Should leaders be feared or loved? with historian Niall Ferguson

Worklife with Adam Grant

TED

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4.8 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Niall Ferguson is an intellectual provocateur. His specialty is counterfactual history — imagining how events could have unfolded differently. And he and Adam disagree on nearly everything. In this episode, Niall and Adam have a vigorous debate about the vital qualities of effective leadership in government, sports, business, and education.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Ted Audio Collective.
0:02.0	Audio Collective.
0:04.0	That's the world I come from in which the leader is capable of rage and perhaps potentially in physical violence. I don't know about you but I
0:16.2	find that concentrates the mind somewhat more than a hug.
0:19.3	Hey everyone it's Adam Graham. Welcome back to
0:24.8	Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the Ted
0:28.6	Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people
0:34.5	to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
0:40.9	My guest today is historian Neil Ferguson. He's currently a fellow at
0:44.7	Stanford's Hoover Institution. He's been named one of times the 100 most
0:48.5	influential people and been knighted for his service to literature. He's published 16 books, advised John McCain's presidential campaign,
0:56.0	and won an international Emmy for Best Documentary.
0:59.0	And in 2021, he co-founded a new institution,
1:02.0	the University of Austin.
1:04.8	To say Neil is contrarian and controversial is putting it mildly.
1:09.0	But I don't think we should shy away from conversations with respected voices on the basis of objecting to some of their ideas.
1:15.9	In this case, Neil's approach to counterfactual history, considering events that could have happened
1:21.1	but didn't, has made me think differently about
1:23.4	effective leadership. Our conversation began by a discussion of whether you can
1:28.1	achieve that through being nice alone or whether you have to be a bit nasty too.
1:33.7	And I think history is strongly on the side of the view
1:36.0	that you need to have at least the nastiness there
	...

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