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Barbara Kellerman, Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, discusses her book Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When the Bad Festers. Bloomberg Opinion Columnist Beth Kowitt talks about her story The Kate Middleton Mess Should Terrify Brands.
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Well, as we're preparing for this next interview, we realized something. We spent a lot of time talking about what it takes to be a good leader. There's certainly a lot of books out there about examples of strong leadership in business, history and politics. But something we don't talk a lot about is bad leadership and the consequences of bad leadership that have been left unchecked. And Carol, that's the focus of Barbara Kellerman's new book. In fact, she's written quite a few books about bad leadership.
She has.
Indeed, she is a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Center for Public Leadership, where she was also the founding executive director. She's the author of a new book, Bad to Worse, What Happens when the bad fester. She joins us from Westport, Connecticut. Barber's so nice to have you here with us. Congratulations on the new book. You write a lot about leadership. Tell us about this book and bad leaders I feel like everybody has a bad leader in their life, sometimes.
More than one. Why is it that we kind of acknowledge that, and what do we learn from that? I'm not saying about my friend.
What do I need to know about this?
If that come on at some point in your.
Life you have a leader that you're like, not a great leader?
Why is it?
Well, we're not going to.
Get personal here, Hi, Carol and Tim. First of all, thanks for having me. Second of all, Tim, you gave me the perfect in production. Because it is absolutely true that what I call the leadership industry, which is a very multi billion dollar industry, is replete full of books on how to be a good leader, but virtually devoid entirely of how to stop a bad leader. So yes, I have focused in my life to some degree on bad leadership, not only on bad but the most recent book, the one that's just out five minutes ago, is Leadership From Bad to Worse What happens when bad festers? And it really is trying to alert people that, in effect, the sooner you deal with a bad leader, the sooner you address the problems that a bad leader inevitably invokes, the easier it's going to be and the better it's going to be. The longer you wait to try to end bad leadership. However you decide to go about it, the harder it's going to be. But in other words, it does go from bad to worse if left unchecked.
But that's kind of like anything if you leave it unchecked.
Right.
If there's something that I don't know with my life, is like if there's something that you need to get off your chest. If there's something that you need to change in your life, do it. Do it because the longer you take not to do it, the worse it gets. But the problem with that, Barbara, is that that's in our own control, right, and we're not always in control of leaders around us who we may not feel or doing the right thing.
That's exactly right. Again, Tim, you've got it nailed. But in the book, I you know, apart from the fact that it's sometimes very difficult to upend a bad leader, we tend to think it's going to get better on its own. So we have we get saddled with political leaders, with corporate leaders. I don't have to tell the two of you about the problem of bad bosses because it's online all the time. I'm sure you hear about it all the time, and we seem to fantasize number one, that there's it'll get better of its own and a bad leader, however defined, and we can go into that we have time, however defined bad leader is going to wake up one morning and say, oh my god, I've been bad. I really do need to get better. And we similarly fantasize that there's nothing we can do about it. But the book talks about things that we can do about it. So it's number one an alert to bad leadership. Again, we can talk about how I use the word bad, and it's number two to alert people to the possibility, not necessarily the probability, but the possibility of acting on it.
Barbara, let me ask you, does every good leader need to be a bad leader?
First?
Absolutely not. We have lots of examples of it.
It's true that we have some examples of bad leaders who either self correct because they realize they're not doing the best possible job, or they correct because somebody or something intervenes.
And that's really what I'm talking about.
If I can just say one more sentence, the way I define bad is along two axes. One is from ethical to unethical, and the other one is from effective to ineffective. So you can have a very effective leader who, however, is deeply unethical.
So maybe that's a good segue to get to some bad case studies. Because the book centers around four different cases of bad leaders. Two of them are political, and two of them are in business leadership. I want to go to one in business that I think everybody's familiar with, and that is Elizabeth Holmes, the CEO of Farhenos, And I looked up where she is right now. She's actually serving time as we speak, and I think in prison. She is in prison. Talk to me about why you chose her as an example of somebody who's not a good leader, and I should not in your view.
