The Provocateurs:

Des Dearlove:

Hello, and welcome to The Provocateurs Podcast. I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. In Provocateurs, we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with some fantastic people.

This is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte. My co-introducer, my cohost today is Geoff Tuff. Geoff leads Deloitte’s sustainability work globally in the energy and industrial sectors. Geoff is also the author, along with Steve Goldbach, of two bestselling books. Detonate, which came out in 2018, and Provoke, which inspired this podcast.

Geoff, as ever, it’s great to see you.

Geoff Tuff:

Likewise, guys. Great to see you. I feel like I need to start off this introduction by saying something completely outrageous, but I’ll resist the temptation. The reason for that will become apparent in a moment. It’s great to be back here. I’m really excited to talk with you, Des, and with today’s guest.

Today’s guest is Karthik Ramanna. He is a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. He has served there as director of one of the world’s most diverse leadership programs and continues to do so. He was previously a professor at Harvard Business School. Karthik’s main gig, I think, and we’ll find out more about it, is studying how leaders build trust with a variety of different stakeholders, especially stakeholders who may not see eye-to-eye with exactly how they see the world. He is the author of The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World that has been recently included in the Thinkers50 Best Management Books of the Year for 2025.

Karthik, first of all, congratulations on that, and welcome.

Karthik Ramanna:

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah, absolutely. Maybe we’ll just start with a bit of your backstory. We had some chit-chat before we started recording here. I understand a little bit about your background as a student at MIT. Tell us about where you came from, how you came into the world in which you’re exploring the ideas of leadership today.

Karthik Ramanna:

Sure. I got my PhD from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. I started my career as a fairly quantitative economist, writing fairly esoteric articles for other academics. I used to teach required courses in financial accounting in the Harvard MBA program. My first job out of the PhD program was as a professor at Harvard Business School. I did that and I absolutely loved it, but then the financial crisis hit. I had my own little personal crisis. I said, “Well, the great problem in the world isn’t that there aren’t enough MIT-trained economists teaching Harvard MBAs how to make more money. It seems like there are other problems in the world. Maybe I should be focused on them.”

I had a conversation with my dean at the time and he had this crazy idea. He said, “Why don’t you take some time off and come back, and teach the leadership course in the MBA program?” I thought it was a crazy idea because I was a quantitative economist. But I had a year off to go self-educate in leadership, so why not? I did it, I came back, I taught the leadership course, taught it for several years thereafter. Absolutely loved it and couldn’t imagine doing anything differently now.

Geoff Tuff:

If I could just ask one quick follow-up question, Des, before you jump in. What was the tie? When your dean suggested that, what was the link to leadership that he either saw in you or your body of work that you had done up until that point?

Karthik Ramanna:

Quite frankly, there was very little.

Geoff Tuff:

Just a random suggestion.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah.

Geoff Tuff:

Content with that.

Karthik Ramanna:

I don’t know whether it was that “here’s this crazy economist in my office complaining about the fact that he doesn’t want to teach finance anymore. Maybe if I give him a crazy idea he’ll say okay, I’ll go teach some more finance.” I don’t know what it was. Quite frankly, I had no qualifications at the time to do anything leadership. I effectively had to self-educate from the bottom up, but I absolutely enjoyed that.

I taught the leadership course. It was called Leadership in Corporate Accountability. I taught that course for well over six years in the required program before I was recruited away here to Oxford, to become the director of the public policy program at the School of Government.

Geoff Tuff:

Right.

The Evolution of The Age of Outrage

Des Dearlove:

Well, I can’t think of any better background to teach leadership than being an MIT-trained economist. It makes perfect sense in a strange sort of way. I thought you were going to say “I’ve always been interested in leadership ever since I was a small child.” But actually, in a way, coming to it with a different perspective is probably really helpful.

Let’s talk about the book, because that’s obviously the next stage of this journey. Why did you write The Age of Outrage? Obviously, it perfectly fits the times. Why did you write it now?

Karthik Ramanna:

Again, I had no grand plan to write this book. I came to the University of Oxford in part because Oxford was building a school of government. They were looking for someone to serve as the director of the Master of Public Policy program. When they reached out and said, “Hey, is this a role that you’d be interested in,” I was intrigued. Initially, I thought they’d made a mistake because it was a job at the School of Government, I was at the business school. I had never taught at a school of government. I said, “I’m not at the Harvard Kennedy School, are you sure you have the right person?” But they said, “No, no, we’ve heard that you might be an interesting candidate, throw your hat in the ring.” It was a global search. I did, and lo and behold a few months later, I had the job.

