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What Machiavelli can teach you about leadership
The thoughts on ruthless leadership by Italian politician and writer Niccolò Machiavelli resonate today.
The Italian Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli is considered one of the seminal figures in modern political science, even though his most important text The Prince was written in 1513. In the book he described a certain kind of behavior that's come to be regarded as a manual for powerful rulers. The book has been so influential that the word “Machiavellian" became an adjective synonymous with immoral, brutal politicians.
While he was a politician and diplomat in Florence, Machiavelli was not known as a ruthless, cunning manipulator himself. Rather, a lot of his insight was informed by the actions of the powerful families of his day like the Borgias and the Medicis. The lessons of his book are rooted in realism and can be useful to any leader. Granted, there are some aspects of Machiavelli's teachings that are surely controversial and should be viewed in light of their historical context.
Here are some key ideas to take to heart:
1. The end justifies the means
Machiavelli often gets credit for saying this classic quote about consequentialism which says that a morally right act is one that causes a positive outcome. But the way you get to that goal is not important and can be immoral.
While he expressed such a sentiment in other ways, Machiavelli didn't actually say this famous maxim. What he did think was more nuanced, proposing that people don't necessarily want to focus on the details and tend to judge leaders by results. In fact, Machiavelli's thoughts describe how a modern politician might deal with the media, which can be baited and confused by strong actions. Does anyone come to mind as you read this from Chapter 18 of The Prince:
[M]en judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, because it belongs to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are, and those few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them; and in the actions of all men, and especially of princes, which it is not prudent to challenge, one judges by the result.
For that reason, let a prince have the credit of conquering and holding his state, the means will always be considered honest, and he will be praised by everybody because the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on.
While his advice might apply well to corporate leaders as well as political, we can see the limitations of such approaches when confronted with the social media outrage culture. Like the United Airlines fiasco recently showed, some “means" will be called out and debated. In the political sphere, however, especially in a hyper-partisan atmosphere, the methods might often be argued but the results of actions will likely overwhelm any details.
2. It's better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both
He didn't say it exactly the way it's been spread around the Internet. His exact quote in chapter 17 was:
“A question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with."
The advice here can certainly be taken to extremes, with visions of authoritarian figures ruling through intimidation and secret police. Taken on a broader basis, the idea is that fear is simpler to maintain for a ruler than love, which can be fickle. The key is to avoid being hated, which is when people can really turn against you.
How do you instill that fear? Machiavelli maintained that the “dread of punishment" was important for a smart prince to institute. Cruelty was also some times necessary. Very much a law and order kind of guy, Machiavelli called for strong examples to be made of offenders as lessons to others:
“With a few exemplary executions, he will be more merciful than those who, through too much mercy, allow disorders to arise, from which follow murders or robberies. These harm the whole people, while those executions he ordered offend only the individual."
3. Strong public outreach/propaganda
In chapter 15, Machiavelli talks about qualities that a leader should appear to possess and thus would need to cultivate in some measure. When talking about things that would bring a prince praise or blame, the Italian thinker describes it this way:
“One is reputed generous, one rapacious; one cruel, one compassionate; one faithless, another faithful; one effeminate and cowardly, another bold and brave; one affable, another haughty; one lascivious, another chaste; one sincere, another cunning; one hard, another easy; one grave, another frivolous; one religious, another unbelieving, and the like. And I know that every one will confess that it would be most praiseworthy in a prince to exhibit all the above qualities that are considered good".
How many of these characteristics are still true for modern politicians or corporate leaders?
Basically, no matter what you do to stay in power, one aspect to not neglect is strong public relations. Good leaders must appear to have certain characteristics even if they don't actually have them. The case of the tone-deaf United Airlines CEO's initial response to the outrage over a passenger dragged out of their plane comes to mind.
4. “It is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves."
This passage means that some times a leader can't always respond by brute force and must act with insight to recognize the any traps. But against other opponents, like against “the wolves," a leader should be ready to show strength of a “lion" to gain respect.
In other words, know your weak spots, be cunning, and ruthless when necessary.
5. Build an enduring leadership structure and strong team
Machiavelli saw that a strong prince is ultimately as good as his "servants".
“The first opinion which one forms of a prince, and of his understanding, is by observing the men he has around him," wrote Machiavelli in Chapter 22 of the book.
He says that if such "men" around the prince are “capable and faithful," then the prince will be considered wise. Otherwise, if the servants are failing, it's the prince's “error" for choosing such help.
