161h.

indd vi 29/03/2012 15:19:52

 THE WINNER EFFECT
How Power Affects Your Brain

Ian Robertson

161h.indd iii 29/03/2012 15:19:51

161h.indd viii 29/03/2012 15:19:52
 To Fiona and our wonderful children
Deirdre, Ruairi and Niall, with love and gratitude

161h.indd v 29/03/2012 15:19:52

161h.indd xii 29/03/2012 15:19:52
 Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Foreword 1
1 The Mystery of Picasso’s Son 9
2 The Puzzle of the Changeling Fish 53
3 The Enigma of Bill Clinton’s Friend 95
4 The Mystery of the Oscars 136
5 The Riddle of the Flying CEOs 181
6 The Winning Mind 238
Afterword 277

Notes 285
Further Reading 295
Index 297

161h.indd vii 29/03/2012 15:19:52

 Foreword

The boss was in a rage. After the incident he ordered an email

to be sent threatening disciplinary action if this happened again.
A chief executive, after all, is paid to be tough: it’s his job to
make sure staff don’t screw up. Especially when he heads up the
biggest company in the world.1
How could this happen, particularly in his newly opened head-
quarters? The offices, each a breathtakingly glazed suite, were
bathed in the soft green light of the nearby hills they overlooked so
nobly. He had taken so much trouble with the architects – he even
chose the silk wallpaper – to make sure that directors were insu-
lated in these finest of aesthetically pleasing surroundings, inacces-
sible to other senior staff, yet still this sort of blunder could occur.
As high-performing executives they needed this isolation
from the organisation in order to preserve the brilliance of the
strategic leadership which had made this, in terms of assets,
the world’s biggest corporation. For people at his level, every-
thing is important. It took pedigree to create this, and a boss
of such quality needed things in his company to be just right.
That’s why, according to a book written by one of Goodwin’s
colleagues, he apparently threatened disciplinary action to the

161h.indd 1 29/03/2012 15:19:52

 2 the winner effect

staff who allowed cheap pink wafers to be included among the

morning coffee snacks in the directors’ boardroom.2 Hadn’t he
brought off the purchase of that huge Dutch company? These
pink wafers could have been a disaster during the boardroom
negotiations.
The boss didn’t appreciate criticism – why should he when
the company’s share price had rocketed during his tenure? He
insisted that his executives wear the same tie – one with the
company’s logo on it – and he was not at all happy when one
senior financial analyst, James Eden, had the temerity to describe
him as a ‘megalomaniac’.3
It was not long after Sir Fred Goodwin’s alleged rage over the
pink wafers that his bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS),
reported losses of around £24 billion, not far off us$50 billion.
Soon after, his company was effectively nationalised by the UK
government at a cost of £53.5 billion of taxpayers’ money, over
us$100 billion, and Sir Fred was out of a job.4
RBS was a very profitable bank until it recklessly over-reached
itself by purchasing in 2007, despite the scepticism of financial
journalists, part of the Dutch bank ABN Amro. It would very
likely have survived the 2008 crash were it not for that deci-
sion, which was made around the same time that its chief execu-
tive, isolated from the rest of the company and from the world
in his luxurious Edinburgh office suite, was preoccupied with
wallpaper and pink wafers.

Ursula is one of three children from two different fathers, and as

was the case for many children in her housing complex, neither
father was around much for their upbringing. On 12 February
2011, the crumpled body of a stabbed forty-two-year-old woman
was found in the elevator car of the Baruch Houses low-income
project where Ursula lived.5

