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Why Smart Leaders Run Their Organizations With Dignity
For a brief period in the 1980s, “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap was hailed as a corporate folk hero for shutting factories and firing thousands of workers. In reality, he was doing little more than juicing the numbers in the short term to earn hefty bonuses. The SEC later sued him for fraud and he has earned fame as one of the worst CEOs ever.
Yet the myth of the “tough guy” CEO never lost its luster. Ego-driven leaders like Eddie Lampert at Sears and Travis Kalanick at Uber not only terrorized employees, but did lasting damage to their organizations. Cruel policies, such as stack ranking, continue to attract a following even though they’ve long been discredited.
The 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant believed strongly in the notion of dignity, which he defined as treating people as ends in themselves, rather than as means to an end. I’ve found that Kant’s ideas about dignity are helpful for leading an organization — no one wants to be a cog in someone else’s machine. Treat them like one and it’s bound to cost you.
How Elon Musk Broke Twitter
After buying Twitter, Elon Musk sent an email entitled “A Fork in the Road.” “Going forward,” he wrote, “to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely…
