(Pg 31) There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself of them. One has to pay something. A man who has becomes conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.
(Pg 32-33) Now, to limit myself to existential philosophies, I see that all of them without exception suggest escape. Through an odd reasoning, starting out from the absurd over the ruins of reason, in a closed universe limited to the human, they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them.
…
He is left powerless to realize the transcendent, incapable of plumbing the depth of experience, and conscious of that universe upset by failure. Will he advance or at least draw conclusions from that failure? He contributes nothing new. He found nothing in experience but the confession of his own impotence and no occasion to infer any satisfactory principle. Yet without justification, as he says to himself, he suddenly asserts all at once the transcendent, the essence of experience, and the superhuman significance of life when {Jaspers} writes: “Does not the failure reveal, beyond any possible explanation and interpretation, not the absence but the existence of transcendence?” That existence which, suddenly and through a blind act of human confidence explains everything, he defines as “the unthinkable unity of the general and the particular.” Thus the absurd becomes god (in the broadest meaning of the word) and that inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything. Nothing logically prepares this reasoning. I can call it a leap. And paradoxically can be understood Jaspers’s insistence, his infinite patience devoted to making the experience of the transcendent impossible to realize. For the more fleeting that approximation is, the more empty that definition proves to be, and the more real that transcendent is to him; for the passion he devotes to asserting is is in direct proportion to the gap between his powers of explanation and the irrationality of the world and of experience.
(Pg. 36) Everything is sacrificed here to the irrational, and, the demand for clarity being conjured away, the absurd disappears with one of the terms of its comparison. The absurd man, on the other hand, does not undertake such a leveling process. He recognizes the struggle, does not absolutely scorn reason, and admits the irrational. Thus he again embraces in a single glance all the data of experience and he is little inclined to leap before knowing. He knows simply that in that alert awareness there is no further place for hope.
…
Kierkegaard likewise takes the leap. His childhood having been so frightened by Christianity, he ultimately returns to its harshest aspect. For him, too, antimony and paradox become criteria of the religious.
(Pg 41) Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question: “What would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: “despair.” Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
(Pg. 51) I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.
(Pg. 52 ) Let us insist again on the method: it is a matter of persisting. At a certain point on his path the absurd man is tempted. History is not lacking in either religions or prophets, even without gods. He is asked to leap. All he can reply is that he doesn’t fully understand, that it is not obvious. Indeed, he does not want to do anything but what he fully understands. He is assured that this is the sin of pride, but he does not understand the notion of sin; that perhaps hell is in store, but he has not enough imagination to visualize that strange future; that he is losing immortal life, but that seems to him an idle consideration. An attempt is made to get to admit his guilt. He feels innocent. To tell the truth, that is all he feels–his irreparable innocence. That is what allows him everything. Hence, what the demands of himself is to live solely with what he knows, to accommodate himself to what is, and to bring in nothing that is not certain. He is told that nothing is. But this at least is a certainty. And it is with this that he is concerned: he wants to find out if it is possible to live without appeal.
(Pg. 54) It may be thought that suicide follows revolt — but wrongly. For it does not represent the logical outcome of revolt. It is just the contrary by the consent it presupposes. Suicide, like the leap, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man returns to his essential history. His future, his unique and dreadful future — he sees and rushes towards it. In its way, suicide settles the absurd.
(Pg. 76) [The Demise of Don Juan] At this point sensual pleasure winds up in asceticism. […] I see Don Juan in a cell of one of those Spanish monasteries lost on a hilltop. And if he contemplates anything at all, it is not the ghosts of past loves, but perhaps, through a narrow slit in the sun-baked wall, some silent Spanish plain, a noble, soulless land in which he recognizes himself.
(Pg. 86) [The Conqueror:] “Knowing that there are no victorious causes, I have a liking for lost causes: they require an uncontaminated soul, equal to its defeat as to its temporary service. For anyone who feels bound up with this world’s fate, the clash of civilizations has something agonizing about it. I have made that anguish mine at the same time that I wanted to join in. Between history and the eternal, I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me?”
(Pg. 87) [The Conqueror:] “There is but one useful action, that of remaking man and the earth. I shall never remake men. But one must do “as if.” For the path of struggle leads me to the flesh. Even humiliated, the flesh is my only certainty.”
(Pg. 102) I want to know whether, accepting life without appeal, one can also agree to work and create without appeal and what is the way leading to these liberties. I want to liberate my universe of its phantoms and to people it solely with flesh-and-blood truths whose presence I cannot deny. I can perform absurd work, choose the creative attitude rather than another. But an absurd attitude, if it is to remain so, must remain aware of its gratuitousness. So it is with the work of art. If the commandments of the absurd are not respected, if the work does not illustrate divorce and revolt, if it sacrifices to illusions and arouses hope, it ceases to be gratuitous. I can no longer detach myself from it. My life may find meaning in it, but that is trifling. It ceases to be that exercise in detachment and passion which crowns the splendor and futility of a man’s life.
(Pg. 104) What distinguishes modern sensibility from classical sensibility is that the latter thrives on moral problems and the former on metaphysical problems. In Dostoevsky’s novels the question is propounded with such intensity that it can only invite extreme solutions. Existence is illusory or it is eternal. If Dostoevsky were satisfied with this inquiry, he would be a philosopher. But he illustrates the consequences that such intellectual pastimes may have in a man’s life, and in this regard he is an artist.
(Pg. 115) At the moment of death, the succession of his works is but a collection of failures. But if those failures all have the same resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of his own condition, to make the air echo with the sterile secret he possesses.
(Pg. 115) Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man’s sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his conditions, persevering in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All that “for nothing,” in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.
(Pg. 117) Thus, I ask of absurd creation what I require from thought — revolt, freedom, and diversity. Later on it will manifest its utter futility. In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence, the doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror’s attitude. To create is likewise to give shape to one’s fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: there is no frontier between being and appearing.
(Pg. 117) All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics – in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of human suffering and, like it, inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.
(Pg. 121) The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.
(Pg. 121) There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
(Pg. 123) The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
Empty your mind of all thoughts. Let heart be at peace. Watch the turmoil of beings, but contemplate their return. Each separate being in the universe Returns to the common source. Returning to the source is serenity. If you don’t realize the source, You stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you came from, You naturally become tolerant, Disinterested, amused Kindhearted as a grandmother, Dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, You can deal with whatever life brings you, And when death comes, you are ready. (Chapter 16)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. Thus the Master is available to all people and doesn’t reject anyone. He is ready to use all situations and doesn’t waste anything. This is called embodying the light. What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher? What is a bad man but a good man’s job? If you don’t understand this, you get get lost, however intelligent you are. It is the great secret. (Chapter 27)
He enters battle gravely, with sorrow and with great compassion, as if he were attending a funeral. (Chapter 31)
Quite a different attitude regarding battle than that expressed in the Gita! Would bet on the soldiers that read the Gita.
Knowing others is intelligence; Knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; Mastering yourself is true power. (Chapter 33)
If you realize you have enough, you are truly rich. (Chapter 33)
The Master does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone. The ordinary man is always doing things, yet many more are left to be done. […] The moral man does something, and when no one responds he rolls up his sleeves and uses force. When the Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, the is morality. When morality is lost, there is ritual. Ritual is the husk of true faith, the beginning of chaos. (Chapter 38)
Ordinary men hate solitude. (Chapter 42)
He is never disappointed; thus his spirit never grows old. (Chapter 55)
Thus the Master is content to serve as an example and not to impose his will. (Chapter 58)
Governing a large country is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking. (Chapter 60)
Confront the difficult while it is still easy. (Chapter 63)
When they know that they don’t know, people can find their own way. (Chapter 65)
The Master is above the people, and no one feels opppressed. He goes ahead of the people and one feels manipulated. The world is grateful to him. (Chapter 66)
I have just three things to teach: Simplicity, patience, and compassion. […] Compassionate towards yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world. (Chapter 67)
The best athlete wants his opponent at his best. The best general enters the mind of his enemy. The best businessman serves the communal good. The best leader serves the will of the people. All of them embody the virtue of non-competition. Not that they don’t love to compete, but they do it in the spirit of play. (Chapter 68)
When they lose their sense of awe, people turn to religion. When they no longer trust themselves, they begin to depend on authority. Therefore the Master steps back so that people won’t be confused. He teaches without a teaching, so that the people will have nothing to learn. (Chapter 72)
While I appreciate Ted’s mathematical style and perspective as a highly intelligent outsider, I don’t agree with his value judgements and thus his conclusions. I’m on team technology. Nevertheless, many of his observations were prescient and remain thought-provoking. Quotes without further comment below.
What the principle of technological autonomy asserts is that the overall development of technological, and its long-term consequences for society, are not subject to human control. […] A corollary is that nothing short of the collapse of technological society can avert a greater disaster. Thus, if we want defend ourselves against technology, the only action we can take that might prove effective is an effort to precipitate the collapse of technological society. Though this conclusion is an obvious consequence of the principle of technological autonomy, and though it possibly is implied by certain statements of Ellul, I know of no conventionally published writer who has explicitly recognized that our only way out is through the collapse of technological society. This seeming blindness can only be explained as a result of timidity.
The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call feelings of inferiority and oversocialization.
The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. The kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant behavior. But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only as member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself.
Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a a non-moral origin. We use the term ‘oversocialized’ to describe such people.
The Power Process Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the power process. This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of the his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy.
