Leading Wisely. Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries
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final cut’, enabling them to take out of the case any information they do not fancy. Unfortunately, by doing so, the ‘nerve is often taken out of the material’. In addition, to add to this ‘cleansing process’, I should mention the case writer's tendency towards self-censorship, his or her not wanting to include material that may seem to be too controversial, exactly because of the existence of this right of final cut. Furthermore, if truth be told, based on my own experience, it is rather rare for executives to truly open up in these case studies – to talk frankly about what is really troubling them. Getting them to go deep enough to tell a more complete story about the challenges they are facing in their lives is always an uphill struggle. After all, it is so much safer to keep the conversation at a rather superficial level.
In the seminars I designed, however, hagiography was not something that had a long life span. As the objective of the program is to help participants develop deeper insights about themselves – to find ways to navigate through life's challenging situations – staying merely on the surface is not really an option. It would be difficult to keep the discussions going by remaining at a superficial level. As a matter of fact, it would be a real waste of time. Yet, most participants tended to open up, as their defenses wore down. Gradually, they would pay more heed to the statement ‘no interpretation without association’. They would come to realize that if they kept the discussion merely at a superficial level, they would not get much out of such a seminar. To go beyond superficialities was in their best interest. Of course, what facilitated the process of having the participants really open up was that their colleague-participants were becoming increasingly effective in identifying what was happening beneath the surface. As time went by, what would come to the surface were the real issues that the person ‘in the hot seat’ was trying to deal with.
During these sessions, many insightful questions, reflections and insights would come to the fore. Although there is nothing bad about learning from one's own experience, learning from the experience of others can be of equal merit. Looking back, having facilitated these kinds of seminars for a very long time, I can only say that it has been a great learning adventure. Much wisdom was always present during these sessions.
More than a decade ago, encouraged by what I learned from my students during these seminars, I wrote a book with the title, Sex, Money, Happiness, and Death: Musings from the Underground, where I reflected on the insights provided to me by my participants. Quite recently, as the COVID-19 pandemic has offered me much more time for reflection, this particular book has been followed by five others: Journeys into Coronavirus Land: Lessons from a Pandemic; The CEO Whisperer: Meditations on Leadership, Life and Change; Quo Vadis?: The Existential Challenges of Leaders; Leadership Unhinged: Essays on the Ugly, the Bad and the Weird and Dancing on Quicksand: The Daily Perils of Executive Life. Looking back, one important issue that runs like a red thread through these three books is how to make wise decisions.
A ‘clinical’ orientation
The importance of wisdom as a guiding principle led me to reflect on the kind of conceptual schemes that I have been using in trying to make sense of the stories my participants would tell me. This pertains to the question of what kind of lenses I apply to understand the deeper meaning of what my participants are dealing with. Added to this is another question of particular importance: while using these lenses, how can I weave together into a cohesive pattern the emerging thoughts, feelings and behavior patterns that come my way?
To start with, as a management professor, there is my knowledge of organizational life. However, to only use this organizational lens to help understand what the executives in my seminars are trying to present would provide a rather one-sided, two-dimensional picture of their lives. Therefore, I have found another lens to be extremely useful. It came from putting on my hat as a psychoanalyst. Through the use of a more psychodynamic-systemic oriented lens – thus having a more clinical orientation to the making sense of things – I began to pay attention to not only what is happening in people's lives on the surface but also what is happening beneath the surface. After all, as a clinician, I have always been interested not only in conscious phenomena, but also in what happens at an unconscious level. Putting on this more ‘clinical’ hat has always been an important part of my way of making sense of the world. It helped me to deal better with the ‘wisdom equation’, to become more reflective in my decision making.
Wisdom and society
By and large, people who realize the importance of wisdom will make better decisions during their life's journey. They appreciate how wisdom can be an enabler. They realize the importance of wise decisions for their individual and social well-being. They realize that, without wise decisions, their societies will be at risk, but they are also quite aware of how much wisdom is still lacking in our present-day world, despite our great advances in knowledge.
It is for all to see that, on a fundamental level, the tragedy of the human condition has not lessened. We still are not able to get things right. Homo sapiens continues to make a mess of things. Presently, our sense of alienation – manifested through feelings of powerlessness, normlessness, and meaninglessness – appears to be at an all-time high. Fear, anxiety, and depression are ever-present, and related to this flood of emotional distress, epidemics of addictive behavior can be seen everywhere. Added to this sorry state of affairs, we are still living in a world full of conflict with large groups of people still exposed to much starvation and war. Sadly enough, the only difference between the past and the present seems to be the difference between throwing stones and shooting high powered, nuclear missiles. Notwithstanding these tragic developments, many of us live with the illusion that if we were to amass just a little bit more knowledge, everything would be all right. Unfortunately, very little thought is given to the greater accumulation of wisdom – how to make wiser decisions.
Sadly enough, while we are living in an information society where knowledge is omnipresent, we are still living in a world where wisdom is direly lacking. Clearly, in our current world, we are able to gather information and knowledge at a much faster rate than we are able to gather wisdom. Referring again to the idea of a ‘wisdom equation’ in leadership, there is no question but that wise leaders are rare and far between. Many of our present leaders are everything but paragons of wisdom. Frankly speaking, far too many of them are not up to the challenge. They are behaving more like actors in a reality show, trying to peddle their illusions. They are catering to what people ‘wish to believe’, but are unable to give wise council to their citizens. Populists as they are, many of them promise unrealistic, overly simplistic miracle cures to deal with the ills of society. They seem to be in the ‘fan fiction’ business, creating fantasy facts and alternative realities. It seems that the ignorant and the belligerent have the upper hand, and it is easy to recognize that in their actions, wisdom is direly lacking. Even worse, it often seems that the less wisdom they show, the more popular they are. The fewer facts they present, the more they push ‘dream politics’, the more they are applauded. The more factoids they present, invented out of thin air, the more they dazzle their followers.
These demagogue-like leaders are not concerned about what is in the best interest from a communal/societal point of view. They are not interested in the common good. Far too many of them only seem to be in pursuit of their self-interest. In other words, they are just looking out for number one. If we take a hard look at their behavior, it would become clear that most of them lack a moral compass. They are anything but value driven. However, where they do excel is in their capacity to take advantage of the dearth of wisdom among their followers. They seem to be acutely aware of the fact that wisdom does not emerge out of collective ignorance, but aiming for the lowest Zeitgeist denominator is not the answer to solving the complex problems that humankind is facing.
Many of these leaders seem to have forgotten that the greatness of a nation is not measured in dollars and cents but in human decency. What makes a country great should not be a simple transactional calculation. To be possessed by the forces of selfishness and greed – individual or national – is not the answer in dealing with the