As indicated in my post of August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s leadership literacy classic is as before, still all About Leadership. The author’s name might well be familiar, though not as a writer, as a social scientist. Specifically, as a psychologist whose renown came from his having conducted what arguably is the most famous social science experiment of all time.
The man’s name was Stanley Milgram, and his experiment was on obedience to authority. Milgram was not primarily interested in leadership – his primary interest was in followership. This was in the early 1960s, not yet two decades after the end of the Second World War. So, what Milgram sought to find out was how it happened that so many Germans had been willing if not even eager to follow a leader like Adolf Hitler. What Milgram was interested in then was in how ordinary people could act so “callously and inhumanely.”
During the 1950s most scholars of the war generally, and of the Holocaust specifically, focused on the Fuehrer, on Hitler. Milgram did the opposite. He understood that the calamities the war engendered were not the handiwork of one man acting alone but of millions acting in concert. Of multitudes of followers in addition to the single leader. Hence his interest in what have called “crimes of obedience” – in what he called “obedience to authority.”
Milgram’s original experiment was conducted at Yale University. It has since been replicated in many different places at many different times, sometimes with results that somewhat differed. Still, Milgram’s findings, and his overarching conclusions, pertain now as they did then and, likely, forever will.
The excerpt below is from Milgram’s book, which was written about ten years after his experiment was conducted.
- Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority, 1974.
This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. A variety of inhibitions against disobeying authority come into play and successfully keep the person in [their] place.