The world feels more divided than ever, with anger permeating every level of society. For leaders, this creates challenges that range from difficult to seemingly impossible. How can they manage anger among employees, stakeholders, and external pressures? In the latest episode of Rotman Visiting Experts, Professor Karthik Ramanna discusses his new book, The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarizing World, and shares a practical framework for navigating these turbulent times.
The world feels more divided than ever, with anger permeating every level of society. For leaders, this creates challenges that range from difficult to seemingly impossible. How can they manage anger among employees, stakeholders, and external pressures? In the latest episode of Rotman Visiting Experts, Professor Karthik Ramanna discusses his new book, The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarizing World, and shares a practical framework for navigating these turbulent times.
Brett Hendrie: Has the world become an angrier place? Anecdotally, it's easy to say yes, people seem quicker to lose their tempers, hold longer grudges and feel more divided across a range of issues from political and economic instability to the erosion of trust in institutions to the echo chambers that reinforce our views of the world. There are plenty of reasons the world might feel like a more negative place, but how do you lead in that environment? How can business leaders respond to controversial issues, and can they build consensus and unity, or are they powerless in this world of outrage?
Welcome to Visiting Experts, a Rotman School podcast for lifelong learners exploring transformative ideas about business and society with the influential scholars, thinkers and leaders, featured in our acclaimed Speaker Series.
I'm your host, Brett Hendrie, and I'm joined today by Karthik Ramanna. Karthik is a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford's renowned Blavatnik School of Government. Previously, Karthik was a professor at the Harvard Business School, where he studied how leaders build trust with stakeholders.
He's a winner of numerous prestigious awards, including the Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award for groundbreaking management thinking. His terrific new book is The Age Of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World, and it explores frameworks leaders can use when navigating outrage from their stakeholders. Karthik, welcome to the Rotman School and welcome to the podcast.
Karthik Ramanna: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me
BH: Karthik, we've had moments of outrage throughout modern history. I think of the anti-Vietnam War protests, the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Arab Spring, outrage directed at corporations. I think of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Enron accounting scandal or Occupy Wall Street. How do you see the moment of outrage that we're in now? Is it different from what's come before?
KR: That’s a great question, and I was deliberate in calling this the “age of outrage,” because managing the age of outrage is different from managing outrage. Managing outrage is crisis management, and we know how to do this. I mean, it may not always be easy, but we figured out what works, and we would lean on our PR function, we'd lean on our comms function and so forth.
Managing the age of outrage is quite distinct, because there's something different about the zeitgeist of our times where people have very short fuses. And in my estimation, there are three factors that really matter. The first is this fear of the future, a sense that we're on the cusp of technological developments, for instance, with AI that are really going to disrupt society on the scale that the Industrial Revolution disrupted society. Likewise, climate change can be very disruptive, and that precipitates fear. Demographic shifts— most Western societies are aging, and by the year 2050, half of all the people under the age of 18 in the world will be in Sub Saharan Africa. So, the world's going to look very different in the future, even in the near future, than it has for the last few centuries. And that's this first real big factor here.
The fear of the future in itself may not precipitate an age of outrage if we had trust in our institutions. If we felt that the elites that ran the institutions, that govern society really had a good track record of looking out for society as a whole, but we're also living in this age of low trust. Particularly middle- and working-class people feel that they've been handed a raw deal. The narratives they were sold on — things like globalization or immigration — haven't really panned out in the way elites promised. At the same time, there's all this evidence that the very wealthiest in society pay lower tax rates than middle- class and working-class people. So the sense of this raw deal and a deep distrust in institutions.
And then a third factor that contributes to our age is a growing sense of othering, a sense of viewing the world, not in terms of we're all in this together in — the sort of global humanist project that we saw emerge in the enlightenment, but really sort of take root after World War Two, particularly in the free world — but rather viewing the world as we do today, in us versus them terms, a sort of reversion to our tribal instinct. So any one of these three factors, a fear of the future, a sense of the raw deal, or a growing sense of othering, would itself maybe be manageable. But having all three manifest the degree at which they do and manifest all at the same time, that's what gives us this age of outrage, and it means that we have to, as leaders, aspiring leaders, think about how we operate in this environment somewhat differently.
BH: In the book, you have a framework, which I want to talk about in a bit, but you also talk about the qualities that leaders need to manage in the age of outrage. What are the most important qualities that you've identified?
