The third move is to be constructively actionable. It is fine and good to write and say critical things without giving solutions—but not if you want to be a thought leader. A compelling example of this comes from Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter and editor who has managed, better than most, to straddle the lives of the critic and the thought leader. A journalist with a Harvard MBA, Duhigg once spent a summer making financial models about the turnaround of distressed companies, before concluding that he would rather be a newspaper reporter. He won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation revealing Apple’s business tricks in managing foreign plants, paying and dodging taxes, and claiming patents. He also exposed corporations for violating pollution laws more than half a million times, and probed Fannie Mae’s near-fatal decision, in the run-up to the Great Recession, to enter the “more treacherous corners of the mortgage market.” Despite his business degree, he had become what MarketWorld did not appreciate: a critic who pointed out what was wrong without offering digestible lists of tips on how to fix things.
Several years later, Duhigg began to write books. He could have done so in the same vein, and one assumes that the books would have been important. But would they have sold? “An investigative series in the New York Times never makes a good book, because if an investigative series in the Times works, basically it tells you everything that’s wrong with the world or with a particular company or with a situation,” he told me. “But when you read a book—nobody really wants to read a book to just learn about how much things suck, right? I mean, those books do exist, and they’re very, very valuable. But they tend to have, you know, limited audiences.” People, especially the winners who shape tastes and patronize thought leaders, want things to be constructive, uplifting, and given to hope. “In addition to learning what’s wrong, they want to learn what’s right,” Duhigg said. And they like easy steps: “They want to learn what they can do and how they can make themselves or the world a better place.”
Duhigg didn’t believe in this kind of solutions peddling when wearing his investigative reporting hat, but he found it useful in his emerging life as a thought leader. “Investigative reporting is trying to avoid speculation,” he said. “Whereas in a book, at least half of your effort should be speculating at solutions.” Yet if Duhigg was right about the preference for solutions, it left less and less space for the kinds of thinkers and critics who have been important to our society in the past. And it made ever more room for the kinds of books that Duhigg began to write.
He produced books that MarketWorlders instantly loved, because they either helped them or taught others to be like them. The first was about how habits are made and broken, and it easily cleared the hurdle of being constructively actionable. It included a story about how Duhigg learned to stop eating a cookie every afternoon. And it was his race to finish this first book that inspired the second. He was busy, doing a little bit of everything and doing nothing well, he felt. He longed to be more productive. Thus began a book on productivity, which would teach readers “to become smarter, faster, and better at everything we do.” To MarketWorld, Duhigg became less threatening. He now wanted to learn from the kinds of people he used to bust. A centerpiece of the book was about what we could learn from the most productive teams at Google, which at the time of the book’s release was close to dethroning Duhigg’s former target Apple as the most valuable company on earth.
Duhigg became a heavily sought-after thought leader—a fixture of the bestseller lists, a denizen of the paid lecture circuit. “I’m blessed,” he said. “I’m very lucky in that businesspeople want to hear what I’m talking about and thinking about.” This gave him special pleasure because of what some of his HBS classmates seemed to think when he first went into journalism: that, as he put it, “someone handed you the winning lottery ticket and you decided to use it as toilet paper.” He said, “I think they thought, economically, I was making a foolish choice because I was going into an industry where I was not going to make money—which, generally, that’s been wrong, actually, but for a long time was true.”
One of the things that turned that dire assessment of his economic prospects from true to false was speaking engagements. Duhigg was adamant that his reliance on the income from those speeches, as on making money from selling constructively actionable books, in no way altered his ideas or corrupted him or caused him to self-censor. Invoking the debate over his lecture circuit fellow traveler Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs, he said that his experience “has been exactly the opposite” of what Clinton’s critics had said about her corruption from such speeches—and rather parallel to her own defense of them. “They literally just want me to give the speech,” he said. “I’m kind of like the entertainment, right? Not someone that they’re trying to buy access to.”
He thought for a moment about whether living off of speaking gigs might cause thought leaders to self-censor. “Do you think people begin not going down path lines of intellectual inquiry because they’re worried that it will be alienating to a potential audience?” he asked out loud. “Or do they skew their thinking in a way that would make it more palatable to a business audience?” Sure, he conceded, there must be some people who do, but it wasn’t a big problem. Yet a moment later he added, “The question is, do you want to be wealthy as a writer or do you want to be an intellectually honest, responsible writer?”
Some years ago, another heavyweight of thought leadership, Malcolm Gladwell, who, like Duhigg (and unlike many thought leaders), had managed to retain social respectability, wrote a long “disclosure” note on his website grappling with the complications of wearing his “two hats” as a writer and a speaker. He argued:
Giving a speech does not buy my allegiance to the interests of my audience. Why? Because giving a paid speech to a group for an hour is simply not enough to create a bias in that group’s favor….Financial ties are in danger of being corrupting when they are ties, when they are, in some way, permanent and when resources and influence and information move equally in both directions.
