E123 - Are You the Victim of your Own Ambition? (w/ Stefan Stern)

Stefan Stern has been writing about management and leadership for over two decades. He has worked for the BBC, Management Today magazine and the Financial Times, He continues to write for the FT, the Guardian and other publications. 

He is Visiting Professor in management practice at Bayes Business School, City University, London. He was previously the director of the High Pay Centre, a think tank which focuses on the causes and consequences of economic inequality. 

Stefan is the author of  How To Be A Better Leader,  the co-author of Myths of Management and most recently has written Fair or Foul: The Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition. 

Interviewed by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Alex is a consultant psychiatrist and a UKCP registered psychotherapist in-training.

If you would like to invite Alex to speak at your organisation please email alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Speaking Enquiry" in the subject line.

Alex is not currently taking on new psychotherapy clients, if you are interested in working with Alex for focused behaviour change coaching , you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com with "Coaching" in the subject line.

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Transcript

 Welcome back today on The Thinking Mind. We're talking all about ambition. Do you have control over your ambition or does your ambition have control over you? What does it mean to have healthier or less healthy forms of ambition? Can you be ambitious from a place of good self-esteem? What's the difference between self-esteem and narcissism?

What does it mean to be an overachiever? These are the kinds of concepts we're gonna be unpacking today. Joining me in this conversation is Stefan Stern. Stefan is a writer and journalist. He's been writing about management and leadership for over two decades. He has worked for the BBC Management Today magazine and the ft.

He continues to write for the ft, the Guardian and other publications. He is visiting professor in management practice at Bayes Business School City University. He was previously the director of the High Pay Center, a think tank, which focuses [00:01:00] on the causes and consequences of economic inequality. Stefan is the author of How to Be a Better Leader, the co-author of MI of Management, and most recently has written Fair or Foul, the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition.

This is The Thinking Mind, a podcast all about psychiatry, psychotherapy, self-development, and related topics. If you'd like to support the podcast, do check out the links in the description. As I've mentioned in previous podcasts, I'm now offering one-on-one behavior change coaching sessions online, and these sessions are designed to help anyone work towards their goals.

Whether that's improving their health, improving the quality of their relationships, career design, kicking a bad habit, or perhaps getting into a healthier habit. I would be working with you in a highly individualized way, coming up with a plan to help you move towards your goals as fast as possible. So if that's something you're interested in, you can check out the [00:02:00] details and the description.

Thank you very much for listening, and now here's today's conversation with Stefan Stern. Stefan, welcome to the podcast, Alex. Thank you very much for having me. What motivated you to write a book all about ambition? I think it's a topic that's interested me most of my working life, even most of my adult life, uh, it's been bubbling away.

Not always at the front of my mind perhaps, but, um, something I've been thinking about, thinking about. In fact, ever since I first read Shakespeare's Macbeth, which was one of my A level set texts over 40 years ago. And I think so at some level, I've been thinking about ambition ever since we, you know, it seems to me we, we have these choices in life often.

We, we have crossroads trade-offs, whatever you want to call it. Uh, and whether we are conscious about it or not, we actually, we are wrestling with, uh, personal ambition. How we see the world, what, what matters to us. So I hope it's a topic that's of interest to [00:03:00] everyone. It's certainly something that I think about a lot.

And I'm curious, did you have a particular reader in mind? I certainly felt like, uh, it resonated with me. I'm someone I've thought a lot about ambition. I've had times in my life where I've been more or less ambitious and struggled to find how I should relate to my own ambitions. Did you have a particular reader in mind when writing this book?

Um, it would be better if I could say yes wouldn't it? But I think I was thinking more of the general reader. I'm glad you are. I think you are much younger than me, but I'm glad that you find it interesting. I did worry that it was, um, you know, a rather, perhaps a rather middle-aged book. I'm a middle-aged guy and I reached a certain stage in life where you look back as, as much as you look forward.

Um, and so I wondered if part of my writing, it was actually a sort of self-assessment. I mean, you know, selfishly, you know, right. As you know, writing anything at length is difficult. It's a lot of work. You've really got to want to do it. Uh, and uh, [00:04:00] so selfishly, I think I was answering questions. I. For me, I was asking of my own life, you know, have I made the right decisions?

Have I been ambitious enough? Have I been too pushy, abrasive at other times? Uh, am I getting things right? And, and what do I think about as I enter, you know, what will be the, the third, the third, third of my life, perhaps you could say, or the third quarter of four, perhaps. Now it's more fashionable to say, so I didn't have a specific region in mind, but I'm glad that you found it interesting.

I guess I'm probably somewhat in the more ambitious stages of my life, but as I said before, I've definitely had different phases and I think something we don't talk about enough is it's so, there's always a trade off involved. People have their own sort of set values, I think around ambition quite naturally by default, you know, we know from studies of personality, some people.

Naturally more ambitious than others, but [00:05:00] they don't necessarily, whatever end of the spectrum you find yourself on there doesn't seem to be a lot of self-examination on what it's all for. Whether that's the ambition or the lack of ambition. What is the ambition? What am I trying to achieve with this?

Similarly, the lack of ambition. There isn't enough like reflection on why we might value what we value and where we're going from A big picture, I. Perspective and what I got from your book is quite a careful examination. You did. I think were quite similar in the sense when I'm, when I'm writing, I hesitate to take a side.

I sensed your hesitation to take a side. I, I really sensed your desire to come across in a very well balanced way. Well, that's good. Again, cynically commercially, it might have been cleverer to have been far more outspoken in one direction or the other, either really, really against ambition or really, really for it.

But I couldn't quite do that. As you mentioned, I've worked at the BBCI was at the ft. For several years, I still [00:06:00] write for them. And journalistically, when you've had that sort of background and training, you know that you've got to be, uh, a bit more measured and a bit more careful. Um, another reviewer said that he sensed ambivalence, uh, from the author about the topic of ambition.

