Pavlos's Thoughts

All leadership involves a kind of lying. Attack and we’ll prevail over our enemies. Work hard on this product and we’ll succeed. Join our growing community. When the leader says these things, success does not yet exist. The act of leading produces an image of success and of a path to it. The many enthusiastic acts of following create the success. If too few people follow, or follow in a very half-hearted manner, there will be defeat, failure, or no community.

Selling is not like this. To sell is to convince someone of the value of a thing that you have, so that you can exchange it favorably. You have to have the thing, and it has to deliver the value readily by itself. Great selling acknowledges this. Buy a Mac, it can do these things out of the box. The cardinal sin of selling is to sell things that don’t deliver the value that is claimed. Drink Coke and you’ll feel happy. Really? That could only be honest selling for drugs. Otherwise it’s very uninspiring leadership. If you’re active and outgoing, do fun things with others, and also drink Coke, you’ll feel happiness.

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A good manager is someone who takes decisions that carry cost before the right decisions become obvious.

Anyone can take precautions if they have zero cost, of if they appear to have zero marginal cost. There is therefore a tendency to reduce the marginal cost of various precautions, processes, regular forums, documents, and the like by turning them into a running waste. That’s an attempt to make management easier, or more precisely to make bad management less distinguishable from good while sacrificing any efficiency.

Also, any vaguely competent functionary or committee can make tough decisions once the costs and benefits are unequivocally obvious. I once had a manager who, when faced with any important decision, asked his reports to gather all relevant information and present it in a table. He would only accept analysis that made the choice obvious, which is equivalent to saying he only made decisions of zero risk and zero marginal value.

The valuable work is to take decisions that are costly now to gain benefits or avoid risks that are as yet unseen in the future. The good manager is alone, or at least needs to have peers who are above the daily affairs of their team and are able to look into the longer horizon. Effective management has to be empowered, like business, so that risks and gains can be balamced and foresight applied.

There are three kinds of leadership: coercive, charismatic, and conventional.

Coercive leadership is what you get in a dictatorship, or a pack of dogs. The leader is whoever took the post by force. They stay in power as long as they can defeat or deter challengers, which requires that the leader is the strongest, literally or in the sense of being the most ruthless. There is a top-down power structure that keeps the majority in line by reminding them that they have no choice.

Charismatic leadership is what you find in a band, or other relatively fresh voluntary association. The leader is perceived as being the best at whatever is the aim of the organization. Followers follow the leader because they value their inspiration and direction. Any challengers would have to demonstrate superior ability, rather than attack the leader as such.

Conventional leadership is the kind found in democratic states and other large, mature organizations. The leader has no distinguishing characteristics other than fairness and commitment. The members of the organization subscribe to the leadership because they see the benefits of structure and coherence. The leader is expected to identify and publish a consensus direction, but not primarily to steer the group.

All three kinds of leadership have validity, including the coercive one in certain contexts. Problems in leadership typically occur when the leader misrepresents, is not true to, or changes the kind of leadership that they are in charge of.

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