Bye Bye Boris...Trump's 'Mini-Me'?

As someone with a long-held fascination with the concept of leadership (coinciding with delusions of grandeur concerning my own prowess in the department) I harbour?an intuitive, if hypocritical unease around the nature-nurture issue. Coming from a lower working-class family, all my adult life?I have taken care to cultivate a belief that I had some control over my success trajectory, whether correct or ill founded. Social scientists such as Frank Furedi might argue the latter. Nonetheless, I grew up in the era when this liberating transatlantic belief system first washed up on UK shores, and was a member of one of the first working class generations in the UK to be freed from the expectation at least that my life would continue as it began, the social landscape at the time providing at least some protection from the absorption of parental criticism for having 'ideas above my station'.??Expectation is turning out to be the key word. My dreams of escaping relative poverty fuelled a desire to learn to play the piano, and being schooled with a cohort of relatively affluent children galvanised my determination to leave my role as the bullied underdog with free school meals behind. I would own my own spacious and comfortable home, I would have new clothes and shoes made of fine materials, and I would somehow educate myself even if I had to go to university later than everyone else and pay for it with my own salary. I refused to believe my life was a random lottery and that I must play the hand I was dealt at birth. Hardly what would be considered a healthy psychological start in life by today's lofty standards, but still not the worst-case scenario. I have achieved all of these goals at a threshold level -?my average day is consumed by pontifications and proclamations on ‘this?and that’ leadership?theory?in my role as Consultant. Yet at 54 years old, my day is still?punctuated by?that same?insatiable?personal?hunger for the magic elixir that, upon a single sip, promises me (not to mention those I spend professional time with) a meteoric rise to the top - of precisely?what?I?still?have no idea.Is this a false horizon created for the terminally susceptible by the media? A torment in an otherwise peaceful existence? Or is it the same fire that has historically galvanised many damaged and subsequently despotic leaders into action? Thankfully I am statistically lacking one of the main qualification for the latter - I am female. But what of it? Is it time we got off the leadership bandwagon altogether and concentrated on being more challenging followers so that we may more proactively shape the trajectory of our society - that is to engage ourselves, start voting and lobbying instead of jostling for personal power?

I think it’s a problem many of us aspirants share – not really knowing the?‘what’?or the?‘why’?behind the pressure to pursue a life at the front edge, as social media seems to impose on us on an hourly basis. There used to be an adage?‘everybody’s a comedian’, now it seems to be?‘everybody’s a leader’ –?or at least everybody is talking about being one, including me. To that end, what follows is a short and admittedly holey critique of our leadership paradigm that is merely my attempt to make sense of this growing feeling that we’ve had our ladders up many a leadership wall – all of which?I suspect?were wrong.

I contend that the (arbitrary) goal of becoming a?neurosurgeon?is arguably more achievable than that of becoming a leader by design. Not because there is any less a measure of work and dedication involved, or even that the two are in that sense comparable - but simply because the arduous task of becoming a neurosurgeon has a defined professional pathway to achievement rather than the equivalent of a dizzying array of instruction books giving a step by step account of the process one random individual developed to succeed in cutting a bit of brain out by trial and error?– “and so could?you?if you buy my e-book at an exclusive one-off introductory offer price of just $9.99! Yes, that’s $9.99 with unlimited web access and live online support! But wait….there’s more! For just three easy instalments of $199 you can have a 12 DVD boxed set complete with our FREE scratch and sniff life size cardboard cut-out of Steve Jobs?to while away those aching dreams”.?

