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WINNERS TAKE ALL

The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Anand Giridharadas

ALFRED A. KNOPF

New York • 2018

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2018 by Anand Giridharadas

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed
in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin
Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aakoop£com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of
Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Giridharadas, Anand, author.
Title: Winners take all : the elite charade of changing the world /
by Anand Giridharadas.
Description: New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. I “A Borzoi book.” I
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017045477! ISBN 9780451493248 (hardcover) I
ISBN 9780451493255 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social change-United States. I United States-
Social conditions-1980- I Elite (Social sciences)-United States.
Classification: LCC HM831 .G477 2018 I DDC 303.40973–dc23
LC record available at https://kcn.loc.gov/2017045477

Jacket images by Spantomoda and AlexRoz, both Shutterstock
Jacket design by John Vorhees

Manufactured in the United States of America
Published August 28, 2018
Reprinted Three Times
Fifth Printing, October 2018

For Orion and Zora,

and the more than 300,000 children born today,

with hope that you will see through our illusions

86 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

don’t see, some magical elf who has a yellow hand. And it’s
not really a person, right? It’s all about the technology.

This was what had bothered Yorra. The technology, which had

made the service easier to procure, had also changed the nature of
the interaction. The one-click app obscured the messy human real-
ity of the working people behind it, who now had less bargaining

power.
Yorra had begun to build what she imagined as a cooperative

answer to the one-click cleaning service. Because MarketWorld is so
hard to escape even when you are rejecting it, she had taken fund-
ing from the Robin Hood Foundation, financed by the titans of Wall
Street, to build her service. The effort was still in progress that night
at the Goethe Institute. (Eventually, her organization would release
a new app called Up & Go, which allowed consumers to book house-
cleaning services, and which channeled 95 percent of the money
directly to the workers, who also owned the businesses.) That eve-

-ning, with the app more than a year away from release, Yorra had a
long way to go to make progress against a statistic that appalled her:
the news, put out by the charity Oxfam, that just sixty-two billion-
aires possessed as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity
(3.6 billion people), down from three hundred billionaires a few
years ago. In fact, it was nine billionaires, not sixty-two, as Oxfam
would later say when better data came in. And the following year,
the number of billionaires it took to account for half the world’s
resources dropped from nine to eight.

Six of those eight made their money in the supposedly equal-

izing field of technology: Gates, Zuckerberg, JeffBezos of Amazon,_
Larry Ellison of Oracle, Carlos Slim of Telmex and other Mexican
businesses, and Michael Bloomberg, the purveyor of computer ter-

minals. Another, Amancio Ortega, who built the retailer Zara, was
famous for applying advanced technology to manufacturing and for
automating his factories. The final member of the gang of eight,

Warren Buffett, was a major shareholder in Apple and IBM.

CHAPTER 4

THE CRITIC AND THE THOUGHT LEADER

It is dijficult to get a man to understand something when

his salary depends on not understanding it.

-UPTON SINCLAIR

In October 20n, in the sleepy village of Camden, Maine, Amy Cuddy prepared to give her first proper talk outside academia. Cuddy was
a social psychologist at Harvard Business School who had spent

more than a decade publishing papers o~ the workings of.prejudice,
discrimination, and systems of power. She had written of how the
sexism that women face is a strange amalgam of the envy men feel
toward career women and the pity they feel for women who don’t
work. She had written of how “socialized obedience” and “confor-
mity” played into the decisions of both the 9/n hijackers and the

American guards at Abu Ghraib who tortured their prisoners. She
had written of how white people taking computerized implicit-bias
tests became more prejudiced when informed that the tests’ purpose
was to measure racism. She had written of how, in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, people more easily perceived “anguish, mourn-
ing, remorse,” and other “uniquely human” emotions in people of

the same race as them than in people of other hues. She had writ-
ten of the “model minority” stereotype that shadows so many Asian
Americans.

That autumn, she was continuing to work with a tea~ on a
long-term project to study how men’s hegemony, that most global

88 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

of phenomena, adapts to local conditions so as to enroot itself In
America, where being independent and self-oriented are the leading

“cultural ideals,” she and her colleagues wrote, the society tends to
cast men as independent and self-oriented. In South Korea, where

being interdependent and others-oriented are more prized, the soci-
ety tends to cast men as interdependent and others-oriented. As a
working paper put it, “Men in general are seen as possessing more
of whatever characteristic is most culturally valued.” Llke much of
her work, the paper didn’t offer solutions. It was part of a noble intel-

lectual tradition of plumbing the depths of a problem. Which was
perhaps why none of Cuddy’s work had led to giving a talk beyond
the walls of academia-until now.

She had been invited to spealc at a conference called PopTech. It
was, like Summit at Sea, an important stop on the MarketWorld cir-
cuit. It had been founded by a group of people who wanted to bring
big ideas to Maine-including the inventor of Ethernet and a former
chief executive of Pepsi and Apple. At Pop Tech, the ideas went down
easy amid the lobster rolls and twilight deck parties overlooking
West Penobscot Bay and nightcaps at Natalie’s at the Camden Har-
bour Inn. Like many MarketWorld conferences, PopTech charged a
sizable attendance fee, and it relied on corporate sponsors. When

MarketWorld organized such events, it could be difficult to keep its
tastes and ways of seeing from shaping what ideas were offered and

how. It was not clear what these MarketWorld types would make 9f
Cuddy, since she tended to speak of problems rather than easy solu-
tions, and of challenging power and systems, and appeared little
interested in the milquetoast change of win-wins.

Fortunately, Cuddy had a guide to this new world in the form of
Andrew Zolli, who, as PopTech’s curator, was her host at the con-
ference. Zolli was a kind of MarketWorld producer, standing at the
profitable intersection of companies wanting to associate themselves
with big ideas, networkers looking for their next conference, and
writers and thinkers who wanted to reach a broader audience and

perhaps court the influential elites of the circuit. Zolli, who called
his conference “a machine to change the world,” was a consultant

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 89

and strategic adviser to companies like General Electric, Pricewater-

houseCoopers, Nike, and Facebook, as well as NGOs, start-ups, and
civil society groups; he was on the boards of various MarketWorld
organizations; and he was a fixture on the paid lecture circuit, where

he spoke on topics like ;esilience. His book on the subject would
praise such things as smart electrical grids and marine conservation
as win-wins.

Zolli was, in other words, an expert in and perpetuator of Mar-
ketWorld culture and its way of seeing. He understood what ideas
would be useful to MarketWorlders, helping them to anticipate the
future and make their killings, and he understood what ideas made
winners feel socially conscious and globally aware but not guilty or
blamed.

An essay he wrote to promote his book on resilience argued
that the world should focus less on rooting out its biggest prob-
lems, including poverty and climate change, . and more on living

with them. The message had reassuring implications for those who
were perfectly content with the status quo and preferred the kinds

of changes that essentially preserved it. Zolli believed that 1;he desire
to solve underlying problems is “an alluring and moral vision,” but

ultimately wrong. The problems were perhaps here to stay,_ and it
was more important, he argued, to teach people to cope.

Zolli promoted various projects that devote resources to help-
ing people weather bad situations rather than to improving those
situations. For example, he praised research at Emory University
that illustrates how “contemplative practice” can “bolster the psy-
chological and physiological resilience of children in foster care,”
which was a lot easier than fixing foster care. He spoke of inflatable
bridges and electrical micro-grids that could help communities sur-
vive exploding transformers as sea levels continue to rise. He was

quick to admit that none of these kinds of fixes “is a permanent
solution, and none roots out the underlying problems they address.”

He knew he had critics: “If we adapt to unwanted change, the rea-
soning goes, we give a pass to those responsible for putting, us in
this mess in the first place, and we lose the moral authority to pres-

90 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

sure them to stop.” But this was the kind of thinking mostly heard
from people who didn’t make a living as corporate consultants and

Market World idea generators, and Zolli didn’t buy it. He made clear

that he wasn’t saying “there aren’t genuine bad guys and bad ideas

at work, or that there aren’t things we should do to mitigate our
risks. But we also have to acknowledge that the holy war against
boogeymen hasn’t worked and isn’t likely to anytime soon. In its

place, we need approaches that are both more pragmatic and more
politically inclusive-rolling with the waves, instead of trying to stop

the ocean.” You can talk about our common problems, but don’t be
political, don’t focus on root causes, don’t go after bogeymen, don’t

try to change fundamental things. Give hope. Roll with the waves.

That is the MarketWorld way.

Cuddy was nervous about speaking, for the first time, to hun-
dreds of strangers who weren’t in her field, who weren’t enthusi-
astic students who had signed up for her class, who didn’t know

any of the basic concepts of social psychology. Although her work
on images of men in individualist and collectivist societies was on

her mind, it may not have exhilarated PopTech. Another paper she

had published, in Psychologicai Science, “Brief Nonverbal Displays
Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance,” would become

the basis for her tall<. The stage lights came up from darkness. Cuddy stood center

stage with her hands on her hips, her feet planted shoulder-width
apart, tucked into a pair of brown cowboy boots that only added to

what would come to be called her signature “power pose.” On the

giant screen behind her was an image of Wonder Woman, who~e
hands and feet were in the same powerful posture, engaged m

the same willful taking of space. What she and her colleagues had
found was that standing in a forceful position like this could stir

confidence in people-and perhaps blunt some effects of the sexism
that she had long studied. For twenty seconds that felt like eternity,

Cuddy stood there, looking powerful and remaining silent, as the

Wonder Woman theme song played. She pivoted from side to side,
holding her position. Then she broke character and smiled.

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 91

”I’m going to talk to you today about body language,” she began.
The title of her talk, revealed on the second slide, was “Power Pos-
ing: Gain Power Through Body Language.” She began to explain
her and her colleagues’ research showing that without changing any

of the larger dynamics of power and sexism and prejudice, there
were poses people could strike in private that would help them gain
confidence. Without necessarily intending to, she was giving Mar-
ketWorld what it craved in a thinker: a way of framing a problem

that made it about giving bits of power to those who lack it without

taking power away from those who hold it. She was, to use a meta-
. phor she would later employ, giving people a ladder up across a for-

bidding wall-without proposing to tear down the wall. Or as Zolli
· might have put it, she was giving people a way of “rolling with the
waves, instead of trying to stop the ocean.”

I t is the best of times for thought leaders. It is the worst of times
for public intellectuals,” declares Daniel Drezner, a foreign policy

scholar, in his recent treatise The Ideas Industry, a part-academic,
part-first-person account of how an age of inequality, among other
things, has distorted the work of thinking. . .

Drezner starts out by defining two distinct kinds of thinkers,

who share in common a desire to develop important ideas and at
· the same time reach a broad audience. One of these types, the dying

one, is the public intellectual, whom Drezner describes as a wide-
ranging “critic” and’ a foe of power; she perhaps stays “aloof from the

market, society, or the state,” and she proudly bears a duty “to point
out when an emperor has no clothes.” The ascendant type is the

thought leader, who is more congenial to the plutocrats who spon-

sor so much intellectual production today. Thought leaders tend,

Drezner says, to “know one big thing and believe that their impor-

tant idea will change the w<;>rld”; they are not skeptics but “true

believers”; they are optimists, telling uplifting stories; they reason

inductively from their own experiences more than deductively from
authority. They go easy on the powerful. Susan Sontag, William F.

