John Antonakis believes that the key to moving forward is getting back to basics: "We need to go back to basics, do some clean experiments, use clean behavioral measures, and then we can build the scaffolding on firm concrete and not on Jell-O that we have right now." We had a great conversation about this and other areas of our field. I hope you enjoy it.
About Dr. John Antonakis
John Antonakis is a Full Professor of Organizational Behavior at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne. His research focuses on predictors and outcomes of leadership, leadership development, psychometrics, and research methods.
He has published articles in many top journals such as Science, Psychological Science, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Operations Management, and Harvard Business Review. He has also published three books and 20 book chapters and has presented his research at dozens of conferences. He has received about 2.38 million Swiss Francs in funding for his research.
John is Editor in Chief of The Leadership Quarterly, and is on the editorial boards of many other top journals in management and applied psychology. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), as well as an elected member of the Society of Organizational Behaviour (SOB).
Learn More About John's Work:
Quotes From This Episode:
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
Connect with Your Host, Scott Allen
John Antonakis believes that the key to moving forward is getting back to basics: "We need to go back to basics, do some clean experiments, use clean behavioral measures, and then we can build the scaffolding on firm concrete and not on Jell-O that we have right now." We had a great conversation about this and other areas of our field. I hope you enjoy it.
About Dr. John Antonakis
John Antonakis is a Full Professor of Organizational Behavior at HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne. His research focuses on predictors and outcomes of leadership, leadership development, psychometrics, and research methods.
He has published articles in many top journals such as Science, Psychological Science, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Journal of Operations Management, and Harvard Business Review. He has also published three books and 20 book chapters and has presented his research at dozens of conferences. He has received about 2.38 million Swiss Francs in funding for his research.
John is Editor in Chief of The Leadership Quarterly, and is on the editorial boards of many other top journals in management and applied psychology. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), as well as an elected member of the Society of Organizational Behaviour (SOB).
Learn More About John's Work:
Quotes From This Episode:
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
About The International Leadership Association (ILA)
Connect with Your Host, Scott Allen
Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate.
Scott Allen 0:00
Today on Phronesis, we have John Antonakis. I have been looking forward to this conversation for some time, john. He's many things. He's Swiss, Greek, and South African. He is a practitioner. He is a scholar. He is an editor. He's a professor of organizational behavior. He has written in Harvard Business Review, and the world's best academic journals, as well as Fast Company. He does TED Talks, and he consults multinational organizations. And of course, we're gonna have your full bio in the show notes. But John, does that capture in a general sense of who you are as an individual, at least on the professional side?
John Antonakis 0:41
Well, you missed out a gardener and cook. So I love to cook and I love to garden and I have worked as a professional chef in the army. Well, I don't know if that's considered professional. But yeah, and I like playing music. So there you go.
Scott Allen 0:55
What do you play?
John Antonakis 0:56
I play the guitar and I play an obscure instrument called the Cretan Lyra. It's tuned like a violin. It's got an analogue in Calabria in Southern Italy called the Lira Calabrese the Gadulka in Bulgaria. So it sounds like a fiddle, you play it on your knee, like an upside-down like a little cello, and you played with a bow.
Scott Allen 1:16
Really? Oh, that's incredible. Now, what are some of your favorite concerts you've attended over the years? What comes to mind?
John Antonakis 1:24
Black Sabbath? A long time ago was Tony Iommi. So I like heavy rock.
Scott Allen 1:29
You do? Okay, so what other heavy heavy rock do you like?
John Antonakis 1:32
Iron Maiden. Led Zeppelin. Yeah, you know, not heavy metal. But you know, pretty good heavy rock.
Scott Allen 1:38
Oh, yeah. Well, Iron Maiden was just nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with Foo Fighters. So we would have a similar heritage. I think probably one of my favorites is Rush. But I started with Led Zeppelin started with then went to Russia and went to a lot of prog metal. So Steven Wilson, from your neck of the woods, Porcupine Tree, and some others...I like hard-driving music with some kind of meaning associated with it. But that's wonderful. So you're a guitarist. I just picked up the guitar over the holidays. So I've been learning chords. I've been playing G and A and C and E a lot.
John Antonakis 2:15
Okay, well, I'm not that good at Guitar. So I mean, I can sort of get by...