I remember I showed up here on campus at Oxford about one week before the students did. That first year, we had about 125 students from 70 different countries. They ranged in age from 22 to 52. There were some very seasoned students who were running a workforce. There was one guy who was running a workforce of a half-a-million people. Then at the same time, there were some people at the beginning of their careers. About a third of the class were rogue scholars. They were necessarily very, very much at the beginning of their careers, but they were very bright.

I remember looking at that class, again 125 people, from 60, 70 countries, and thinking, “Gosh, Karthik, at the very least, don’t screw this up.” Then I said, “But more aspirationally, it would be helpful if you left them at the end of the year with something that was worthwhile.” Look, these people believed passionately in improving public service. They all believed passionately in improving the practice of government. But they come from such different parts of the world that they can’t agree on what constitutes good government.

I said, “Look, we’re living in this polarized world. I don’t know how to lead in it, you don’t know how to lead in it.” I did the thing that many academics quite frankly do when they don’t know the answer to a question, which is I offered to teach a course on it. I started to offer this course called How to Lead in a Polarized World. I was very honest with the students. I said, “Look, we don’t know the answer. What I will do is every week, I will invite someone from my professional network who is running something.” My rule was that they had to be operationally in charge of a complex setup. We had CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, we had the commissioner of London Police, we had the mayor of one the largest cities in Brazil, we had the governor of a province. The idea was you were operationally in charge of an organization or a system.

Every week, they would come to class, we’d have a different guest speaker. And say, “Bring us your hardest problem in this age of outrage, but don’t tell us what you did. Just bring us the problem and let’s see if we, as a class, can fix this, make it better. Bring us your best piece of reading, something that really helped you.” It could be anything. It could be an article from the Harvard Business Review or it could be a poem from Shakespeare, whatever you want. That was the format. I taught that course for six, seven years. In fact, I still teach the course. But after all those years of teaching it, I said, “Well, it’d be a shame if we lose this collective wisdom.” I said, “Well, maybe we should just put it down.”

What I did was I wrote an essay, it was about 12,000 words, and I sent it to my editor at the Harvard Business Review. I said, “This is a pitch for a piece in the magazine.” David, my editor, he said, “Well, it’s too short and it’s too long.” I said, “What do you mean, David?” He said, “Well, it’s too long for the article, but we can edit that down. The article, maximum length is 5000 words, we’ll take care of that. But it’s too short, because it should be a book.” He’s the guy who put the idea in my head and then HBR gave me the contract. Boom, there we go. That was the book.

It wasn’t planned. It came out of the course, quite frankly. And the course came out of the fact that I didn’t know how to do my job.

Des Dearlove:

We should probably say that’s David Champion, to give him his credit.

Karthik Ramanna:

Indeed.

Des Dearlove:

You’re not the first person to say how helpful he was. Just a shout-out to David. It’s appreciated, I know.

Geoff, you look like you were going to ask a question.

What Makes This the Age of Outrage?

Geoff Tuff:

I want to go back to the beginning because what I heard in the genesis story of the ideas in the books was coming into a very diverse class of different aged people, different thinkers, different backgrounds. It actually sounds like the kernel of the idea was not outrage, it was just different points of view. And the fact that, even at a small level, even though it may not be an incendiary argument, people have different points of view.

The lessons within the book I assume are lasting lessons and they probably could have been applied at any point in the past as well. Have we always lived in a polarized world, either very polarized or somewhat polarized? Do you think the ideas apply universally?

Karthik Ramanna:

Well, there are some elements of the ideas that do apply universally. The course was titled How to Lead in a Polarized World, so there’s some elements of polarization that have always been part of our history. In teaching the course and eventually in writing the book, the idea was how do you … The phrase we used in the public policy program at Oxford was how do you build the unlikely coalitions that are needed to drive progress in a world where people have different perspectives, different points of view. Throughout history, we’ve needed to build unlikely coalitions to get things done.