92 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

Buckley Jr., and Gore Vidal were public intellectuals; Thomas L.
Friedman, Niall Ferguson, and Parag Khanna are thought leaders.

Public intellectuals argue with each other in the pages of books and
magazines; thought leaders give TED talks that leave little space

for criticism or rebuttal, and emphasize hopeful solutions over sys-

temic change. Public intellectuals pose a genuine threat to winners;
thought leaders promote the winners’ values, talking up “disrup-

tion, self-empowerment, and entrepreneurial ability.”
Three factors explain the decline of the public intellectual and

the rise of the thought leader, according to Drezner. One is politi-
cal polarization: As American politics has grown more tribal, peo-
ple have become more interested in hearing confirmation of their
views, by whoever will offer it, than in being challenged by interest-
ing, intellectually meandering thinkers. Another factor is a general-
ized loss of trust in authority. In recent decades, Americans have
lost faith in virtually every institution in the country, except for the
military, thanks in part to years of hard economic realities and a
dysfunctional public sphere. Journalists have come to be trusted less

than chiropractors. This loss of faith has pulled public intellectuals
down a few notches, and created new space for the less-credentialed

idea generators to vie for attention. Yet in Drezner’s view it is ris-
ing inequality that has most altered the sphere of ideas. It has had
a paradoxical effect. On one hand, extreme inequality has created

“a thirst for ideas to diagnose and treat the problems that seem to
plague the United States.” On the other, it has spawned “a new class
of benefactors to fund the generation and promotion of new ideas.”
So America is more interested than ever in the problem of inequal-
ity and social fracture-and more dependent than ever on explain-

ers who happen to be in good odor with billionaires.
Drawing on his own surveys and scholarship by others, Drezner

shows how these explainers get pulled into MarketWorld.’s orbit-
how thinkers like him and Cuddy and others are coaxed to abandon
their roles as potential critics and instead to become fellow travel-

ers of the winners. “As America’s elite has gotten richer and richer,
they can afford to do anything they want,” he writes. “It turns out

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 93

a surprising number of them want to go back to school-or, rather,
make school go to them.” Thinkers are invited to become the elite’s

teachers on the circuit of “Big Idea get-togethers”-“TED, South by
Southwest, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Milken Institute’s Global

Conference, anything sponsored by The Atlantic.” These thinkers
often find themselves having become thought leaders without real-
izing it, after “a slow accretion of opportunities that are hard to
refuse.”

It could be added to Drezner’ s analysis that even as plutocrats

were providing these alluring incentives, less corrupting sources of
· intellectual patronage were dwindling. On America’s campuses in

recent decades, the fraction of academics on tei:nire track has col-
lapsed by half. Newsrooms, another source of support for those in

the ideas game, have shrunk by more than 40 percent since 1990.
The publishing industry has suffered as bookstores vanish and
print runs dwindle. We live in a golden age for digitally beaming out
ideas, but for many it has been a dark age for actually making a liv-
ing on them. Many thinkers have no expectation but that a life mal<-

ing ideas will be grueling, unremunerated, and publicly unsung.
But for those drawn to money or stardom or solo influence, publicly
oriented sources of support have been eclipsed by privately oriented
ones, and the new patrons have their tastes and taboos.

It can be said that MarketWorld’s circuit, and the world of the
thought leader more generally, has had many virtuous effects. It has
made ideas more accessible and available to many people. It has
created, with the new form of videotaped talks, an alternative to the
heavy tomes that many people, frankly, didn’t read a generation ago
and aren’t about to start reading now. It has extended the opportu-
nity to reach a wide audience to people from backgrounds long shut
out by the old gatekeepers at publishing houses and newspapers.

But the world of thought leadership is easily conquered by char-

latans. It is long on “affirmation without any constructive criticism,”
as Drezner argues, emphasizing beautiful storytelling and sidelin-

ing the hurly-burly of disputation that helps ideas to get better and
keeps bad ones from attracting too many adherents. And h puts

94 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

thinkers in a compromised relationship to the very thing they are
supposed to keep honest and in check: power.

The phenomenon Drezner details matters far beyond the world
of thinkers, because on issue after issue, the ascendant thought

leaders, if they are positive, unthreatening, mute about larger sys-
tems and structures, congenial to the rich, big into private problem-
solving, devoted to win-wins-these thought leaders will edge out
other voices, and not just at conferences. They get asked to write
op-eds, sign book deals, opine on TV, advise presidents and pre-

miers. And their success could be said to come at the expense of the
critics’. For every thought leader who offered advice on how to build
a career in a merciless new economy, there were many less-heard
critics aspiring to make the economy less merciless.

The Hilary Cohens and Stacey Ashers and Justin Rosensteins and
Greg Ferensteins and Emmett Carsons and Jane Leibrocks and Sher-
vin Pishevars and Chris Saccas and Travis Kalanicks of the world
needed thinkers to formulate the visions of change by which they
would live-and to convince the wider public that they, the elite,
were change agents, were the solutions to the problem, and there-
fore not the problem. In an age of inequality, these winners longed
to feel, on one hand, that they had “some kind of ethical philoso-
phy,” as Pishevar put it. They needed language to justify themselves
to themselves and others. They needed the idea of change itself to be
redefined to emphasize “rolling with the waves, instead of trying to
stop the ocean.” The thought leaders gave these winners what they

needed.

Cuddy’s choice of topic at PopTech paid off. She hadn’t talked about the structural power of men. She had talked about poses
that individuals can do to feel more powerful, and the crowd had
loved it. Word of her compelling, digestible research and her Won-
der Woman shtick got out, and soon afterward she was asked to give

a main-stage TED talk.
She said she had no desire to sugarcoat reality in the talk. But she

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 95

decided to speak of the feeling of powerlessness that many women
experience without getting into the causes of that sentiment. In an
interview years later, she was straightforward about the motivation
behind her “power pose” research. It came, she said, from watching

her female students not speak in class: “Seeing their body language,
watching them shut down and curl themselves up, that truly was it
for me. It was watching that and then seeing myself behaving the
same way when I got into an interaction with a man who I found
intimidating.” In the interview, Cuddy minced no words about the
cause of the behavior. It flowed from “sexism.” But in the talk she

‘ sanded the rough edges of these ideas. She described the class-
rooms in which she had taught, where some stucieiits come in “like
caricatures of alphas,” physically and conversationally expansive,
and others are “virtually collapsing when they come in.” Then she
casually mentioned the gender factor, even though it was the found-
ing observation of the research. The collapsing behavior, she said,
“seems to be related to gender. So women are much more likely to
do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less power-
ful than men, so this is not surprising.”

Cuddy was a leading authority on why women chronically feel
less powerful than men, who does that to them, and how. But that
story was not for this stage. Instead, Cuddy led the audience toward
the findings of her and her colleagues’ study of “power poses.”

It was already known that being and feeling powerful made peo-
ple stand more grandly and spaciously. But what if you did not have
to redress those larger power imbalances to get more women speak-
ing up in the classroom? What if you could teach them to stand
grandly and spaciously in the hope of making them feel, and even
be, more powerful? What Cuddy and her colleagues wondered, she
said that day at TED, was: “Can you fake it till you make it? Like, can

you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behav-
ioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful?” Their big con-
clusion was that you can. “When you pretend to be powerful, you
are more likely to actually feel powerful,” she said. “Tiny ~eal

96 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

she asked the audience to share the poses far and wide, because,
she said, “the people who can use it the most are the ones with no
resources and no technology and no status and no power.” Now at
least they had new tools for pretending.

More than forty million people would eventually watch Cuddy’ s
TED talk, making it the second most popular talk of all time-even
as some began to question her research. Members of the “replica-
tion movement” in social psychology, who have been pushing for
more rigorous standards of double-checking, re-tested her findings

and reported the effects of posing on hormones to be nonexistent,
while acknowledging some effect on people’s self.reported feel-
ings. The ensuing battle turned bitter at times, with one of Cuddy’s
own coauthors publicly disavowing the power-pose work Cuddy
acknowledged on the TED website that “the relationship between
posture and hormones isn’t as simple as we believed it to be,” even
as she has continued to defend-and further research-the effects

of power posing on people’s emotional states. And the controversy
in academia did nothing to deter people from stopping her in the
street to thank her tearfully for giving them confidence. Her email
inbox began to overflow. She would soon land a book deal. And she
would become one of those people known for a phrase that you can
never escape-the “power pose” woman forevermore.

Cuddy was still Cuddy, was still a strong feminist, was still a
scholar and dangerously equipped foe of sexism. She remained
better qualified than most people on earth to explain why women
weren’t born feeling powerless but had that feeling implanted in
them. But she had pulled a punch in her talk, leaving out the critic-
style utterances and making a pleasant, constructive, actionable,
thought-leaderly case, and the world had rewarded her by listening.

As Cuddy figured out how to address these new forums and audi-ences, she had the benefit of many surrounding examples. The
culture was full of instruction, if you were open to it, about how
to become more hearable as a thinker-how to move toward the

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 97

thought-leader end of the critic/thought-leader continuum. This

becomes apparent when you consider some of Cuddy’s contempo-
raries who have also gone the thought-leader way. You start to see a
few basic dance steps in common-what we may call the thought-
leader three-step.

“Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator” is the first of these
steps. The phrase itself comes from Adam Grant, an organizational
psychologist who has surged to the highest altitudes of thought lead-
ership in recent years-“one of his generation’s most compelling
and provocative thought leaders,” as his own book jacket declares.

· When faced with a problem, the human instinct is ·often to hunt
for a culprit. But that is a win-losey approach to ·solving a problem.

· Grant proposed a more congenial way to deal with problems such

as sexism. “In the face of injustice, thinking about the perpetrator
fuels anger and aggression,” he wrote. “Shifting your attention to

the victim makes you more empathetic, increasing the chances that
you’ll channel your anger in a constructive direction. Instead of try-
ing to punish the people who caused harm, you’ll be more likely to
help the people who were harmed.”

The second step is to personalize the political. If you want to be
a thought leader and not dismissed as a critic, your job is to )1elp the
public see problems as personal and individual dramas rather than
collective and systemic ones. It is a question of focus. It is possible
to look at a street comer in Baltimore and zoom in on low-hanging
pants as the problem. It is possible to zoom out and see the problem
as overpolicing and a lack of opportunity in the inner city. It is pos-
sible to zoom out further and see the problem as the latest chapter
in a centuries-long story of the social control of African Americans.
Many thinkers tend to be zoomers-out by nature and training, see-
ing things in terms of systems and structures. But if they wish to be
thought leaders who are heard and invited back, it is vital to learn
how to zoom in.