Scott Allen 2:19
Oh, well. But that's not why we're here, sir. We're here to talk everything leadership. I'm excited to explore three or four different topics with you. But I think where I'd like to start is charisma. I would love to start with the question around charisma. And I'm going to ask you kind of charisma, "what do we know?" And I think what we know I'll place in parentheses a little bit, because, I mean, there's obviously some nuances, but it came across my Twitter feed the other day, that you had been involved in some research of US Governors, and their charisma, and the impact that had on following guidelines. And I thought that was kind of fascinating. So let's start there. Let's start with charisma, kind of what do we know? And what kind of stays as a question at the forefront of your mind when we get to this topic?
John Antonakis 3:11
Well, it's a good way to work backward into why I'm looking at charisma in the first place. And why I need to say completely broke with the previous notions of what charisma is and how it studied. So in the governor paper, which we just put out, in Psych Archives, on Open Access is under review. right now as we speak, we coded for the degree of charismatic content in governance speeches over time. So it was over approximately two months, two and a half months window. We are at the point where we understand Christmas so well that we use deep neural networks to code for the charisma now these have been trained on humans, and we can talk about that later. So we have an objective measure of charisma that's pure in the sense that its behavior is what the governors actually said. And then we look at over time, where the people physically distance or not. So first, we examined and made sure that the speeches were actually asking people to physically distance and then we saw if people actually physically distancing wasn't there pretend physical distance or cheap talk physical distance or intentions of physical distance, it was actual physical distance measured by smartphone movements in all the different counties. So we could estimate whether people actually moved at war stayed at home based on historical evidence and what was currently happening over there. So what we find is over time, as governors were more charismatic on my conceptualization of charisma people physically distance and you know, we control for a bunch of things you know, time affects how many days a stay at home orders were in place, you know, number of deaths, whatever, you know, we checked we threw in the kitchen sink. The bottom line is if Governor's had been an average governor one step at a time. Even more charismatic over a certain period of time that that translates into 1000s and 1000s of lives saved by, you know, so and this is just mind-boggling that people don't take leadership as seriously as they should. And what's also interesting is we noticed the governor's speeches were kind of distributed positively skewed, meaning that was skewed towards zero. It's like they have no idea that charisma is important because if it was, it would be strongly negative skewed, you know that everyone would be charismatic. And that was not the case humungous variation in observations of charisma and then we followed it up with an incentivized laboratory study, where we gave excerpts of speeches from real governors, we must to the governor was and then we asked people, you know, what would they do if they physically distance if they'd if they heard that speech? And then we asked them to try to guess what others would do? And we incentivize that measure. And interestingly, we find that conservatives, who are the ones who we would like to influence a bit more because they're slightly more skeptical about COVID and distancing, and care more about individual liberties. You know, they're the ones that are most affected by charisma. Interestingly.
Scott Allen 6:05
Well, we'll talk a little bit about for listeners, what's underneath when you talk about the behaviors? What are some of those behaviors? Is it vocal variety is that word choice? What are some ways that you're conceptualizing that I find fascinating.
John Antonakis 6:17
Well, let me just begin at the beginning about charisma per se, because this is such a misunderstood construct. So we wrote a piece in the annual reviews, so organization behavior on Organization Psychology, and it's titled, "Charisma: An Ill-defined and Ill measured Gift." And the problem was the following. You know, when when we're being introduced the notion in the modern era, I mean, it predates the web, it goes back to the three graces in ancient Greek mythology, a long time ago. So when Weber introduced the concept to social sciences, you know, he talked about these leaders having some kind of alchemic ability, some mystical quality, you know, a gift of grace that that normal people didn't have. And you know, that distinguish them from these other normal people, and they could accomplish great feats. So the sociological literature wrote a lot about these people with mystical qualities. But you know, having mystical quality is beyond scientific purview. You know, we can't study something that's some kind of alchemic ability, mystical quality that some people have, and some people don't. So, you know, all the literature was written in a very abstract way, there was no one knew what was going on. You know, there are a lot of theoretical accounts of charismatic leaders, but he wasn't properly defined, it was defined as if it was undefinable. So how can you study something undefinable. So that was a big problem. Then Bob house came