And I thought that was a rather astute comment too, because I dunno what you thought. It strikes me that this is quite a British, uh, perhaps or European take on ambition. It's not an American. Take if I was, if I was crudely, you know, stereotyping the American sort of gung-ho spirit, I, I, this is more measured.

I, I couldn't write a book that was. Purely negative about ambition. Of course, we need ambitions and ambitious people, but what I was trying to say also is that, you know, we can be ambitious for, you know, the greater good, the common good, not just for ourselves. Um, and that, uh, and the, the Macbeth theme is interesting because they're someone who was very talented for, was very able, uh, esteemed person in society, but nonetheless, it was not quite enough.

And he [00:07:00] aims, I'm gonna spoil it for anyone who doesn't know Macbeth, but he aims. Too far and things go wrong. Why did Macbeth go wrong? Like how, given that he had so many things in favor, how and why did he make those choices that he made? It's a wonderful question and uh, because it's a timeless classic, this play and that's why people come back to it and why it's staged every year.

One critic said of Shakespeare wrote a book called Shakespeare Our Contemporary. And you know, in your field, you know, people, I dunno if it, I dunno what your view of Sigmund Freud is, but he was fascinated by Shakespeare and I think other. Ernest Jones psychoanalyzed Hamlet, I think at one point. Um, so Shakespeare, although not trained in your disciplines, nonetheless, had a, had a, I think a fascination with the, or the, the psyche and human personality.

Macbeth. Well, he, he, he knows what he's doing is wrong. I mean, this is why it's a tragedy, as you say, he's an esteemed figure in society. He's, he's very [00:08:00] successful, uh, admired, very close to the king, but he isn't the king. And the king has named his son as his successor, but he's met these witches, he has this, uh, now we can speculate what that is.

It's a metaphysical or a supernatural or a psychological, perhaps. He's imagined the whole thing. Who knows, uh, moment, but they tell him that he will be king. Now, is that a prophecy? Is it an instruction? Is it guidance? Is it what we might call, or the Americans would call a bum steer? Is it just a bad bit of advice that he follows anyway, for whatever reason?

He weighs it up. He has the opportunity. But in Act one, scene seven, he has decided not to go through with the murder of the king until his wife comes along and they have a marital discussion. And, and he changes his mind. And it's partly why it was partly a joke, but it's partly why I've called the book, uh, the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition because she is absolutely instrumental and the, and the play apart from anything else is a study of a [00:09:00] marriage.

Is absolutely fascinating and why people are motivated to do what they do and how they try to try to keep their relationships, you know, together on the road, on the, and, and partly he does it. I can't blame her alone, but partly he goes through with this, this murderous right plot because he has discussed it with his wife and they together have agreed to do it and he doesn't want to let her down.

That is, that's in the script, you know, that's partly there. It's got interesting echoes of, uh, Adam and Eve. Yes, absolutely. E tempting Adam with the, I don't know if this, I, I'm, I'm not a literary expert. I don't know if these parallels have been drawn before. Well, I, I, I haven't thought of that one myself, but of course, you're absolutely right that then that was the ultimate in, certainly in the.

In the Jewish and, and Christian traditions. That's the ultimate, uh, story of, and some would say now a somewhat misogynist account of, [00:10:00] uh, a woman being blamed for the fall of man in, uh, in Genesis, in the, uh, Hebrew Bible. Um, uh, the, the woman Beguiled me and I did eat is what Adam says to God in his defense.

And, uh, yeah, I think you're absolutely right when there's a. Husband and wife scene, whether it's this play, whether it's the Bible, whether it's that famous Edward Alby play who's afraid of Virginia Wolf, made in a film with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor with the husband. And wi, whether it's Beatrice and Benedict, more comically in much ado about nothing.

Um, you know, uh, husband and wives are, uh, private lives. No coward. You know, it's always a classic dilemma, classic, uh, tension. But yes, there is a hint of the, in this play in Macbeth, there's a hint of. Lady Macbeth persuading him finally to go through with something that he was wavering, at least wavering about.

Mm-hmm. There's a really interesting interpretation of the Adam and Eve story through an evolutionary psychology lens. I. That actually, [00:11:00] it's not really a, a following of the fall of man Exactly. But it's more humanity gaining consciousness for Yes, for the first time and all of the pros and cons of gaining consciousness.

And in the story, obviously the cons are awareness of the need to work. From now on, you're gonna toil, because if you're conscious, you can become aware of the future and awareness of snakes and awareness of predators and through that lens. It's really interesting because. Eating the fruit from, from the tree of knowledge isn't exactly a bad thing.

It's more like, okay, humanity is gaining some awareness. Yes. And in that respect, I think, you know, women are the half of the species which help men gain some useful awareness about, you know, what needs to be done in this life. So in that respect, I think women can be really useful to men because they, they help us understand what's important.

And I think obviously women are also the. Deciders of which genes get to go to the next generation. Yes. And which, which men, [00:12:00] which men measure up, you know, and in the division of Labin reproduction, of course the, the ma the male contribution is momentary and instantaneous, as it were in the female gestation period, is, uh, in humans anyway, far, far longer.

And then after birth as well. You know, the mother. You know, traditionally, perhaps it's taking a, a far greater, uh, the burden of, of a work forward. So, yes. So, um, Gier said that the eternal feminine draws us on through life. So see, yeah. So the great writers have, the great writers have, have, have spotted male or female.

The great writers have spotted that the, the, the feminine drive is, um, incredibly important and perhaps more important sometimes than the male one. So getting back to ambition, how do you think, how do you think we should start to examine and reflect on. Our ambitions and, and to what extent they're leading us down healthier or, or less healthy directions.

Well, I've [00:13:00] written a bit about this and I can, I'm very happy to get some feedback from you and guide from you because you're more expert in these science questions than I am. But it seems to me that ambition is a kind of personal response to the world and um, that's obviously informed by. You know, early experiences, childhood experiences, relations with parents, the circumstances you're born into, you know, to sometimes said that entrepreneurs who are, you know, very ambitious commercially, are often driven by some early difficulties.

