James McCalman

The new management challenge: information systems for improved performance

In this valuable and realistic study the contributors look at the implications of information technology from the point of view of practising managers.

Leadership narratives in a post-truth era

The election of Donald Trump and the success of similar campaigns across Europe have highlighted the dangers of (deceitful) storytelling by leaders. As a result, the narratives used by leaders to disseminate their message have become a serious concern in society at large. What is most worrying about these newly emerged leaders is that they gained a resounding victory by relying on half-truths, lies, innuendoes and empty verbiage. This climate has given rise to the idea that we live in a post-truth era (Davis, 2017), where truth cannot be objectively determined and boundaries between truth and lies, honesty and dishonesty, fiction and nonfiction become blurred (Keyes, 2004). The Oxford English Dictionary announced ‘post-truth’ as the word of the year for 2016, defining it as, “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Of late, it appears that many leaders tell untruths as a matter of routine. More drastically, many followers have come to expect their leaders to tell lies and untruths and do not seem to mind, as long as these lies express wishful thinking, identify suitable scapegoats for anger and hostility, and meet other psychic needs. Inaccurate, deceitful and emotionally manipulative stories have been deployed long before the arrival of Trump. Salmon (2017) argues that since the mid-1990s, the instrumental use of stories has become common, both in the world of business and of politics. The human creative imagination, he argues, can be hijacked by leaders who use sophisticated techniques of storytelling to exploit people’s timeless desire for meaningful narratives. Examples include: