nick

He doesn’t pursue wild visions and missions. His priority is solving for “normalcy” — making sure today is pretty much like yesterday. Grudgingly, all citizens acknowledge that that is in fact what they really want: perpetuation of normalcy. But this does not mean status quo!

Vetinari is the master of what Brad DeLong calls slouching towards utopia. He quietly nurtures progress in the sciences. He has his eye on the arc of the moral universe and stays on the right side of history, getting out of the way of creeping social progress and helping it along

He tries as much as possible to let natural forces and motives do the work for him. Minimize coercion. Maximize alignment. “The trick to getting the donkey down from the minaret is to find the part that really *wants* to come down... and a sharp stick” as he says once.

He is an assassin by training. His tastes are simple/ascetic. He is incorruptible not because he has no temptations you can use against him, but because he has no ideals to corrupt. It’s just one pragmatic realpolitik move after another. Muddling through, living another day.

In summary, though Ankh-Morpork is not a democracy, Vetinari is the embodiment of “the worst kind of political system except for all the others.” He is the steward of near-perfect gridlock. Lots more to be said, but that’s enough for now. Let’s draw the key conclusions here.

Good corporate executives need to be both leaders and managers, but good politicians must *only* be good managers while *pretending* to be leaders at most. They must not actually lead or try to. At most “leadership” during a campaign phase, and only at a party level, is tolerable

The ideal de jure leader is an empty throne. The ideal de facto ruler is someone who makes sure nobody ever tries to occupy it, while solving for normalcy one day at a time, without getting in the way of natural-rate progress or entrenching a status quo of cronyism.

If you like James Scott’s anarchist model (the art of being ungoverned), Vetinari embodies the closest thing possible to practical ungovernance in a technologically complex society. The protector of the illegible against illegibility. Keeper of goose that lays golden eggs for all