When a new “thought leader” or “leadership guru” enters our collective awareness, it’s usually because their messages resonate with our hopes, fears and needs of the time. In this era of “viral” speed in social media, a nobody can become a somebody in a very short period of time. But the phenomenon has been going on for much, much longer than since the advent of online proselytizing.
Five years ago, Inc. magazine did a study to identify the top fifty people that the general public might rank in order as experts on leadership. The magazine stated their methodology: “The purpose of our work was to find out which people are globally the most popular management and leadership writers, in the English language. In other words, we did not focus on local countries or languages; we did not focus on teachers, professors, or CEOs; and we did not measure any other topics besides management and leadership.”
Their method of selection centered on how many times an individual appeared from keyword searches on the logical phrases and words associated with leadership “gurus”. They then added qualifiers of notoriety using Twitter follower population size, ratings of book reviews, citations from others, etc. The magazine study ended up with six rankings from each of six sources. They averaged the rankings and arrived at a ranked list.
John C. Maxwell was number one. Jack Welch was number three. Ken Blanchard holds the number eight spot. Michael Porter was number ten. Marshall Goldsmith was number eleven. Simon Sinek, number fifteen. Anthony Robbins, number thirty-one. You can see the full list here: https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/the-top-50-leadership-and-management-experts-mon.html
An impressive group, to be sure. But how many of these gurus followed their own advice? And was that advice really any good? Those weren’t questions answered by the Inc. study. How would one go about measuring this authenticity factor? I used the same Google search method, picking one of the top fifty gurus Inc. cited and adding search phrases associated with that person’s name, like “bad management”, “poor leadership”, “problem leadership”, “jerk”, etc.
Let’s take Jack Welch. My modified search yielded five million citations. One example of a search result with this study method for Jack was damning:
“Welch, the CEO from 1981 to 2001, built GE into a super-conglomerate that owned a major bank and NBC. But that business model has since been cast aside as overly complex, and in retrospect, it’s clear that Welch’s shopping spree masked problems.
Those problems blew up when he left. The most obvious example is GE Capital, the finance company that dealt GE a near-fatal blow during the 2008 crisis.”
How about Simon Sinek, a more recent and high-flying “thought leader”? The negative press Google search yielded a significant number of citations, including a piece entitled, “Why Millenials Can’t Stand Simon Sinek”, with the following lead paragraph, written by a Millenial:
“I’ve been asked my opinion on Simon Sinek’s video on Millennials in the workplace about 50 times…but I’ve hesitated to respond. Other generations have emailed the video to me to validate Sinek’s thoughts. Millennials have emailed me with frustration of seeing another person they had respect for completely misrepresent them. There are many things in his career that Simon Sinek has gotten right. For example, the concept of Start With Why. So let’s turn that logic on Sinek for a moment. Why are you pretending to understand the why of someone who is not you?”
Let’s take a look at another leadership and self-help guru, Anthony Robbins. The bad press algorithm yielded many entries. One identified a key feature of Robbins’ approach in his seminars, which is to point out the flaws and failings of the audience, even physically confronting people who disagree with him. The writer explains how this is a long-known tool of people who want to exert their influence over others:
“It was a tactic that early 20th-century guru G.I. Gurdjieff used to propel himself from obscurity to international acclaim. At his spiritual center, which would come to attract some of the wealthiest and most prominent people of his time, he would regularly point at attendees and tell them that their ideas and talents were worthless. They inevitably came back for more. Does this mean that you need to be a total jerk to become the supreme guru in your field? Not necessarily. That said, you should point out where people are going wrong whenever possible. And when you do so, make sure to position yourself as the only one who knows what they should do instead.”
We leaders of people want to get it right, mostly. We are continually looking for ways to get better. Our self-questioning is healthy. But it makes us susceptible to people who may have some good ideas, but are not necessarily good at living up to their own advertising. Or they are providing that advice in a manner intentionally designed to command our attention and our wallet.
So I offer my own advice on the matter, taken from arguably the first, most famous guru of them all, Siddhartha Gautama, known by his title, the “Buddha”, which means “one who is awake”. The Buddha reportedly told people not to let him get in the way of their enlightenment. He didn’t want followers. He wanted people to be their own path to enlightenment. The Buddha taught us to accept no teaching on authority alone, but to investigate it for ourselves.