In his recent autobiography, Turner describes a difficult childhood in which his father, Ed Turner, constantly moved the boy from one boarding school to another. Forever the new kid, Turner faced more than typical childhood harassment from his peers; at one point, when he was sent away from home at age four, he felt completely abandoned. When Ted was home, Ed Turner worked his son hard and sometimes beat him. The boy was once expelled from elementary school (“I was a restless kid and got in trouble a lot. I didn’t do anything really bad,” Turner explains) and had poor grades, which he now attributes to his painful home life. (“Today’s schools would probably jump to the conclusion that I had Attention Deficit Disorder, but that wasn’t the case. After being isolated and alone for so long I was simply craving attention.”)
After his father placed the troublemaker in a high school military academy, Turner evolved into an academic and social success. Urged by his father to go to the Ivy League, Turner did well at Brown initially, but then partied his way to becoming a dropout. (He attributes this reversion to conflict with his father, who refused to support him financially after Turner chose to major in classics.) Around this time, Turner also describes potentially manic symptoms, such as reckless driving. He routinely drove about 120 miles per hour from his father’s vacation home in South Carolina to visit friends in Savannah, Georgia. On one such occasion, while crossing a railroad track, he narrowly missed being run over by a train. He was also a highly energetic person, a personality trait that he acknowledges. (And explains away: “I have always had a lot of energy. Every since I was little, my mind and body were active and I couldn’t stand sitting around. Even today, I’m constantly moving. Purgatory for me would be spending twenty-four hours with nothing to do but to be alone with my thoughts.”) His ex-wife Jane Fonda psychoanalyzes away this manic personality trait: “As a result of his upbringing, for Ted there’s fear of abandonment that is deeper than with anyone I’ve ever known. As a result he needs constant companionship and keeping up with him can be exhausting. It’s not just all the constant activity—it’s his nervous energy that almost crackles in the air. He can’t sit still because if you sit still the demons catch up with you. He has to keep moving.”
TURNER’S SYMPTOMS ARE put into relief by his family history: Ed Turner committed suicide at the peak of his professional success, after he had built up a thriving billboard advertising company in Atlanta. Turner explains the act as the paradoxical aftermath of success; his father had achieved all his goals and was left with no new ambitions. But Turner also describes, sometimes in literal terms, a sick mind: “The fall of 1962 was an exciting time. Dad was elated—the most energized I’d ever seen him. . . . Unbeknownst to all of us, this upbeat behavior came just as he was approaching the brink of collapse. He was like an engine that runs at its fastest right before stripping the gears. My dad had always had his mood swings, but almost overnight his behavior became significantly more erratic and unpredictable. One day he’d be high as a kite and the next he’d be in a state of abject depression.”
These mood swings were accompanied by paranoid and nihilistic thoughts: “My father knew the billboard business cold and while most of his advisers assured him that he wouldn’t have trouble meeting his [debt] obligations, an irrational fear of losing everything began to consume him.” He also began drinking and smoking more, and eventually went to a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut. Turner’s recollection at this point seems to get cloudier, and he attributes his father’s worsening mental state and eventual suicide to having been prescribed the wrong medicines at the hospital. “He said they were for ‘his nerves,’ and I’m pretty sure they included Quaaludes and a variety of other uppers and downers. In effect, my dad basically swapped alcohol and tobacco for prescription drugs.” This may be true, since in 1962 antidepressants were barely known, antipsychotics were rarely used for mania, and lithium (which likely would have saved his father’s life) still languished in unread journals, unused until a decade later. The most common treatments in that era were amphetamines (“uppers,” which would worsen mania), and barbiturates or benzodiazepines (“downers,” which could exacerbate depression but lessened anxiety and encouraged sleep). His father finally decided to sell his growing, successful company at a large discount to a competitor. Turner, who had joined the family business, argued forcefully against this, but his father signed a letter promising to sell the company, and a few days later shot himself.
Faced with his father’s death, and the impending loss of the family business, twenty-one-year-old Ted, to the surprise of many, rallied the company staff, hired lawyers, negotiated with his father’s competitor, and settled the agreement to sell by giving company stock to the competitor. Turner not only kept the billboard enterprise going and growing, but eventually he expanded it to radio and television.
IN LATER YEARS, Turner himself saw a psychiatrist, but now he denies severe depression or clear mania, unlike his father, attributing most of his own mental symptoms to anxiety triggered by the stresses of an active life:
I’d had some problems with mood swings when I was a kid—probably because of being sent away at such a young age and the anxiety that my life produced. . . . Still, in the 1980s a doctor diagnosed me with bipolar depression and put me on lithium. I took this medication for a couple of years but I couldn’t tell that it made much of a difference. When I switched psychiatrists, I had a thorough interview that led to a completely different diagnosis. My new doctor asked me questions like whether I ever went for long stretches without sleep (only when I was sailing, I told him), and whether I ever spent inordinate amounts of money. (We both got a chuckle out of that one. . . .) He concluded that while I definitely had an uncommon drive and still do struggle with occasional bouts of anxiety, I don’t have depression, and he canceled the lithium.
