Continued Success Requires Constant Negativity?
Chet discusses a private sector example of orientation lock.
The point is, though, that if orientation lock can happen to a company as well run as GE, it can happen to anybody. To paraphrase Andy Grove, only those who remain paranoid survive. Perhaps a maxim for senior leaders should be that the more the world seems to be confirming your strategy and your abilities, the more frightened you should become.Chet has made this point many times, most notably in Certain to Win. It is a corollary to his argument that only bad news can help you because only bad news can warn you where your orientation may be off.
I professor of mine said that you have to be paranoid to be a strategist, and my question to both him then and Chet now is “at what cost?” At the level of individuals, depressives have more accurate self-perceptions than healthy individuals. If one truly followed the philosophy that only bad news is useful and continued good news should make you more worried, then how long would it be until this way of thinking spilled over into the rest of your life? How long would it be until the paranoid drive turns you into James Angleton (see chapter six of Thomas Powers’ Intelligence Wars)?
There is a balance in everything. Complacency is a danger and wishing isn’t a strategy. But rampant paranoia and depression bring with them their own dangers.
Obviously, negativity keeps your orientation in check. How much do you sacrifice to be right, at an individuals cost? There has to be a point where you just are right where second guessing yourself helps nothing. Paranoia and depression have to be kept in check since you can’t afford them to bleed into other parts of your life. Thanks for giving me something to chew on tonight.
Comment by Glenn — October 14, 2008 @ 12:35 pm
Exactly. The negativity used to keep one’s orientation aligned with reality can itself become pathalogical.
Thanks for coming by,
W
Comment by Wiggins — October 14, 2008 @ 5:24 pm
I would like to see what Chet has to say about it. I’ll drop him an email unless you already have. The more I thought about it last night I think there is a certain point where you have to block off the paranoia and depression so it can’t bleed through. If you can’t, than as a strategist you would have to sacrifice certain aspects to achieve such an orientation. It would be interesting to do a few small case studies on famous strategist and see if this is true. To see how top strategist keep themselves within the loop.
I’m always here, I just like listening instead of speaking.
Comment by Glenn — October 15, 2008 @ 10:50 am
Wiggins,
You’ve raised a good point. Let me approach it from a couple of angles.
First, just because you have to be paranoid to survive doesn’t mean that all paranoids survive. Certainly you can carry it too far, as James Jesus probably did (but, you also have to give the KGB credit — they were getting good feedback from Kim Philby early in his tenure and it may have scarred Angleton for life). Put another way, paranoia is necessary but not sufficient.
Another consideration, which perhaps balances the first to some extent, is that there is a tendency in many organizations to tell people what they want to hear. This is especially true if the person in question is the boss. So a boss / commander / leader who wants to know the world as it is has to assume that information is being filtered and that bad news in particular is being filtered out or at least watered down. Happy talk will kill you.
You want Collins’ “brutal reality,” you have to be suspicious of what you’re being told, which is what I really meant by paranoia.
As Angleton’s case demonstrates, you can carry it to extremes, so your comment about balance is entirely appropriate. But in a world of opponents and competitors (not to mention sycophants), it’s probably best to err on the suspicious side. Which is why most people can only do the boss / commander job for so long, and then they need to regain their perspectives on life.
I’m going to write more about this on my blog — thanks for bringing it up.
Comment by Chet Richards — October 15, 2008 @ 7:09 pm
That clarifies matters, Chet, thank you. I’d summarize the conclusion thusly: while not sufficient, judicious paranoia is necessary. You want to err on the side of paranoia, but not surrender to it. The art lies in finding where the line between “judicious” and “delusional” lies.
Some interesting question for further discussion would be what other approaches help to bust the sycophantic echo chamber and what techniques can be used to rotate leaders through the boss/commander job so that they get out of there before they lose their perspective.
Comment by Wiggins — October 16, 2008 @ 5:51 pm