Ethics

A Train Journey Through Philosophy: Summary of Eric Weiner’s ‘Socrates Express’

June 24, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Journalist and author Eric Weiner’s The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers (2020) is a travelogue, memoir, and self-help book all rolled into one. It’s a distillation of the teachings of 14 great philosophers.

The “Express” isn’t just part of a catchy title. Each chapter starts with a wisdom-seeking train journey that Weiner took to locations where past great philosophers lived, worked, and thought (or are studied.) This introductory vignette orients Weiner’s study of these philosophers’ concepts: how to wonder like Socrates, see like Thoreau, listen like Schopenhauer, have no regrets like Nietzsche, fight like Gandhi, grow old like Beauvoir, cope with hardship like Epictetus, and so on.

The insights resonate with a fresh vibrancy for our problems today. Gandhi (on “how to fight”) believed that individuals who resorted to violence did so from a failure of imagination. Gandhi’s most significant fight was the fight to change the way we fight. He taught that a perpetrator of violence, “unwilling to do the hard work of problem-solving, he throws a punch or reaches for a gun.”

Weiner packs just enough background details on the philosophers’ life stories and how their intellectual traditions are rooted in the context of their times. Stoicism, for example, evolved when ancient Greece’s city-states were facing sociopolitical uncertainty.

The slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus distilled Stoicism to its essence with the dictum, “Some things are up to us, and some are not up to us.” Weiner writes, “Most of what happens in our life is not up to us, except our internal reactions to those events. The Stoics have a word for anything that lies beyond our control: “indifferents.” … Their presence doesn’t add one iota to our character or our happiness. They are neither good nor bad. The Stoic, therefore, is “indifferent” to them.”

Indifference, thus, is an empowering philosophy. With outward events, we are less powerful than we think, but with our reactions, we’re much more powerful.

There’s a scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, calmly extinguishes a match between his thumb and forefinger.

A fellow officer tries it himself, and squeals in pain. “Ouch, it damn well hurts,” he says.

“Certainly it hurts,” replies Lawrence.

“Well, what’s the trick, then?”

“The trick,” says Lawrence, “is not minding that it hurts.”

Lawrence’s response was Stoic. Sure, he felt the pain, yet it remained a raw sensory sensation, a reflex. It never metastasized into a full-blown emotion. Lawrence didn’t mind the pain, in the literal sense of the word: he didn’t allow his mind to experience, and amplify, what his body had felt.

Socrates Express won’t be the most exhaustive philosophy book we can access. Moreover, as we read through, it’s helpful to have some prior appreciation for what we’re reading. For philosophers we’ve studied best, Weiner’s prose will reiterate the key findings. (That was Gandhi, Epictetus, Thoreau, Confucius, and Aurelius, for me.) The other chapters will seem comparatively less insightful.

Ultimately, Weiner reminds what we should be really looking for isn’t knowledge but wisdom. The difference, he says, is that, while information is a jumble of facts and knowledge is a more organized clutter of facts, wisdom is something else altogether. Wisdom “untangles the facts, makes sense of them and crucially, suggests how best to use them.” Put succinctly, “knowledge knows. Wisdom sees.”

Weiner’s prose meanders, it ventures down sidetracks, it stops frequently, it staggers, and it distracts. And it never arrives anywhere. And that’s the whole point. “The Socrates Express” begins in wonder—as does philosophy. The journey never ends—the quest for wisdom is ongoing. By the end, if, at Weiner’s prompting, philosophic thought has done its best, the curiosity of the journey has evoked remains.

Recommendation: Read Eric Weiner’s Socrates Express. It’s an engaging reminder that many philosophical systems are not just academic abstractions whose real meaning is lost in the minutiae.

Weiner’s prose invites us to start “questioning not only what we know but who we are, in hopes of eliciting a radical shift in perspective.” Socrates Express is a reminder that philosophy ultimately isn’t a cure-all for our current or future woes. Instead, philosophy is worthwhile because it builds immunity against negligent judgments and unentitled certitude. And it’s as relevant today as it’s ever been.