along, and he wrote his 1976 theory of charismatic leadership, which triggered a lot of research, Bernard bass wrote some stuff on a guy called James Downton James McGregor burns, but what happened is that they immediately jumped into using questionnaire measures to measure charisma, and they didn't again, to find a property like, you know, charismatic Lee design inspiring, you know, it's like kind of a circular thing. You know, charismatic leaders are effective, you know, so if someone's effective, MSP by definition, charismatic. So the definitions were very poor, number one, and number two, they used questionnaire measures and questionnaire measures really suck. You know, it's a real reboot, big problem. I'm slowly at my journal, I'm rejecting a lot of research that uses these things. Because if you asked me is a person a charismatic, and I might respond on the questionnaire, but you know, they can be charismatic, for many reasons beyond their behavior, you know, treats me nice, is inspiring, and whatever. So, you know, beyond the tautological measurements, the fact that I might rate you, more or less charismatic doesn't just depend on what you do, or what you say, it depends on your skin color, it depends on the symmetry on your face, it depends on so many factors. And the sum total of those then are reflected in the questionnaire. And then what do you do? How do you inform policy? You know, you tell people to be more inspiring, okay, what the hell does it mean to be more inspiring, you know, more powerful, or what does that mean? So basically, you know, the previous research has zero policy implication zero, because there were so many confounding factors that feed into a questionnaire that we just don't know. So basically, you need to disentangle all these causes and measure them if you want to inform policy. And not one study has done that. Some attempted to do manipulations, but again, they were very fuzzy and not very well thought out. So what we did is we said that charisma is basically symbolic, emotional, and value-laden leaders signaling so values meaning that you speak about your morals, your values, what you're defending. Symbolic means that you can speak in pictures, emotion is that you can signal your emotions, your confidence, your emotional state, with your body, what you say, and on your face. And these things are easy to observe. They're easy to code objectively and easy to manipulate. Hmm,
Scott Allen 9:50
what I imagine you could also do kind of the inverse of this whole study where you have governors who are charismatic, but not caring, and the damage that was done in In those situations.
John Antonakis 10:01
yes. But again, in the speeches that we looked at, and we coded for about 90% of the governance, we're actually asking people to socially distance and to try to take actions to mitigate COVID. So yeah, I mean, I know there are some powerful leaders, we won't mention names who didn't take things seriously in the beginning. And you know, if you're charismatic and you don't take things seriously, that can cause huge problems and lead people down the garden path, you know, the typical Hitler problem.
Scott Allen 10:28
Yeah, I have a paper in my, in my head right now called when leaders kill their followers. Right? I mean, because they're influencing their behavior. And in some cases, those individuals die. Because of that influence. I mean, it's really, it's a fascinating phenomenon. And so charisma, can it be learned, this goes to the HBR article, let's talk a little bit about learning charisma, I have a student right now that I'm working with. And she believes emphatically that it's a wouldn't be me, it's acting. It's not who I really am. I don't think this can be something that's learned. So how do you respond to that?
John Antonakis 11:05
Well, the Harvard Business Review article we wrote it was actually an invited article by HBr. They, they saw a paper we published in 2011, where we showed that charisma could be taught to normal people. So we had two studies, one was was managers from a high-tech firm, and the second was MBAs from our university. Um, so to cut to the chase, I did that study, because about six years before that, I saw a study that kind of dropped out of the sky. It was published in the journal Science showing that we could predict who would win an election by how intelligent they looked how competent and that really pissed me off. Because, you know, as a professor of leadership, what am I supposed to teach? If, if your success is already imprinted on your face? You know,
Scott Allen 11:49
like I said, you got to get taller, and you lower your voice, and then you're a leader, right?
John Antonakis 11:53
Yeah, they're exogenously given so you know, I can't choose what I look like. So if I've symmetrical facing competent and trustworthy looking face, you know, I'm going to earn more money in my lifetime. I mean, the economists have established in an estimated the effect, they call it the Beauty Premium. This really bothered me, and I want you to figure out is there a way that we can get people to appreciate us beyond the initial impression, because, you know, typically, cognitive psychology shows us that people look at us, they sum up, they look at our age, or sex or height or skin color, put a price on our tag, if we look like a million dollars, they fill in the blanks and assume we have lots of positive characteristics. If we don't, then we have a problem. So I tried to figure out whether we could get beyond the initial impressions by using charisma.
Scott Allen 12:35
So what did you find? Could it be learned?