KR: So we have in the management literature, in particular in the leadership literature, perhaps emphasized qualities associated with courage and qualities associated with rousing rhetoric. We've sort of advanced a particular type of what we might say an A-type leader. And it's maybe not clear that that kind of leadership model is what will work in this moment. In the book, I talk about the four classical virtues that the ancient Greeks talked about: courage, justice, wisdom and temperance. And the first three — courage, justice and wisdom — have received a lot of attention, but temperance as a classical virtue has not. And temperance is perhaps the most salient of the values for this moment, for this age of outrage, a model of leadership which involves creating conditions for active listening, creating conditions for solutions to emerge from the bottom up, rather than leaning in on your positional power to drive your preferred solution. And that's the kind of model of leadership we'd really like to see now. It's going to require those already in positions of power to think about how they can be more effective in this temperate context and temperance tends to get, you know, a bit of a bad rep, because people see it as weakness. A temperate leader is someone who is always searching for a consensus, because they don't stand for something. But some of the most compelling models of recent leadership, like Nelson Mandela and Yitzhak Rabin are temperate leaders. They were people who were very, very powerful. They had enormous positional authority, and yet they had the confidence in themselves and in the institutions around them to know when to step back and to let solutions emerge from the bottom, rather than to impose them upon the people they governed.
BH: And when you think of those examples and the idea of temperance, you think of a leader who doesn't swing too much in one direction or the other, and can be relied upon to make a sensible solution that's thinking about the organization and the people that they lead.
KR: That's exactly right. A temperate leader isn't necessarily someone who doesn't themselves have strong views. But that's why I give those two examples. Mandela, for instance, had very strong views about most things, but he also had the capacity to allow people the space to come to the realization of what was right for the context. He recognized, for instance, when he took over as president of South Africa after the end of apartheid, that he had a deeply divided country and he could go the way of Mugabe and really clamp down on the injustices of the past, but he saw that as potentially counterproductive. So rather than lean into that, he says, well, let's create the institutions that allow South Africans to themselves determine what is the right solution, and let it sort of, in some sense, percolate from the bottom up. So it's not the absence of strong views that makes you a temperate leader. It's that sense of comfort to say I can trust a process that I've myself create that allows these answers to come from the bottom up again, which is especially useful in a time when we're deeply polarized, as was the case with South Africa after apartheid, and indeed, many parts of the world today.
BH: It's also an appreciation for temperate leaders to have the perspective that they can't just impose their will, that they are operating within the reality that they find themselves in. And you stipulate in the book that part of the end game that leaders have to internalize is you say, (one) they will never be able to address the whole problem, and (two) they have to accept that they will be seen as being part of the problem. Those were interesting limitations. Can you expand on why you have that viewpoint?
KR: So first off, the nature of the underlying causal factors for this age of outrage, as we've talked about — things like the technological shift towards artificial intelligence or climate change, or demographic shifts, et cetera — they're such that no one leader and no one organization is going to be able to wholly address these right. So that first axiom is really saying you want to have a sense of perspective about, as a leader of a particular organization, what is the part of the problem in front of you that you can realistically address, that is within the scope and the capabilities of your organization to deliver a meaningful response. One of the reasons why organizations get into trouble in this age is because they over promise and under deliver. But if you have a thoughtful process of identifying, well, given my strategy and my capabilities, here's the part of the problem that I can genuinely own, I can authentically deliver on, then that's what you deliver on, right. So don't try solve the whole problem. That is first axiom. The second is, we're living in such a polarized world, the nature of polarization, again, is so far beyond your capacity to understand it, anyone's capacity to manage it, that you will be seen by some residual group, no matter what, as part of the problem, and you've got to have a sense of perspective and humility about that. By virtue of having the kind of power you do to be an organizational leader, you have, in some sense, implicitly taken on this role of being part of the “system” that people are railing against. And so, you know, having a sense of perspective on that, recognizing this isn't a popularity contest, and being comfortable with saying I've done my best, and then knowing when it's time to lean out of a situation that's important for your own sanity and for your organization's sustainability.
BH: Is there a risk that leaders will not be ambitious enough in trying to protect their organization, or it's more important for them to accept the reality of the constraints that they're working within?
