The BS in 'Leadership BS'

Jeffrey Pfeffer’s 2015 book Leadership BS makes a lot of good points about the intellectual vacuity of the leadership industry. Companies have spent billions of dollars on leadership training over the past thirty years without any measurable impact, and most of those training courses preach a gospel that is just as divorced from reality as the abstinence counseling taught in religious high schools.

However, the book has some bullshit of its own:

[We] draw one important lesson from all this evidence: you need to take care of yourself… [T]he pursuit of individual self-interest just might be, as virtually all economics writing and theory since the time of Adam Smith teaches, good not just for you but also generally beneficial for the social systems including the work organizations in which you live. The alternative—hoping for some beneficent, godlike parental figure to look out for and take care of you at your place of employment—seems like a risky bet at best.

Pfeffer surely knows that the claim about “virtually all economics writing and theory” is false. From Veblen through Keynes to Chang, some of the most incisive thinkers ever to work in the field have pointed out that Smith’s “invisible hand” is a myth. Their analyses may have been marginalized by neoliberals over the last 40 years, but Pfeffer is old enough to remember what his field was like before Friedman’s disciples burned down an intellectual rainforest to create a monoculture whose only real purpose is to justify wealth disparity as “inevitable”.

Which brings us to the second (and more infuriating) claim in the paragraph quoted above. A core tenet of the neoliberal canon is that people only have two choices: Wall Street or Pyongyang. They can’t afford to let us think about coming together of our own free will to create professional associations, trade unions, and other instruments of collective action that might counterbalance the power of bankers and CEOs because they don’t want that power constrained. While they quote Adam Smith, their true forebears are those who wrote justifications of the divine right of kings.

My parents were both public school teachers. Their union ensured that when there was a dispute between a teacher and a school board, the teacher didn’t have to stand alone. Doctors, nurses, accounts, and engineers all have professional associations for the same reason, and societies that foster such organizations are fairer and happier than ones that squash them. And yes, those organizations sometimes defend people who don’t deserve to be defended, but companies lay people off who don’t deserve to lose their jobs and routinely cover up the crimes and misdeeds of executives. To write as if managers’ power is a law of nature that the rest of us have no choice but to accept is just as full of bullshit as the claims about leadership that Pfeffer sets out to demolish.