A Leader's Destiny

March 4, 2024
Executive coaches, boot camps, and workshops promising to develop leadership skills are incorrigibly ineffective, according to this provocative takedown. Stanford psychiatry professor Aboujaoude (Virtually You) argues that the tendency to conflate holding a leadership position with success has pushed individuals to seek out the C-suite even when it’s not a good fit. For instance, he describes how one of his patients, Jeff, was beset by anxiety during his MBA program’s public presentation exercises. Aboujaoude recommended Jeff reevaluate if the program was worth the trouble, leading him to drop out and take a less public-facing job at a solar energy plant, where he’s much happier. The problem with leadership programs, Aboujaoude contends, is that “great leaders are... mostly born” great or become so via circumstances outside their control. Unfortunately, his evidence is less than convincing, as when he claims in a bit of circular logic that former Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher’s natural leadership skills explain why he was well-liked and why leadership can’t be taught. Still, Aboujaoude makes a thought-provoking case that pat, multistep prescriptions for good leadership generalize too broadly and fail to account for the importance of chance (Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s leadership skills, Aboujaoude posits, were forged by unforeseen circumstances, not by a program or coach). This doesn’t always convince, but it will leave readers with much to contemplate. Agent: Howard Yoon, WME.

March 1, 2024
A psychiatrist and researcher at Stanford sees the current crop of "leadership" courses as not just useless but often dangerous. Aboujaoude has penned a number of engaging books about psychology, including Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the e-Personality. In his latest, he takes aim at what he terms the "leadership industrial complex," an alliance of self-appointed business gurus, executive coaches, and consultants. The author notes that some of his patients exhibited deep worries that they were not fulfilling the leadership potential that the college they attended or course they took was supposed to give them. Aboujaoude, however, is skeptical that leadership can be taught--not the way that it is currently done, at least--and he cites research showing that most business leadership courses produce little in the way of positive results, despite the exorbitant costs. Indeed, they are often counterproductive, favoring people with streaks of narcissism, selfishness, and even sociopathology. True leadership, writes the author, flows from innate temperament, character, and talent, as well as a large dose of being in the right place at the right time. In one chapter poking fun at the alphabet soup of how-to acronyms, he stresses instead the importance of self-awareness and humility. Not every person is suitable for a leadership position, he writes, but no matter: there are many other skills that are equally important to business and personal success, as he demonstrates throughout the book. Business schools, in pushing the message that everyone can and should be a leader, are manufacturing neuroses and dissatisfaction. Despite these interesting points, the author is not always convincing, with many of his brush strokes being overly broad. Nevertheless, he delivers a book that anyone considering enrollment in a course with "leadership" in the title should investigate. A distinctive, thought-provoking view on leadership in the 21st century.

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