Tylenol Made a Hero of Johnson & Johnson: A Timeless Crisis Management Case Study

March 11, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Crisis needn’t strike a company solely because of its own neglect or disaster. Sometimes, situations emerge where the company can’t be blamed—but the company realizes quickly that it’ll get much blame if it fumbles the ball in its crisis-response.

Ever since cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol killed seven people in Chicago in 1982, corporate boards and business school students have studied the response of Johnson & Johnson (J&J,) Tylenol’s manufacturer, to learn how to handle crises. The culprits are still unknown almost 40 years later.

Successful Crisis Management: Full Responsibility, Proactive Stance

Good Crisis Management: The 1982 Response of Johnson & Johnson to the Tylenol Scandal In 1982, Tylenol commanded 35 percent of the over-the-counter analgesic market in America. This over-the-counter painkiller was the drugmaker’s best-selling product, and it represented nearly 17 percent of J&J’s profits. When seven people died from consuming the tainted drug, Time magazine wrote of the tragedy’s victims,

Twelve-year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village took Extra-Strength Tylenol to ward off a cold that had been dogging her. Mary Reiner, 27… had recently given birth to her fourth child. Paula Prince, 35, a United Airlines stewardess, was found dead in her Chicago apartment, an open bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol nearby in the bathroom. Says Dr. Kim [the chief of critical care at Northwest Community Hospital]: “The victims never had a chance. Death was certain within minutes.”

A panic ensued about how widespread the contamination may be. Moreover, Americans started to question the safety of over-the-counter medications.

Advertising guru Jerry Della Femina declared Tylenol dead:

I don’t think they can ever sell another product under that name. There may be an advertising person who thinks he can solve this, and if they find him, I want to hire him because then I want him to turn our water cooler into a wine cooler.

The ‘Grand-Daddy’ of Good Crisis Response

J&J acted quickly, with complete candidness about what had happened, and immediately sought to remove any source of danger based on the worst-case scenario. Within hours of learning of the deaths, J&J installed toll-free numbers for consumers to get information, sent alerts to healthcare providers nationwide, and stopped advertising the product. J&J recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol capsules from store shelves and offered replacement products free of charge in the safer tablet form. J&J did not wait for evidence to see whether the contamination might be more widespread.
J&J’s leadership was in the lead and seemed in full control throughout the crisis. James Burke, J&J’s chairman, was widely admired for his leadership to pull Tylenol capsules off the market and his forthrightness in dealing with the media. (The Tylenol crisis led the news every night on every station for six weeks.)
J&J placed consumers first. J&J spent more than $100 million for the recall and relaunch of Tylenol. The stock had been trading near a 52-week high just before the tragedy, dropped for a time, but recovered to its highs only two months later.
J&J accepted responsibility. Burke could have described the disaster in many different ways: as an assault on the company, as a problem somewhere in the process of getting Tylenol from J&J factories to retail stores, or as the acts of a crazed criminal.
J&J sought to ensure that measures were taken to prevent as far as possible a recurrence of the problem. J&J introduced tamper-proof packaging (supported by an expanded media campaign) that would make it much more difficult for a similar incident to occur in the future.
J&J presented itself prepared to handle the short-term damage in the name of consumer safety. That, more than anything else, established a basis for trust with their customers. Within a year of the disaster, J&J’s share of the analgesic market, which had fallen to 7 percent from 37 percent following the poisoning, had climbed back to 30 percent.

Business Principles Should Hold True in Good Times and Bad

Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke - Tylenol Scandal and Crisis Management When the second outbreak of poisoning occurred four years after the first, Burke went on national television to declare that J&J would only offer Tylenol in caplets, which could not be pulled apart and resealed without consumers knowing about it.