Gladwell may be right that each speech is its own thing, not enough to corrupt an honest person on its own. But can a speaking career as a whole never form something like “ties” that have some degree of permanence and a two-way flow of influence and information? Many gigs insist on a phone call with the speaker, during which the organizers inform the speaker about the context of the event and what is “top of mind” for attendees, and perhaps offer suggestions to make the talk more relevant. Each gig is certainly its own, but many of them grow out of a commercial world that does harbor a consistent set of values and preferences for the depoliticized, the actionable, the perpetrator-free. It is not easy to build a career catering to these institutions while being as sure as Gladwell is that the cumulative effect of this catering, and of wanting to succeed rather than fail, does not affect you.
“It’s got to be about what I write. Don’t criticize me for who I talk to,” the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman once said, similarly insisting on his incorruptibility. Yet even if one were to take Friedman and Gladwell at their word about the effect of money on them as individuals, it is hard to accept the conclusion that the plutocratic funding of ideas has no effect on the marketplace of ideas as a whole.
The money can liberate the top thought leaders from the institutions and colleagues that might otherwise provide some kind of intellectual check on them, while sometimes turning their ideas into advertisements rather than self-contained work. As Stephen Marche has written of the historian turned thought leader Niall Ferguson, who reportedly earns between $50,000 and $75,000 per speech:
Nonfiction writers can and do make vastly more, and more easily, than they could ever make any other way, including by writing bestselling books or being a Harvard professor….
That number means that Ferguson doesn’t have to please his publishers; he doesn’t have to please his editors; he sure as hel
l doesn’t have to please scholars. He has to please corporations and high-net-worth individuals.
While individual thought leaders like Gladwell might resist the temptations of changing their ideas for, say, a banking convention, the plutocrats’ money amounts to a kind of subsidy for ideas they are willing to hear. And subsidies have consequences, as the Harvard Business School professor Gautam Mukunda observes in a piece about how Wall Street clings to power, including by cultivating ideas that make us believe “that those with power are good and just and doing the right thing”:
The ability of a powerful group to reward those who agree with it and punish those who don’t also distorts the marketplace of ideas. This isn’t about corruption—beliefs naturally shift in accord with interests. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.” The result can be an entire society twisted to serve the interests of its most powerful group.
The idea that thought leaders are unaffected by their patrons is also contradicted by their very own speakers bureau websites, which illustrate how the peddlers of potentially menacing ideas are rendered less scary to gatherings of the rich and powerful.
Anat Admati is a Stanford economist and prominent critic of the financial industry. “Bankers are nearly unanimous” about this “persistent industry gadfly,” the New York Times reports: “Her ideas are wildly impractical, bad for the American economy and not to be taken seriously.” Admati’s writing has been praised for her ability “to question the status quo”; she is someone who “shreds bankers’ scare tactics” and “exposes as false the self-serving arguments against meaningful financial reform advanced by Wall Street executives and the captured politicians who serve their interests.” Admati is also a thought leader, represented by the Leigh Bureau, a speaking agency, which takes the hard, critical edge off in advertising a speaking topic from her: “We can have a safer, healthier banking system without sacrificing any of its benefits.”
Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post columnist who writes about rising nationalism, Russian aggression, and other dark geopolitical currents, is presented on her speaker page as a lecturer on “The Politics of Transition—Risks and Opportunities.”
Jacob Hacker is a political scientist at Yale. He was the one concerned about the Even app, and a trenchant critic of America’s economic direction over the last generation. He has written such books as American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper and The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream. He is a very win-losey thinker, and one of the most insightful critics of corporate America. This presents a challenge to his agents, who nonetheless find a way out: Hacker, somewhat denuded, becomes a “policy thought leader on restoring security to the American dream.”
One may protest that these are just superficial tweaks in language that do not alter the underlying message. Yet even were that true in some cases, it is not self-evident that giving in to such tweaks is without its costs. There is tremendous pressure to turn thoughts into commodities—into tiny, usable takeaways, into Monday morning insights for the CEO, into ideas that are profitable rather than compelling for their own sake. To give in to this pressure, to make your thoughts more actionable, to enter the business world’s domain of language and assumptions is in effect to surrender. In the poem “Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry,” by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet realizes that he has no chance of getting his way because the language in which he is forced to speak belongs to another domain. The businessperson’s amortization is factored into his tax bill, but what about the poet’s “amortization of the heart and soul”? The businessperson gets a break for his debts, but can the poet claim the same advantage for his indebtedness “to everything/about which/I have not yet written”?
Thought leaders can find themselves becoming like poets speaking a tax collector’s language, saying what they might not say or believe on their own. And the danger isn’t only in what they say in this new language, but also in the possibility that they might somewhere down the line stop thinking in their native one.
* * *
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Five years after giving her TED talk, Cuddy continued to live in the beautiful new world it had built for her. She was now famous, among the top thought leaders of her time.