John Antonakis 12:38
Yeah, so. What we did do was first try to understand what were the tactics that leaders use to make themselves appear more charismatic. So that had to do with essentially framing as attracting attention, getting people to focus on what you're saying. And that's using storytelling metaphors, analogies, contrasts, rhetorical questions, then the substance of what was being discussed. So what are we defending? How does it resonate with the individuals you're trying to influence? What kind of strategic goals are you going after. And then the third major component is delivery. That's to do with the body language, the voice, and the emotions. So it turns out that, you know, once we could kind of unravel and break these tactics out, in show individuals how to use them in practice, that they were able to actually do it. So in the field experiment, we had a control group where we made people reflect on their personality on the leadership, they knew they were going to be re-measured, they knew they were part of a study. So interestingly, they will see increased, you know, they would just, I don't know, maybe they just started acting nicer with their subordinates what have you. So three months later, the control group increases, but the experimental group increased a lot more. And then we did a kind of controlled lab study where we filmed students giving a speech before they knew what charisma was about. And then we taught them charisma, then we told them, give them the same speech. And then what we did is we put the speeches in, in our head, and we randomly pulled out for speeches, always two times one speech against two time-two speeches, so we could control for the individual fixed effects. For example, I may be handsome. So if I'm handsome to one group of people, time one, I'll still be handsome at time two. So you know, we could take out the fixed effect of the person's look, their voice, whatever was constant, you know, they were they had to wear the same clothes, whatever. And then we looked at the change of charisma and where they'd predicted anything. And it certainly did predict how they were seen, whether they were liked whether it was seen as prototypical of a leader, and in which order they were ranked when they were in group before we told them you know, who's the best and who's the worst leader. So that strongly followed the extent to which charismatic tactics were being used. We controlled for communication skills, non lexical utterances, how confident I felt, you know, nothing mattered apart from the use of these charismatic tactics.
Scott Allen 14:46
Yeah, and those who employed them and did them well were perceived as leaders?
John Antonakis 14:51
definitely a lot more. They were perceived as more charismatic and more leader-like and here's the funny part, which I think may speak to your student in the beginning. A lot of them were like, man, "if I do this, people will know what I'm doing. They'll figure it out, you know." And we in debriefing the participants in the experiment, who watch the videos, they had no idea what we actually did, what we manipulated what we taught them. They just thought, you know, we were looking at speeches or speech content, because you know, every student, we had the students that spoke on different things, you know, the head of fire 10% of the staff, they had to do change location, and they speak to Jack who's derailed, you know, we had different topics, so they thought it was a topic thing, it wasn't a topic thing, it was actually the tactics. So this is actually explained by the illusion of transparency, because people have information in them, and they feel something, or they know something, they believe that this leaks out, and others are also aware of that. And that's just not true. People are very bad at guessing what my emotional state may be unless I signal that transparently. So you know, we can lie a lot better than what we believe we can. So this is the illusion of transparency phenomenon or the illusion of knowledge, then it didn't really matter what combination of tactics people use, you know, I asked them to use all of them. But you know, some didn't use I don't know, metaphors, because he didn't resonate with them. You know, you just got to take these tactics and use the ones that resonate with you try to be as truthful and as honest to your own self and your own story and your own identity when you use them. And it really doesn't matter, you become an after a while. So I you know, what can I say? Some people are naturally more charismatic because they had better role models, they more extroverted, they smarter, they learned things by trial and error. But you know, you can still learn this stuff.
Scott Allen 16:39
Well, I said to this individual, I said, I've seen you behave incredibly charismatically, especially in small group conversations, something shifts for you when you're in front of a larger group. But I've seen some of those charismatic tactics, I've seen those in how you tell a story and how you engage a small group. I've seen that, but something shifts for you when you're in front of a group, or at least that was my perception, right?
John Antonakis 17:02
Now. I mean, the ancient Greeks also, drawing now from Phronesis, you know, they trained young men who were going to hold political office in the art of oratory, and how to speak. And for Aristotle, he was convinced this was the right thing to do. You know, either you move people with what he called contracts and torture contracts, meaning incentives or stick bayonets in their back, spears, and they didn't have bayonets in those days, you know, all you can influence people through the art of leadership. Now, of course, there are ethical and moral consequences to what we do and how we do it. And why are we using the persuasion? Are we doing it, you know, to solve coordination problems? Are we doing it to protect the public good? Are we doing it to manipulate others? So, you know, that's another question entirely. But, but, you know, this was already on the radar of the ancient Greeks, where they wrote the first, you know, leadership development manual, by way of Aristotle, his works. And Plato's as well.
Scott Allen 17:51
Let's go there for a few moments - leadership development. I saw in your bio that it mentions when you were at Yale, focusing on expertise, and I just wanted to explore that a little bit was that expertise in kind of the expertise, literature, the branch of psychology, K. Anders Ericsson, and those individuals? Is that how we're defining expertise?
John Antonakis 18:12
Well, it was sort of based on that. And then also the professor worked with was Robert Sternberg. And he's interested in tacit knowledge. But at the end of the day, I tried to get into that literature, but I got interested in other aspects of leadership very quickly, because I, you know, it's very hard to measure people's, you know, tacit knowledge and things like that. So, yeah, I mean, that's why I went there originally was to study that.