You know, perhaps a bad relationship with a parent, perhaps, uh, starting out very poor in life, perhaps as a uprooted person, as a, as an immigrant, and so on. And, and this seems to drive. People on to achieve more, to prove a point. So that's one kind of ambition. But of course there is perhaps as you hinting, uh, a less intense or dramatic ambition and a more, perhaps more sustainable, perhaps a healthier ambition just to be [00:14:00] content, uh, to do good work, to make a good contribution to society.

These two are ambitions. So, um, I think an ambition takes many different forms. Um, and levels of intensity. Some people will never be satisfied. We look at Rupert Murdoch, for example, who I think is now 94 years old and still apparently, essentially in control of his business. Uh, and just recently, just after we've recorded this, just before we've recorded this, the Warren Buffet has finally announced that he's stepping down from his big financial, uh, group, uh, Berkshire Hathaway, and he's 94, 95, but he's kept going until now.

Some people. Feel the need to carry on and somehow can never be satisfied for whatever reason. And this is where, uh, you know, psychiatry and psychotherapy could probably be very useful. Not that I suspect Mr. Murdoch would ever submit to, uh, an investigation of that kind. Yeah, I mean, definitely aside from the facts that you [00:15:00] mentioned, I would also think about genetics.

You know, we know from studies of personality, um, behavioral genetics that. On average, um, per personality traits are 50% heritable, meaning 50% of the differences can be explained by genetic rather than environmental influences. I've talked about this before on the podcast. If people are interested, they can read a book, uh, called Blueprint by Robert Proman, which is all about this.

I think, you know, obviously genetics are something that, you know, they can change, you know, across life we are starting to learn about epigenetics. But I think all the really interesting stuff does happen psychologically, and if I'm talking to someone about choices, you know, I'm just, I'm always interested where they feel the motivation coming from for them.

If someone loves working hard, like really loves working hard and they're doing it because it fills them with a kind of present moment, joy, then so be it. You know? But [00:16:00] you always wonder about the people for whom. Ambition and hard work is coming from a place of not enoughness insecurity, self-criticism.

Actually, one of the reasons I really want to talk to you was about the archetype of the insecure overachiever. Oh, yes. You know, which I think is such a, is such a tragedy, and so much of our economy is built on insecure. Overachiever. Maybe you could unpack this a little a bit for our listeners. Like what does it mean to be an insecure overachiever?

Well, it's a, it's a fascinating label and it does, it's quite a clarifying label. Excuse me. I think because when you think about some of the most competitive industries in finance politics, but also in sport, uh, the people who are driven, and as you say, nothing is ever quite good enough, and even after a triumph, the thoughts turn to.

Next challenge and the next one. Um, it's a, it's a strange combination of, uh, being self-critical. I mean, there's another [00:17:00] phrase that is used quite widely and perhaps loosely of imposter, imposter syndrome, so-called, um, this idea that I am not good enough. I'm a phony. I'm not for real, a voice, an insecurity somehow in your head saying, oh, come off it, you who you trying to fool you are not as.

Impressive as you pretending to be. Uh, but the insecure achievers seem to be driven by a bit of fear of, of either being found out or of failing their own very high standards or perhaps some other, some other person's high standards, perhaps an unnamed other person, perhaps an arbitrary, uh, almost mythological figure.

But it could be a disapproving parent classically, but it might be something else. It might be a school teacher who told you that you were nothing. I. You know, when you were young and that you were never going to amount to anything, and that can drive people on. And so there's that desire not merely to achieve, to succeed, but to overachieve, to be, to be outstanding in the literal sense to, to, to, to, to be a [00:18:00] remarkable success.

Uh, but even then, perhaps. There is an an inability to take a deep breath, have some perspective, to be objective about your achievements and say, this is, this is something to be content about and I can happily retire or ease up or redirect my energies towards something else. I think the insecure overachiever is, finds it very hard to be happy in that sense.

And of course the clue is in the adjective and, you know, the first word of the two in, in insecure, the, these are bad. Insecurities is not about being well adjusted. It's about having, um, uncertainty, discomfort, uh, being ill at ease, not comfortable in your own skin. All these phrases that we use, um, and, and these are, these are personality types, I think, or traits.

I mean, so I'm, I'm going to use some of the language a bit loosely, Alex, not, not like a professional person like you. No pressure. But these are, um, yeah, these are, these are characteristics of people and, [00:19:00] um, I. And we sense it very quickly. I think as we get older, I mean, if there's a danger of something called pattern recognition, isn't there in psychology where you can sometimes believe you are in a similar situation or you believe you're with someone that, oh, I know this type of person.

I've worked with someone like him before. And that can lead you astray. But some other instincts are very good and uh, yeah, we spot it quite quickly in the workplace. We spot difficult bosses I think very quickly. Uh, when we, when we've had one or two before and we think, oh, this are. He's never gonna be happy.

You know, I can feel that already. I can recognize that after a few months working with this guy, uh, nothing's gonna be good enough. And that, you know, and that's, that's when we have to take these decisions about our, our career paths and our ambition. Can I put up with this for another year or two, uh, on the basis that if I get through the next year or two, there might be a better job on the other side of it, or there might be a different boss in, in due course.

Or do I actually lack the resilience? Uh, do I lack the sort of toughness? To put up with [00:20:00] a really difficult boss, and would I be happier going somewhere else? I mean, these, these are also aspects of ambition, I think, because they're about personal career choices. But yes, insecure, overachiever. I, I, I, I'm diagnosing myself not, uh, as being not an insecure overachiever.

Um, my, my, uh, late mother was a, a child psychologist, educational psychologist, and also. A very lovely Jewish mother. So I had a lot of advantages, I think starting out, but also I was encouraged and not made to feel insecure. I, I, I was made to feel extremely secure. I'm happy to tell you and your listeners.

So I think some of that insecurity certainly can start very young and uh, and I was not exposed to that. I think. Yeah, I think you're right. I think the whole insecure overachiever, I tend to frame it as a self-esteem issue fundamentally Uhhuh. Yep. And I wrote a whole essay about this, which I put on my podcast about a year ago, insecure Overachievers and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.

