Surface Geography of Leadership Land (1/2)

Introducing the Institute of Conventional Wisdom and the Plague Plateau

We belatedly realized that writing a newsletter saying “go to this other post” wasn’t reader-friendly. For your convenience, here is the first part of the Leadership Land Map post (split into two parts because of email size limits).

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Hand-drawn map! Why use Adobe Creative Suite when you can smear your thoughts all over with Microsoft Paint?

Welcome to Leadership Land: a dangerous and exotic place where the risks might be worth the rewards. Whether you’re a Harvard Business School graduate with your eyes set on the fiery peak of Executive Mountain, or a migrant manager with amorphous ambitions, let this map be your guide! Some of the major features of Leadership Land’s surface include:

Boss Forest

Where most leaders start out after crossing the Interview Mountains. Those who seek mentors and external assistance can find their way out with relative ease. Others are stuck for much longer, mired in day-to-day tasks and struggling to see the forest through the trees.

Career Swamp

The unexpected and (usually) unplanned destination of many careers. Once trapped in the stagnant waters of the Career Swamp, it becomes exceedingly difficult to bootstrap oneself out. Those who perish in the Swamp are sucked into the Silent Graveyard beneath Leadership Land.

Desert of Good Intentions

Many travelers end up here by blindly following advice from leadership “experts” (often conveyed via TED talks, self-help books, or Harvard Business Review articles). By applying too much of a good thing, employing a good technique in a bad place, or using the right method at the wrong time, these leaders are swallowed by the unintended consequences lurking beneath the Desert’s shifting sands.

Executive Mountain

This active volcano towers over Leadership Land, serving as a beacon for ambitious leaders. Those who rise to the challenge (often HBS graduates) must climb its treacherous slopes to claim one of the C-suites near the peak. Once there, they can enjoy a 30,000 foot view of Leadership Land from their corner offices…but they’re never safe. The summit of Executive Mountain is known for its violent eruptions, and high-level leaders are the most endangered by the lava and pyroclastic flows.

Interview Mountains

This mountain range rings the periphery of Leadership Land, serving as a formidable barrier to entry against those unworthy of directing other human beings (though there’s some leakage through Nepotism Pass and the Crony Caves). Elaborate mating rituals take place in these mountains, with aspiring leaders attempting to gain entry into Leadership Land by impressing the gatekeepers. Given the incentives for interview candidates to embellish, and the gatekeepers’ roles in inferring capability with very little information, the Fog of Uncertainty is extraordinarily dense in the Interview Mountains¹.

Institute of Conventional Wisdom

The Institute’s campus radiates dignity and prestige. Academics and New York Times bestselling authors, dressed conservatively in dark suits, sip Earl Grey tea on the meticulously-groomed quadrangle. The Institute’s buildings are impeccably proportioned with straight lines and Euclidean shapes, their exteriors gleaming with polished stone and their interiors paneled in rich mahogany. The west wing of the Institute comprises the Tower of Corporate Astrology, which soars into the skies above Leadership Land like a middle finger in defiance of the Fog of Uncertainty².

Everything about the Institute suggests intelligent design, domestication of the unknown, and the triumph of human foresight over the vicissitudes of fate. The Institute’s “best practices” (generally considered managerial canon) are carefully studied by leaders of all stripes, from first-time managers in the Boss Forest to visionaries atop Executive Mountain.

To trick the casual observer into believing that the Institute of Conventional Wisdom is the keeper of esoteric secrets, its coat of arms bears the Latin inscription Sola lux et veritas (“Only light and truth”). True to this motto, the Institute believes that anything not illuminated by its brilliance is unworthy of consideration.

Unfortunately, the rest of Leadership Land watches the Institute so closely that it has become a victim of its own success. The Institute was originally built from Cerebrium (crystalized secrets) mined in the Secret Grottos, but the very act of exposing yesterday’s secrets to the world converts it irreversibly into tomorrow’s conventional wisdom. The Cerebrium transported from the subterranean depths of Leadership Land quickly loses its ability to help leaders “get ahead” or maintain a competitive advantage.

The Institute of Conventional Wisdom seems oblivious (or willfully ignorant) of the fact that converting secrets into conventional wisdom often decreases the potency of the knowledge³. The Institute continues to pride itself on its inert Cerebrium, and this façade of erudition continues to hoodwink leaders into believing that the Institute is infallible.

Fog of Uncertainty

The Fog of Uncertainty is ambiguity incarnate. It is composed of aerosolized vagueries suspended in a cloud of vaporous doubts. The Fog is ubiquitous in Leadership Land because:

• Leaders must make decisions with incomplete information. Sometimes, we don’t even know whether we’re missing crucial information.

• The information we do have is often outdated or low-quality. It’s difficult to check if our information is half-right, totally wrong, or 100% right but conditional on other factors.

• Even if we had 100% of the relevant facts, and the relevant facts were 100% true, all decisions are subject to some randomness, variability, and luck. Even if it worked for 1,000 days, it could fail on day 1,001. The more unexpected the failure, the more unpleasant the surprise!

The Fog of Uncertainty is what makes Leadership Land so difficult to navigate. You’ve probably never seen a five-year plan that includes “perish in the Desert of Good Intentions.” No one has ever put “go skinny-dipping in the Career Swamp” on their bucket lists.

Middle Management Foothills

Clustered around the base of Executive Mountain, the Middle Management Foothills are home to medieval fiefdoms ruled by a feudal lord. These middle managers could be up-and-coming leaders destined for the C-suite…or they could have topped out professionally, and their domain is slowly crumbling into the Career Swamp.

Plague Plateau

This is technically a tepui, but it doesn’t alliterate as well as “Plague Plateau.” CC-BY-SA photo courtesy of Heribert Dezeo

Satellite offices, separated by physical barriers, tend to develop distinct cultures and processes over time. Organizational units, siloed by institutional barriers, will diverge from one another without central control. The Plague Plateau, separated from the rest of Leadership Land by vertical cliffs of stone, has evolved into a quarantine zone known for breeding a diverse array of organizational diseases.

Conveniently shaped like a skull and crossbones, the Plague Plateau is the origin of epidemics such as pseudo-productivitis and bureaucratic bloat.

Straits of Conflicting Interests

The Straits comprise a tidal region where self-interests ebb and flow in a cyclical struggle against the greater good. The region is home to:

• Rocky shoals and issues

• Narrow channels and minds

• Turbulent waters and emotions

All of which make the Straits of Conflicting Interests extraordinarily difficult to navigate – a challenge compounded by the Fog of Uncertainty.

Temple of Trust

Trust is sacred in Leadership Land. To build trust, leaders must construct a temple with bricks of integrity, held together by the mortar of vulnerability, all atop a rock-solid foundation of credibility. Inside the Temple is an altar of psychological safety, which the leader must protect from the taint of mistrust.

Building a temple and maintaining the purity of the altar is hard work, so most managers would rather throw some icebreakers, potlucks, and other “teambuilding activities” at their teams a few times a year, then pray for a miracle.

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For the subterranean map (part 2), click here.

1. Just like the Mountains of Shadow surrounding the land of Mordor.

One Substack to rule them all, one Substack to find them;
One Substack to bring them all, and in the Fog of Uncertainty bind them.
In the realm of Leadership Land where everyone lies.

2. The Institute of Conventional Wisdom is sealed against the Fog of Uncertainty. It’s one of the few places on Leadership Land’s surface where the Fog does not penetrate.

3. This is only applies in competitive environments (e.g. zero-sum games) and some dynamic systems. This is not true in mathematics, art, and underwater basket-weaving (where discoveries and new techniques are rising tides that lift all boats).