“Don’t fly too close to the sun”

Eugene Sadler-Smith, in his chapter titled ‘“Don’t Fly Too Close to the Sun”: Using Myth to Understand the Hazards of Hubristic Leadership’ offers us profound insights about hubris, specifically, characteristics, causes and (unintended) consequences of hubristic leadership that exerts over-confident and over-ambitious judgement and behaviour. Taking from Ovid’s Metamorphoses the story of Dædalus and Icarus, the dream of god-like power of flight that led to Icarus’ downfall are retold and interpreted. He is offering an interpretative sensemaking and re-storying of this myth for modern-day organisations and leadership. Following the hubris-followed-by-nemesis archetypal pattern, such destructive leadership is that it implicates volitional, systematic and repeated leader behaviours that violate legitimate interests of organisations and their members through a misuse of power or position and generates negative unintended consequences. Furthermore, he suggests possibilities for mitigating hubristic leadership through moderating practical wisdom and its prudential judgement.