strategy+business, April 19, 2022
by Theodore Kinni
Illustration by Klaus Vedfelt
In the novel City of God, E.L. Doctorow wrote, “You find invariably among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as an entitlement.” The three-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction delivers this judgment as an aside, but it is a particularly disturbing indictment of business leaders.
I asked Rasmus Hougaard, founder and CEO of the leadership training consultancy Potential Project, what he thought of Doctorow’s observation during a recent video interview. He immediately pointed to J. Willard Marriott, founder of Marriott International, as a notable exception. Marriott reputedly lived the hotel business sans cruelty, and his famous dictate “Take care of associates and they will take care of the customers” remains a mainstay of the company’s culture after nearly 100 years.
And yet, admitted Hougaard, “there are a lot of CEOs in other companies [about whom] you could say the absolute opposite. It is almost as if they think, ‘Now that I’m a senior executive, I don’t have to be nice anymore.’” It is those CEOs who might find his new book, Compassionate Leadership: How to Do Hard Things in a Human Way, most valuable.
Hougaard and coauthor Jacqueline Carter, director of Potential Project North America, argue that the hard-nosed people management once espoused by CEOs like “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap and “Neutron Jack” Welch is a loser’s game. “It’s clear that entitlement is dying and for good reason,” Hougaard told me. “Anybody who says, ‘I can be mean, because now I have the power,’ gets punished, because people won’t work with them.” CEOs who live up to Doctorow’s caricature by shutting down their emotions and coldly making decisions that harm people also incur a personal cost. Hougaard adds: “You turn into someone who you probably won’t like.”
Often, empathy is touted as the antidote to mean business. But Hougaard thinks that an approach to leadership based solely on empathy has its own adverse side effects. Read the rest here.
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