Still, success, and the particular way in which it had come, had caused a dilemma for her. She had been studying prejudice and sexism for nearly twenty years, and even after her breakout continued to work on those topics with academic colleagues. She had often taken on such themes in harsh, perpetrator-blaming ways. But a viral TED talk all but drowned out every other thing she had ever said, and now she was fielding lucrative invitation after invitation to offer her ideas in that same safe way.
She found herself repeatedly being asked to speak or do workshops that came with a corporate expectation of usability. “Here’s what’s frustrating me,” Cuddy told me. “Everyone wants me to come in, and, basically, they want me to address prejudice and diversity and fixing it. First of all, without saying those words, because that might alarm people. And in one hour people want this to be done. They have the sense that you can come in and reduce prejudice in an hourlong talk, which is absurd. I’m tired of people asking me questions like, ‘I really don’t know how to get the women to speak up more in a boardroom.’ ” She had, as she saw it, tried to make things a little easier for them with her talks. Now they wanted her to morph into a quick-acting drug.
Cuddy saw herself as a person who had fought in the trenches against sexism for most of her career, but now she was being played back to herself as the dispenser of easy fixes. Even if she thought of it as merely adding an aria to her repertoire, the world more and more saw her as capable of singing just one song. When MarketWorld likes you, it wants you as a product.
She worked to defy that perception. She was asked to teach one of Harvard’s executive education seminars, at which midcareer business executives from around the world fly into Boston for some intellectual refreshment. The organizers wanted her to talk to the group about prejudice and diversity. They gave her roughly an hour and hoped she could cover sexism, racism, and other topics. She asked for three hours; they agreed on an hour and a half. She insisted on focusing on one topic alone—sexism—and on flying out a male collaborator, Peter Glick, at her own expense, to help her deal with a crowd that she expected to be tough. It was a highly global group, largely male, and she had the bad luck of teaching them during a World Cup match that some of them soon made clear they would rather be watching.
Cuddy, a body language expert, walked into a room that was a textbook case of people closed off from the beginning. Nonetheless, she tried to wear the hat of the critic, not the thought leader. In fact, she and Glick started by flouting the first rule of thought leadership. Instead of focusing on the victim, they spoke of the perpetration of sexism. “We tried to start really soft by explaining how we’re all bigots,” she said. So they were refusing to talk about the feeling of powerlessness that women get without naming who gives them that feeling. But they were trying to be gentle about it. Glick, a leading authority on the psychology of sexism, tried a classic tactic with men wary of being called sexist: He spoke of his own sexism. He told a story of how he once stepped in it by buying his wife a princess mug.
This approach did not help. “I actually stopped in the middle of the class and I said, ‘I feel how frustrated people in this room are, so can we stop for a moment and talk about what’s going on?’ ” But talking didn’t help. “We had two slides at the end,” Cuddy said. “One was individual things you can do to reduce sexism in your organization, and the second one was organizational things or structural things. And we didn’t even get to them because there was so much pushback on just the idea that there was a problem with sexism.”
Knowing even more now ab
out the tastes and boundaries of MarketWorld, Cuddy looks back and sees how she could have handled the situation another way, although she isn’t sure that doing so would have been honorable. “If I had gone in and said, ‘Hey, let’s talk about empowerment and how to get the best out of our employees,’ that would’ve been totally different,” she said. People “would’ve accepted that something is going on that makes it harder for women to speak up. They would’ve accepted that because it would’ve been about the bottom line. It would’ve been about making your organization the best. But when you go in and say, ‘Hey, here’s the truth. The system is set up in a biased way. It favors white guys. Sorry, but it does’—I mean, you cannot get past that statement. That’s it. You’re stuck there.”
Cuddy felt it harder and harder to speak truths like this the better known she became. She became a target of the sexism she had long drily studied: the almost inevitable fate of the online superstar. “The misogyny that I experience as a female scientist who’s had success—it’s repulsive, it’s awful, it’s disgusting,” she said. The attacks had a paradoxical effect on her. On one hand, they made even more vivid and personal to her the sexism she had studied through an academic lens. Deemphasizing talk of the system had made her ideas more accessible, which caused her to become even more aware of how dismal the system was. Yet at the same time, the constant vitriol made her less interested in devoting her work to fighting sexism as a system. “I think there was a point where I said, ‘I’m tired of fighting this fight. I feel alone,’ ” Cuddy said in the interview. “As a woman, I find it harder to do. It’s unpleasant, either dealing with people who don’t believe me”—by this she meant men—“or who I’m really disappointing”—now she spoke of women—“by telling, ‘Yeah, you’re right. You think there’s prejudice? There is, and it’s hurting you.’ ” She hated to say it, but she didn’t “see the -isms going away”—by which she meant sexism, racism, and other prejudices. “That is largely because I do not see the people at the top really willing to wrestle with them, really willing to take them on.” She stopped believing that “people are going to make the big sweeping changes that are actually going to change these things.”
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World Page 12