Scott Allen 18:37
Well, how are you thinking about leader development or leadership development? If we go with kind of a Day distinction, David Day distinction of the two? What are you thinking about right now? And even in your position as editor of leadership quarterly? What are you seeing that is cutting edge? I mean, the research you spoke of around charisma of the neural networks and actually using cell phone data, I mean, that feels to me very, very cutting edge. That sounds incredibly exciting. That sounds very, very exciting. What are you seeing in the leader development space that is exciting for you? And what are maybe some opportunities that you still think we haven't necessarily captured?
John Antonakis 19:15
Yeah, I mean, firstly, I think the world of practice doesn't realize how important leadership is certainly not enough is done to properly select leaders and properly train leaders. You know, the process of becoming a doctor requires that one studies medicine and then one gets certified to practice and that one uses interventions that have been tested, doesn't happen in leadership, you know, people become leaders for all sorts of reasons. One, one paper that I mean, I published a follow-up paper in the journal Science, we showed little kids identify who would win the election on the basis of the face, I mean, and there's nothing on the face that correlates with any bloody, intrinsic quality that you may have in a normal range of individuals, you know, who don't have any visible genetic malformations To become leaders for a whole bunch of other reasons other than that they're good at doing what they're doing, or they're experts in the system. So this is a serious problem. So firstly, we need to focus more on making the world of leaders selection more professional, somebody enough on that, you know, once that is done, then we can start thinking about the leadership pipelines and training leaders and developing leaders using artificial intelligence. There's so much to be done. And it's like we're in the Stone Age of leadership right now. But I think one good thing that has happened, which is an awfully bad thing is Corona. Now that the Corona fog is clearing, we starting to realize how important leadership is political level leadership, Governor level leadership, local level leadership, and in companies. So yeah, there's so much to be done.
Scott Allen 20:44
Well, even some of the basic definitions are confusing. It always amazes me to your example of whether it's medicine, or I was having a conversation on a previous episode with Bob Reimer. He's at the United States Air Force Academy. Imagine training a pilot, and you don't have definitions that are clearly agreed upon for what's in the cockpit. I mean, it's just to your point, I think you said stone age, I couldn't agree more, I think, how we select and how we then train, there's so much opportunity, it's almost wide open, wouldn't you agree?
John Antonakis 21:17
Yeah. You mentioned Scott, that we appointed doctors and pilots on how symmetrical the face was. I mean, this would be absolutely shocking. But that is the crap we are seeing right now. I'm sorry to speak in such rosy ways. But and excuse my French, actually, I do speak French. But that wasn't French. That was, but you know, this is what's happening. I mean, I have a study, online press, we took a random sample of TED Talks, you would hope that what predicts a TED talk going viral is the content, right? So we code for content, we code for the type of speech given, we also take a photo of the person giving the TED Talk. And in our lab, we just asked our students, how attractive is this person. So basically, a standard deviation below the mean. And above the mean, and attractiveness increases, TED talks to us by about 130% is crazy. So people, you know, would rather see a more attractive TED Talk presented in a less attractive independent of the content, people earn more money as they go up the hierarchy, if they more symmetrical now, perhaps there's something on their face that helps coordinate actions gives investors more confidence, you know, there could be some legitimate effects, which have nothing to do with how good I am, but which may affect what others think. But the point is that it's very unfair, it's not correct. You know, that, that people are being selected on how they look on their skin color, you know how old they are, or they're a woman or man, you know, there's so much discrimination that goes out there. And here's the problem. The problem is this. When we discriminate on the basis of specious factors, first impressions, we're going to put someone who looks the role, you know, who's handsome, but can't fly the damn plane. And this is what we know.
Scott Allen 22:55
That's not who you want flying, we're doing the surgery, my head's in three or four different places right now. But it's a very interesting conversation because we have an opportunity in my mind, and even and that's why I was going down some of the expertise literature and Know Sternberg written on that topic, of course, and but the work of K. Anders Ericsson, at least for me, has some clues about how we help people work at some of the highest levels, you know, even the notion of deliberate practice. And a very, very simple explanation of deliberate practice would be, you know, time, repetition, real-time coaching and feedback, and, you know, working on skills outside of your current ability level. So we started with the instrument that I can no longer pronounce that you play. What was that called? Again?
John Antonakis 23:40
The Cretan Lyra.
