Managing in the Age of Outrage with Karthik Ramanna

0:00People feel like they've been dealt a raw deal, that the leaders and the institutions just aren't working for them.

0:11What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty-gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change? I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

0:46Hello, everybody, and welcome to this edition of TruthWorks. And today, we are interviewing Karthik Ramana, and he's going to make us feel better about everything, he promises. Karthik Ramana is a professor of business and public policy at the University of Oxford Blatvanik School of Government. where he has served as director of one of the world's most diverse leadership programs. And we're really excited to talk to you today. And if you want to add something to that, tell us a little bit. Yeah, tell us about your book and what's, bring us up to date with you, Karthik. Sure. So thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here, Patti and Jessica.

1:26And yeah, what I'll add is I have just written a book called The Age of Outrage, How to Lead in a Polarized World. I remember sending your name to my production team because I was like, oh, okay, this is something that really resonates with me personally, like of what I'm dealing with. But really like what I was dealing with, even at Netflix before I left when I was a CHRO, like trying to navigate leading in a global company where there were so many things happening around the world that there was so much divergence on. And it was really scary at times on what to say, what not to say, how to diffuse it, how to get people to focus on work.

2:19Yeah. And, you know, I was thinking about this, too, Jessica, before we started today. I was thinking about, you know, one of my observations around the pandemic is that because we got to see each other, we brought people's home lives into their work lives. Right. And we used to think that we could divide it. Right. There's your work self and there is your other self and there was your political self. And those two never crossed. Right. And you certainly were in the middle of it all crossing. And now, holy moly. So talk to us, mister. Tell us about your three observances. And when you taught your class, I mean, what was the learning from that that said, I got to do this?

3:05So about 10 years ago, I moved from Harvard Business School to the University of Oxford School of Government. Part of the move was it was a new school and it was creating a public policy program. that would educate leaders from around the world. And I remember I came here about a week before the students did. And in that first class, we had 120 students from about 70 different countries. Now, when I say students, some of them are very seasoned. And I remember standing there in front of the class on that first day saying to myself, gosh, Karthik, at the very least, don't screw this up. but, you know, maybe more aspirationally, we should leave them better than we found them, you know, leave them better for the experience since they've taken time away from really impactful careers to come here to Oxford and spend some time to make the world a better place.

3:57But of course I realized that I had no idea how to do this. And so I did the thing that, you know, inside secret, many academics do, many professors do when they don't know the answer. So when you don't know the answer to something, you say, well, let's teach a course on it. And so that's where the course comes from. It says, so I was very upfront for the students. I said, look, we're all in this to be able to be better leaders in the context of polarization. So let's teach a course on how to lead in a polarized world. And so every week I would invite someone from my personal network who was a general manager.

4:35And so we had a wide range of protagonists come to the classroom, everyone from, you know, the CEO of a beer company to the commissioner of London police to the mayor of a frontier town, you know, on the border between Brazil and Venezuela that was dealing with massive influx of immigrants. So the idea was, look, these are all, you know, really difficult frontline general management jobs. How are people dealing with this situation? And it was through the collective wisdom of teaching that course, you know, with very smart students over the course of five to seven years that the insights from this book came about.

5:14I'm guessing you had some outward motivation to writing the book as well, just in kind of maybe even seeing outside of your class what was going on in the world. Absolutely. And, you know, there's a reason I called it the age of outrage. And one of the premises of the book is that managing outrage is not managing in the age of outrage. So managing outrage is sort of like crisis management. It's not easy, but we know how to do it. and you bring in a PR firm and you get good at the comms and things like that. And it's sort of firefighting. And then you get on with the course of business. But managing the age of outrage means that you can't really take a firefighting approach to things because if you did, when would you do the fire prevention?

6:03And more importantly, when would you do all the learning and growth and innovation and all the other stuff you've got to do, like your day job, right? So there was something different about the zeitgeist of our times that meant that we needed to look at this more structurally, more systematically. And, you know, my eventual conclusion was that managing the age of outrage is now a functional general management skill, just like finance or accounting or marketing. You can't be a general manager and say, oh, I don't do balance sheets. You know, that's not like, I mean, that's not going to work very long.

6:36So in the same way, you can't be a general manager and say, oh, I, you know, I'm not worried about, you know, managing in the age of outrage. Like, no, it's just, it's just part of what it's going to be, mean to be a manager in this day. And I thought one of the interesting thing about your conclusions was outrage is a different, there's a different thing depending on where you come from, what part of the world you're in, you know, what your politics are, what your differences are. I mean, so that time that it took for you to put it together must have driven you to thematic choices, right? That's right.