Yes, And I make very clear my own bias. For example, I make clear in the book that I'm a liberal Democrat. So one of the leaders in that I cover is China's Xijingping, and I make clear that I think he's a bad leader because he's deeply oppressive. So yes, by the way, I think it's a very important point that I think one of the reasons we don't talk about bad leaders is because views of who is a bad leader and who is a good one are so likely to differ.
But I try very hard to invalidate it.
I don't think that's a good reason for not taking on bad leadership full throat again as early on in the process as possible, So I chose. I think Elizabeth Holmes is by far the best known to American audiences in the book. Most people are familiar with her story, which, however, does it make it any less interesting?
See?
Can I ask you something? Can I just jump in?
Yes, Elizabeth Holmes somebody that we all covered and everybody was enamored, and everybody had.
A cover story or a big story on her. Is she a bad leader or was she fraud And is there a distinction to be made?
You know, I would argue, Carol that there's not I think a leader. I think you said the word fraud. I think the leader who is fraudulent is indeed bad. She's a case in point of somebody who ended up deeply unethical, and also her company collapsed. So you'd have to say, there's no more effective and indicator of being ineffective having your company collapse. But there were you raised a very important point. The press fell in love with this woman, by the way, the fact that she was a woman and a good looking woman and an idiosyncratically appealing an attractive woman is not irrelevant to the story, which I make very clear in the book.
Can we can we?
You know, Tim and I were talking and planning for our discussion with you, is we kind of want to throw some names at you if we may, because we've studied leadership. You've written so much about it. President Biden and good leader, bad leader?
Why Carol im trying to nail me on live radio.
I'll give you a good.
Both President Biden and former President Trump good leaders, bad leaders?
Well, I may. I don't talk.
I don't name Biden in the book at all, but I do name Trump, and I will stick with one fact about him because it's so obvious and so indisputable and so at odds with the American character that I think it's really worth extracting. I do think he's bad in different ways, although I recognize that many in your audience no doubt disagree with that. But as I said earlier, I think we must take a stand on the leaders we have, and I will simply turn to his or point out his proclivity for lying, for fabricating, for fantasizing. You know, we teach our kids in the House, and we like to think the people we deal with in everyday life are by and large truth tellers. Note I say by and large all of us lie some of the time, but he lies a lot, and it is interesting to me that somehow he gets a pass on that with many Americans. So again, I don't think it's ethical for our public, our political leaders to lie as much. Again I say as much, because political leaders lie, but to lie as much as he does to the point of fantasy and fabrication, I'm not sure that's acceptable, and I'm not sure that in times past the American body politic would have tolerated it.
And to be fair, there's been a lot of legal action against the former president, not our opinion, but there's also been legal cases to kind of really lay out some of his past activities.
Okay, we only have ten seconds ten seconds for this last one. What about someone like Elon Musk.
I mention, I do mention him. In the book.
I mentioned him as complicated, good and bad. And by the way, I know ten seconds left. But the reason, one of the many reasons this is so difficult to tackle is because humans are not widgets.
They can be complicated and complex and musk is.
An indicator of a leader who is in some ways great and good and in other ways awful and bad.
Yeah, two sides of that coin in a big way.
No, I would say that many people would agree with you on that great stuff, So appreciate it. Barbara Kellerman her new book Leadership From Bad to Worse What Happens when Bad Festers.
This is Bloomberg BusinessWeek inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news As it happens. Bloomberg Business Week with Kroo Messer and Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio.
It is Bloomberg a business Week. Check out what Bloomberg opinions that Beth Cohit writes in her most recent column, and I quote because sometimes it's just so good you have to read write from it. A big, powerful organization with a carefully manufactured image gets embroiled in a conspiracy theory about one of its most beloved and valuable brand ambassadors. To try to quell the uproar, set organization takes to its social feeds, but when those posts turn out not to be the full story, the conspiracy mushrooms sparking even more intense scrutiny and mass intrigue.
