Why the Seven Deadly Sins?

To categorize these potential failings, I sought a number of different models including abuse of special privileges, abuse of power, and corruption. None seems to fit all of the cautionary tales Drucker used to warn leaders of all stripes.

Finally, the idea of the seven deadly sins occurred to me while I was asleep. Clearly, this was my subconscious at work. When I compared the seven deadly sins with Drucker’s view of where executives go awry, I discovered that they were identical to the traps Drucker cautioned leaders to avoid. In further analyzing the seven deadly sins, I saw that to a great extent avoiding these sins might have saved otherwise outstanding leaders.

The Leadership Sin of Pride

The sin of pride is usually considered the most serious of the seven deadly sins. Yet it seems so innocuous. My wife calls it “being full of yourself.” I mean after all, why shouldn’t leaders feel proud of their accomplishments? I believe feeling proud of what one has accomplished or is accomplishing is perfectly acceptable. The problem comes when leaders believe themselves so special that ordinary rules no longer apply. Generalized pride—as opposed to being proud of specific things—is the most serious leadership sin because it can easily lead to the other six. Sometimes even the perception of what the leader does while committing this sin will make things far worse.

On May 18, 1993, Bill Clinton stopped in Los Angeles. After his stay, Air Force One was on the runway getting ready to take off from Los Angeles International Airport when Clinton decided to avail himself of the services of an upscale Beverly Hills hair stylist, Cristophe, who had cut Clinton’s hair in the past. Cristophe rushed to the airport, boarded Air Force One, and gave Clinton a $200 haircut, upscale for the early 1990s. Reporters aboard Air Force One soon learned the reason for the take off delay.

The next day it was all over the news, television, radio, newspapers, and the networks: while airliners circled overhead burning fuel impatiently awaiting clearance to land and while other airliners lined up on the ground behind Air Force One, unable to take off, President Clinton got a well known Beverly Hills hair stylist to cut his hair. Americans were irate. Clinton appeared to be an arrogant and insensitive leader, not at all the individual those who voted for him thought he was. Clinton of course apologized, saying that he did not know the trouble this caused, but it took some time for him to live this incident down, and it harmed his image.

The only problem with this story is that much of it was untrue. Clinton did get a haircut, which took a few minutes, but according to FAA records, the haircut caused no significant delays of regular scheduled flights. There were no circling airplanes and no traffic jams. Still, if for no other reason than the perception of an unwarranted special privilege, he should not have done it. It was a minor incident in the scheme of things—but, unfortunately, it was a harbinger of much more serious things to come that damaged an otherwise highly successful administration.

The Leadership Sin of Lust

I once heard a retired leader of an organization of almost a million members speak about the challenges of leading this organization. “One of the biggest problems,” he said, “was a newly promoted senior executive. I may be exaggerating a little,” he continued, “but it seems that almost as soon as we promoted him, he suddenly decided that he was God’s gift to women.”

This individual spoke at a time when almost all senior executives were male. However, I do not think that one would find much difference with female executives. There is unfortunately a feeling among some leaders that they have “arrived” and are “entitled”; sex is seen as some sort of fringe leadership benefit. In one online survey by the White Stone Journal, lust was the most frequent of the seven deadly sins self-reported as “my biggest failing.”¹ This sin is hardly uncommon. However, it can have very unfortunate consequences. In any workplace, it creates jealousies, feelings of favoritism, and lack of trust, damaging people and relationships and more.

While organizations often prefer to conceal sexual scandals and force the leader quietly out of office, many times this is not possible with political and public institutions, which are closely watched by media quick to publish even suspicions of misconduct. So we frequently know the consequences of the leader’s actions. Hardly a month goes by without the media reporting a leader for this vice. The problems created for leaders because of this deadly sin seem almost without limit.

Clearly, sex is a major psychological drive. Napoleon Hill, author of perhaps the greatest motivational book in modern times, Think and Grow Rich, suggested that by rechanneling sexual energy into other areas, considerable success might be achieved. Rechanneling sexual involvement in the workplace probably is the best idea.

Drucker didn’t seem to care much about these activities in and of themselves. He seemed to believe that a leader’s individual morals were up to that individual, except where it affected the organization and the leader’s performance as a leader. However, Drucker thought that leaders did not pay enough attention to avoiding this particular deadly leadership sin, and thought that leaders could do a better job of avoiding problems that affected their ability to lead.