There are literally dozens of scientifically untested, unproven leadership theories, programmes, academies and conventions dedicated to the pursuit?of greatness– one held in Munich a while ago was boasting a?‘personality day’?in and amongst, and although?‘personality’?undoubtedly?has a legitimate place on the leadership mardi gras float, it seems wholly bizarre that hundreds of people would convene for what seems to amount to a leadership personality parade, or advice on personality given by?‘personalities’. Just imagine – for a mere 100 Euro including buffet lunch with vegan options, you too could emerge from the conference with a?sparkling?personality! Not your own obviously, but none-the-less a better-than-nothing alternative for those unfortunates who underwent a charisma by-pass at some stage in their as of yet lack-lustre careers.??Is this not snake oil at its very best? The penny is finally dropping for me in that the main learning point is this: any kind of random success gives free entry to the elite club of individuals qualified to create an even bigger off-shoot empire explaining how they did it, without deference to the fact that history will not repeat itself – not even for?them?let alone us. Too many contextual variables exist. Some people are now cutting out the inconvenient middleman that is bona fide experience in favour of?cutting straight to the chase. For a growing number,?‘making it’??happened as a result of simultaneously writing a book about?‘making it’. Talk about the?‘Just in Time’?supply chain management approach! So commoditised is the notion of leadership as a taught skill that webinars and boot camps are being run to help you write your best-seller in a weekend (email me for details) – even if you are one of the unfortunate people who are desperate to write a book but publicly admit to being unable to?compose a vaguely legible?sentence and/or have nothing to say even if you could. (Don’t think I’m joking either).?

It would be simplistic to be morally conservative when the issue is extremely complex and one whose tendrils creep out much farther than the outer reaches of this piece. Some though, are inevitably riding the crest of the entrepreneurial wave, enabled by the enhanced connectivity the internet has afforded us, and who can blame them? Tim Ferris and his 4-hour work week is a prominent example. People will always produce whatever we will buy – and dreams are at the fore, always. But it comes at a price - elevated expectation leading to deeper dissatisfaction and disappointment with life for those who?‘fail’?to make it. Philosophers from Schopenhauer to Alain de Botton and beyond have commented that inner peace can only be derived from acceptance of the self and others. Of all of those who bought the 4 Hour Work Week, I dare say many have gone on to realise their aim successfully, however the remaining majority who do not commit to achievement of its goal (note I’m not making Ferris responsible for individual inaction) now have a slightly enhanced sense of failure and dissatisfaction than they had prior to reading the book. In other words, the sour grapes-ometer went up a notch for many, even if on an unconscious level. That’s fair you might say – each has a responsibility to get out there and have a go at least. On that point I would agree – Ferris gives you all but the phone numbers in his Rolodex along with practical and usable advice that can work regardless of personal traits. However there is an exploitative angle?worthy of consideration??when, in the case of leadership as a self-help topic, there?exists?a?powerful?seduction towards the need to acquire, or worse, copy traits that a great many of us are not predisposed to – not forgetting a lack of any proof that those traits will lead to anything useful should we aim to acquire them.??Not only is it psychologically exhausting in terms of emotional labour, but they are, for the most part in my view, false tinctures for reasons I’ll come on to.