Burke received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2000. He was named one of history’s ten most outstanding CEOs by Fortune magazine in 2003. In Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of Our Times (2004,) Burke emphasized,

J&J credo has always stated that the company is responsible first to its customers, then to its employees, the community and the stockholders, in that order. The credo is all about the consumer. [When those seven deaths occurred,] the credo made it very clear at that point exactly what we were all about. It gave me the ammunition I needed to persuade shareholders and others to spend the $100 million on the recall. The credo helped sell it.

Trust has been an operative word in my life. It embodies almost everything you can strive for that will help you to succeed. You tell me any human relationship that works without trust, whether it is a marriage or a friendship or a social interaction; in the long run, the same thing is true about business.

Idea for Impact: A Crisis Makes a Leader

The first few days after any disaster or crisis can be a make-or-break time for a company’s and its leaders’ reputation. The urgency experienced during a crisis often gives leaders the go-ahead to enact change faster than ever before.

Admittedly, the Tylenol case study is more clear-cut than most crises because, from the get-go, it is clearly evident that criminals, not Johnson & Johnson, were responsible for the poisoning and the withdrawal of Tylenol from stores was comparatively easier to execute.

A Real Lesson from the Downfall of Theranos: Silo Mentality

February 4, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The extraordinary rise and fall of Theranos, Silicon Valley’s biggest fraud, makes an excellent case study on what happens when teams don’t loop each other in.

Theranos’ blood-testing device never worked as glorified by its founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. She created an illusion that became one of the greatest start-up stories. She kept her contraption’s malfunctions and her company’s problems shockingly well hidden—even from her distinguished board of directors.

At the core of Holmes’s sham was how she controlled the company’s flow of information

A Real Lesson from the Downfall of Theranos: Silo Mentality Holmes and her associate (and then-lover) Sunny Balwani operated a culture of fear and intimidation at Theranos. They went to such lengths as hiring superstar lawyers to intimidate and silence employees and anyone else who dared to challenge their methods or expose their devices’ deficiencies.

Holmes had the charade going for so long by keeping a tight rein on who talked to whom. She controlled the flow of information within the company. Not only that, she swiftly fired people who dared to question her approach. She also forcefully imposed non-disclosure agreements even for those exiting the company.

In other words, Holmes went to incredible lengths to create and maintain a silo mentality in her startup. Her intention was to wield much power, prevent employees from talking to each other, and perpetuate her deceit.

A recipe for disaster at Theranos: Silo mentality and intimidation approach

Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou’s book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018; my summary) is full of stories of how Holmes went out of her way to restrain employees from conferring about what they were working on. Even if they worked on the same project, Holmes made siloed functional teams report to her directly. She would edit progress reports before redirecting problems to other team heads.

Consider designer Ed Ku’s mechatronics team responsible for designing all the intricate mechanisms that control the measured flow of biochemical fluids. Some of his team’s widgets were overheating, impinging on one another and cross-contaminating the clinical fluids. Holmes wouldn’t allow Ku and his team to talk to the teams that improved the biochemical processes.

Silo mentality can become very problematic when communication channels become too constricted and organizational processes too bureaucratic. Creativity gets stifled, collaboration limited, mistakes—misdeeds in the case of Theranos—suppressed, and collective objectives misaligned.

Idea for Impact: Functional silos make organizations slow, bureaucratic, and complicated

Innovation hinges increasingly on interdisciplinary cooperation. Examine if your leadership attitude or culture is unintentionally contributing to insufficient accountability, inadequate information-sharing, and limited collaboration between departments—especially on enterprise-wide initiatives.

Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

August 11, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Flattery has had a bad name since the Greeks. Over 2,000 years ago, Publilius Syrus, the Latin writer of mimes and dramatic sketches, warned, “Flattery was formerly a vice; it has now become the fashion.”

Flattery continues to be an obligatory weapon in all manner of political and personal influence. Richard Stengel’s A Brief History of Flattery (2000) lists over 200 synonyms for “to flatter” and “flattery.”

A trio of marketing professors conducted a set of experiments using a sunglasses kiosk. The sales clerks flattered customers either during the sale, after the sale, or not at all. Then, researchers asked the shoppers to evaluate the trustworthiness of the clerks.