Scott Allen 23:41
Okay, the Cretan Lyra, if we want to create, you know, world-class player, in John, you know, 15-20 years, repetition, real-time coaching, and feedback, we find you people who can guide your learning and scaffold it. And then working on music or skills outside of your current ability level for all of that time. And when we look at again, leader development, people are going to work today, but they aren't intentionally practicing anything, a good number of them. They don't necessarily have real-time coaching and feedback they're repeating things. But maybe some of those are really, really bad behaviors. And there's an opportunity, I can't wait John, for us to have an actual holodeck a virtual reality or just an augmented reality holodeck where we can actually put people in simulations and help them develop help them grow. Put them in scenarios, like a flight simulator, where we can actually perform analytics, real analytics, right?
John Antonakis 24:38
Yeah, let me say a couple of things on that point, I'm, you know, obviously, we can't just take anyone and make them start cutting people open up and removing appendencies. So I think music is something where some people may have an intrinsic talent, you know, Beethoven, what Mozart they could write symphonies already at the age of seven with zero practice. So I think in the music's there is intrinsic talent and, you know, coming from the genes it plays a massive, massive role. So you know, some people just don't have a musical ear, you can train them 100 years to play the violin, they will never play the violin. Same thing with mathematical ability. Some people just don't get it, you know. But I do agree, you know, some things with deliberate practice, we can improve. If a person has a reasonable level of intelligence, they should be able to learn and improve. So I agree with you that there is a genetic component, and the genetic component affects intelligence, which is the ability to learn at least the modern definition of it. And that's not really something we can change too much. But I did come back full circle to expertise. I wrote a paper with Bob House that we published in 2005, or six, titled instrumental leadership, beyond transformational and transactional, and instrumental leadership is exactly about what you said, it's about expert leadership. Do you understand the strategic environment in which you're operating how to select a strategy? Do you know how to give your expertise and path-goal clarifications and monitor outcomes? So it's like a purely nothing to do with, you know, values and exciting and being emotional, it's like task-focused leadership. And we found at least in the paper we published in 2004-5, I don't remember that it is a much stronger predictor of outcomes than is transformational transactional leadership. So, you know, I like to say, even though I'm studying charisma, and all that stuff, you know, I'm not getting on a plane, if the pilot doesn't auto fly, I don't care charismatic down, how beautiful they are, you know, and, you know, I've got papers showing how beauty helps how charisma helps. But you know, that's all in French, we say to the glaçage, you know, it's the glazing, and it's the cherry on the top of the cake. You know, the cake is his expertise. So yeah, just to go back to what you said earlier on. expertise is really important. Knowing the nuts and bolts of the organization is important. Knowing how to manage is important. Of course, the human touch is also important how to manage humans is also a skill that's important. But you know, all these factors are not really fit into the selection mechanisms for putting leaders where they belong. They get there for other reasons.
Scott Allen 27:06
Yeah, kind of the last topic before we wind down. And this is really focused on what you're seeing. you'd mentioned artificial intelligence. I mentioned a moment ago virtual and augmented reality, are you seeing a passion topic of mine is technologies enabling disruption. So you could go 5g sensor technology, virtual augmented reality, blockchain artificial intelligence, we can kind of go down the list of a number of these innovations that are converging to create new business models, new opportunities. Are you seeing any of that kind of being incorporated into the leadership literature? Are you seeing anything on that front right now? Have you seen anything around blockchain and leadership or sensor technology and leadership? I can envision a space john, where we would get into a lot of moral and ethical discussions here. Put that aside, again, to your charisma statement a few moments ago, we could probably have someone where device where the how they communicate all day long, it's being recorded, and we could probably perform some analytics on are they showing up as inspirational or as D motive? Are they a Dementor? Right from the Harry Potter sense, and provide again, the analytics and the data and help people improve? If that's your objective. Have you seen anything on that front?
