The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World
Karthik Ramanna
Harvard Business Review Press (October 2024)

“Cherish those who seek the truth. Beware of those who find it.”  Voltaire

To what does the title of this book refer? Karthik Ramanna sees the current age of outrage as a perfect storm of three main drivers: outrage at institutions and their leaders, a sense of past injustice or exclusion, and a belief that some hostile or alien “other” force — preferred by current leaders and institutions — is to blame for the current situation.

As I began to work my way through The Age of Outrage, I was again reminded of this passage in W.B. Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming”:

“Turning and turning in the widening
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity:”

Ramanna carefully organizes his material within seven chapters:

1. Presents the framework of leadership for a polarized world
2. Focuses on the level of the individual leader within the context of a general aggression model
3. Returns his attention to the drivers of outrage while suggesting how to analyze to an immediate crisis
4. Shifts attention from an outrage’s context and motivations toward formulating a response
5. Focuses on implementation of response to developments in an age of outrage (e.g. unpick the power dynamics of decision-making)
6. Shifts focus from communications, analysis, and decision-making to understanding the culture and behaviors of the given organization
7. Explains why and how the proposed framework could perhaps represent a transformation of how organizations build buy-in

Note: “The traditional approach to this challenge has usually required a leader to rally diverse people around a well-articulated common value or aspiration, usually one that is not easily defined or even realizable — which is why they are sometimes labeled ‘the noble lie.'”

It is not enough to feel outrage. Obviously, we must be committed to specific values and convictions and use our outrage as the fuel we need to survive and then thrive in a world that has become more polarized than at any prior time that I can recall.

I commend Ramanna on his brilliant, substantial contributions to thought leadership throughout the global marketplace and highly recommend this material to all C-level executives and those who aspire to become one as well as to those that now have middle management positions. Also, to those preparing for a business career or have only recently embarked upon one.

These are among Karthik Ramanna’s concluding remarks: “Alas the age of outrage is here to stay,”  Karthik Ramanna asserts, “and leaders are on precariously thin ice as they navigate even narrower channels between increasingly divided and agitated politics. The playbook for leadership in this moment has to be urgently updated if we wish to avoid losing all our experienced players to outraged assaults. Indeed, the wiser ones among us may simply opt out of formal leadership roles, wary as they should be of devastating destruction.”

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading The Age of Outrage: First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the boxed mini-commentaries that are strategically inserted throughout the lively and eloquent narrative. Also to the last paragraph of each chapter where one or more key points are made.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.