Conversely, more recent models of leadership behaviour have made a gradual move away from?‘traits’?and?‘great man’?type theories.?Though still?exploitative, current practice is more in tune with the bottom line issue of accountability for results, or ROI as the spiel goes, which means the best methods to select from a revenue creation point of view are those which have a measurable ROI or those which purposely circumnavigate any kind of ownership for results.?My money is on the latter.?On the one hand, if you are crazy enough to think you can change another person’s personality you are both narcissistic and doomed to failure – see a doctor. Take blast from the past Gordon Brown as a case in point. How much do you think the taxpayer spent on PR to mind his obvious lack of fitness for public office? And to what effect? On the other hand, if you can write a generic prescription and teach?leadership?to every?Tom Dick and Harry?regardless of their inherent capability – or better still charge freelance consultants a hefty fee for accreditation so they can do it for you remotely - there is much less ownership of the outcome or even?connection?to the individual results – they are devoured by the HR professionals and subsumed into the?‘sunk costs’cell on the client company’s P&L account, nuff said. Thus you can happily concentrate your resources on maintaining your online brand, picking your?‘successes’?as testimonials and divorcing your brand from any negative outcomes (unless someone is disgruntled enough to start a campaign?having failed to earn a parliamentary seat after a leadership makeover?– and let’s face it, who is? - most of the delivery is done at the level of classroom delegates with a day away from the desk and a free lunch. Managers rarely even question the outcomes or deliverables of programmes they pay thousands for – even many fortune-500 companies are renowned for their lack of interest in evaluation). In the case of the former, you will only eat based on your results. In the case of the latter you are quids in until some researcher debunks your theory – and sometimes those controversial papers that threaten to upset the applecart of an entire industry somehow get misplaced in Google’s attic. I remember finding what I thought was an explosive paper written by the American equivalent of the British Psychological Society that smashed Learning Styles theory to smithereens. Now I’m not a natural conspiracy theorist,?but each time I re-Google the paper I can’t find it. The bottom line is the bottom line - traits based theories don’t make consultants much money. When you pay them inordinate amounts of cash to coach you into being a charismatic leader – in much the same way as I once asked my singing coach to make me sing like KD Lang (showing my age I know) – they tend to get a bit tetchy with the botched reincarnation.?“So Sir, that’ll be ￡24,000 for a Clinton, ￡40,000 for a Churchill or ￡100,000 for a Mandela. Oooh, suits?you?Sir! And in the ladies, we have the Patel at ￡500, the Merkel at ￡20,000, the Thatcher at ￡32,000 and the Mother Theresa at ￡90,000 – they’re a bit cheaper than the men’s because they tend to be a bit smaller”. No, it didn’t really take off (in the same way that I still sing like Marlene Dietrich without the?‘tude or hose). Money is only to be made from dreams we can sell as possible, so the concept that everybody?can’t?be a leader became a bit of faux pas - an elephant in the room, and one-size fits all leadership prescriptions became the order of the day, since models such as Blanchard’s Situational Leadership ? could be prescribed to everyone irrespective of the severity of their personal symptoms, because leadership was no longer personal, but entirely commoditised and context dependent.??To a large extent leadership?is?context dependent – it’s just that traits rather get in the way because without exception we all have them, and many of them just aren’t negotiable, tending to show up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Need I even start a narrative on Boris or Donald? Taking a?‘coaching’ approach is all very well provided you are not hard wired to be a narcissistic, dominating control freak – as many of history’s?actual?leaders (like them or loathe them)?have?been.

This is where my attraction to a growing body of literature dedicated to the concept of Evolutionary Psychology comes into play, although much of the research therein contains results that run counter to our idealised western notions of clean-shaven, God fearing leadership. In other words, in terms of the realities of our idealised notions of what constitutes a good leader, the numbers just don’t add up on the global stage when you look at exactly?whom?we have bestowed the burden of leadership upon.??It seems?good?leadership is not really as important as?a?leader – any port in a storm in reality.

Unfortunately articles like mine are destined to be unpopular because they threaten something of a return to the meagre pickings of the bad ole days when, if one was to have any integrity at all, after twizzling one’s handlebar moustache with a north eye staring wistfully out of the window there would be frequent utterances of the words?“I’m sorry love. It’s fatal. You have more chance of turning into a web-footed gay Scottish salmon than a leader”, at which point you would throw your stethoscope indignantly into your beaten leather doctor’s bag, clasp it shut and exit the door with no more than a diagnostic fee with which to call at the chip shop on the way home. Not even enough left over for a bap. Nope.

The evolutionary psychology and biology of the inherent traits of alpha and non-alpha males in the ape and other primate communities make infinitely more unified sense relative to the actualities of human behaviour (as opposed to the espoused ideals of the conscious brain) than the random maze of individual?‘success stories’ and theories that fill our shelves and gouge holes into our pockets. Some people think that the evolutionary argument is retrograde – that Darwinism is a blank cheque for barbarism not to mention the rub with religion. In my view it is elegant in its simplicity in so far as the more theories that hit Waterstones’ shelves the less feasible it is that any one of them has any long-term credibility. That leadership is founded in evolution connects the concept to our developmental history, and goes a long way towards?explaining why teaching people to be leaders, on the whole, fails?as grandly as teaching a blue eyed person to have brown ones instead. We are a branch of the primate order. We have no issue with the study and recording of the behaviour of our primate cousins, and yet somehow studying ourselves as primates is too demeaning for some. Many argue that since we have the?advanced?cognitive capacity to override our primal drivers and to make rational choices, we are therefore exempt as higher order beings from inclusion in such comparisons.?Controversially, one might argue that the US, which considers itself to be the most civilised nation on earth, houses over 60% of the global prison population, and assumes with an in-itself violent vehemence (as exemplified publicly by the Piers Morgan petition / interview) that community values should pivot on the right to kill another human being with a firearm should the need arise. Whilst respecting the fact that many Americans have opposing views, there can’t be enough of them or the constitution would be amended again. The majority of nations have their violence issues, but few, if any, live in such darkness of the realities of the human condition, instead bathing in the artificial light of belief that we are somehow?'better'?than we are, and that transgressions so awful are anomalous and derived though?a?flawed?psychology?or?theological?evil?that should be locked up or destroyed in the same eye for an eye barbarism that gave rise to the initiating act of violence.

