Many Democratic voters thought they were feeling a vibe shift by the time Nov. 5 rolled around in this year’s U.S. election cycle. Most polls showed a tight race, but some numbers from Ohio, late observations from a prominent data scientist, and some intangible feeling in the air suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris was going to break new ground in political leadership and take the Oval Office in January. Instead, Trump won a surprising and decisive victory.
Since then, political pundits have been dissecting Trump’s success and Harris’s failure: Did misogyny and racism hold Harris back? Did toxic masculinity guarantee Trump’s win? Had the Democrats ignored the realities of today’s economy or failed to present a coherent vision of the future?
Stanford business school professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, who teaches a popular class on the rules of corporate power and has written several books on leadership, has a different theory: Trump is the kind of leader who people like and seek out, whether in politics or at the office, not despite his perceived faults but because of them.
The current zeitgeist might tell us otherwise, but Pfeffer argued in a 2015 Fortune essay that today’s leadership industrial complex—pushing ideas about the effectiveness and appeal of empathetic, and modest CEOs—has it all wrong. The chief executives who get rewarded, and the politicians who get elected, are narcissistic, boastful, and overly confident, he says. Writing on LinkedIn after the election this year, Pfeffer said the current “fascination with constructs such as servant leadership, authenticity, and as Stephen Colbert would say, ‘truthiness’ belies how social life actually operates.”
Until people who seek to change the way the world works accept realities about power dynamics, he added, they will not make any progress.
The Trump case study
Pfeffer has been writing and speaking about his views on influence for decades—and has used Donald Trump as a muse.
In his 2015 essay, the professor pointed out that Trump was anything but self-effacing; he put his name on buildings and golf courses. (This year, he also slapped his name on bibles and sneakers.) For this habit, Pfeffer predicted years ago that Trump would find followers, partly because of the “exposure effect”—Trump made his name familiar to all—but also because people are drawn to those who self-aggrandize. The average person secretly likes “confident, overbearing people because they provide us with confidence—emotions are contagious—and also present themselves like winners,” he explained. “We all want to associate with success and pick those who seemingly know what they are doing,” he wrote, linking to research to support his point.
Leaders who have mastered the art of making grand but not entirely true statements —or outright lying—are also likely to be admired despite the half-truths, according to Pfeffer’s analysis. In 2015, he called truth-telling an “overrated quality” in a leader, and pointed out that even the late and much admired Apple CEO Steve Jobs made things happen by speaking as if they already had. The former president, too, “did not write the best-selling business book of all time, as he claimed. And some aspects of his business acumen and success are clearly exaggerated—after all, Trump-named casinos went into bankruptcy,” Pfeffer wrote. “No matter.”
Part of Pfeffer’s theory also speaks to one of the most vexing questions Democratic voters have asked about Trump’s large following: Why don’t Republican voters seem to care about his criminal convictions or his role in the Jan 6 Capitol Riot? In his recent book, 7 Rules of Power, Pfeffer asserts that influence protects people from paying the price for their misbehaviors, “partly because people want to be close to money and power and are therefore willing either to forgive those who have them or avert their gaze from their possessors' misdeeds.”
To be sure, one could argue that Pfeffer is himself exaggerating. Trump is on track to win just over 50% of the popular vote, a figure that would hardly be a commendable approval rating for the CEO of a major company. What’s more, the corporate world has produced plenty of CEOs—like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, GM’s Mary Barra, or Apple’s Tim Cook—who have mostly won the respect of their employees, investors, and customers, without turning their respective companies into vanity projects and shrines to their personalities. Some CEOs rose to the top on their competence, not their ability to play power games.
But those CEOs might be the exception rather than the rule. Which brings us back to Pfeffer’s ultimate message: Rather than ignore the reality of power dynamics, he suggests, those who were surprised and disappointed by this election’s outcome ought to study and accept the way power actually works in the world, not as you might wish it did. People who aren’t white men have all the more reason to do so, he said in an interview a few years ago. If you hope to see an alternative leadership model take hold in politics or the corner office, Pfeffer suggests, there’s no other way.
Read Pfeffer’s original essay, here.
