World Monitor Magazine, Economy WM_April 2019 web version (2) | Page 66

additional content
Leadership lessons from
Game of Thrones
Paying attention to your values and persuasion style can help you avoid getting beheaded or
stabbed to death.
by Bruce Craven
Leadership is difficult but necessary. The achievement
of good results requires the willingness to confront
challenges and guide yourself and your colleagues.
In recent years, I have used the fictional stories from
George R.R. Martin’s series of novels, A Song of Ice and
Fire, and the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones, in my
MBA and executive MBA elective course “Leadership
Through Fiction” at Columbia Business School. The
leadership decisions made by the characters in
Game of Thrones sometimes result in devastating
consequences, but the characters who survive learn
how to improve their decisions and navigate risks
more effectively. (For the purposes of this article, we’ll
refer to the TV series and the books interchangeably;
although they differ in some key ways, they are closely
enough aligned to provide the examples used here.)
The narrative in Game of Thrones is derived in part
from myth (dragons, sorcery, and the reanimated dead
are all elements of the story) and in part from history.
It draws on and amplifies many past chronicles of
leadership dilemmas and reversals. What looks like a
reasonable decision at first can result in trusting the
wrong person and being publicly executed. In our own
world, we may not face literal execution, but we often
must make decisions with similarly wrenching tensions
and unpredictable results. We may see our projects
falter or our companies founder, and the fortunes of
our families, communities, and broader economies may
be at stake.
As leaders, we have more capability to manage this
tension than we may think — especially if we can keep
our perspective. In the first season of the series, Cersei
Lannister (queen of the seven kingdoms of Westeros,
where most of the story takes place) tells Ned Stark,
“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.
There is no middle ground.” The queen is wrong — both
in her fictional world, and in ours. There is a middle
64
world monitor