly what Gautam Mukunda counter-intuitively proposes, in his book Indispensable, as being required for critical situations – being ‘prepared’ for extreme situations means being ‘unfiltered’ or ‘unqualified’ in traditional or ‘normal’ situations. Such leaders may turn out good or bad, so there are high risk levels involved. Can one select a ‘good’ extreme leader, such as an Abraham Lincoln, and avoid selecting a ‘bad’ extreme leader, such as an Adolf Hitler? And such leader selection processes: do they not in itself present some ‘filtering’ challenges, and thus tend to lessen the chances of a ‘good’ extreme leader being chosen?
Gautam Mukunda, with his book ‘Indispensable’ and its cornerstone leader filtration theory (LFT), provides a significant new contribution to, first, organization studies in general and, second, leadership theory in particular. Books on leadership, including leadership theories, classifications and models, abound in almost every sphere of human endeavour, be it in politics, business, education, military or moral/religious fields. Most of these are descriptive and discipline-focused (e.g. political leaders), trait-description oriented (e.g. ‘great man traits and competencies’) and context-related leadership style classifications (e.g. 5 to 10 leadership styles). The LFT postulates a new theory, that truly outstanding leaders in history are those that have been ‘unfiltered’ by extensive external and internal experiences or pressures, but carry higher risks, while ‘filtered’ leaders perform effectively but not greatly due to prior long spells of leadership refinement, with lower risks for their domains of activity.
The key underlying questions that LFT answers are these: Are some leaders indispensable at specific times in history, and could they be identified and possibly predicted – and thus selected and influenced? Or are all leaders substitutable, i.e. easily replaceable or interchangeable (fungible)? If some leaders are truly indispensable, could we determine how and why they assume this nature, and how they would (or could) exercise leadership in particular situations?
By identifying and analysing the hidden patterns of their careers, and by exploring the systems and/or processes that placed these leaders in positions of power, Indispensable attempts to shed new light on how we may be able to identify such ‘best’ leaders and what leader selection lessons we can learn, from both the processes and their results. Mukunda’s book is based on the author’s PhD thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, in 2011, and though his perspectives are mainly rooted in political science (the focus is derived from US presidents and further cases from British prime ministers, and the military, with additional profiling of two business heads and one research leader), LFT seems to have relevance and further research dimensions for the fields of organization studies, such as leadership, organizational behaviour, innovation, technology, scientific research and many more. Due to its profound in-depth analyses and discussions, the book offers important implications and research pointers for organizational researchers.
In this way, a new theory (LFT) about leaders is constructed that, even as it acknowledges that most individual leaders have little impact, identifies the relatively rare circumstances when a single individual in the right place, at the right time, can make significant history. Mukunda focuses on leadership selection process and systems, with the goal to identify and help guide organizations in their quest to find and select ‘extreme leaders’ in crisis situations, while also assisting in selection of ‘modal leaders’ in normal situations. What is normal and what is ‘abnormal’ or ‘crisis’ might be more clear in the political arena, and further research would be necessary to determine their respective natures in other domains (e.g. in business). For example, a ‘normal’ industry situation might (ironically) require an extreme leader (e.g. a Steve Jobs) to create disruptive innovation and thereby help create a new industry.
The author proposes a two-stage theory of leader impact encapsulated in the leader filtration theory (LFT). In the first stage, leaders are usually chosen from among a pool of candidates by a filtration process that homogenizes the pool. This makes actual leaders highly similar to those who almost got the job, rendering individuals replaceable, interchangeable or capable of mutual substitution. It is significant that practitioners, journalists and historians generally believe that particular leaders play a crucial role in determining events, while social science theorists generally argue that individual leaders are unimportant or interchangeable. Sometimes filtration is bypassed in the leadership selection process. When this occurs, leaders who are very different from potential alternates can gain power. In the second stage, leaders face constraints from within their organization and outside of it. If these constraints are sufficiently weak an unfiltered leader can have a very large impact on outcomes. Such leaders are likely to display a high degree of variance in their performance.