I don't know if you watched the documentary about the Dallas Cowboy [00:21:00] cheerleaders, but they seem to conform to that archetype, and I am really curious as to your thoughts. Do you think that. Organizations, big companies, prestigious companies, consciously are, or unconsciously take advantage of that because that seems to be what I've seen where the way corporations and some companies are structured, it's almost to exploit this archetype.

Is this something you've seen? I think there has been something of that perhaps in the investment banking world, perhaps in the elite, uh, law firms management consultancies. Uh, I think you've spoken to my. A good colleague and friend Laura Emon, who's a professor at, um, uh, what we used to call cas Business School.

We now call ourselves Bays Business School. Uh, but she's really an expert in the, uh, in the professional service firms and has certainly spotted, I think that, um, yeah, as per as first in the recruitment and then through the career. You see this in the [00:22:00] sort of elite financial houses too. This, this pressure, you know, real and imagined, you know, explicit and implicit to do well and to do really well, and to compete and to prove yourself.

Yeah, I mean, they kind of, they benefit from applicants that and what's in the horrible management language. We call the pipeline, the pipeline of human beings. Um, this future pipe, the pipeline of people who turn up applying from elite universities and so on. Uh. Needing, needing to do well, needing to prove themselves to, to, to show their peers and to others.

And yes, I think quite a lot of that is perhaps based on being an insecure overachiever, and the, the organizations themselves knowingly exploit those. I. Vulnerabilities. And um, that's why there still doesn't seem to be too much of a shortage for that. We talk about the generations changing attitudes to work and so on, and the younger people coming through.

I think there's still not a shortage of candidates, uh, for [00:23:00] some of these hard driven, uh, elite firms and so on. Just so people can get a really clear idea. 'cause they may be working in these companies. They may have these jobs without being aware that they're being exploited. How? How might a company subtly or not so subtly exploit someone with these kinds of issues?

I. Oh, well I think you, you, you play on the insecurity bit, don't you? And you let it be known that you've got, I mean, and again, this is, this is where there's a gradation of behavior because it, it could be very good management and leadership to have high expectations. You know, it could be very good to tell people you are capable.

Of great things and we want to support you in that, and we want to help you achieve that. And I think Adam Grant at Wharton has written about this, you know, that that high expectations could be a very healthy and a very positive thing, but if you twist it and go over the top with that and use it to exploit people's insecurity, uh, then I think you are, you are doing something darker, more [00:24:00] troubling, more ex, more exploitative.

Um, and, uh, this business of comparing. People, something that we do individually. We compare ourselves to others that that can often be a route to unhappiness, especially if we have unrealistic comparisons with, you know, elite performers. But similarly, what a manager could do, uh, improperly is, uh, you know, encourage people to be very competitive between themselves in a bad way.

Again, there's a gradation, there's a spectrum of behavior. Uh, people talk about something called tournament theory within the organization, which. Could be quite a healthy thing. This idea that there should be competition to get to the top. We, we do want ambitious people to want to take on these bigger, tougher jobs nearer the top of the organization with bigger responsibilities and bigger salaries of course, but yeah, big responsibilities.

And we, and we shouldn't, uh, belittle or, or sneer at people who want to get to the top, you know, that's, it is, it's completely healthy. It depends how you do it, and it depends [00:25:00] with what you do with that power. Once you have, uh, acquired, acquired it, and attained it. So this is, you know, the difference between crudely good leadership and bad leadership.

Good leaders will support people, bring them on. Think about the organization, not just themselves. Bad leaders will be more selfish, less interested in the organization. Satisfying, narrow, personal ambition. Perhaps at the expense of their employees and the business they're running. Yeah. Uh, I, I see the tragedy of the insecure overachiever is really because these are some of the most high performing, smartest, hardworking people we have in our society, and the tragedy is it's like having a really powerful engine, but they're not sitting at the steering wheel or someone else is sitting at the steering wheel for them.

Almost using them in some sense. And there's, there's this really interesting psychologist named Carl Rogers, who was essentially the founder of something called Person centered Therapy. And he had this idea of conditions of worth that [00:26:00] we all carry around conscious and uncondition, uh, conscious and unconscious conditions, which if we meet them, we allow ourselves to feel worthy.

Rogers would say that a lot of people, you know, having never reflected on it, would carry a lot of external conditions of worth, prestige, what other people think of them, status and so on. And obviously if there needs to be a balance, it's not like you can live a life not really thinking about the external world at all, but if someone is just carrying external conditions of worth and they've never cultivated an internal range of conditions, you know, what are my own values?

What do I own? What do I think is important? You live a very untethered. Life in some sense. You're like flying without a radar or again, like driving without a steering wheel. And you other people can either, people can hijack you and hijack your orientation and that's way and yes. And also when you, when you sense in others a kind of almost aimless ambition that I think [00:27:00] that relates to that.

When people seem to be very driven, there's, but they, but they're not quite. Sure why. And then, and also they can't ever be happy because actually they are sort of, uh, de deracinated in that sense. It is a kind of ungrounded ambition. Another thing I think we see in workplaces and organizations is that clash between those who do have some of that comfort, some of that sense of self-worth.

Whether they deserve it or not is perhaps a separate question, but they have a, a slightly less fraught. Or, you know, intense demeanor because precisely because they have a certain level of comfort. And that, of course, is also potentially very provocative to a boss who is not so comfortable and who is still insecure and, and absolutely driven.

And that's a kind of personality clash, clash of emphasis, clash of priorities when you, when you are being managed by someone and. You have to sometimes at least give the impression of being just as intense and committed as they are, because if they sense [00:28:00] an element of. Comfort, which they might regard as nonchalance or complacency or the lackadaisical, you know, that's, that's very provocative to a, a driven intense boss and they often only want similarly driven people around them.

