Dick Fuld and The Difference Faces of Charisma-Part One-

Dick Fuld, the CEO of Lehman Brothers, was called The Gorilla by fellow executives. He was an aggressive weightlifter, and he would scream in the boardroom. If you go to YouTube, you can see videos of him screaming, trying to point the finger away from Lehman Brothers for their sins in the 2008 financial crisis. 

He screams about investors shorting his company, blaming them for the collapse – not the banks. He screams at his subordinates who can't follow orders. More than anything, he screamed about how unfair the government was for bailing out the other banks but not bailing Lehman. When Dick screams, the veins on his neck pop out. He has a wide forehead, deep dark eyes, and a voracious appetite. Senior executives used to bring a plate of ribs for his mid-morning snack, which according to those same executives, never made Dick fat because he’d burn off those calories with intensity. 

Dick Fuld also seemed fully capable of hurting you if you disagreed with him. One former executive stated in the New York mag, “Through these little physical cues, he made it seem like a situation would lead to physical violence if you didn't relent.” Usually, when we think about charisma, we think of charm, magnetism, a winning smile, and a warm handshake. But charisma can also be persuasiveness, the ability to browbeat the ship and its crew into action. Steve Jobs's charisma came from his wit, which was used to turn Apple into a Powerhouse. Specifically, Jobs was persuasive. He knew how to use rhetoric, and he was the master of the tools of persuasion. He was able to get subordinates moving in the direction he wanted. That's the hidden dark side of charisma. 

Every company desperately desires a charismatic CEO because if you're lucky enough to get a Steve Jobs, they'll steer your ship into money, and everyone will follow. But if you get a Dick Fuld, someone who was by all accounts is very charismatic, and they'll steer you towards the rocks. And guess what? Everyone will follow. In other words, if you're headed towards success, the charismatic leader will get your people paddling there faster, but if you're already successful and the 800-pound gorilla wants to steer into failure, your people will paddle there too, or into a national bank housing collapse - as was the case with Dick Fuld, our very charismatic CEO. 

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Whether we like to admit it or not, we are all in sales. Parents have to sell their kids and their achievements to get them into private schools. Employees have to sell their skills to get better jobs. High school star athletes have to sell themselves to the right college. Single people online have to sell themselves by crafting the perfect dating profile. In short, we're all in sales, and the person who sells themselves the hardest gets to be the president or whatever they want. So, what's the universal language for selling yourself? That's what we're here to find out on this two-part episode about charisma. And in this first episode, we will bust our biggest myth about charisma.

Myth One: Why is the world one big popularity contest? We will go all the way back to ancient roots to find out. How did humanity manage to survive following aggressive tribe leaders like Dick Fuld, and why do we still follow Dicks when there are plenty more qualified leaders out there?

In the second episode, we will cover our other myths, like Myth Two: Can we outsell ourselves against the competition? Is charisma a learnable skill, and where do we pick up those skills? And finally, Myth Three: Do we even need charisma as modern humans? In a society governed by statistics, the internet, AI, and data do we still need persuasive hotheads telling us what to do?

Joe: Our first episode about charisma is really all about what historians call the Great Man Theory. It's the idea that every tribe needs to have a leader - that you need to have this charismatic chest-thumping person to lead you into the horizon. It is the theory that we need a caption or a Dick Fuld. 

Todd: We here at the Re-Engineered You are big history people. I dug and dug into Dick’s life, and all I know is that he was a rich kid, but most of the people around him were not. They weren't the ivy leaguers or silver spoon kids. He had money, but he actually went to the University of Colorado for his Bachelor's.

Joe: I was expecting you to say Harvard or Yale when you're talking about Dick Fuld. 

Todd: As soon as he got his MBA, he had one job. He was a commercial paper trader at Lehman Brothers. This wasn’t just a job. From day one, he was where he wanted to be and what he wanted to do. Lehman Brothers was in Dick's blood and everyone that worked with him in the early years all said the same thing about him – he is smart and intense. Before its collapse, Lehman was the 4th largest investment bank in the country. 

Joe: Lehman Brothers was the oldest, the most aggressive, and it seems like the most cards.

As we found out in our classism episode, frequently in job interviews, companies are seeking out a good cultural fit. Often, classism is more important than a legitimate skills assessment. I'm guessing that when Lehman Brothers first met Dick, they were probably looking at how he's going to lead their ship. He had the right attitude for the culture, the right socio-economic background, etc. I'm guessing if he had been there on a poverty scholarship, he probably wouldn't be the CEO. So, this is the secret sauce we're talking about what makes charisma. People think it's being friendly and giving them a handshake. I'm learning that charisma is being Dick Fuld. It's being aggressive, persuasive, and being the tribal leader that everyone would follow. 

So, let's rewind the clock just a tiny bit because I want to get to why we as people react to Dick as we do. Because if Dick Fuld were in the room with us right now, we probably would do whatever he said.

If you have heard of the book Sapiens, it theorizes that humans came together to dominate the world because we can cooperate. There's a lot of thoughts that early man dominated the planet because they had thumbs or that we had intelligence over everyone else, but that's not true. Neanderthals had spears. We were all basically on a level playing field. The difference is we were underwhelming as a species. We had no claws, and we were not that strong. If you look at Neanderthals, which we were competing with, they were faster and reached maturity quicker. They were a version of humans, but they were better than us in almost every way except for one tiny detail – we could talk to each other better. We socialized, organized, traded, and grouped up, which is why we ended up winning the species war. If you have a Dick Fuld chief come up to you and say you're not just a primitive man, you are a part of a team that is powerful. People like that basically would say, follow me, and then your identity becomes part of that tribe.

