EVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR OUR LIVES, POLITICS, AND DIGITIAL MANAGEMENT
Leadership!
Leadership has always been a prime topic for conference speakers and self-help authors. We all know, intuitively, that it is fundamental to success, not just in business or personal relationships, but wider society as well. However, most of what has been said and written about leadership is mere “fluff” — how to use leadership skills to get what you want. Fortunately, some great books do take a deeper look at the phenomenon of leadership, such as Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Power: Why Some People Have It — and Others Don’t, and another masterpiece with an unusually descriptive title, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, by Robert L. Sutton. While these books and their authors are very insightful, they do lack a vital ingredient: a general theory explaining the real roots of leadership.
Developing this “grand theory” of leadership will be the object of this set of articles. What tools can help us draw up such a theory?
EVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP THEORY
Modern Homo sapiens is a master of social organization and has evolved through a type of cooperation unmatched anywhere else on this planet. Migrating from Africa, our ancestors occupied the world and seem to have driven every other human species out of existence. Available evidence suggests that by 40,000 years ago, the Neanderthals had already disappeared from Europe. While developments in Asia are more obscure, the outcome was ultimately the same. Our kind rules alone, having outcompeted Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus, floresiensis, and luzonensis — and quite possibly many other human species.
The scientific consensus long assumed that Homo sapiens individuals possessed higher cognitive abilities and were, simply put, “smarter.” However, there is little actual evidence suggesting why Neanderthals and other humans would have lived for hundreds of thousands of years then suddenly all faltered within a relatively narrow window of time. New scientific evidence suggests that an evolution of social capabilities may have been at the heart of Sapiens’ success.
Yet, how could Sapiens have achieved a new capability, so powerful that our kind would rapidly surpass any other human and launch them into an era of civilization and technology?
The theory put forward here is that modern Homo sapiens evolved an entirely new form of cooperation: authority and leadership. Our kind is the first human ever to be able to create large groups, not just sizeable, but of significant cohesion, allowing for extensive division of labor and social hierarchies. Leadership and social organization seem entirely normal for today’s way of life, but it was an extraordinary step in evolution. Hence, in order to cut out the fluff from leadership theory and establish a grand theory of leadership, we need to understand how both leaders and followers have shaped human evolution.
How did evolution adapt humans to willingly obey the orders of a leader? Human compliance was the key ingredient to modern Homo sapiens’ extraordinary evolutionary achievement. Leadership by authority is not just a part of our evolutionary heritage; it is the very reason that our kind arrived at civilization. It is why we alone rule the planet and live in a world full of technology.
On the dark and violent side, modern Homo sapiens is prone to vote for authoritarians and populists in a crisis. The success of Donald Trump seems difficult to believe; yet it makes sense through the lens of humanity’s evolutionary legacy. Could the Trump voters (and any other authoritarian or populist) really be a Stone Age strike force? Might humanity’s violent inclinations have significantly assisted us to become the only human species — the dominant species on this planet? And how is it that at times, we live in peaceful cooperation and harmony?
Irrationality is the key ingredient to leadership and to tightly coordinated group behavior. Perfectly rational beings would never have spent their lives farming for a landowning aristocracy, believed in punishing gods, or waged war for a greater cause. Humans evolved to “outsource” their decision-making to leaders and to abstract beliefs. Evolving this irrationality was anything but easy — it was a prolonged and gradual process that took place in Africa over hundreds of thousands of years.
Unfortunately, irrationality poses real issues in our technologically advanced age. In modern times, our Stone Age instincts are mismatched to the very world they created. Understanding the evolutionary origin of leadership provides powerful insights into politics and management. Most importantly, it delivers a consistent explanation of populism and authoritarian government, from Adolf Hitler to Donald Trump.
My book, Raindance for Growth, came out in 2017 — just a few months after Donald Trump assumed the Presidency. Since then, some of the principles espoused in the book have evolved. Our rapidly improving ability to analyze ancient DNA has corroborated many of my ideas and given more flesh to them.
The following articles are a condensed version of these ideas — complete enough, I hope, to offer a clear view of how leadership really works. According to Occam’s razor, the most straightforward theory is the best.
ANDRÉ KOSTOLANY
“Economists can’t think!”
These were the devastating remarks of André Kostolany. I had driven to the Hotel Atlantis in Hamburg, Germany, to pick up this famous writer, investor, and talk show host. He was a Jew who had escaped Nazi Germany and made a fortune during the stock market collapse of 1929 — and another fortune after the postwar boom. I had read about his wonderful books providing investment advice. They were highly entertaining, yet profound.
After picking him up, I introduced myself.
“What are you studying, kid?”
“Economics,” I replied, timidly.
Without mincing any words, he shot back, “Economists can’t think!” And for the rest of the trip, he ignored me.
His point was all too obvious to me. A few weeks before, I had fallen out with one of my better professors after letting him in on my thoughts. My take was that explaining the economy’s path by inflation rates, monetary supply, and interest rates did not make sense. Economics needed to consider the impact of technology better. Furthermore, there were clear dangers to democracy. In the long term, technological growth could cause unemployment and more inequality. Eventually, we might find large parts of a disenfranchised population voting for dictators again. The professor saw no evidence for this and booted me out of his office.
Now, Kostolany — my chosen hero — refused to talk to me. And even worse, he had lumped me in the same camp as my professors!