Brene Brown, who has become a friend of Cuddy’s, offers a case
study in how to zoom in successfully. She was a scholar of social
work, a field that has produced few, if any, major thought leaders

98 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

besides her. Tbat may be because social work is almost constitution-
ally a zoom-out discipline. A psychologist’s analysis of a troubled
child may not go much further than the parents and home environ-
ment. But a social work scholar is educated to consider and write

journal articles in venues like Families in Society about the systems
beyond the home that implicate us collectively-crime-ridden neigh-
borhoods, failing foster care programs, chronic poverty, threadbare

health care offerings, lack of nutrition options. Tbis makes social
workers poor candidates for thought leadership, because at any

moment they might say something critical and win-losey.
As a researcher at the University of Houston, Brown started by

studying human connection, which led to studying shame, which
led to studying vulnerability-“this idea of, in order for connection
to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.” She
studied this for six years, after which time she came to one ines-
capable conclusion: “There was only one variable that separated
the people who have a strong sense oflove and belonging and the
people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have
a strong sense oflove and belonging believe they’re worthy oflove
and belonging. That’s it.” Now, scholars of social work tend not to
speak like this. Tbey are experts in the thicket of circumstances that
keep so many of us from being our fullest selves-some of them
escapable through individual effort, but many of them not, being

structural in nature, or depending on the choices of many other

actors we do not control.
Brown did not emphasize all of the other reasons and cir-

cumstances and forces-poverty, family abuse, police treatment,
addiction-that made some people feel worthy and others unworthy.
She became a thriving, Oprah-backed thought leader. She, too, gave
one of the most popular TED talks of all time. “We live in a vulnera-
ble world,” she said, in which people got sick, struggled in marriage,

got laid off, had to lay others off. Tbe country was deep into an eco-
nomic crisis when she said this. Millions had lost jobs and homes
and even loved ones as a complication. Brown warned people that

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 99

numbing the pain wasn’t the answer, though that is what Americans
were doing as “the most in-debt, obese, addicted, and medicated
adult cohort in U.S. history.” (Following the first step, about focus-
ing on the victim rather than the perpetrator, she did not mention

the powerful interests pushing debt and fat and opioids and mood
medications on people.) The answer to these woes was, for Brown,

in acceptance-in saying, “I’m just so grateful, because to feel thi~
vulnerable means I’m alive.” In an age awash in vulnerability, an
age in which the winners were reluctant to change anything too
fundamental, this mantra of feeling grateful for vulnerability caught
on. “There are 1,800 Facebookers today whose lives· will never be
the same,” a Facebook executive said after Brown spoke there. Tbe
winners loved her, Oprah loved her, and then everyone loved her.
And everyone was now able to have their piece of Brown as she be-
came that rarest of social work scholars-the productized one. She
offered an array of electronic courses that promised to train people
to be daring leaders, to “fully show up” in life, to engage in “self-
compassion,” to live bravely and vulnerably.

Tbis second step was, in a sense, to do the opposite of what a
generation of feminists had taught us to do. Tbat movement had
given the culture the phrase “the personal is political,” credited to
this passage from Carol Hanisch: “Personal problems are political
problems. There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only

collective action for a collective solution.” It was an important and

fruitful idea in February 1969. It helped people to see that things
that happened in ·the quiet of personal life, and yet happened over
and over again at the scale of the system, and happened because of
forces that no individual was powerful enough to counteract alone-
that these things had to be seen as and acted on politically, grandly,
holistically, and, above all, in the places where the power was. A

man beating a woman wasn’t just one man beating one woman; he
was part of a system of male supremacy and laws and a culture of
looking away that put the problem beyond solution by the wo:µian in
question. Tbe shame one felt in getting an abortion wasn’t a feeling

100 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

cooked up by the feeler; it was engineered and constructed through
public policy and the artful use of religious authority. The feminists

helped us to see problems in this way.
In our own time, the thought leaders have often been deployed to

help us see problems in precisely the opposite way. They are taking
on issues that can easily be regarded as political and systematic-
injustice, layoffs, unaccountable leadership, inequality, the abdica-
tion of community, the engineered precariousness of ever more
human lives-but using the power of their thoughts to cause us

to zoom in and think smaller. The feminists wanted us to look at a
vagina and zoom out to see Congress. The thought leaders want us
to look at a laid-off employee and zoom in to see the beauty of his
feeling his vulnerability because at least he is alive. They want us to
focus on his vulnerability, not his wage.

The third move is to be constructively actionable. It is fine and
good to write and say critical things without giving solutions-but

not if you want to be a thought leader. A compelling example of
this comes from Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter and
editor who has managed, better than most, to straddle the lives of
the critic and the thought leader. A journalist with a Harvard MBA,
Duhigg once spent a summer making financial models about the

turnaround of distressed companies, before concluding that he
would rather be a newspaper reporter. He won a Pulitzer Prize for
an investigation revealing Apple’s business tricks in managing for-
eign plants, paying and dodging taxes, and claiming patents. He
also exposed corporations for violating pollution laws more than
half a million times, and probed Fannie Mae’s near-fatal decision,
in the run-up to the Great Recession, to enter the “more treacher-
ous corners of the mortgage market.” Despite his business degree,
he had become what MarketWorld did not appreciate: a critic who

pointed out what was wrong without offering digestible lists of tips
on how to fix things.

Several years later, Duhigg began to write books. He could have
done so in the same vein, and one assumes that the books would
have been important. But would they have sold? “An investigative

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 101

series in the New York Times never mal

thing that’s wrong with the world or with a particular company or
with a situation,” he told me. “But when you read a book-nobody

really wants to read a book to just learn about how much things
suck, right? I mean, those books do exist, and they’re very, very valu-
able. But they tend to have, you know, limited audiences.” People,
especially the winners who shape tastes and patronize thought lead-
ers, want things to be constructive, uplifting, and given to hope. “In
addition to learning what’s wrong, they want to learn what’s right,”

· Duhigg said. And they like easy steps: “They want ·to learn what
they can do and how they can make themselves or the world a better

· place.”

Duhigg didn’t believe in this kind of solutions peddling when
wearing his investigative reporting hat, but he found it useful in his
emerging life as a thought leader. “Investigative reporting is trying
to avoid speculation,” he said. “Whereas in a book, at least half of
your effort should be speculating at solutions.” Yet if Duhigg was
right about the preference for solutions, it left less and.less space
for the kinds of thinkers and critics who have been important to our
society in the past. And it made ever more room for the kinds of
books that Duhigg began to write.

He produced books that MarketWorlders instantly loved, because
they either helped them or taught others to be like them. The first
was about how habits are made and broken, and it easily cleared the
hurdle of being constructively actionable. It included a story about
how Duhigg learned to stop eating a cookie every afternoon. And it
was his race to finish this first book that inspired the second. He was
busy, doing a little bit of everything and doing nothing well, he felt.
He longed to be more productive. Thus began a book on productiv-

ity, which would teach readers “to become smarter, faster, and better

at everything we do.” To MarketWorld, Duhigg became less threat-
ening. He now wanted to learn from the kinds of people he used to
bust. A centerpiece of the book was about what we could lear:n_ from
the most productive teams at Google, which at the time of the book’s

102 I WINNERSTAKEALL

release was close to dethroning Duhigg’ s former target Apple as the
most valuable company on earth.

Duhigg became a heavily sought-after thought leader-a fixture
of the bestseller lists, a denizen of the paid lecture circuit. “I’m

blessed,” he said. “I’m very lucky in that businesspeople want to
hear what I’m talking about and thinking about.” This gave him spe-
cial pleasure because of what some of his HBS classmates seemed
to think when he first went into journalism: that, as he put it, “some-
one handed you the winning lottery ticket and you decided to use

it as toilet paper.” He said, “I think they thought, economically, I
was making a foolish choice because I was going into an indus-
try where I was not going to make money-which, generally, that’s
been wrong, actually, but for a long time was true.”

One of the things that turned that dire assessment of his eco-
nomic prospects from true to false was speaking engagements.
Duhigg was adamant that his reliance on the income from those
speeches, as on making money from selling constructively action-
able books, in no way altered his ideas or corrupted him or caused
him to self-censor. Invoking the debate over his lecture circuit fellow
traveler Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Goldman Sachs, he said that
his experience “has been exactly the opposite” of what Clinton’s crit-
ics had said about her corruption from such speeches-and rather
parallel to her own defense of them. “They literally just want me to

give the speech,” he said. “I’m kind oflike the entertainment, right?
Not someone that they’re trying to buy access to.”

He thought for a moment about whether living off of speaking
gigs might cause thought leaders to self-censor. “Do you think peo-
ple begin not going down path lines of intellectual inquiry because
they’re worried that it will be alienating to a potential audience?” he
asked out loud. “Or do they skew their thinking in a way that would
make it more palatable to a business audience?” Sure, he conceded,
there must be some people who do, but it wasn’t a big problem. Yet a
moment later he added, “The question is, do you want to be wealthy
as a writer or do you want to be an intellectually honest, responsible
writer?”

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 103

Some years ago, another heavyweight of thought leadership,
Malcolm Gladwell, who, like Duhigg (and unlike many thought
leaders), had managed to retain social respectability, wrote a long
“disclosure” note on his website grappling with the complications of

wearing his “two hats” as a writer and a speaker. He argued:

Giving a speech does not buy my allegiance to the interests
of my audience. Why? Because giving a paid speech to a

group for an hour is simply not enough to create a bias in
that group’s favor. . . . Financial ties are in danger of being
corrupting when they are ties, when they are, in. some way,
permanent and when resources and influence and informa-
tion move equally in both directions.

Gladwell may be right that each speech is its own thing, not
enough to corrupt an honest person on its own. But can a speaking
career as a whole never form something like “ties” that have some
degree of permanence and a two-way flow of influence and infor-
mation? Many gigs insist on a phone call with the speaker, during
which the organizers inform the speaker about the context of the
event and what is “top of mind.” for attendees, and perhaps offer
suggestions to make the talk more relevant. Each gig is certainly its
own, but many of them grow out of a commercial world that does
harbor a consistent set of values and preferences for the depoliti-
cized, the actionable, the perpetrator-free. It is not easy to build a
career catering t

“It’s got to be about what I write. Don’t criticize me for who I talk
to,” the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman once said

‘ similarly insisting on his incorruptibility. Yet even if one were to

take Friedman and Gladwell at their word about the effect of money
on them as individuals, it is hard to accept the conclusion that the
plutocratic funding of ideas has no effect on the marketplace of
ideas as a whole.

104 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

The money can liberate the top thought leaders from the insti-

tutions and colleagues that might otherwise provide some kind of
intellectual check on them, while sometimes turning their ideas into
advertisements rather than self-contained work. As Stephen Marche
has written of the historian turned thought leader Niall Ferguson,

who reportedly earns between $50,000 and $75,000 per speech:

Nonfiction writers can and do make vastly more, and more
easily, than they could ever make any other way, including by

writing bestselling books or being a Harvard professor ….
That number means that Ferguson doesn’t have to please

his publishers; he doesn’t have to please his editors; he sure
as hell doesn’t have to please scholars. He has to please cor-

porations and high-net-worth individuals.

While individual thought leaders like Gladwell might resist the

temptations of changing their ideas for, say, a banking convention,
the plutocrats’ money amounts to a kind of subsidy for ideas they
are willing to hear. And subsidies have consequences, as the Har-

vard Business School professor Gautam Mukunda observes in a
piece about how Wall Street clings to power, including by cultivating
ideas that make us believe “that those with power are good and just

and doing the right thing”:

The ability of a powerful group to reward those who agree
with it and punish those who don’t also distorts the market-

place of ideas. This isn’t about corruption-beliefs naturally
shift in accord with interests. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is
difficult to get a man to understand something when his sal-
ary depends on not understanding it.” The result can be an
entire society twisted to serve the interests of its most power-

ful group.

