A First-Rate Madness (7 page)

 

 

HOW DID TURNER'S CONDITION, whether hyperthymic personality or bipolar disorder, affect his leadership? One might cite resilience, after his father's suicide, but in this chapter I will focus on the creativity he displayed throughout his career.

Turner likes to analogize business decisions to military methods. He compares the launch of CNN in 1980, for instance, to the methods of World War II German general Erwin Rommel: “On several occasions, the German general attacked the British when he knew he didn't have enough fuel to conduct an entire offensive. What he intended to do was strike when they weren't expecting it, overrun their lines, and then capture their fuel dumps. At that point, he could refuel his panzers and continue the offensive. My vision for financing CNN was similar.” With little cash on hand, and no chance of getting decent loans, Turner launched CNN knowing he only had enough funds to run it for about a year. After that, he hoped, correctly, that it would generate enough attention that new sources of funding (through advertising, cable fees, and new loans) could be found. It was an audacious risk, certainly not standard practice in the business world. It reminds me of Sherman sending his army into southern Georgia and the Carolinas, cutting off his supply lines behind him, planning on living off the land that he would despoil along the way.

Another example of Turner's manic creativity occurred soon afterward. In its early years, when CNN survived and grew, the networks took notice. ABC planned a direct competitor to CNN, as well as a cable headline news network that would repeat the main stories hourly, as opposed to CNN's in-depth coverage. Turner saw this competition as potentially fatal to his new company: “We had already invested about $100 million in CNN and were still far from breaking even. Now, two multibillion-dollar corporations [ABC in partnership with Westinghouse] were coming at us with a dagger pointed at our heart. . . . I once again thought in military terms and reasoned that I could not afford to engage in a long, protracted war against opponents with such superior resources. I had to knock them out, and quickly.” So Turner created CNN2 (now called Headline News) almost spontaneously, working feverishly to get the new channel on the air in only four months, so as to preempt ABC's proposed channel by six months. By establishing his channel first, he made ABC's plans for a headline news station more competitive and costly; ABC decided to scrap its second channel. Then to fight off the direct competitor (ABC's Satellite News Channel), Turner used his personal contacts with cable providers to get preferential exposure for CNN2. Eventually, Turner bought out ABC's channel and got rid of his competition; in so doing, he protected CNN for another decade of competition-free growth.

 

 

TURNER CLEARLY SEES HIMSELF as a divergent thinker: “Confronted with a problem, I've always looked for an unconventional angle and approach. Nothing sneaky, nothing illegal or unethical, just turning the issue on its head and shifting the advantage to our side.” His great achievement—cable media (not just news, but also the first national cable station, and all-sports, all-movie, and all-cartoon networks)—entailed recognizing a new medium at its inception and jumping into it without inhibition, when others either failed to see the opportunity or hesitated to take advantage of it.

On the one hand, Turner seems to have been realistic: he saw a new field about to explode. Yet, as Shelley Taylor, the psychologist who described the notion of positive illusions, notes, entrepreneurs are unrealistic, at least initially, taking chances that may or may not work out. Whether Turner was more realistic than others because of his depression is uncertain; but his manic energy and creativity are relatively clear.

In later years (after coming off lithium), Turner made his great mistake: he joined forces with Time Warner in 1995, hoping to garner enough funds to buy one of the major networks, a lifelong goal of his. But the Atlanta entrepreneur couldn't survive within the confines of a New York corporation. He could no longer make decisions himself: his audacious moves were now vetoed by the corporation's board. By merging his business, he had lost control of it, a fact that became clear when, at the peak of the new Internet market, Time Warner merged with AOL, without consulting Turner. Within months of the announcement, the Internet stock bubble peaked, then crashed. Turner watched his net worth fall by $10 million daily, without (given his contractual obligations to Time Warner) being able to do anything about it. He waited out an 80 percent loss of his wealth, eventually sold all his stock in AOL Time Warner, and resigned.

CNN lives on, but it is no longer Ted Turner's CNN. In 1991, on Turner's personal orders, and despite pleas from the White House, the network refused to remove its reporters from Baghdad when George H. W. Bush bombed the city, thereby showing the American public the truth about what was happening there. A decade later, after Turner's exit, CNN went meekly along with other networks, “embedding” its reporters for the attack of another George Bush on Iraq, this time presenting only what the military allowed journalists to see. In the buildup and the immediate aftermath, CNN, like most of the media, followed the administration's line; there was little independent journalism or critical thinking. As Turner writes in his memoirs, he would never have let that happen if he'd still been in charge.

 

 

TED TURNER'S SUCCESSES and setbacks demonstrate how a person's mental condition fosters different kinds of leadership in the business world, just as it does in the other contexts we examine in this book. In a strong economy, the ideal business leader is the corporate type, the man who makes the trains run on time, the organizational leader. He may not be particularly creative, but he doesn't need new ideas; he only needs to keep going what's going. Arthur Koestler called this kind of executive the Commissar; much as a Soviet bureaucrat administers the state, the corporate executive administers the company. This is not a minor matter; administration is no easy task; but with this approach, all is well only when all that matters is administration.

When the economy is in crisis, when profits have fallen, when consumers no longer demand one's goods or competitors produce better ones, then the Commissar fails; the corporate executive takes a backseat to the entrepreneur, whom Koestler called the Yogi. This is the crisis leader, the creative businessman who either produces new ideas that navigate the old company through changing times or, more often, produces new companies to meet changing needs. David Owen, a neurologist and British politician, has observed political leaders up close, and also served on corporate boards. He notes that the skills needed by successful businessmen may exceed those of great statesmen. The goals of businessmen, unlike politicians, are “defined almost exclusively in terms of growth . . . doing little or even on rare occasions nothing is sometimes a wise course in politics; that is rarely the case in business.”