On?a?slightly?less controversial?footing, perhaps we?do?have the cognitive capacity for restraint– Daniel Kahneman’s excellent 2010 book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ outlines the argument beautifully. But most of us don’t bother to exercise it –for long anyway. Perhaps shooting people is just a more serious manifestation of?our patchy mechanism for?controlling?rage in the same way that most of us can’t resist the dodgy 1- minute microwave burger?languishing?in the fridge when we’re starving. Socialisation only takes us so far in situations which challenge our basic needs or desires. No burger, no can eat crap. No gun, no can shoot someone. The rote answer that?‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’?is no more than?shallow wordplay, and in fact an ironically unacknowledged truism. Yes, left to their own devices, in some circumstances, and in common with other primates, humans randomly kill each other. If this is to remain unacceptable to society then more reason to?accept?that biological predisposition and observe what mycolleague pointed out?- that?nobody ever killed anyone with an aubergine (to our knowledge). It may, on the surface seem unfair to put the spotlight on the US here, but the fact is, most of the leadership industry and related income is seated there,?and?it’s ideologies, at least for now, radiate and resonate across the globe - capitalist Christian ideologies flavoured generously with?the?‘American dream’, which may in the long term turn out to be just that.

The cognitive load, or stress?associated with disciplining against our instincts is more than?many?of us can bear?when running in tandem with other pressures derived from?the cognitive strength-sappers in our daily humdrum lives.?Like a computer, there are a finite number of programmes the brain can run before it starts robbing Peter to pay Paul.?An ever-increasing abundance of?‘stuff‘?is within our reach, and our intuition is to reach for it in fear that it might not be there tomorrow. Denying our primal desires is getting harder and harder as we process more and more informationsimultaneously. Attention is not an exhaustible resource. Something has to give. Putting ourselves on diets is a prime example. Unless our origins and current surroundings have afforded us a diet devoid of an abundance of unhealthy food, we struggle to prevent ourselves from gorging. Because that’s what we do in primal fear of scarcity. Add stress and modern living to the pot and ‘voila!’?For our ancestors, starvation was a reality. Now, both a blessing and a curse,there?is?no scarcity?in affluent societies.?And given the amount of cognitive attention required to deny our?genetic leanings, most of us are just too tired and/or stressed?to bother half the time. A growing movement of scientists are now promoting the idea of fasting to combat the obesity crisis -a method of body normalisation achieved through artificial creation of prehistoric reality. In other words, ‘faux non-abundance’. That’s how twisted we have become. We now have to play-act starvation in an effort to turn back the clock on weight gain and the myriad comorbidities that are now widely thought to accompany it.

If we were to accept momentarily that we are mentally arranged in much the same way as our primal ancestors, we would conclude that most of us are not?tribal heads– unless an opportunity arises or is forced upon us. Many of us have no natural inclination to be one either. And here’s the rub - attempting to copy someone else’s journey pretty much puts the last nail in your own capacity to excel. The?‘Bootleg Beatles’?are doing well, but compared to?the?Beatles? Whilst we’re busy trying to be Bill Gates we’re neglecting one important thing – our own natural potential (if we’re fortunate enough to have?a will and resources).

