The Dark Side Of Leadership

Here are several articles on the topic of leadership- I’m of the opinion that it is more important to invest in companies with wide moats than great leadership.

Article 1: Leadership Based On Quality Not Quantity (Via Mindhacks) Click Here To Read It

Time magazine reports on an intriguing new study finding that groups select natural leaders on the basis of how much each person contributes to group discussions, even when their contributions have no relation to their actual competence.

Article 2: Leaders Emerge By Talking First & Most Often (Via PsyBlog) Click Here To Read It

Put some random people in a group, give them a task and soon enough a leader will emerge. What is it about that person that makes others grant them the honour of being in charge?  New insight comes from a study published in Personality and Social Psychology, which suggests that leaders emerge through a combination of their own outspoken behaviour, and how this outspoken behaviour is perceived by others.

In two studies Anderson and Kilduff (2009) from the University of California, Berkeley, looked at how dominant individuals in a group were perceived by others in the group. Perceived competence is important because, everything else being equal, it’s very difficult to become a leader if everyone in the group thinks that person is a dunce, even if they are extremely dominant. But what Anderson and Kilduff’s research showed is that there is a big gap between the actual competence of leaders and the way in which they are perceived by the others.