KH: Both of those present real risks, right? So there's a risk of overreacting and a risk of underreacting. And what the framework in the book really does is give you a set of questions to help you then determine how you can mitigate those risks, how you can minimize those risks, because and it's all art. There's no science to say, you know, here are the five factors you look at. And you’ve done none because you know what's right for, say, a bank in a particular situation may not be what's right for an oil company in that situation, and what's right for oil company A may not be right for oil company B because of the different geographies in which they operate, or because of the different prior commitments that they've made. So managing the age of outrage requires you to constantly be calibrating what is the part of the problem that I can authentically own, that I must authentically own, because failing to own that means I'm going to find myself in even deeper trouble. But also, what are the parts of the problem that actually, it's in the best interest of stakeholders on net, that I lean out of this, and then again, there will be people that will resent you for that. There will be people that will attack you for that. And if you have done your homework, right, if you've sort of used the framework or other frameworks, for that matter, as a way to exhaustively recognize, “okay, this is where I should draw the line.” Then you should have the confidence to back it up.
BH: It's very interesting how you set up the framework, by talking about how important it is to turn down the temperature when you're in a crisis situation. What does that look like, practically? And can you share an example?
KR: Sure. So, you know, in writing that chapter, turning down the temperature, I wrote it very much from the perspective of the manager, rather than from the perspective of those who have to be managed. And that's because intrinsically or inherently, as managers, we might say, “Oh, well, we're perfectly rational people, and it's all the people that we have to manage, whether there are internal stakeholders like employees or there are external stakeholders like activists, they're the ones whose temperature I need to be turning down.” But no, as a manager or a leader, you're human too, and you're just as prone to have all those biases. You're just as prone to overreact to a situation. So turning down that temperature is as much for you as it is for everybody else so that you bring the best version of yourself to this situation, to whatever situation that you're trying to address. And there, the behavioral science of aggression provides very useful managerial insights. So that particular part of the book starts with understanding the neuroscience of aggression in the brain. Where does our aggression come from, and what do we know about that? And rather than making it a scientific treatise, what I say is, well, given what we know about that, what are the managerial implications? So for instance, we know that ambient conditions play a huge role in triggering us to an aggressive state. That means that if we're having this conversation in a hot, crowded room with bright lights shining upon us, and lots of sort of ambient disturbance, then we're probably more likely to be prone to outrage than if we were doing it in a cool, quiet, somewhat subdued sort of environment where we are isolated from all of these sort of ambient, stimuli and so simple things like that that come out of the framework the neuroscience of aggression can be adapted into tips for managers to de-escalate situations.
BH: You have a interesting example of IKEA and how it was working in Saudi Arabia, and a problem that it faced there. Can you tell us about that example and what it revealed about the idea of moral commitments?
KR: Yeah. So IKEA has been a fantastic furniture store most young people around the world, their first couch or bed or chest of drawers is from IKEA, and they have operated in many countries around the world. And they've operated in particular in Saudi Arabia since 1983. And Saudi Arabia, of course, is a country that has sort of very conservative traditions, certainly relative to the western world. And so it used to be that, back in the day when IKEA's catalogues were print only, one way IKEA avoided the censorship of its catalogues in Saudi Arabia was to simply airbrush out all images of women in the catalog, adult women, so that, for instance, if there was a scene of father and a mother and two children, this would obviously be filmed in some sort of Scandinavian photo shoot. So people would be dressed according to western customs and norms, and they would basically airbrush out the mother from that photograph. And this was obviously in viewed in the modern context, or potentially even viewed in the context in which it was done, completely at odds with IKEA's western values. But you know, it had in some sense, gotten away with this practice in Saudi Arabia for many, many years. But then catalogues started going online, and norms in Saudi Arabia started changing. And importantly, IKEA started leaning in more and more on its western progressive image. I mean, this was a company that as far back as the 1990s was running same-sex families in its commercials, and was seen as sort of very progressive in terms of the kind of Swedish values that it embodied across the 2000s. And so when this was discovered as being part of its long-standing practice in Saudi Arabia, there was, as you can imagine, a predictable and quite forcible sort of pushback from its stakeholders in Western Europe — its largest markets, like Germany and northern Scandinavian countries, northern European countries. And the folks at IKEA were perhaps a little surprised, because they said, “Well, we've been doing this since 1983. What happened?” And as social norms, both in the west and in Saudi Arabia, evolved, IKEA was caught kind of behind the times. It had made certain promises about being a progressive, western, Scandinavian brand, and as the expectation of those promises had evolved over time, it had failed to keep pace with it. And this is one of the key lessons in the book, which is that we're living in an age where people are far more aware of these things, in part thanks to things like social media, and they will spot out a hypocrisy and an inconsistency far faster than they ever would have even 10 years ago. And it's those hypocrisies or inconsistencies that really get you into trouble. So if you were, say, an oil company that never made a commitment to LGBT rights, you're far less likely to get into trouble about something like this. But if you are a lifestyle company that has advocated gender equality as part of your brand, that has attracted customers and has made money on that brand, then to do something so hypocritical that really comes back to bite.
