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I don't have a conclusion yet to this train of thought. There isn't actually a good alt to doomsday leadership, since high momentum + no steering is such a low-energy, easy equilibrium, it's really hard to disrupt or take over.
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by doomsday mode, I don't mean they're planning and leading around a specific doomsday vision or outcome. It just means they've abandoned all attempts or pretense at foresight and navigating in a sort of dead-reckoning way, extrapolating from momentum vectors of business
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ie, if you sell products A and B, growing/declining QoQ at say +5% and -5% respectively, and you do all your management based on that and supply chain without reference to your market environment or where it's going, you're in doomsday mode inertial navigation
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It's not that you fear zombies or asteroids. It's that sensemaking the environment directly has become too hard, so you use inertial demand signals as a proxy for environmental intelligence, which means a zombie behavior cascade
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For eg. say you sell kitchen appliances and the market is shifting due to people moving out of cities and into suburbs or something. That trend will show up in your demand data, but is going to be hard to interpret unless you gather supporting signals to interpret what's going on
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So to the extent A. G. Lafley "leader's job is to interpret external reality for the org" is still correct, you're instead *projecting* internal realities onto the environment, probably with an obsolete mental model
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This leads on to the further thought that it's the weak signals around the main signals that drive environmental intelligence and measure something *other* than sheer momentum
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This is downstream of Great Weirding playing havoc with (or rendering ridiculous) all extant candidate models to help build that external world picture, yes? Related to your thread about zombies
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Like reducto ad absurdum but what would TED-like big picture punditry look like now? Feels like everyone has despaired of any simple optimistic model having enough persistent traction on reality to even take one seriously as a placeholder folk hopium source
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I literally don’t have a clue what I’d say if invited to do a big TEDdy keynote 🤣 I have plenty of little thoughts, no big ones since ~2018 that I’d be willing to hawk with a straight face