A Tour of the Tower of Corporate Astrology
A synopsis on why personality tests and other weird leadership beliefs are so prevalent • How the Tower of Corporate Astrology touched a former U.S. President
The Tower of Corporate Astrology pierces the sky of Leadership Land, soaring high enough to escape the Fog of Uncertainty’s clinging tendrils. Located in the west wing of the Institute of Conventional Wisdom, the Tower is home for leadership practices that closely resemble astrology.
Just like real-world astrology, the Tower of Corporate Astrology divides leaders into:
One camp of true believers who can’t imagine life without the Tower’s ideas
Another camp of condescending skeptics who deride the Tower as the peddler of organizational snake oil and other forms of woo-woo nonsense
Those blissfully unaware of the Tower’s existence
The remainder, who are generally indifferent to the Tower. This group considers the Tower – at worst – to be full of benign falsehoods.
Let’s begin our tour in the Tower’s historic dungeon, then work our way up.
Skeletons in the Closet of Human Fallibility
Beneath the gleaming marble and smooth surfaces of the Tower of Corporate Astrology, there’s a gloomy dungeon that was roughly hewn into the granite bedrock of Leadership Land. The dungeon is where the Tower buries the skeletal remains of belief systems that it popularized long ago. Some examples of long-dead leadership beliefs (in the United States, anyway) include:
Phrenology is the world’s most tangible personality test: Phrenology is the practice of diagnosing people with personality traits and mental disorders based on bumps in their skulls. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different skills (artistry, dexterity, critical thinking, etc.) → skills can be trained like muscles → muscles get larger with training → each person should have bumps and divots on their head where their brain is overdeveloped and underdeveloped…right?
Phrenology was popular in the 1800s.
Child labor is good for society: The earlier a person can work, the earlier they mature from “hungry mouth to feed” into “productive member of society.” Besides, if the bellicose Nonexistonian Empire is using child labor and we aren’t, our industrial output and military capacity will fall behind! Child labor is a national security issue, which is why patriots send their kids to the coal mines!
Child labor has fallen out of fashion in industrialized countries, but remains common in developing countries.
Planned economies are the best economies: Leave a diverse group of people at the mercy of the free market, and diversity in consequences (i.e. unequal and unfair outcomes) will inevitably result. The strong often exploit the weak, extracting resources to further consolidate their power. Like vultures circling over fresh carrion, opportunists use disasters to price gouge and war profiteer their way to disgusting profits. Cycles of greed and fear drive all sorts of irrational behaviors, benefiting a few at the expense of many. Shouldn’t an enlightened intelligentsia guide the wayward flock? Isn’t it the government’s job to restore balance to imbalanced systems?
Central planning and command economies were much more popular in the mid-1800s than they are today. Only a few countries (e.g. Cuba) continue to operate planned economies today.
The dungeon is where the Tower of Corporate Astrology keeps its skeletons locked away in a closet. No will deny the dungeon’s existence, but they won’t advertise its existence either. Would you shine a spotlight on the skeletons in your closet? The skeletons are testaments to our fallibility, and we leaders can only highlight our flaws so much before we start losing credibility1.
You ask your tour guide about the discredited beliefs that the Tower of Corporate Astrology once promoted. She grins sheepishly and replies, “yeah, we were so stupid back then. Can you believe that our ancestors believed such silly things? The modern world has come such a long way!” And the two of you revel in a shared sense of smug superiority, like two teenagers laughing at an octogenarian who can’t figure out how to use an iPhone. Our progenitors lived in the dark ages of stupidity and superstition, but we’ve figured it all out, right?
Escaping the Fog of Uncertainty
Your tour guide leads you out of the dark and dingy dungeon, and up a white spiral staircase. Your next stop is the top of the Tower of Corporate Astrology, where you can admire the view from the observation deck. From this lofty vantage point, you can see all of Leadership Land! Or rather, you would be able to see all of Leadership Land if it weren’t blanketed by the Fog of Uncertainty.
