Beginnings are Important. Don't Squander Them!

Leadership Land Reader Check-in #1: How "change management" is a sexy distraction to the quiet grace of getting it right in the first place.

Let’s pretend like we’re having a coffee chat. Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash

Adventures in Leadership Land is two months old!

With 10 published articles floating around in cyberspace, it felt timely to take a step back and have a “meeting” with you, the reader. You regularly check-in with your subordinates and supervisor to give/receive feedback and make sure you’re all on the same wavelength, right? This is one of those meetings – an opportunity for you to guide the trajectory of this young publication so that it better serves your needs.

Let’s keep things lively and thoughtful. Otherwise, routine check-ins will devolve into another useless meeting that loiters on your calendar. We’ll start with something that you may find useful in your next endeavor before soliciting your feedback.

The Importance of Beginnings

This Substack started as an outlet to drain the restless energy from the primary author (who is writing these words - hello there). Have you ever met someone who read a self-help book and won’t shut up about it for two straight weeks? That’s me. You can politely excuse yourself to go pick up your kid from a maximum-security daycare, but my direct reports are wary of rolling their eyes when their boss starts waxing philosophical¹.

Although Adventures in Leadership Land started as a way to spare my subordinates from my incorrigible preachy-ness, I want to be more deliberate in my writing than using this Substack as an internet dumping ground for random thoughts. In Zero to One, Peter Thiel (co-founder of Paypal/Palantir and early Facebook investor) wrote an entire chapter on the importance of beginnings. “Thiel’s Law” states:

A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.

It’s important for Adventures in Leadership Land to start off right. Without some core principles (from me) and feedback from readers (you), this publication will quickly go from “burgeoning” to “metastasizing.”

Aim carefully

But let’s not follow Thiel’s Law blindly. Consider what happens when you begin a journey by aiming just a teeny-tiny bit to the side of a distant target. If your aim is off by one degree, you’d only diverge from the bulls-eye by 0.2 inches after traveling one foot (equivalent to 1.7 cm after traveling one meter). But the farther you go, the more you stray from the direct path to your goal. If you were one degree off while aiming at the moon, you’d miss your target by almost two full moon widths!

A tiny initial error can balloon into a huge one by the time you reach your goal. If your aim is off by one degree, you’d miss by 4,169 miles (6,709 km), which is ~1.9 times the moon’s diameter. CC-BY-SA moon photo by Gregory H. Revera

We are not bullets doomed to follow a straight path. However, it becomes progressively more difficult to course-correct the farther we travel in our journeys.

Oasis in the Desert

Consider that:

• Chlorophyll is the dominant photosynthetic chemical, even though most plants are pathetically inefficient at converting sunlight into food (<5% efficiency at best, <2% efficiency is typical).

• A human arm, eagle wing, and whale flipper all have the same basic bone structure (including two bones in the forearm section) despite the three limbs having vastly different functions.

• All of our amino acids (which make proteins) are “left-handed” molecules², while sugars (which make our DNA) are “right-handed” molecules. All known life follows this rule. Mirrored proteins (created from right-handed amino acids) and mirrored DNA (created from left-handed sugars) are not compatible with our biology, in the same way a left-handed glove won’t fit on your right hand or vice versa.

It’s been this way since the beginning of photosynthetic, vertebrate, and organic life, respectively. We don’t know why these biological systems came into being. However, we do know that it’s nigh-impossible to switch to a different system now that these conventions have been established. Even if there existed a superior photosynthetic chemical, skeletal system, or molecular structure, there is an impassable barrier to reach it. Outside this oasis is a vast, hostile desert separating us from a bigger, lusher oasis.

Beginning Right > Change Management

You can see the same phenomenon in organizations that you lead. Once established, cultures cannot change overnight. After bureaucracies congeal, they trudge onward by sheer inertia; their reasons for being are quickly forgotten. The only ways to change course are to:

1. Make small, incremental changes at the margins. Minor course-corrections can help you reorient toward a distant goal like a heat-seeking missile, but this method is terrible for “locking on” to a new goal after your previous heat source is extinguished.

2. Intelligently design your ideal world so that it exists in conjunction with existing conventions, like a walled garden within an oasis. As your garden flourishes, you can start breaking down the walls and encouraging your cultivated products and behaviors to overtake the rest of the oasis.