The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid , drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid change inevitably break down traditional values.
Leftism, at least in its recent (mid- to late-20th century) form, is in part a symptom of deprivation with respect to the power process.
Disruption of the Power Process in Modern Society We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied but only at the cost of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes. The power process is the process of satisfying drives of the second group. The more drives there are in the third group, the more there is frustration, anger, eventually defeatism, depression, etc. In modern industrial society, natural human drives tend to be pushed into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly of artificially created drives.
It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is no one’s fault, unless it is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal demon. But threats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE. They are not the results of change but are IMPOSED on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence. Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry.
Again, having successfully raised his children, going through the power process by providing for them with the physical necessities, the primitive man feels that his work is done and he is prepared to accept old age (if he survives that long) and death. Many modern people, on the other hand, are disturbed by the prospect of physical deterioration and death, as is shown by the amount of effort they expend trying to maintain their physical condition, appearance and health. We argue that this is due to unfulfillment result from the fact that they have never put their physical power to any practical use, have never gone through the process using their bodies in a serious way.
The Motives of Scientists Science and technology provide the most important examples of surrogate activities. […] With possible rare exceptions, their [scientist] motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit humanity but the need to go through the power process: to have a goal (a scientific problem to solve) to make an effort (research) and the attain the goal (solution of the problem). Science is a surrogate activity because scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the work itself. Of course, it’s not that simple. Other motives do play a role for many scientists. Money and status for example.
Genetic Engineering
If you think that big government interferes in your life too much NOW, just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic constitution of your children. Such regulation will inevitably follow the introduction of genetic engineering of human beings, because the consequences of unregulated genetic engineering would be disastrous. The usual response to such concerns is to talk about ‘medical ethics.’ But a code of ethics would not serve to protect freedom in the face of medical progress; it would only make matters worse. A code of ethics applicable to genetic engineering would be in effect a means of regulating the genetic constitution of human beings. Somebody (probably the upper middle class, mostly) would decide that such and such applications of genetic engineering were “ethical” and others were not, so that in effect they would be imposing their own values on the genetic constitution of the population at large.
People tend to assume that because a revolution involves a much greater change than reform does, it is more difficult to bring about than reform is. Actually, under certain circumstances revolution is much easier that reform. The reason is that a revolutionary movement can inspire an intensity of commitment that a reform movement cannot inspire. A reform movement merely offers to solve a particular problem. A revolutionary movement offers to solve all problems at one stroke and create a whole new world; it provides the kind of ideal for which people will take great risks and make great sacrifices.
Therefore two tasks confront those who hate the servitude to which the industrial system is reducing the human race. First, we must work to heighten the social stresses within the system so as to increase the likelihood that is will break down or be weakened sufficiently so that revolution against it becomes possible. Second, it is necessary to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the industrial system.
Thoughts on AI Alignment
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions we can’t make any conjecture as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race could never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race migh easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines more and more intelligent, people will let machines more and more decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will in the hands of a tiny elite– just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control of the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other pscyhological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becauses extinct, leaving the world the the elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the resk of the human race. They willl see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him buys, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remvoe their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. Those engineered human being may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.
Globalize to Destabilize
Revolutionaries might consider favoring measures that tend to bind the world economy into a unified whole. Free trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT are probably harmful to the environment in the short run, but in the long run they may perhaps be advantageous because they foster economic interdependence between nations. It will be easier to destroy the industrial system on a worldwide basis if the world economy is so unified that its breakdown in any one major nation will lead to its breakdown in all industrialized nations.
Critical Cop-out
Would society EVENTUALLY develop again toward an industrial-technological form? Maybe, but there is no use in worrying about it, since we can’t predict or control events 500 or 1,000 years in the future.
By this time it should be sufficiently clear to the reader that what the anarcho-primitivists (and many anthropologists) are up to has nothing to do with a rational search for the truth about primitive cultures. Instead, they have been developing a myth.
Many people do not understand the roots of their own frustration, hence their rebellion is directionless. They know they want to rebel, but they don’t know what they want to rebel against. Luckily, the System is able to fill their need by providing them with a list of standard and stereotyped grievances in the name of which to rebel: racism, homophobia, women’s issues, poverty sweatshops… the whole laundry bag of ‘activist’ issues. Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait.
So, in a nutshell, the System’s neatest trick is this: (a) For the sake of its own efficiency and security, the System needs to bring about deep and radical social changes to match the changed conditions resulting from technological progress. (b) The frustration of life under the circumstances imposed by the System leads to rebellious impulses. (c) Rebellious impulses are co-opted by the System in the service of social changes it requires; activists “rebel” against the old and outmoded values that are no longer of use to the System and in favor of the new values that the System needs us to accept. (d) In this way rebellious impulses, which otherwise might have been dangerous to the System, are given an outlet that is not only harmless to the System, but useful to it. (e) Much of the public resent resulting from the imposition of social changes is drawn away from the System and its institutions and is directed instead at the radicals who spearhead the social changes. Of course, this trick was not planned in advance by the System’s leaders, who are not conscious of having played a trick at all.
In this situation there is a conflict between integration propaganda and agitation propaganda. Those people in whom the cuddly values and the aversion to violence have been most deeply planted can’t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.
Possibly you misinterpret my motives for emphasizing the “power process.” The purpose of doing so is not the exalt the “will to power.” […] I should admit, though, that I personally am strongly inclined to individualism. Ideally, I shouldn’t allow my individualistic predilections to influence my thinking on revolutionary strategy but should arrive at my conclusions objectively. The fact that you have spotted my individualistic leanings may mean that I have not been as objective as I should have been.
The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529) Albrecht Altdorfer
Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership , “vision”, planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.
Bad strategy tends to skip over pesky details such as problems. It ignores the power of choice and focus, trying instead to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests.
The term “strategy” should mean a cohesive response to an important challenge. Unlike a stand-alone decision or a goal, a strategy is a coherent set of analyses, concepts, policies, arguments, and actions that respond to high-stakes challenge. Many people assume that a strategy is a big-picture overall direction, divorced from any specific action. But defining strategy as broad concepts, thereby leaving out action, creates a wide chasm between “strategy” and “implementation.” If you accept this chasm, most strategy work becomes wheel spinning.
Part 1: Good and Bad Strategy
A good strategy doesn’t just draw on existing strength; it creates strength through the coherence of its design.
Andy Marshall
“Our defense planning had become driven by the annual budgeting process. The process of justifying expenditures as counters to Soviet expenditures conditioned U.S. actions on Soviet strengths, expressed as threats, not on Soviet weaknesses and constraints.”
This fascinating analysis of the situation worked to redefine “defense” in new terms – a subtle shift in point of view. It argued that “in dealing effectively with the other side, a nation seeks opportunities to use or more distinctive competences in such a way as to develop competitive advantage-both in specific areas and overall.” It then went on the explain that the crucial area of competition was technology because the United States had more resources and better capabilities in that area. And, most important, it argued that having a true competitive strategy meant engaging in action that imposed exorbitant costs on the other side. In particular, it recommended investing in technologies that were expensive to counter and where the counters did not add to Soviet offensive capabilities. For instance, increasing the accuracy of missiles or the quietness of submarines forced the Soviet Union to spend scarce resources on counters without increasing the threat to the United States. Investments in systems that made Soviet systems obsolete would also force them to spend, as would selectively advertising dramatic new technologies. […] the power of that strategy derived from their discovery of a different way of viewing competitive advantage-a shift from thinking about pure military capability to one of looking for ways to impose asymmetric costs on an opponent.
To detect bad strategy, look for one or more of its four major hallmarks;
1. Fluff (words that give the illusion of high level thinking)
2. Failure to face the challenge (can’t evaluate strategy against an undefined challenge)
3. Mistaking goals for strategy (statements of desire rather than plans to overcome)
4. Bad strategic objectives (not addressing critical issues or impractical)
If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen.
We have a different type of ritualized formalism for producing “strategic plans.” The current fill-in-the-blank template starts with a statement of “vision,” then a “mission statement” or a list of “core values,” then a list of “strategic goals,” and then, finally, a list of “initiatives.”
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) works to achieve radical technological innovation to support national security. As a counterpoint to Harvestor, DARPA’s strategy is based on clear-sighted recognition of the nature of the challenge. Here is DARPA’s own statement of a fundamental problem its strategy address:
“A basic challenge for any military research organization is matching military problems with technological opportunities, including the new operational concepts those technologies make possible. Parts of this challenge are extremely difficult because: (1) some military problems have no easy or obvious technical solutions; (2) some emerging technologies may have far-reaching military consequences that are still unclear. DARPA focuses its investments on this “DARPA-hard” niche – a set of technical challenges that, if solved, will be of enormous benefit to U.S. national security, even if the risk of technical failure is high.
To attack this challenge, DARPA focuses on projects the military services see as too risky or too removed from their current missions. It tries to imagine what commanders will want in the future rather than what they are calling for today, but it restricts its work to that conducted by very talented people with very good ideas. […] DARPA’s strategy is more than a general direction. It includes specific policies that guide its everyday actions. For example, it retains program managers for only 4-6 years to limit empire building and to bring in fresh talent. The expectation is that a new program manager be willing to challenge the ideas and work of predecessors. In addition, DARPA has a very limited investment in overhead and physical facilities in order to prevent entrenched interests from thwarting progress in new directions. These policies are based on a realistic appraisal of the obstacles to innovation. They are a far cry from vague aspirations such as “retain the best talent” and “maintain a culture of innovation.” DAPRA’s surprising strategy has a shape and structure common to all good strategy. It follows from careful definition of the challenge. It anticipates the real-world difficulties to be overcome. It eschews fluff. It creates policies that concentrate resources and action on surmounting those difficulties.
