Om hybris

Gillian Tett skriver i FT Weekend varje veckoslut och jag missar aldrig att läsa hennes krönika. Denna helg handlar  det om hybris.

Hon beskriver utgångspunkten:

A couple of years ago, Lord David Owen, a former UK foreign secretary, created a foundation in London to study hubris. He was prompted by personal experience. After becoming an MP in the 1960s, Owen was able to see first hand how the mentality of politicians could change after a spell in power. Margaret Thatcher was a case in point: after several years in office, she became capricious, arrogant and unwilling to take advice.

Owen, a former doctor who had trained in psychiatry, was convinced that this phenomenon needed to be studied. So his foundation, the Daedalus Trust (of which, in the interest of disclosure, I am a trustee), is now looking at (among other things) the speech patterns of British politicians and utterances of company CEOs in order to track how hubris forms. “I’ve grown increasingly worried about the way in which decisions are made by leaders,” Owen says. “They’re elected by the body politic as leading politicians or chosen to be chief executives of companies. Everyone thinks they are going to be good and they start off well [but] then they get carried away – they get narrower in their vision, less interested in other people’s views… They start making decisions very much on their own.”

Mina tankar gled över till vårt eget land. Vilken roll spelar hybris här ? I politiken ? I näringslivet ?

Jag tänker inte på arrogans – det finns gott om sådana exempel – utan just på hybris så som Tett och Daedalus Trust definierar begreppet.

Några egna funderingar har jag. En första tanke var att vi kanske har för lite hybris ? Kanske skulle mera gott åstadkommas om inte så mycket förskjuts till ledningsgruppergrupper, utredningar, kommittéer ?

Eller finns det exempel på problematisk hybris ?

Har du funderingar är du välkommen mejla mig direkt. Jag lovar redovisa de inspel jag får.