How Do Leaders Lead? Through Social Influence

From 1933 to 1944, US president Franklin D. Roosevelt used a series of radio broadcasts—his famous “fireside chats”—to persuade Americans to remain calm through a continuing series of financial, domestic, and military crises. In the early 1980s IBM hired Bill Gates to write an operating system for that company’s computers, but Gates convinced IBM to allow him to market the system through his own start-up company, which he named Microsoft. In 2013 Secretary of State John Kerry threatened Syria’s leaders, warning them the United States would launch a military strike against that country unless they curtailed their weapons program. In 1978 Jim Jones, the leader of a religious sect known as the Peoples Temple, ordered his followers to commit suicide, and nearly all complied with his deadly demand.