Subterranean Geology of Leadership Land (2/2)
Subterranean Geology of Leadership Land (2/2)
Introducing the Silent Graveyard, Fiery Hells of Competition, Contrarian Caves, Secret Grottos (and Cerebrium mines), and the Unknown Abyss
We belatedly realized that writing a newsletter saying “go to this other post” wasn’t reader-friendly. For your convenience, here is the second part of the Leadership Land Map post (split into two parts because of email size limits).
The surface world of Leadership Land is brightly lit; you’ll be able to find anything from that sun-kissed realm with a quick Google search1. The dimly-lit underground of Leadership Land is where you’ll find the stuff that few people think about, and fewer people talk about. Down here, you’ll find unconventional thinking, controversial views, and subversive methods (for offense against competitors, defense against encroachment, or undermining internal saboteurs)2.
Ancient Repositories
You won’t find any original thinking on Adventures in Leadership Land. We’re not smart or clever enough to generate new ideas; we only have the creativity and intellectual horsepower to plagiarize borrow ideas from superior thinkers who preceded us, connect the dots, and resell the ideas in modern packaging3. Sometimes, a very-old idea created by a very-dead guy has aged so well that it doesn’t require re-packaging. In those cases, we’ll pull their work out of the Ancient Repositories to share with you.
Contrarian Caves
The Contrarian Caves are antithetical to the Institute of Conventional Wisdom. Unlike the Institute’s centralized control over what’s “right” versus “wrong,” the Contrarian Caves form a dogma-free, decentralized network. The walls of the Contrarian Caves are rough and jagged, in stark contrast to the Institute’s straight lines and Euclidean architecture. The motto of the Contrarian Caves, written in English vernacular, stands in direct opposition to the Institute’s pretentious Latin motto:
Follow conventional wisdom, get mediocre results.
These Caves are home to the mavericks, iconoclasts, and exiles who march to the beat of their own drums. Many of these contrarians are more concerned about results than appearances4. They can:
be right while appearing wrong
look poor while being rich
ask stupid questions while decreasing their own stupidity
Despite the value of visiting the Contrarian Caves, few leaders do. The Caves are inelegant, counterintuitive, and often incomprehensible. There’s zero prestige in elevating messy practice (“what works”) above elegant, smart-sounding theory (“what should work”). Worst of all, independent thought is a lonely venture; many leaders are uncomfortable toiling away in a dark, grimy cave with only their ideas for company. Many “leaders” prefer to be led than to actually lead.
You’re probably wondering: why would contrarians continue lurking underground if the Caves are dirty, lonely, and unpopular?
It’s because the Contrarian Caves are adjacent to the Secret Grottos, which contain rich veins of Cerebrium (crystalized secrets). The discovery of a secret is the only vindication a contrarian will receive for an unpopular belief. Leaders who follow conventional wisdom will get conventional results, but contrarians who toil away in the Cerebrium mines can use their secrets to achieve superior results. In this regard, the obscurity of the Contrarian Caves is a blessing, not a curse – it allows practitioners to exploit Cerebrium without divulging their secrets.
Fiery Hells of Competition
The Fiery Hells are a network of magma chambers located deep below Executive Mountain. The friction of competition generates enough heat to melt rock into magma. Competitive pressures squeeze the Fiery Hells, forcing magma all the way up to the summit of the volcano. The magma chambers scorch all that they touch – some leaders will perish in the searing heat; others will re-forge themselves in the fires of adversity and emerge tougher than before.
The most ambitious leaders eagerly throw themselves into the fires of adversity, like some religious rite of passage, to prove that they “have what it takes.” Even those with more modest goals still believe that competition is an ideal state (think of all the people aiming to be “more competitive”). Leaders from the Contrarian Caves beg to differ, believing that competition is a destructive force best avoided.
Liar’s Lair
Leadership is full of self-deceptions, mandatory insincerities, polite fictions, and cherry-picking. We sometimes tell well-intentioned “white” lies, and other times we tell strategic falsehoods to throw competitors off our trail. Other people are doing the same things, opening up some interesting game-theory mechanics. We behave differently when we know they’re lying, which causes them to behave differently when they know that we know they’re lying.
But we don’t visit the seedy tavern in Liar’s Lair merely to people-watch. We’re also interested in the arms race of deceit, how a lie can indicate the presence of a truth hidden nearby, and the strategic value of authenticity when everyone else is lying.
Secret Grottos
The gloomy, grimy Grottos are home to the Cerebrium mines. Extracting Cerebrium is a miserable process, requiring miners to dig and pry at the fringes of the Unknown Abyss while fumbling and stumbling around in the dark. But the miners willing to toil away in obscurity are rewarded with a valuable treasure: a glint of enlightenment in solid form.
Each piece of Cerebrium is a crystallized secret. It could be arcane knowledge or an unconventional technique that empowers the owner to seize a greater share of the pie (competition and scarcity), to grow the overall size of the pie (innovation and abundance), or both. Cerebrium is a precious resource for upwardly-mobile leaders, inventors, and scientists.
Cerebrium has a curious property: the more people behold its light, the faster it loses its glow. Eventually, it becomes an inert lump of crystal. By definition, secrets are not widely known; a widely-known secret is just common knowledge. Transport Cerebrium from the subterranean bowels up to the densely-populated, high-traffic surface of Leadership Land, and you will deactivate the very thing that made Cerebrium valuable in the first place.