But then, there is something different about the zeitgeist of our time, and this is this age of outrage that we’re talking about. In my mind, there are three things that really make this moment distinctive. The first is we’re dealing with a profound amount of uncertainty even in the course of one generation. AI promises to be as disruptive if not more disruptive than the industrial revolution was. We also have to deal with climate change and the fact that shifting weather patterns could mean the collapse of North Atlantic trade winds, or monsoon winds, or things like that. We have to deal with demographic shifts. By the year 2050, half of all the people under the age of 18 in the world will be just in sub-Saharan Africa because the rest of the world is getting older. You look at all these things, the world in the course of just one generation, 25 years from now, will look radically, profoundly different. That’s one thing that’s getting people really anxious, what I call a fear of the future.

The second thing that’s different about our times is if we were just dealing with this fear of the future and we had deep trust in our institutions of governance, maybe we’d be okay. But we’re dealing in this moment where we feel like these institutions that were supposed to look after us, that were supposed to do right by us, they’ve not necessarily done a great job. The narratives that people feel they were sold over globalization or the cultural shifts that have happened over the course of the last 25, 30 years, those narratives people now experience less positively. The sense that the institutions that govern us have given us a raw deal, that’s the other thing that’s happening.

The third thing that is happening is perhaps a cause of the first two, the fear of the future and the raw deal. We’re seeing a shift away from this enlightenment mindset of global humanism that’s effectively defined the way the world works since the end of World War II at least, to what you might call an economic or cultural nationalism. Which is to see the world more in terms of us versus them. Othering, “lenses of othering” is what I call it in the book.

These three things. Of course, throughout history we’ve dealt with moments of profound uncertainty, moments of deep distrust, moments of othering. But having all three manifest at the same time and manifest to the degree to which they are, and throw into that, in some sense, the catalytic factor that is social media, and suddenly, boom. You end up with what I call the age of outrage.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah. I’m sure we’ll dig much deeper into the whole topic of othering. I do want to ask one quick follow-up. That is, have we had any moments in history at any point, or have you seen an example of an organization, or a culture, or a region, or whatever it might be, where there has not been polarization? Where there has actually, I don’t know if the opposite of polarization is harmony or not othering, but is there even such a thing in our history?

Karthik Ramanna:

Well, there were certainly moments of great collective optimism. Now again, they might have been bifurcated across. For instance, the period right after the end of World War II through to about the early 1950s when the notion of the iron curtain solidified, you were potentially dealing with this moment that there’s something different about how we might manage the world. Right after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Frank Fukuyama wrote a famous book now called The End of History where he said, “Well, we figured it out. Liberal democracy and free markets, that’s the solution, and the rest of history will be a little boring.”

There have been these moments where … Now, it may not be that Frank was right or wrong. It may be that we screwed up the opportunity. Point is that there have been these moments of great promise, but we’re very far away from one of those moments right now unfortunately.

Geoff Tuff:

Too true.

Managing Outrage vs Managing in the Age of Outrage

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, that is true. In the book, you make a distinction between managing outrage and managing in the age of outrage. What does that distinction mean, and is that important?

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah. In my mind, it’s really important for the following reason. Managing outrage, to me, is an element of crisis management. Which is important and it’s not easy, but we know how to do it. We’ve done it in the past. You bring in a PR team, they’ll figure out “okay, how do you deal with this,” et cetera. Then the rest of the organization goes on doing what they have to do.

The problem with the age of outrage is the velocity and the magnitude of these problems is so large that, if you took a traditional firefighting approach to it, crisis management approach to it, you’d very quickly exhaust the organization. Because when will you have time to do the fire prevention? When will you have time to do all the learning and growth, and all the real stuff that the organization needs to do in order to sustain and thrive, and so forth? You’ve got to therefore have a different approach to it than crisis management.

That’s where the notion of it needs to be built into your organizational culture. It needs to be built into your organizational processes. We say just like finance, and accounting, and marketing are skills that any general manager needs to have a working knowledge of. You can’t be a manager of a large organization and say, “Oh, balance sheets, I don’t do balance sheets.” Well, that’d be a disaster. In the same way, you can’t now be a general manager of an organization and say, “Oh, managing crises, I don’t do that. I outsource that to crisis management.” Well, that is your job now because of the world we live in. We’ve got to find a way to make it your job without it taking away from all the others things you got to do.

Des Dearlove:

I think what you’re saying is outrage is the new normal.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah.

Des Dearlove:

It isn’t the exception as in it’s a crisis, it happens once in a while, this is how we have to manage now.

Karthik Ramanna:

I think so. Sadly, that is at least for the foreseeable future until we’re able to resolve some of this anxiety around these forces we’ve talked about. That is going to be the situation, yeah.

