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.
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.
There's an apocryphal story of a Japanese officer who realizes they will lose the war because the American fleet has a ship dedicated to making ice cream. Any force that can commit surplus resources to ice cream cannot be reduced by banzai charges, and dying with honour still leaves you dead.
It's funny to contrast the language with which these people discuss themselves and the object-level accomplishments, in business and in government. Funding useless crypto startups and near-useless B2B SaaS in the former, overconfident incompetence in the latter. At least the business titans of the long 20th century were working on something real. At least DC's bureaucracy had some semblance of 'domain knowledge'. Musk was the only one who did great things, and the level of influence do-nothings like Andreessen and Horowitz won over him is a world-historical shame.
A generation of entrepreneurial cowboys, set to reset us for a new and dynamic future is something I'd like to believe in, but my anecdata from working as an in house lawyer in tech makes me skeptical about this kind of approach. Obviously the legal folks like myself are naturally going to be the most risk averse naysayers in the room but hear me out. For every Steve Jobs with an uncanny ability to turn innovative ideas into things people actually want there are thousands of guys who just caught lightning in a bottle. Now, catching lightning in a bottle isn't nothing. I've never done it, there usually is some level of skill and insight involved in being at the right place at the right time, and those who have done it are by any objective measure wealthier and more successful than I will ever be.
However the thing I notice about the personalities being lionized here is that many of them fail to understand the exact nature of their success. You get a lot of self absorbed people obsessed with abstractions like honor but who in practice are constantly chasing various forms of gamblers and/or sunk cost fallacies. They're bad to work for and best case scenario have one good idea before swiftly hitting their ceilings. You get somewhat of a sense of this in the book Chaos Monkeys, where people of middling ability become millionaires (or more) over night by virtue of happening to be at one random app company as opposed to another when they were handing out equity but before the VC came in to make a bet. Having worked for both there's a lot to be said for no nonsense, hired gun ceos that keep their eyes on the prize and understand positive sum thinking, as opposed to the erratic founder-inventor types, despite the latter being more fun to read about.
Great review, as usual. I wonder how much of this is rose-colored thinking on the part of the tech CEOs? In my experience, >>50% of a tech CEO’s job is raising money, which is much less glamorous than high speed decision making and defending your honor.
Loved the review! I was glad you liked the book after the drubbing you gave Scaling People. Personally, it's one of my favorite business book.
Horowitz genuinely commits to the rap lyrics (he posts them all over his blogs as well) and I like them.
While noting the similarities between war and business, I would love to hear your thoughts on Clausewitz or Musashi who believed there could be nothing like war since only war involves literal death.
Personally, I think SV bros are much like Wall Street bros of the 80s who think they're doing God's work (a little humility never hurt). Noah Smith writes about the Tech Right's failures to extend their abilities to politics (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-tech-right-is-not-succeeding) with Musk and Andreesen at the forefront. While Smith correctly diagnoses the inability of tech to run anything but tech, I think politics are a much more complicated beast while tech is largely straightforward about getting shit done (as you point out in my favorite book review Reentry by Eric Berger).
Thiel theorized that the Soviet Union had so many chess masters because chess was the only place for ambitious young men without the consequence of being controlled by the Communists or being killed for politcally subversive acts. Sounds like much the same happened with tech as the only escape from sclerotic bureaucracies.
I've been chewing on the Nomic framing, and I think I get more mileage out of starting with: there are some cases where results are all that matter. War and sales are two big ones. The other things that can matter are a) how well you followed key rules and b) how well you played your social role.
So e.g., a surgeon that does their job perfectly but the patient dies - I'm honestly not sure how medical institutions approach it, but I think for most of us it's intuitive to care more about whether the surgeon made any *mistakes* than outcomes we know are noisy when judging them. Conversely a surgeon who does something sloppy but it works out - that's bad! We don't judge them fundamentally by success, but adherence to procedure. That's a case where rules take priority.
Bureaucrats are kind of the quintessential "perform a part regardless of outcome". Higher education staff are mostly completely free of influence on results like enrollment or graduation; they just have to seem important to each other and authoritative to students. Electoral campaigns (and international development) are more like this than I'd like - they seem like a natural fit for "results are all that matter", but in practice it seems like a big part is impression management: do you seem like a good candidate to donors? And down the chain, does the data lead seem technically skilled and collegial to his peers and reports he might work with on future campaigns? Are the comms people polished and reliable, even if they don't actually get the message out?
The campaign example gets at my biggest reservation about the characterization of CEOs throughout the piece - a lot of CEOs have failed businesses behind them! And arguably more important than success or failure in keeping future doors open was just giving the impression that they're a leader-type. In other results: results can be secondary to role playing/impression management, even in high stakes commercial settings.
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.
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.
Important to remember that while war and business have some similarities, they are fundamentally different domains.
There's a reason America's best warriors are the Scots-Irish of Appalachia and her best businessmen were Yankees and Quakers.
It's also notable that during the Civil War it was the Yankees who won; in modern war, logistics and industrial production beats warrior spirit.
There's an apocryphal story of a Japanese officer who realizes they will lose the war because the American fleet has a ship dedicated to making ice cream. Any force that can commit surplus resources to ice cream cannot be reduced by banzai charges, and dying with honour still leaves you dead.
