| Maybe you’ve managed to keep your cool despite the deepening political divisions and potentially life-altering technological innovations all around us. But how do you manage others when they might not be feeling as calm? Karthik Ramanna, a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, offers a useful framework for this in his new book The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World. Ramanna identifies three main factors of outrage: a fear of the future, distrust of institutions, and an “us versus them” mindset. These anxieties have long existed, of course. What makes our age special is that all three exist at the same time and at great intensity, thanks to a perfect storm of climate change, high inflation, AI, multiple wars, aging populations, the fallout from globalization, and the push for (and pushback against) diversity and ESG goals. I spoke with Ramanna about what it means to lead in the age of outrage and when and how to take a stance without looking like you’re playing whack-a-mole. A word of warning: His five-step framework is more circular than linear. “It’s not like you go through it once and you’re done,” he said. “You are constantly going through it to because this is, in some sense, a crisis of indefinite length.” Who do you think has a harder job today, CEOs or politicians?
“CEOs in have a clarity of purpose in that at the end of the day, they have to deliver a return to their shareholders. They do have to do that within the context of the law, they have to stay attuned to things like culture, and so forth. But, to the to the extent that they have the support of their boards, they also have wide discretion in how they act. In government, it’s much harder, especially now that you have to figure out how to deal with the fact that the people you serve are deeply divided. Most public service managers don’t have the kind of authority that business leaders will have. And in business, efficiency is the driving objective. In government, there’s so many other things that matter beyond efficiency. Fairness matters.”
What does it mean to lead in the age of outrage? In your book, you set out a five-point plan.
“The first step is about putting yourself in the right mindset so that when you are confronting these situations, you are not making things worse. There’s this tendency for leaders to say, ‘I’m somehow above it all,’ and that everybody else is outraged. But of course, everybody in a managerial or leadership capacity is just as liable to be outraged as the people you manage. How do you temper your own emotions? How do you set aside your own tendency to overreact to a situation?
“The next step is about active listening. If you try to make decisions top down in a polarized context, chances are you polarize things even further. So what you need to do is to be able to have active listening mechanisms where people feel heard, where diverse ideas get voiced and surfaced as well. “Step three is then saying, OK, now that you’ve heard these things from across the diverse constituents, how do you make a decision? There’s some things where you don’t want to put your hand in it because it’s like putting your hand in a hornet’s nest. For other things, if you don’t put your hand in, you’ll get into even more trouble. [You need] a framework to help you understand when to lean in, when to lean out. “Step four is, how do you implement that strategy into practice? That requires a nuanced understanding of power in the age of outrage. If you try to get things done again simply by commanding people, chances are you’ll very quickly deplete that authority. How do you sustain your strategy in a way that is accretive of goodwill rather than depletive of power? “The final step recognizes that the first four steps are really hard to do. So how do you do this in a way that you are continuously replenishing your resilience individually and organizationally? Because if you treat this as a firefighting exercise, then you very quickly run out of steam. You have to have time to do fire prevention.” We’ve seen business leaders rushing out commitments without making the structural changes that were needed to ensure those commitments will be successful. Does your leadership framework work at the current pace of doing business? Or does it require leaders to slow down a bit?
“[I]t’s slowing down in the sense of saying, as these issues come to me, I need to have a process to determine whether I can and should legitimately address this crisis. If I do, what is my plan to deliver on that promise? How will expectations of me shift in the future? Because by under promising and overdelivering, you are much better off making progress than by overpromising and underdelivering.
“We saw a lot of commitments from the asset management industry on things like ESG, and the reality is that they haven’t been able to deliver even a small fraction of what they promised. People see the hypocrisy of it all.” Do you think that the traditional business school leadership style has become obsolete? What should the leaders of tomorrow look like?
“It’s not so much that the traditional models of leadership are obsolete as it is that they’ve emphasized one set of dimensions of leadership over the others. The classical Greeks spoke of the four cardinal virtues of leadership: courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And we spend a lot of time talking about courage and justice and to an extent, wisdom, where we don’t spend a lot of time talking about temperance in the context of leadership. But in this world, a world that’s highly fractured, temperance is actually a really useful virtue.
“Now, people often misunderstand temperance as weakness. But some of the most temperate leaders that you see in history, people like Nelson Mandela, they were very clear what they stood for, but they had enough courage to say, ‘We are operating in a highly divided context and we need to wait and see if people are ready to take themselves in the direction in which they want to travel.’ When you think about how powerful Mandela was when he became president shortly after the end of apartheid in South Africa, he could have taken the country in a sort of retributive direction. Instead he said, let’s pace this and let’s let the country decide what is. Instead of investing his power in an outcome, he invested his power in a process.” After a hiring spree that landed dozens of former Credit Suisse investment bankers in the US, Banco Santander SA is climbing the league tables — and minting a lot more millionaires than it used to. Read the full story here. While some employers stay committed to remote work and others try to force workers back into offices, insurance giant Allstate is offering staff an expanded menu of flexible options, including co-working setups and more inviting workspaces for occasional gathering. There’s no guarantee Allstate’s balancing act will work, but there’s also no going back: The company has already slashed its real estate footprint, cutting its annual spending on corporate offices from $382 million in 2020 to $138 million this year. Bloomberg’s Matt Boyle has more on how Allstate is thinking outside the cubicle. | 