Both methods are necessary for effective leadership, but change requires time and energy – possibly more than you have available. That’s why it’s important to invest heavily in the beginnings of any endeavor, whether it’s a new leadership position, product, project, program, relationship, company, or this Substack publication. There is complete freedom in new beginnings. Once the oasis is established, it may be impossible to cross the desert in pursuit of greener pastures.

Adventures in Leadership Land Core Principles

Practicing what we preach, we decided on some Core Principles before we launched. We want these Core Principles to start the publication off in the right direction, thus minimizing the need for course correction later.

1. Each piece of content must provide value for the reader.
   Even this “check-in with readers” post contains a philosophical concept that may influence your thinking the next time you get promoted, launch a project, or conceive a baby – any new beginning where you’re responsible for laying a fresh foundation and building something on top of it.

2. Adhere to via negativa (“negative way”).
   Most smart, educated people tackle complex problems with even more complex solutions…which inevitably spawn their own problems. People generally prefer the pursuit of cohesion, self-mastery, success, and happiness (via positiva) over the avoidance of strife, temptation, failure, and misery (via negativa). This tendency leaves us woefully unprepared when life gives us lemons, in the form of lemon juice squirted straight into our eyes.
   As described in our about page, we prefer to solve problems by subtraction, not addition. As Charlie Munger (Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway) used to say: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.” Words to live by as you’re exploring Leadership Land!

3. Use metaphors, parables, and allegories to weave coherent narratives.
   This Core Principle shows up in the publication’s title: we characterize leadership (an intangible, hard-to-define concept) as a geographical province, full of environmental hazards. It’s easy to get lost because Leadership Land is obscured by the Fog of Uncertainty. We find abstract and foreign concepts easier to visualize, easier to remember, and easier to explain by transforming them into something tangible and familiar.

4. There are no taboo topics.
   Most leadership/management books, listicles, training courses, motivational speakers, and self-assessments (MBTI, DISC, StrengthsFinder, etc.) are excessively positive in tone. The intention is benign enough: if the audience is squirming under the influence of negative emotions, they’re distracted from the core message. We dislike this paternalistic behavior. It’s downright insulting to assume that the reader can’t handle the ugly truth.
   Adventures in Leadership Land will cover uncomfortable topics such as sleeping with colleagues, Machiavellian backstabbery, and other behaviors ranging from irritating to atrocious. We will be playing with fire, so we must be careful to:

   1. Avoid glorifying antisocial behaviors. We will encourage readers to use their awareness for defense first, offense second (if at all).

   2. Refrain from needless sensationalism. We will be mindful that visceral reactions distract from the core message.

   3. Focus on outcomes, not morals. Concern about what’s right vs. wrong (morality) is fine, but what truly matters is not who’s right, but who’s left (survival).

5. Leadership Land must not be a fun-free zone.
   In the office, we dress and behave like accountants attending a funeral. Online, the masks come off. We take our careers and duties seriously, but that doesn’t mean we need to take ourselves seriously. Some frivolity will take the sting out of uncomfortable topics.

Adventures in Leadership Land is the newest entrant to the crowded leadership/management content creation space. We hope that these Core Principles will differentiate our work enough to carve out a niche, but only the readers (you) can be accurate judges of that. Speaking of which…

Finding Our Voice (With Your Help)

You and your direct reports thrive on regular feedback. This publication is no different. Help us serve your needs by expressing them in the comments below! If no constructive criticisms come to mind immediately, here are some questions to begin:

1. What leadership/managerial topics would you like to read about?

2. Do you prefer succinct lessons or meandering prose? The former is more respectful of your time, but the latter is more conducive to learning by discovery.

3. How frequently should we have these check-in/philosophical posts? In the absence of feedback, we’ll default to once every 10 articles.

We will be building our social media presence over the next few weeks, so the next series of posts may be more compact than usual. Please share our publication with your friends and colleagues! The greatest compliment you could pay us is to find our work worth sharing with others.

1. I’ve given my subordinates explicit permission to interrupt me if my train of thought derails onto some sidetrack, but they rarely exercise that power. Many people naturally hesitate before challenging authority.

2. Technically, all but one of the amino acids are left-handed. Glycine is achiral (neither left- or right-handed), meaning that a mirrored version would be identical to the original. The rest of the amino acids are like your hands; your right hand is a mirror image of your left hand, but they are mismatched if you overlay one hand over another.