Leadership: A Very Short Introduction by Keith Grint

Author:Keith Grint
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2010-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Despite this, there are, and always have been, significant female leaders who have broken the male mould. There are, for instance, at the time of writing, 23 female heads of state from the 192 countries affiliated to the United Nations, and there were queens ruling Egypt in 3,000 BC. But these are often exceptions that prove the rule of male dominance across space and time.

So what kinds of characters do leaders seem to be now? Kaplan’s analysis suggests an even more stereotyped model – CEOs are not just THWM but also archetypal alpha-males: aggressive, efficient, persistent, privileged, and uncompromising. So we can change our acronym now to tall handsome white alpha-males (of) privilege, or THWαMPs (which is easier to say than THWMs). Yet Kaplan’s data are derived from CEOs of private equity firms… the very arena that seems to be mired in financial disaster as I write. Perhaps this personality type explains why, according to Andrew Clark, five days after the world’s largest insurance company, AIG, accepted an $85 billion emergency loan from the US government to stave off bankruptcy (17 September 2008), the company spent $440,000 on a week-long corporate retreat at one of California’s top beachside resorts. Or, as Henry Waxman, chair of the US Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said to Richard Fuld, then CEO of Lehman Brothers, on 8 October 2008: ‘Your company is bankrupt and our economy is in a state of crisis. Yet you get to keep $480m. I have a very basic question: Is that fair?’ The following day, AIG was granted access to a further $37.8 billion from the US state; it must have been a great party. In fact, the party must still be in full swing: in 1999, the average ratio of CEO to employee pay in the UK rose from 47 to 128, with Bart Becht, CEO of Reckitt Benckiser, topping the show at 1,374 (Becht received £37 million in 2008, whilst the average employee salary of the Slough-based multinational was £26,700 – the UK’s national average). Not that Becht needed to fear isolation: the average pay of the top 25 FTSE 100 directors in 2007/8 was over £10 million (as quoted in The Guardian).

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