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Definitely a lot of naked sociopathy and adverse selection on the way to the top, but there's enough live player moral curiosity as well that it is a mistake to conclude that all big orgs are entirely run as cynical extraction machines and power trips.
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This is somewhat the case in Wall Street, but not usefully true elsewhere. You'll end up mis-analyzing most large orgs if incentives/profits/power are the only lenses you use. The moral postures, self-awareness, and curiosities C-suite people bring to the party affect outcomes.
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I only recently realized this, but looking back at my consulting history, I've never actually worked for a leader with zero moral curiosity. Which is actually very surprising because my primary lead-gen is from blog posts that are effectively paeans to amoral sociopathy.
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True moral vacuum type people are a) surprisingly rare at the top b) typically concentrated in finance or very financialized businesses (PE turnaround cos are snakepits) c) accumulating a huge psyche toll that blows up at some point like a time bomb
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I make a distinction between generalized criticism and "defense of the little guy" criticism. The latter is a solid place to put a stake in the ground. Liberal democracies only work if enough people prioritize individual rights and welfare as their moral project.
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It's also an excellent way to tell principled moral curiosity at small scale apart from lazy ressentiment. The defenders of the little guy will go after very specific issues in specific ways. The ressentiment driven ones will punch randomly anywhere they sense an opening.
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Tech companies add a third dimension to the money-curiosity/moral-curiosity design space. There is such a thing as raw tech curiosity, which typically is more fundamental where it exists at all, because it tends to subvert existing moral AND financial notions.
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Elon I think is genuinely in this bucket in a way almost no other highly visible leaders are. The DNA of any top-level leader is some ordering of curiosities. Elon is tech > money > morality.
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Failures happen when you're not smart enough to actually deliver results in your preferred order. If you (costly) signal tech > money > morality, but deliver money > tech > morality, you'll bleed leaderly agency.
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Facebook's existential dilemma is that it costly-signals tech > money > morality, cheap-signals morality > money > tech, but has actually failed to do truly interesting tech in the last decade in proportion with its reputation and costly signals.
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Interesting rant, though I don’t agree with it. I think Facebook is a Hanlon’s razor company. Those who leave believe it is malicious. Those who stay (like me), believe it is incompetent. In a specific way — the product side isn’t strong enough to resist capture by the ads side. twitter.com/doctorow/statu…
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By contrast, Google, even though it has kinda degenerated into a comfy bureaucracy, and failed to make money outside its core search/ads business, has consistently signaled its tech-powerhouse priorities and capabilities.
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Okay, this is turning into a chaotic rant in its own right, and I should move this to Roam and develop more carefully into a newsletter or blog 🤣
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