The idea that thought leaders are unaffected by their patrons is
also contradicted by their very own speakers bureau websites, which

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 105

illustrate how the peddlers of potentially menacing ideas are ren-

dered less scary to gatherings of the rich and powerful. ”
Anat Admati is a Stanford economist and prominent critic of

the financial industry. “Bankers are nearly unanimous” about this

“persistent industry gadfly,” the New York Times reports: “Her ideas
are wildly impractical, bad for the American economy and not to
be taken seriously.” Admati’s writing has been praised for her abil-
ity “to question the status quo”; she is someone who “shreds bank-
ers’ scare tactics” and “exposes as false the self-serving arguments
against meaningful financial reform advanced by Wall Street execu-
tives and the captured politicians who serve their interests.” Admati
is also a thought leader, represented by the Leigh Bureau, a speaking
agency, which takes the hard, critical edge off in advertising a speak-
ing topic from her: “We can have a safer, healthier banking system
without sacrificing any of its benefits.”

Anne Applebaum, a Washington Post columnist who writes about
rising nationalism, Russian aggression, and other dark geopolitical
currents, is presented on her speaker page as a lecturer on “The
Politics ofTransition-Risks and Opportunities.”

Jacob Hacker is a political scientist at Yale. He was the one con-
cerned about the Even app, and a trenchant critic of America’s eco-
nomic direction over the last generation. He has written such books
as American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget
What Made America Prosper and The Great Risk Shift: The New Eco-
nomic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream. He is a very

win-losey thinker, and one of the most insightful critics of corpo-
rate America. This presents a challenge to his agents, who nonethe-
less find a way out: Hacker, somewhat denuded, becomes a “policy
thought leader on restoring security to the American dream.”

One may protest that these are just superficial tweaks in lan-

guage that do not alter the underlying message. Yet even were that
true in some cases, it is not self-evident that giving in to such tweaks
is without its costs. There is tremendous pressure to turn ~oughts
into commodities-into tiny, usable takeaways, into Monday morn-
ing insights for the CEO, into ideas that are profitable rather than

106 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

compelling for their own sake. To give in to this pressure, to make
your thoughts more actionable, to enter the business world’s domain

oflanguage and assumptions is in effect to surrender. In the poem
“Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry,” by Vladimir Maya-

kovsky, the poet realizes that he has no chance of getting his way
because the language in which he is forced to speak belongs to
another domain. The businessperson’ s amortization is factored into
his tax bill, but what about the poet’s “amortization of the heart and
soul”? The businessperson gets a break for his debts, but can the

poet claim the same advantage for his indebtedness “to everything/

about which/I have not yet written”?
Thought leaders can find themselves becoming like poets speak-

ing a tax collector’s language, saying what they might not say or
believe on their own. And the danger isn’t only in what they say in
this new language, but also in the possibility that they might some-
where down the line stop thinking in their native one.

F
ive years after giving her TED talk, Cuddy continued to live in the
beautiful new world it had built for her. She was now famous,

among the top thought leaders of her time.
Still, success, and the particular way in which it had come, had

caused a dilemma for her. She had been studying prejudice and sex-
ism for nearly twenty years, and even after her breakout continued
to work on those topics with academic colleagues. She had often
taken on such themes in harsh, perpetrator-blaming ways. But a
viral TED talk all but drowned out every other thing she had ever
said, and now she was :fielding lucrative invitation after invitation to

offer her ideas in that same safe way.
She found herself repeatedly being asked to speak or do work-

shops that came with a corporate expectation of usability. “Here’s
what’s frustrating me,” Cuddy told me. “Everyone wants me to come
in, and, basically, they want me to address prejudice and diversity
and fixing it. First of all, without saying those words, because that

might alarm people. And in one hour people want this to be done.

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 107

They have the sense that you can come in and reduce prejudice in
an hourlong talk, which is absurd. I’m tired of people asking me

questions lik~, ‘I really don’t know how to get the women to speak
up more in a boardroom.”‘ She had, as she saw it, tried to make

things a little easier for them with her talks. Now they wanted her to
morph into a quick-acting drug.

Cuddy saw herself as a person who had fought in the trenches
against sexism for most of her career, but now she was being played
back to herself as the dispenser of easy fixes. Even if she thought

of it as merely adding an aria to her repertoire, the world more and
more saw her as capable of singing just one song. When Market-
World likes you, it wants you as a product.

She worked to defy that perception. She was asked to teach
one of Harvard’s executive education seminars, at which midca-
reer business executives from around the world fly into Boston for
some intellectual refreshment. The organizers wanted her to talk to
the group about prejudice and diversity. They gave her roughly an
hour and hoped she could cover sexism, racism, and other topics.

She asked for three hours; they agreed on an hour and a half She
insisted on focusing on one topic alone-sexism-and ~n flying out
a male collaborator, Peter Glick, at her own expense, to help her deal

with a crowd that she expected to be tough. It was a highly global
group, largely male, and she had the bad luclc of teaching them dur-
ing a World Cup match that some of them soon made clear they
would rather be watching.

Cuddy, a body language expert, walked into a room that was a
textbook case of people closed off from the beginning. Nonetheless,
she tried to wear the hat of the critic, not the thought leader. In fact,
she and Glick started by flouting the first rule of thought leadership.
Instead of focusing on the victim, they spoke of the perpetration
of sexism. “We tried to start really soft by explaining how we’re all
bigots,” she said. So they were refusing to tallc about the feeling of
powerlessness that women get without naming who gives them that

feeling. But they were trying to be gentle about it. Glick; a leading
authority on the psychology of sexism, tried a classic tactic with men

108 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

wary of being called sexist: He spoke of his own sexism. He told a
story ofhow he once stepped in it by buying his wife a princess mug.

This approach did not help. “I actually stopped in the middle of
the class and I said, ‘I feel how frustrated people in this room are,

so can we stop for a moment and talk about what’s going on?”‘ But
talking didn’t help. “We had two slides at the end,” Cuddy said. “One
was individual things you can do to reduce sexism in your organi-
zation, and the second one was organizational things or structural
things. And we didn’t even get to them because there was so much

pushback on just the idea that there was a problem with sexism.”
Knowing even more now about the tastes and boundaries of

MarketWorld, Cuddy looks back and sees how she could have han-
dled the situation another way, although she isn’t sure that doing so
would have been honorable. “If I had gone in and said, ‘Hey, let’s
talk about empowerment and how to get the best out of our employ-
ees,’ that would’ve been totally different,” she said. People “would’ve
accepted that something is going on that makes it harder for women.

. to speak up. They would’ve accepted that because it would’ve been

about the bottom line. It would’ve been about making your organi-
zation the best. But when you go in and say, ‘Hey, here’s the truth.
The system is set up in a biased way. It favors white guys. Sorry,
but it does’-1 mean, you cannot get past that statement. That’s it.

You’re stuck there.”
Cuddy felt it harder and harder to speak truths like this the better

known she became. She became a target of the sexism she had long

drily studied: the almost inevitable fate of the online superstar. “The
misogyny that I experience as a female scientist who’s had success-

it’s repulsive, it’s awful, it’s disgusting,” she said. The attacks had a
paradoxical effect on her. On one hand, they made even more vivid
and personal to her the sexism she had studied through an academic

lens. Deemphasizing talk of the system had made her ideas more
accessible, which caused her to become even more aware of how
dismal the system was. Yet at the same time, the constant vitriol

made her less interested in devoting her work to fighting sexism
as a system. “I think there was a point where I said, ‘I’m tired of

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 10s

fighting this fight. I feel alone,'” Cuddy said in the interview. “As a
woman, I find it harder to do. It’s unpleasant, either dealing with

people who don’t believe me” -by this she meant men-“or who
I’m really disappointing”-now she spoke of women-“by telling,

‘Yeah, you’re right. You think there’s prejudice? There is, and it’s
hurting you.'” She hated to say it, but she didn’t “see the -isms going
away”-by which she meant sexism, racism, and other prejudices.
“That is largely because I do not see the people at the top really
willing to wrestle with them, really willing to take them on.” She

stopped believing that “people are going to make the big sweeping
changes that are actually going to change these things.”

If she was right, she felt that her best strategy was to help women
see the kinds of small-scale changes they could make without chang-
ing anything. “Basically, I can give them armor so that they can buf-
fer themselves and push through it even when it’s happening.” She
would teach them to roll with the waves. She would focus on the
victims, not the perpetrators .

The irony of all this is dark: Scaling back her critique of the sys-

tem had allowed her to be wildly popular with MarketWorld elites
and more easily digested by the world at large; and so she became
famous, which drew the system of sexism into her lif~ as never
before and heightened her awareness of it; and its ferocity con-
vinced her not to take on that system but to conclude that it might
never change; and this acquiescence made her turn from uprooting
sexism to helping women survive it. She had been drafted into a
growing brigade, the theorists of the kind of change that leaves the
underlying issues untouched.

“I might have a view that’s a little bit unorthodox,” said Cuddy,
“which is that, actually, we have done a really good job of document-
ing the problems and the mechanisms underlying them,” she said.
“We really fully understand all of the structural and psychological

and neurological mechanisms that lead to prejudice. We get it.” This
view of scholars’ work perhaps made it easier to justify the punch-
pulling for MarketWorld, but it was also problematic. Aft~r all, her
academic colleagues in other fields like race, gender, and sexuality-

110 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

to cite just a few examples-worked, in a slow, winding, often un-
heralded way, producing tangible change in an entire culture’s way
of talldng. Sometimes even the most risk-averse politicians now
casually voiced concepts coined at universities: “micro-aggressions”

(Chester Pierce, psychiatry, Harvard, 1970); “white privilege” (Peggy
McIntosh, women’s studies, Wellesley, 1988); “gender identity”
(Johns Hopkins School of Medicine); “intersectionality” (Kimberle
Williams Crenshaw, critical race theory, University of California at

Los Angeles, 1989).
Nonetheless, Cuddy believed that in her field, the real need was

for serious scholars, equipped with serious money, to work on solu-
tions and the implementation of what had already been learned. “I
actually think we need to start now doing really deep science on
interventions that work, and they are not going to be easy,” she said.
The interventions she had in mind involved something deeper and
more sustained than one-off diversity trainings and the like: “It’s
going to be lifelong.” .

. But what about the charge from some of her critics that power

poses, and perhaps other similarly oriented interventions, were just
feminism lite? Cuddy insisted not. She saw such interventions as
“tiny incremental change that over time can lead to downstream
measurable changes in your life.” She added, “This is not light-
weight shit. This is real stuff that happens, and it works a lot better

than trying to make a big change lil

Strangely, one of the things that makes it easier to accept the sys-
tem is that when you do, you will find yourselfbeing told more often
that you are changing things. Many genuine agents of change must
make peace with never being seen as such, at least within their own
lifetimes. One presumes that the scholars mentioned above, having

coined the new verbiage of a nation awakening to the realities of
identity and power, were rarely stopped on the street and told about
the difference they had made in so-and-so’s life. And Cuddy, during
her years of throwing scholarly rocks at sexism and other prejudices,

The Critic and the Thought Leader j 11

had to trust that she was changing things, but wasn’t told so by th(
public. Yet when she scaled back her claims, when she depoliticized

when she focused on the actionable, when she accepted that sht
didn’t “see the -isms going away,” when she focused on how indi-

vidual women could navigate a bad system, ironically, at that very
moment of relinquishing hope of changing systems in a serious
way, she began to be stopped everywhere she went by women who
thanked her for changing their lives. Even if she had narrowed her
ambitions, she was attracted to the personal gratification that came
with the more doable kind of change.