Turns out that the customers could see through it. Flattery, whether it comes during or after the sale, reduced the customer’s perception of the clerk’s trustworthiness. Without conscious reflection, flattery made the customers distrust the salesclerks:

Our findings show that even when it was obvious the compliment didn’t serve any underlying sales motive, the participants didn’t trust what the sales agent had to say.

In a way, it’s sad that the marketplace has become so suspicious, but it seems that when someone flatters us, we get our back up even if it’s not called for. It’s the consumers’ default position to react negatively to what is perceived as an attempt to manipulate them.

Idea for Impact: Don’t try to sway anybody by unsavory flattery and ingratiation.

Flattery is an inducement that seems great initially but leaves a horrid aftertaste. People will eat up your flattery if they’re starving for affection, but undue adulation isn’t as appealing as honest, sincere appreciation.

Food Delivery Apps are Eating Up Your Money

August 3, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Food delivery apps have been the salvation for restaurants—and laid-off workers—during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the promotions and fees charged by the likes of Uber Eats and GrubHub are bleeding restaurants dry. According to the Washington Post, one restaurant with $1,043 in food sales was left with just $377 after GrubHub’s charges for delivery, commission, processing, and promotions.

The food delivery startups’ #eatlocal and #keeprestaurantsopen promotions are exploiting customers’ generosity. Customers aren’t really helping out local restaurants as much as they may think. WIRED notes,

Uber Eats has waived delivery fees to consumers on most phone orders but still charges a 25% commission on orders from restaurants it partners with.

On a normal Wednesday night, [one Miami restaurateur] would expect roughly $5,000 in revenue. This Wednesday, the total was $665. Of that, $523 came through delivery apps, primarily Uber Eats. Those commissions totaled $131, leaving him just $534 to cover rent, plus the cost of food and staff. His typical daily overhead is about $3,000. With reduced staff, it’s now $1,200—more than twice as much as his revenue Wednesday. “It’s not sustainable,” he says.

Uber Eats isn’t the only company accused of trying to capitalize on the crisis. GrubHub’s “Supper for Support” initiative, meant to encourage buying from local restaurants, drew widespread criticism. The deal offers a $10 discount on certain orders between 5 pm and 9 pm, but restaurants that opt in cover the discount, and GrubHub still charges its commission on the full price.

Customers ought to know about these apps’ deceptive business practices and be able to make meaningful choices about patronizing local businesses.

In 2018, food delivery raked an estimated $161BB in sales worldwide, and the potential market size has attracted a great deal of startup funding. En bloc, the food delivery business has struggled to sustain itself profitably. The restaurants are particularly agitated, not least because food is a low-margin business, and the fiercely competitive meal-delivery firms just can’t recompense restaurants and riders as much as needed.

Idea for Impact: If you want to support your local businesses, patronize them directly. Call your order in. Pick up the order yourself or get your food delivered by the restaurant itself. Cut out the intermediary.

Power Inspires Hypocrisy

July 27, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Mark Hurd, whom I featured in Friday’s article, was one of the most respected and eminent leaders in Silicon Valley until his mighty fall following his dalliance with a contractor during his time as CEO of Hewlett Packard (HP.)

Hurd had hired this contractor, a glamour model, as a “hostess” for “executive summit events,” even at out-of-town places where there is no HP event, but Hurd happened to be.

Power Corrupts and Inspires Hypocrisy Hurd was ultimately exonerated of violating HP’s sexual-harassment policy (nothing was consummated with the contractor, and Hurd settled with the accuser for undisclosed terms) but he was officially charged with drumming up expense reports.

Hurd walked away from HP with a $34 million severance package. Almost immediately, he became co-president of Oracle, earning $11 million a year and options.

Much has been speculated about the real reasons HP’s board gave Hurd the boot, especially considering that he probably falsified his just an expense report just the once. Even then, said expenses were petty compared to the massive turnaround he had engineered at HP after walking into a very troubling situation. Hurd was famed for his no-nonsense management style and for finagling a culture of operational excellence at HP.