Creating Active Listening Networks

Geoff Tuff:

Let’s then dig a bit more into this as it applies to leadership within organizations. It doesn’t have to be companies, it can be nonprofit organizations, governmental organizations. Not everything is a crisis, but one could in theory construe everything is a crisis if one so desired. How do you draw the line? If your central challenge as a leader with an organization is to keep the organization on track, fulfill the purpose that you have in the world, if you’re a for-profit organization, return to your shareholders, et cetera, when do you need to react to outrage, perceived crisis, what have you? Where should you just let other natural mechanisms take care of it?

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah. That’s a great question. I think part of what the book talks about is this framework for managing in this age. It is about creating systems of active listening to help you understand when something really can become a crisis and when it’s not. What really effective organizations are doing in this moment is not being surprised by things as they come their way. That’s because they have these active listening networks with potential antagonists. When something like this happens, you’ve had warning. You’ve heard about it sometimes weeks, sometimes months in advance because you’ve seen it emerge, then perhaps develop slowly, perhaps then develop more quickly.

Geoff Tuff:

Can we unpack that a little? What is an active listening network? What does it look like?

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah.

Geoff Tuff:

How do you set it?

Karthik Ramanna:

Let me give you an example of someone who did that. I’ll give you an example from a particularly difficult scenario. Which is this woman who was appointed as the first Peace Commissioner in the north-central Nigerian state of Kaduna. Kaduna State in north-central Nigeria, like some parts of the country, deals with a lot of violence. Priscilla Ankut was the woman who had been appointed as the first Peace Commissioner in this region.

She’s a technocrat by training. She had served as a technocrat in the African Union. But really, in East Africa rather than West Africa. A large difference between the cultures, and so forth. But she’s ethnically from Kaduna State. She came, she took this job. One of the first things she did, being a technocrat, a data-driven type of person, is see where is this violence coming from. She starts plotting the violence over time, like a good data-driven manager might. She sees that it’s not random. In fact, it’s almost like a sign wave, there’s a cyclical pattern to it. She’s like, “Oh.” Then she says, “What is predicting this?”

Of course, what’s predicting it is elections. Every time you get close to an election season, violence is manufactured because of course it benefits election outcomes. What she does is say, “Okay, well where is this violence coming from?” Well, it turns out it’s coming from a few provocateurs on social media that start saying things that are incendiary, and so forth. What does she do?

She reaches out to some of those people in an ad personam capacity, they will have certain political roles and religious roles. She doesn’t reach out to the organizations that host them, she reaches out to them in an ad personam capacity. She creates this little club which she calls the House of Kaduna Family. When I first hear this, she’s describing this to me, I’m thinking, “That sounds corny as hell. What does that even mean?” But you think about it, it’s brilliant.

She brings these people together and she gets them to know each other. This is well in advance of the election, a couple of years before the election.

Geoff Tuff:

Do these people have aligned points of view or not at all?

Karthik Ramanna:

No, no, no, they don’t.

Geoff Tuff:

Right, okay. Yeah.

Karthik Ramanna:

That’s the point. They are provocateurs across the spectrum, and she’s bringing them together and they’re getting to know each other. There’s this great line from Michelle Obama where she says, “You can’t hate someone when you know them.”

When the election season comes around, it’s not like obviously the violence magically disappears. But that now, suddenly people know each other. When things get really tense, she’s able to bring everyone in the same room and say, “Hey, guys, we all know each other. What can we do to deescalate the situation?” That’s not the first time they’re meeting each other. They’ve been talking about what their kids do, they’ve been talking about what they did for religious holidays, this and that.

That’s the sense in which I say creating this active listening network, and not necessarily of just people who agree with you, of potential antagonists. That’s what really smart organizations … Because she figured out, “I can’t be surprised by the fact that there will be violence around elections. If I’m surprised by that, I’m terrible at my job. But what I can do is figure out how I might turn down the temperature on it.”

Geoff Tuff:

Great example.