Cuddy was raised in a working-class town in Pennsylvania, and
she has come to feel, thanks to the fame that po~er posing brought
her, that she is helping the kinds of people she grew up with. “Most
of the people that I hear from who say, ‘You really changed my life,’
are not the powerful people,” she said. “They’re the people who
really do deal with incredible adversity and figure out these ways to
get through it.”

Cuddy says she remains committed to fighting sexism as a sys-
tem of power, and she still conducts research along those lines. But
it is, she says, “and I’m just being honest, less personally gratify-

ing.” Still, she seemed to wonder about her choices: “It’s not the way
I thought I would go when I started in this field.”

I f Cuddy was caught between the polarities of criticism and
thought leadership, Simon Sinek was confidently and comfortably

ensconced at the thought-leader end of things. Sinek is now famous
for the idea that companies and people should “start with why”-
should discover and organize their lives around a single animating
purpose. His own “why,” he said, is “to inspire people to do what
inspires them.”

He was put onto the path of thought leadership, he said, by the
fact that as a young man he was largely unable to read. His mind
hopped and twirled too much to stay on the page; he had ~ atten-
tion deficit issue. But Sinek likes to see problems as opportunities

112 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

in disguise: “I believe that the solutions we find to our challenges as
children become our strengths as adults.” He realized he couldn’t
learn through reading. He could learn only through talking. When
he became a thought leader, and a highly successful- one, and the

time came for him to write a book, he did his research in a curious
way. “If books need to be read, I’ll ask somebody to read it for me
and then explain it to me, and let me ask him questions,” he said.
This was his own, very particular way into a quality that defined
many thought leaders: a certain freedom from any kind of intel-

lectual tradition, a comfort with pronouncing on a subject with-
out being burdened by what others had said about it before. This

advantage, as Sinek saw it, was soon compounded by another: sev-
eral years of training in advertising, which was useful because the
thought leader’s work was often to make ideas as catchy and sticky
and digestible as ads, and to use ideas as advertisements for work-
shops, paid speeches, and consulting.

Sinek had initially set out to study law in Britain, but he realized
. not long after the course began that “it didn’t fit me and I didn’t fit
it.” He quit in the middle of his first year, to his parents’ horror, and
went into the world of advertising. There he “learned the impor-
tance of the role of emotions,” he said; “that it’s not just an argu-

ment but rather that you can make somebody feel a certain way or
connect to them in a certain way.” He learned that “rather than just

facts and figures, if you can get someone to associate their lives and
themselves to whatever it is you’re doing, and assert whatever it is
you’re doing into their lives, you’re more likely to create not only a
saleable product but love.”

He remained in advertising for several years, working for such
clients as Enron and Northwest Airlines. Then he started his own
marketing agency, taking on clients such as Oppenheimer Funds,
ABC Sports, GE, and AOL. But his passion for the work waned, and

he grew stressed with the duty to perform for clients and employees.
“I spent most of my days lying, hiding, and faking,” he said. “And
it became darker and darker, and more and more stressful. I would
go to business conferences to learn how to do things right, and they

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 11

would actually malce me feel worse. Because this guy would stanc
on the stage and tell me everything I wasn’t doing.”

One day, a friend asked whether he was alright. Sinek told hei
_he felt depressed. Getting that off his chest “gave me the courage

to start seeking a solution.” At the heart of the solution that wouk
emerge was an idea that Sinek branded as “the Golden Circle.”
Imagine a circle. The core of the circle is the “why,” the purpose
or cause, of a business. The ring outside the core is the “how,” the

actions the company takes to live out the purpose. The ring outside
that is the “what”-the results of those actions, measured in prod-
ucts and services.

Sinek had come up with the rudiments oftlie framework while
trying to figure out “why some advertising works and some doesn’t.”
One day he was at a “black-tie affair,” he said, and he sat beside a
guest whose father was a neuroscientist. Sinek says the neuroscien-
tist’s daughter began telling him about her father’s work with “the
limbic brain and the neocortex.” This led Sinek to follow up with
his own research on the brain. “I started realizing that the way the
human brain made decisions was th~ same as this little idea that I
had on a shelf,” he said. As he would later put it, “None of what I’m
telling you is my opinion. It’s all grounded in the tenets of biology.
Not psychology, biology. If you look at a cross section of the human

brain, from the top down, the human brain is actually broken into
three major components that correlate perfectly with the Golden

Circle.” The why and how of what people do is, according to Sinek’ s
(incredibly controversial and highly oversimplified) brain theory,
controlled by the limbic brain, while the what of what people do is
controlled by the evolutionarily newer neocortex. The science may
have been dubious, but it did sound fancy.

He started his new career as a thought leader by helping people
find their whys for $100 each. He would sit with them and interview

them for four hours about their “natural highs,” their moments of
peak inspiration, and then inform them of their purpose in life.

The service caught on, and it would eventually lead him t~ giving a
wildly successful TED talk, publishing widely read business books,

114 I WINNERSTAKEALL

and racking up gig after gig speaking to and advising corporate
types. This rocket-ship success as a thought leader has a (slightly
apocryphal-sounding) founding story. In Canada on a business trip,
Sinek went out for breakfast with a former client. His friend asked:

“What are you up to these days?” As I did everywhere, I pull
out a napkin and started drawing circles. And he says to me,
“This is amazing. Can you come and share those with my
CEO?” And I looked at my watch, and I go, “Sure.” So we

walked over to his company. I sit down with the CEO. It’s a
small business. I take her through the Golden Circle and the
concept of the “why,” and she says, “This is amazing. Can you
help our company discover their ‘why’?” I said, “Sure.” She

said, “Could you do it this afternoon?” I was like, “Sure.” She
says, “How much is it?”

And, of course, what goes through my head is $100. So
I said, “It’s $5,000,” and she said, “Okay.” And I made five
grand for two and a half hours’ worth of work and literally

walked out of there giggling. I literally was walking the street,
laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of this whole day. But
more importantly, I realized that I could actually make a liv-
ing doing this thing. I was literally doing math in my head:
how many days I could work at five grand a pop to make the
same living that I was mal

Sinek was not burdened by a multiplicity of ideas. This was his
one big idea, and he now set out to spread it. “I’m a preacher of a
gospel, and I’m looking for people to join me in the gospel and help
me preach the good word,” he said. For the aspiring thought leader,
it is less important to have an undergirding of scholarly research
than it is to be your idea-to perform and hawk it relentlessly. Sinek
was good at this: He embodied his own dogma about living one’s
life in service of a single, pulsing “why.” He had confidence and

zeal and persistence. He knew how to “productize” his thoughts, as
they say in the business world. He gradually built up a vast business

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 11

with two_ divisions: One was for all the things he did himself, sud
a~ speaki~g and writing; the other was for all the things others die
without him, such as speeches given by more junior thought lead-
ers he had recruited to his network and the sales of his books and
other wares.

. That there is someone out there ‘willing to promote some ques-
t1~nable gospel i~ nothing strange. What is more striking is how
ehte~ embrace an idea such as this. Sinek lectures to and consults for

a va~ie~ of influential institutions and people, including (according
to his literary agency) Microsoft, American Express, the U.S. Depart-
me~t of Defense, members of Congress, the United Nations, and
foreign ambassadors. Thought-leaders-in-the-making might have
to compromise_ themselves, but that compromise can be lavishly

rewarded. And In the embrace they receive, it is not their values that
are rev~aled so much as the values of those MarketWorld elites who
are their patron~ and impassioned base: their love of the easy idea

that ~oes do~ like gel~t~, _an idea that gives hope while challenging
n~thmg. Their suscepubihty to scientific authority, no matter how
thin or dis~uted. Their need for ideas to be useful, results-oriented,
~rofitable m order to receive their support. Their wariness of collec-

~ve p~litical purp~se, and their preference for purpose to_ be priva-
tized mto ~omethmg small and micro, trapped inside companies
and exe~uves. Their interest in a man like Sinek giving their work-
aday busmesses the glow of heroism change making · · f , – , rmss10n-o
a c~use. That ideas like these guide the rich and powerful in their
busmess lives is-what it is But is this the kind ofthinki· . · ngwewant
to guide the solution of our biggest shared problems?

Sinek himself seemed to have doubts about the thought lead-
ers’ ascendancy. While he obviously believed in his own ideas he
made a point of criticizing thought-leader charlatans whom he fret-
ted were being birthed by a new age of plutocratically bacl

and the c~~odification of thought. “I have contempt for people in
the speaking arcuit,” he said, even though he was one of the leadin

fi~res on the speaking circuit. “Even though I’m getting lu~ped i!
with people who do have spealcing goals and call themselves moti-

116 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

vational speakers or whatever they call themselves, I have contempt
for these guys who I love, who I think are brilliant, and I see them
stand on stages presenting to companies that I know they disagree.
with, saying shit that I know is not true,” he said. “I go up to them
after, and I’m like, ‘Dude, why would you do that?’ And they’ll say,

‘Simon, I’ve got to make a living,’ and I think ‘got to make a living’
is a rationalization we tell ourselves to do things without integrity.”

Although some describe Sinek himself in precisely the same terms,
he viewed such pandering as something that he had managed to

stay above.
“Sometimes it’s very difficult, and I’m empathetic with the strug-

gle,” he went on. “Somebody offers you a massive amount of money
to do something, and you say no in integrity. And then they offer you
more money because they thought it was a matter of money, and it
wasn’t. And then you sit there and go, ‘Oh man. I could just do one.
I could just do one.”‘

Not long ago, he was invited to an advice circle. It was ten or
so people, and many in the group were big-name thought leaders
like Sinek. “We’re supposed to be talking about how we can com-
bine our efforts to advance the greater good,” he said. “That’s why
I showed up. And every single one of them tallced about how they
can increase their mailing lists, how they can get an extra dollar for
X, Y, z, how they can sell more products. And I literally sat there,
and I was disgusted.” Even ifhe perfectly embodied how ideas were
being turned into products, he had found a way to see himself as a
purist among sellouts. “It becomes a business,” he said. “And, look,
there’s a lot of guys whose first book, their breakout, is absolutely
all integrity-took them their whole lives to get there. And then the
money gets involved, and the business gets involved, the TV gets
involved, the TED gets involved, and it becomes seductive. And
some give in to the seduction, and some are able to sort of manage
the seduction, and it’s not easy. Like I said, I turned down things,
but it doesn’t mean it’s not stressful to turn them down, because it’s
a lot of money, and I can rationalize fast.”

The world of ideas “is just another industry,” he said after a

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 1′.

moment. “There’s good product, and there’s bad product.” Th
question is whether a republic can thrive when ideas are thougb
of as an industry, and the prevailing incentives so heavily favor ba(
product. Is this how we want ideas to be generated? And are th(

·elites who embrace and sponsor such ideas the people we trust tc
arrange our future?

