Are You Breeding Competence? /+ Prigozhin Update
What are you optimizing for?
During a discussion in my Discord voice chat (remember to join mf) with Biscuit and
we started talking about the World War 2 German military and incompetence in organizations. I wrote a few Substack posts on this topic but they were mostly focused on individuals and not organizations. I wanted to expand a bit on what we were discussing, no I don’t have a college level paper (yet lol) but it’s food for thought.
The One Man
Something that can plague organizations is the obvious cult of personality. Where you have one leader at the top that’s suffocating all the rest of the leaders in the organization. Depending on the size of the organization, competent leadership is always going to look like teamwork. The planning and the execution should all look like a symphony. Everyone has their roles and expertise but everyone is contributing to the overall picture. What a cult of personality does is that in the planning phase it removes all the other leaders and only keeps the person at the top. Everyone is present and executing but have an innate fear of losing status so their expert opinions are not being heard. The leader at the top want’s everything done his way and will decapitate anyone who disagrees. These types of organizations can maybe haphazardly stay afloat if the organization is small and stays small. This is why a lot of times when a company grows big the founders have to step back or sell to let someone else take over. The one man organization can stay afloat if it has deep pockets, but eventually on a long enough timeline, they too will fail.
Like Clint Eastwood said in Magnum Force, “A mans got to know his limitations”. There’s not enough time in the day for a man to be an expert in everything or see what’s going on in every department’s day to day in his organization, or sit around and have conversations with all his underlings. While simultaneously keeping up developments in each field that his organization brushes up with. This could be possible in the stone age but we live in a way more complex world now meaning it’s heavily specialized.
This type of organization is not optimizing for competence but in what the leader want’s to hear. The dictionary definition of a cult of personality is more than this but I want to leave it on a raw level.
The Ideology
Another thing that causes organizations to fail is when they’re optimizing for ideology and not for competence. Of course when you recruit someone into your organization you don’t want them to be serial killers that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about hiring someone because of how devoted and loyal they are to a cause and not how efficient they are at their profession. The Nazis attacked Russia not because of any strategic reason, they did it for ideology and It played a huge role in bringing them to the fruitless end we read about today. This kind of thing is like nature balancing itself. You can have an insane organization but insane people on a long enough timeframe end up killing themselves and their entire organization. The laws of physics are the laws of physics, you can’t just change them because you have power… In the end you have to be logical and competent.
The Family
Not much to be said here, you should get the point by now. You should always be checking what your organization is optimizing for. Don’t be surprised when your organization actually get’s a challenge and immediately folds. You filled your leadership with donkeys. This goes for businesses, government, militaries anything that requires a hierarchy of people.
Air Prigozhin
If you read this Substack or follow me on Twitter, Prigozhin’s death should not be a surprise to you. Prigozhin being alive was a blackeye to the Kremlin’s grip on power. He symbolized that you can shoot for the throne and live to tell the tale. Prigozin and other Wagner group leaders were on a jet from Moscow to St. Petersburg were they allegedly got shot down. Their deaths are confirmed, we’re not 1000% sure on the method but getting shot down is currently the prominent theory. Wagner leaders all traveling together is really an unwise thing to do. This is the reason why you’ll never see the US president and vice president on the same flight. These guys traveling together basically allowed the Kremlin to do a decapitation strike on the Wagner Group leadership.
I saw something like this coming a while back, I didn’t think it would take this long though.