7:11That's absolutely right. And basically, as I looked at, you know, I mean, this is very much a book about solutions rather than diagnosis. But I think it's important to understand what we're dealing with and why we're dealing with it. I was just going to ask, like, I think a lot of hope that we have as leaders is that it goes away, right? Because everything seems to be an 11 for everyone. Nothing's a 10, nothing's a five. It's all 11s. Do you have any idea of why and how and where this is all stemming from? And then do we get to a place where if we're leading the right way, we can have a more stable, steady state?

8:01Or is this just like how it's going to be? So let me start with that second question first, because I do think we can manage the situation in a way that'll make it better. That's part of why, you know, I do what I do in terms of my day job. That's why I wrote the book, etc. So history is not destiny, but we can also quite easily screw this all up. So, you know, that's part of the whole point of sort of engaging in this area. But let's go back to your first question, which is sort of why and is it going away anytime soon? And in my estimation, there are three things that really matter in this moment.

8:39The first is what I call a fear of the future. And we're living at a time where we're dealing with AI, for instance, which promises to be as disruptive, if not more disruptive than the Industrial Revolution was. right? I mean, you just think about it, our jobs, the jobs you and I have, they were unimaginable even 50 years ago, right? In the context of industrialization and so forth. And if we were trying to explain to our ancestors from 200 years ago, what we do, they would be like, what kind of job is that? So in the course of just the next 25 years, the very nature of work will change so profoundly.

9:17And people are afraid about that. People are anxious about that. They're also anxious about climate change. Some people are. They're anxious about, and they might not use the words climate change, but they are anxious about things like rising sea levels. They are anxious about things like hurricanes and tornadoes and things like that, right? So people have common sense and they get that there's something changing there. They're worried about demographic shifts, right? Much of the world, not just the Western world, even China and India are now below replacement rate, right? And by the year 2050, half of all the young people in the world, all the people under the age of 18 will be just in sub-Saharan Africa because the very nature of population growth in the world will completely shift.

9:56And so you've got that, right? So people look at the world just one generation from now and they're like, whoa. So that's like fear of the future, right? Now, if you were dealing with that and you felt like, you know what? I can trust my leaders. I can trust the institutions, I can trust business and government and the church and so forth to just make this sort of work for us, maybe we'd be okay. But the second factor is this notion that, you know, people feel like they've been dealt a raw deal, that the leaders and the institutions just aren't working for them. People feel rightly or wrongly, they've been sold the wrong narrative on globalization.

10:38They've been sold the wrong narrative on immigration, right? So there's this sort of distrust with the institution. So you've got that on top of the fear. And this is where the third factor comes in. Perhaps as a consequence of these first two, we're retreating from what I call sort of the global humanist project. This is sort of, you know, this idea that we're all in this together and, you know, through the pursuit of democracy and markets, we'll be able to sort of, you know, lift ourselves out of this to this us versus them kind of, you know, so I I call it the ideology of othering. And we're seeing more and more of this ideology of othering in mainstream political discourse that if we don't, as our tribe, hunker down and solve this problem, we're going to get, you know, eliminated by all of these changes.

11:25Right. Winners and losers, right? We're going to lose. We're going to lose. Yeah. They're going to get us. They're going to get us. Yes. So now you think about it, any one of these problems itself is a big problem. having all three at once at the degree to which they manifest. That's kind of what's making this, this, as you said, Jessica, 11 every single time. Yeah. And then what about it seeping into work? You know, there's this recently I gave this talk at Google, right? And Google is a great company. It has done wonders in terms of technology and so forth. and it's a company that, you know, people are its real asset.

12:06It's only asset. I mean, you know, it'd be different if you were, say, like an oil company or something like that, because then, you know, you have this other asset. Obviously, people are important, but you also have this asset sitting on the ground. But for Google, the asset is the people. So they have rightly said to people that, you know, we want you to treat this like this is an extension of your identity. We want you, you know, so people who work at Google are called Googlers. and then when you go to the Google headquarters, you can see what a comfortable life that is, right? They'll do your dry cleaning, they'll shampoo your dog, they'll do, you know, and in fact, the dogs of Googlers are called Douglers and in the buildings they say, you know, Douglers welcome and this and that.

12:48So, you know, and that makes good business sense. The whole idea is bring your whole authentic selves to work because you are our asset and we want you to identify with us as a family. Now, fast forward to sort of where we are, right, in this sort of world and everything that's happening and so forth. And you've been telling people, bring your authentic self to work. You have these town halls where, you know, people weigh in on strategy and they say, we should be doing this and we should be doing that. And then the CEO says, yes, yes, we should. And this is great. There's this sort of, you know, dialogue and so forth.

13:21But of course, there's other things happening in the world. There's the war in the Middle East, for instance, that's happening. And then people start bringing that to work, right? And then of course the company, what the leadership, what's their response? Like, oh, we can't talk about that. Now that, that's not going to work so well because, you know, I mean, like you've told people bring your whole authentic self. This is my family. This is my identity. I'm a Googler, right? And now suddenly this thing that I care so personally about this thing, that's 11 out of 10 for me, I can't bring this to work.