So you have to acquire the ability to at least give the impression of being as driven as your very driven boss if you want to a more quiet life. Absolutely. That reminds me of narcissism. If you are in a relationship, friendship, romantic relationship. Work relationship with a narciss, what you learn quite quickly is they want you to mirror them and that the, the psychological theory would be they unconsciously there is they unconsciously fail to separate between themselves and others and therefore would, would like to see others as a reflection of themselves.

Yes. So if you're, if you're in an involuntary relationship with a narcissist. Uh, let's say at a work situation, your best bet is [00:29:00] to make sure, at least by all appearances, you're mirroring them so they don't see you as a threat. 'cause as soon as you stop mirroring, they're, they're gonna see you as like an obstacle that needs to be destroyed if they're that malignant analysis.

I think that's absolutely right, and I'm, I'm going to misquote now, but, uh, JPI Petri from in used a phrase like this recently when he said, um, the narcissist. Loves himself or herself, but just in your presence, you know, they are, they are kind of, they are so delighted by themselves that was obsessive themselves and you just have to, yeah, as you say, you just have to kind of go with the ride, as it were, and, and, and not, not do anything to disturb that too much because they won't necessarily be able to cope with it, uh, uh, anyway, uh, this is, so this is what I think, this is why these questions are so fascinating because they're subtle.

They are. Timeless. Wherever human beings meet and interact, these tensions can rise. And when they're, when the stakes are high, so much, so much [00:30:00] more so, and I suppose this is partly why we find the political struggle or intense sporting rivalries or intense commercial rivalries, fascinating, dramatic because we, we, we feel that there are strong, big personalities at play with powerful feelings.

Uh, being expressed and displayed forcefully and that, that makes for, that makes for drama. To what extent do you think narcissism is a prerequisite to success and, and leadership? You know, there's, there's a lot of different thoughts on this. Some people think, you know, we have to be a bit delusional. Yes, delusively, self-confident, can you get by with healthy self-esteem is healthy self-esteem.

Enough to be successful in conventional terms in this life. Do you think? That's a wonderful and very subversive question. Uh, my friend who died, he died sadly, recently, a couple years ago, Michael Maccabee, uh, you may have, uh, read, he, he wrote about something called constructive narcissism and he made a [00:31:00] very sort of subtle and intelligent defense of the role of narcissism, uh, in someone like he was talking about, uh, Barack Obama, for example, and Bill Clinton.

And we got political figures are the ones we often. About. Um, and then even in the, that drama that was very popular, the West Wing, one of one of the characters, uh, Toby Ziegler, who's a sort of rather uncomfortable driven, uh, policy guru and thinker really. And he says, you'd better be. If you think you're gonna be president in the United States, you better be narcissistic.

You better have a pretty high opinion of Israel. You better think you're special. You can't be sheepish. Uh, you, you can't be entirely well adjusted in that sense. You, you, we don't really want utterly modest, um, uh, self-deprecating, quiet people at the top because we kind of want to look up to them a bit and, and they're gonna have to compete however.

How much above us do we want them to be? We want them to be still relatable in the modern world. We want 'em to be familiar. Um, and there was a professor at, uh, California, Jay [00:32:00] Conga, who, who's told me years ago, he says, we want leaders to be a bit taller than us, but not too much taller. Uh, so, uh, we don't want, they want to be remote, but yeah.

So I think narcissism there, there's, I think Michael MCee was right. I think that, you know, there must be a role for some sort of. Constructive healthy narcissism, particularly at a time when the challenges are very great. Um, like today, like in 2025. Um, and, uh, you, again, there's not, these are not challenges we can be too sheepish or mely mouth about.

As, as leaders, we, we get to need leaders who can, uh, see the big picture and the, the challenges, but then somehow make them understandable and manageable. When they talk about them, when they just describe them to us. So it's, yes, we, we have very high expectations of leaders. We want 'em to be these very rounded, uh, sophisticated people, but there's, we've got to tolerate a bit of narcissism.

I think sometimes it's not [00:33:00] necessarily, uh, a purely negative, uh, phenomenon. Yeah. Psychoanalytically, you could say. Some people like to disown their ability to have agency and power in the world, and therefore they project a lot. They, they're. I feel more comfortable projecting power into other people. And so when someone's narcissistic, they're very ready to receive that projection.

They're very ready to be like, yeah, absolutely. I'm gonna take care of everything. And as much as we worship freedom. Explicitly consciously in the West. I think in the West we're always talking about, you know, we want to be free to do whatever we want to do at any time. Whenever we really worship something explicitly, you can be certain that implicitly we crave the opposite.

We crave, I think being taken care of, not having to make every decision, having someone at the top that can kind of shepherd us through the crisis. So I think it's, you can, we can end up in a very [00:34:00] strange. Relationship with the ruling or political class and they can take on the burdens maybe that we don't want to take on.

Yes, indeed. And we remember perhaps now nostalgically and fondly. Remember Bill Clinton, who was famously the empathetic leader and, and, and the cliche phrase was, I feel your pain. I'm not sure if he ever actually used that phrase verbatim, but that was the message he was sending. I feel your pain, I recognize, I understand what you're going through.

I feel it too, and I share it. And I'm like, you, I'm not so remote from you. I'm a human being what we have today. We don't want to get hijacked by, uh, Trump. Like all conversations are at the moment. But this is something far more bizarre, I think. I mean, this is not a healthy narcissism. And this is also, I mean, I think we, we teeter over into.

Something like Sadism and I, I can't say if, if we can even call it, uh, being a sociopath, but, but, uh, Trump makes a pitch to his core supporters and they seem to enjoy [00:35:00] it. But equally, absolutely part of his business is to be. Coarse and unpleasant and threatening and offensive and insulting to the people who don't support him.

And rather than being a, a unifying leader, he's absolutely, apparently trying to divide. I mean, that's part of his way of operating, but clearly there's something I think even beyond. Narcissism. I know after Barry Goldwater American, uh, psychologists and so on agreed that they shouldn't do amateur, what I'm doing now, amateur ill-informed, semi informed, uh, psychoanalysis of public figures that who were not their patient.