The Institute of Conventional Wisdom was originally built from glowing Cerebrium. After all, every bit of “common knowledge” we take for granted today was a secret to our ancestors at some point5. But those secrets have been converted into conventional wisdom, and the crystals have grown dull. The Cerebrium’s potency has been extinguished by the gaze of all the people who visited the Institute.
Silent Graveyard
Beneath Leadership Land is a vast cemetery of leaders whose names and deeds we’ll never hear about. The Silent Graveyard is haunted by the ghosts of:
People with amazing potential who were born in the wrong place at the wrong time, like mathematical geniuses born into the toilet-scrubber caste.
Intelligent, hard-working, and daring entrepreneurs whose risk-taking landed them in the Silent Graveyard rather than onto the cover of Forbes magazine.
Visionary leaders who successfully prevented pandemics, world wars, and zombie apocalypses, but died in obscurity because the disasters that never happened aren’t “noteworthy.”
Contrast that with the surface of Leadership Land, where every schoolchild is indoctrinated with the biographies of famous leaders, inventors, and scientists who happened to be born in the right place at the right time. Every business school has a shrine to the risk-taking entrepreneurs who happened to “make it.” Historians normalize our hero worship by writing books about the leaders who saved us from extinction, but never about the ones who prevented existential crises from ever occurring.
The bigger the Silent Graveyard → the more famous the survivors → the worse our survivorship bias → the more distorted our definition of “success.”
Only by studying the phantoms of survivorship bias can we rectify our distorted perception of what “success” really means. The problem is…the Silent Graveyard is very, very silent. It doesn’t call for our attention, so we have to deliberately schedule a visit. Anyone up for some ghostbusting?
Taboo Tunnels
The Taboo Tunnels are created by social inhibitors, and they contain all of the things left unsaid. Each tunnel is a physical manifestation of the void created by a breakdown in communication. Each entrance to a Taboo Tunnel starts with a euphemism, and the rest of the tunnel is drilled through solid rock by the 800-pound gorillelephant in the room, ridden by an emperor with no clothes.
The Taboo Tunnels are the primary routes for traveling between the surface and the underground of Leadership Land. Even though the subterranean map only shows the two biggest Tunnels connecting Liar’s Lair to the Desert of Good Intentions and the Straits of Conflicting Interests, there are many other Taboo Tunnels crisscrossing the depths of Leadership Land.
Unknown Abyss
The Unknown Abyss is cloaked in the perfect darkness of anti-knowledge. Don’t let appearances fool you; the anti-knowledge may look uniformly dark, but it comes in very different flavors:
Secrets: things we don’t know…yet. The Unknown Abyss contains glowing veins of Cerebrium waiting to be discovered. Miners in the Secret Grottos are constantly encroaching on this part of the Abyss, transmuting anti-knowledge into knowledge.
Mysteries: things that definitely exist, but can’t be accurately measured (e.g. support for a coup d'état) or predicted (e.g. the next earthquake or market crash). Mysteries correspond to the “known unknowns” in Rumsfeldese, or the “gray swans” in Taleb-speak.
Inconceivabilia: things that are impossible to know6. We’d provide an example, but then the example would belong to the “Mysteries” category rather than this one. Inconceivabilia are analogous to the “unknown unknowns” in Rumsfeldese, or the “black swans” made famous by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The Unknown Abyss is responsible for tremendous destruction and misery. The unseen, the unheard, and the unknown can hurt you a lot more than what you do know and are prepared for. On the other hand, the Unknown Abyss is also the wellspring of discovery, pleasant surprises, and serendipity. As Nietzsche once wrote (paraphrased):
What’s unintelligible to me isn’t necessarily unintelligent.
We live by the words “hope for the best, prepare for the worst, capitalize on what follows.” Embrace positive unknowns and welcome happy accidents. Protect against negative unknowns, both Mysteries and Inconceivabilia. You will never be fully prepared when a massive black swan emerges from the Unknown Abyss, but you will be less unprepared than everyone else – allowing you to capitalize on what follows.
Return to the surface map (part 1) by clicking here.
Sure, you could read about the same things on straight-laced publications like the Harvard Business Review. But it won’t contain our colorful commentary and misanthropic snark.
“Subversive” does not mean “illegal.” This blog is about avoiding failure; habitually breaking laws tends to buy you a one-way trip to the Career Swamp.
Newton’s quote:
If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants
is too grandiloquent for us. We’re not even tall enough to climb onto the shoulders of giants, so we resorted to breaking into their houses and stealing their stuff.
Some denizens of the Contrarian Caves are anti-establishmentarians who take the contrarian view solely to raise a middle finger in defiance of the mainstream. We’re not interested in their ideals or politics; we’re only interested in results.
A lot of things we consider obvious in hindsight used to be secrets. Consider that the first U.S. patent for a suitcase with wheels came after we landed a man on the moon (the wheeled luggage was invented before that, but the patent came almost two decades later). Or consider that splinter-free toilet paper was a novelty back in the 1930s. There are people alive today who remember what it’s like to get sphincter splinters!
Until they happen. After they occur, we look through the lens of hindsight and honestly believe that the occurrence was more predictable than it really was. Retrospective explainability is a hallmark of Taleb’s black swan theory.