Can we learn more from bad leaders than from good ones?

Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator

Who is this? He was born into a poor family in the distant provinces, terrorized by a brutal father who died when he was still young, and never completing his education. Instead, he drifted through a succession of dead-end jobs. Few would have imagined, seeing him living in a working-man’s hostel at the age of thirty, that he would ever amount to anything. A voracious reader and tireless autodidact, he overcame all these obstacles — as well as an awkward social manner and a thick provincial accent — to become leader of a major political party and prime minister of his country at the age of forty-five.

Of course, Adolf Hitler was not all good news: to the tens of millions who perished in the Second World War, he was very bad news indeed. But his case does illustrate, in unusually stark terms, that we can sometimes learn more from considering the careers of bad leaders than good ones.

What is a bad leader?

By bad leaders I don’t mean those who are simply incompetent — who want to lead well but fail. I mean rather those who pursue only their own interests and ambitions, using organizations and their personnel as nothing more than raw material: the macho, driven leaders so common today.

This is the style of leadership we are nowadays called on to admire. Business biographies have replaced the lives of saints and the lives of famous Greeks and Romans as recommended reading — except that theirstudying lives was supposed teach us to be virtuous, whereas the lives of business leaders are only supposed to teach us how to be rich. (In fact, because most such success stories in business are simply the result of luck and greed, the subjects of the biographies often wind up in the remainder bin just before their biographies do.)

Hitler was the bad leader incarnate. Like Stalin (the subject of a forthcoming article) he was only interested in self-aggrandizement, ignoring the welfare of his country or his people. He was intelligent, but poorly educated — a lethal combination. He interfered endlessly in matters of detail, refused to take advice, promoted sycophants, destroyed any opposition, and deliberately created organizational chaos to strengthen his dominant position. He had, in other words, many of the qualities displayed by a successful macho manager of today.

So what’s to learn?

Hitler also had an outstanding sense of timing and pursued his goals with ruthless opportunism. When the 1929 Wall Street Crash destroyed the German economy and plunged millions into unemployment and poverty, he realized that his chance had come. By providing the only alternative to the exhausted conventional market economic wisdom (other than the Communists), he attracted a huge protest vote. He knew that he would have only one chance, so he parlayed this transitory popularity into real power, refusing to settle for anything other than the Chancellorship. The rest is history — and tragic history at that.

Yet it is surprising, and frankly rather worrying, how closely Hitler’s career parallels the trajectory of today’s business heroes.

Compare this with today’s macho managers

Hitler took a struggling enterprise, almost destroyed by previous mistakes, and built it up by sheer determination to be a market leader, He exploited opportunities as they arose, recovered markets lost after 1919, and made several shrewd international acquisitions before 1939.

In that year, Hitler was probably the most popular politician in Europe. Domestically, he was respected for having put an end to unemployment and undone the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. Internationally, he was the pin-up boy of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times for his destruction of the Communist Party and the Trades Union movement and the recovery in the profitability of German industry.

Then of course, like many leaders since, he started to believe that he was infallible, and began the disastrous hostile takeover attempt against the Soviet Union. He was encouraged in this course, it has to be said, by experts and analysts from all over the world, who thought the task would be an easy one. And even as Berlin was in flames around him, Hitler refused to accept any blame. His personal testimony — the equivalent of the departing press conference of a contemporary CEO — blamed the German people themselves for losing the war.

Losing touch with reality

The most worrying parallel with today’s macho leaders, though, lies in Hitler’s detachment from reality. He lived in a world of production targets and statistics, of small-scale maps and quick, third-hand, oral briefings. The expert he most consulted was himself. Ordinary people simply did not exist for him: he never, so far as we know, visited a bombed city or went anywhere near the front line.

For the enemies of the regime, of course, it was far worse. The policy of working Soviet prisoners of war, racial “enemies” like the Jews, and political prisoners to death (those who could not work were simply killed) was not the product of ruthlessness, but something much worse: the inability to understand that there were actual human beings involved. Everything was subordinated to the impersonal goal of economic efficiency and war production.

You may think this comparison is tasteless. Maybe it is. But these days we are encouraged to admire the ‘Leader as Psychopath’ — not the inspiring leader, or the virtuous leader, or the leader who incarnates our best qualities, but the leader who pursues personal ambition and success exclusively — and for whom an organization is simply an economic vehicle, and its workers only a numerical abstraction on a Powerpoint slide.

The modern gospel of economic Darwinism — psychopathic competition to the death — has replaced the social Darwinism of Hitler’s time. The comparison is not, therefore, a frivolous one.

They say that societies get the leaders they deserve. What have we done to deserve what we have today?

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