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What early US presidents looked like, according to AI-generated images
"Deepfakes" and "cheap fakes" are becoming strikingly convincing — even ones generated on freely available apps.
Abraham Lincoln, George Washington
- A writer named Magdalene Visaggio recently used FaceApp and Airbrush to generate convincing portraits of early U.S. presidents.
- "Deepfake" technology has improved drastically in recent years, and some countries are already experiencing how it can weaponized for political purposes.
- It's currently unknown whether it'll be possible to develop technology that can quickly and accurately determine whether a given video is real or fake.
After former U.S. President William Henry Harrison delivered his inaugural speech on March 4, 1841, he posed for a daguerreotype, the first widely available photographic technology. It became the first photo taken of a sitting American president.
As for the eight presidents before Harrison, history can see them only through artistic renderings. (The exception is a handful of surviving daguerreotypes of John Quincy Adams, taken after he left office. In his diary, Adams described them as "hideous" and "too true to the original.")
But a recent project offers a glimpse of what early presidents might've looked like if photographed through modern cameras. Using FaceApp and Airbrush, Magdalene Visaggio, author of books such as "Eternity Girl" and "Kim & Kim," generated a collection of convincing portraits of the nation's first presidents, from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant.
Modern Presidents George Washington https://t.co/CURJQB0kap— Magdalene Visaggio (@Magdalene Visaggio)1611952243.0
What might be surprising is that Visaggio was able to generate the images without a background in graphic design, using freely available tools. She wrote on Twitter:
"A lot of people think I'm a digital artist or whatever, so let me clarify how I work. Everything you see here is done in Faceapp+Airbrush on my phone. On the outside, each takes between 15-30 mins. Washington was a pretty simple one-and-done replacement."
Ulysses S Grant https://t.co/L1IGXLI3Vl— Magdalene Visaggio (@Magdalene Visaggio)1611959480.0
Visaggio added:
"Other than that? I am not a visual artist in any sense, just a hobbyist using AI tools see what she can make. I'm actually a professional comics writer."
Did another pass at Lincoln. https://t.co/PdT4QVpMbn— Magdalene Visaggio (@Magdalene Visaggio)1611973947.0
Of course, Visaggio isn't the first person to create deepfakes (or "cheap fakes") of politicians.
In 2017, many people got their first glimpse of the technology through a video depicting former President Barack Obama warning: "We're entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time." The video quickly reveals itself to be fake, with comedian Jordan Peele speaking for the computer-generated Obama.
While deepfakes haven't yet caused significant chaos in the U.S., incidents in other nations may offer clues of what's to come.
The future of deepfakes
In 2018, Gabon's president Ali Bongo had been out of the country for months receiving medical treatment. After Bongo hadn't been seen in public for months, rumors began swirling about his condition. Some suggested Bongo might even be dead. In response, Bongo's administration released a video that seemed to show the president addressing the nation.
But the video is strange, appearing choppy and blurry in parts. After political opponents declared the video to be a deepfake, Gabon's military attempted an unsuccessful coup. What's striking about the story is that, to this day, experts in the field of deepfakes can't conclusively verify whether the video was real.
The uncertainty and confusion generated by deepfakes poses a "global problem," according to a 2020 report from The Brookings Institution. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense released some of the first tools able to successfully detect deepfake videos. The problem, however, is that deepfake technology keeps improving, meaning forensic approaches may forever be one step behind the most sophisticated forms of deepfakes.
As the 2020 report noted, even if the private sector or governments create technology to identify deepfakes, they will:
"...operate more slowly than the generation of these fakes, allowing false representations to dominate the media landscape for days or even weeks. "A lie can go halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on," warns David Doermann, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute at the University of Buffalo. And if defensive methods yield results short of certainty, as many will, technology companies will be hesitant to label the likely misrepresentations as fakes."
Why do we remember more by reading in print vs. on a screen?
The author of 'How We Read' Now explains.
During the pandemic, many college professors abandoned assignments from printed textbooks and turned instead to digital texts or multimedia coursework.
As a professor of linguistics, I have been studying how electronic communication compares to traditional print when it comes to learning. Is comprehension the same whether a person reads a text onscreen or on paper? And are listening and viewing content as effective as reading the written word when covering the same material?
The answers to both questions are often “no," as I discuss in my book “How We Read Now," released in March 2021. The reasons relate to a variety of factors, including diminished concentration, an entertainment mindset and a tendency to multitask while consuming digital content.