When the Hurd controversy broke out, Wall Street Journal’s Jonah Lehrer argued that when nice people rise to positions of power, “authority atrophies the very talents that got them there.”

The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude.

Contrary to the notion that nice guys finish last, research shows that the surest way to accumulate power is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But once nice guys reach the top, the headiness of wielding power causes them to morph into a very different kind of beast. They lose their ability to empathize with others, especially lesser mortals, and ignore information that doesn’t confirm what they already believe. Most tellingly, perhaps, they learn to excuse faults in themselves that they are quick to condemn in others. That’s not to say that every CEO is a secret villain. But even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

Idea for Impact: Power can become an enabler of corruption, deceit, and hypocrisy. People in positions of power have incentives to hold others to strict account for their behaviors even as they themselves act up, especially when the odds of being caught and punished are slim.

The Poolguard Phenomenon

February 24, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Even Petty Power Corrupts

Ever wondered why some people in a position of power, but without the concomitant rank or status, tend to exert their power unreasonably?

People in menial jobs can have, within their petty fiefdoms, the ability to inconvenience people. Rub a TSA agent the wrong way, for example, and you could be signaled for expanded screening. Summer-time poolguards can be seen checking excessively over kids and parents who show no deference to the poolguards’ authority. At bureaucratic offices, clerks and stern supervisors sometimes impose petty rules that must be followed for the sake of the rules—and nobody likes dealing with them!

The power tripper’s fragile ego hinges on exerting his/her power.

Power Increases People’s Sense of Entitlement

The Poolguard Phenomenon: Even Petty Power Corrupts This anecdotal fact seems to be substantiated by this study, titled “The Destructive Nature of Power Without Status.” The researchers make a case that neither power nor low status independently provokes people to mistreat others. Rather, the combination of these two facets of social interaction makes abuse that much more likely.

We predicted that when people have a role that gives them power but lacks status—and the respect that comes with that status—then it can lead to demeaning behaviors. Put simply, it feels bad to be in a low-status position and the power that goes with that role gives them a way to take action on those negative feelings.

One way to prevent such power dynamics is to find ways to make all individuals feel respected and valued irrespective of the status of their roles. “Respect assuages negative feelings about their low-status roles and leads them to treat others positively.” Courtesy pays!

Notes

Some people will despise anyone they suspect is exerting power over them.
Compare to the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, in which a group of students was appointed either prisoners or guards in a mocked-up prison. Although all the participants understood they were part of a simulation, the “guards” treated the “prisoners” in extremely humiliating ways because, per the researchers, the guards recognized that they lacked respect and admiration in the eyes of others. (This controversial experiment was the subject of a 2015 docudrama.)
Compare to the concept of the Napoleon Complex, through which, shorter men could overcompensate for their height by means of social aggressiveness. (Napoleon wasn’t short.)
Cf. The “Waiter Rule” states that how you treat seemingly insignificant people says a lot about your personality and priorities.

Why People under Pressure Choose Self-Interested Behaviors

January 17, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi

Why People under Pressure Choose Self-Interested Behaviors Pressure can put people in a state of threat. As I’ve examined previously here, here, and here, pressure can undermine people’s ability to make sound decisions.

Under pressure, people can abandon their inhibitions, cut corners, and loosen up their moral standards. In other words, they are more likely to engage in self-centered behaviors as opposed to pursuing the common good.

People adopt moral standards that dissuade them from unacceptable behaviors. Under normal circumstances, they think sensibly about the costs and benefits when making decisions. However, under pressure, people can be depleted of the cognitive resources they need to act ethically and resist temptations. See my article on the much-debated “muscle metaphor” of willpower.

When people are in that state of emotional and psychological anxiety, the brain goes into a defensive mode. With that, they are more likely to engage in self-interested behaviors that they would otherwise avoid, especially if the payoff for such behavior is high, and the odds of getting caught and punished are low.

