Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas

  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 changing anything. “Basically, I can give them armor so that they can buffer 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 system 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 life as never before and heightened her awareness of it; and its ferocity convinced 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 documenting 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. After all, her academic colleagues in other fields like race, gender, and sexuality—to cite just a few examples—worked, in a slow, winding, often unheralded way, producing tangible change in an entire culture’s way of talking. 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” (Kimberlé 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 solutions 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 lightweight shit. This is real stuff that happens, and it works a lot better than trying to make a big change like a New Year’s resolution.” But was this truly a workable plan to change the system, or just acceptance of the system adorned with feedback loops?

  Strangely, one of the things that makes it easier to accept the system is that when you do, you will find yourself being 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, had to trust that she was changing things, but wasn’t told so by the public. Yet when she scaled back her claims, when she depoliticized, when she focused on the actionable, when she accepted that she didn’t “see the -isms going away,” when she focused on how individual 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 power 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 system of power, and she still conducts research along those lines. But it is, she says, “and I’m just being honest, less personally gratifying.” Still, she seemed to wonder about her choices: “It’s not the way I thought I would go when I started in this field.”

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  If 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 an attention deficit issue. But Sinek likes to see problems as opportunities 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 intellectual tradition, a comfort with pronouncing on a subject without being burdened by what others had said about it before. This advantage, as Sinek saw it, was soon compounded by another: several 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 workshops, 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 importance of the role of emotions,” he said; “that it’s not just an argument 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 would actually make me feel worse. Because this guy would stand on the stage and tell me everything I wasn’t doing.”

  One day, a friend asked whether he was alright. Sinek told her he felt depressed. Getting that off his chest “gave me the courage to start seeking a solution.” At the heart of the solution that would 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 products and services.

  Sinek had come up with the rudiments of the 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 neuroscientist’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 the 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 to giving a wildly successful TED talk, publishing widely read business books, 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 living 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 making, which wasn’t very much.

  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 with two divisions: One was for all the things he did himself, such as speaking and writing; the other was for all the things others did without him, such as speeches given by more junior thought leaders 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 questionable gospel is nothing strange. What is more striking is how elites embrace an idea such as this. Sinek lectures to and consults for a variety of influential institutions and people, including (according to his literary agency) Microsoft, American Express, the U.S. Department 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 revealed so much as the values of those MarketWorld elites who are their patrons and impassioned base: their love of the easy idea that goes down like gelato, an idea that gives hope while challenging nothing. Their susceptibility to scientific authority, no matter how thin or disputed. Their need for ideas to be useful, results-oriented, profitable in order to receive their support. Their wariness of collective political purpose, and their preference for purpose to be privatized into something small and micro, trapped inside companies and executives. Their interest in a man like Sinek giving their workaday businesses the glow of heroism, change-making, mission—of a cause. That ideas like these guide the rich and powerful in their business lives is what it is. But is this the kind of thinking we want to guide the solution of our biggest shared problems?

  Sinek himself seemed to have doubts about the thought leaders’ ascendancy. While he obviously believed in his own ideas, he made a point of criticizing thought-leader charlatans whom he fretted were being birthed by a new age of plutocratically backed ideas and the commodification of thought. “I have contempt for people in the speaking circuit,” he said, even though he was one of the leading figures on the speaking circuit. “Even though I’m getting lumped in with people who do have speaking goals and call themselves motivational 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 struggle,” 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 combine our efforts to advance the greater good,” he said. “That’s why I showed up. And every single one of them talked 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 if he 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 moment. “There’s good product, and there’s bad product.” The question is whether a republic can thrive when ideas are thought of as an industry, and the prevailin
g incentives so heavily favor bad product. Is this how we want ideas to be generated? And are the elites who embrace and sponsor such ideas the people we trust to arrange our future?

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  Amy Cuddy wants to believe the thought leader can use the tricks of her trade to transcend the pitfalls of thought leadership. 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.