The leader filtration theory is tested quantitatively using historians’ rankings of 40 US presidents. The hypothesis is that unfiltered leaders should be disproportionately represented among the best and worst presidents. LFT’s prediction of higher variance in performance is very strongly supported by this test. The theory is also qualitatively tested by case-examining the profiles of three American presidents and two British prime ministers. Jefferson, a ‘filtered’ president, made decisions with regard to the Louisiana Purchase very similar to those that alternative presidents would have made. Lincoln and Wilson, by contrast, both ‘unfiltered’ presidents, made decisions that were radically different from those that would have been made by alternative presidents.
Chamberlain, a filtered British prime minister, made decisions with regard to appeasement of Germany before the Second World War very similar to those of alternative prime ministers. When his preferences diverged from those of potential alternate prime ministers, British policy followed the alternates’ preferences, not his. When Churchill, an unfiltered prime minister, gained office, his unique preferences determined British policy. Mukunda contends that the theory should have power outside politics as well. Four leaders from other domains – the military, business (two) and scientific research – who are commonly believed to have been highly consequential are examined. All four would have been classified as unfiltered by LFT.
The book is structured into nine chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 provides the rationale and hypothesis for the book, and the classification of 40 US presidents into filtered and unfiltered. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 each focus on a profile of a particular US president (Jefferson, Lincoln and Wilson). Chapters 6 and 7 profile two British prime ministers (Chamberlain and Churchill). Chapter 8 investigates leadership arenas other than governmental, with short profiles of four leaders: Admiral Sir Jacky Fisher of the Royal Navy; Albert Dunlap, CEO of Sunbeam; Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase; and Judah Folkman, chief surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital. In the final chapter (Chapter 9) the author summarizes and offers conclusions, and provides particular guidance to organizations, in two categories: (a) who should decide and choose an ‘extreme leader’ – LFT offers six guidelines in choosing the ‘next leader’; and (b) how to maximize the odds of obtaining a successful ‘extreme leader’ – LFT offers five ‘steps’ for selectors. Finally, LFT also offers guidance to leaders on how to use their status as either unfiltered or filtered in their decision-making, in assembling their teams (and its individuals) and in allocating their resources (e.g. into different business models). The latter conclusions have particular relevance for organization studies researchers, providing potentially rich areas of future research.
The research methodology which LFT is based on is encapsulated in the book’s statistical Appendix. It contains the results of statistical testing of 40 US presidents through Monte Carlo simulation, and a ‘validation’ of the LFT through testing of absolute variance and examination of two potential sources of error. While internal validity is thoroughly tested, the issue of external validity (‘does the theory apply beyond US presidents?’) of LFT seems amenable to more extensive testing than the two other governmental examples and the four non-political leadership profiling examples/case studies. For example, only two business leader profiles are examined, viz. Albert Dunlap and Jamie Dimon. Nevertheless, Mukunda provides a soundly researched theory in the political sphere that serves as a basis for application and more extensive testing in other contexts. The book ends with 23 pages of Notes, 15 pages of Bibliography and a 10-page Index, offering a thorough basis for further research.
The concepts of filtration and indispensability are not new in leadership studies. Mukunda acknowledges, for example, that Karl Popper implied several decades ago that filtration is ‘bound to select mediocrities’:
…the secret of intellectual excellence is the spirit of criticism; it is intellectual independence. And this leads to difficulties which must prove insurmountable for any kind of authoritarianism. The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his/her influence. But in doing so, he/she is bound to select mediocrities, for he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence. (Popper, 1971, 134–5)
John Zenger and Joseph Folkman (2002) in their book The Extraordinary Leader: Turning Good Managers into Great Leaders and the article ‘Making yourself indispensable’ (Zenger et al., 2011) propose three leadership identification filters based on leadership skills/competencies, organizational needs and individual passion. Mukunda’s approach to filtration, however, is a fresh, original one, in which filtration (LFT) is a concept depicting the extent to which leaders are or have been exposed to external or internal shaping/winnowing/refining forces that, on the one hand, tend to homogenize leaders towards effectiveness (or ‘modal’) requirements (the highly filtered end), or to make them more loose/unencumbered or extreme in acting in particular situations (the relatively unfiltered end).