To obtain higher performance, leaders must identify the critical obstacles to forward progress and then develop a coherent approach to overcoming them. This may require product innovation, or new approaches to distribution, or a change in organizational structure. Or it may exploit insights into the implications of changes in the environment – in technology, consumer tastes, law, resource prices, or competitive behavior. The leader’s responsibility is to decide which of these pathways will be the most fruitful and design a way to marshal the organization’s knowledge, resources, and energy to that end. Importantly, opportunities, challenges and changes don’t come along in nice annual the need for true strategy work is episodic, not necessarily annual.
A long list of “things to do,” often mislabeled as “strategies” or “objectives,” is not a strategy
If the leader’s strategic objectives are just as difficult as the original challenges, there has been little value added by the strategy.
Strategy involves focus and, therefore, choice. And choices means setting aside some goals in favor of others. When this hard work is not done, weak amorphous strategy is the result.
Only the prospect of choice inspires peoples’ best arguments about the pluses of their own proposals and the negatives of others’. As in the law, disciplined conflict calls forth stronger evidence and reasoning.
The general outline (of charisma leadership) goes like this: the transformational leader (1) develops or has a vision, (2) inspires people to sacrifice (change) for the good of the organization, and (3) empowers people to accomplish the vision. […] This conceptual scheme has been hugely popular with college-educated people who have to manage other college-educated people. It satisfies their sense that organization should somehow be forced to change and improve while also satisfying their contradictory sense that it is awkward to tell other people what to do. Whatever you think about this definition of leadership, a problem arises when it is confused with strategy. Leader and strategy may be joined in the same person, but they are not the same thing. Leadership inspires and motivates self-sacrifice. Change, for example, require painful adjustments, and good leadership helps people fell more positively about making those adjustments. Strategy is the craft of figuring out which purposes are both worth pursing and capable of being accomplished.
This class of verbiage is a mutant offspring of the concept of charismatic, then transformational, leadership. In reality, these are the flat-footed attempts of organizational men to turn the magic of personal charisma into a bureaucratic product — charisma-in-a-can.
This statement is very appealing to many people and, at the same time, is quite obviously untrue. Ascribing the success of Ford and Apple to a vision, shared at all levels, rather than pockets of outstanding competence mixed with luck, is a radical distortion of history.
Kernel
The kernel of a strategy contains three elements
1. A diagnosis
2. A guiding policy
3. A set of coherent actions
Diagnosis
Key question: “What’s going on here?”
Making the diagnosis an explicit element of the strategy allows the rest of the strategy to be revisited and changed as circumstances change.
The diagnosis for the situation should replace the overwhelming complexity of reality with a simpler story, a story that calls attention to its crucial aspects.
Guiding Policy
Good guiding policies are not goals or visions or images of desirable end states. Rather, they define a method of grappling with the situation and ruling out a vast array of possible actions.
Without a diagnosis, one cannot evaluate alternative guiding policies. Without working through to at least the first round of action one cannot be sure the guiding policy can be implemented. Good strategy is not just “what” you are trying to do. It is also “why” and “how” you are doing it.
Coherent Action
Strategic actions that are not coherent are either in conflict with one another or taken in pursuit of unrelated challenges.
The idea that coordination, by itself, can be a source of advantage is a very deep principle. It is often underappreciated because tend to think of coordination in terms of continuing mutual adjustments among agents. Strategic coordination, or coherence, is not ad hoc mutual adjustment. It is coherences imposed on a system by policy and design.
Another powerful way to coordinate actions is by the specification of a proximate objective.
Strategy is visible as coordinated action imposed on a system. When I say strategy is “imposed,” I mean just that. It is an exercise in centralized power, used to overcome the natural workings of a system. This coordination is unnatural in the sense that it would not occur without the hand of strategy. The idea of centralized direction may set off warning bells in a modern educated person. Why does it make sense to exercise centralized power when we know that many decisions are efficiently made on a decentralized basis? […] Decentralized decision making cannot do everything. In particular, it may fail when either the costs or benefits are not borne by the decentralized actors.
There will be costs to demanding coordination, because it will ride roughshod over economies of specialization and more nuanced local responses. […] Good strategy and good organization lie in specializing on the right activities and imposing only the essential amount of coordination.
Part 2: Sources of Power
Sources of power used in good strategies: leverage, proximate objectives, chain-link systems, design, focus, growth, advantage, dynamics, inertia and entropy.
An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passing on a simpler problem — one that is solvable.
The more dynamic the situation, the poorer your foresight will be. Therefore, the more uncertain and dynamic the situation, the more proximate a strategic objective must be. The proximate objective is guided by forecasts of the future, but the more uncertain the future, the more its essential logic is that of “taking a strong position and creating options,” not of looking far ahead.
Quality matters when quantity is an inadequate substitute.
Many effective strategies are more designs than decisions — are more constructed than chosen.
Corporate leaders seek growth for many reasons. They may (erroneously) believe administrative costs will fall with size. A poor, but common, reason for acquisitions is to move key executives to the periphery rather than let them go. The leaders of larger firms tend to get paid more. And, in a decentralized company, making acquisitions is a lot more fun than reading reports on divisional performance.
First, management may mistakenly believe that improvement is a “natural” process or that it can accomplished by pressure or incentives alone. As Frank Gilbreth pointed out in 1909, bricklayers had been laying bricks for thousands of years with essentially no improvement in tools and technique. By carefully studying the process, Gilbreth was able to more than double productivity without increasing anyone’s workload. By moving the supply pallets of bricks and mortar to chest height, hundreds or thousands of separate lifting movements per day by each bricklayer were avoided. […] One must reexamine each aspect of product and process, casing aside the comfortable assumption that everyone knows what they are doing.
The most obvious approach to strengthening isolating mechanisms is working on stronger patents, brand-name protections, and copyrights. […] When an isolating mechanism is based on the collective know-how of groups, it may be strengthened by reducing turnover. […] Another broad approach to strengthening isolating mechanisms is to have a moving target for imitators.
Much of academic strategy theory concerns more and more intricate explanations for why certain types of economic high ground are valuable. But such discussions sidestep an even more important question: how do you attain such an advantage in the first place? […] One way to find fresh undefended high ground is by creating it yourself through pure innovation. […] The other way to grab high ground is–the way that is my focus here–to exploit a wave of change. […] Leaders who stay “above the details” may do well in stable times, but riding a wave of change requires an intimate feel for its origins and dynamics.
The origin of Andy Grove’s inflection point was Intel’s own product–the microprocessor. The modularization of the computer industry came about as each major component was able to contain its own microprocessor–each part became ‘smart.’ […] Smart components operating within a de facto standard operating system meant that the job of systems integration became almost trivially simple. The skills at systems integration that IBM and DEC had built up were no longer needed. […] With the glue of proprietary systems engineering no longer so important, the industry deconstructed itself.
It is hard to show your skill as a sailor when there is no wind. Similarly, it is in moments of industry transition that skills at strategy are most valuable. During the relatively stable periods between episodic transitions, it is difficult for followers to catch the leader, just as it is difficult for one of the two or three leaders to pull far ahead of the others.
Fortunately, a leader does not need to get it totally right — the organization’s strategy merely has to be more right than those of its rivals. If you can peer into the fog of change and see 10% more clearly than others see, then you may gain an edge.
Industry transition guide posts:
1. Rising Fixed Costs –> force consolidation in the industry because only the largest can over these fixed charges.
2. Deregulation –> newly deregulated players chased what used to be the more profitable segments long after the differential vanished. This happened because of the inertia in corporate routines and mental maps of the terrain, and because of poor cost data.
3. Predictable biases in forecasting –> Ex: people rarely predict that a business trend will peak and then decline. Ex: in a time of transition, the standard advice offered by consultants and analysts will be to adopt the strategies of the incumbents that are on the verge of disruption
Entropy makes it necessary for leaders to constantly work on maintaining an organization’s purpose, form, and methods even if there are no changes in strategy or competition.
As I developed working relationships at AT&T, some high-level managers let me in on what they saw as an embarassing secret. AT&T wasn’t competent at product development. Yes, the company the proud owner of Bell Labs; the inventor of the transistor, the C programming language, and Unix; and was marvelous place that probed deeply into the fundamentals of nature. But there was no competence within AT&T at making working consumer products. One story was told concerned cellular phones. Starting in 1947, Bell Labs had developed the basic ideas underlying mobile telephony. However, the first market test, in 1977, had to be undertaken using Motorola’s equipment.
The first tep in breaking organizational culture inertia is simplification. […] After the first round of simplification, it may be necssary to fragment the operating units. […] Such fragmentation breaks political coalitions, cuts the comfort of cross-subsidies, and exposes a larger number of smaller units to leaderships’s scrutiny of their operations and performance. After this round of fragmentation, and more simplification, it is necessary to perform a triage. […] The triage must be based on both performance and culture — you cannot afford to have a high-performing unit with a terrible culture infect the others. […] Once the bulk of the operating units are working well, it may then be time to install a new overlay of coordinating mechanisms, reversing some of the fragmentation that used to break inertia.