161h.indd 2 29/03/2012 15:19:52

 foreword 3

What caught the attention of New York Times reporter Michael

Wilson a few days later when he was sent to 555 Roosevelt Drive,
Lower Manhattan, was that the elevator car in which the body
had been found was so clean: all the others were like graffiti-
smeared, urine-stinking ashtrays.6 Wilson ends the article on the
murder with a comment from a former Baruch Houses tenant
he met hurrying through the entrance hallway – the man only
returned, as briefly as possible, to visit his father. ‘I got the hell
out of here,’ the reporter quotes the ex-resident as saying.
In 2010, exactly thirty years after she first worked as a summer
student intern at Xerox, Ursula was ranked by Forbes as the
twentieth most powerful woman in the world.7 The first black
woman to become CEO of a Fortune 500 company, Ursula M.
Burns heads up the Xerox Corporation. She had gained a place
in the Polytechnic Institute of New York, and Xerox, through its
graduate engineering programme for minorities,8 paid for part
of her graduate work at Columbia University, where she was
awarded a master’s degree in engineering.
Ursula’s mother had scrimped and saved to send her
to Cathedral High School, a Catholic, all-girls school on
Manhattan’s East 56th Street, an escape route from the poverty
and stunted promise that pervaded the Baruch Houses. This
education allowed her to enter the Columbia programme which
included that crucial internship at Xerox.
After she graduated in 1981, Ursula began to work full-time
for the company. It took just nine years before a senior executive,
Wayland Hicks, offered her a position as his executive assist-
ant. She was wary at first, fearing that this might be a dead-
end helper role, but took the risk and accepted the job. By the
following year, she had become executive assistant to chairman
and CEO Paul Allaire and by 1999 she was vice-president for
global manufacturing.

161h.indd 3 29/03/2012 15:19:52

 4 the winner effect

On 21 May 2009, Ursula M. Burns was named CEO to

replace Anne Mulcahy, who was retiring. Not only was Burns
the first black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company, but the
transfer of the post was the first ever transfer of a Fortune 500
CEO role from one woman to another.9

These two stories throw up questions that this book sets out to
answer. What makes a winner? Are people like Fred Goodwin
born to success, or is it a result of chance and circumstance?
Would Ursula M. Burns have been so successful if she hadn’t
been given the power of early management positions that kindled
abilities that might otherwise not have been realised?
Why do some people have an enormous drive to win, while
others shy away from success and power? What does power do to
people – and what about powerlessness? Do success and power
make you live longer and better – and if so, why? Is power really
an aphrodisiac and if it is, how and why does it have this effect?
The question of winning underpins almost every part of our
lives. Who wins is the factor that shapes our lives more completely
than anything else. Winning is a drive as powerful as sex, and we
all want to win, whether we are aware of it or not. Think of the
ambitions swirling around the desks of any office; consider the
emotions and skirmishes surrounding promotion and advance-
ment. In its more naked form, look at the parents howling at the
sidelines of the football pitch for the victory of their seven-year-
old darlings. What are they shouting for? Winning. And they
want it very, very badly. Why do we want to win so badly, and
what makes a winner?
That is the question that I aim to answer in this book. In the
first chapter, The Mystery of Picasso’s Son, I consider the ques-
tion of whether people are born into winning. This is not an
abstract question – it is something that everyone should consider

161h.indd 4 29/03/2012 15:19:52

 foreword 5

in relation to their beliefs about their own lives and, even more
importantly, those of their children. This is because believing that
you are born into success – that you are endowed with winner’s
qualities as opposed to earning your success – can leave some
people demoralised and psychologically crippled. Whether you
are a winner or not, in other words, can depend on your beliefs
about winning and these preconceptions can, through biasing of
the very firing of your brain cells, act as self-fulfilling prophecies.
I will challenge you to examine your own preconceptions
about what lies behind your own achievements – or lack of
them – and gauge what your own drive to succeed is. I will also
encourage you to explore how you react to success and, more
importantly, to failure, along the way explaining how your brain
mediates these key aspects of your psychological make-up.
Chapter 2 offers another mystery – that of the changeling fish
– and asks the follow-up to the question of whether we are born
to win: is winning a matter of chance and circumstance? Ursula M.
Burns is at great pains to reject any notions that her achievements
at Xerox have anything to do with her gender or background, but
would her success been quite so brilliant had she not been given
the opportunities of an enlightened employer? Did the positions
of status and power she was given by Xerox actually create – or at
least kindle – the qualities and abilities that led her to becoming
the twentieth most powerful woman in the world?
These are the questions that are raised in Chapter 2 and in
answering them I will visit the boxing rings of Las Vegas, combat
between California mice, and the lower rooms of the Olympic
Games. I will show how indeed the chances of winning are
shaped by many things, from home advantage to bodily posture.
The winner inside can be raised up or crushed by subtle uncon-
sciously mediated effects related to gender, race and age that we
are completely unaware of.