Print versus digital reading
When reading texts of several hundred words or more, learning is generally more successful when it's on paper than onscreen. A cascade of research confirms this finding.
The benefits of print particularly shine through when experimenters move from posing simple tasks – like identifying the main idea in a reading passage – to ones that require mental abstraction – such as drawing inferences from a text. Print reading also improves the likelihood of recalling details – like “What was the color of the actor's hair?" – and remembering where in a story events occurred – “Did the accident happen before or after the political coup?"
Studies show that both grade school students and college students assume they'll get higher scores on a comprehension test if they have done the reading digitally. And yet, they actually score higher when they have read the material in print before being tested.
Educators need to be aware that the method used for standardized testing can affect results. Studies of Norwegian tenth graders and U.S. third through eighth graders report higher scores when standardized tests were administered using paper. In the U.S. study, the negative effects of digital testing were strongest among students with low reading achievement scores, English language learners and special education students.
My own research and that of colleagues approached the question differently. Rather than having students read and take a test, we asked how they perceived their overall learning when they used print or digital reading materials. Both high school and college students overwhelmingly judged reading on paper as better for concentration, learning and remembering than reading digitally.
The discrepancies between print and digital results are partly related to paper's physical properties. With paper, there is a literal laying on of hands, along with the visual geography of distinct pages. People often link their memory of what they've read to how far into the book it was or where it was on the page.
But equally important is mental perspective, and what reading researchers call a “shallowing hypothesis." According to this theory, people approach digital texts with a mindset suited to casual social media, and devote less mental effort than when they are reading print.
Podcasts and online video
Given increased use of flipped classrooms – where students listen to or view lecture content before coming to class – along with more publicly available podcasts and online video content, many school assignments that previously entailed reading have been replaced with listening or viewing. These substitutions have accelerated during the pandemic and move to virtual learning.
Surveying U.S. and Norwegian university faculty in 2019, University of Stavanger Professor Anne Mangen and I found that 32% of U.S. faculty were now replacing texts with video materials, and 15% reported doing so with audio. The numbers were somewhat lower in Norway. But in both countries, 40% of respondents who had changed their course requirements over the past five to 10 years reported assigning less reading today.
A primary reason for the shift to audio and video is students refusing to do assigned reading. While the problem is hardly new, a 2015 study of more than 18,000 college seniors found only 21% usually completed all their assigned course reading.
Audio and video can feel more engaging than text, and so faculty increasingly resort to these technologies – say, assigning a TED talk instead of an article by the same person.
Maximizing mental focus
Psychologists have demonstrated that when adults read news stories or transcripts of fiction, they remember more of the content than if they listen to identical pieces.
Researchers found similar results with university students reading an article versus listening to a podcast of the text. A related study confirms that students do more mind-wandering when listening to audio than when reading.
Results with younger students are similar, but with a twist. A study in Cyprus concluded that the relationship between listening and reading skills flips as children become more fluent readers. While second graders had better comprehension with listening, eighth graders showed better comprehension when reading.
Research on learning from video versus text echoes what we see with audio. For example, researchers in Spain found that fourth through sixth graders who read texts showed far more mental integration of the material than those watching videos. The authors suspect that students “read" the videos more superficially because they associate video with entertainment, not learning.
The collective research shows that digital media have common features and user practices that can constrain learning. These include diminished concentration, an entertainment mindset, a propensity to multitask, lack of a fixed physical reference point, reduced use of annotation and less frequent reviewing of what has been read, heard or viewed.
Digital texts, audio and video all have educational roles, especially when providing resources not available in print. However, for maximizing learning where mental focus and reflection are called for, educators – and parents – shouldn't assume all media are the same, even when they contain identical words.
Naomi S. Baron, Professor of Linguistics Emerita, American University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The science behind ‘us vs. them’
Humans may have evolved to be tribalistic. Is that a bad thing?
- From politics to every day life, humans have a tendency to form social groups that are defined in part by how they differ from other groups.
- Neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky, author Dan Shapiro, and others explore the ways that tribalism functions in society, and discuss how—as social creatures—humans have evolved for bias.
- But bias is not inherently bad. The key to seeing things differently, according to Beau Lotto, is to "embody the fact" that everything is grounded in assumptions, to identify those assumptions, and then to question them.
Catacombs of Paris: The city of darkness finds its new raison d'être
Ancient corridors below the French capital have served as its ossuary, playground, brewery, and perhaps soon, air conditioning.