A lack of response is not always an indication of sticky routines or a frozen culture. A business may choose to not respond to change or attack because responding would undermine still-valuable streams of profit. Those streams of profit persist because of their customers’ inertia — a form of inertia by proxy. […] The apparent inertia of the telephone companies was actually inertia by proxy, induced because their customers were so slow to switch suppliers, even in the face of price differences. […] Inertia by proxy disappears when the organization decides that adapting to changed circumstances is more important than hanging on to old profit streams.
Entropy is a great boon to management and strategy consultants. Despite all the high level concepts consultants advertise, the bread and butter of every consultant’s business is undoing entropy — cleaning up the debris and weeds that grow in every organizational garden.
Nvidia
Faced with the failure of the company’s first product and the sudden rise of 3dfx, Jen-Hsun Huang reformulated the company’s strategy. Key inputs came from a temporary technical advisory board made up of both insiders and expert outsiders. The new strategy was a sharp change in direction. Instead of multimedia, the company would focus on 3-D graphics for desktop PCs. Instead of its initial proprietary apparoch to graphics, the company would embrace the SGI-based triangle method. Abou the only thing that stayed unchanged Nvidia’s commitment to being a “fabless” chip company, focusing on design and outsourcing fabrication. […] This is the point where a bad strategist would have wrapped the concept of a faster development cycle in slogans about speed, power, and growth, and then sought to cash in by taking the company public. Instead, the Nvidia teacm designed a set of cohesive policies and actions turn guiding policy into reality. The first tep in executing the guiding policy was the establishment of three separate development teams. Each would work to an 18 month start-to-market cycle. With overlapping schedules, the three teams would deliver a new product every six months.
Part 3: Thinking Like Strategist
Good strategy is built on functional knowledge about what works, what doesn’t, and why. Generally available functional knowledge is essential but because it is available to all, it can rarely be decisive. The most precious functional knowledge is proprietary, available only to your organization. An organization creates pools of proprietary knowledge by actively exploring its chosen arena in a process called scientific empiricism.
The delicacy in the situation was that Schulz’s proprietary information was only a glimmer in his mind, a mood, a feeling. Others, exposed to exactly the same information and experiences, did not have this insight or feeling. The privacy of his insight was both blessing and curse. Were it easily shared with others, Schultz himself would have been irrelevant. But because it could not be fully shared, it was difficult to convince others to back the project.
Once Schultz initiated business operations, he began to accumulate privileged information.
“Mr. Carnegie,” Tylor said, ” would advise you to make a list of the ten most important things you can do. And then, start doing number one.”
Our own myopia is the obstacle common to all strategic situations. Being strategic is bing less myopic – less shortsighted – than others. You must perceive and take into account what other do not, be they colleagues or rivals. Being less myopic is not the same as pretending you can see the future. You must work with the facts on the ground, not the vague outlines of the distant future.
I invoke a virtual panel of experts that I carry around in my mind. This panel of experts is a collection of people whose judgements i value. I use an internal mental dialogue with them to both critique my own idea s and stimulate new ones.
Good judgement is hard to define and harder still to acquire. Certainly some part of good judgment seems to be innate, connected with having a balanced character and an understanding of other people. Still, I am convinced that judgment can be improved with practice. For that practice to be effective, you should first commit your judgments to writing.
Keeping your head: beware five intertwined errors in human judgement of behavior:
engineering overreach: systems whose failure modes and consequences are opaque
smooth-sailing fallacy / recency bias
risk-seeking incentive: socialized down-side, privatized upside. Lack of skin in the game.
social herding
inside view: “we’re special here, this time is different”
Prompt: indian chad, krishna, destroyer of worlds, meditation, highly detailed beautiful organic molding, art nouveau, sharp focus, dynamic lighting, elegant, beauty, masterpiece, oni mask, white and black. Negative prompt: feathers
“As unnecessary as a well is to a village on the banks of river, so unnecessary are all scriptures to someone who has seen the truth.”
{Humility or self-referential undermining? Either way I like it.}
***
“What a great man does ordinary people will do; whatever standard he sets everyone else will follow.
In all the three worlds, Arjuna, there is nothing I need to do, nothing I must attain; and yet I engage in action.
For if I were to refrain from my tireless, continual action, mankind would follow my example and would also not act, Arjuna.”
{Why does Krishna care? Regardless, lead by example, set the standard of greatness.}
***
“The wise man does not unsettle the minds of the ignorant; quietly acting in the spirit of yoga he inspires them to do the same.”
{Be an inspiration, not a troll.}
***
“He who can see inaction in the midst of action, and action in the midst of inaction, is wise”
{Center effectiveness. Patience sometimes required.}
***
“A man unattached to sensations, who finds fulfillment in the Self, whose mind has become pure freedom, attains an imperishable joy.”
***
“For the man who wishes to mature, the yoga of action is the path; for the man already mature; serenity is the path.”
***
“Of ten thousand men, perhaps one man strives for perfection; of ten thousand who strive, perhaps one man knows me in truth.”
{Do you even strive?}
***
“Others, on the path of knowledge, know me as the many, the One; behind the faces of a million gods, they can see my face.
I am the ritual and the worship, the medicine and the mantra, the butter burnt in the fire, and I am the flames that consume it.“
{Something so powerful and poetic about that assemblage.}
***
“they reach the world of the gods and enjoy an indescribable bliss, although after eons of those vast and glorious pleasures,
when their merit is spent, they fall back into the mortal world; impelled by desire, they achieve only what will pass away.”
{Transcendence leads to a pleasure garden? Merit is something to spent down over eons in heaven? One of the most sad, counterintuitive passages.}
***
(Context: Who are you, Krishna?)
“of swindles, I am the dice game; the splendor of the high and mighty; determination and victory; the courage of all brave men;” […] “Whatever in this world is excellent and glows with intelligence or beauty- be sure that it has its source in a fragment of my divine splendor” […] “I am death, shatterer of worlds, annihilating all things. With or without you, these warriors in their facing armies will die.
Therefore stand up; win glory; conquer the enemy; rule.”
***
Arjuna said:
One man loves you with pure devotion; another man loves the Unmanifest. Which of these two understands yoga more deeply?
The Blessed Lord said:
Those who love and revere me with unwavering faith, always centering their minds on me- they are the most perfect in yoga.
But those who revere the Imperishable, the Unsayable, the Unmanifest, the All-Present, the Inconceivable, the Exalted, the Unchanging, the Eternal,
mastering their senses, acting at all times with equanimity, rejoicing in the welfare of all beings- they too will reach me at last.
But their path is much more arduous because, for embodied beings, the Unmanifest is obscure, and difficult to attain.
{I love that Arjuna essentially asks, ‘what level of abstraction is best for all this stuff’? And Krishna says, more or less, the peasants should probably just worship me literally. It’s simple and will produce good behavior. If you’re going to go abstract (which would appeal to those who can’t stomach bending the knee to fantastical beings), then you better embody the practice and it’s pretty hardcore.”}
***
Now, Arjuna, I will tell you about the three kinds of happiness. The happiness which comes from long practice, which leads to the end of suffering
which at first is like poison, but at last like nectar — this kind of happiness, arising from the serenity of one’s own mind, is called sattvic
Rajasic happiness comes from contact between the senses and their objects, and is at first like nectar, but at last like poison.
Happiness is called tamasic when it is self-deluding from beginning to end, and arises from sleep, indolence, and dullness.
***
“But we should know better, Krishna: clearly seeing the harm caused by the destruction of the family, we should turn back from this evil. When the family is destroyed, the ancient laws of family duty cease; when law ceases, lawlessness overwhelms the family; when lawlessness overwhelms the women of the family, they become corrupted, the intermixture of the castes is the inevitable result. Intermixture of the castes drags down to hell both those who destroy the family and the family itself; the spirits of the ancestors fall, deprived of their offers of rice and water.”
{No wonder the caste system has been so brutally durable.}
Paraphrases and genuine quotes completely jumbled together. Chaos.
Why it’s hard to bring big company executives into little companies
When you are building an organization, there is no organization to design, there are no processes to improve, and communicating with the organization is simple. On the other hand, you have to be very adept at running a high-quality hiring process, have terrific domain expertise (you are responsible for quality control), know how to create processes from scratch, and be extremely creative about initiating new directions and tasks.
Two key steps to avoiding disaster:
Screen for devastating mismatches in the interview process.
Take integration as seriously as interviewing.
Screening questions (executive)
What will you do in your first month on the job?
Beware of answers that over-emphasize learning. This may indicate that the candidate thinks there is more to learn about your organization than there actually is.
How will your new job differ from your current job? (test self-awareness)
Why do you want to join a small company? (Beware answer: equity. Green light: creativity)
Integration (executive)
Force them to create.
Make sure they “get it.” Bring them up to speed fast. If in 30 days you don’t feel they are coming up to speed, definitely fire them.
Put them in the mix. Give them a list of people they need to know and learn from.
Hiring executives: If you’ve never done the job, how do you hire somebody good?
Key difference between functional manager and general manager: general manager must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs.
The very best way to know what you want is to act in the role.
You are looking for the right executive for your company today, not a generic executive.
Backdoor reference checks can be an extremely useful way to get an unbiased view. However, do not discount the front door references. While they clearly have committed to giving a positive reference, you are not looking for positive or negative with them. You are looking for fit with your criteria.
