Successful leaders possess a personality disorder, and a modicum of psychopathology is a prerequisite for exceptional performance. Influenced by recent advances in neuroscience and genetics, I argue in a book that leadership and followership are evolutionary adaptations that developed in order to enhance group cohesion, to maximise chances for survival and reproduction, two basic functions of living organisms. A prodigious leader should enhance, or appear to enhance, these two imperatives. Therefore, leader emergence must be biologically determined and, consequently, heritable, as we observe in the animal kingdom, where pecking orders and hierarchies are genetically determined
