“The more power you have, the less imagination and empathy you have.”
— Professor Jiang Xueqin, The Diary of a CEO
I was listening to Jiang Xueqin on The Diary of a CEO a while back, and he tossed out an off-hand line that hit me right between the eyes: “The more power you have, the less imagination and empathy you have.”
Most listeners probably treated that like some vague fortune-cookie wisdom. I didn't. In twenty years of building companies, managing software teams, and working with founders, I've seen that exact sentence play out in real time. It destroys leadership faster than running out of money ever could.
Picture a safecracker. The old-school kind.
He's kneeling on cold concrete at two in the morning, ear pressed hard against the steel door of a three-ton bank vault. His fingertips are rubbed raw. He's holding his breath, feeling for the microscopic drag of brass pins lining up inside the lock. If he doesn't pay attention to the tiniest rattle, he spends the next ten years in federal prison. The guy has to care about nuance. His whole life depends on listening.
Then some guy hands him ten pounds of C4 explosive.
Suddenly, the game is over. He doesn't need to kneel in the dark. He doesn't need to listen for clicks. He slaps the putty against the hinges, unspools fifty feet of wire, and blows the door into the street.
Now, ask yourself: what happens to that safecracker's touch over the next five years?
It disappears. Atrophies completely. Why spend half your night sweating over tumblers when you've got a backpack full of plastic explosive?
That safecracker is almost every founder, C-suite executive, and political leader I've ever sat across a table from—including myself at times.
When you first launch a business, you don't have leverage. You're broke, desperate, and totally exposed. You're the safecracker. You have to read the room. You watch a customer's eyes twitch when you quote a price. You listen obsessively when someone tells you your software sucks. Empathy isn't a virtue you put on a corporate values poster—it's how you survive.
Then you raise ten million dollars. Or you corner a market. Or you get promoted into a corner office where everyone answers your emails in thirty seconds.
Somebody handed you the C4. And almost overnight, your brain stops listening for the clicks.
1. Power Physically Scrambles Your Brain
People love to pretend power is just a magnifying glass. We tell ourselves the comfortable lie: “Power doesn't change you; it just shows who you really were all along.”
Nice story. Too bad neuroscience says it's completely wrong.
Power doesn't reveal your character—it literally rewires your gray matter.
About a decade ago, Dacher Keltner over at UC Berkeley wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review on what he termed the Power Paradox. His research pointed out something cruel: the very skills that get people promoted in the first place—empathy, curiosity, building consensus, and actually listening to people—are the exact neural circuits that power burns out.
It's even worse when you look at actual brain imaging.
Back in 2014, Dr. Sukhvinder Obhi's neuro lab ran a fascinating study using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. They were tracking something called motor resonance in the mirror neuron system.
Mirror neurons are the reason you cringe when someone stubs their toe or gets hit in the groin. Your brain physically simulates what other humans are experiencing in front of you. It's the biological root of human empathy.
Obhi found that the second people felt powerful, their mirror neuron response flatlined.
The human brain is basically a lazy energy-conservation machine. The second it realizes it doesn't need to read someone else's emotional state to get what it wants, it cuts power to the wiring. Why waste calories trying to understand someone when you can just fire them or outbid them? It's like parking a forklift in your living room and wondering why your legs gave out six months later.
2. The Boardroom Echo Chamber
This isn't just biology, though. Modern corporate life is practically designed to pour gasoline on the fire.
The higher you climb, the more insulated you get. You get the executive assistant. You get the calendar that blocks out the world. You surround yourself with lieutenants whose unwritten job is to make sure bad news never ruins your morning.
I've watched this happen in boardrooms over and over.
The subordinates sitting around the mahogany table are terrified. They're scrutinizing the boss's face, hanging on every pause, trying to read the tea leaves so their mortgage stays paid. Meanwhile, the executive at the head of the table is completely blind to the room. Because nobody is screaming at him, he assumes everyone loves his idea. He mistakes terrified silence for brilliant consensus.
