The Age of Outrage: How to Lead in a Polarized World

A first-of-its-kind look at the outrage being directed at organizations across the globe--and how leaders can respond to it.

Outrage is everywhere--on the left and on the right--and many companies are finding themselves in the crosshairs. Go Fund Me was pressured to cut off funding to protesting truckers in Ottawa. Disney's CEO was dragged down for mishandling both sides of Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law. Facebook and other tech companies have been accused of manipulating elections in many countries and by many parties. People are angry with the world--in some cases, rightfully so--and now view companies as they do governments: as targets of their ire and potential forces for social change. Managing outrage has moved from being an occasional leadership challenge, such as handling a PR crisis, to a necessary and critical leadership capability, like strategic thinking or financial acumen.

Based on his popular Oxford leadership program and deep-dive case studies on organizations such as IKEA, Nestlé, the London Metropolitan Police, the Vatican, and others, Karthik Ramanna offers a set of practices for leaders to navigate this age of polarization--steps leaders can take to make sense of the outrage they encounter, work with relevant stakeholders to progress through it, and emerge stronger for it. Ramanna's practical framework, developed through years of experience with organizations, helps leaders "turn down the temperature," analyze root causes, develop and implement distinctive organizational responses that are mission consistent, and build individual and organizational resilience.

Just as governments have systems for managing regular adverse-weather events such as hurricanes, organizations and their leaders now need an equivalent for managing the stakeholder hostilities that contextualize nearly all their decisions. This book is the essential guide for managing in the age of outrage.

Karthik Ramanna is a professor of business and public policy at University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government, where he's served as director of one of the world's most diverse leadership programs. Previously a professor at Harvard Business School, Ramanna studies how leaders build trust with stakeholders. He is an expert on business-government relations and has won numerous awards, including the Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award for groundbreaking management thinking, the Journal of Accounting and Economics Best Paper Prize, and the international Case Centre's Outstanding Case Writer prize, dubbed by the Financial Times as "the business school Oscars."