Two Leadership Lessons from Oscar Munoz, United Airlines CEO

December 12, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

United Airlines announced last week that CEO Oscar Munoz and President Scott Kirby would transition to new roles as executive chairman and CEO respectively in May 2020.

Two Leadership Lessons from United Airlines' CEO, Oscar Munoz Munoz was very good for the airline. He deserves kudos for getting United back on track, for improving the company’s culture, employee morale, brand image, and customer experience, and for hiring Kirby.

Munoz, who came to United from the railroad company CSX, had hitherto gained considerable experience while serving for 15 years on United’s (via its predecessor Continental Airlines’s) board. But, when he became CEO in 2015, he stated that he hadn’t realized how bad things had got at United. That admission reflects poorly on his board tenure—board members are expected to be clued up about the day-to-day specifics of the company and have more visibility into the pulse of the company’s culture beyond its senior management. Alas, board members not only owe their cushy jobs to the CEOs and the top leadership but also build long, cozy relationships with them.
Munoz will be remembered chiefly for the David Dao incident and the ensuing customer service debacle. The video of Dao being dragged out of his seat screaming was seen around the world. While the dragging was not Munoz’s fault (the underlying problem wasn’t unique to United,) the company’s horrendous response to the incident was. However, Munoz is worthy of praise for using the event as a learning exercise and an impetus for wholesale change in United’s operations and employee culture. In the aftermath of the incident, many customers vowed to boycott United flights, but that sentiment passed as the backlash over the incident waned. Even so, the David Dao incident need not have happened for United’s operational and cultural changes to materialize.

Now then, Scott Kirby is a hardnosed, “Wall Street-first, customer loyalty-last” kinda leader. Even though Kirby has made United an operationally reliable airline, his manic focus on cost-cutting has made him less popular with United’s staff and its frequent fliers. Let’s hope he’ll keep the momentum and preserve the good that Munoz has wrought.

Transformational Leadership Lessons from Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Founding Father

June 24, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Almost all leaders take office with an ambitious vision for their country or their organization, but only a few ever succeed in transforming that vision into reality. Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015,) the architect of modern Singapore, was one of them.

Leadership Lessons from Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's Founding Father

Lee was one of the most competent leaders the world has ever seen. An incorruptible Cambridge-educated lawyer, he was an autocratic pragmatist—a strong-willed, visionary leader who “got it done.” Under his leadership, Singapore metamorphosed itself from a tropical backwater with few natural resources to a first-world metropolis in just one generation. Today, Singapore’s per-capita GDP in terms of Purchasing Power Parity is the third highest in the world.

There is also a darker side to the Singapore story, however. The island-nation’s prosperity came at the cost of a rather authoritarian style of government that sometimes infringed on civil liberties. In a 1986 National Day Rally, Lee defended,

I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters—who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.

Singapore is not quite a dictatorship, but neither is it a full democracy. Its political system is skewed to let Lee’s party dominate the country’s polity. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Lee asserted, “It is not the business of the government to enable the opposition party to overturn us.”

A vast majority of Singaporeans today will overlook these civil-liberty concerns in the context of the country’s socio-political stability, public security, world-leading and affordable healthcare, free education, good housing for all, and high employment.

Singapore’s spectacular success is accepted as evidence, sometimes lamentably as justification, as with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, that a vibrant economy and sustained prosperity could blossom only under a totalitarian government. Singapore’s achievement is not likely replicable in its entirety elsewhere.

Over the last several months, I’ve read a few biographies and evaluations of Lee and his political leadership, including the memoirs The Singapore Story: From Third World to First (1998) and One Man’s View of the World (2013.) Here are a few key leadership lessons that Lee had to teach.

Vision, structure, and determination are paramount to efficacious leadership. Lee was a brilliant, clear-eyed, far-sighted statesman. Singapore’s political stability, rapid economic growth, and its raising affluence between 1959 and 1990 were not accidental, but the result of his dynamic leadership and disciplined social engineering. In The Singapore Story (1998,) he writes, “The task of the leaders must be to provide or create for them a strong framework within which they can learn, work hard, be productive and be rewarded accordingly. And this is not easy to achieve.”

