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At Work with The Ready
AUA: Are Ego-Driven Leaders The Only Kind That Succeed?
00:10:45
Rodney and Sam explore survivorship bias, frontier founders, and a definition of success that counts more than the balance sheet.
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Transcript16 lines
- [00:03]
A
Hey everyone. Welcome back to OrkwithReady. I'm Sam Sperlin and I'm joined, as always, by Rodney Evans.
- [00:10]
B
Hey, Sam.
- [00:11]
A
Every other week we're tackling one tough, thought provoking listener question and sharing a few ideas we think might help. Let's dive in. Rodney, what have you got for us this week?
- [00:23]
B
I recently read the article in the New Yorker about Sam Altman. I guess I am right that he is exactly the kind of leader that's doing the opposite of what you would advise him to. And yet he created one of the most valuable companies in the world. The same thing is probably true for someone like Elon Musk. So maybe his way of doing things is more successful than going for trust and participation, et cetera. Or do the companies that you work with get another kind of success? Also in my organization and environment, I see people getting quote unquote to the top that act from a position of ego and power and still look successful. What does success look like in an organization that's worked with you for a while? And how might that be different to the results someone like Altman and Musk get? Okay, what do you got, Sam?
- [01:10]
A
So, I mean, this is going to be a philosophical answer, I think, or heavy. Heavy on. On the philosophy. One thought, just real quick. Anytime we are holding up exemplars of, you know, leadership or organizations that are doing things in a kind of iconoclastic way and is, you have to be very conscious of just the insane survivorship bias that is inherent in that. So there could be so many companies that are run in the same way with the same sort of practices and the same sort of principles, and 99% of them die on the vine along the way. But you have a very small minority that do succeed for various reasons outside of kind of the culture or how they're actually run, and we hold them up as like, oh, shouldn't we all be this way? It's the classic like, you know, Steve Jobs was an so why can't I be an asshole?
- [02:04]
B
Sure.
- [02:05]
A
It's that, that whole realm of things, I'm just always incredibly skeptical or somewhat hesitant to hold up any organization as what we should all be be striving for. Just so setting that aside, the philosophical thing that I just want to throw into the mix, and this is something that I've been, I think, wrestling with a lot more in kind of how I think about the work and how I help other people do this work, is that I think there's a definition question about what does success mean? And I think we've always, or else I speak for myself. I have tried to have a definition of success that is more than just we made a lot of money or we have the biggest organization or the greatest sort of impact. And I think there is something around the experience of people in your organization, non monetary things related to the meaning and the value that you place on the work that is important. And I don't want to hold up a company as like ultra successful because they made the most money as the paradigm here. Um, so that, that's where my head goes at first on, on something like this.
- [03:19]
B
Yeah, I mean I think to your first point, I was going to talk about another bias that is adjacent and related. So there's the survivorship bit, which is, you know, for every Sam Altman there are, you know, 9,000, 9,000 poor and out of business Sam Altman, 9,000 single shingle consultants who are like, I'll advise you on startups, you know the bias. I was going to talk about that. I think that the archetypal leader that is very like colorful and ego driven and very public, gets a lot of ink and like gets a lot of eyeballs. There are a lot of very successful companies that you've never heard of because there is no Elon Musk like posting pictures of like him on ketamine. Like there are wonderful, thriving scaled organizations, many of which didn't ipo, many of which don't have a founder billionaire at their helm, many of which have been in business for a century that are like not as exciting to read about and to profile because they don't have a little baby psycho founder. And so I just want to say out loud, like when I come across those companies, I'm always like, it's so interesting to me that like I've never heard of you. And then when I read their Wikipedia, I'm like, holy shit. You make so much money and you've been in business for such a long time and there's literally nothing written about you in Forbes because there's nothing interesting about you because you're not bad.
- [04:57]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [04:59]
B
So like it's a different kind of bias but it's like we have to remember that there are reasons that there is a whatever like 15 page profile about Sam Altman in the New Yorker to begin with.
- [05:11]
A
Yeah, yeah. It's the conflating of like news and entertainment with this. I guess my last thought on this is that some of the most outwardly successful people in business, in organizations are also some of the most profoundly unhappy and broken people I've ever met. So just again, kind of going back to the idea of what are we actually talking about with success? And I want to contribute to a world where we have a more holistic view of what it means to be successful in work in an organization. And a, not just, you know, did we make the most money that was absolutely possible. But what is the experience of the people who work in our organization and our collaborators and our, our vendors and just what, what's the sort of impact that we're having on the world beyond the, the balance sheet? And obviously like you need to make money to exist. No, I'm not against making money. If you don't make, if you don't have a profit, you're probably not going to be around for a long time. But there's more in play here that I'm will always kind of keep coming back to.
- [06:14]
B
Yeah, I think this relates to something I wanted to say just about the broader system which is, you know, like late stage capitalism does really reward this outsized kind of financial success. On the one hand, you know, like America loves billionaires for reasons that I think neither you nor I really understand. But, but also like take Sam Altman in the context of both the economic system that we're working in and also this particular industry. So like, you know, AI is the most sort of rocket ship, phase shift, frothy, trendy, exciting, terrifying new thing that we've had in a long, long time. And what that means is that in order for people like Sam Altman to continually raise capital, to continually get their bets underwritten for decades plus before they're able to actually have a profitable business, does require a certain archetype that is not necessarily the archetype of long term stable businesses. Like there are, there's a reason that frontier CEOs are more like Steve Jobs than they are like the founders of Patagonia. Because they are doing a thing that requires like almost freakish self confidence, ego belief, conviction, delusional thinking, et cetera, to raise billions of dollars to do what they want to do. I'm only saying that as a backdrop both in terms of sort of the natural selection of this kind of industry for this kind of human. And also in your question, you asked specifically about the kinds of companies that we work with in the long term. And I would, what I would tell you is like particularly the mid market companies that I primarily work with at this point, like they don't have investors who are going to fund a decade or more of like trust me, guy, this thing's going to be a rocket ship. Like these are real companies with real customers and real businesses and they're profitable and they have been for decades. And so they have a different interest in sustainable systems, in, you know, benefiting from change, in being able to evolve with the market. Because they're not playing the frontier game. They're playing the long term community, stability, survival, resilient, profitable game. And that's just like a different, it's a different thing. Well, and so I don't expect that we're going to get a call from Sam Altman like anytime soon, like nor do I frankly think we would be a good fit for that kind of company.
- [09:04]
A
Sure, sure. Well, just the last thing what you guys made me think of is that most companies are like the mid market that you just described, you know, needing to make money and stay alive and are not a frontier AI company like SpaceX and OpenAI.
- [09:21]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [09:23]
A
All right, that is it for this mini. If you've got a question of your own, hit us up at podcast at the ready.
- [09:31]
B
Com and we will see you back next week for a full episode of At Work with Ready. Thank you so much for being a listener.