John Antonakis 28:24
Well, yes. So one of my colleagues, Marianne Schmid must she's in the OB department of our faculty. She's my neighbor, not here at the office. So she and I have a common interest. We work with the social sensing laboratory of the Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne. And we will with two separate groups, I work with people who do NLP natural language processing. She does that and social sensing emotional sensing and those kinds of analytics MIT also, I know that they've been working on developing sensor so much more trust, pure behavioral data based on biological or other features that are beyond, you know, me reporting my impressions of something, you know, or the self-report to your point, the survey. That is honestly I don't trust us anymore. And, you know, we're at the point now where we can use technology to get true behavioral measures. There is a special issue in LQ called "Beyond the Ritualized Use of Questionnaires Towards a Science of True Leadership Theory and Practice" or something like that. And the whole point of this is to show that questionnaires actually have led us down the garden path. So much has been done, and so much of it is absolutely useless to informing policy because all these studies don't actually identify causal effects. They just identifying correlations and associations. So yeah, I think more is being done. A few people are starting to take advantage of this, but I think in leadership and in management in general, you know, we got to take a lot more advantage of like topic modeling, you know, qualitative researchers. who, you know, read stuff in the report on their opinions and interpretations? Those are highly idiosyncratic. If I look at that, if you look at if 100 people look at, we'll come up with 100 different ideas about what's in there, because we're going in there with a priori expectations. A computer program doesn't have that. So, you know, topic modeling, I think, is something that is just not used enough deep neural networks. I think that's the future, every student should learn how these things work and what they do. And I think then we should be beginning to integrate them in learning. Like, you know, what Google did with Alpha Zero, self-reinforced deep neural network learning, I mean, unbelievable stuff, that this programming...you know, they've got superhuman abilities in chess, and you know, using very simple trial and error learning mechanisms. Now, how can we harness these to solve problems to create vaccines, to give people on the fly feedback on the leadership, you know, there's so much we can do, and biologists taking advantage of that. Physics is taking advantage of some other sciences. But social sciences, we're just too slow. And you know, we think that computers, because they don't have emotions, you know, we they, they connect like us. But certainly, they can do many tasks much better than we can.
Scott Allen 31:10
And so for listeners, please watch AlphaGo it's about the company DeepMind. They're a Google company now. But they invented this, this neural network that basically beat the best human in the world in the game Go. And what's interesting of a couple of things are interesting about this, and I'll put, I'll put a link to the movie, it's on YouTube in the show notes. In the game go. According to the film, there are more potential options than atoms in the universe - options for moves. So this machine that they invented is not going with if-then statements, it's thinking. And in fact, it was playing the game in ways that humans wouldn't when they got into it, it was really fascinating. But imagine that, john, I mean, okay, so I've got my augmented reality contact lenses, and the system knows I'm having a really bad day, and I'm failing badly. And I get a little red light in my eye that says, "Hey, take a couple of breaths and check yourself because your vitals are not where they need to be and how you're communicating is not going to get you where you want to be.' I mean, that real-time feedback and coaching, we could be using technology in some really, really interesting ways.
John Antonakis 32:16
Yeah, we have that for driving. I mean, you drove a Tesla when you Volvo. I would I have now Subaru, you know, if you're not driving very well, with the things shows a cup of coffee saying, "Hey, dude, should pull over and take a break here. You know, when you're not driving properly," you know, I start to derail, hey, you know, the steering wheel corrects me, you know, we could have the same stuff with leadership, "John, you being an asshole right now. Listen to what the person saying"...you know,
Scott Allen 32:41
well, and think about the ramifications across domains. So you know, parenting or relationships, john, you're going to be divorced if you continue to communicate this way.
John Antonakis 32:50
But you know, people are just so scared of this, you know, like, I was talking to someone the other day, you know, we have a machine that can instantly give you the charisma score of a speech, if we're gonna be writing up the paper now for the validation. But, you know, it took me like five years of hard work thinking, working with a couple of experts in signal processing, these electrical engineers, computer scientists, you know, now this thing can do this job very, very well, just like deep neural networks can identify, you know, skin lesions that are cancerous much better than the best dermatologist, but it's the only thing you can do, you know, it's not gonna suddenly evolve into controlling all the bank accounts of the world. You know, I can't even tie my shoelace. You know, he just does one thing very well. So I think we shouldn't be scared of these technologies. Many people have said crazy stuff that these machines are going to take over us and killers, they don't have any intent. And the humans are the ones who are the problem. You know, I can, I can use physics to develop a nuclear bomb, I can use it to do radiation therapy and cure cancer, chemistry, we can develop chemical weapons, we can whatever, you know, it's the humans that are the problem. It's not the technology, and we can do so much harm and so much good. But we need to harness the power of technology to solve the world's problems. It's the future and it's the only way we're going to survive on this planet is we need to embrace technology.