As you gaze from the observation deck at the Fog-shrouded provinces of Leadership Land far below, you feel oddly comforted by the Tower of Corporate Astrology. You look around the observation deck and appreciate how the architecture is intelligently designed, how the ivory Tower’s interior surfaces are polished to a reflective sheen, how the decorative elements are intricately inlaid with the lustrous gold leaf and shimmering mother-of-pearl. The Tower’s inhabitants seem enlightened, exuding the confidence that comes from mastery of the unknown. Even the janitors seem to have figured it all out as they go about their duties with erect postures and their heads held high.
You mention your observations to the tour guide, and her eyes light up. She proudly describes how the Tower of Corporate Astrology is free from the Fog of Uncertainty, which blesses the Tower’s inhabitants with the serenity of pure certainty. Of course everyone in the Tower seems to have figured it all out! When you’re untouched by the Fog of Uncertainty, you know where you’re going. With your penetrating vision, you can see what lies ahead. This feeling of omniscience pervades your mind, banishing the vaporous doubts that haunt your thoughts. Your newfound clarity appears on your face as a calm demeanor; in your voice as a matter-of-fact tone; in your gaze as unwavering eye contact; in your leadership as decisive actions.
When you practice leadership in the Boss Forest, Interview Mountains, or most above-ground locations of Leadership Land, you are blinded by the Fog of Uncertainty. Your anxiety conjures up the worst-case scenarios that could ambush you as you wander deeper into the Fog. In contrast, when you visit the Tower of Corporate Astrology and rise above the Fog of Uncertainty, you wrap yourself in a cocoon of tranquility. Everything in the Tower is formulaic, and following the formula always leads to a sensible answer. There’s comfort in knowing that for the low, low price of $999.95 per month, the Tower of Corporate Astrology will protect you from the Fog of Uncertainty, grant you peace of mind, and provide you with clear answers.
False Certainty: We Crave Reasons, Not Truth
After basking in the comfort of psychological safety for a few minutes, you begin to wonder: how do you reconcile the Tower’s aura of certainty with the mummified remains of long-dead belief systems buried down in the dungeon? If the Tower of Corporate Astrology has truly “figured it all out,” shouldn’t the dungeon be…nonexistent? Sure, our ancestors engaged in barbaric practices, but what changed to make us infallible? Which of today’s clever concepts will be considered cringeworthy by our descendants?
You discuss this with your tour guide. As you ask your questions, the warmth drains out of her pleasant demeanor. “What interesting questions!” She replies with a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. Then she clears her throat, and in a staccato monotone, recites a legal disclaimer lifted straight out of a McKinsey/BCG management consultant’s report:
The Tower of Corporate Astrology (hereinafter, “Tower”) makes no representation that the services rendered will result in any enhancement to the Tower’s clients. The Tower’s services are not guarantees of future performance and undue reliance should not be placed upon them. Services that repel the Fog of Uncertainty within the theoretical confines of the Tower necessarily involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties when practiced in the Real World outside the range of the Tower’s Anti-Fog Force Field® (patent pending). The aforementioned risks and uncertainties may cause Real World performance to differ materially from any projections of future performance expressed or implied by the Tower’s services.
Translation: the Tower of Corporate Astrology sells the perception of certainty, not truth. Just like something unintelligible isn’t necessarily unintelligent, something intelligible (i.e. sensible and coherent) isn’t necessarily true, either. Astrology and personality tests provide cogent categorizations of people’s personalities – one based on the alignment of the stars, the other on a questionnaire – but they aren’t necessarily true. As we demonstrated in Personality Tests Are Just Horoscopes for White-Collar Professionals Part 1 and Part 2, both systems can be easily subverted by approaching them from the wrong direction.
Whenever the Tower of Corporate Astrology promotes a comprehensible-but-untrue system, the Tower is selling false certainty. In the case of personality tests, false certainty is relatively benign and can have net-positive impacts (see How Leaders can Use Personality Tests for Good, Not Evil, coming soon to an inbox near you!). But for the cataclysmic collapse of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) in 1998, mathematical models (created by Nobel laureates) lulled investors into a dangerous sense of false certainty. On the day of reckoning, LTCM required a $3,625,000,000 bailout to prevent its meteoric fall from blowing up the global financial system.
Why is False Certainty So Alluring to Leaders?