Of course leadership and followership are as old as life itself, and evidence of?‘teaching behaviours’, leadership’s non-human equivalent, exist even in humble ant?and fish?communities,?so its existence?within the social hierarchies of the living creature?is most certainly?not?a figment of our collective imagination?or an exclusively human contrivance.However, it is looking increasing likely that the multiplicity of roads leading to the proverbial Rome. Artifice?lies in the disassembling of this prehistoric transaction between protector and protectee?that consultants, business and so called?‘thought leaders’?alike have reassembled into various flat packs complete with badly translated Chinese instructions and a missing Alan key (ouch, just pulling the bullet out of my foot). Every leadership success is de-constructed for imitable traits, when clearly so much of an individual’s journey to prominence is?often a?random?collision of traits, circumstance and participant involvement.?The practice of awarding individuals leadership roles on equally random grounds as a common function of politics and commerce is a convenient way of rustling up a hierarchy, but often fails to deliver. There is little point in advocating a return of the natural oppressor as the shoots of the Arab Spring grow and die in concert, however we need a clearer understanding of the real dynamic of groups– history tells us that as followers we are wholly unreliable in our choice of sliced bread let alone voting habits.?We?can make you…and?we?can break you – although?admittedly we?seem to have quite a short memory given the number of prominent figures who fall from grace only to bounce back with a new set of teeth and an infomercial – in itself testament to our fickleness and the power of marketing and PR – once you know what?really?drives human behaviour.?

According to the spritely author of?‘Fascinate’, Sally Hogshead, our primary drivers are collectively: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice and trust. Whoa boy….hold on – where is love, integrity, honesty, reliability, religious faith and hand knit sweaters sporting Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer whilst stoking an open fire?at Christmas? Does all the cozy stuff fit in loosely under?‘trust’, and if so, how come they don’t dominate the scene? Funny isn’t it – this is a list of the uglies – the deniables.

The leadership industry has been subsumed into a composite which brings fame and notoriety into the category by virtue of the power afforded to those who are seen to be at the forefront of the media at any given juncture. We are happy scrutinising the bowel habits of anybody who happened to float to the top (no pun intended) in any sphere, whether sport, business, politics, art or by pure fluke - the category for those famed only for being devoid of any particular skill or talent.??Such is the order of things that being?a cheeky contestant on a game show can lead to the engagement of an agent and subsequent high-profile gigs at the UN – as can participation in a reality show. Ironically the latter are probably the closest we can get to the inane and insane truth about the true randomness of leadership – perhaps one of the most powerful stimulants for sitting up and questioning the leadership industry comes from what would appear to be the nonsensical yet fanatical following of individuals whose logical credentials would fit on the back of a nicotine patch.??In fact, you couldn’t’t write it. And yet all are deemed uniquely qualified to communicate their esoteric journey to a wide-eyed audience of suckers who don’t stand a chance but are willing to stake 15 quid on a book on the offchance. Take Victoria Beckham’s interim biography?‘Learning to Fly’? I don’t think it ended on a promise to migrate (to a foreign planet – LA was still within earshot) but it was still a big seller. Shilpa Shetty’s perfume? My sister describes it as smelling like thistles because it causes spikes of pain up your nose when you smell it. Sold quite well I understand. I got a quid for mine at the car boot sale last summer. Why and why? Because our prehistoric brains think that if girl next door VB can overcome the trials of a hard existence as a Spice Girl, then we can all be inspired to overcome our weaknesses and achieve unbridled fame and fortune – or security and safety in primal language (even though the majority of us have more chance of sleeping with her husband than repeating the random raft of factors that brought the joy that is the Beckham brand into our living rooms). And if we smell like Shilpa, by association we are somehow personally embraced by her and we are thus as beautiful and?‘fit’?(in genetic terms) as she is. A bit. Enough to continue riding in the rickshaw of self-deceit anyway.

This is not a polemic about who should be famous or termed a leader – this is about the reality of the human condition and the lack of reliability or consistency of choice in whom we choose to follow or support. And to complicate matters further, todays meat is tomorrow’s poison. Once Churchill had served his purpose and the Second World War won, he was ousted without further ado, so being on today’s menu guarantees you nothing. As of today, the same fate may await Boris. Thanks for Brexit, thanks for Covid, thanks for the memories old cock but now it’s over it’s time to scrutinise your personality. My central argument is that our criterion is unreliable, varied and often morally questionable if you’re of that ilk – thus high-minded aspirations to follow a prescription that would have led to beatification 500 years ago is no guarantee of success regardless of what the self-help shelf continues to proliferate. According to Arnold Ludwig, monarchs, tyrants and oppressors are as attractive to us as leaders as anybody else, and?“no identifiable form of intelligence, talent, genius or even experience seems necessary for ruling a country”. They need not be?“sane, rational or even mentally competent” – and these are the people we actually get off our butts and vote for (well, a few of us anyway) let alone the rest.?