Scott Allen 34:05
Well just even imagine, and then we'll wind down in a moment. But I am in Cleveland, Ohio. We have a gentleman here named Charlie Lougheed who I should have on the podcast. He sold his company to IBM Watson health, it was called explore us. He started a new company using blockchain and artificial intelligence, it's called Axuall. And essentially what they're doing is they're trying to solve a multi-billion dollar problem. When a physician is hired, it usually takes about 90 days before they're credentialed. Well, for an organization, especially now during COVID. When you have upwards of 1000 of your medical staff offline, because they're sick or they're quarantining, you need these people that you've hired, practicing medicine as quickly as possible. And the average physician is making $8,000 a day, and that's billions of dollars. So he's actually putting these credentials on the blockchain so that we can turn the switch on day one. Imagine if, from a leader development perspective, we have some type of learning progress, some type of learning journey where we can actually validate that this individual has at least been, you know, it takes, what, 25,30, 40 years to create a general in the military. And that's not perfect, but it's scaffolded learning over a career. And could we scaffold that learning? I think there's, there's so many fun, wonderful opportunities, there just is.
John Antonakis 35:26
Yeah, I agree with you so much. And you know, when you said, I have many different hats, you know, one of the other hats I have is about 30%, of what I've published is on statistics, and on how to properly estimate models, and I just pulled out a book because if you look behind me on the video, or you know all the books here on econometrics, this is a micro econometrics. So you know, I teach a class called On Making Causal Claims on our PhD program, and we have another class on econometrics. I think before we do anything, we need to just go back and figure out what works and what doesn't work. And what is the causal impact of doing A on B, a lot of the literature done in the last 50 years is pretty much useless for policy. So I think we need to go back to basics, do some clean experiments, use clean behavioral measures, and then we can build this scaffolding really on firm concrete and not on jello that we have right now. Because, you know, it's a really big problem in like four or five papers, where we show it, but 90% of articles that make claims causal claims are false, these causal claims are not supported by the design used and the evidence that they have. And that's a massive problem. So, you know, econometrics is one thing that I think the observational researcher in our field needs to learn. And if they don't do that, then they better do experiments.
Scott Allen 36:42
Yeah. Well, John, I hope sometime we can go down that road, your vision of what the next steps for our field should be...From a, again, back to basics rebuild, and then we can base policy off of some of what it is the work that we're doing, and our educational initiatives can be rooted in sound thinking as well. Not that there hasn't been good thinking, It's all brought us to where we are. But I think, to your point, it's an evolution.
John Antonakis 37:07
Yeah, definitely. I mean, there has been some good work. Like I said, about 80% of the papers have huge problems. So there is some good work out there. And I'll be happy to engage on this because I'm very interested in how to design consequential and policy-relevant experiments, and especially field experiments, and you know, who's leading the way in the social sciences right now and field experiments? It's economics. You know, they went from not doing experiments to doing like, tons of field experiments, you know, Esther Duflo, she won the Nobel Prize two years ago. She's a field experimentalist. That's what she does. And, you know, we got to, we got to do stuff that's relevant in the field. And we need to know what's going on in the field.
Scott Allen 37:45
Yes, we're too far from the field. And when we go to the field, it's, again, to your point, these self-report surveys that do us very little good.
John Antonakis 37:54
You know, the quote by I forget the name of the guy who was a Harvard professor, and he became the CEO of Caesars Casinos. And he said, these three words, you can get fired from my firm - "You know, one is if you steal if you goof off for whatever, kid, and then the third way is if you run an experiment that you don't have a control group."
Scott Allen 38:11
Well, john, when I close out the podcast, I always ask listeners, what they are reading, streaming, or listening to. And it doesn't have to be anything having to do with leadership or economics or statistics. It could just be something that's caught your attention lately. So what are some things that have caught your attention in recent months?
John Antonakis 38:28
Well, a book that I'm reading right now, almost at the last chapter is called Stoner, an unbelievable book. It was written about 50 years ago, 60 years ago in the US by I think a guy called John Williams. The title is just called stoner, and it's about a professor. So I think all of you who are listening either will be a professor or aspiring to be a professor or our professors. It's an amazing book. It's written in the most crisp and engaging prose I've read, and I've ever read. I mean, I think this is probably the best writer I've ever read a lot. read up about this book, stoner it became the best selling book now, like 50-60 years after it was published, people didn't realize what a great book it was. And it really shows the life of being a researcher, a professor, but it's incredibly sad but incredibly beautiful, and at the same time, I find a very happy story about a guy who goes from a farm becomes a professor and dies and everything that happens in between so Stoner, get that book, read it. excellent book.
Scott Allen 39:29
I will put it in the show notes. John Antonakis. Thank you so much, sir. We appreciate your time today. You've given us a lot to think about and for that, we are very, very grateful. Thank you.
John Antonakis 39:39
Thank you, Scott for the invitation.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai