Powers of Two by Joshua Wolf Shenk

Author:Joshua Wolf Shenk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

21

Varieties of Alphas and Betas

The Hitchcock Paradox

The necessary flexibility in power can manifest in a variety of ways. Consider the extreme situation where one partner seeks to dominate relentlessly and ruthlessly. Alfred Hitchcock is a legendary example. In 1961, he put an obscure thirty-one-year-old model named Tippi Hedren under contract. She thought she’d be a background actor on TV. Then she learned that Hitchcock had cast her as the star in his next feature film, The Birds.

“I really found it so new and difficult,” Hedren said, noting that she “overcompensated by working too hard, by sometimes being too accommodating.” “She was very nervous and unsure of herself,” said the actor Martin Balsam, who worked with her during a screen test, “but she had studied every line and every move that was asked of her, and she tried very hard to do everything.”

Here was a blank slate, exceedingly eager, entirely submissive—just what Alfred Hitchcock liked. “I controlled every movement on her face,” he said. “She wasn’t allowed to do anything beyond what I gave her. It was my control entirely.” Hitchcock began to dictate to her what clothes to wear, what food to eat, and whom she could see. To keep tabs on her, he had her tailed by members of his crew.

This was his thing. When he hired Kim Novak to star in Vertigo, he had her over to his house and talked about everything but the film, choosing topics he knew she’d be unfamiliar with. “By the end of the afternoon,” the film’s producer said, “he had her right where he wanted her, docile and obedient and even a little confused.” It’s tempting to write Hitchcock off as a monster, but at the upper reaches of many industries we often find leaders with a power style edging into the tyrannical. Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour’s leadership style earned her the nickname Nuclear Wintour. Scott Rudin, the superproducer behind everything from The Truman Show to The Book of Mormon, was reported by the Wall Street Journal to have fired 250 assistants over a five-year period. (Rudin said the correct number was 119.) He once fired an assistant for bringing him the wrong kind of muffin. He threw his office phone at assistants so frequently that they measured the cord. “The rookies often stood too close,” one told the Journal.

According to Mark Lipton, a professor of management at the New School, stark bullying, tantrums, and other behaviors associated with nine-year-olds commonly intersect with high-level vision, leadership, and prestige. Many CEOs behave so badly, he said, that they exhibit classic symptoms of psychopathology. “What saves them,” Lipton told me, “and I see this in just about every instance where they remain effective, is a deputy, or a spouse—someone who is by their side.”

To succeed in these situations, betas must find a way to both submit and engage—to work in a position of great asymmetry while still making their creative presence felt. In the psychoanalyst Michael Maccoby’s studies of narcissistic visionaries, he found they typically depend heavily on sidekicks Maccoby calls “productive obsessives.

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