You look like Theranos material!

How to lead like Elizabeth Holmes

Are you ready to be on the cover of Forbes and Fortune? Celebrated by the leaders of your industry and nation? Worth billions of dollars? Then buckle up, you’re about to found Theranos and become Elizabeth Holmes.

Think of it as style over substance

It’s not as hard as you might think to build a world-changing company. As you’re about to see, you don’t really need anything that’s “world-changing”. What you do need is a strong leadership style. In fact, the less of a product you have, the more you’ll have to act like you do. Think of it as style over substance.

But don’t worry! To be Elizabeth Holmes and found Theranos, there are pretty much 3 big steps before you’re sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with former Secretaries of State.

First, create a personal mythos

Marshall Ganz, a Harvard professor of leadership, organizing and civil society, says that every leader ought to have a Story of Self — why you were brought into the work that you do.

This is great advice, that you’ll need to follow. Stories are part of what makes us human and are incredibly powerful tools. They can create a sense of unambiguous purpose among a group. This is why symbols of victory are so popular in team spaces — they help tell the teams’ stories. This is also why Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor, recommends getting team members to see their current roles as part of their personal stories. Doing this will give your team members a sense of purpose.

So, as founder and CEO, your story is important to the whole company, because the company is made in your vision.

Unfortunately, if you founded a company when you were only 19 years old without much real world or professional experience, you might be hard-pressed to think up such a story.

No problem! Because you’re Elizabeth Holmes, you can use the tragic death of an uncle you didn’t really know as the reason you got interested in medical testing. Don’t worry if it’s not true.

Also, pretend to have a deep voice.

(If you’re uncomfortable doing these things, bad new: it’s about to get a lot weirder.)

Next, create a shared delusion

After making (or making up) a “Story of self,” Ganz recommends going on to create a “Story of Us” and a “Story of Now.”

Because you’re Elizabeth Holmes, you aren’t too worried about “us” — that sounds dangerously close to admitting employees are human.

(In reading John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood with all of its insider accounts as well as dozens of laudatory articles written about Theranos before Carreyrou’s original expose, I could find no evidence that Holmes thought of or treated her team as a team. In fact, just the opposite…)

But you are very interested in now. Now is when you’re changing the world! Or, that’s the story anyway ;). It does get a little tricky for you though because all you have to show for your big story is a slightly-modified glue packing robot.

This is why you need to double down on your ambitions and hype. You are changing the world with truly momentous technology.

Support this mindset with strong external validation, while ignoring the people who actually work on the product.

For example, this scene from page 143 of Bad Blood:

The conversation eventually drifted back to the here and now and to Theranos. Tony [the lead engineer], who like Ian [a high-level chemist] no longer had Elizabeth’s favor and was being excluded from the development of the miniLab, floated the notion that perhaps the company was just a vehicle for Elizabeth and Sunny’s romance and that none of the work they did really mattered.

Ian nodded. “It’s a folie à deux,” he said.

Tony didn’t know any French, so he left to go look up the expression in the dictionary. The definition he found struck him as apt: “The presence of the same or similar delusional ideas in two persons closely associated with one another.”

And this, since you’re Elizabeth Holmes, brings up the final — unfortunately necessary — aspect of running a company like Theranos: the people who work for you.

Finally, manage ruthlessly

Since you are Elizabeth Holmes and you run Theranos, that should be enough to become a billionaire. And it pretty much is. But you’ll still need a few other people to round out the team, such as the scientists and engineers who will work tirelessly trying to make your fantasy a reality.

The good news is that you can treat them pretty terribly.

First, hire a brash sociopath to handle most talent management duties. Sunny Balwani, a dot-com millionaire whom you’re secretly dating is perfect. Let him handle most of the following areas of management.

Stifle communication

Forget the idea that intra-department communication can spur innovation. Running Theranos does not involve a lot of innovation. It does require hiding the lack of any.

So no IMs or chatting across teams. Keep careful watch of how all company computers are used (which you’ll definitely use for blackmail later), and if someone does invent something neat on the weekends, try to force him to give you the patent for it.

Bizarre team rituals

Like stories, rituals are great tools for any leader. They reinforce your team’s culture and bring everyone together. At Pixar, they have lots of field trips. Since you’re ostensibly a blood company, big Halloween parties make sense and are cute.

But rituals need to truly capture the essence of your culture, warts and all.

For example, if your culture includes an angry man often firing people with no notice for minor infractions or speaking up against dangerous conditions (which it does), then a more apt ritual might include something more like this (Bad Blood pg 105):

[T]he head of Theranos’s security team, [came] down with a mischievous look on his face, a badge hidden in his hand. At the sight of him, John and the logistics team would gather in excitement, knowing what was coming. As [the head of security] drew closer, he would slowly spin the badge from its necklace and reveal the face on the front, eliciting gasps of surprise. It was Sunny’s latest victim.

(Which is a ritual at your company, whether or not you realize it. If you don’t provide them, your team will create their own accurate artifacts of team culture.)

An active alumni network

Finally, with so many people “graduating” from Theranos, you’ll want to round out your team’s culture by letting everyone know you won’t forget about them.

Netflix, for example, is “a great place to be from.” Managers there try to set up leaving employees for their next position. Ex-Googles are called Xooglers and do all kinds of neat stuff together.

But because you run Theranos, you’ll foster your alumni network a little bit differently. Mainly through threats of lawsuits, actual lawsuits, stalking, and general intimidation carried out by one of the most powerful lawyers in the country.

Hey, as long as you stay in touch, right?

No but seriously

What happened under Holmes and Balwani at Theranos was abuse.

You can imagine how disorienting it must have been to work under such conditions while your tormentors met with the President, Vice President, was celebrated by national press, became a billionaire, and more. The stress drove one Theranos employee, the chemist Ian from the first quote above, to take his own life (which the company did not acknowledge at the time, except to get a lawyer to email his widow asking for company property).

The lesson here is that employee abuse doesn’t matter. To those people who could have checked Holmes’ power, our culture of leader admiration overpowered the importance of human decency.

It may be that greed blinded people. Or it may be that Holmes’ behavior didn’t differ too much from that of other Silicon Valley heroes.

But in any case, while so much of the media attention surrounding Holmes and Theranos relates to the fraud and the corporate governance that should have prevented it, I think we’re missing something more pressing to 99.99% of people: the power company leaders have over their employees.

Just as the abuse at Revolut has gotten swallowed up by the story about regulatory compliance, so too is this larger point going unmentioned about Theranos. The solution is to unapologetically demand better bosses by making leadership — as it relates to humans — the central consideration for employment and, yes, news coverage.

Had any one of the many leading journalists who lined up to dote on Holmes and Theranos inquired about the chemist she’d driven to suicide or the sociopathic president, then maybe another — the true — story about Theranos would have emerged sooner.

Thank you for reading. I research team culture for a soon-to-be-released team culture app called Sprynkl.

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