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Analog to Digital Aliasing's avatar

I enjoyed this foray, but alas it fails to fit the frame of a Swiss mercenary, a frame I'm too aware of insofar as my paternal line still follows that frame centuries after the biz disappeared. It's hard I guess to erase centuries of cultural reinforcement when what followed couldn't match its story line.

Three themes: first, "gfy", or "go f#$# yourself". This origin of Swiss mercenary lore was the Ur-moment when the forest cantons said "gfy" to the Hapsburgs - and, of course, its followup. How it justified animal extra brutality, akin to stories from Afghanistan. And how it forced an expulsion of men who followed it, until they returned, since their attitude was locally toxic. You can see this attitude in Mark Andreesons remarks about his home town, which unlike a Swiss mercenary or an El Salvadoran gang story had no cultural memory of turning toxic anger into a business.

Second, "no money no Swiss". The French phrase "pas d'argent, pas de Suisse" is one of the oldest references to the Swiss mercenary brand, and it refers both to the power of the money constraint and to the decision-making independence of the Swiss mercenary org.

Third, the "rationality is brutal" ethic. Along with the willingness to die that follows from "gfy" and its religious merkin of "holy alliance" which is like a follow through to swinging a bat that seems silly if one doesn't realize that a good swing requires a good followthrough, the Swiss mercenary experience maintains a rich memory of stupid actions that got one killed, plus determinations to avoid them by deciding not to enter fights. I'm afraid, from my knowledge of Swiss mercenary tradition, I don't see any sort of honor trend there, even while I'm aware other fighting traditions turn loss into some sort of death valorization they call "honor". My dad tells the secret story of Winkelried, the Swiss mercenary who saved his phalanx of pike men by offering himself as a target to open up a hole through which his buddies could escape. It's a famous story, there are statues memorializing it, etc etc. The secret story was his last words were, "they pushed me".

Again and again, my paternal line has always pushed an anti-stupid party line. Their biggest story of stupidity is contra their own people, since Nidwalden was the only canton that militarily fought Napoleon, who then made a very public example of it to warn off anyone else. My paternal relations worship the ground Napoleon walked on.

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F. Ichiro Gifford's avatar

I’ve been running through an MBA for the past couple years; and one of the things I’ve come to learn is that much of MBA literature lives or dies on whether a given manager has the guts to hold accountability for a decision.

In sufficiently strong hands, Porter’s Five Forces map is a clarifying battle map—what are we, and what are we not? But in the hands of a spineless manager, that same tool allows the manager to pin downside risk on some McKinsey suits.

I wonder if a core mistake of MBA thinking is assuming anyone can become a leader without eating shit—and the lie continues because at this point an “honest” management consultant would judge most of their clients as personally unworthy to lead.

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