This is the BBC.

Welcome to Late Night Woman Dower. I'm Lauren Levern. When you talk to your friends,

the world seems the right way up again here to put things straight for us tonight. Our neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott. Hello. Hello. Technology evangelist Dr Sue Black. Thanks for joining us, Sue. And journalist and academic Zoe Strimple. Hi, Zoe. Hi. So Sophie, one of the things you wanted to talk about then was leadership.

What makes a good leader and who would want to be one? Why?

I've been thinking a lot about this recently because I was reading an old book that I read when I was an undergraduate.

It was already quite old then from 1976 and it's called On the Psychology of Military Incompetence.

And it is such a good book.

It's written by a proper sort of pipe-smoking Freudian,

who identifies his definitive tendencies in everybody.

But he had been in the army himself.

It's called Norman Dixon.

He'd been in the Army, I think the Engineering Corps for 10 years,

nine years of which he was in bomb disposal.

It's quite stressful decade.

Well, he lost an arm.

He said he's his own incompetence.

Wow.

And then he made the sort of body swerve move to go off and study psychology and did a PhD

in psychology at UCL where I am.

And then, um, you know, he was, the dominant mode at the time was using Freudian ideas

to sort of try and understand human behavior.

And that was what he did. And he started to apply it back to military incompetence.

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