Power struggles among nice people
edbatista.com
edbatista.com
It may limit their effectiveness, but that doesn't mean they can't win.
There is no shortage of extremely visible role models who exhibit "conquistador syndrome", and their influence across society is creating a cohort of small business owners and professional people managers I've started calling the "petty bourgeoisie" -- members of the upper middle and lower upper classes who are, well, petty.
As a direct result of these personalities winning out time and time again, American society is starting to develop a distinct "Après moi, le déluge" feel.
As opposed to what less dominant but still significant systems?
The cold war ended roughly half a century ago; I'm rounding. (To be clear: no love lost for the soviet system, but "an ideology of capital" it decidedly wasn't.)
A few recent examples: Travis Kalanick vs the Taxi medallion cartel, Elon Musk vs a space industry that stopped innovating after Apollo (and to a lesser extent getting EVs over the adoption hump), Steve Jobs 2.0 (the return) vs ugly beige box PCs.
In all cases you have industries very set in their ways dominated by strong but stolid and conservative personalities and a lot of innovation being held back.
All the conquistador really has to do is gallop in and show what is possible. They have to execute well enough to do that. It doesn’t have to be excellence, but it often looks like excellence against a backdrop of mediocrity.
Take SpaceX for example. Old school NASA in the 50s and 60s or Lockheed Skunk Works in the same era were far more innovative. SpaceX looks superhuman today against the backdrop of an industry that had totally gone out to pasture.
Apple paired good industrial design with what is basically a polished consumer grade analog of a Linux desktop and looked revolutionary against ugly metal cans and chunky laptops running Windows. The iPhone was a bit higher on the innovation scale but also wasn’t wholly original, but damn did it cook when compared to flip phones.
But when you get past that disruption phase the conquistadors often fall down. We don’t get to see how Jobs would fare today because the torch was passed to Tim Cook, a solid operator. Musk is floundering with Tesla now that the EV market is full of strong competitors and it remains to be seen if SpaceX will hold it together. Kalanick’s Uber is a money bonfire but people still love it because Taxis suck.
Here are some of my issues with SpaceX marketing:
1) Cost to NASA/DoD seems to be similar to ULA.
2) SpaceX continues to fly expandable boosters for missions above LEO and for heavier payloads. Reusable boosters have lower lift and range and require extensive refurbishment between missions. Upper stage is not reusable.
3) SpaceX hasn't flown a single mission into deep space or Mars despite this being the stated goal of the company. In the same time, others have flown multiple rockets to Mars and to other planets. We have multiple rovers roaming the surface of Mars and satellites orbiting other planes all while SpaceX has contributed nothing to these efforts.
1) Booster reusability to LEO and for light payloads.
3) Human rated capsule for space station resupply missions.
3) High quality video content from launches.
4) Increased interest in space exploration at the expense of unrealistic expectations in relation to cost and timelines.The main point so, IMHO, is that prices for comparable launches are not so much cheaper using SpaceX. Kind of like those Ryan Air 19.99 tickets. Sure, there are some, but on average the price difference is much smaller than people think.
NASA's shuttle would have solved reusability in the 70s/80s, but a combination of DoD interference and severe funding cuts effectively crippled the project. This was politically fatal because it killed NASA's reputation as an effective manager of innovation. Which is why every project from the 90s onwards has been supported by slightly overwrought rapturous PR - to try to restore that reputation, because funding relies on it.
SpaceX has copied this.
So yes - SpaceX is incremental. A non-incremental company would be developing blue sky alternatives to chemical engines and/or looking for new propulsion physics. I can't see that happening without a government-run academic R&D program.
They are charging not much less than ULA for some launches because they can, and to recoup R&D expanses. The cost per launch to them is much lower.
I do however agree that technologically it’s incremental. Look up the DC-X. NASA and Lockheed had flown VTVL test boosters before. Werner von Braun talked about them. Starship is basically what he wanted to evolve Saturn V into.
(Not at all belittling the achievements of SpaceX engineers. Space flight is truly brutally hard even if you are doing what’s been done before let alone innovating at all.)
But none of that went anywhere because by the 1990s you had a stolid conservative industry happy with expendable rockets and cost plus contracts. It didn’t move until a lunatic swaggered in and turned over the table.
Bureaucracies and stolid industries generally have to be kicked and beaten and dragged into the future. They are happy to cash checks, moo, and chew cud.
Same goes for EVs. Marketable EVs have been possible since the GM EV1. There was demand too; GM had to pry those prototypes away from people. But the car industry was set in its ways. It must go vroom vroom or it’s not a car, and then there is the huge oil industry with all its lobbyists and PR. Again it took an unhinged lunatic to say “fuck you all we are doing this” and basically shame the industry into moving by showing them up.