Thus, LFT regards the truly indispensable leader as one that is ‘unfiltered’ and ‘extreme’ in nature and behaviour, with some leading to real positive impact and others leading to negative or destructive impacts. Indispensable leaders are those that carry high risk for the country, group or organization, but often there is no alternative to decide upon such leaders. Extreme leaders are likely to appear in systems that are tolerant to failure, in newly established regimes, in times of turbulent change and uncertainty, and from ‘respected’ individuals who have not been exposed to filtration due to their wealth or inherited positions.
Mukunda also contends that ‘extreme leaders’ are likely to have relatively higher rates of psychological or personality disorders, such as paranoia, self-destructiveness, higher risk acceptance, false optimism and depression. Lincoln’s melancholic nature, for example, is often seen as having produced more realistic assessments of critical situations than would have been the case for more euphoric assessments rooted in leaders with more optimistic temperaments. This is substantiated by other authors, such as Nassir Ghaemi (2011) in his book A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness.
The real significant value of LFT is the development of a process by which one can identify leadership requirements for particular situations, as well as the predictive power to limit the potential risks in leader selection decision-making and guidance. As such, the book makes a valuable and commendable contribution to the body of scholarly leadership work. The predictive nature of LFT has been soundly tested in the political leader arena in Mukunda’s work, and it would be significant to conduct further research to more extensively test its validity in other fields, including among economic and business leaders.
A significant result of the underlying research is that indispensable leaders have high impact for relatively short periods of time – precisely those characteristics of an extreme leader that are so needed in periods of crisis, shortly thereafter become liabilities, when relatively more effectiveness and tighter controls are required. Churchill is a good example as an indispensable leader during a major crisis, with the more desperate the situation, the more willingness to gamble on an extreme leader; shortly after the crisis passed, he became dispensable. On the other hand, a Jack Welch of GE and military leaders are likely to be ‘modal leaders’, selected by extensively filtered processes, with high success levels over longer periods of time – but they are more easily substitutable (dispensable) than extreme leaders. Mukunda’s contention that the ‘best leaders will almost always be unfiltered extremes’ might be valid for US presidents, but is open for question and further research in the business leader arena, as well as other leadership arenas.
Indispensable raises a number of further research pointers:
Testing LFT in other arenas than the political, especially in business. When are leaders such as Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and Richard Branson really indispensable, and for what periods of time? Many industries and businesses are almost constantly in periods of crisis, due to high levels of competitive innovation – does this require extreme leaders, or extreme advisers?
Examining the characteristics of extreme leaders, and when and how to contain them, as opposed to giving them relatively free rein. For example, psychological and personality disorders could be either destructive or constructive to an organization or country.
Measuring the impact and implications of extreme leaders for organizational dynamics, e.g. developing new business models, team and individual member selection, and human capital management.
Investigating paradoxical and ambidextrous extreme leadership requirements, e.g. the need for self-confidence and self-belief combined with intellectual humility. Mukunda refers to Lincoln and Folkman as good examples of paradoxical leadership qualities.
In conclusion, it is appropriate to view LFT through the prism of personal values. Martin Luther King Jr. stated: ‘The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.’ Extreme leaders are innovators; however, we know that most innovations fail, as they are ‘fuzzy gambles’. According to Mukunda’s LFT, extensive filtration tends to lessen disruptive innovation, and thus could reduce the rise of indispensable leaders – if leaders are filtered, they are easily substitutable. However, if leaders are unfiltered they tend to be extreme, and some become immoral tyrants and destroy, while moral visionaries save their countries, peoples and organizations. The major challenge might be to enable unfiltered leaders, even with personality and psychological defects, to arise while keeping possible negative behavioural tendencies in check – perhaps through moral coherence measures. But that in turn could lead to a stifling measure of filtration. It seems we need ‘some method in the madness’, as Lucio Anneo Seneca put it: ‘Nullum magnum ingenium mixtura demientiae fuit’, i.e. there is no great genius without a tincture of madness. Mukunda has with Indispensable certainly succeeded in opening a new and rich vein for further research and debate on leadership and organization studies.