Amy Cuddy wants to believe the thought leader can use the tricks of her trade to transcend the pitfalls of thought leader-
ship. She wants to believe there is a micro way into the macro-that

we can Sheryl Sandberg our way to a Simone de Beauvoir-worthy
society. She wants to believe that a thought leader can also be a critic,

that she can use her embrace by MarketWorlders to effect change
from within. She thinks the secret to cajoling them toward systemic
reform may lie in blending two disparate concepts from her field.
One is about how to get people to care about a problem by zooming
in on a vivid person. The other is about how to get them to care by
zooming out from one person to see a: system.

The first of these concepts is known as the “identifiable-victim
effect.” As Deborah Small and George Loewenstein, scholars at
Carnegie Mellon University, write in a major paper:

People react differently toward identifiable victims than to
statistical victims who have not yet been identified. Specific

victims of misfortune often draw extraordinary attention
and resources. But, it is often difficult to draw attention to

‘ or raise money for, interventions that would prevent people
from becoming victims in the first place.

Small and Loewenstein’s research confirms what many budding
thought leaders intuit by reading the faces in the crowd: that people
feel and care more when you help people to see a problem in terms
of individuals. In Cuddy’s case, she experienced this when~ver she
spoke about young girls, rather than adult women, shrinking physi-

118 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

cally. A light would go off in the heads of men with daughters. “A

sixty-year-old man would come up to me and go, ‘Oh my God, thank
you so much. This is so important for my daughter and for her kids.’
‘Ib.ey were open to it. Suddenly, the audience that I could never cap-

ture when I talk about, ‘You need to change as a leader; you need to

say that this is not okay; you need to do this and that’-those people
who completely turned off to me were suddenly open when I was

talking about their daughters and the opportunities their daughters

would have.”
Cuddy wondered if a thought leader could use feedback like this

to her advantage. If you want to talk about the structural power of
sexism, first make people think of their daughters. “People want

their daughters to have every opportunity, but they don’t feel like
that about their female coworker,” Cuddy said. For a thought leader,

the advantage of zooming in, of telling the story of sexism and power
and systems as a story about your daughter is that you hook people.
The risk, which the thought leader may or may not acknowledge,
is that you change the nature of the problem by that act of zoom~

· ing. By framing it as a problem for their daughter, you shrink the
issue. “‘Inere’s this problem where people don’t generalize beyond
their daughter, because their daughter is different from other girls,”

Cuddy said. “‘Iney call it subtyping.” It is the age-old phenomenon

of the racist who says, “My black friend is different.”
Many thought leaders, facing this pressure, give in. And Cuddy

insists that it is not because they don’t wish ,to press for bigger
changes but because they are human. “It’s not that you, as a thinker,
are forgetting that it’s about the group. You’re not,” she says. “When
you’re talking to other humans, you want a response, you want to see

them move, you want something other than a neutral facial expres-

sion. You want an interaction. You crave that. And so when you find
over time, talldng about these ideas, that when you start talking
about individuals, suddenly people start becoming animated, I see
how you’re led down that path or how you follow that path. It’s not

just more gratifying; it gives you hope. You actually feel like people

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 11:

are going to change. I think that’s where you start to thinl<, Now have to reach all of them as individuals."

Listening to Cuddy, it was possible to understand the symbiosi~
that developed between MarketWorld elites and their thought lead-

ers. The thought leaders put out a variety ofideas and, being human
beings, noticed what moved people at places like the Aspen Ideas
Festival and TED. What especially moved such audiences was the
rendering of social problems as unintimidating, bite-sized, digest-
ible. The thought leader picked up on this and spoke more and more

in these terms. The audience responded more and more raptur-
ously. The actual nature of the problem receded. .

This is why Cuddy was interested in the possibilities of the sec-
ond social psychology concept, the one involving zooming out. She
felt it might break up this limiting symbiosis. The formal term for
the concept is the “assimilation effect,” and it occurs when people
link the personal and specific to the surrounding social context. You
tell the story of that one girl, and those men think of their daugh-
ters, but then they also “assimilate the concept of their daughter to
other girls. It’s the girls who don’t look like their daughter. It’s the
girls who have brown skin and who are from poor f~ies,” she
said. The challenge, as Cuddy sees it, is to humanize a vast political
and social. problem without triggering the opposite reacti~n, which
is called the “contrast effect.” “Oh my God, but my daughter is so
special,” Cuddy said, mimicldng the contrast reaction. “She’s so dif-
ferent from all of the other girls. I need to protect her from that. I
need to protect oply her.”

The thought leader, when he or she strips politics from the issue,
makes it about actionable tweal

120 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

sacrifice of privilege and the expenditure of significant resources,
may inspire a rich man to tum away.

For her own sense of integrity, Cuddy wants to find an escape
from this trap: to focus on helping victims, to draw people into prob-

lems by zooming in, but to avoid giving power a pass. “How do
you bring these things together?” she asked. “Messages about what
the in-group is doing wrong, unless it’s with the lining of hope that
here’s an easy thing you can do to be a better person-I think
that those messages are the ones that get shut down.”

What happens to a society when there is not one Amy Cuddy but thousands of thought leaders, each making their private
bargains, pulling punches in order to be asked back, abiding certain
silences? What is the cumulative effect of all ofl:hese omissions?

In part, they have given rise to watered-down theories of change
that are personal, individual, depoliticized, respectful of the status
quo and the system, and not in the least bit disruptive. The more
genuine criticism is left out and the more sunny, actionable, take-

away-prone ideas are elevated, the shallower the very idea of change
becomes. When a thought leader strips politics and perpetrators

from a problem, she often gains access to a bigger platform to influ-
ence change-makers-but she also adds to the vast pile of stories
promoted by MarketWorld that tell us that change is easy, is a win-
win, and doesn’t require sacrifice.

What the thought leaders offer MarketWorld’s winners, wittingly

or unwittingly, is the semblance of being on the right side of change.
The kinds of changes favored by the public in an age of inequality, as
reflected from time to time in some electoral platforms, are usually
unacceptable to elites. Simple rejection of those types of changes
can only invite greater hostility toward the elites. It is more useful
for the elites to be seen as favoring change-their kind of change, of
course. Take, for example, the question of educating poor children
in a time of declining social mobility. A true critic might call for an
end to funding schools by local property taxes and the creation, as

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 12

in many advanced countries, of a common national pool that fund:
schools more or less equally. What a thought leader might offer Mar
ketWorld and its winners is a kind of intellectual counteroffer-thE
idea, say, of using Big Data to better compensate star teachers anc
weed out bad ones. On the question of extreme wealth inequality, a

critic might call for economic redistribution or even racial repara-
tions. A thought leader, by contrast, could opine on how foundation
bosses should be paid higher salaries so that the poor can benefit
from the most capable leadership.

When this denuding of criticism happens on not one or two
issues but every issue of import, the thought leaders are not merely
suppressing their own ideas and intuitions. They are also participat-
ing in MarketWorld’s preservation of a troubled status quo by ges-
turing to change-making. Not long ago, Bruno Giussani, the man
who had hosted Amy Cuddy’s TED talk, was grappling with his own
role in this phenomenon. Giussani is one of a small handful of cura-
tors of the TED organization, and the host of some of its events. It
was from his stage in Edinburgh that Cuddy catapulted to global
stardom several years earlier. A former journalist from Switzerland,

Giussani is one of the small team of senior executives who decide on
presenters for the conference’s main stages, who coach the speak-

ers and edit the talks, and who help disseminate their ideas. He is
known to be something of a dissenter from the technology-loving,
market-admiring ethos that dominates TED events, but obviously
not to the extent that he doesn’t still work for TED. He is a behind-
the-scenes ope:rp-tor who doesn’t have a household name but has
helped to make many of them.

Giussani was meant to be on a long-awaited sabbatical. But he
had quit his respite a few months early, because the rise of populism
around the world and the spreading politics of anger had him wor-
ried and wondering about what had happened to societies gone mad.

At first the anger at elites could seem puzzling, for in Giussani’s
own social circles he saw a plethora of organizations and people
socially concerned and socially active. “You go to any dinner, and not

only at TED or at Skoll or at Aspen or anywhere else, but you go to

122 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

any dinner with people in this circle,” he said, “and to your right is
somebody who just sent $1 million to an NGO in Africa, and to your
left there is somebody whose son just came back from spending s:ix
weeks operating on somebody in a field hospital.” Giussani joked

that there were so many elite do-gooders trying to change the world
that “if everybody would jump at the same time, it would probably
tilt the axis of the earth.” And yet look what was happening to the
world-seething populism, anger, division, hatred, exclusion, and
fear.

In recent years, Giussani noticed how elites seemed increasingly
guided by lite facsimiles of change. These ideas largely exempted
markets and their winners from scrutiny, despite their immense
power in deciding how people’s lives were lived and their support
for a system that produced extraordinary fortunes and extraordinary
exclusion. These notions of change were shaped and hemmed in by
the complex of “intellectual assumptions that have dominated the
last two decades,” Giussani said. Among them: “Businesses are the
engines of progress. The state should do as little as possible. Market
forces are the best way at the same time to allocate scarce resources
and to solve problems. People are essentially rational, self-interest-
driven actors.” Speaking as a man who had controlled access to one
of the most powerful stages in the world, Giussani said that over this
period, “certain ideas have got more airtime because they fit into

those intellectual assumptions.” Others :fit less well.
MarketWorld finds certain ideas more acceptable and less threat-

ening than others, he said, and it does its part to help them through
its patronage of thought leaders. For example, Giussani observed,
ideas framed as being about “poverty” are more acceptable than
ideas framed as being about “inequality.” The two ideas are related.
But poverty is a material fact of deprivation that does not point fin.
gers, and inequality is something more worrying: It speaks of what
some have and others lack; it flirts with the idea of injustice and
wrongdoing; it is relational. “Poverty is essentially a question that
you can address via charity,” he said. A person of means, seeing
poverty, can write a check and reduce that poverty. “But inequal-

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 123

ity,” Giussani said, “you can’t, because inequality is not about giving

back. Inequality is about how you make the money that you’re giv-
ing back in the first place.” Inequality, he said, is about the nature
of the system. To fight inequality means to change the system. For a

privileged person, it means to look into one’s own privilege. And, he
said, “you cannot change it by yoursel£ You can change the system
only together. With charity, essentially, if you have money, you c~
do a lot of things alone.”

This distinction ran parallel to Cuddy’s reframing ofher antisex-
ism message in her TED talk. What motivated her to study the topic
was inequality-specifically, a lack of power in one set of students
because of the power held by another set (and people like them).

This was a crime with a victim and a perpetrator. By the time this
idea made it to TED, the inequality, as we’ve seen, had been re-
sculpted into poverty. “Women,” Cuddy said, “feel chronically less
powerful than men.” The crime was still a crime, but now it wanted
for suspects.

Giussani had a clearer view than most of how thinkers were
tempted into this kind of thought leadership. It wasn’t as though
you had no choice but to compromise. You could easily develop your
ideas and promote them through what he labeled “marginal maga-
zines” and “militant conferences.” But your reach would be limited.
If you had acquired from the age something like what Hilary Cohen

had acquired, the sense of wanting to help others at Coca-Cola-like
scale, and you knew your ideas could help, you could feel that your
purity would lin* your reach, which would hurt rather than help
all the people who needed you. Your alternative, Giussani said, was
to do what Cuddy had done: Bite your tongue to open their ears.
”You can go out and make this stuff known by packaging it in a way
that it becomes appealing to big stages, high-level audiences or large
audiences, hoping that in that context you can still put in enough of
those ideas that are supposed to drag them along, rather than just
those ideas that are supposed to please them or satisfy them or just
keep them there listening to you.”