And that used to be a professional convention. But I think in the case of Trump, that has been relaxed a bit because Trump is such an extreme example of, of a really rather bizarre personality. It seems to me that it's, it's almost, it is irresistible to speculate on. What has shaped him, and this is something beyond mere narcissism.

I think this is something really very odd indeed. Yeah, I agree. And [00:36:00] I, I'll, I'll wait in and do my own semi informed psychoanalysis. Um, I, I think one, one pattern you can see is on the political left, uh, without making any statements, you know, about what, who's right. Political left or political right. You know, I think they both have merits in different ways.

I think what you've seen on the political left in America for a long time is incongruence, by which I mean, say one thing, do something different, kind of presenting a very professional, calm facade, and then quietly things are going on in the background, which people aren't so happy with to an extreme.

And I think what you see and what that, I think that partly encouraged the rise of an extremely to a fault congruent. Figure like Trump. And I think what people kind of envy about Trump in some strange way is that he always seems 100% certain about what he says, and he's willing to say [00:37:00] whatever crude or vulgar or offensive thing that's on his mind, and that's how you know he is being congruent because the things he says are so vulgar and crude and offensive and so on.

Brand. It all fits. It all makes sense. Everything that he says makes sense in light of everything we know about his personality. If Barack Obama said the exact same things he said, he would get in trouble because that would be so incongruent with Barack Obama's brand, which is the measured, you know, calm political figure.

So I think Trump in some way gives, is this like release valve for all the people who feel. They have a lot of things that are very dark and offensive and aggressive that they want to say, and they don't feel like they can say them for better or worse. You know, I, that rings very true. That I think that's a very plausible description.

And of course you didn't use the, the, the fashionable word that's become a cliche, which is, you know, authenticity or authentic. But people would [00:38:00] say about Trump, well he's, you know, we get the feeling that he in public, he's giving us. The real Donald Trump, we get the feeling that maybe in private he's not so different.

I think he probably is a little bit more sophisticated in private than he appears in public, but maybe not so much. He certainly convincingly seems to be, as we say, shooting from the hip and giving vent, giving, uh, space to some pretty basic prejudices, basic views. And he doesn't mind about old fashioned concepts such as manners or civility, uh, courtesy or the things that we used to actually.

Think American presidents would, would, would display, uh, at least in public, he's, uh, changing a bit. We don't want to, as I say, don't want to get too hijacked by Trump. But one of the other reasons I think he's say destabilizing psychologically for us all collectively is this kind of nor norm busting. You know, he's, um, he, he's, he's upended many of the conventions of public life, of behavior, of political [00:39:00] leadership and, and democracies, um, that we had come to.

Expect ever since, you know, 1945. And it's, uh, so it's quite a, it's quite a shattering moment in a way. Certainly destabilizing moment for, for many people. But that's another conversation, Dave. Yeah. And it's, the extremes are always gonna be dysfunction. You know, you don't want to be always congruent. You don't want to always be extremely incongruent.

I think the political left has a tendency towards some level of incongruence because. I think if you're left-leaning, you tend to value things like politeness a little bit more. If you are, uh, right-leaning, you tend to be a little bit more congruent 'cause right-leaning people tend to be a little bit more disagreeable, a little less compassionate, for better or for worse.

But where it's where you go to the extremes, that's a problem. It's kind of similar to ambition. You know, ambition is a tool that can help you accomplish things. The problem is, and a lot of what you really wrote about [00:40:00] quite nicely in your book is how, you know a lot of people, ambition isn't the tool that they use, but ambition uses them.

They become like a victim of their own ambition in a way. Yes, exactly. Yes. Are you? That's right. Are you actually Yes. The victim of your own ambition rather than someone deploying it in a considered way. Has it consumed you? Um, certainly with Laidback Beth, that's what it feels like. Um, this famous speech where she asks, and it's quite topical as well, she asks for her femininity to be removed, not in the contemporary sense of transgender, not because she says she wants to be a man, but she does say she wants to be less female.

She called calls on the the gods and the Dark Spirit. She says, unsexed me here, unsexed me. She, it is an invented verb. It's a, again, part of Shakespeare's. Linguistic and poetic genius that he can think [00:41:00] of a, a verb like that unsexed me here and fill me from the crown to the toe top full of dire cruelty.

She said, but she wants to be, she thinks that to, to carry out this evil act of ed, of killing the king who is a guest in their own castle that evening with her husband. She has to be less. Feminine about things less female. And it's a, it's a, it's a fascinating, again, you could say amateur, but it's a fascinating psychological insight.

And, and in her collapse and indeed segment fo did write a short paper about lady, um, uh, but in her collapse later on we sort of see, as it were, a, a, a reappearance of the suppressed. Uh, femininity. I think that's how I read it. Uh, the, the sleepwalking scene. And, and so again, uh, all, all these aspects are, are in this play.

And do we ever understand Lady Mac bet's motivations? Why was she so focused on mac bet's ascension through killing the king? Do we ever find out about that? [00:42:00] Not really. And one of the problems of Macbeth as a script, as a text, it's much shorter than some of the other great tragedies like Hamlet or King Li or Anthony Raeth Heller.

It's much shorter. And so there's been speculation among the literary scholars that perhaps some scenes are missing. Perhaps it's not the complete text, although why it would be, why there would be scenes missing where, whereas none of the other. Major plays have got scenes missing from, from the first folio that was published in the 1620s, 400 years ago.

Um, she says, I mean, one of the debates about Macbeth and and Lady Macbeth are, did they, did they have any children? They don't seem to have children. Uh, and yet she, again, in this important scene where she persuades him to go through with the murder, she talks about breastfeeding a baby. I have given suck.

She says I've given suck and know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me. Uh, so, you know, have they had a baby before that [00:43:00] died in childhood? Um, was she married before? I mean, none of these things are explained, but she is anyway, in a sense, even more intensely ambitious than him, and driven even more than him.