The standard response when we witness someone else’s false certainty is to educate the problem away. We were taught in school that enlightenment will chase away superstition and falsehoods like shadows fleeing before a floodlight.
But what if the belief that “education is the solution to false certainty” is, itself, a false certainty? Many people are resistant – sometimes openly hostile – to anything that challenges their worldview. You could throw tomes of scientific literature at your aunt to convince her that horoscopes, healing crystals, and tarot cards are different forms of quackery. Would your scientific evidence illuminate the darkness, causing her to thank you profusely for saving her time and money?
No! She would throw the worst of her eight yowling cats right back at you, retreat to her crystal-encrusted, incensed sanctuary and pay more money to seek consolation from her astrologer.
This type of behavior isn’t limited to crazy cat ladies. Leaders routinely:
Apply personality tests before hiring someone or assigning projects
Rely on 30-year projections of future commodity prices, interest rates, and climate patterns even though the projections are often proven wrong within six months
Commission management consultant reports that always conclude with “your problems are only solvable with more management consulting services.”
If you point out that these practices are more likely to lead to false certainty than to the truth, the practitioner will probably get defensive. “Well, what alternative do we have?” he’ll ask, rhetorically. “Leaders can’t make arbitrary decisions like a herd of thoughtless beasts, you know. It’s irresponsible! What would the board think? What would the shareholders think?!”
And thus, Company McCorporateface, Inc. continues paying for the services of the Tower of Corporate Astrology. The biggest difference between the Company leader and your aunt is that the Company leader is paying much more for false certainty than your aunt. The Company pays for psychologists, financial analysts, and management consultants who wear tailored suits and operate out of gleaming skyscrapers with glass-walled conference rooms; your aunt is paying for a chain-smoking psychic who operates out of a ramshackle hut propped up by a liquor store on one side and a restaurant with sixteen health code violations on the other.
Clearly, false certainty is alluring enough to be mentally sticky – so sticky that people will fight and pay folding money to maintain their beliefs against all evidence to the contrary. Let’s look at some of the things that make false certainty so alluring.
A cocoon of psychological safety
In 1981, a would-be assassin shot and wounded Ronald Reagan, the president of the United States at the time. Reagan survived and recovered from the attempt, but Nancy Reagan, his wife and First Lady of the United States, became fearful for his life. For the remainder of Ronald Reagan’s two-term presidency, Nancy Reagan consulted with an astrologer named Joan Quigley, who provided advice on which days and times would be optimal for the president’s safety and success.
The extent of Quigley’s influence on the Reagan Administration is unknown. In Nancy Reagan’s memoir, she acknowledged that she altered her husband’s schedule without his knowledge based on astrological advice, while denying that any political decision was based on astrology. However, a conflicting memoir from Ronald Reagan’s former chief of staff claimed:
Virtually every major move and decision the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with a woman in San Francisco [Quigley] who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable alignment for the enterprise.
Donald Regan, For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington (1988)
The truth is probably somewhere in between the two claims, but we’re less interested in which presidential decisions were influenced by astrology than why astrology was influential in the first place. The Reagan-Quigley story helps illuminate why the Tower of Corporate Astrology is so popular with leaders, and why so many people are unwilling to give up their beliefs.
The most difficult truths create more uncertainty, not less. The assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan forced his wife to confront a grim reality: that her husband was in mortal peril from unseen, unheard, and unknown threats, every second of every day. Realizing this truth did not banish the Fog of Uncertainty; it paradoxically made the Fog denser and more oppressive. Ignorance was bliss.
Just like Nancy Reagan, we become more susceptible to the Tower of Corporate Astrology whenever we feel embattled. The Tower ensconces us in a cocoon of false certainty that instills a sense of psychological safety. Anyone who comes to us with a harsh truth becomes a threat – an adversary who would rip us out of our cocoons of tranquility and cast us back into the Fog of Uncertainty.
If you consider that the opposite of psychological safety is the feeling of danger, is it a surprise that people tend to resist new information that could challenge their worldview?
We like feeling right and self-righteous
The desire to be right is inborn, to some degree. This desire is further reinforced by decades of schooling, where we learned that we’re rewarded for correct answers and punished for incorrect answers. Is the correct answer also true? It doesn’t matter; speaking the truth doesn’t increase your social value (grades) if the teacher marks you as incorrect. To succeed, you only have to be right (truth be damned). To win at life, you must avoid the humiliation of sullying your permanent record with a black mark by being wrong.