There is a tendency in MarketWorld to deny what Cuddy and

124 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

Giussani candidly admit: that one does, often but not always, have to

keep certain ideas at bay in order to gain a hearing. “You need to cut
some of your moral corners or some of your convictions in order to

package your ideas to make them palatable to this ldnd of environ-

ment,” Giussani says. For many thought leaders, he said, it was still
a terrific deal. “If that’s your belief,” he said, “you want to be able to
repeat that next week and the following week-and by repeating it
and by reinforcing it and by keeping researching on it and by touch-
ing more and more people, you’re trying to have an impact to create

change.”
Many thinkers cut these moral comers and contort themselves

in these ways because they are so reliant on the assent of Market-
World for building their careers. Some manage to forge robust
careers without a single paid speaking gig, without summer panels
at the Monsanto- and Pepsi-sponsored Aspen Ideas Festival, without
the usage of platforms like TED or Facebook, where sunnier ideas
have more of a shot. There remains, Daniel Drezner observes in The
Ideas Industry, “a middle class ofintellectuals housed in the academy,

· think tanks, and private firms.” But they have few of the opportuni-
ties of the thought leaders shooting past them into the stratosphere
of fame and public recognition. “To stay in the superstar rank, intel-
lectuals need to be able to speak fluently to the plutocratic class,”
Drezner writes, adding, “If they want to make potential benefactors
happy, they cannot necessarily afford to speak truth to money.”

It isn’t that any of those elites had ever telephoned Giussani and
told him to keep this or that person offstage. It does not happen
like that, he said. These invisible mantras are enforced subtly. One
means of enforcement is the preference these days for thinkers who
remind winners of their victorious selves, Giussani said. A critic in
the traditional mold is often a loser figure-a thorn, an outside agi-

tator, a rumpled cynic. The rising thought leaders, even though their
product is ideas, are less like that and more like sidekicl

powerful-buying parkas in the same Aspen stores, traveling the
same conference circuit, reading the same Yuval Noah Harari books,

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 12~

getting paid from the same corporate coffers, accepting the same
basic consensus, observing the same intellectual taboos.

“People like winners, and we don’t like losers, and this is the
reality,” he said. And, yes, he knew one could argue that people like

him should defy that preference rather than pander to it. “If confer-
ences don’t put losers onstage, then they will forever remain los-
ers,” Giussani said, anticipating his critics. But he told himself that
it was unfair “asking a conference organizer or the New York Times
to solve a social problem at the end of the chain that exists because

people like winners and don’t like losers. Ifl put only losers onstage,
I become one of them because nobody comes to my conference.”
(He said he was using “losers” in thick quotation marks, to capture
how they are perceived, not his own view. And, to be fair, Giussani
has smuggled a number of critics onto the TED stage, most notably
Pope Francis.)

It wasn’t necessarily malice or cynicism that sustained these
patterns, but, in Giussani’s telling, something far more banal. The

people who served as tastemakers for the global elite-people like
Giussani-were, like many, in an intellectual bubble. “The French

have an expression for that, which is une pensee unique. The sole way
of thinking? Everybody thinks the same way.” In his world, he said,
that meant an unspoken consensus (widespread but not total) on
certain ideas: Progressive views are preferable to conservative ones;
globalization, though choppy, is ultimately a win-win-win-win; most
long-term trends are positive for humanity, making many supposed
short-term probl~ms ultimately inconsequential; diversity and cos-
mopolitanism and the free flow of human beings are always bet-
ter than the alternatives; markets are the most realistic way to get
things done.

What this pensee unique did was cause his tribe to “ignore a lot
of issues that were r.elevant to other people and not to us,” Giussani
said. “And so the more this went on, the more we kind ofleft behind
a lot of these issues and sensitivities and culture eventually-culture

in a broad sense that then came back and is haunting us.” By this

126 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

he meant the rising populist anger, for which he blamed himself in
a modest way.

Of course, it wasn’t only curators and arbiters like him who pro-
tected their own worldview and shut out others. It was also the elite
audiences who heard only what they wanted to hear. He gave the

example of Steven Pinker’s popular TED talk on the decline of vio-
lence over the course of history, based on his book The Better Angels
of Our Nature. Pinl

to thought leadership’s temptations. Yet his talk became a cult favor-
ite among hedge funders, Silicon Valley types, and other winners. It
did so not only because it was interesting and fresh and well argued,
but also because it contained a justification for keeping the social
order largely as is.

Pinker’ s actual point was narrow, focused, and valid: Interper-
sonal violence as a mode of human problem-solving was in a long
free fall. But for many who heard the talk, it offered a socially accept-
able way to tell people seething over the inequities of the age to drop ·
their complaining. “It has become an ideology of: The world today
may be complex and complicated and confusing in many ways, but
the reality is that if you take the long-term perspective you will real-
ize how good we have it,” Giussani said. The ideology, he said, told
people, “You’re being unrealistic, and you’re not looking at things
in the right way. And if you think that you have problems, then, you
know, your problems don’t really matter compared to the past’s, and

your problems are really not problems, because things are getting
better.”

Giussani had heard rich men do this kind of thing so often that
he had invented a verb for the act: They were “Pinkering” -using
the long-run direction of human history to minimize, to delegiti-
mize the concerns of those without power. There was also economic
Pinkering, which “is to tell people the global economy has been
great because five hundred million Chinese have gone from poverty
to the middle class. And, of course, that’s true,” Giussani said. “But
if you tell that to the guy who has been fired from a factory in Man-

The Critic and the Thought Leader I 127

chester because his job was taken to China, he may have a different
reaction. But we don’t care about the guy in Manchester. So there are

many facets to this kind of ideology that have been used to justify
the current situation.”

· Here is an expert example of Pinkering, from the social psy-
chologist Jonathan Haidt. Notice how accurate observations about
human progress between the time of hunter-gatherers and the pres-
ent creep into criticism-shaming:

We’re this little, tribal species that was basically just sort of
beating each other up, and competing with each •other in all
these ways, and somehow or other, we’ve risen so vastly far
above our design specifications. I look around at us and I say,

go humanity. We are fantastic. Yeah, there’s ISIS, there’s a lot
of bad stuff, but you people who think that things are bad, you
are expecting way too much.

As a TED curator, Giussani was one of many people who had
helped to build a new intellectual sphere in recent decades. It turned
thought leaders into our most heard philosophers. It p~t many on
the payroll of companies and plutocrats as their means of making
a living. It promoted a body of ideas friendly to the winne~s of the

age. It beamed out so many thoughts about why the world was get-
ting better in recent years that its antennae failed to detect all the

incoming transmissions about all the people whose lives were not

improving, who didn’t care to be Pinkered because they knew what
they were seeing, and what they were seeing was a society in which
a small number of conference-going people and their friends were
hoarding much of the progress they claimed to be inevitable, abun-
dant, and beneficial to all.

Now in America, in Europe, and beyond, revolts were under way.
People were rejecting the winners’ consensus that Giussani had
described. Had MarketWorld’s commandeering and distortion of

the realm of ideas contributed to the anger that so disturbed him?
“Of course that distortion contributed,” he said. “I believe even that

128 I WINNERS TAKE ALL

it is one of the biggest engines of it.” MarketWorld elites spun an
intellectual cocoon for themselves, and kept repeating the stories
that insured against deep change. Meanwhile, Giussani said, mil­
lions around the world were “feeling that a big chunk of their reality
was being ignored at best, censored, or ridiculed even.”

Eventually, they would do something about it.

CHAPTER 4: THE CRITIC AND THE THOUGHT LEADER

Amy Cuddy’s research papers can be found on her Google Scholar page:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ikdjewoAAA AJ. Her paper on
men and perceptions of independence and interdependence is “Men as
Cultural Ideals: How Culture Shapes Gender Stereotypes” (Harvard Busi­
ness School Working Paper 10-097, 2010). Andrew Zolli’s essay is
“Leam­ing to Bounce Back” (New York Times, November 2., 2.012).

Regarding the statistics on job security: The tenure data come from
“Higher Education at a Crossroads,” a report by the American Association
of University Professors (March-April 2016): www.aaup.org/sites/default
/files/2015-16EconornicStatusReportpdf (accessed September 2017). The
newsroom data come from “Newsonomics: The Halving of America’s
Daily Newsrooms,” by Ken Doctor (Nieman Lab, July 28, 2015).

The Adam Grant quotes are from his book Originals: How Non­
Conformists Move the World (New York: Viking, 2016). The quotes from

A Note on Sources 275

Brene Brown come from “The Power of Vulnerability,” her talk at TED>.
Houston (June 2010). Carol Hanisch’s quote comes from her 1969 essa
“The Personal Is Political,” available at her website: www.carolhanisch.org
CH.writings/PIP.html (accessed September 2017). Malcolm Gladwell’s du.
cussion of the ethical quandary of paid speaking can be found in a “Disdc

sure Statement» on his website: http://gladwell.com/disdosure-statemen
(accessed September 2017). The Stephen Marche criticism of Niall Fergu
son is from “The Real Problem with Niall Ferguson’s Letter to the 1%
(Esquire, August 2012.). Gautam Mukunda’s observation is originally fron
his essay “The Price of Wall Street’s Power” (Harvard Business Review, Jun

274 A Note on Sources

Social Progress: Use of Change and Rebellion by the Rich and Powerful People

The rich and powerful play a leading role in the initiation and perpetuation of progress in society. The groups of people contribute to change in myriad ways, which include advocacy for the progress and initiation of projects and programs that steer change. It is worth noting that the wealthy adopt different approaches to enhance the progress. After all, no standard(s) suffices for the introduction of progress in society and change-makers enjoy the liberty to experiment with different techniques. Social progress is indeed possible when the rich and powerful use the language of change and rebellion for their agenda.

Richness and power imply the ability to influence following and loyalty. To achieve the end, the categories of people may bribe people with money and other goodies to have potential followers to subscribe to their ideas. According to Giridharadas (104), “The ability of a powerful group to reward those who agree with it and punish those who don’t also distorts the marketplace of ideas.” If benevolent persons, therefore, came up with programs aimed at social development, they may effectively gain following. It is no doubt that rebellion may crop up during introduction of programs and subsequent promotional efforts. The advocates, however, would stand a good chance of overcoming the rebellion through monetary influence to gain a following of community members. It is also worth noting that the rich are usually well connected and, therefore, have access to other influential people such as community leaders. In the quest of the power to succeed, they may establish links with opinion makers in society and have them support their agendas for convenience. Implementation of social progress programs may also require the adoption of legislations that sanction the activities therein. In the context, the connectedness that the rich enjoy may imply links to legislators in the concerned territories. In the case, the former may influence the latter to have the passing of favorable legislations occur and the ensuing commencement of the intended programs. In case the ambitious community programs require imported resources, in the form of capital and manpower, the persons spearheading the programs would, as well, have the capability to make the necessary imports. In general, the fact that social progress is being led by the wealthy and powerful implies a high likelihood of success owing to the availability of requisite resources and the much-needed influence.