The Leadership Sin of Greed

The sin of greed is a sin of excess. It frequently starts with power. Leaders have power, and unfortunately having power has a tendency to lead to corruption if the leader isn’t careful. This may start with the acceptance of small favors and grow into accumulating vacations, bribes, and worse.

Randy “Duke” Cunningham was a real naval hero during the Vietnam War. Wounded in action, he received a Navy Cross, the highest award next to the Congressional Medal of Honor, for bravery in battle. He was one of a handful of ace fighter pilots who shot down five or more enemy aircraft in that war. He served the Navy for twenty one years; later, he was elected to Congress, where he served for almost fifteen years. However, on November 28, 2005, Cunningham pled guilty to a variety of charges and resigned his seat in Congress. He admitted to taking $2.4 million dollars in bribes from defense contractors, and was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison. This was the longest sentence ever given a former congressman in a corruption case. On receiving sentence, he said, “I misled my family, staff, friends, colleagues, the public—even myself. For all of this, I am deeply sorry. The truth is—I broke the law, concealed my conduct, and disgraced my high office.”²

How do these things happen? Usually a leader sees others with more possessions, more power, more privilege. Like Cunningham, such a leader probably has quite a few accomplishments on record. The leader may wonder why others have so much more, when (in the leader’s mind) they are far less deserving. This sin is closely associated with the sin of envy.

Maybe a small bribe is accepted. The leader may not even see it as a bribe, just a favor between friends. If the leader allows seduction to take place, greed can take over, resulting in a tearful confession like Congressman Cunningham’s. Despite the claim in the movie, greed was never “good,” even as a motivator, and though Drucker analyzed and approved many motivators, greed was not one of them.

I should not leave this discussion of the sin of greed without noting the terrible contribution greed made to the economic meltdown that began in late 2008. Call it gluttony (which I will discuss shortly) or greed, it is not something the ethical leader participates in.

The Leadership Sin of Sloth

For the leader, the sin of sloth is associated with an unwillingness to act. Sometimes this is laziness. More often, it is an unwillingness to do work the leader considers beneath the dignity of the office. I have many times seen leaders watching critical work they could do as well as anyone—standing around “supervising” when they could have given real help to their subordinates and to the mission for which they were responsible.

Aaron Bloom was brought in to take over a company that two years earlier he had served as vice president. The former president was gone, the company was a shadow of its former self with only 50 employees (it formerly had 350), and was now under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company was short of money and resources of all kinds.

Bloom insisted that all company officers, including himself, work on the production line under the supervision of line supervisors after hours to fulfill an important order and get a needed inflow of cash started. He didn’t stand around watching. He worked the production line like an hourly employee. He did not practice the sin of sloth. As president, he returned the company to its former status and worked it out of Chapter 11 in two years. He went on to lead it until he retired, fifteen years later.

As his army moved toward a critical battle, the Emperor Napoleon and his staff and several senior Marshals of France, all mounted on horses, came upon an artillery caisson mired in the mud and blocking the passage of his troops. A dozen soldiers were struggling to free it. Napoleon immediately jumped from his horse, and put his own shoulder to the effort, saying “Boys, we’ll get it free together.” Naturally, his staff and the be medaled Marshals of France present soon joined him. They freed the cannon, remounted, and went on their way, and Napoleon’s army eventually won the battle. Is it any wonder why Napoleon’s troops followed him in the most difficult conditions again and again?

During World War II, Air Force Major General Hoyt Vandenberg commanded the 9th Tactical Air Force in Europe. He happened to be visiting an airbase when a gunner, suffering from combat fatigue after flying repeated missions with high losses, suddenly “cracked” and shouted that he couldn’t fly that day. Rather than rebuke the young gunner, Vandenberg said, “That’s okay, son. You don’t need to fly today. I’m qualified as an aerial gunner, and I’ll fly for you.” He did. It saved a good gunner, who returned to flight status and was able to complete his tour of duty honorably and successfully. Vandenberg went on to become chief of staff of the Air Force.

In the last article that Peter Drucker wrote for the Wall Street Journal before his death, he stated that American CEOs were unique and that the concept of the CEO as conceived in the United States, and with the responsibilities of the CEO, did not exist in any other country. These responsibilities, Drucker said, not only included work that only the CEO could do but also the requirement to do it.³ In Drucker’s view, these responsibilities involved dealing with things outside the organization and deciding what to do about them. Unfortunately, some CEOs abdicated these and many other responsibilities, which fall under the heading of the sin of sloth.

