The Memo: The humble leader’s time is here

Plus takeaways from "Billion Dollar Loser" and SpaceX's latest launch.

To modern workers everywhere, For at least two decades, management theorists have been talking about the real risks associated with arrogant leaders whose unearned faith in their own ability inspires admiration, and the benefits of elevating leaders who approach the job with far less ego. In business and in the voting booth, we've been slow to heed their advice. But there are signs all around us that the slow walk away from command-and-control management is about to accelerate, with a fresh embrace of the rarest of species: the humble leader. Marilyn Gist's well-timed new book, The Extraordinary Power of Leader Humility, begins with a definition of what leading with humility means: "the tendency to feel and regard others' dignity." In politics, it's easy to see how that might be applied to leaders who focus on serving both the middle class and the marginalized, or to forming protocols that guide the way the government responds to families who seek asylum at your border. At a company, it can mean seeking out the voices of rank-and-file employees, paying people fairly, ensuring a living wage, avoiding incentives and perks that encourage the wrong behaviors or overly reward top management, and understanding that people who have had different life experiences from your own have something to teach you. Between worsening inequality and a wider awareness of how much injustice some groups have endured, and the pandemic bringing all of this into focus, the time is ripe for the book's key message. History suggests that the defeat of Donald Trump by a humble Joe Biden in the race for US president also could hasten a change in corporate culture. In post-World War II America, in the wake of the destruction wrought by leaders like Hitler and Mussolini, companies were especially disinclined to seek CEOs with messianic complexes. The power-hungry were seen as too threatening—at least until the 1980s, when the pendulum swung the other way again. Now, we see a fresh focus on stakeholder capitalism (as an ideal, at least), calls to expand business school curricula to incorporate more notions about how capitalism could work, and broadening support for raising the minimum wage. And America has just denied a second term to a president who brought plenty of self-aggrandizement and old-school power dynamics to his role. It all suggests that we're perhaps returning to a place where openness and a willingness to build consensus through democratic processes will be welcomed. That's an environment that ought to make humility an honorable trait in leaders once again.—Lila MacLellan

+ There's a workshop for that. Our Quartz at Work (from home) series of live, free events continues this Thursday at 11am US eastern time. Join Quartz executive editor Heather Landy and a panel of business leaders prepared to offer advice on managing teams through times of tension.

Register here Five things we learned this week Prop 22 won't stop with California. Uber and its gig economy brethren plan to take their "third way" of classifying workers to other jurisdictions. The UK government wants new powers to block corporate takeovers. It's not saying its proposal has anything to do with China, but it's not not saying it, either. There's a simple tip for staying assertive in emotional conversations. It draws upon the wisdom of improv comedy. We shouldn't make teachers pay taxes. So says Blackstone chief Stephen Schwarzman, arguing for making educators a "valued class." But we should tax people who work from home. So says a team of researchers at Deutsche Bank, arguing for the bigger-picture economic impact. It's a fact Speaking of taxes…San Francisco's new "CEO tax," targeting businesses with highly paid executives and low-paid workers, is expected to generate $60 million to $140 million of revenue per year, or 0.4% to 1% of the city's annual budget.

+ Quartz's Michael Coren and Dan Kopf, both of whom are based in the Bay Area, put together a fascinating analysis of what the CEO tax will, and won't, accomplish. The key takeaway? Without real enforcement of the provision, "the potential to dodge the tax is high. Yet economists, citing near-total inaction of the US government to rein in inequality, say it still may be worth a shot." Read more here.

30-second case study Conventional wisdom holds that professionals need to project confidence to be successful. But as the new book Billion Dollar Loser suggests, confidence—embodied in the megalomaniacal figure of WeWork co-founder and ex-CEO Adam Neumann—is a bit of a scam. As author Reeves Wiedeman tells it, Neumann's extreme confidence in his own abilities propelled WeWork to achieve a wildly inflated $47 billion valuation. Neumann talked about building WeWork cities by 2028 and tried to convince Elon Musk that he'd need WeWork communities on Mars. "Our trajectory looks like Amazon's," Neumann told Wiedeman in April 2019. "Except our market is larger and our growth is faster." By the end of that year, he'd been ousted as CEO, and his company was falling apart. In Billion Dollar Loser's telling, the problem was not so much that individual investors looked past WeWork's overspending and governance issues, but the fact that the logic of venture capitalism "dictated that you bet on entrepreneurs as much as their companies." AP Photo/Mark Lennihan The takeaway: Neumann's self-assurance had nothing to do with his ability to execute on his larger-than-life ambitions. If anything, it was a warning sign of hubris that people around him repeatedly failed to heed. If intelligent people can be so easily and erroneously swayed by confidence, perhaps we should spend less time trying to project it ourselves, and more time learning to be skeptical of the quality in others. Such a skill would have certainly saved WeWork investors a lot of money. Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank, poured nearly $20 billion into WeWork largely because he was looking for, as Wiedeman puts it, "entrepreneurs with a sparkle in their eyes and a willingness to act a little crazy." On that, at least, Neumann delivered. In this week's field guide for Quartz members In 2020, the changing nature of cool is affecting what shoppers buy, who they follow, and how companies behave. Today, being cool includes being—or at minimum, looking—informed and concerned about the world. But racial justice, feminism, and environmentalism movements have been around for decades. So why is cool changing now? Read more about the factors behind the new meaning of cool in our latest field guide to the new meaning of cool. Words of wisdom

"We're all here just trying to catch up on our email inboxes, and Elon Musk is sending humans into space on official missions."—Box CEO Aaron Levie, marveling on Twitter at SpaceX's successful launch of a capsule carrying four NASA astronauts to the International Space Station

+ Into space stuff? Sign up for our weekly newsletter all about the space business. ICYMI "They hung in conference rooms and reception areas, as innocuous as the office fern, ideally engineered (as organizational psychologists later would find) to be almost instantly forgotten by the conscious mind." In this gem from the Quartz at Work archive, we learn the surprisingly dramatic history of Successories, the company behind the bland posters of placid scenes—a crew team rowing at dawn, a glacier towering over a valley—that once covered the offices we now miss so much. Successories You got The Memo! Our best wishes for a productive and creative day. Please send any workplace news, comments, humble leaders, and confidence-skepticism skills to work@qz.com. Get the most out of Quartz by downloading our app and becoming a member. This week's edition of The Memo was produced by Heather Landy and Sarah Todd.

Enjoying The Memo from Quartz at Work? Forward it to a friend! They can click here to sign up. If you're looking to unsubscribe, click here. Quartz | 675 Avenue of the Americas, 4th Fl | New York, NY 10011 | United States Copyright © 2020 Quartz, All rights reserved.