Hello, I'm Dr. Steven Hassan with another episode of the Influence Continuum.

Today, I have a guest, a colleague and old friend, who is an expert on leadership and organizational studies. In fact, he's a professor at the University

of Sussex Business School. Dr. Dennis Taurus and I go back many years. I've had the opportunity

to interview several times, Dennis, but I'm fascinated by your research and I follow your work.

For my listeners who may not know of you, I just would like to say that you

you came to this particular interest in the dysfunctional and dark side of leadership, probably from growing

up in Northern Ireland at a time of great conflict between the two main communities. You also

fed into a book that you wrote, The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership, A Critical Perspect perspective, published by Rutledge in 2013.

I do want to cite the original book that I read of yours that is called On the Edge,

political cults right and left, and even though it's written in 2000 I still think it has a lot

of relevance and I like that you cover left-wing cults and right-wing cults because like myself

you are concerned about authoritarian mind control groups und undue influence groups.

What else do I want to say?

So I invited you to do this one, Dennis, because of your research into Elizabeth Holmes,

the infamous CEO of the biotech firm Theranos, who was sentenced to 11 years in jail for fraud.

And this woman started this corporation at age 19 in 2003, managed to raise $700 million

in startup capital,

or the valuation of Theranos at one point, I think,

you said was $10 billion, and it went bankrupt in 2018.

And, yeah, she's going to jail,

and so is her co-conspirator, Ramesh Balvani, I believe, is his name.

And as you know, I did my doctoral dissertation in the area of organizational change in development,

...