The Commissar is the peacetime business leader; the Yogi the crisis business leader. The best business leaders combine both qualities—doers, like Commissars, and thinkers, like Yogis—but such specimens are rare. Most leaders lean more in one direction or the other, mainly based on how they are mentally primed. In business, it seems that Ted Turner may not have understood that his mental makeup prepared him to be an excellent Yogi, but a poor Commissar. The entrepreneurial winner was a corporate failure.

The psychologist Martin Seligman first set forth the highly influential “learned helplessness” theory of depression in 1967. He reasoned that depressed people see the world too negatively because they are scarred by early hardship and learn to feel helpless. Studies on animals had supported the theory, and in 1979 two of Seligman's students, Lauren Alloy and Lynn Abramson, decided to test it on undergraduates. They asked their test subjects to press a button and observe whether it turned on a green light. The subjects effectively had no control over the light; the researchers would decide whether or not to turn it on when the subjects pressed the button. In several different trials, the researchers varied how often the light came on after the button was pressed: in one experiment, it lit up 75 percent of the time; in another experiment, 50 percent; in a third, only 25 percent. Students were divided into two groups, based on tests they'd previously taken: those with no symptoms of depression, and those with some depression.

Alloy and Abramson made an unwelcome discovery: their teacher was wrong. Depressed students didn't underestimate how much control they had; normal students
overestimated
it. This observation, which they called “depressive realism,” was strongest when the green light came on most often. When the light came on only 25 percent of the time after they pressed the button, about half of both depressed and normal groups realized they had no control over it. But when the light came on 75 percent of the time, only 6 percent of normal students realized they had little control versus 50 percent in the depressed group.

Aware that this artificial test didn't replicate real-world decisions because there were no performance-based rewards or penalties, the researchers introduced motivation—money. Students were told they would gain or lose up to five dollars (which was worth a lot more in 1979 than it is now) each time the green light went on. As before, the experimenters manipulated the frequency of the light. When they made money off the green light, normal students again thought they had more control over it than they actually did. But when the light meant losing money, the normal students were more realistic. In all cases, depressed students accurately judged how much control they had.

Alloy and Abramson had discovered something new: depression led to more, not less, realistic assessments of control over one's environment, an effect that was only enhanced by a real-world emotional desire, like making money. In the decades since they published their paper, their results have been replicated many times in other experiments. As counterintuitive as the idea of depressive realism may be, it is hard to deny.

 

 

A FEW YEARS EARLIER, psychologists Ellen Langer and Jane Roth had tested the concept of an “illusion of control” in our daily decisions. They devised an experiment in which ninety Yale students were asked to call out heads or tails just before thirty coin tosses. Unbeknownst to the students, the results were rigged. One group was told repeatedly,
early
in the thirty coin tosses, that their guesses were
correct
even when they weren't; this was called the
descending outcomes
group. Occasionally, researchers would show the coin to the students when they guessed right in order to reinforce the impression that they were being told the truth. The opposite,
ascending
group, was repeatedly told that their guesses were
incorrect
(even when they were right)
early
in the thirty tosses, and then more and more correct as the study went on. A third group was told the truth throughout the thirty coin tosses. Afterward, students were asked how good they thought they were at predicting coin tosses and whether they thought they could improve with practice.

The ascending and random groups were realistic: they were convinced the results were the product of chance, that they hadn't done especially well, and that they wouldn't do better with practice. But, the
descending
group thought they'd done rather well, and would do better with practice.

Langer and Roth found it remarkable that highly intelligent students at a prestigious college, who clearly knew that coin tosses are completely random events, could be fooled by early apparent success into consistently overestimating their sense of control. The researchers titled their paper “Heads I Win, Tails It's Chance” and concluded that normal people have an illusory sense of control, especially if things seem to go well for them.

Building on this work, Shelley Taylor, a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, spent much of her career developing the concept of “positive illusions.” Studying how we react to sickness, she first thought that normal people who became ill and then recovered would return to their former worldviews. But she found that breast cancer patients saw the experience of serious illness and subsequent recovery as transformative; they didn't just go back to being who they were. They became different, and two-thirds of them said they'd changed for the better. But this sense of well-being came at a price. Taylor dryly noted, “From many of their accounts there emerged a mildly disturbing disregard for the truth.” The women emerged with a greater sense of control over their disease or their recovery than was actually the case. The typical patient consistently overestimated her likely survival compared to the known statistics and her own medical status. Interviewing the oncologists and psychotherapists who cared for these patients, the researchers found that their unrealistically optimistic attitudes correlated with
better
psychological adjustment. That is,
the psychologically healthier patients were the most unrealistic
. Taylor had discovered “positive illusion”—the opposite of depressive realism, a kind of healthy illusion found not just in a trivial button-pushing test, but in life-threatening illness.

If all this is correct—if there is depressive realism, and if there are normal illusions that have positive effects—then we have to reconsider what it means to be mentally healthy. We tend to see mental health as “being normal”—happy, realistic, fulfilled. Yet Taylor showed that we sacrifice realism in the interest of happiness. These counterintuitive data lead me to two conclusions about what it means to be normal: