Listen to “#812 The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World” on Spreaker.

On‌ ‌this‌ ‌episode‌ ‌of‌ ‌The‌ ‌Small‌ ‌Business‌ ‌Radio‌ ‌Show…‌ ‌

Segment 1 and 2 with Karthik Ramanna starts at 0:00.

It seems if one thing is for sure, is that we are living in “the age of outrage”. Social media and politics certainly has turned up the heat and people seem to be outraged and angry almost everywhere about almost everything. How can we still lead in such a highly charged environment?

My guest is Karthik Ramanna who is a professor of business and public policy at University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, where he has served as director of one of the world’s most diverse leadership programs.

Previously a professor at Harvard Business School, Professor Ramanna studies how organizations and leaders build trust with stakeholders. His scholarship has won numerous awards including three times the international Case Centre’s prizes for “outstanding case-writing,” dubbed by the Financial Times as “the business school Oscars.”

His new book is called “The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World“.

Karthik attributes the polarization to  the unusual confluence of three drivers:

  • A Fear of the Future (due to forces like disruptive technology, climate change, and demographic shifts);
  • A belief of being handed a Raw Deal by those in power (on issues like globalization, immigration, and taxes on the rich); and
  • A growing Sense of Othering (viewing the world in “us versus them” terms).

In the face of these powerful divisive forces, he writes that leaders still have the power to uphold a sense of cohesion and make a positive difference in the world.

Karthik offers a toolkit of solutions over a five-part framework to guide leaders through their response to a particular crisis:

  1. “Turning down the temperature” – creating a suitable environment for calm discussion
  2. “Making sense of the moment” – drawing from the drivers of disunity to identify the source of a particular crunch point
  3. “Scoping the response” – assessing the organization’s capabilities and limiting factors, including whether it has a moral responsibility and a pragmatic necessity to act
  4. “Understanding the leader’s power” – sorting out how to drive action in a sustainable way, because the current crisis will not be the only one to manage
  5. “Building organizational and personal resilience” – adopting a set of disciplines designed to devolve power more broadly and nurture the capability to accept and grow from failure

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