In her book?‘The End of Leadership’, Barbara Kellerman, Executive Director of the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, agrees that somehow we have managed to engineer society in such a way that for many, being a?‘leader’?is the ultimate prize in life, without any real focus on?‘what for?’?And just to make matters worse, a largely failing, yet behemoth industry now exists solely for the purpose of polishing corporate turds (my term not hers and clearly a?‘theme’ for me today) whilst the?natural?leaders sit amongst the rank and file attracting micro crowds of followers to their hotbed of personal power (usually their desk, the smoking lot?or the water cooler), gathering enough voluntary followership to derail the entire business if they so wish. To be fair, occasionally, and somewhat serendipitously, leadership development rear-ends the rare beast that is an?actual?leader, and only then can it reliably stake any claim to success, and even?then, there is no guarantee that this newly anointed?‘leader’?has any scruples. If history tells us nothing else, it is that as long as there is a leader at the helm, we’ll take it (him usually) rather than suffer the interminable void of leaderless-ness. It is in our ancestral DNA to elect leaders – and a motley arrangement of them at that.?We revere them, copy them, quote them then duly chew them up and spit them out.?The bizarre re-emergences (in spite of imprisonment) of Silvio Berlusconi in the Italian political arena stands as just one of a cacophony of modern reminders of our collective ability to shun the nice guy in favour of the womanising, embezzling, drug trafficking, mafia supporting?‘missing link-esque’ ugly b*****d over and over if there’s?‘something about him’. Traits theories may hold the key after all, which is bad news for the Leadership industry. It seems that we can’t draw a picture of an ideal leader – we just know one when we see one,??and teaching that is no more?likely to succeed?than a random stab in the dark. The theories proclaiming goodness and greatness and all things family and true espoused by the Stephen Coveys of the (next) world, just don’t hold water in the?real?world. They make great reading for those of us who have bought into the wholesome American paradigm that we need to be better people to succeed as leaders hook, line and sinker. It gives us that warm, fuzzy feeling that we may also succeed through devout devotion to God and peace and loving thy neighbour – yet in the next breath we (yes?you) elect world leaders because we like their charisma, wealth, suit, hairdo and firm jutting chin??– just a few modern manifestations of primal prowess. And physical attributes which have stood the test of time will always be trusted as intuitive indicators of fitness over fancy semantics. Half the time we don’t even?know?it let alone?admit?it. We look to the dominance hierarchy even when our eyes are closed. Would we have actually?elected?Gordon Brown given the opportunity???And if not, why not? Policy? Historical successes? Nope. I’ll say it for you…..he just didn’t look or sound right. Call me trite if you wish.

The real reasons we follow have more to do with our primal trust of the marauding, moody, chest beating baboons to keep us fed and safe and rear our kids than anything pious we might superimpose upon our actions?in retrospect. Women just can’t stop themselves and men clear the path for them – until they weaken and become aged or otherwise?‘deposable’. I recall an unattributed quote from a woman who said?“who would want to be Bozo the clown’s first wife when they could be Kennedy’s second?” Social evolution has rendered these primal intuitions ugly?to the majority,?but we can’t change them, they’re hard wired - so we dress them up in Woke pyjamas. Marketers have had this sussed for a good while now. We don’t know what we think – even when asked, which is why electromagnetic brain scanning is becoming the consumer questionnaire of choice. When we are interviewed about our opinions – let’s say for arguments sake on a brand of shampoo we?‘mindlessly’?chucked in the trolley at Sainsbury’s. Yes, we might say it was an economic decision if a market researcher was to collar us. But equally, as behavioural economists such as Daniel Kahneman and journalist Malcolm Gladwell (of Blink fame) have long been telling us, we’re just as likely to make up something wholly bizarre to save face for buying the cheapest – or the most expensive for that matter. Since we conduct a vast amount of our existence on autopilot, making snap decisions (perhaps as nature originally intended) we might even?think it’s true!?As Robert Trivers says in his book ‘Deceit and Self Deception’, evolution has done the thinking for us – all we need to do is act, and so long as we do, nature doesn’t care what we think about it or what false narrative we invent to make us feel better about it. In fact, if the self-deceit makes us do it more, so much the better! Nature is inherently amoral and has no intention of apologising any time soon.