13:53Wait, how does that work? That's jars with everything we've done. So that's the challenge that businesses are facing. The CEO might think that's the right decision, but it's not going down well at all. Yeah. No, we grappled with this so much at Netflix of like, where's the line? What do you comment on? What do you not comment on? Because there was something happening around the world all the time. And everybody wanted a message sent from the CEO to the whole company on all those issues. And so we really debated and debated and debated and debated, like, what's the right method? Where do we stand?

14:34What do we comment on? What do we not comment on? Do we handle it globally? Do we handle it locally? Yeah, particularly since the culture was built on open communication and honesty and truth telling. So then, you know, what's your truth? And it's pretty different from one place to the other. It totally is. And what we were learning is that, you know, what an 11 was in the United States wasn't what an 11 was in Brazil. And that wasn't what an 11 was in Tokyo. And, you know, some managers would send out these emails to their entire global team and half of the team would be like, I don't even know what you're talking about.

15:11Yeah. Yeah. Why is this an issue for me? Why is this an issue? Absolutely. So, you know, as I searched, one of the things about teaching the course that was so fun was you got to bring in really creative people from around the world who were tackling with this. Some successfully, some less successfully, right? I mean, you learn as much from failure as you do from success. And so, but as I searched for people who were navigating this challenge, I came across this remarkable leader, a woman called Priscilla Ankut. She was actually brought to my attention by the Ford Foundation in West Africa because they were, you know, one of her granters.

15:47She ran this organization called the Kaduna State Peace Commission. She was CEO of this commission. Now, Kaduna State is a state in north central Nigeria. And like much of the country of Nigeria, which is sort of divided between a Muslim north and a Christian south, Kaduna State being in sort of the north center of it is sort of, you know, same divisions, and slightly more Muslim than it is Christian. And elections tend to be largely on religious lines. And so they had just elected a fairly populist governor, Governor El Rufi. And he was often likened to President Trump. He was sort of, you know, this is someone who just sort of like, you know, said things and people thought he was just very polarizing and so forth.

16:33And perhaps surprisingly, he, as he's elected, reaches out to Priscilla Ancut, who at the time is this technocrat in the African Union, which is this sort of pan-African organization of countries. And she had spent her whole career building peace in East Africa, so a completely different part of this huge continent. But she's from Karuna State. So she gets this email from this governor saying, hey, I want to create this peace commission. will you come and be the first CEO of it? And everyone in her network, like her friends, family, mentors say, don't do it. You know, don't touch this guy. This guy's toxic.

17:12You know, he's like Trump, why would you do this? And she says, look, if I didn't build my skill for this moment, what did I build it for? So if I don't do this, I will regret it. So I've got to do it. so she goes in right and he doesn't even give her a budget so the first few months she's just like running this commission out of the trunk of her car that's actually how she meets the ford foundation because she's trying to raise money to be able to actually do something so here she is ceo of this peace commission she has no control over the police no control over military no budget etc but she's sort of you know scrabbling together something to say i built my skill to help my people right, both Christians and Muslims in my state, and I want to try to see if I can do something.

17:57Now, being the really good data-driven manager that she is, right, and this sort of resonates with all of us, she starts looking at the data on violence in her state. And she says, she's a CEO of the Peace Commission, I got to do something out of violence. And she realizes it's not like random, right? Instead, it's more like a sine wave. It's periodic. And she says, huh, so I wonder what happens if I sort of try to align this in event time and see what's the periodicity that's creating this. And it turns out it's elections, right? So of course, it's manufactured violence to affect election outcomes.

18:33That's right. So now what she does is she says, okay, who are the most outspoken voices on social media that say crazy things around elections that then provoke ordinary people to go commit violence? and she starts approaching them in an ad personam capacity, right? Not like sort of an official or anything to join this little, like almost like a little household club that she's created that she calls the House of Kaduna family. Now, when I first hear this, I'm like, this is corny as hell. Yeah, right, right. So she creates this thing, House of Kaduna family, and she brings in these people. Like, so for instance, the head of the Christian Association in Nigeria is there, the head of Jamaati Islami is there, et cetera.

19:17But they're all there in their personal capacities, right? And she starts this two years before the next election. And what she's trying to do is she's trying to humanize them to each other, right? There's this great line from Michelle Obama, which says, you can't hate someone when you know them, right? And so that's what she's trying to do here. And so she starts creating these relationships within this group of really catalytic individuals in a polarized society. And so, of course, it doesn't make the election violence magically disappear. But when it comes time to the next election cycle, there's sort of this, oh, wait, these are people I know.

