I recently ran across Barbara Kellerman’s Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters (Leadership for the Common Good) (2004, Harvard Business School Press). Kellerman makes the argument that the current thinking on leadership is that it is always positive. Hitler is a bad leader because he did evil. People don’t talk about bad leadership and have focused almost entirely on positive leadership.

As she points out, what is bad to you might not be bad to me.

She creates a typology of 7 Types of Bad Leadership, with four for ineffective leadership (a quatrile!) and three for evil leadership.

Most of the book is not worth the price of admission, frankly. She ignores a massive amount of work in genetics that studies on antisocial tendencies (it seems that this is a spectrum) and how leaders tend to have some of these to be effective.

But she did show me that most people think leadership is good.

It’s not: leadership is amoral.
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Ben Levisohn, “How To Make A Madoff“, Business Week, December 16, 2008.

You don’t have to do anything to get a Madoff. They are always with us, like the poor. The question is whether or not you will create the social structures that detect them early. In evolutionary psychology, this is called cheater detection and it makes up a major component to most primate life.

I think that the final quotation may be more interesting:

Says Marwil, who has worked on recovery at [Samuel Israel's Bayou Hedge Fund Group, which created a dummy accounting firm to cover up trading losses]: “I don’t think you can reach a conclusion other than they are bad guys.”

Some people are just evil. Really. They are called sociopaths and if you lump in borderline personalities and psychopaths (if there is a difference between psycho- and socio- here) you end up with a number that is close to 4% of the population. Just sociopaths, according to some estimates, make up 1 in 25, but I think that the number is inflated by bad methodology. Throw in people with aggressive conduct disorder and you get some great things.

Does power corrupt? Yes. Does absolute power corrupt absolutely? Yes.

That’s why the Reformation said that Christ had three roles, not two. “Prophet, Priest and King”, said John Calvin, a triple cure.
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