Scott Galloway wrote a blog post titled Power.
« Entrepreneurs succeed by navigating an ecosystem of counterweights. »
« Building a company requires that you listen to, and balance, all of these counterweights… Early-stage entrepreneurs who ignore their counterweights fail. »
« Some entrepreneurs achieve enormous success within this system, balancing leadership and consensus. And with great success comes great power — the power to stop listening. Which often results in a fall from grace and loss of power. »
« Power doesn’t just create bad actors, it creates ineffective actors. »
« Predators have forward-facing, binocular vision to better track prey — at the expense of good peripheral vision. While prey species have more sensitive peripheral vision: “They sacrifice depth perception and focus for the ability to detect danger approaching from any angle.” Lions are awesome, and yes, you want a lion running your company, not a nervous antelope. But someone needs to alert the lion to less obvious threats. »
« Successful companies build guardrails into their corporate architecture. Waffle House, for example, requires its executives to work shifts in its restaurants. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos was obsessed with information flow and decision-making, and he expressly took actions he didn’t personally believe in when he did believe in the team — he called it “disagree and commit.” Bezos understood that Amazon’s success was due in part to his genius but not entirely — that he functioned best when he trusted his team. »
« God Complex. Over the past three decades, we as a nation decided to lower these guardrails and glorify the individual. We got bored of the slow, careful process of deliberation. We fetishized vulgar narcissism and confused it with leadership. You can see it in corporate governance. We’re obsessed with visionary founders, as evidenced by the increasing popularity of the dual-class shareholder structure. WeWork’s failed IPO in 2019 would have given Adam Neumann stock with voting power worth 20 times that of public shareholders… Mark Zuckerberg owns 13% of Meta’s shares and, thanks to the company’s dual-class structure, controls 55% of the votes. »
« I believe Elon will be a poster child for how power corrupts potential. Not the Putin kind of corruption, but the more pedestrian (and still troubling) kind. The kind that reduces effectiveness. Last week at TED, Mr. Musk continued to disparage what’s left of our nation’s umpires, calling the SEC “bastards” for its enforcement action against him after he tweeted he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private. Elon insisted the Commission had bullied him into saying he’d lied and had no funding. The day after Elon’s TED interview, a court filing confirmed that, yes, he had lied, and funding had not been secured. »
Articles of Interest 