When an executive drops a 6:00 AM email laying off 2,000 employees while bragging about shareholder value, Twitter calls them a psychopath. But they usually aren't. It's worse: their biological radar is turned off, and they're sitting in an air-conditioned office five states away from the people whose lives just got wrecked.
3. What I Call “Mechanical Game Theory”
When you take this executive blindness and blow it up to the level of a Fortune 500 company or a nation-state, you end up in what I call Mechanical Game Theory.
Strategy stops being about humans. Employee morale, regional economies, and customer frustration don't register as feelings; they turn into rows on a spreadsheet. Costs to be absorbed. Friction to be ignored.
And because the entrenched giant holds all the coercive leverage, its imagination rots. It stops innovating. It defaults entirely to blunt instruments: lawsuits, non-competes, predatory pricing, or heavy-handed sanctions. When you hold a sledgehammer, you convince yourself every dispute on earth is a nail.
A sledgehammer can beat people into quiet submission for a while. But it cannot build a loyal community, a great culture, or a durable business. And that blindness is why giants get toppled.
4. Why the Underdog Usually Wins
Here's the part that catches incumbents off guard every single time: the agile underdog usually takes them down.
Look at how startups beat monopolies.
The monopoly gets fat. It treats its users like hostages. It charges exorbitant fees and provides garbage support because, hey, who else are they gonna call? The giant swings the C4 because it can.
Then three kids in a garage start a company. They have zero capital and zero brand. They can't afford to be arrogant. So they do what the safecracker does: they pick up the phone. They talk to angry customers for three hours. They listen for the quiet clicks in the industry that the big company is too lazy to see.
They use corporate judo—using the giant's own bloated inertia to flip them onto their back.
The giant doesn't lose because they ran out of cash. They lose because their brain forgot how to imagine an angle they didn't already own.
5. My Three Rules for Staying Sane
If you run a company or manage people, don't kid yourself. You aren't special. You aren't immune to this. Biology doesn't care about your good intentions.
You cannot fix neurological empathy rot by “trying to be a nicer boss.” You have to build real, uncomfortable friction into your week. Here is what I do to keep my radar from going dark:
Rule 1: Build a Direct Line to the Bottom
Never rely on your direct reports to tell you what's really going on. By the time a report works its way through three layers of management, bad news has been bleached white. Nobody wants to look incompetent.
You need an unfiltered pipeline straight to the frontline. If your newest support rep or junior coder is afraid to tell you that your product is broken or your latest strategy sounds moronic, you're already flying blind.
Rule 2: Do the Grunt Work Yourself
You cannot keep mirror neurons firing by looking at Tableau charts. You have to physically touch the work.
If you run software or services, get in the queue. Spend three hours a month answering raw customer support emails. If you manage a physical plant, walk the loading dock. Put down the spreadsheets, step out of the forklift, and pick up the boxes yourself. Remind your brain how heavy they are.
Rule 3: Pay People to Tell You You're Wrong
Power makes you crave validation. Surround yourself with people who nod, and within six months, you'll believe you're the smartest human on the continent.
You need a Red Team. People whose explicit, evaluated job is to attack your assumptions and point out the landmines. But here's the key: their paycheck cannot depend on whether you like them. If an employee risks their job or bonus by telling you you're about to drive the company off a cliff, they will smile, nod, and let you drive right off the edge.
The Myth of the “Good Dictator”
Throughout history, people have loved the fantasy of the “benevolent dictator”—the enlightened ruler who takes total control and somehow uses it purely for the good of the people.
Neuroscience proves that leader is a biological myth.
The very process of taking total leverage burns out the exact cognitive hardware you need to care about the people you're leading. You cannot carry the C4 without losing the touch of the safecracker.
If you want to lead well over the long haul, don't trust your own ego. Build the friction. Keep the radar on. And whatever you do, never stop listening for the clicks.