The Five-step Framework for Maintaining Calm

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. A lot of the book is about how you deescalate, how you turn down the temperature, and how you, yeah, you bring some calm where there’s aggressive behavior. You’ve got this platform for calm. Talk us through the stages of that because it’s fascinating.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah. It’s a five-step framework. The first stage of it is what I call turning down the temperature. When people often read that, they think that it’s the manager has to turn down the temperature of everybody else around that they’re managing, et cetera. I’ll be honest, I wrote that chapter for myself because I’m not a particularly zen guy or anything. I get really worked up about everything. I was like, “How do I turn down my own temperature?” Because my students were aggravating the hell out of me. What can the behavioral science and the neuroscience of aggression teach me about why I get aggravated, why I’m prone to aggression, and what I might do about it? That was my perspective in writing that, it was entirely selfish.

It turns out that there are actually some really simple things you can do from the neuroscience of aggression to mitigate that. First, we’re really triggered by what you might call ambient conditions. For instance, if you’re in a hot, crowded room, you’re far more likely to be triggered to an aversive response than if you’re in a cool, comfortable room. If you find yourself in that kind of situation and have to respond managerially, get yourself out of it because you can’t trust yourself to do the right thing. If you’re in a room with a rectangular table rather than a circular table, you’re more likely to take an adversarial stance. Again, really simple stuff, low-hanging fruit.

Next stage of it is your emotional response is triggered by the last few things that have happened in your mind kind of thing. This age-old advice of sleep on important emails, that kind of thing, all that makes real sense. If something’s really important, it’s actually cathartic to type out an email that expresses your full emotion, but then not to send it. Then sleep on it, come back to it the next day. Chances are you will tone it down, if you even will send it.

The third thing is probably, to me, was the most, I guess, surprising because we like to think of ourselves as rational beings. We like to say that once we’ve had a chance to sleep on it, we will come to the right decision. But what we think of as our rational, cognitive part of our brain is in itself shaped by what behavioral scientists call knowledge structures. Your knowledge structures colloquially might be your lived experiences. If I have got a certain set of lived experiences, then the assumptions that my brain implicitly calls on when it’s doing a rational analysis of a situation are such that I will come to conclusion A. If someone has a different set of knowledge structures or lived experiences, they will come to conclusion B. Both have the same flawless logic, but they’ve made different implicit assumptions which are hidden to us.

In fact, the best argument for surrounding yourself with a diverse, trusted team with different knowledge structures is just that. Because if you have the team with all the same knowledge structures, you’re all going to be observing the same situation and analyzing it with the same biases. That is, again, simple, quick, low-hanging kind of stuff to make you a better manager. Then quite frankly, it works with everybody else, too. If you start living this as a manager, you can in some sense, infect the rest of the group with what it takes to turn down the temperature.

Leading with Trust

Geoff Tuff:

Let’s talk about what this looks like in practice when leaders try it at their organizations. Presumably, there’s a way to introduce or to act within organizations in a way that doesn’t further polarize. But there has to be some part of the organization, if you have two sides fighting, some part, or some individual, or some collection of individuals must feel some distress in whatever the intervention might be. Talk to us a little bit about how when you practice this, you can minimize the distress and minimize the further polarization.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah. Two really important things there. The first is your observation that no matter what you do, there’s going to be some distress. The fact is that there’s this underlying polarization. You’re not going to make the polarization magically disappear. When we think about the causal factors for the age of outrage, you’re not going to make those magically disappear, just like Priscilla was not able to make the violence in Kaduna magically disappear.

When we think about this, the goal is not to avoid disagreement. It’s to disagree without being disagreeable. Often times, people confuse that and say, “Oh my God, the way to manage through the age of outrage is to not take a stand on anything.” No, no, no. If you do that, A, people won’t trust you because they will feel like you’re inauthentic. And B, you really won’t be able to lead. How are you going to make the decisions that you need to make in order to get things done? This is not about saying, “I don’t want to disappoint anyone.” You’re going to disappoint lots of people if you’re going to lead in this age of outrage. But do it in a way that is less disagreeable. There’s a way to drive an agenda that doesn’t make people more pissed off than they already are.

What does that entail? That entails often giving people more agency for how the decisions land with them. Giving people more agency with how they might implement the decision. What we saw with really successful managers navigating through hard decisions was not the absence of making hard decisions. Of course, they wouldn’t be good managers then. But the ability to work with their teams to say, “Okay, how would you like this decision to land? How would you like to implement this decision? What are the conditions under which you would own this decision?”

Really successful managers created the trust where they turned the power structure around. They had enough trust with their teams that they were able to trust their teams and their teams were able to trust them with that implementation. It’s that reciprocity between I’ve got to make and implement a hard decision that I might not have bought in, but part of what makes this acceptable is I’m in the driving seat in the implementation. The manager trusts the employee well enough to say they’re not going to sabotage my project as part of owning that implementation. That is what really successful managers have done.