It's funny to contrast the language with which these people discuss themselves and the object-level accomplishments, in business and in government. Funding useless crypto startups and near-useless B2B SaaS in the former, overconfident incompetence in the latter. At least the business titans of the long 20th century were working on something real. At least DC's bureaucracy had some semblance of 'domain knowledge'. Musk was the only one who did great things, and the level of influence do-nothings like Andreessen and Horowitz won over him is a world-historical shame.
Ulrich Beck as Obi-Wan Kenobi: "You were supposed to manage the social risk--not become the social risk!"
A generation of entrepreneurial cowboys, set to reset us for a new and dynamic future is something I'd like to believe in, but my anecdata from working as an in house lawyer in tech makes me skeptical about this kind of approach. Obviously the legal folks like myself are naturally going to be the most risk averse naysayers in the room but hear me out. For every Steve Jobs with an uncanny ability to turn innovative ideas into things people actually want there are thousands of guys who just caught lightning in a bottle. Now, catching lightning in a bottle isn't nothing. I've never done it, there usually is some level of skill and insight involved in being at the right place at the right time, and those who have done it are by any objective measure wealthier and more successful than I will ever be.
However the thing I notice about the personalities being lionized here is that many of them fail to understand the exact nature of their success. You get a lot of self absorbed people obsessed with abstractions like honor but who in practice are constantly chasing various forms of gamblers and/or sunk cost fallacies. They're bad to work for and best case scenario have one good idea before swiftly hitting their ceilings. You get somewhat of a sense of this in the book Chaos Monkeys, where people of middling ability become millionaires (or more) over night by virtue of happening to be at one random app company as opposed to another when they were handing out equity but before the VC came in to make a bet. Having worked for both there's a lot to be said for no nonsense, hired gun ceos that keep their eyes on the prize and understand positive sum thinking, as opposed to the erratic founder-inventor types, despite the latter being more fun to read about.
Great review, as usual. I wonder how much of this is rose-colored thinking on the part of the tech CEOs? In my experience, >>50% of a tech CEO’s job is raising money, which is much less glamorous than high speed decision making and defending your honor.
So he’s from a Jewish family, growing up in a black environment, and his greatness is due to Scotch-Irish culture. Got it.
Loved the review! I was glad you liked the book after the drubbing you gave Scaling People. Personally, it's one of my favorite business book.
Horowitz genuinely commits to the rap lyrics (he posts them all over his blogs as well) and I like them.
While noting the similarities between war and business, I would love to hear your thoughts on Clausewitz or Musashi who believed there could be nothing like war since only war involves literal death.
Personally, I think SV bros are much like Wall Street bros of the 80s who think they're doing God's work (a little humility never hurt). Noah Smith writes about the Tech Right's failures to extend their abilities to politics (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-tech-right-is-not-succeeding) with Musk and Andreesen at the forefront. While Smith correctly diagnoses the inability of tech to run anything but tech, I think politics are a much more complicated beast while tech is largely straightforward about getting shit done (as you point out in my favorite book review Reentry by Eric Berger).
Thiel theorized that the Soviet Union had so many chess masters because chess was the only place for ambitious young men without the consequence of being controlled by the Communists or being killed for politcally subversive acts. Sounds like much the same happened with tech as the only escape from sclerotic bureaucracies.
> only war involves literal death.
Counterpoint: mountaineering. I'd love to see a Psmith review of Conquistadors of the Useless by Lionel Terray...
The theme of every post is Agency. A lot of this resonated with my experience or starting and running a company, and I don't have any employees yet.
Charles Haywood's account of entrepreneurial success is illuminating:
https://theworthyhouse.com/2023/02/20/on-entrepreneurial-success/
Also Andreessen on Musk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naWDOtWih5I
Self promotion alert, but this reminds me - enormously - of a book I reviewed that I STAKE MY HONOR ON you never having heard of:
https://blogoutwardfacing.substack.com/p/the-mise-caucus
I've been chewing on the Nomic framing, and I think I get more mileage out of starting with: there are some cases where results are all that matter. War and sales are two big ones. The other things that can matter are a) how well you followed key rules and b) how well you played your social role.
So e.g., a surgeon that does their job perfectly but the patient dies - I'm honestly not sure how medical institutions approach it, but I think for most of us it's intuitive to care more about whether the surgeon made any *mistakes* than outcomes we know are noisy when judging them. Conversely a surgeon who does something sloppy but it works out - that's bad! We don't judge them fundamentally by success, but adherence to procedure. That's a case where rules take priority.
Bureaucrats are kind of the quintessential "perform a part regardless of outcome". Higher education staff are mostly completely free of influence on results like enrollment or graduation; they just have to seem important to each other and authoritative to students. Electoral campaigns (and international development) are more like this than I'd like - they seem like a natural fit for "results are all that matter", but in practice it seems like a big part is impression management: do you seem like a good candidate to donors? And down the chain, does the data lead seem technically skilled and collegial to his peers and reports he might work with on future campaigns? Are the comms people polished and reliable, even if they don't actually get the message out?
The campaign example gets at my biggest reservation about the characterization of CEOs throughout the piece - a lot of CEOs have failed businesses behind them! And arguably more important than success or failure in keeping future doors open was just giving the impression that they're a leader-type. In other results: results can be secondary to role playing/impression management, even in high stakes commercial settings.