I did an exercise in a management class a couple of months ago. Keen to illustrate this point I asked each delegate to name the oddest purchase decision they ever made – and then explain to us why. And there were some?really?odd purchases. True to form, each delegate spun a complex yarn to justify their purchase. In one notable case, the?real?answer to the question?“what made you buy an ocean-going boat when you live 100 miles from the nearest shore?” was?‘because I was living a fantasy of bikini clad page 3 girls sprawling on the deck guzzling Lambrini whilst I stood at the helm with my newly highlighted mullet blowing in the Mediterranean breeze to a Hawkwind soundtrack’.???Well, even if you had enough self-awareness to make the connection, you just?wouldn’t go there?would you.

It is in the face of this knowledge that marketing has become so incredibly sophisticated –increasingly sneaking in through the back door of consciousness, appealing to our utterly irrational need to satisfy primal desires through behavioural?‘priming’, or?‘suggestion’. Kahneman writes extensively on this. Robert Trivers shows us from a biological perspective that self-deceit predates the human primate form, and that nature has selected for the advantages of self-deception over and over. In far less interesting words than Trivers’, we are kidding ourselves constantly, and the only reason that can reliably justify it is that it must be to our reproductive advantage to do so.??As a species we remain in constant flux between what we think we think and what we actually do. How do we explain why, on a global stage (remember there are many more leader profiles than those we can relate to in the west) many?‘successful’?leaders invite a follower tolerance so out of tune with the social espousals of reasonableness that it is hard to find a rational explanation – which is why I’m coming around to the idea that the real explanation is?not?rational?– well the explanation is, but the cause is not.??It is hard to imagine that we are not genetically primed to take what’s on offer until something better comes along – or that actually, despite our conscious leanings we are drawn to a?disposablesmorgasbord of prats, prawns, airheads and despots provided they have ample supply of whatever’s missing at time of writing, and because of this, the chances of us ever consciously creating the exact circumstances leading to our own election as Prime Minister are slim to nil. We may have ambitions, but like any living organism, even ruthless dictators require favourable conditions in which to thrive, and all contributing factors are not within the control of a single person or entity.?

So, I’m increasingly coming down on the side of evolutionary biology and its younger sibling, evolutionary psychology as the only sensible explanation I have yet heard to explain the reason it is the way it is despite our continuing efforts and expense. Why would we continue to live so dichotomously if our desired leadership traits were purely a matter of education like maths or Spanish grammar? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a defeatist any more than I am a slave to the embers of feminism – itself a harsh and unnatural concept doomed to failure because in spite of some honourable intentions it never managed to talk its way convincingly out of the biological truism that men don’t have tits or ovaries however?‘just’ the cause of equality. We can’t ‘woke’ our way out of biology (although we may socially engineer the same outcome if we don’t get a handle on it). There are givens that only the passing of millennia will change - and given we are still running on a prehistoric brain developed whilst roaming the African Savannah, how many of us girls would?really?sign up to Match.com looking for our fantasy basque-wearing lady-bloke carrying a suckling babe in arms? (not counting my sister-in-law). According to research conducted by Professor of Psychiatry, Arnold Ludwig, if we narrow the subject down to global leaders of the 20th?century , of 1,941 rulers, 27 (1.4%) of them were women. And?of?those 27, nearly half of them were afforded the title thanks to the old man’s charisma and connections – widow of, daughter of – you get the picture. In fact, Ludwig concluded that of those few women who achieved ruler status in the 20th?century, a mere 0.78% of them achieved status on their own merits. That’s a 1 in 100 chance girls. Now you might be thinking at this juncture that the 21st?century is different…. but is it really? Technology will certainly continue to advance at an unprecedented rate, however the human brain will not (without intervention that is). The human brain has not evolved significantly in the last 200,000 years. No leadership theory in practice has to my knowledge proved causality or guaranteed results, in my view as a direct result of what is still a natural phenomenon. The only guarantee is that your bank account will be lighter and your cognitive burden heavier. Do you?really?want to be a leader? Why not kick back and enjoy the ride…..

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