The aspect of rebellion may contribute to the success of community progress programs initiated by the rich and powerful. In the context, the promoters of progress would devise strategies to have community members buy into the predetermined rebellion. One such strategy would be the creation of the narrative that the poor have long been oppressed by the current regimes and that it was the time that they rose up against the oppression. In this case, the promoters may label any persons opposed to the planned society progress programs as the beneficiaries of the prevalent oppression. In like manner, the promoters may argue that they seek to bring to an end the lack of transparency. To highlight the need and difficulty to achieve transparency, Foer (106) argues that, “To get people to this point where there’s more openness-that’s a big challenge…” The outcome of labeling would be psychological hostility against the persons opposed to the program initiated by the rich. In like manner, the purported victims may rally may steadfastly rally behind the initiated programs as a way of rebelling against oppression. The rich may also base rebellion on the factor that the current dominant persons in society are not natives of the society but foreigners. In the scenario, the lead rebels would claim that the foreigners are not well versed with the challenges that persons in the society experience and neither do they understand the society’s most pressing needs. Moreover, the rebellion may be based on the argument that the non-natives seek to transfer the benefits realized from prevalent programs to their regions of residence while leaving locals with little or no share of benefits. In the same breath, it may be possible to base rebellion on a lack of adequate knowledge and expertise on the part of the prevalent society leaders. Foer (106) reinforces the idea by arguing that, “Over the last two hundred years, the West has been unable to shake an abiding fantasy; a dream sequence in which we throw out the bum politicians and replace them with engineers-rule by slide rule.” In the context, the assertion may be that materiality of the current development programs is in question.

Employment of the language of change may also potentially contribute to the success of the society progress programs. It is worth noting although people are usually afraid of change, they love it deep down their hearts. One requirement for people to embrace change would be encountering a convincing person that offers to spearhead the change. The rich and powerful would, therefore, need to package themselves in light of possession of knowledge, expertise and experience in supervising and implementing change. In like manner, they should seek the support of influential people in society in a bid to have them rally community members behind the proposed change. In the endeavor, the emphasis would be the provision of adequate knowledge for the avoidance of any among community members and the opportunity for the members to support the change without reservations. Conversely, the powerful persons with an agenda would have to make community members believe that they have not recorded significant progress, at personal levels, under previous and current programs. Giridharadas (97) argues that “The second step is to personalize the political. If you want to be a thought leader and not dismissed as a critic, your job is to help the public see problems as personal and individual issues rather than collective and systemic ones.” The message line would, undoubtedly, prompt society members to appreciate the need for change in order to realize meaningful progress in society.

The rich and powerful may also succeed in their agenda through the placement of emphasis on the benefits that people would stand to reap from the proposed programs. In the case, the promoters may highlight increased employment opportunities, which imply income and the subsequent capability to live a fairly quality life. Giridharadas (89) provides that “An essay he wrote to promote his book on resilience argued that the world should focus less on rooting out its biggest problems, including poverty and climate change, and more on living with them.” The other aspect of benefit may be access to basic social amenities in the form of the proposed program’s initiative. In like manner, the promoters may predict a possible influx of persons to the identified localities in pursuit of employment opportunities, the implication of which would be a high population. Notably, the high population may lead to mean the possibility of the establishment of businesses due to the availability of buyers. The other potential benefit on which advocacy may be based would be enhanced access to knowledge and information for the opportunity to engage in self-employment and/or making informed choices. Furthermore, promoters may promise community members that the new programs, being promoted, will involve members in decision making owing to the latter’s vital position as stakeholders in society. Notably, every person would like to be valued and esteemed and the promise may potentially attract a backing for the proposed programs.

At the same time, I have been thinking about a potential problem.（ok this is IMPORTANT. dont save this for the end. introduce earlier） Are Critics and thought leaders also belonging to the rich? This is an issue that can be scary if you think carefully. Personally, I believe that if they are on the opposite side, monitor each other, and advance each other, it will be beneficial to society. But if they come from the camp of the rich, can we think that their public words and deeds are ultimately for their own benefit? For example: As an ordinary person, I can’t directly define what Amy Cuddy does（what do you mean here? i think this is crucial. you can use Amy Cuddy as an example for your claims.）. At least it seems that she is trying to help women improve their self-confidence. But we do not know whether her behavior in public is for her personal purposes. For most countries in the world, class solidification is already an obvious issue. Most people live in a world set by a small number of people. Of course, there will always be someone who will stand up and make changes for most people’s issues, whether he or she belongs to Critics or Thought Leaders.

The red words are also the feedback.

And by online meeting, professor said: You could find the bad sides or bad things which Facebook or Zuckerberg did. Make it to critical thinking. It’s like: I do agree that we need this kind of platform though they do something bad.

Social Progress: Use of Change and Rebellion by the Rich and Powerful People

The rich and powerful play a leading role in the initiation and perpetuation of progress in society. The groups of people contribute to change in myriad ways, which include advocacy for the progress and initiation of projects and programs that steer change. It is worth noting that the wealthy adopt different approaches to enhance the progress. After all, no standard(s) suffices for the introduction of progress in society and change-makers enjoy the liberty to experiment with different techniques. Social progress is indeed possible when the rich and powerful use the language of change and rebellion for their agenda. Foer, however, does not seem to acknowledge the role of language in the introduction of change in society（I don’t think this is true, but also don’t include it in your intro. you can leave this for your body paragraphs.）. The reason for the assertion is that the author does not delve into a discussion that supports the role of change language.

Wealth and power imply the ability to influence following and loyalty. To achieve the end, the categories of people may bribe people with money and other goodies to have potential followers to subscribe to their ideas. According to Giridharadas, “The ability of a powerful group to reward those who agree with it and punish those who don’t also distort the marketplace of ideas（Giridharadas is disagreeing with you here. You should address this piece）” (104). If benevolent persons, therefore, came up with programs aimed at social development, they may effectively record gains. It is no doubt that rebellion may crop up during the introduction of programs and subsequent promotional efforts. The advocates（Hm im a little confused what you mean by “rebellion” and “advocates.”Do the “rebels” stop progress from happening?）, however, would stand a good chance of overcoming the rebellion through monetary influence to gain a following of community members. It is also worth noting that the rich are usually well connected and, therefore, have access to other influential people such as community leaders. In the quest of the power to succeed, they may establish links with opinion makers in society and have them support their agendas for convenience. The links should, however, be dismissed if they are not based on honesty and the desire t help（Hm how would we know that theyre honest?

） the community. Implementation of social progress programs may also require the adoption of legislations that sanction the activities therein. In the context, the connectedness that the rich enjoy may imply links to legislators in the concerned territories. In the case, the former may influence the latter to have the passing of favorable legislations occur and the ensuing commencement of the intended programs. In case the ambitious community programs require imported resources, in the form of capital and manpower, the persons spearheading the programs would, as well, have the capability to make the necessary imports. In general, the fact that social progress is being led by the wealthy and powerful implies a high likelihood of success owing to the availability of requisite resources and the much-needed influence.

The aspect of rebellion may contribute to the success of community progress programs initiated by the rich and powerful. In the context, the promoters of progress would devise strategies to have community members embrace the predetermined rebellion. One such strategy would be the creation of the narrative that the poor have long been oppressed by the current regimes and that it was the time that they rose against the oppression（Wouldn’t the corporations NOT want this message to get out?）. In this case, the promoters may label any persons opposed to the planned society progress programs as the beneficiaries of the prevalent oppression（unclear）. In like manner, the promoters may argue that they seek to bring to an end the lack of transparency. To highlight the need and difficulty to achieve transparency, Foer (106) argues that, “To get people to this point where there’s more openness that’s a big challenge…”（I think you can find a better quote here） The outcome of labeling would be psychological hostility against the persons opposed to the program initiated by the rich. The observation is that Facebook can be used as an agent of change although the endeavor may require time and effort. In like manner, the purported victims may rally may steadfastly rally behind the initiated programs as a way of rebelling against oppression. The rich may also base rebellion on the factor that the current dominant persons in society are not natives of the society but foreigners. In the scenario, the lead rebels would claim that the foreigners are not well versed with the challenges that persons in the society experience and neither do they understand the society’s most pressing needs. Moreover, the rebellion may be based on the argument that the non-natives seek to transfer the benefits realized from prevalent programs to their regions of residence while leaving locals with little or no share of benefits. In the context, the rebellion would not be organized based on the rich against the poor to avoid potential counter-rebellion by the wealthy.（Oh ok good observation. I wonder if you can tie this into either Facebook or Giridharadas. Also… isnt’targeting of foreigners BAD?） In the same breath, it may be possible to base rebellion on a lack of adequate knowledge and expertise on the part of the prevalent society leaders.

Employment of the language of change may also potentially contribute to the success of the society progress programs. It is worth noting although people are usually afraid of change, they love it deep down their hearts. One requirement for people to embrace change would be encountering a convincing person that offers to spearhead the change. The rich and powerful would, therefore, need to package themselves in light of possession of knowledge, expertise, and experience in supervising and implementing change. In like manner, they should seek the support of influential people in society in a bid to have them rally community members behind the proposed change. In the endeavor, the emphasis would be the provision of adequate knowledge for the avoidance of any among community members and the opportunity for the members to support the change without reservations. Conversely, the powerful persons with an agenda would have to make community members believe that they have not recorded significant progress, at personal levels, under previous and current programs. Consequently, community members may gain the desire for change and the adoption of new programs in order to realize real benefits. Giridharadas (97) argues that “The second step is to personalize the political. If you want to be a thought leader and not dismissed as a critic, your job is to help the public see problems as personal and individual issues rather than collective and systemic ones.” The message line would, undoubtedly, prompt society members to appreciate the need for change in order to realize meaningful progress in society.

The wealth and powerful may also succeed in their agenda through the placement of emphasis on the benefits that people would stand to reap from the proposed programs. In this case, the promoters may highlight increased employment opportunities, which imply income and the subsequent capability to live a fairly quality life. Giridharadas (89) provides that “An essay he（Who? Either contextualize the quote or strip it down to just the necessary piece） wrote to promote his book on resilience argued that the world should focus less on rooting out its biggest problems, including poverty and climate change, and more on living with them.” The other aspect of benefit may be access to basic social amenities in the form of the proposed program’s initiative（Spend more time connecting to the quote. A little unclear how it’s important to this paragraph’s argument.）. In like manner, the promoters may predict a possible influx of persons to the identified localities in pursuit of employment opportunities, the implication of which would be a high population. Notably, the high population may lead to mean the possibility of the establishment of businesses due to the availability of buyers. In this case, advocacy would be based on enhanced access to knowledge and information for the opportunity to engage in self-employment and/or making informed choices. Furthermore, promoters may promise community members that the new programs, being promoted, will involve members in decision making owing to the latter’s vital position as stakeholders in society. Notably, every person would like to be valued and esteemed and the promise may potentially attract backing for the proposed programs.

All in all, the rich and powerful enjoy the opportunity of introducing progress in society through the introduction of their agenda by means of rebellion and advocating for change. In the context, availability of money would imply the ability to reward the people that support them as well . In like manner, the power and riches would also mean their ability to punish the persons that oppose their agenda. To institute rebellion, the promoters may convince community members of the oppression that they have undergone in the past. Moreover, the rich may package themselves in light of possessing expertise in the introduction of changes in a bid to have potential followers to follow them. To register success, the persons need to act politically to persuade community members that they stand to benefit as a result of the programs that are initiated in society.