[Note: This column appeared in the San Diego Daily Transcript in May of 2009. Nearly five years later, it still seems relevant.]
With apologies to Hunter S. Thompson for ripping off the title of his seminal book on the political and social zeitgeist of the early 1970’s, it seems overdue for a look at this era’s fear-based milieu, and a comparison to Thompson’s time.
When Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974, the first President to do so, it was a low point of demoralization and fear in the U.S. The Viet Nam war was still going on and would not end until April 30 of the following year. We lost over 50,000 lives in that war. We were still reeling from the oil embargo of 1973, at the birth of OPEC, which occurred two years after the U.S. lost its position as a net exporter of oil to the rest of the world. The oil wasn’t just high priced; it was unavailable to us. The stock market crash of 1973-1974 saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average lose 45% of its value over a period of 694 days. The London exchange lost 73% in the same period. Between 1973 and 1974, GDP was a negative 2.1%. Inflation was 12.3% in 1974. We were still in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and both sides had literally thousands of warheads programmed for thousands of targets in the opposing country.
When you compare these facts to where we are today, it’s not hard to conclude that there are similarities. Bush didn’t resign, but he finished out his second term as the President with the lowest approval rate of any since the measure has been applied. There still may be legal proceedings against his administration related to allegedly illegal actions taken in the name of national security. Bush left office with the economy in deep trouble and the equity markets experiencing declines similar to that of the Nixon era. We’re engaged in another, broader war in multiple locations, against an enemy that transcends national boundaries. We are threatened by the potential proliferation of atomic weaponry in the hands of nations who may fear less the consequences of applying those weapons. Unemployment is already higher by three to four points than it was in Nixon’s time, and the national net worth is more seriously affected by the loss of value on Wall Street, because millions more people have put their money into the stock market since 1974, through 401(k) plans and other defined contribution retirement plans. And our GDP in 2009 is projected to be a negative 2.2%, nearly identical to 1974.
One significant difference is that in 1974, the economic difficulties were not caused by massive, greed-driven, stupid, sometimes criminal leadership in the most revered names of corporate America. Some of the most respected firms of both operating companies and the financial industry have been bereft of principled leadership, especially in the board room, which is the repository of accountability for our nation’s companies. It now deserves to be asked, “What is the role of the director in not just correcting the systemic corrosion of accountable leadership in our businesses, but in leading successfully through these times of fear?”
The answer is that leading through fearful times must include the same elements in a board room as any other leadership environment facing the same psychological dynamics. Let’s look at just one, yet critical factor within those dynamics.
A state of fear causes a physiological shift in the individuals involved. A daily attention to imminent danger creates a sustained and heightened sympathetic nervous system, which is part of our autonomic, i.e., automatically enervated, nervous system. This system is designed to react reflexively in times of threat, in order to prepare the person for the classic responses of struggle (fight), escape (flight) or stasis (essentially freezing to become undetectable or to submit, relying on the mercy of the attacking entity). The neurotransmitters and hormones active in a heightened sympathetic nervous system increase heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, reflex responsiveness and alertness. They also reduce cognition (the ability to reason), diminish range of sensory acuity, constrict peripheral blood vessels (to protect from potential bleeding in the extremities during a fight), impede digestive processes, increase workload of the kidneys and liver and reduce the presence of neurotransmitters associated with a calm, positive mental state.
When a person is constantly exposed to stimuli that elicit this sympathetic nervous system response, two things happen. First, the continual enervation of this system causes the homeostatic point of balance, i.e., that physiological state which the body comes to view as “normal”, to shift. The body becomes habituated to the high enervation state, almost like a drug user becomes tolerant of ever higher doses of stimulants. Second, the body’s systems begin to gradually fail under the constant stress of being “worked” so hard. The person can become addicted to the fearful state (like watching the bad news constantly), and the body begins to break down from the inside out.
A leader’s key role in this regard is first to understand the physiological mechanisms involved, as above, and to understand that a person experiencing constant fear will be less able to reason, respond rationally, stay calm in a crisis, find the logical path out of the difficulty and model that behavior for others to emulate. Most leaders who have lived through repeated and extended periods of personal threat come to learn the methods of ensuring their counter-balancing mechanism, the parasympathetic nervous system, recovers dominance quickly, even in the face of great danger. If this is the first time a leader has experienced what Hunter Thompson called “fear and loathing” then an understanding of what is going on physiologically will increase their chances to respond consciously and effectively.