Then you graduate from the Institute of Conventional Wisdom. You promote into Leadership Land where you’re constantly surrounded by the Fog and Uncertainty, and you realize that there’s no teacher or professor or authority figure who has all the correct answers. You are that authority figure now, which means you dictate what’s right and wrong within the limits of your power. You could declare that what’s objectively true is also correct…but that’s really, really hard. The truth is sometimes cruel, so we hide it in the Taboo Tunnels and don’t talk about it. Other times, the truth is hidden deep in the Secret Grottos far beneath Leadership Land, only accessible by putting in hard labor in the Contrarian Caves.
Many of us take the path of least resistance: we gravitate toward the Tower of Corporate Astrology. When we’re wrapped in our cocoons of false certainty, we can feel right without worrying about truth or similarly inconvenient concepts! False certainty allows us to proclaim our opinions as facts – like a parent assuring a frightened child that the sun will rise again tomorrow morning. When we’re free of doubt, we have absolute faith in our beliefs. Those beliefs become indistinguishable from objective truth, which means we’re correct all the time! Just watch a multi-generational family argue about politics during Thanksgiving dinner, with each side utterly convinced about the rightness of their position and the wrongness of all others.
Being right means you win. And winners deserve to feel self-righteous…right?
The illusion of respectability
As you conclude your tour of the Tower of Corporate Astrology and prepare to leave the observation deck, you pass by one of the janitors. He looks up from his floor-mopping, looks you steadily in the eye for a few seconds, nods politely, and returns his attention to the floor. You can’t help but admire how he maintains a noble bearing despite the menial nature of his task. This person would be the Director of Janitorial Services anywhere else.
A leader who is confidently wrong can be more effective than a leader who is un-confidently right. False certainty and the feeling that you’ve figured it all out is contagious. When you follow a respectable leader with rock-steady confidence, your own misgivings often become quieter. The shackles of analysis paralysis become easier to break. You think less about all the things that could go wrong and more about all the things that could go right. Both good and bad outcomes await you in the Fog of Uncertainty; a self-assured and charismatic leader redirects your attention toward the good.
Of course, a leader whose confidence flows from false certainty could be steering the ship toward disaster whilst exhibiting the visible markers of effective leadership: meeting all key performance indicators, being extremely persuasive, keeping morale high, etc. But a weak leader who steers the ship in the right direction is more likely to be removed from power – either from above by the powers that be, or from below by a crew mutiny. Which is worse: an effective leader who gets to the wrong place faster, or an ineffective leader who’s headed in the right direction but never reaches the destination?
Having a ready scapegoat
Sometimes, leaders seek false certainty for purely strategic reasons, not emotional ones.
You can blame the psychologists for a flawed personality test when someone you hired steals money and trade secrets from the organization.
You can defect responsibility by claiming that you based your misallocation of capital, materiel, and personnel on the analysts’ inaccurate forecasts.
You can fire the management consultants for providing bad advice if you followed their advice and a disaster ensued.
Heads, you’re a visionary genius. Tails, it was someone else’s fault. We covered this in-depth in Anti-Fragility and Asymmetry Explained: Leadership’s Best-Kept Secret.
Leadership In a World Full of False Certainty
Your tour guide graciously sees you off at the exit of the Tower of Corporate Astrology. Maybe a little too graciously – she’s probably relieved to be free of your probing questions. A short distance from the exit, the Fog of Uncertainty forms a wall of gray blankness that marks the limit of the Tower’s Anti-Fog Force Field® (patent pending).
Before you plunge back into the Fog of Uncertainty and return to the real-world practice of leadership, you take a moment to collect your thoughts. To recap:
The purpose of the Tower of Corporate Astrology
The Tower of Corporate Astrology sells ideas and systems that reduce anxiety when the truth is unfathomable, impenetrable, or unpalatable. The Tower’s products aren’t necessarily false, nor do they have to be true; they must only be effective at repelling the Fog of Uncertainty. The Tower has been confidently wrong about many things, and continues to be confidently wrong about many things that will seem ridiculous to future leaders. Assuming we haven’t gone extinct in a few centuries, the leaders of 2225 AD will laugh at our beliefs while believing their own false certainties, sold to them by the Space Station of Corporate Astrology for the low, low price of 999.95 credits per galactic standard month.