The differing views of Turner’s doctors reflect the state of our knowledge. Many psychiatrists in the 1980s and 1990s did not diagnose bipolar disorder: about 40 percent of people with bipolar disorder were misdiagnosed as not having it (and usually given anxiety disorder or depression labels instead, as Turner was).
For Turner, the evidence for at least some bipolar condition seems strong if we apply the four lines of diagnostic evidence, not just symptoms, but also course of illness, family history, and treatment response. His father likely had severe bipolar disorder; his mood symptoms began quite early in childhood (which is uncommon in mood conditions besides bipolar disorder); Turner’s specific symptoms included decreased need for sleep (constant high energy), distractibility (self-described since childhood), agitation (being unable to sit still), notable self-confidence, rapid speech, impulsive behaviors like his reckless driving, and sexual indiscretions as documented in Jane Fonda’s memoir. One might add excessive spending, but this criterion is difficult to assess in a billionaire. His self-described lack of response to lithium doesn’t support the bipolar diagnosis, but it hardly rules out that interpretation either. Many people with bipolar disorder don’t respond to lithium, and Turner’s self-reported nonresponse would need to be verified by others, such as family and friends, who might have witnessed a change in his behavior he didn’t pick up on himself. (Indeed, in 1992, Turner’s female companion stated that for Turner, “lithium is a miracle”; at that time, both his ex-wife, Janie, and his wife-to-be, Jane Fonda, confirmed the benefits of lithium for Turner. Now Turner denies such benefit.) Based on Turner’s own report (which can be wrong, since patients often have little insight into their own manic symptoms), his symptoms were constant, not episodic. This course of illness, if true, is consistent with hyperthymic personality (which is genetically related to bipolar disorder but less severe).
Though I believe Turner was a success because of, rather than despite, his bipolar symptoms, we will see below that in the long run a touch of lithium wouldn’t have hurt.
HOW DID TURNER’S CONDITION, whether hyperthymic personality or bipolar disorder, affect his leadership? One might cite resilience, after his fat
her’s suicide, but in this chapter I will focus on the creativity he displayed throughout his career.
Turner likes to analogize business decisions to military methods. He compares the launch of CNN in 1980, for instance, to the methods of World War II German general Erwin Rommel: “On several occasions, the German general attacked the British when he knew he didn’t have enough fuel to conduct an entire offensive. What he intended to do was strike when they weren’t expecting it, overrun their lines, and then capture their fuel dumps. At that point, he could refuel his panzers and continue the offensive. My vision for financing CNN was similar.” With little cash on hand, and no chance of getting decent loans, Turner launched CNN knowing he only had enough funds to run it for about a year. After that, he hoped, correctly, that it would generate enough attention that new sources of funding (through advertising, cable fees, and new loans) could be found. It was an audacious risk, certainly not standard practice in the business world. It reminds me of Sherman sending his army into southern Georgia and the Carolinas, cutting off his supply lines behind him, planning on living off the land that he would despoil along the way.
Another example of Turner’s manic creativity occurred soon afterward. In its early years, when CNN survived and grew, the networks took notice. ABC planned a direct competitor to CNN, as well as a cable headline news network that would repeat the main stories hourly, as opposed to CNN’s in-depth coverage. Turner saw this competition as potentially fatal to his new company: “We had already invested about $100 million in CNN and were still far from breaking even. Now, two multibillion-dollar corporations [ABC in partnership with Westinghouse] were coming at us with a dagger pointed at our heart. . . . I once again thought in military terms and reasoned that I could not afford to engage in a long, protracted war against opponents with such superior resources. I had to knock them out, and quickly.” So Turner created CNN2 (now called Headline News) almost spontaneously, working feverishly to get the new channel on the air in only four months, so as to preempt ABC’s proposed channel by six months. By establishing his channel first, he made ABC’s plans for a headline news station more competitive and costly; ABC decided to scrap its second channel. Then to fight off the direct competitor (ABC’s Satellite News Channel), Turner used his personal contacts with cable providers to get preferential exposure for CNN2. Eventually, Turner bought out ABC’s channel and got rid of his competition; in so doing, he protected CNN for another decade of competition-free growth.
TURNER CLEARLY SEES HIMSELF as a divergent thinker: “Confronted with a problem, I’ve always looked for an unconventional angle and approach. Nothing sneaky, nothing illegal or unethical, just turning the issue on its head and shifting the advantage to our side.” His great achievement—cable media (not just news, but also the first national cable station, and all-sports, all-movie, and all-cartoon networks)—entailed recognizing a new medium at its inception and jumping into it without inhibition, when others either failed to see the opportunity or hesitated to take advantage of it.
On the one hand, Turner seems to have been realistic: he saw a new field about to explode. Yet, as Shelley Taylor, the psychologist who described the notion of positive illusions, notes, entrepreneurs are unrealistic, at least initially, taking chances that may or may not work out. Whether Turner was more realistic than others because of his depression is uncertain; but his manic energy and creativity are relatively clear.