Despite many people being involved in the process, the ultimate [executive hire] decision should be made solo. […] Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.
metrics are incentives
No performance management or employee feed-back process
Your company now employs 25 people and you know that you should formalize the performance management process, but you don’t want to pay the price. You worry that doing so will make it feel like a “big company.” Moreover, you do not want your employees to be offended because you can’t afford to lose anyone right now. And people are happy, so why rock the boat? Why not take on a little management debt?
The first noticeable payments will be due when somebody performs below expectations: [example dialog]. However, the larger payment will be a silent tax. Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving. In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally across either dimension. Directions with no corrections will seem fuzzy and obtuse. People rarely improve weaknesses they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance.
Requirements to be great at running HR
World-class process design skills
A true diplomat
Industry knowledge (deeply networked in the industry and abreast of compensation and recruiting practices)
Intellectual heft to be the CEO’s trusted adviser (CEO must trust HR leader’s judgment)
Understanding things unspoken (when management quality starts to break down in a company, nobody says anything about it, but super-perceptive people can tell that the company is slipping. You need one of those.)
In addition, you tell him that he’ll need to be a strong enough leader, such that other executives in the company want to work for him.
Techniques to minimize politics
Hire people with the right kind of ambition (sublimated into mission and company success)
Build strict processes for potentially political issues and do not deviate. Examples: (A) performance eval and comp (B) org design and (C) territory/promotions
CEO should have had an airtight performance and comp policy and simply told the executive that his compensation would be evaluated with everyone else’s.
You should evaluate your organizational design on a regular basis and gather the information that you need to decide without tipping people off to what you plan to do.
Be careful with “he said, she said”
Two distinct types of complaints: (1) executive behavior (2) competency
For the first type, get the complaining and targeted executive together in the same room and have them explain themselves. If the second type, either you either already know or it’s a big shock. If you already know, you let it get too far and now the org is turning on them. You will almost certainly need to fire. If the news is actually a shock, then you must immediately stop the conversation and make clear to the complaining executive that you in no way agree with their assessment. You do not want to cripple the other executive before you reevaluate his performance.
As CEO, you must consider the systemic incentives that result from your words and actions. While it may feel good in the moment to be open, responsive, and action oriented, be careful not to encourage all the wrong things.
Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.
Positive example of executive hire
When the conversation turned to Opsware, Mark had already interviewed sales reps at our number one competitor’s company and knew what deals they were in. He relentlessly questioned me on how we were going to win the deals that they were in and how we planned to get into the deals that we weren’t in. He wanted to know the strengths and weaknesses of everyone else on the team. He wanted to know the game plan for winning. The topics of his potential compensation and career advancement didn’t come up until the very end of the process. And then he only wanted assurances that the compensation was performance- and not politically based. It was clear that Mark was all about the team and its success. During Mark’s tenure, sales increased more than tenfold, and our market cap increased twentyfold.
Peter Principle
The Peter Principle is unavoidable because there is no way to know a priori at what level in the hierarchy a manager will be incompetent.
Titles
You might think that so much time spent on promotions and titles places too much importance and focus on silly formalisms. The opposite is true. Without a well thought out, disciplined process for title and promotions, your employees will become obsessed with the resulting inequities. If you structure things properly, nobody other than you will spend much time thinking about titles other than Employee of the Month.
Hiring
Hiring someone who has already done what you are trying to do can radically speed up your time to success. But CEO, beware: Hiring senior people into a startup is kind of like an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs. If all goes well, you will achieve incredible new heights. If all goes wrong, you will start degenerating from the inside out.
One good test for determining whether to go with outside experience versus internal promotion is to figure out whether you value inside knowledge or outside knowledge more for the position. […] This is when the head of engineering gets promoted from within, she often succeeds. When the head of sales gets promoted from within, she almost always fails.
One-on-Ones
The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting.
Questions for drawing out key issues
If we could improve in any way, how would we do it?
What’s the number one problem with our organization? Why?
What’s not fun about working here?
Who is really killing it here? Whom do you admire?
If you were me, what changes would you make?
What didn’t you like about the product?
What is the biggest opportunity that we’re missing out on?
What are we not doing that we should be doing?
Are you happy working here?
Programming your Culture
Designing a way of working that will:
Distinguish you from competitors
Ensure that critical operating values persist
Help you identify employees who for with your mission
“That’s related to the truth but not actually true.”
Ideally, a cultural design point will be trivial to implement but have far-reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value.
Scaling
“When you scale an organization, you will also need to give ground grudgingly. Specialization, organizational structure, and process all complicate things and implementing them will feel like you are moving away from common knowledge and quality communication. It is very much like the offensive lineman taking a step backwards. You will lose ground, but you will prevent your company from descending into chaos. At the point when adding people into the company feels more like more work than the work that you can off-load to the new employees, the defensive lineman has run around you and you probably need to start giving ground drudgingly. […] As the company grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to add new engineers, because the learning curve starts to get super-steep. Getting a new engineer up to speed starts to become more difficult than doing the work yourself. At this point, you need to specialize.”
Org Design
Your goal is to choose the least of all evils. Think of the organizational design as the communications architecture for your company. If you want people to communicate, the best way to accomplish that is to make them report to the same manager.
Figure out what needs to be communicated. Start by listing the most important knowledge and who needs to have it.
Figure out what needs to be decided. Consider the types of decisions that must get made on a frequent basis.
Prioritize the most important communication and decision paths.
Decide who’s going to run each group. Notice this is the fourth step, not the first. You want to optimize the organization for the people – for the people doing the work – not for the managers. Most large mistakes in organizational design come from putting the individual ambitions of the people at the top of the organization ahead of the communication paths fro the people at the bottom of the organization. Making this step four will upset your managers, but they will get over it.
Identify the paths that you did not optimize.
Build a plan for mitigating the issues identified in step five.
Process
The purpose of process is communication.
A process is a formal, well-structured communication vehicle.
If you are looking for the first process to implement in your company, consider the interview process.
Will people scale?
As CEO, you must constantly evaluate all the members of your team. However, evaluating people against the future needs of the company based on a theoretical view of how they will perform is counterproductive, for the following reasons:
Managing at scale is a learned skill rather than a natural ability.
It’s nearly impossible to make the judgment in advance.
The act of judging people in advance will retard their development.
Hiring scalable execs too early is a bad mistake. If you judge your team in advance and have a high sense of urgency, you will bring in executives who can manage at scale in advance of needing them. Unfortunately, you will probably ignore their ability to do the job for the next 12 months, which is the only relevant measure. As a result, you will swap out good executives for worse ones.
You still have to make the judgment at the actual point in time when you hit the higher level of scale.
It’s no way to live your life or run an organization. Deciding (with woefully incomplete data) that someone who works their butt off, does a terrific job, and loyally contributes to your mission won’t be with you three years from now takes you to a dark place. It’s a place of information hiding, dishonesty, and stilted communication. It’s a place where prejudice substitutes for judgment. It’s a place where judgment replaces teaching. It’s a place were teamwork becomes internal warfare. Don’t go there.
Mental Toughness and Attributes
The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.
As a VC, I have had the freedom to say what I want and what I really think without worrying what everybody else thinks. As a CEO, there is no such luxury. As CEO, I had to worry about what everybody else thought. In particular, I could not show weakness in public. It would not have been fair to the employees, the executives, or the public company shareholders. Unrelenting confidence was necessary.
The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.
Recently, a large company offered to buy one of our portfolio companies. The deal was lucrative and compelling given the portfolio company’s progress to date and revenue level. The founder CEO (I’ll call him Hamlet — not his real name) thought that selling did not make sense due to the giant market opportunity that he was pursuing, but he still wanted to make sure that he made the best possible choice for investors and employees. Hamlet wanted to reject the offer, but only marginally. To complicate matters, most of the management team and the board thought the opposite. It did not help that the board and the management team were far more experienced than Hamlet. As a result, Hamlet spent many sleepless nights worrying about whether he was right. He realized that it was impossible to know. This did not help him sleep. In the end, Hamlet made the best and most courageous decision he could and did not sell the company. I believe that will prove to be the defining moment of his career. Interestingly, as soon as Hamlet made the decision, the entire board and executive team immediately embraced the choice. Why? If they wanted to sell the company enough to advise the CEO to give up his dream, how could they reverse so quickly? It turns out that the most important data point driving their earlier preference for selling the company was Hamlet’s initial ambivalence [indecision] — the team supported the decision they thought the CEO wanted. Hamlet did not realize this and interpreted their desire to sell to be the result of a thorough analysis. Luckily for everybody involved, he had the courage to make the right decision.
CEO transition is hard. If you bring people in from outside, you lower your chances for success. If you promote from within, you must deal with the One-Two phenomenon. Ideally you’ll promote a One and the rest of the executive team will be glad you did. Too bad things are rarely ideal.
So what makes people want to follow a leader? We look for three key traits:
The ability to articulate the vision [Steve Jobs]
The right kind of ambition / aligning interests / caring [Bill Campbell]
The ability to achieve the vision [Andy Grove]
Andy Grove: “All I have in this world is my time, and you are wasting my time.”
Peacetime CEO / Wartime CEO
Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win.
Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO care about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive.
Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs.
Peacetime CEO spends time defining culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture.
Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six.
Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid.
Peacetime CEO strivies not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully.
Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children.
Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market.
Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant.
Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone.
Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions.
Peacetime CEO strives to broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements.
Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.
Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in battle.
Peacetime CEO has rules like “we’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number one or two.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number one or two and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.
Even the most basic CEO building blocks will feel unnatural at first. If you buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say, “Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the buildup and then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it, and present it to me again tomorrow.”
Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what CEO must do. If she doesn’t, the more complex motions such as writing reviews, taking away territory, handling politics, setting compensation, and firing people will be either impossible or handled rather poorly.
Giving feedback turns out to be the unnatural atomic building block upon which the unnatural skill set of management gets build.
As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything.
Does the CEO know what to do?
Two facets:
Strategy: In good companies, the story and the strategy are the same thing. As a result, the proper output of all the strategic work is the story.
Decision making: At the detailed level, the output of knowing what to do is the speed and quality of the CEO’s decisions.
A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy.
Great decisions come from CEOs who display an elite mixture of intelligence, logic, and courage.
Accountability vs. Creativity Paradox Solution
Accountability for effort (yes)
Accountability for promises (yes on inputs/process)
Accountability for results (depends)
How experienced is the person?
How hard was the task?
Was the original risk good to take?
There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.
Holding people to a high standard (con’t)
You did not know everything when you hired her. While it feels awkward, it is perfectly reasonable to change and raise your standards as you learn more about what’s needed and what’s competitive in your industry.
You get leverage. If you find yourself as busy as you were with that function before you hired or promoted the executive, then she is below standard.
As CEO, you can do very little employee development. […] The demands of the job made is such that the people who reported to me had to be 99 percent ready to perform.
What about loyalty?
The answer is that your loyalty must go to your employees — the people who report to your executives. […] You owe them a world-class management team. That’s the priority.
End
Embrace your weirdness, your background, your instinct. If the keys are not in there, they do not exist. I can relate to what they’re going through, but I cannot tell them what to do. I can only help them find it in themselves.
Prompt via Lexica: whimsical uncanny creature alchemizes unique canto about ‘as above so below’ being ignited by the spirit of haeckel and robert fludd, breakthrough is iminent, glory be to the magic within, to honor jupiter, painted by ronny khalil
For after all, the maximum integration of the individual into the hierarchy of the educators and scholars, has ever been one of our ruling principles.
These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in tomorrow.
This process paralleled the general evolution of cultural consciousness, which had survived the great crisis and had, as Plinius Ziegenhlss puts it, “with modest pride accepted the fate of belonging to a culture past its prime, as was the case with the culture of late antiquity: Hellenistic culture in the Alexandrian Age.”
Mathematicians in particular played it with a virtuosity and formal strictness at once athletic and ascetic. It afforded them a pleasure which somewhat compensated for their renunciation of worldly pleasures and ambitions.
The world had changed. The life of the mind in the Age of the Feuilleton might be compared to a degenerate plant which was squandering its strength in excessive vegetative growth, and the subsequent corrections to pruning the plant back to the roots. The young people who now proposed to devote themselves to intellectual studies no longer took the term to mean attending a university and taking a nibble of this or that from the dainties offered by celebrated and loquacious professors who without authority offered them the crumbs of what had once been higher education. Now they had to study just as stringently and methodically as the engineers and technicians of the past, if not more so. They had a steep path to climb, had to purify and strengthen their minds by dint of mathematics and scholastic exercises in Aristotelian philosophy.
This new element arose out of an observed evil. Mnemonists, people with freakish memories and no other virtues, were capable of playing dazzling games, dismaying and confusing the other participants by their rapid muster of countless ideas. In course of time such displays of virtuosity fell more and more under a strict ban, and contemplation became a highly important component of the Game.
Perhaps we who were so good about remaining in Eschholz were in fact the weaklings and cowards.
Freedom exists in those professions only to the extent that the student chooses the profession himself. That produces an appearance of freedom, although in most cases the choice is made less by the student than by his family, and many a father would sooner bite off his tongue than really allow his son free choice. But perhaps that is slander; let us drop this objection. Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes the slaves of base powers; he is dependent on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him. He must submit to elections, must earn money, must take part in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties, newspapers. In return he has the freedom to become successful and well-to-do, and to be hated by the unsuccessful, or vice versa.
We suspect that he avoided Waldzell partly to expunge as far as possible from his own mind and the minds of others the memory of his role as a student there, partly so that he would not stumble into a similar role among the community of Glass Bead Game players.
They did not regard the Game language as a lingua sacra, but more as an ingenious kind of stenography. They practiced the Game as an interesting or amusing specialty, an intellectual sport or arena for ambition.
A muted, polished tone prevailed in this group. Its members were ambitious without showing it, keen-eyed and critical to excess. Many in Castalia, and some in the rest of the country outside the Province, regarded this elite as the ultimate flower of Castalian tradition, the cream of an exclusive intellectual aristocracy, and a good many youths dreamed for years of some day belonging to it themselves. To others, however, this elect circle of candidates for the higher reaches in the hierarchy of the Glass Bead Game seemed odious and debased, a c clique of haughty idlers, brilliant but spoiled geniuses who lacked all feeling for life and reality, an arrogant and fundamentally parasitic company of dandies and climbers who had a silly game, a sterile self-indulgence of the mind, their vocation and the content of their life.
They involved the renunciation of the present and the future in favor of something perfect enough, but past.
He was aware of still other forces within himself, a certain inner independence, a self-reliance which by no means barred him or hampered him from serving, but demanded of him that he serve only the highest master. And this strength, this independence, this self-reliance, was not just a trait in his character, it was not just interned and effective only upon himself; it also affected the outside world.
Knetch had often noticed that many schoolmates his own age, but even more the younger boys, liked him, sought his friendship, and moreover tended to let him dominate them. They asked him for advice, put themselves under his influence. Ever since, this experience had been repeated frequently. It had its pleasant and flattering side; it satisfied ambition and strengthened self-confidence. But it also had another, a dark and terrifying side. For there something bad and unpalatable about the attitude one took toward these schoolmates so eager for advice, guidance, and an example, about the impulse to despise them for their lack of self-reliance and dignity, and about the occasional secret temptation to make them (at least in thought) into obedient slaves.
“You are still speaking the language of students and thinking in student terms, Joseph Knecht. That is quite all right now, but soon it will no longer be all right, for we need you.”
What appealed to the young and made them his admirers was his wholesome vigor and still youthful charm which appeared to be resistant to passions, incorruptible and then again boyishly irresponsible–a kind of innocence, that is. And what commended him to his superiors was the reverse side of this innocence: his freedom from ambition and craving for success.
He would not be a subordinate or an independent scholar; he would be a master. That he grasped this later than others in a similar position gave him that indescribable extra magic, that note of innocence.
His constraint came from the responsibility, from belonging to the higher collectivity. This it was that made many young men old and old men appear young, that held you, supported you, and at the same time deprived you of your freedom like the stake to which a sapling is tied. This it was that took away your innocence even while it demanded ever more limpid purity.
There he found the security of a precisely defined task a great benefaction.
What you need is an unshakable confidence that the superiors were right in making you one of their own. Trust them, trust the people who have been sent to help you, and blindly trust your own strength.
Yet we know that devotion to a discipline does not necessarily preserve a man from selfishness, vice, and absurdity.
Among us we use meditation, the fine gradations of yoga technique, in our efforts to exorcize the beast within us and the diabolus dwelling in every branch of knowledge. Now you know as well as I that the Glass Bead Game also has its hidden diabolus, that it can lead to empty virtuosity, to artistic vanity, to self-advancement, to the seeking of power over others and then to the abuse of that power. This is why we need another kind of education beside the intellectual and submit ourselves to the morality of the Order, not in order to reshape our mentally active life into a psychically vegetative dream-life, but on the contrary to make ourselves fit for the summit of intellectual achievement. We do not intend to flee from the vita activa to the vita contemplativa, no vice versa, but to keep moving forward while alternating between the two, being at home in both, partaking of both.
Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace.
He had already explored all the possibilities the office provided for the utilization of his energies and had reached the point at which great men must leave the path of tradition and obedient subordination and, trusting to supreme, indefinable powers, strike out on new trackless courses where experience is no guide.
Scholarship has not been cheerful always and everywhere, although it ought to be. But with us, scholarship, which is the cult of truth, is closely allied to the cult of the beautiful, and allied also with the practice of spiritual refreshment by meditation. […] Our Glass Bead Game combines all three principles: learning, veneration of the beautiful, and meditation; and therefore a proper Glass Bead Game player ought to be drenched in cheerfulness…
It was wholly in the style of Knecht’s methods of teaching and psychotherapy that he not only won over this patient by his frankness, but also planted the thought in Plinio’s mind that he could help his friend, and thus spurred him really to do so.
…infected by the characteristic disease nobility — hubris, conceit, class arrogance, self-righteousness, exploitativeness…
Ruling does not require qualities of stupidity and coarseness, as conceited intellectuals sometimes think. But it does require wholehearted delight in extraverted activity, a bent for identifying oneself with outward goals, and of course also a certain swiftness and lack of scruple about the choice of ways to attain success.
With a faint sense of alarm he saw those clear, controlled, disciplined eyes, the eyes of a man equally great in obeying and commanding, fixed upon him now, regarding him with cool composure, probing him, judging him.