Use the Tower of Corporate Astrology for good, not evil
When you’re a new leader just starting out in the Boss Forest, the Tower’s formulaic advice is probably better than nothing. We believe it’s more important to avoid being a bad boss than striving to be a good one (see Don’t be a Good Boss. Avoid Being a Bad One for our counterintuitive reasoning). If false certainty is what it takes for you to effectively lead your team, reduce your crippling anxiety, and get things done, then there’s some merit to “fake it ‘till you make it.”
That said, you should begin truth-seeking in the Contrarian Caves as soon as you’re able, because…
In a 40-year career, it’s better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong
As your responsibilities expand and your job title becomes loftier, you will eventually reach a point where the formulaic approach becomes ineffective. Either:
You’ve encountered a problem that’s rare or novel enough to defy a cookie-cutter approach, and/or
You’re playing a zero-sum game where your competitors are applying the same formulaic approach, but everyone’s trying to do it harder, faster, better, or longer than everyone else.
What got you here won’t get there (see When “Best Practices” Produce the Worst Results). This is a clear signal that you should leave the comfort of false certainty, start spelunking in the Contrarian Caves, and seek a competitive edge in the Secret Grottos.
This is easier said than done, of course. The Tower of Corporate Astrology is always ready to provide a quick-fix solution to your apprehensions. Just remember that the longer you stay warm and cozy in a cocoon of false certainty, working longer and harder to implement a formula that you believe will bring you success…maybe you’re just getting to the wrong place faster.
Winning hearts and minds requires good timing
Since many people reflexively defend their worldviews from external assault, the only people you can rescue from the Tower of Corporate Astrology are those with unusually open minds. A blank slate (e.g. a youngster whose head isn’t full preconceived notions) has never entered the Tower to begin with – they don’t have the knowledge or experience to be falsely certain about anything!
To jailbreak someone out of the mental prison of false certainty, you’ll have to wait until they are vulnerable to persuasion. The most susceptible people are the ones who have been ripped out of their cocoons of false certainty by the vicissitudes of fate, then cast adrift in the Fog of Uncertainty. When they’re wandering in the Fog of Uncertainty, lost and afraid, that’s your opportunity to rescue them and show them a truer path – one that doesn’t lead back into the Tower of Corporate Astrology. Never let a good crisis go to waste!
Back to the Fog of Uncertainty
In her memoir, Nancy Reagan nicely summed up her decision-making process:
Astrology was simply one of the ways I coped with the fear I felt after my husband almost died […] Was astrology one of the reasons [further attempts on Ronald Reagan’s life did not occur]? I don’t really believe it was, but I don’t really believe it wasn’t.”
Many people were understandably upset that an astrologer had influence over the President with the nuclear launch codes. But try to look past the astrology for a moment – maybe you can recognize your own predicaments in Nancy’s words and empathize with her maddening inability to pierce the Fog of Uncertainty. If you struggle under the emotional toll of constant uncertainty, we recommend our earlier article Living With Uncertainty – How Leaders Can Manage Emotions.
We’re getting our publishing schedule back on track. In a few weeks, we’ll continue where we left off in July with How Leaders can Use Personality Tests for Good, Not Evil.
How much weakness and/or vulnerability a leader can show before losing credibility is a complex topic. For now, suffice it to say that:
Revealing vulnerability is a key component to building the Temple of Trust.
Highlighting your personal flaws can enhance your credibility in certain contexts and with certain people. This only works when the leader’s strengths vastly outweigh their weaknesses. Confident and factual admissions of weakness seem to work best (bonus points if delivered with humor). Using a woe-is-me tone, or anything implying victimhood, tends to erode credibility. So do blame and responsibility-dodging.
The most inspiring examples are where leaders convey “if I can accomplish so much in spite of my flaws (or perhaps because of them), then you, too, can succeed in spite of yours.”