Dick Fuld had a Lehman tribe of 25,000 people, and as you know, your mind cannot comprehend over 150 names/faces. But in a tribe this large, you don’t have to anymore – you can simply identify yourself by a team or a tribe that occupies one space in your 150 number. So, you don't have to learn everyone's name. You don't have to infinitely expand your Dunbar’s Number. All you have to say is, I'm under this banner. Whatever your banner is, you only have to learn one thing rather than 150+, and it's very easy to follow that. Even more, a tribe/team is a huge connector. It makes you feel secure and safe, especially if you have an aggressive leader who is fighting for you. 

Jumping into grudges for a moment, you don't have to be wronged by somebody to have a grudge against them. Very easily, you can feel the sting of a grudge that someone else tells you about. In fact, a study put people in functional MRIs and found that good storytelling makes somebody else's brain sync up. So, if I tell you that my neighbor murdered my dog, you will have the same sort of rage that I have over it. Dick Fuld tells a compelling story. If you watch a video of Dick screaming, somebody who watches from the outside might think he is a villain. But for those on the inside, that is not a screaming lunatic leading your business. That is a guy who has gotten really good at telling you we're at war and going to battle. 

Joe:  Have you ever heard of the YouTube channel Charisma on Demand?

Todd: No, I haven’t. 

Joe: This channel breaks down stars/starlets and people on television, and they explain why these people are compelling to watch - why their charismatic, etc. But the one thing that shows up in their videos repeatedly is that charismatic people tell stories. They get you on their side and hijack this network in your brain. They leave little signals in their story to remind you of your part in the tribe that you're being included in.  

Todd: This sounds like borderline or flirting with cult leaders again. 

Joe: We can't do an episode without using the cult word. There's a New York Times Bestseller, David Farland, who talks about the kinesthetic cycle. It's effectively story hypnosis. If you ever find yourself listening to an audiobook from anybody and you miss your bus, or your eyes glaze over in the aisles of a bookstore, these stories basically hijack your brain. You get into this trance and your brain goes from operating at like 17 Hertz down to like 7 to 10, or something like that. Your brain starts accessing those parts of your senses and stops working on critical thinking towards what you were doing. 

Todd: The first person that popped into mind from American history was the very charismatic President Abraham Lincoln and is world-renowned storytelling. 

Joe: Oh my God, yes. If you listen to Barack Obama, he had a speech where he responded to a hurricane and used the kinesthetic cycle immediately in his speech. He used all the senses in less than two sentences. Dick Fuld does the same thing. It is primal tricks; it’s storytelling. 

Todd: So, we could do this. We can study this and get this down. 

Joe: We absolutely can. That is going to be the whole second half of our charisma episode. We are going to talk about leadership storytelling. We will cover how to incorporate good metaphors into your persuasive arguments to become a tribal leader. 

There is an Atlantic article on charisma, and they talked about how subjects who saw Ted Talks by a charismatic speaker gave more money to strangers than those who saw a non-charismatic TED Talk. This means your charisma can ripple other people's actions to the point where they're giving more money. This article also says that thinking about a charismatic person versus just an acquaintance also made people more likely to cooperate with a stranger. So, it's not just that a good charismatic leader can make you cooperate with them, it hits a switch in your brain where they get you into that sort of hypnosis zone where they can access your senses for you. Once they get you listening to what they would like you to help them with or do with them, you continue to be pliable, and you continue to be cooperative with other people after you've left their sphere. In short, it is the combination of I have power in this tribe, and I want you to survive in this tribe. That is the fundamental part of charisma. Todd does this a lot in a sort of big brother style. 

Fun Fact: If you ever want to have fun on a Saturday night, watch The 13th Warrior. For a video explanation of the stock market crash, watch The Big Short.

Joe: In the next episode, we are going to learn more about the market crash, and we're going to talk about how to learn charisma. Whether we decide to be the winning type of charisma where we smile and give a warm handshake or become Dick Fuld, we want to be the primal charismatic leader where we yell ‘get under my banner.’ We are also going to ask the question if we really need charismatic CEOs. What if every ship is driven by artificial intelligence and algorithms? Most of Wall Street is now led by computers, algorithms, and stock-picking AI. Why do we have any CEOs? Why do we have any charismatic leaders? That's what we'll cover next episode. But before we close out today, I wanted to ask Todd - why did you pick this subject? 

Todd: I used to work with a guy named Jason, and he was the most charismatic salesperson I've ever worked with. He was just so engaging. He took a leadership role before he was even a manager and invented the 4-hour workweek. He listened to everybody, he befriended everybody, and I just liked to be close and learn from him. 

Joe: That last part is so important to our charisma episodes -you want to learn from them. When I talk about how charismatic leaders are persuasive and informative, that’s a lot of what charisma is, learning. It's being able to educate people in an interesting way to where you think your life is more enriched after you've talked to somebody. As for Dick, he had power plus warmth and spoke as if he was competent at everything. 

Todd: The outrage, of course, is that these investment banks can be as risky as they want and make bad decisions because the government will bail them out. And the rich people get their money saved, but the poor people that actually pay the taxes get screwed. 

Joe: Dick could afford to sound like he knows everything because he knows that he has a golden parachute tied to the back of that really expensive suit. 

Todd: A suit he's been using for 40 years.