“Well now, Christopher was a man of great strength and courage, but he wanted to serve rather than to be a master and govern. Service was his strength and his art; he had a faculty for it. But whom he served was not a matter of indifference to him. He felt that he had to serve the greatest, the most powerful master. And when he heard of a mightier master, he promptly offered his services. I have always been fond of this great servant, and I must in some way resemble him.”
“You have an excessive sense of your own person, or dependence on it, which is far from the same thing as being a great personality. A man can be a star of the first magnitude in gifts, will-power, and endurance, but so well balanced that he turns with the system to which he belongs without any friction or waste of energy. Another may have the same great gifts, or even finer ones, but the axis does not pass precisely through the center and he squanders half his strength in eccentric movements which weaken him and disturb his surroundings. You evidently belong to this type. Only I must admit you have contrived to conceal it remarkably. […] One who wishes to serve should abide by the master he has sworn to serve for good or ill, and not with the secret reservation that he will change as soon as he finds a more magnificent master. In assuming such an attitude the servant makes himself his master’s judge, and this indeed is what you are doing.”
My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present.
The Calm Sea (1869) Gustave Courbet, Oil on canvas
A classic for a reason and a bargain at 127 pages. The style fits the story. Hemingway’s prose never breaks character.
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.
Vivid, poetic, simple.
He had no mysticism about turtles although he had gone in turtle boats for many years. He was sorry for them all, even the great trunk backs that were as long as the skiff and weighed a ton. Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered.
Hemingway has a talent for creating simple surprises.
They sailed well and the old man soaked his hands in the salt water and tried to keep his head clear. There were high cumulus clouds and enough cirrus above them so that the old man knew the breeze would last all night. The old man looked at the fish constantly to make sure it was true. It was an hour before the first shark hit him.
Run-on sentences abound but they always seem to work — perhaps because they’re usually comprised of short thoughts that benefit from the cadence.
The shark’s head was out of water and his back was coming out and the old man could hear the noise of the skin and flesh ripping on the big fish when he rammed the harpoon down onto the shark’s head at the spot where the line between his eyes intersected with the line that ran straight back from his nose. There was only the heavy sharp blue head and the big eyes and the clicking, thrusting all-swallowing jaws. But that was the location of the brain and the old man hit it. He hit it with his blood mushed hands driving a good harpoon with all his strength. He hit it without hope but with resolution and complete malignancy.
‘But man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated.’
‘Tiburon,’ the waiter said. ‘Eshark.’ He was meaning to explain what had happened.
‘I didn’t know sharks had such handsome, beautifully formed tails.’
I include this quote from the final page of the book not for its beauty or cleverness but because I enjoyed the fortuitous connection it has with a major theme from the last fiction work I read, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. That is, the theme of kitsch. “Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.” Fish not excluded.
I tip my bowler hat to Mr. Kundera. This was artful. While I’ve never been a romantic, perhaps I even learned something about love in this novel.
The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
What could it have been if not love declaring itself to him?
But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? His unconscious was so cowardly that the best partner it could choose for its little comedy was this miserable provincial waitress with practically no chance at all to enter his life!
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
We believe the greatness of man stems from the fact that he bears his fate as Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders. Beethoven’s hero is lifter of metaphysical weights. … “Es Muss Sein”
If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.
“You mean you were really jealous?” she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Prize. […] Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.
Theirs was the joyful solidarity of the soulless.
… it was a recapitulation of time, a hymn to their common past, a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story that was disappearing in the distance.
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its open bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
And at the moment he felt pleasure suffusing his body, Franz himself disintegrated and dissolved into the infinity of his darkness, himself becoming infinite. But the larger a man grows in his own inner darkness, the more his outer form diminishes. A man with closed eyes is a wreck of a man. Then, Sabina found the sight of Franz distasteful, and to avoid looking at him she too closed her eyes. But for her, darkness did not mean infinity; for her, it meant a disagreement with what she saw, the negation of what was seen, the refusal to see.
Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls’ Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That’s why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out my our universities.
But deep down she said to herself, Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he’s weak. Franz’s weakness is called goodness.
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life. Their monuments were meant to display how important they were. There were no fathers, brothers, sons, or grandmothers buried there, only public figures, the bearers of titles, degrees, and honors; even the postal clerk celebrated his chosen profession, his social significance-his dignity.
Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Once he had reached the lowest rung on the ladder, they would no longer be able to publish a statement in his name, for the simple reason that no one would accept it as genuine. Humiliating public statements are associated exclusively with the signatories’ rise, not fall.
I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.
…the American actress, who, egocentric as she was, imagined herself the victim of envy or misogyny.
She was afraid of shutting herself into grave and sinking into the American earth. And so one day she composed a will in which she requested that her dead body be cremated and its ashes thrown to the winds. Tereza and Tomas had died under the sign of weight. She wanted to die under the sign of lightness. She would be lighter than air.
Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it have the additional effect of cutting it short.
Lying in the hot water, she kept telling herself that she had set a lifetime of her weakness against Tomas. We all have a tendency to consider strength the culprit and weakness the innocent victim. But now Tereza realized that in her case the opposite was true! Even her dreams, as if aware of the single weakness in a man otherwise strong, made a display of her suffering to him, thereby forcing him to retreat. Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength.
The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
National success requires achieving both continuity and economies of scale. Those big enough to have economies of scale rarely have good borders – think Russia. Those sufficiently isolated to have long continuities rarely have scale – think New Zealand.
The Americans have changed their mind about their alliance and have turned sharply more insular. There is no effort to ride herd. The W Bush administration abused the allies, the Obama administration ignored the allies, and the Trump administration insulted the allies.
Below is a long, quoted passage where Zeihan lays out his perspective that America has merely drifted since the conclusion of the Cold War, bereft of leadership with vision.
The Cold War victors had a bit of a party, and then something curious occurred.
The American policy of global Order was a strategic one, designed as a means of doing battle in a global conflict. With the Cold War over, it was time to rejigger that Order toward a new goal.
With the Soviet fall, American president George HW Bush sensed history calling. He used his unprecedented popularity in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and victory in the First Iraq War to launch a national conversation on what’s next. What do the American people want out of this new world? He openly discussed a New World Order, his personal goal being “a thousand points of light,” a community of free nations striving to better the human condition. Bush’s background-he had previously served as vice president, budget chief, party chief, ambassador, House representative, and intelligence guru-made him the right person with the right skill set and the right connections and the right disposition in the right place in the right job at the right time.
So of course the Americans voted him out of office, and all serious talk of moving the Order onto newer footing for the new age, more relevant for the challenges and opportunities of the post-Cold War era, ceased.
American leadership in the years since has been, in a word, underwhelming. Bill Clinton found foreign policy boring and did his best to avoid it. George W Bush became embroiled exclusively in the Middle East. Barack Obama proved so insular he refused to have meetings with, well, anyone-even allies within his own Democratic Party. Donald Trump’s “America First” expressly calls for divorce from the global system.
None of the four picked up the challenge of George HW Bush to reform the Order and build a better world. Nor did any of the four provide the necessary guidance to American military, intelligence, and diplomatic staff as what America’s goals actually are.
With no clear grand strategy, the Americans lurched from crisis to crisis – Haiti to Bosnia to Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq to Yemen to Syria-with the country’s political, economic, and military elite seeing power as something to be used in an endless march of tactical situations, rather than a tool for shaping the broader picture. For a mix of reasons political, personal, and institutional, there has been a lack of imagination all around.
Bereft of direction from the top, American strategic policy slipped into a thought-free rut. The US Navy continued to provide global maritime security. The American military continued to protect Cold War allies. The American economic system continued to be a sink for global exports. The American system continued to enable all the nuts and bolts of global energy and finance and agriculture and manufacturing.
The only change was the Americans stopped asking for anything in return.
The Order had been so successful, most forgot – or never learned – that it was even there in the first place.
^I certainly never learned. What I learned was globalization as a secular, disembodied, unstoppable, inevitable, righteous force. While America accelerated globalization by providing stability, to some degree globalization would have occurred due to transport technology and the internet even without the added insurance of geopolitical security. Zeihan doesn’t like to admit this.
But the ever-more-wealthy ever-more-connected, ever-more-advanced world lost sight of one central, inconvenient truth: American involvement in the Order isn’t about-was never about-free trade and its subsequent effects as an end. Free trade was the means. Free trade was part of the bribe. […] The Americans forged, operated, and subsidized the free trade Order so that they would have allies to help face down the Soviets. […] With the Order’s strategic rationale gone, the Order has had to justify its continuing existence to the Americans. It has not gone well.
At the time of this writing (2019/2020), the Americans now have fewer troops stationed abroad than at any time since the great depression.
Chinese GDP has expanded by a factor of 4.5 since 2000, but Chinese credit has expanded by a factor of 24. Total debt in China has ballooned to more than triple the size of the entire economy. According to Citigroup, some 80 percent of freshly issued private credit in 2018 globally is in China, while the Conference Board estimates productivity growth (how much you get from what you put in) has declined since 2012. The Economist now estimates three-quarters of the value of new loans does nothing more than pay the interest of loans issued previously. China is spending more and more to get less and less, and it has already resulted in the greatest debt run-up in history.
The rest of the world has seen-repeatedly-where this sort of expansion-at-all-costs development model leads: investment-led bubbles that collapse into depressions. In Japan, it resulted in three lost decades of inflation and near-zero growth. In Greece and Italy, the bubbles generated what are (so far) the largest sovereign debt and banking crises in history. In the United States, runaway lending created Enron and the subprime lending crisis.