We don't quite know why, but she seems less. Healthy even than him. And indeed it is her psychology, her mental health, which collapses first, not his, hence the sleepwalking and hence the, uh, loss of sanity and the implication that perhaps she actually takes her own life again. That's not made quite clear how she dies.

Yeah, she dies, she dies off stage, uh, but she becomes truly ill. And collapses. And again, there's the really interesting theme that any personality trait taken to its extreme goes down a self-destructive path. Yeah. So was it Hogan who talks about over strengths? I mean, sometimes, you know, we, and in business we have a leader who does very well, or a politician does very well, [00:44:00] and perhaps they'd come a little bit stereotyped Again, this business of pattern recognition, whether, you know, I, yes, I, I recognize the situation and last time what I did was this.

And that played my strength and everything worked out well. But yes, you can sort of overemphasize, uh, what might have been a strength and become almost caricatured as a certain type of person and lack the adaptability, you know, lack the, the ability to adjust, um, we or say of leaders with a whatever field that they, they need this sort of repertoire of behavior to be good, uh, senses of the situation sense, uh, and senses of the context that they're in the moment.

And the people they're working with. And again, the rigidity of personality probably doesn't help. You can be, you can be a very effective leader at certain times, you know, time of war, for example, conflict or, uh, if intense competition, but perhaps an organization or a business needs something else in a different period.

And, and then, and then you need. A different type of leader or at least different types of behavior. But, [00:45:00] uh, as you know, it's very, it's, it's a high, it's a big ask of anyone to be able to display very different types of behavior, especially when they're under pressure. You know, we, you know, that's actually very, very hard.

And, um, on the whole politicians, business leaders fail when the circumstances change and they are not quite able to, uh, change with them and move at the times. Yeah, I think one of the most mind blowing things I learned about personality when I studied it is, you know, we think about personality as an attitude and a maybe a set of behaviors, but the most mind-blowing thing I learned is personality is also a percept, a perceptive thing.

It's a, it's how you see the world, for example. If you are highly extroverted, you see the world as a landscape of social opportunities of parties and conferences and places to meet people. If you're hardworking, you see the world as a job market. If you're an introvert, you see the world as a place to shy away from.[00:46:00] 

So the crucial thing to understand is your brain is always selecting. Selecting out most of the information you could perceive unconsciously focusing on a tiny amount in part, dependent on the personality traits, which predominate. So you might think your personality might make you inadequate to respond to a certain situation, and that's true, but it goes even further than that.

Your personality will change what problems you even perceive in the first place. If you look at a newspaper with one personality, different articles are gonna appear at you as relevant to other, to other personalities. And that's why it's so important to have teams, you know, teams of people with different personalities.

I'm sure you've seen this in the business world, teams with different temperaments. This is exactly right. And also, I mean, just to be parochial at the current UK political scene, uh, the, the Prime Minister is a highly successful, very highly regarded. Uh, lawyer, a barrister advocate [00:47:00] who, um, and we know that they take on a brief, they take on a, a commission as it were, and argue a case, and then the case is settled and they move on.

Um, and that could be very useful. I. In political leadership, but equally as you've just described, we need people who have a wide perspective and a feel for different circumstances and the ability to recognize different circumstances and the need to behave differently. Uh, and you hope that such leaders also, as you say, well served by a team of good advisors who are free to say what they.

Honestly think and what they honestly think will not get them into trouble or limit their career prospects. And there's another part of your, your point about perception. We need these personalities in leadership who are capable of hearing bad news and not blaming the messenger, not blaming the person who's delivering the bad news.

We need, we need realists, I think is how I would characterize that realists and perhaps [00:48:00] even I could say pragmatists, people who can adapt. And can deal with reality. There's a leadership guru, uh, management guru called Jim Collins. And, uh, he talks about, you know, confronting the brutal facts, uh, of, of the, of life.

Mm. Remaining reality oriented. Yes. Reality oriented. That's right. We, we, I surrealist bosses who make unreasonable demands except often achieve amazing things. I mean, Elon Musk is someone who. Has crushed the, uh, production cycle time on, on space rockets or, or cars, partly by being completely unreasonable by being almost a surrealist, by making ridiculous and absurd and possibly even harmful demands of some of his teams.

But sometimes it's worked out, you know, surprisingly well, and other times less so. Uh, but I mean, it's an old line. I think George Bernard Shaw who said that, you know. Only unreasonable people change things because reasonable people, uh, you know, [00:49:00] tolerate reality. But it's like, I think as you said, there's this balance between having an unreasonable goal with a.

Uh, paired with a reality orientation. Hmm. So I have an unreasonable goal, but I'm committed to reality orientation to get there. And I think what you see in a lot of like career trajectories, even if you look at trajectories like someone, like an adult of Hitler, or you look at the trajectories of certain films like criminal gangster films, it's like unreasonable goal with reality orientation in the beginning.

But as the person accrues, success, often wild success. The unreasonableness unreasonable demand goes up, but reality orientation goes down and all of a sudden you have the person thinking, oh, I'm gonna achieve this goal. 'cause it's me. Like I'm the, I'm the secret source. I'm the special ingredient. I think personally, I'm not a historian.

Napoleon had this problem, like there was a certain point, it seemed like [00:50:00] Napoleon reached a point where he was like, I'm gonna win because I'm Napoleon, not because I. Had really good strategy and then that's where people seem to get into trouble and then, and then people become very, very unreality oriented, and then there's like a downfall.

Yes. Well, in the business world, the cliche is that success doesn't really teach you a lot. Failure. It teaches you a lot more, especially if you, especially if you could learn from it. Build on it, but success may very well just sort of reinforce your own, initially slightly deluded sense of your abilities and just enhances that and being reality based.

You mentioned criminals. I think famously, I can't remember which. There was the gang, the Cray brothers, Ronnie and Reggie Cray in the sixes and I can't remember which brother it was, who actually was finally caught for murder when he just killed someone, as we say, in cold blood in the pub and, and I think probably you could say his reality.