In later years (after coming off lithium), Turner made his great mistake: he joined forces with Time Warner in 1995, hoping to garner enough funds to buy one of the major networks, a lifelong goal of his. But the Atlanta entrepreneur couldn’t survive within the confines of a New York corporation. He could no longer make decisions himself: his audacious moves were now vetoed by the corporation’s board. By merging his business, he had lost control of it, a fact that became clear when, at the peak of the new Internet market, Time Warner merged with AOL, without consulting Turner. Within months of the announcement, the Internet stock bubble peaked, then crashed. Turner watched his net worth fall by $10 million daily, without (given his contractual obligations to Time Warner) being able to do anything about it. He waited out an 80 percent loss of his wealth, eventually sold all his stock in AOL Time Warner, and resigned.
CNN lives on, but it is no longer Ted Turner’s CNN. In 1991, on Turner’s personal orders, and despite pleas from the White House, the network refused to remove its reporters from Baghdad when George H. W. Bush bombed the city, thereby showing the American public the truth about what was happening there. A decade later, after Turner’s exit, CNN went meekly along with other networks, “embedding” its reporters for the attack of another George Bush on Iraq, this time presenting only what the military allowed journalists to see. In the buildup and the immediate aftermath, CNN, like most of the media, followed the administration’s line; there was little independent journalism or critical thinking. As Turner writes in his memoirs, he would never have let that happen if he’d still been in charge.
TED TURNER’S SUCCESSES and setbacks demonstrate how a person’s mental condition fosters different kinds of leadership in the business world, just as it does in the other contexts we examine in this book. In a strong economy, the ideal business leader is the corporate type, the man who makes the trains run on time, the organizational leader. He may not be particularly creative, but he doesn’t need new ideas; he only needs to keep going what’s going. Arthur Koestler called this kind of executive the Commissar; much as a Soviet bureaucrat administers the state, the corporate executive administers the company. This is not a minor matter; administration is no easy task; but with this approach, all is well only when all that matters is administration.
When the economy is in crisis, when profits have fallen, when consumers no longer demand one’s goods or competitors produce better ones, then the Commissar fails; the corporate executive takes a backseat to the entrepreneur, whom Koestler called the Yogi. This is the crisis leader, the creative businessman who either produces new ideas that navigate the old company through changing times or, more often, produces new companies to meet changing needs. David Owen, a neurologist and British politician, has observed political leaders up close, and also served on corporate boards. He notes that the skills needed by successful businessmen may exceed those of great statesmen. The goals of businessmen, unlike politicians, are “defined almost exclusively in terms of growth . . . doing little or even on rare occasions nothing is sometimes a wise course in politics; that is rarely the case in business.”
The Commissar is the peacetime business leader; the Yogi the crisis business leader. The best business leaders combine both qualities—doers, like Commissars, and thinkers, like Yogis—but such specimens are rare. Most leaders lean more in one direction or the other, mainly based on how they are mentally primed. In business, it seems that Ted Turner may not have understood that his mental makeup prepared him to be an excellent Yogi, but a poor Commissar. The entrepreneurial winner was a corporate failure.
PART TWO
REALISM
CHAPTER 3
HEADS I WIN, TAILS IT’S CHANCE
The psychologist Martin Seligman first set forth the highly influential “learned helplessness” theory of depression in 1967. He reasoned that depressed people see the world too negatively because they are scarred by early hardship and learn to feel helpless. Studies on animals had supported the theory, and in 1979 two of Seligman’s students, Lauren Alloy and Lynn Abramson, decided to test it on undergraduates. They asked their test subjects to press a button and observe whether it turned on a green light. The subjects effectively had no control over the light; the researchers would decide whether or not to turn it on when the subjects pressed the button. In several different trials, the researchers varied how often the light came on after the button was pressed: in one experiment, it lit up 75 percent of the time; in another experiment, 50 percent; in a third, only 25 percent. Students were divided into two groups, based on tests they’d previously ta
ken: those with no symptoms of depression, and those with some depression.
Alloy and Abramson made an unwelcome discovery: their teacher was wrong. Depressed students didn’t underestimate how much control they had; normal students overestimated it. This observation, which they called “depressive realism,” was strongest when the green light came on most often. When the light came on only 25 percent of the time after they pressed the button, about half of both depressed and normal groups realized they had no control over it. But when the light came on 75 percent of the time, only 6 percent of normal students realized they had little control versus 50 percent in the depressed group.
Aware that this artificial test didn’t replicate real-world decisions because there were no performance-based rewards or penalties, the researchers introduced motivation—money. Students were told they would gain or lose up to five dollars (which was worth a lot more in 1979 than it is now) each time the green light went on. As before, the experimenters manipulated the frequency of the light. When they made money off the green light, normal students again thought they had more control over it than they actually did. But when the light meant losing money, the normal students were more realistic. In all cases, depressed students accurately judged how much control they had.
Alloy and Abramson had discovered something new: depression led to more, not less, realistic assessments of control over one’s environment, an effect that was only enhanced by a real-world emotional desire, like making money. In the decades since they published their paper, their results have been replicated many times in other experiments. As counterintuitive as the idea of depressive realism may be, it is hard to deny.
A First-Rate Madness Page 5