But he wasn’t ungracious. Kostolany came around for a talk after I had complimented him on his presentation at Kiel University. I found out that he had known Milton Friedman, Salvador Dalí, Friedrich August von Hayek, and John Maynard Keynes.
His comments on Keynes were striking. Keynes is widely believed to have been a great speculator and successful investor. Interestingly, Kostolany claimed to have insight into Keynes’s trading account. He saw no evidence of brilliant trading. Still, he thought of Keynes highly and believed him to be a “true thinker.” He did not elaborate further on his reasons.
Why did Kostolany make an exception for Keynes, an economist and the founder of demand-driven economics? It raised a big question mark in my mind, until I came across a book by T.W. Hutchison, Keynes v. the ‘Keynesians’…? Apparently, by 1945, Keynes was revolted about the turn economics had taken. He stated that he was “not a Keynesian” anymore. His take on Post-Keynesians was that “modernist stuff, gone wrong and turned sour and silly, is circulating.”
When he died in 1945, his last words were: “I should have drunk more champagne!” Was it an attempt to drown his sorrows over his lasting legacy of highly mathematical, demand driven economics?
Given that the greatest economist of the 20th century was unable to convince his fellow professors, I slowly came around to the reality that I could not do it either.
What was less understood to me at the time was that “not thinking” is not a deficit but the most extraordinary step of recent human evolution!
IT MANAGEMENT
Joining the professional world, I chose a field where freethinking was still possible: Information Technology. While IT also contains plenty of irrational decision-making, it was most definitely a good choice on my part.
Most companies have real issues coping in today’s digital world. Helping them overcome these complexities is what I do.
The most significant organizational issue in IT management is that strong authority and conceptual work do not go well together. Overbearing power does not lend itself towards the free flow of abstract information. On the other hand, freewheeling democracy can lead to indecision and inadequate results. Authentic leadership is, therefore, the striking of a balance between the free flow of information and the getting of results.
Understanding management from an evolutionary perspective will make digital decision-making more effective. Furthermore, it provides a theoretical underpinning to populism, history, and politics.
THE CORNERSTONES OF EVOLUTIONARY LEADERSHIP
Authority is more complicated than it appears. Neurologically, authority is the fear of disobeying. This phenomenon stems from the amygdala, a vital brain region that functions as the brain’s emotional alarm center. When we fear bosses, gods, or a pseudoscientific paradigm, our amygdala may prevent the flow of information from reaching the frontal lobe, our area of rational thought.
This is how even intelligent people can, as Kostolany would say, “not think.” It’s a little like an electrical short circuit. A person may score highly on an intelligence test but still be unable to think in novel ways. Authority amounts to nothing other than thought suppression. Innovators — technical, social, or otherwise — must possess a spirit of irreverence and a willingness to go against the flow. Professors of economics will pass an intelligence test with flying colors, yet their amygdala prevents them from going against the consensus.
Typically, we associate cooperation with empathy and friendship. Compliance is an entirely new level of altruism. Large groups of humans rise on command. Fearful crowds become even more compliant. Authority separates humans into leaders and followers. It also adds, as later articles will show, other vital dimensions to humanity’s division of labor and social roles.
Modern Homo sapiens dominates our planet today. I will argue that we are the only highly social and cognitively advanced organism. Without obedience to authority, a world full of technology would have been impossible. Today we have a technologically capable civilization, but the price we paid for it is obedience to authority. Evolution has traded a great deal of our intellectual freedom to gain the power of groupthink.
REMEMBERING KOSTOLANY
Kostolany died in 1999 in Paris at the grand age of 93 years. I never met him again after that talk we had about Keynes.
I am sure he would have appreciated the irony that humanity’s outstanding achievements of technology and civilization are due to our ability “not to think.” He also would be unsurprised that authoritarian politics and populism have made a significant rebound.
John Maynard Keynes was a member of the British Delegation of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, negotiating the infamous Treaty of Versailles. Amidst deteriorating health, Keynes resigned from the delegation in protest and denounced the treaty as Carthaginian. He predicted that the attempt to crush the economy of Germany with overwhelming war reparations would lead to the destabilization of its politics and to an eventual war. Not only did he resign in protest, but he wrote a booklet The Economic Consequences of Peace. It was published in 1919, the same year of the conference and in the heat of the debate. While some critics denounced it as a diatribe, the book became a bestseller. Keynes further fueled the fire by a vivid description of the responsible actors. On Clemenceau, Keynes wrote: “He had one illusion — France; and one disillusion — mankind, including Frenchmen, and his colleagues not least.” These words did not make Keynes popular with those he criticized, but ultimately, he proved correct. Without the Treaty of Versailles, Adolf Hitler is unlikely to have overthrown the German democracy to unleash the Holocaust and world war.
Defying authority is a vital ingredient of innovation but also of preserving democracy and peace. I do not wish to say that authority must be abolished or that it must be fought always. This would be equally foolish and impractical. Though authority is responsible for some of the most uncomfortable aspects of human conduct, it is a key component of the human sociobiological tool set.
What I hope to achieve is to construct an evolutionary framework for interpreting social behavior, our history, politics, and daily lives. Please judge for yourself if this provides useful insights into the behaviors that define human conduct and civilization.
