The Power of the Herd Read Online Free PDF Page A

eventually emerged. Yet once you graduate to a significant leadership position, particularly one with entrepreneurial elements, the rules change. There are no government regulations to protect you. You must suddenly learn to advocate for yourself while also organizing, motivating, and inspiring others. To raise the difficulty level, some people will rave enthusiastically about whatever mission you represent while covertly undermining some aspect of the plan, often unconsciously, sometimes for reasons even they don’t understand. As the vision expands and takes on a life of its own, you must constantly modify your original expectations and strategies to align with unforeseeable challenges and opportunities, or you too will compromise the dream. And no one ensures that you receive fair pay for working no more than a reasonable number of hours, either. In the most daring, potentially paradigm-shifting fields, you’re likely to spend years compensating others before yourself. All the while, employees will assume you’re raking in the bucks, a throwback to the old robber-baron days, when the resentment was truly justified. Mass media reinforces this age-old mistrust, offering far more coverage of CEOs flying in private jets to receive government bailout funds than of innovators who sacrifice time and moneywhile supporting a worthy vision. In the public mind, leaders are, quite simply, guilty until proven innocent. This is why, even though people are conditioned to at least feign respect for anyone in a supervisory role, authentic trust and compassion must be won, sometimes slowly over time, sometimes as dramatically as a warrior running a gauntlet of tribal abuse.
    In 1999, Mike Judge, of Beavis and Butthead fame, satirized egotistical yet clueless bosses and insipid management practices in the film Office Space. A decade later, after running his own increasingly successful media enterprise, he couldn’t help but take the opposite position in his film Extract. Here Judge explored, with his usual brand of twisted social commentary, what the founder of a company deals with on a daily basis. In a radio interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, he revealed the reasons behind this change in perspective:
    I’d worked just dozens and dozens of jobs before I started my animation career. And by that point, I was pushing thirty. So I’d always been the employee. I had never had anybody work for me….And then suddenly, when Beavis and Butthead started, I had anywhere from thirty to as many as ninety people working for me. And so, I just suddenly became sympathetic to my former bosses. You know, I was just, like, God, these people don’t appreciate anything. I’ve got to baby-sit them. They’re always fighting with each other and me.
    One eye-opening experience involved hiring someone to color in his line drawings. In a good-natured attempt to share the little bit of wealth he was finally accessing, Judge offered what he felt was a generous, above-minimum-wage rate for a job that didn’t require any significant thought or creativity. At that time, mind you, he was working within a limited budget for an untried series of MTV shorts. Even so, Judge overheard, along with so many unprintable expletives, his employees complaining that he was getting rich at their expense. “I was, like, God, I can’t win,” he told Gross, obviously still surprised by the irony of his position.
    This is the dark side of leadership. No one talks about it much, perhaps because most people would refuse to be promoted if they knew what to expect. Even worse, conventional training programs don’t prepare new leaders, let alone visionaries, for the most infuriating challenges involved. Common advice for handling power stress is to “suck it up” and “get over it.” Even the best books on emotional intelligence in the workplace only scratch the surface of the personal and social issues