Habit number 1, the illusion of personal preeminence. This is the belief that you are capable of influencing, even dominating the thinking of everyone around you regardless of how other people think or where they're coming from. Leaders with the illusion of personal preeminence, believe that everyone will see it their way no matter what. And now you're thinking probably of someone that you've worked with or seen in the past, that behaved in that way. Well, it's not good that you had people like that, but it's good that you're thinking that way, right? If you want to know how to you create a delusional company, you allow your leaders to have this illusion of personal preeminence. They're always going to believe that, how could anyone think differently than me? I am just so important, so smart, so capable. And the truth is sometimes the smartest people do fall into this trap. And this is kind of a tricky thing because sometimes the smartest people are the highest educated, people that have real technical skills, researchers, academics for sure. Your scientists, they sometimes fall into this trap because they have done the work, they've done the research. They really are smarter than people around them, but not everybody buys into what they're saying, and they can't understand that. It's kind of the example of, you come up with a solution to a problem and if customers don't buy that solution, it doesn't make any sense to you because you have this illusion of personal preeminence. I touched on this example way back in module one, when I mentioned creative labs, when the iPod came out and how the leadership of creative labs couldn't possibly understand how anyone would buy the iPod. Because despite how cool and need it was, it didn't have the highest MP3 audio quality and they couldn't get it. And so the illusion person preeminence just denigrates other people who don't buy into it. There are a lot of examples. Martha Stewart, pretty famous example, she believed that the rules didn't apply to her and she could act in any way that she wished. And by the way, that's another sign of the illusion of personal preeminence when you think the rules don't apply to me, I'm different. And some of you may recall that this led to her actually deceiving or trying to deceive federal investigators way back in 2004. Who wanted to know more about a stock investment she made and she ended up being guilty of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. She couldn't imagine that anyone wouldn't agree with her point of view. And this is something that a lot of internet entrepreneurs have fallen into. Quite a few considered, for example, Travis Kalanick, the founder and longtime CEO of Uber who was pushed out because of a lot of pretty bad behavior. I mean, he created Uber, right? It's a genius idea, it's a fantastic idea to create a company like that and he did it from nothing into something big. And so, you can kind of understand how this illusion of personal preeminence could take hold sometimes because a lot of these leaders have been tremendously successful. But they let that power get to their head in the case of Travis Kalanick, well, these headlines will make that clear, right? Sexual harassment criticism, the creation of this kind of bro culture, lack of real open mindedness in the organization. Kind of a party place, people not really doing what they what they should be doing, significant ethical breaches by far, and it cost him his job. Yeah, if you want to know how organizations become delusional, it's really when leaders start to adopt the illusion of personal preeminence. Okay, now, you know a little bit about this idea, right? In a second, I'll ask you to turn to your application exercise and dig into those three leaders and assess them along the dimension of this illusion of personal preeminence.