Leadership entails tough, unpopular decisions. Lee was not afraid of being out of favor. “I have never been overconcerned or obsessed with opinion polls or popularity polls. I think a leader who is, is a weak leader. If you are concerned with whether your rating will go up or down, then you are not a leader. You are just catching the wind … you will go where the wind is blowing. And that’s not what I am in this for.” He famously forbade the sale of chewing gum to keep Singapore’s streets clean. He maintained capital punishment and caning. Singapore’s vandalism rules drew worldwide attention in 1994 when American teenager Michael Fay was caned for damaging cars and public property, in spite of appeals for clemency from the US media and government, including then-President Bill Clinton.

The litmus test of great leadership is results that matter. Many take issue with Lee’s methods, but few dispute the results he achieved. He was a pragmatist with devotion to no particular ideology. He once contemplated, “I was never a prisoner of any [socio-political] theory. What guided me were reason and reality. The acid test I applied to every theory or scheme was: Would it work?” and “The acid test is in performance, not promises.”

Nurture a meritocracy. Lee’s commitment to meritocracy is a hallmark of Singapore’s national identity—social mobility is rooted in hard work and contribution regardless of ethnic differences. He devoted resources to cultivate an excellent education and health system, and developed a high-quality teacher workforce—all to maximize people’s potential. According to Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (1998,) he wrote, “It is possible to create a society in which everybody is given not equal rewards, but equal opportunities, and where rewards vary not in accordance with the ownership of property, but with the worth of a person’s contribution to that society. In other words, society should make it worth people’s while to give their best to the country. This is the way to progress.” In recent years, though, the debate over rising social inequality has led to some reproach of Singapore’s meritocracy.

Attract and retain superior talent; pay them well. A key contributor to the wealth, stability, efficiency, and cleanliness of Singapore is its civil service—it’s one of the most proficient and least corrupt bureaucracies in the world. The government’s transparent policies have been a powerful enticement for people, businesses, and investments. Singapore has some of the highest paid civil servants in the world. The country is not content to let its top graduates all go straight to the private sector, so it pays what it takes to get them. Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, Lee’s immediate successor, told Singapore’s parliament on 3-Dec-1993, “If we do not pay ministers adequately, we will get inadequate ministers. If you pay peanuts, you will get monkeys for your ministers. The people will suffer, not the monkeys.”

One’s accomplishments become one’s legacy. Having a broad picture of the effect you want to have on the world will help you pinpoint the actions necessary to achieve it. Explaining his legacy, Lee wrote in Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going (2011,) “I have spent my life, so much of it, building up this country. There’s nothing more that I need to do. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.”

To judge leaders by their methods alone is to underrate their successes. While considering Lee’s legacy, one needs to acknowledge his achievements while refusing to close one’s eyes to certain lapses. Lee’s many critics considered him authoritarian—he imposed media restrictions and used detention without trial and defamation suits to quash critics of his government. Discussing a political opponent in Lee Kuan Yew: The Man and His Ideas (1998,) Lee justified, “If you are a troublemaker, it’s our job to politically destroy you. … Everybody knows that in my bag I have a hatchet, and a very sharp one. You take me on, I take my hatchet, we meet in the cul-de-sac. That’s the way I had to survive in the past.” Lee was unapologetic about his heavy-handed style of governing, seeing it as necessitous to get Singapore to where it got.

Ethics

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Successful Crisis Management: Full Responsibility, Proactive Stance

The ‘Grand-Daddy’ of Good Crisis Response

Business Principles Should Hold True in Good Times and Bad

Idea for Impact: A Crisis Makes a Leader

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At the core of Holmes’s sham was how she controlled the company’s flow of information

A recipe for disaster at Theranos: Silo mentality and intimidation approach

Idea for Impact: Functional silos make organizations slow, bureaucratic, and complicated

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Even Petty Power Corrupts

Power Increases People’s Sense of Entitlement

Notes

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