Dun, Dun, Dunn.
What do you think we're talking about?
We're talking about the Palace's crisis involving Kate Middleton and it's kind of interesting, so interesting that it is among our most red stories on the Bloomberg.
Who'd a thunk? I would have thunk, because.
You've been wanting to do this since Monday. Be honest, what we were looking for the angle? You were like, how can we work this in?
How can we do it?
You called it Kate Gate, We called it photo Gate.
Beth koh It is here. She is senior columnist form Bloomberg Opinion. She covers Corporate America. She joins us here in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio. I'm so glad like you tied, like you know, thread the needle.
So that we could do this story. You know, there's a business angle for everything. Tell us about the bet. I mean, but it is interesting. You know, we all know about the firm.
Right in terms of the royals that are over in the UK, it's amazing that they are in this predicament.
Right, I mean, I think that's the thing that's so shocking here. Right, They're supposed to be very sophisticated, they have a massive pr apparatus. How did they get this so wrong? And I think that is where we can make the connection to business. Right, they are a brand, they are the firm. So how can companies kind of look at this and say we can not make the same mistakes?
So what what do you think was the moment where it kind of all unraveled here?
So yes, I do think there was a moment when sort of your casual you know, Royal Rocher became like crazy internet sleuth. And I think that was the photo, right, Like, if you hadn't been paying attention, that's when you started. And that's when you know.
That's totally true for me, right, Like as soon as I heard about that, I was like googling everything, watching the tiktoks.
Watching the ticket, Right, you're watching the tiktoks, You're like trying to look at the photos to figure out what had been doctored, and it just raised so many more questions.
And we have the photo opplicit.
It's the photo that's been seen around the world. To be fair, I mean every Tabloid's been on it.
We've all been on it.
But it was interesting because they obviously put it out there to send a reassuring sign, because everyone was like, kind of, where's Kate, where's Kate?
What's going on? You know, we know there's surgery involved, we don't know all the details.
But nonetheless, this was put out on Mother's Day in the UK right to kind of just say hey, everything's okay, And then so quickly.
It came on right, it spiraled out of control. People were like, what is going on with this picture? There's all these little details that have been edited, and I think what sort of even took it up a notch? Was they tweet after the fact? Kind of maybe a couple days later, day later, their handle tweeted out, oh, apparently a direct message from Kate.
I'm so sorry.
Like a lot of amateur photographers, I dabble and you know, photoshop basically, and it's just so hard to believe.
You know, it's crazy.
And forgive me if I know too much about this, but I mean, Kate is an accomplished photographer and most of the shots that are sent out I feel like shared with the public are often photos that she takes. She has kind of a real I feel like control over this. Tina Brown, who's a Royal watcher, She's a brit well known for when she was editor of Vanity Fair and More.
I heard her on air.
Talking about that this is an individual who's so meticulous. So to see her kind of come out and be like, oops, I made a mistake, it just doesn't fit with kind of who she is. Make the connection note in terms of brands who often make mistakes, the role of social media, like why this has kind of really caught your attention and how you think about it much more broadly and really for the Bloomberg audience.
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of big institutions have lost trust, right business being one of them. And these organizations take to social to have to social media, to their social platforms to have a direct relationship, to have a direct conversation with their with their consumer, and that can be a really good way to build and restore trust. But then when you mess it up, it just can really spiral out of control. You know, this is a very sophisticated audience that will just parse everything you do and if you make a mistake, they're going to be all over it.
I mean, stuff happens all the time to different brands, and you write about some of them in your piece. Before we get to those, I want to just start with the idea of what can you know the firm do to recover from this, or at least how could they have handled it differently.
Yeah, I think the problem here is that they are really straddling two worlds.
Right.