BH: It's a fascinating example, and it also re-emphasizes the importance of having that platform or the channels to receive the feedback from communities, so that as values shift or expectations shift, you as an organization can adapt to what the times call for. Karthik, you write near the end of your book that we now live in a “ post truth society in which ideas and facts are subjectively determined,” and you seem to be indicating that everything is relative now, and people see the world through their lived experience. Is your vision moving forward, that this age of outrage that we're in right now is destined to continue indefinitely, and if so, how can leaders prepare themselves and be resilient in that situation?
KR: We've always had perhaps relative determinations of truth throughout history, but up until times when you have really disruptive technologies, like the invention of, say, the printing press, which completely changed the nature of information in that period in Europe, they have been sort of fairly stable arbiters of truth. As recently as 10 or 15 or 20 years ago, the mainline journals, the mainline newspapers, were basically the arbiters of truth. They were “newspapers of record” that carried the facts that people then worked off those facts Because of the disruption that the internet, in particular social media, provide we've lost those arbiters of truth, much like a time in history with the invention of the printing press right after that, where we lost those arbiters of truth, and it took, you know, in some cases, a couple of 100 years before that was restored. That was also a very disruptive time in human history. Now, the way some of those conflicts were resolved was through violence, and part of what I'm hoping to do in this book is say we should avoid that, right? So we're living in a very polarized world, and we're not going to see the polarization immediately get resolved right now. There are two ways in which this could get resolved. This could get resolved by gradually building consensus and gradually listening to the different voices and their frustrations and their concerns and their angst, and creating policies that then address them so that the outrage dissipates. Or unfortunately, it could be resolved by doubling down on the polarization of the outrage to a point where you participate violence, which is what has happened time and time again with these kinds of moments of outrage in history. And so that's why I'm so direct and candid about it in the preface. And I say if you think that the way to address this age of outrage is through violence, then stop reading, because there's nothing here that'll be helpful to you. But that's really sort of where we are in moment in society with our deep polarization, and we've got to figure out, well, how do we do this in a way that doesn't make things worse and it's going to ask a lot of our leaders. It's going to ask and demand our leaders to be temperate, as we said earlier.
BH: It certainly will insist that leaders step up and find ways to navigate through these situations. This has been a great conversation as we wrap it up and we think about those leaders who are in those situations or destined to be in those situations, if you have one piece of advice for them on how they can be resilient through these critical moments, what would that be?
KR: The most important thing that leaders need to realize in this moment is they won't have all the answers and that they need to create the conditions where a lot of people in their organization, including external stakeholders, at times, are empowered to supply those answers. It's not all up to them, and they don't have to be the hero in this moment. So, create institutions, internally and externally, that allow those answers to come up to you, and that in effect, allow those answers to be determined at the level in the organization where the most sensible determinations can happen. I'm reminded of this great piece of advice President Eisenhower gave John Kennedy just before Kennedy was to take the oath of office. And here was Eisenhower, this great war general, and Kennedy, of course was youngest man elected president so fairly inexperienced, and Eisenhower says to him, “No easy matter should ever come to you as president. If it is easy, it should be settled at a lower level.” And that says something about the kind of organization that you should, as a leader, be creating, and about the kinds of challenges eventually that you therefore will be facing.
BH: It's great advice and a great insight for us to wrap up on. Thank you, Karthik, for sharing your insights and ideas and for being with us here today at the Rotman School.
KR: Thank you, Brett for having me
BH: The book again is The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World by Karthik Ramana. This has been Visiting Experts, a Rotman School podcast for lifelong learners, exploring transformative ideas about business and society with influential scholars, thinkers and leaders featured in our acclaimed speaker series to find out about upcoming speakers and events visiting us here at Canada's leading business school, please visit rotman.utoronto.ca/events.
This episode was produced by Megan Haynes, recorded by Dan Mazotta, and edited by Damian Kearns. For more innovative thinking, head over to the Rotman Insights Hub and please subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks for tuning in.,