My most recent book – Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers – was just published by Oxford University Press.
The book has a simple message simply stated. Bad leaders and their bad followers – you cannot have the former without the latter – do not stay the same. Over time they change. They go from bad to worse. Bad gradually digs in, digs in deep and then deeper unless it is somehow, by someone or something, stopped or at least slowed.
As the book describes, the progression, which unfolds in four phases, is invariable, inexorable. Unless, again, there is an intervention. Unless, again, the bad leader is somehow stopped from going from Phase 1 (“Onward and Upward”); to Phase 2 “(Followers Join In”); to Phase 3 (“Leaders Dig In”); and finally, to Phase 4 (“From Bad to Worse”).
As I write in the book: “The process of going from bad to worse tends to be steady, not sudden or hasty.” But once bad has burrowed in, once it has been permitted to progress, it becomes “finally very difficult to extract or excise. In other words, once the system is close to being completely corrupted, it’s late, maybe even too late. By then bad leaders and their follower are so entrenched that they control the system itself, which is why at this point the only way to totally get rid of bad is to totally get rid of everyone involved.”
This truism, the inevitable progression from bad to worse, applies across the board. To leaders in every sector, in every context and culture. It’s the nature of the human condition – which raises the key question. Who, or what is “bad”? Clearly who I consider a bad leader might be, or it might not be, who you consider a bad leader. In the book I make at least some of my biases clear. For example, that I write from the vantage point of a liberal democrat. Which means that in my view a leader like Vladimir Putin – and, yes, Donald Trump -is “bad.” Similarly, because I take integrity seriously, I label a leader “bad” if he or she is demonstrably and frequently fraudulent, such as Sam Bankman-Fried.
Because our conceptions of good and bad can be as elusive as contentious, there is a chapter in the book on “Making Meaning of Being Bad.” I argue however that just because a subject is fraught does not mean we should steer clear. Given bad leadership is as ubiquitous as pernicious, the leadership industry has an obligation to tackle it as it pertains to both theory and practice. We should be as dedicated to stopping bad leaders as to growing good ones.
Moreover, because if it is not stopped or at least slowed bad leadership invariably gets worse, we should not be even a smidgen surprised when worse occurs. In 2020 President Xi Jinping decided to impose on Hong Kong a national security law that gave the government a powerful tool to silence its critics. They could be and mostly were rounded up and threatened with arrest. It was entirely predictable then that a few years later (in 2024), another law was passed that further enhanced and expanded the government’s control. It was, or it should have been foreseen that in time most of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists and lawmakers would be either in prison or self-imposed exile.
Similarly, should we be in the least surprised that Russia recently ratcheted up its online censorship? The Russian regime is doing nothing different from what it has been doing for years. It is increasing the level of its suppression and oppression. The New York Times reported that “Internet censorship has grown in Russia for more than a decade, but the scale and effectiveness of the most recent blocks have surprised even experts.” Why? Why was any Russian expert “surprised” in the slightest? The trajectory was entirely predictable. So long as Putin was in charge there was, there is, no question: censorship in Russia will go from bad to worse.
The syndrome – leadership from bad to worse – is not just of theoretical interest. It is of practical importance. Pay attention and act if you can or you too could be screwed.