19:55And so it's not as crazy as it could have been, right? So it starts making progress. She says, OK, I'm going to create the institutions that I'm going to have to call on to diffuse the violence well before I actually need those institutions. That's the groundwork that she's right. So if you go back to our Google example that we were using earlier, part of what I think companies need to do is recognize, look, this issue is not going away. Today, it's maybe the war in the Middle East. Tomorrow, it's going to be something else. Maybe there's a war with Canada. Who knows? So what we've got to figure out is how do we create the institutions that we're going to need when things get really bad?

20:35Because we know things are going to get really bad. And how do we create the trust with those groups, right? And say, look, if this can work in the context of decreasing violence in Kaduna State, this can work at Google, right? Yeah. So that's the sense in which, you know, anticipating you're going to have this problem and starting well before you need to in convening the people that need to hear from each other. That's been one thing that really successful managers have done in this space. Yeah, I really love that. And I think it's a good thing for our listeners to maybe hear is that doing it in the moment when the crisis is happening, that's when everything's, the stakes are too high, everybody's hot.

21:21Yeah. And you won't be able to get so like doing this and thinking about it well before something happens, to know how you're going to manage it, to know how you're going to lead through it. And that is really where we spent a lot of time focusing at Netflix was let's have a plan, right? And let's have the right people answering for the right things, right? And, you know, we went around the globe and said, okay, when something happens here, how are we going to, you know, when something happens here, you know? But the simple act of putting different people in the same room together with different perspectives, you know, is management 101 kind of.

22:01but we never think of applying that to the playbook's already written, right? Put the marketing person in the room with the engineer in the room with the salesperson and have a conversation about what the customer wants, right? That's right. And that seems well-known management practice. We would all do that. But would we think about that at a personal level too without fear? Without fear and without an agenda, right? Because if you start well before you need it, right? So for instance, now, even if Google's leadership is correct to say, we shouldn't be bringing the world in the Middle East to our town halls, because that's just not, you know, it's not going to be a productive use.

22:41Not what we do. Right. And it's not a productive use of this time and space, et cetera. For that to be a decision that the CEO makes in the moment and pushes top down, that's the part that's jarring. It may not be the outcome, but it's the, right? So instead, imagine, say, look, we're going to have these problems. So let's create a group that thinks through what's the right way for us to solve this problem. And then let them come up with a process. And if you have the right people and you've created the right conditions, then trust that they will come up with the right process that gives you that outcome.

23:13Because then it's not you putting your decision down, which flies in the face of everything else you've tried to do in the culture, right? There's this other example of this CEO of one of the world's largest research hospitals managing, you know, a potential surgeon's revolt during COVID, right? So this is sort of a time very early in the pandemic, when we didn't have a sense of how serious this virus was going to, how contagious or infectious it would be. We didn't have the PPE, the protective equipment, we didn't have the testing equipment. So it's a great deal of anxiety. And yet, you know, governments were saying, well, hospitals have to stay open, they have to do elective surgeries, because, you know, you still have to treat the motorcycle victims, you have to do all this.

23:54And so there was so much anxiety and fear, even amongst the medical community. And here you had this group of surgeons that were sort of, you know, very worried about sort of going ahead and doing all the things they needed to do. You know, because we had sort of this pandemic like, you know, almost public health war footing here in the UK, heads of hospitals were called gold commanders for their districts because they were in charge of, you know, public health. They were kind of like, you know, just like the surgeon general is called the general. And so her team around her, the CEO, they were saying to her, look, you just got to tell them this is their duty.

24:29They've taken this oath and you're their, you know, gold commander. And this CEO had been just about maybe 13 months in her job. And part of the reason she had been brought in, she was the first outsider, you know, it's a very prestigious research hospital. And she was the first outsider brought in to lead this hospital, right? Always it had been someone from the inside promoted. So when you say, okay, well, why would you bring in an outsider? Was it something about the culture inside that's not working, right? That's why you're, and she'd figured out that the problem was that there wasn't enough trust in management.

24:59There was sort of, you know, it had become too much of a sort of rock star research professor type mentality, and there was less focus on patient safety and so forth. So she was in the process of that kind of cultural transformation. It's like patients first, you know, their issues reported up to management, management's got your back. You know, this is where we're about delivering quality to patients and so forth. So she's in the process of doing this, but she's only 13 months into the job and the pandemic strikes. And then you have this sort of surgeon strike. And her team says, you know, now's the time to sort of lay off that sort of culture stuff and the patient safety huddles and all that she's created.

25:37And let's just tell these surgeons to get on and do their job. And one of her advisors. Command them. Yes, command them. And she says, hell no. If we didn't build this culture for this moment, then what were we building the culture for? And then she says something really important. She says, look, I look at my inbox and I'm getting 200 emails every 30 minutes. There is no human being on earth who can deal with 200 emails every 30 minutes. And this is the beginning of this pandemic, and we don't know how long it's going to last. So there's something wrong if people feel like they have to send all these messages to the CEO because they don't know what to do.