Des Dearlove:

Maybe it’s just universal, but we’re programmed to want to win discussions, to want to win arguments. Even our political institutions. I know you’re based on Oxford, but a goodish part of them is founded on two sides battling out and one side winning. Maybe that’s not so helpful if we’re trying to find common ground. If that’s going to help us get through this age of outage, do we need to question that whole premise that’s a win-lose?

Karthik Ramanna:

I think that the key is that it depends on what the purpose of your organization is. In the School of Government where I was helping with the public policy program, I said our goal is to create public leaders for this world that is highly polarized. A few doors down the road from us is the Oxford Union, the famed debating society. The goal there is to create great debaters. I personally go there and debate. I was once invited to debate to defend the role of bankers in the financial crisis, which is the opposite of what a lot of my research has been about in that area. But I went there with great theater. You got to put on a tux and then you debate, and you drop the cleverest argument you can find. You watch as the audience stands up and applauds and your opponent picks up the pieces. That’s the theater.

There’s a role and place for that kind of theater. But in this School of Government, that’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to create world-class debaters, we’re trying to create leaders for an age of polarization. Then there’s a different mindset that you need to take in this moment when you’re in here. As individuals, we will be called to take on different identities and we will be called to represent ourselves differently in different scenarios. That’s important to have the good judgement to recognize when that is needed and when it’s not.

When we’re here in a school of government or when you’re in a position of public leadership, or managerial responsibility in a private company, you’re suddenly saying, “Well, I’m responsible not just for what I say, I’m responsible for how my words land on others.” That’s a big difference between being a leader and a debater. When I’m in the Oxford Union, I’m not responsible for that because I’m there for the debate. But when I’m a leader running an organization, when I’m a manager of a team, how others experience me is a huge part of how effective I am.

Des Dearlove:

But the Oxford Union is where we’ve trained our politicians.

Karthik Ramanna:

It is, yeah.

Des Dearlove:

What we’ve ended up with often, and I think you can see it even, is possibly world-class debaters rather than leaders.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah, I think so. The thing that gives me great cause for optimism is now that this School of Government exists and it is a few doors down from the Oxford Union, our students both engage in the theater and the magnificence of debating in the Union, but they also engage now in the importance of leadership development. Hopefully, that will make a difference in the world going forward.

“Ideas are everywhere, implementation is everything.”

Geoff Tuff:

What’s the end game here? I’m not presuming you’ve thought about the end game. But if I roll the tape forward and imagine everyone reads The Age of Outrage, are we working towards a place where polarization decreases and we become less outraged over time? Or are we working to a place where, yeah, outrage will flare up here and there, but we’re just better suited to be able to handle it when it comes? Or is there some other outcome in between?

Karthik Ramanna:

Obviously, I think polarized societies is not a great thing. But very often, the structural causes of that polarization are legitimate and they need legitimate solutions. Eliminating the polarization as a pure matter of cosmetics is not helpful either, if we’re not addressing the structural causes of polarization.

One of the things I make clear about my work and has been a necessary part of being the leader of the public leadership program at Oxford was that this is a book on process, it’s not a book on policy. There’s a whole set of issues on policy, and in my other research I’m very engaged on matters of public policy in specific domains. That’s a good, and important, and useful set of conversations we need to have. But conditional on policy, how do you actually get that done?

Somebody asked me, “What was the most important lesson you learned?” I said, “Ideas are everywhere, implementation is everything.” This is a book on the process. It doesn’t mean that you can’t have the conversation about ideas, you have to have that conversation about ideas. But then, how do you put that idea into practice? That’s what this is about.

The hope is that if we’ve done the hard work on the ideation and we do the thoughtful, careful work on the implementation, we will both structurally address the legitimate causes of polarization and we will depolarize. That’s how I would tackle that.

Geoff Tuff:

Yeah, that’s great.

Temperate Leadership

Des Dearlove:

Interesting. The final chapter of the book, which I enjoyed very much, I have to say, focuses on the need for what you call temperate leadership. I like the way you reach back to Plato and Aristotle, and you make sense of a lot of human history actually. Including some of the foundational myths that are possibly causing us some discomfort now. I also liked the way you linked that to Jim Collins’ idea of level five leadership. Tell us a little bit about temperate leadership and where it comes from.