161h.indd 5 29/03/2012 15:19:52

 6 the winner effect

Chapter 3 offers a third riddle – that of Bill Clinton’s friend

Tony Blair and the question posed here is – what does power do
to us? As one of the most powerful men in the world, Sir Fred
Goodwin showed a pattern of behaviour towards his staff that
would be unusual in the vast majority of men of less elevated
status and power. Are the two things connected? Does power
change our personalities and patterns of behaviour? Can power
tip some people – Fred Goodwin, for instance – over some
notional peak into negative behavioural territory? And if so,
is this the modern manifestation of the notion that ‘power
corrupts’: how precisely does this happen?
Most of us have had bosses who have not handled power well
– you can probably think of an example of a previous or current
boss of yours. And if you are a boss, or a parent, or a teacher, or
a police officer, or a prison guard, or an older brother or sister,
how have you handled the power that flows from that role? Has
it changed you in some way, either negatively or positively? You
probably don’t know the answer to that question yet. You won’t
be an accurate assessor of your own ability to handle power and
your need for it, but, rest assured, your younger siblings, chil-
dren, underlings, pupils, students or prisoners will be all too
aware of it, for better or for worse. After reading this chapter,
you will probably have a slightly better idea of what your own
need for power is.
In Chapter 4, The Mystery of the Oscars, I address the ques-
tion of why we want to win so badly – what is the attraction of
power? Answering this takes us into a detailed consideration of
the self and its vulnerabilities, and of stress and how we differ in
our susceptibility to it. We will have to consider key aspects of
our own outlook which shape our resilience – and ultimately the
likely length of our own lives.
Chapter 5 asks whether winning has a downside. Does the

161h.indd 6 29/03/2012 15:19:52

 foreword 7

power that comes from success ‘go to the head’ of some people,
leading to strange and at times harmful behaviour? Is power, as
Henry Kissinger maintained, really an aphrodisiac, and if so,
why is there such a link between sex and power?
And do men and women respond differently to power? Is
it a coincidence that almost all of the world’s worst dictators
have been men, or is this simply a by-product of the fact that
few women have gained such political power? How do power
and morality intersect? Does power ennoble or corrupt, morally
speaking?
In Chapter 6 we get up close and personal with power,
addressing the question of what makes a winner at its most raw
and intimate level. Almost everyone has had some power in their
life – all human relationships have some element of power strug-
gle about them. In relationships where there is an imbalance
of power, for instance parent and child or older versus younger
sibling, does simply being in the more powerful role distort
some people’s behaviour? Is the beastly older sister, say, who is
so nice to her friends, obeying simple laws of power more than
she is displaying hypocrisy? Why can human beings display
such apparently inconsistent and contradictory behaviour, and
how do their brains deal with these contradictions? Is there
anything comprehensible about such wanton cruelty whether in
a marriage or a political system?
The questions of success and power are so personal and so
important in every aspect of our lives that we can get glimpses
of their operation in our own minds. From time to time in the
book, therefore, I will ask you to complete some exercises and
questionnaires which will illustrate these often unconscious
mental processes at work.
The answers to the questions of what makes a winner and
how power affects us are as important to the life of every person

161h.indd 7 29/03/2012 15:19:52

 8 the winner effect

as they are to the collective future of the human race. This is not
just an ethical or theoretical issue, but a very physical product
of the interplay between our self and its environment. By learn-
ing to be aware of these physical roots of power and success,
we can better learn to control how power affects us and those
around us.

161h.indd 8 29/03/2012 15:19:52

THE WINNER EFFECT
How Power Affects Your Brain
By
Ian Robertson

‘Very lively and readable’

Oliver Sacks (on Mind Sculpture)
 B Y T H E S A M E AU T H O R

Mind Sculpture
The Mind’s Eye

161h.indd ii 29/03/2012 15:19:51

 A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Ian Robertson is Professor of Psychology at Trinity College

Dublin, Visiting Professor at University College London and
Bangor University and is a Scientist at the Rotman Research
Institute, University of Toronto. A trained clinical psychologist
as well as a neuroscientist, he is widely known internationally
for his work on attention and brain rehabilitation, is a member
of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Arts. His popular writing has included regular features in The
Times, a column in the British Medical Journal, and many scien-
tific books and articles. Ian has written three previous books
aimed at the general reader: Mind Sculpture (2000), The Mind’s
Eye (2003) and Stay Sharp (2005), all of which have been widely
translated. He is married with three children and lives in Dublin.

161h.indd 307 29/03/2012 15:20:04

161h.indd 308 29/03/2012 15:20:04
 First published in Great Britain 2012

Copyright © 2012 by Ian Robertson

The moral right of the author has been asserted

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3DP

www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New York and Berlin

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 4088 2473 3

Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 4088 3189 2

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc.

161h.indd iv 29/03/2012 15:19:52