Leadership, bureaucrats, society and biology, parasites, viruses

I recently had an interesting conversation with Carlo (my PhD supervisor) the other day, about the nature of the modern society we find ourselves in.

Historically, those individuals chosen as leaders have been so chosen due to their ability to enhance the utility of the group being led. These individuals typically possess traits such as competence, integrity, values, vision, commitment, decisiveness (these are a few of the qualities listed by Wuest et al’s ‘self assessment tool‘; more information in the CSE5806 slides). Such leaders benefit the group with their actions; in a commercial scenario, for example, by improving the group’s ability to compete with peers groups.

More recently, this appears to have changed – or at least, the balance appears to have shifted. The ‘anti-leader’ is a beast that has the opposite of the qualities expressed above. These are selfish individuals that are driven by power, and power alone.
The strategy of an anti-leader is typically to latch on to a group (say, a company), and use its resources to gain power and influence, climbing to the top. This process benefits the anti-leader, at the expense of the group.
In a fashion, this could be described as intra-competition (competing within the group, which expends group resources), as opposed to inter-competition (competing with other groups, which benefits the group by out-performing peers).

An anti-leader uses up the resources of the group, in gaining power, then moves on if (or when) the group collapses, to find another.

In a corporate or military environment, a leader type will identify and nurture talent, selecting individuals for promotion that possess favourable leadership traits. In contrast, an anti-leader type will identify this talent, and suppress these ‘threatening’ individuals, typically by driving them out of the group (company, etc.). Individuals who perform well, and achieve successes for the company, are immediately dealt with, and driven out, as they threaten the power of the anti-leader. Thus, an anti-leader will remove competition, at the expense of the group.

An aside: Although I, luckily, haven’t witnessed this personally, Carlo reports that this has happened to him several times.

These anti-leader types are typically known as bureaucrats, and have somehow infiltrated society, particularly in commercial and governmental Australia. Many organisations possessed checks to avoid an anti-leader/bureaucrat climbing too high and gaining a hold of the organisation (an organisation we were discussing the other day (which I won’t name) once possessed three separate checks – regular reviews, continuing observation by certain officials, and the tradition of consulting with past leaders). Somehow, due to perhaps negligence, general complacence, or perhaps just pure chance, these checks have been deconstructed, thereby removing obstacles for the anti-leader.
The organisation mentioned above is now in serious trouble.

I have been lucky enough not to have encountered this epidemic personally, but it appears to be very real, and almost ubiquitous in Australian society – the infection is widespread.

The parallels that one can draw between this social phenomenon and biological phenomenon are startling: The behaviour of the bureaucrat or anti-leader is just like that of a parasite. The individual attaches to a victim organism, sapping the organism’s resources for its own gain. Once the organism is destroyed, the individual moves on to find another victim.
The bureaucracy pandemic is also similar to the spread of a virus: This behaviour tends to infect the culture of the organisation, and typically results in more of the same behaviour. Our culture lacks the immune response to deal with the infection, and so, it continues unchecked.

Generally speaking, it is fascinating that, en masse, human behaviour appears so much like that of other organisms. Population spread seems to mimic that of bacteria (which is a topic for another day), group dynamics mimic that of pack predators (we too, have an alpha male/female), mob behaviour is the same whether it consists of humans or other animals (although we appear to be more destructive, too), and the bureaucratic infection appears quite similar to that of a virus or parasite.

So, lets hope that we develop antibodies to deal with the anti-leader infection before something really bad happens.

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