I take speculation about how much debt is “too much” with a huge grain of salt after reading some of Ray Dalio’s work, especially when the debt is denominated in the country’s own currency. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to hear someone so bearish on China these days.
One downside of China’s massive population is that the country has less farmland per person than Saudi Arabia.
In one fell swoop, the Americans provided the Japanese with everything Japan had fought for-and ultimately lost-between 1870 and 1945. A position under the American nuclear umbrella was tossed in as a cringe-inducing bonus.
That passage was cringe-inducing but I love that the author was willing to go there.
The first issue is the looming iceberg of Japan’s demographic implosion. The niggardly amount of flatland in Japan that has so shaped the country’s political, agricultural, industrial, and technological history has similarly shaped Japan’s demographic structure.
Once one filters out countries that aren’t really countries (think Monaco) and takes into account the fact that over 80% of Japan’s land is uninhabitable, Japan is the world’s most densely populated and fifth most urbanized country. Cramming everyone into tiny urban condos generates some amazing economies of scale and wonderfully efficient city services, but it makes it damnably difficult to raise children.
Japan is approaching the worker shortage of the twenty-first century in the same way it approached its higher cost structures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth – by being more advanced. Japan is the most technologically advanced society humanity has ever produced, and it continues to push the limits of what humans consider possible.
I found this a little too dismissive of the demographic trend.
In these scenarios China doesn’t so much stew in its own juices as boil in its own blood, and that is before the Communist Party has to make any decisions about how violent it might be in its efforts to preserve a unified China. The last thing on the Chinese mind will be venturing out into the wider, more dangerous world.
Chinese power will dissolve and China itself will likely break up as well, but China has never been a global player – in fact it has rarely even exercised power beyond its current borders. China’s degradation is simply a reversion to the mean.
Zeihan is so incredibly contrarian on China it boggles the mind.
Fascinating geographic factoid:
Russian rivers are so useless as to be largely cosmetic. Those that are navigable tend to flow through useless terrain on their way to emptying into remote, unpopulated seas. Most of them flow north, which sounds innocent until one factors in Russia’s trademark harsh winters.
South flowing rivers in the Northern Hemisphere freeze from their headwaters to their mouths. Snow and ice in the river’s upper reaches do not flow into the river until spring, so during winter the river’s level drops considerably.
In contrast, north-flowing rivers freeze from their mouths to their headwaters, meaning the upriver flows do not necessarily drop, but they flow into a frozen river. […] Eventually the ice accumulates to the point that it forms an ice dam, which forces the semi frozen water up and over the banks. […] If you’re watching from satellite, this entire process is fascinating. If you’re watching from the river banks, you’re dead.
Death rates for Russian males between 15 and 29 were over six times those of the Iraqi men during the American occupation and subsequent civil war.
I wonder what the death rates were for men in prior Empires that disintegrated rapidly? Is it all economics or is a significant part of it soul – loss of status and humiliation?
For countries like Greece, who were burning cash like a Saudi prince on Instagram, reality hit hard – and it brought receipts.
In many ways, the French system takes the two types of racism most prevalent in the United States and applies the worst of both. In the American South, racism takes the form of, “We will mingle, but we are not equal.” In the American North, it is in the vein of, “We are equal, but we will not mingle.” In France, the targets of racism are out of sight and out of mind, consigned to ghettos and at the back of the line as regards government services.
Since World War II, the Middle East’s population has sextupled, putting it far beyond the region’s meager carrying capacity. Anything that disrupts oil flows disrupts income disrupts food supply.
After Brazil broke away from the Empire in 1822, independent Brazil did not simply continue the practice; Brazil expanded it. Best guess is some 4.9 million Africans were sold into Brazilian slavery-more than half the global total. So dependent was Brazil that it did not criminalize slavery until 1888, making it the last country in the hemisphere to do so.
Typical high school American education makes slavery seem almost uniquely American. I didn’t realize Brazil was the biggest sinner in the Western Hemisphere in this domain.
Different geographic and economic features necessitated a different sort of immigrant. In proto- and early America, the limiting factor wasn’t transport or capital, but labor. A horde of hale and hearty immigrants with can-do attitudes (plus a sprinkling of criminals who were not allowed to return to Britain, backed by a far from insignificant number of slaves) fit the bill perfectly. In contrast, the Spanish New World desperately needed capital, and so attracted a cut above: the wealthy, especially those willing to relocate for a shiny new business opportunity. […] Smallholders of the American style were largely unheard of; there is no Spanish version of Little House on the Prairie.
American power is both huge and insulated. Until the rise of the Soviet threat forced the bipartisan unity of the Order, American policy varied with the political passions of the day. Now, with the Order’s end, the United States returns to a more “normal” strategically unfettered state. Predicting French or Turkish or Argentine actions is child’s play compared with guessing what the Americans will do now that they are freed from concerns of context and consequence.
That forces us to do something most students of geography loathe: dive into what actually will guide American foreign policy for the next decade or so. It is time to dissect American domestic politics.
America’s political parties are both stable and weak. They’re stable in that, once a coalition of factions is formed under the umbrella of a party, that party tends to stick around for decades. Each faction’s power can ebb and flow within the party coalitions without disrupting the overall political system. They’re weak in that each faction has its own ideas about what the party should be about, and corralling the factions behind any specific goal requires a great deal of legwork.
America’s two established parties in 2020 are in a state of flux. Factions are not simply rising and falling within the existing parties, but even jumping party affiliation.
The Republican Party is broadly an alliance of six groups: the business community, national-security conservatives, fiscal-primacy supporters, evangelicals, pro-life voters and populists.
The populists have always been the crazy uncle of the Republican alliance, and the other factions have tolerated them only because the populists were wildly disorganized and so provided a vote bank without ever really being able to shape the Republican agenda.
The populist’s previous disorganization meant the rest of the Republican coalition didn’t really have a grip on what the populists were after in terms of policy. Now with the populists calling the shots, the rest of the old Republican coalition is somewhat gobsmacked. The populists’ position on social programs alienates the fiscal conservatives. Their views on national-security policy infuriate the military and intelligence communities. Their immigration goals split the evangelical community down the center. And their thinking about finance and regulations has banished the business community into the wilderness. With the exception of the pro-life voters, the old Republican coalition is completely shattered.
“You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after exhausting all other options.” – Churchill
Even more notable is what has happened with the US Navy. Relentless modernization and drawdowns reduced the number of vessels by half even as the number of carriers increased. That forced a concentration of the remaining vessels around the all-important carriers. (Even when not expecting combat, each carrier typically has a dozen escorts.) The Cold War-era Navy of 550-plus ships could fairly reasonably disperse to provide global coverage. Not so in 2020, when the Americans’ naval vessels total fewer than 300 – nearly one-third of which compose the concentrated forces of the carrier battle groups.
Israel may become defined by attributes that are normally associated with pariah states, but without American leadership, international institutions like the United Nations are not likely to continue anyway. Being a pariah doesn’t mean what it used to.
Few recognize just how beneficial and transformative the global Order has been to the world writ large, much less their personal lives.
The Order’s impact has been deep and pervasive, so singularly effective that it suffused itself into every aspect of human existence, nearly erasing every previous structure. Its absence will not be merely non-Order, but instead a new kind of chaos. In the Imperial Age when people were miserable, they were just the same kind of miserable they had always been. But in the Disorder the sense of achievements lost will be palpable. People will remember a degree of security and wealth that they will never be able to achieve on their own.
The Americans are not so much passing the torch as dropping it.
The “America First” of the hard right is reflexively hostile to the world. The “America First” of the hard left is reflexively hostile to American involvement in the world. The “America First” of the middle just finds the world exhausting.
Zeihan has the most unusual and entertaining Acknowledgements section I’ve ever seen. He defends not really citing sources for facts and then describes in prose the sources he found most influential.
I am not a journalist. Journalism is about reporting facts and statements and events, so the criticality of citations is burned into the souls of all good reporters. In contrast, my background is in private intelligence work. Back in the day it was less my job to uncover facts or tell someone’s story, or even to pore over and make sense of a specific region or sector, but instead to weave disparate information flows from every part of the world into a tapestry that demonstrates linkages across systems.
There are some exceptions of course – counter-acknowledgements, if you will: Eurostat and Statistics Canada. Such great data. Such horrible interfaces.Why do you make data mining so painful? And, of course, Russia’s Rosstat. I am hugely thankful for your work. Not for your data, of course. Most of it is absolute crap. Fabricated carp to support the Kremlin’s renewed propaganda campaigns. But, wow, you always good for a laugh!
Peter is a character.
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Peter Zeihan is a geopolitical strategist with contrarian perspectives grounded in geographic, demographic, and militaristic insights. I first learned of him on Invest Like the Best Podcast by James O’Shaughnessy while hiking the John Muir Trail. His articulate breadth and depth of knowledge compelled me to read his book. Refreshing views but must be taken with some skepticism.
Criticisms: (1) Downplaying how much nukes have changed the territorial security equation. The focus on navies and shipping security is fascinating, but the focus on armies seems dated. (2) Ignoring the impact of culture entirely. (3) Treating demographics (birth rates) as a death knell in some contexts but totally manageable in others (example: Germany vs Japan). (4) Focusing heavily on disruptive technology when looking to the past but not to the future.