On the one hand, they've been really active in new media social we want to talk to you directly, and in this case, they've really defaulted to old ways of doing business, talking in about private engagements and personal matters, and you kind of can't have it both ways. You can't talk to your audience when it's convenient for you. They want to hear from you all the time, and you have to make a choice. And I think that's a big part of the problem.
It's interesting going back to Tina Brown, who is on another air, another network, one of the major networks, and she made the point of that the queen in her I guess the last eight or ten months, which I know Idea apparently said she had a form of cancer, but she's still at some point did some zoom video and that maybe something as simple as Kate going.
Out on a zoom and kind of addressing.
UK citizens directly might have just made kind of made everything go away and been a much easier, simpler way to kind of deal with all these concerns.
And the fact they haven't done that, I think raises a lot of questions for people. Why have you not just done something like that to clear this up?
I mentioned that you talk about another company and your piece that had a I don't want to call it a similar misstep because it's hard to compare what's going on with right with to anyone I know.
I was trying to think of examples. Is there's nothing that's quite parallel.
But when you are thinking about it from a brand perspective, it is absolutely parallel here. And I feel like that there are so many examples of companies making missteps and you chose just one through.
For this piece.
Yeah, and I wrote about this because this is a company I've covered in the past and it's and I think you could probably look at a lot of direct to consumer brands and see examples of this. But this is a small brand called Daily Harvest. Their direct to consumer vegan or yeah, vegetarian Vegan frozen food company, and what happened was they really just capitalized off you know, the Instagram era. That's how they built their audience. But then they had a food safety crisis and they took too long to really talk to their consumer directly. And what happened was their customers filled that silence with their own theories kind of critique of their failings. And I think that's the real risk here. You cannot again talk to them when it's convenient, Beth.
I mean, lots of companies get into trouble and I think about you know, Chipotely for a long time, or Lululemon when it you know, the sheer, you know.
Wis stuff right exactly? Like there's lots of things that you know, what was interesting.
I also thought about like using social media to address concerns versus maybe sometimes good old I don't know, like doing a zoom or I don't know what it is, Like we need to think about like how brands communicate with consumers because sometimes I feel like you throw something on social media you think it's all it's all done right, and that isn't always a great way of communicating. Yeah, I think that going back to some old fashioned ways, whatever.
That may be, is better, right, right, I mean I think we we do think of I mean that's the thing, right, social media for everybody is very much manuft factored authenticity.
Right.
It's like, oh, look how accessible we are. But we know that this is so so performative in so many ways. And I do think maybe that maybe having an interview with someone talking directly to people and just not kind of putting out something that's so polished all the time maybe.
Helps a little bit.
I think the thing that's also different now is the way that you have these Internet sleuths that are able to figure out what's going on. Because I would have looked at a picture. I would a picture like that and be like, fine, yeah it's a picture, like.
What a nice family?
Yeah yeah, but you know, I.
Think About's Day. I also didn't know Mother's Day in the UK was different than Mother's Day here. That's a big takeaway that I have is that was a big takeaway.
But I think about it.
Did you ever play those games like it's like two photos, like find the Differences.
I'm kind of upset.
I go through and you think like I don't see anything, and then all of a sudden you're like or continuity like in media, like have you ever done that? You're watching a show and you're like, wait a minute, that sweater it's like different or something.
It sound like you're fun to watch movies.
I'll do it all the time.
But it is interesting, right that the social media world is savvy yeah, and can say wait, something's off, and it makes you think about brands need to be really wary about it. Right, I don't know AI is going to make it all perfect, So what are we worried about.
I think that one guarantee we have, Carol, is that the story is going to continue. Yeah, I think it's until they say something.
It is like from where we started that anything you've ever seen the Crown or books written about royalty, the.
Firm like they have such control that for.
Them to be in this situation is pretty remarkable. It is a great lesson for anybody who's got some kind of company or institution or brand that's really important.
Well, Beth cod has absolutely figured it out. Senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion who worked away to make a connection to business in the world.
Thank you anytime. Thank you