His grasp of reality had gone. He, he thought, I, I can get away with this. And Worryingly Trump last time when he was campaigning, said I could shoot someone [00:51:00] in Fifth Avenue and it wouldn't cost many support. My support would go up. And this is also the dark side of him and the, the murky, troubling side that he, he, he sort of flirts with some of this, but he's never been caught for anything serious.

So we must presume that he's never done anything, done nothing quite as serious as that. One more thing I did want to ask you about, uh, in terms of ambition was, you know, the UK has a very peculiar relationship to ambition. You know, the UK used to be the dominant superpower in the world, and yet I, I've lived here for 10 years.

There seems to be a bit of a sheepish attitude towards, towards ambition. We mentioned ambivalence, and I don't think it's actually ambivalent because. I think an ambivalent attitude is quite a psychologically mature perspective. The ability to appreciate both the pros and the cons. That's the mature attitude I got from your book.

But what I see in the UK is like kind of a cynicism and a repression. And my question to you, and maybe you don't have an answer for [00:52:00] this, is why Stefan, why, especially in comparison to. Countries like the US where they seem to run on ambition again, for better or for worse, but what is it about the UK that gives us this relationship to ambition, do you think?

Well, it's a, it's a fascinating question and a big topic. Dean Atchison, who is. Harry Truman's section of state said that after the War Britain had lost an empire, but not yet found a role. And, um, that was a, a serious and an intelligent thing to say, which I think a lot of Brits at the time probably found quite difficult to take and still do.

And I think if you think of the Brexit discussions from almost 10 years ago now, some of that was about a kind of nostalgia. It seems to me, for a time when Britain was still a serious. Big player, global Superpower and even Imperial. And we're speaking in the week of the, uh, 80th anniversary of the end of World War ii.

And, and once again, Britain is, you know, marking it with seriously big, uh, [00:53:00] events and uh, you know, even celebrations. But this is double-edged because, uh, you know, it's back in a sense, it is backward looking inevitably, and I think there is. Crudely to oversimplify, there is a sort of unease about Britain's place in the world and it's part of the Brexit debate.

Um, there is, you know, post imperial decline, not, not as severe a decline as we sometimes think. You know, Britain is still a much richer country than it was 40, 50, 60 years ago. But you know, famously not necessarily doing as well as some of our continental European neighbors. Or some of the emerging countries of, uh, of, uh, of Asia.

Um, if we think about Monty Python, the comedy group, um, they had a sketch where in Whitehall, where government is located, they had a, a, a, a department, government department. It was called the Ministry of Silly Walks, and John Cleese and others were marching up and down Whitehall, walking in a silly way.

And this was a satirical. [00:54:00] But in a sense it was sort of saying, well, we used to have empires and have the map painted red, and now who are we? What are we? And again, and clearly this is part of the British, uh, confusion if you like, in this relationship to the rest of Europe. Who are we? Are we kind of American offshoot or are we actually really a European country?

So I think Britain is still. Quite a confused place and that, and that relates to the ambition too. We, we, we we're, we're burdened by memories of greatness and yet we're, and and it's very, gets very controversial. So when people try to reassess the British Empire and tell a more measured. Give a more measured account of it.

You know, some people get very upset. The hit the hint that Britain might have benefited from, you know, slavery or exploitation or, uh, colonialism, imperialism, that these might not have been good things. And some of the wealth that we see, and some of the great buildings we see around us [00:55:00] in the UK may have actually been built on the back of, um, you know, slavery or exploited labor.

Can get very upset when you start saying that to them. So we, we still haven't quite come to terms with some of our wonderful great, but also troubling history and perhaps that's a slightly uncertain foundation on which to build healthy ambitions, uh, for the future and explains why you know, the identity.

Is confused and, uh, you know, and, and like many other countries concerns about, you know, the makeup of the population and so on, and who are we really, and, and all that. It's all, it's all in the mix. Uh, whereas America is a new country, it's an experiment. It's still developing it, and it was for partly as an escape from old Europe and the old ways of doing things.

And they can still be almost uncomplicated, healthfully ambitious about the future because. They're still writing there, new history, and [00:56:00] perhaps we struggle to do that a bit in the UK sometimes. Yeah. Again, I can see both sides of it. In the UK it's like on the political right, you see like a refusal to acknowledge on the darker aspects of the UK's past.

Uh, on the political left, you, you'd, uh, see a lack of willingness to acknowledge the good things about the UK's past, for example, that the UK. It was one of the first countries to abolish slavery and actually fought to abolish slavery among other states, which is, you know, paradox is hard to, to deal with.

And I think, I think what distinguishes like self-esteem from narcissism is like narcissism is this desire to expunge and of your flaws and project a hyper unrealistic version of all your virtues. And I think self-esteem is the ability to be like, I have these strengths, I have these flaws. And I'm gonna try my best.

It's kind of something, it's a much more quietly powerful, but still humble, [00:57:00] uh, approach to oneself and on one's life, I think. And maybe, uh, I'm not going to, you know, steadfastly prescribe something for the country, but if I had to, if I was pushed to be something like a kind of healthy self-esteem kind of thing that, that the UK could adopt, perhaps.

Very good. Yeah, and reality based. Absolutely healthy self-esteem. I'm with you. I'm for that reality based, definitely we want to stay reality based. Stefan. Unfortunately, we're out of time, but it's been wonderful talking to you. Your book Fair Oral, the Lady Macbeth Guide Ambition. If you are interested in learning more about ambition, I can't recommend this book enough.

It's such a nice, well-balanced, comprehensive view on this topic. Stefan, where can people go to find out more about your work? Well, they can certainly buy the book, uh, on that big online sales place called Amazon and order it from their local bookshops if they can't find it on the bookshelf. Um, some of my work's been published in the garden, which is [00:58:00] freely available on the internet.

If you're a FT subscriber. You can also see some of my pieces there. And you mentioned two other books that I've written, so Google me and there's a back catalog to, uh, to check out if you're really feeling bored. Perfect. Stefan, thanks so much. Thank you, Alex. It was great fun talking to you.