Failing to know what is going on in your organization is also an abdication of responsibility. Kenneth Lay, Enron CEO, proclaimed his innocence in the fall of Enron right up until his death. However, even if Lay knew nothing of the illegal machinations that led to Enron’s collapse, and one of Enron’s vice presidents did testify in support of this statement, he was still guilty of abdicating his responsibilities in a way that led to the demise of his company. Leaders are responsible for everything that their organization does or fails to do, and nothing can absolve a leader of this responsibility.

Leaders do not sit around when they are needed. They don’t ignore their responsibilities. Both are examples of the sin of sloth and lead to disaster. Leaders are proactive and they take action.

The Leadership Sin of Wrath

This sin has to do with uncontrolled anger. There is a time for anger in leadership when it serves a definite and useful purpose. As Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson taught us in The One Minute Manager, you can take one minute to make a correction, include the words “I’m angry,” and then tell the recipient why.⁴ Moreover, anger does have a useful function in that it can mobilize psychological and physical resources to do something about a problem.

However, leaders need to avoid repeated and uncontrolled anger because it can damage their leadership. It can destroy morale. It does not guarantee a lasting effect in correcting problems, and its constant application makes it useless as a tool at the times when expressing it would really be helpful and appropriate. Moreover, when in an angry state, the leader loses the capacity to self monitor and the ability to observe objectively.

If nothing else, Drucker taught leaders to analyze their environment and to determine what actions that had already occurred meant for the future before taking action. Using anger as a single response to all leadership challenges precludes doing this analysis. It prevents the leader from making good decisions and perhaps from taking the action appropriate to the situation. Actions taken during uncontrolled anger are almost invariably in error and require additional work to undo their consequences later.

The Leadership Sin of Envy

With the sin of envy, the leader is envious of what is enjoyed by someone else. This may or may not be accompanied by greed. The sin usually leads the leader to make decisions and to take actions that will harm the object of the envy.

A leader who falls victim to this sin may deny an earned promotion to a qualified subordinate, attempt to destroy another’s reputation, or in other ways attempt to feel better by lowering the status of another. This is obviously harmful to the other individual and hurts the organization, and it is probably harmful to the leader who perpetrates these actions.

The Leadership Sin of Gluttony

Most associate food or drink with this sin, but for the leader it has a far more ominous connotation. Of all the deadly sins, gluttony is the one that most frustrated Drucker. Expensive food or drink is scarce; therefore, excessive consumption can be seen as a sign of status, but gluttony does not apply only to food.

Drucker had defended perceived high executive salaries in his early writings. He knew how hard executives had to work and how much they had to do without to reach the pinnacle of their careers. However, by the time I became his student in the mid 1970s, sky-rocketing executive salaries caused him to alter his opinion drastically. He said that executive salaries at the top had become clearly excessive and that the ratios of the compensation of American top managers to the lowest-paid workers were the highest in the world. The ratio of average U.S. CEO compensation to average pay of a U.S. nonmanagement employee hit a high in 2001 of 525 to 1.⁵ He said this was morally wrong and recommended a ratio of no more than 20 to 1.⁶

In class, he debunked the arguments for such enormous pay differentials. In response to the proposition that top executives deserved these salaries because of the performance of the corporations they headed, he noted that many top executives were paid these salaries even when their organizations suffered enormous losses or as they led companies into bankruptcy.

Nor were these salaries needed to attract the most qualified executives. He pointed to examples of several well known companies that were performing very well but whose chief executives were paid much more modest salaries. One was Avis Rent A Car. Its president, Robert Townsend, was well known for the “We Try Harder” advertising campaign and his relatively modest salary had a significant effect on Avis’s success during his tenure. Townsend actually refused to leave the room when his board of directors tried to raise his salary and made it plain that this was a leadership issue, stating, “This would be counterproductive to everything I’m trying to accomplish.”

Drucker did not win many friends among high executives with his injunction about too high salaries. Once awarded, an excessive benefit like this is hard to give up. It’s easy to rationalize—and a status issue. However, there was no question in Drucker’s mind but that executive hypercompensation was an accurate example of the sin of gluttony and was to be avoided for good leadership. Interestingly, he drew a parallel between high executive salaries and the demands of unions for more and more benefits without an increase in productivity. He said we would pay a terrible price for these examples of gluttony and that it is never pleasant to watch hogs gorge. As I write these words, this is exactly what we are witnessing.

Drucker on What a Leader Should Avoid

I have characterized the vices that Drucker counseled leaders to avoid as the Seven Deadly Sins of Leadership:

• The Sin of Gluttony

There are things that leaders must do, and things they must not. These are the things Drucker maintained that leaders must not do.