Karthik Ramanna:

Yeah. The classical Greeks spoke about four cardinal virtues. They were courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. Courage gets a lot of play in the management literature, courageous leaders, et cetera, particularly in business schools. Then justice and wisdom, obviously we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. The case method of education which I use in my teaching is all about wisdom and building that kind of good judgement.

The thing that perhaps gets the least play in leadership education is this notion of temperance. In part, because temperance is probably seen almost as a weakness. It’s seen as a compromise of some sort. But actually, that’s not what temperance is at all. Temperance is an ability to know when to let go in a particular context or scenario.

If you think about some of the most tempered leaders over the course of the last few years, two names to me come to mind. One is Nelson Mandela. Mandela of course was a freedom fighter, and so forth. Had a fairly violent youth, and so forth. But when the moment came, when Mandela for instance becomes first president of democratic South Africa with universal suffrage, he could have made himself dictator for life. He could have made himself king. But he said, no, what was important was to create a process for South Africa to navigate what will be the next 100, 200 years, et cetera. That’s where he puts it.

That’s what we mean by temperance, is knowing when to pull the reins and when to let go. He has this quote that’s perhaps apocryphally attributed to him where he says, “Leaders must lead from ahead, but not too far ahead.” That’s another way of getting that… this notion.

Carbon Accounting

Geoff Tuff:

Des, if I may, I think I may steal the last question here because I recognize we’re probably running out of time. As I am wont to do on occasion, I may make it a somewhat complicated one. I think clearly, Karthik, you’ve met the profile of provocateur that we’re looking for. There’s lots of other things that you’ve done in life. I’m fascinated by your experience with greenhouse gas accounting and some of what you’ve been trying to do E-liability as a challenge to traditional norm around the accounting. I’m not asking you necessarily to go directly to that. Between the body of work that you have in your past or in front of you, the two-part question is what’s next? And what provocation would you like to leave our listeners with from this conversation?

Karthik Ramanna:

In terms of what’s next, the thing that I’m focusing my energies on is how do you align the interests of business in a market capitalist society with the decarbonization necessities that we have today. My diagnosis with why the climate movement has been relatively ineffective at addressing decarbonization is because it has seen decarbonization and it has framed decarbonization as a cost rather than a basis for competitive differentiation. Obviously, there are costs for decarbonization. But if the benefits of decarbonization cannot accrue to those who are better at it than those who are worse at it, then you don’t have an incentive in the market system to really fix it at scale.

If you don’t have a thriving economy with energy abundance, then we will very quickly plunge into even deeper, darker problems than those being produced by climate change. We’ve got to find a way to square that circle. Part of what I’ve been engaged in through the work of the E-liability Institute has been a system of carbon accounts that is technologically agnostic and ideologically neutral, that simply counts carbon as it moves through supply chains. So that companies can focus on reducing their emissions in their products and services, doing it in a way that is energy abundant and meets consumer demands, but getting rewarded for it.

The problem with our current carbon system is it’s like… imagine what would have happened if the Securities and Exchange Commission had said to companies, “Oh, you don’t know what your profits are this quarter? No problem. Just report the industry average and we’ll call it a day.” There’d be no incentive to compete. We’ve got to move away from that system and that’s part of the transformation that I seek to drive.

It’s hard to imagine this today, but 90 years ago, the term generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, didn’t exist in the English language. Every company that traded on the New York Stock Exchange made up its own definition of revenue, and asset, and liability, and all that kind of stuff. That was a huge problem. We created GAAP, it was a very good invention. Can we not do that now with this urgent challenge? But also, reward those who are really good at it. That’s the next problem I’m working on.

Geoff Tuff:

Lest it sound like a 90-degree turn from Age of Outrage, I’m actually hearing exactly the same themes. Stop the rhetoric that’s preventing us from making progress in driving sustainability and driving decarbonization, and actually get down to pragmatic solutions. I see the strong thread through all of that.

Karthik Ramanna:

Splendid. Thank you so much for having me.

Geoff Tuff:

Absolutely.

Des Dearlove:

The thread is tremendously strong, but we are out of time. I have to say huge thanks to our guest Karthik Ramanna, and to you for listening. This is The Provocateurs Podcast, and we’ve been Des Dearlove and Geoff Tuff. Please do join us again soon for another episode of Provocateurs. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please hit the button and share with your friends and colleagues.