About this episode
Look around and you’ll be surrounded by let’s face it... d**ks. Not just in politics and business — but also in Medicine.
We’re taught lots about the multidisciplinary team and how important each member is — but that’s not always the experience in the real world. What I really want to know is: Do you need to be a d**k to be a good leader?
So I’m on a mission to ask this question to all the people I admire in Medicine. Whether that’s clinicians, academics, policymakers or people in business. People of all backgrounds, races, genders etc. It should be really interesting.
In this conversation
- The launch of a whole series built around one deliberately awkward question — "do you need to be a dick to be a good leader?" — put to the clinicians, academics, policymakers and business leaders Musty admires.
- Musty refuses the knee-jerk "of course not." He wants the ins and outs — and to test whether it's sometimes genuinely useful to be brash, abrasive, and not everyone's best friend.
- A montage of famous "dicks" behaving badly (the format is a knowing homage to Max Joseph's short film of the same name) sets up the medical twist: the same energy plays out on the wards, not just in politics and business.
- The multidisciplinary-team ideal versus the real-world experience of hierarchy and ego in medicine.
- A taste of the awkward situations the question has already produced — including one guest visibly thrown by being asked it to their face.
Transcript AI-generated
Look around you and you'll be inundated with — let's face it — dicks. [a montage of clips plays: a public figure holding forth on immigration; a man fumbling live on camera — "Come on, try getting it out… I don't know if you're going to put this on television, but you don't even know what you're talking about."]
Not just in politics and business, but also on the wards. And it seems to work.
I thought I'd get your theories, mock them, then embrace my own. The usual.
We're taught lots about the multidisciplinary team and how important each member is. But that's not always the experience in the real world. What I really want to know is: do you need to be a dick to be a good leader? And not just the knee-jerk response of "well, of course not." I want to know the ins and outs — and maybe, if sometimes it is useful to be a bit brash or abrasive, and not always be everyone's best friend. [a clip of a politician on the attack — "…really, you have the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk."]
So I'm on a mission to ask this question to all the people I admire in medicine — whether that's clinicians, academics, policymakers, or people in business. People of all backgrounds, races, genders. It should be really interesting.
Occasionally, this question has led to some awkward situations. [a guest, caught off guard — "Do you need to be a… a dick to be a good leader? A dick?"]
Yeah. If you know anyone who has an interesting philosophy on this, then feel free to email me at hi@musty.io — that's hi at m-u-s-t-y dot i-o.
I hope you enjoy the series — and as always, reviews on iTunes are worth their weight in gold. Thank you.
[a final clip tags the end — "…we have people that are babies. It's like a chess player, a grandmaster, playing against a checker's child."]