If Tesla fails it will be because Tesla succeeded. The big car companies are probably better at making cars and may outcompete Tesla once they actually decide to move.
The same personality willing to offend millions to bring trolls back to Twitter is the same sort of personality it apparently takes to whip conservative bureaucracies and industries into action.
The only other force I am aware of that can do it is government mandate, and that carries a more literal whip. That wasn’t going to happen for rockets or EVs due to regulatory capture and conflicts of interest.
Edit: I guess the other force is war, which is why war has tended to bring innovation. But I’ll take Elon Musk types with all their negative traits over war any day.
They do it in a reasonable time frame for a fraction of the cost, aka, a bit of '1st era' commercialization of Space - still relatively government related, but mostly private though nowhere near consumer or even general industrial.
They're just making what was previously 'research' to be economically feasible.
Yes, gallop. To do so loudly and conspicuously.
Moribund industries are staffed by quiet competence that took decades to build. There are no quiet conquistadors. Even if their ideas are actually mediocre, riding in on a white horse and creating a spectacle is essential to the show.
The age of marketing uber-alles, social media 'reach' and personality cults has green-lighted armchair conquistadors who previously would have bided their time to reach maturity. It's no surprise that once they've shot their one-hit load, there's no sustainability or stamina behind it.
The other billionaire funded disruptive space startup has proven themselves less competent than "old space". Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin two years before SpaceX, and they've still accomplished a fat lot of nothing. Their most significant accomplishment to date is stalling ULA's Vulcan rocket for years, because they couldn't deliver engines on time. They still haven't been to orbit.
> All the conquistador really has to do is gallop in and show what is possible.
They were massively outnumbered, lost all their artillery and most of their horses. Nothing about what they did was easy, they only survived because they were better at politics than the Aztecs, and made many regional alliances. And because they got extremely lucky. It defies logic and all rational expectation that so many were able to escape Tenochtitlan with their lives. If not for their native allies, they surely never would have been heard from again.
> But when you get past that disruption phase the conquistadors often fall down.
Broken analogy. Despite their rocky start, the conquistadors would come to utterly dominated the native cultures (including their former allies.)
> Steve Jobs 2.0 (the return) vs ugly beige box PCs.
And we're all worse off for it. We, the aggregate computer consumers, have chosen a shiny prison instead of shabby freedom. Despite increased public awareness for environmental concerns, our computers have become increasingly less repairable. Apple's most significant innovation has been turning computers into fashion items that get replaced while still useful to avoid looking uncool.
> it remains to be seen if SpaceX will hold it together.
No more than the rest of the space industry, who are all still very far behind SpaceX. The whole thing may collapse if nerds ever figure out that Mars colonies aren't happening, but by all rights that realization should have come years ago.
According to 1491, this myth is inaccurate. I believe Mann's argument is more along the likes of "if Genghis Khan came through Europe during the black plague, none of us would be speaking Romance languages".
I am also sure bringing a disease that wipes out 30-90+% of your enemy should not be considered luck.
I do believe the metaphor is apt, because it's a story of leaders who come in loud, destroy things, but are lauded as civilizers or advancers of humanity. We have no counterfactual for post-1491 in the Americas, but there are reasonable arguments that indigenous people were more advanced in a number of fields.
There are no advantages to avoiding power. One of the big lessons in politics is people will sometimes roll in and mess up your life and it never mattered how much of a threat you were. Avoiding power struggles doesn't let people avoid the consequences. Similarly, avoiding struggles is also bad. If you can't resist someone taking your power, then you don't have any. It is nuanced and it is important to be selective in which battles to fight but there will always be some.
If you do want to be a bystander, you still have a responsibility to make sure that power goes to people with a grow-the-pie mindset and not people who only understand wealth destruction or wealth transfer. If wealth-destroyers gain power, you won't be spared.
But in the context of the article, I suspect that the most important definition of "nice" is probably "pays me for executive coaching".
The term isn't defined because "I am nice" is an axiom, "I can do what I need to get what I want" is the desired conclusion, and the article provides some motivated reasoning for getting from A to B.
Over the time, I have found myself more willing to fight over my "slice" of power in the workplace, making my demands assertively and showing that I know my value without traces of regret or false humility. That is something I have had to work on a lot, it makes me uncomfortable; but I understand that I "deserve" some power. If I am doing things right I cam claim my state for influence and being heard. I think this aligns with your point on being responsible with yourself and not just being a bystander.
On the other hand, there are other spheres in which I do not expect such power beforehand, so I'm not usually ready to draw my weapons. This may be a social encounter with barely-known people, friends, or even family. There are power fights there too, but somehow they feel different. Maybe I'm not as convinced of how I deserved such power, or maybe I'm not willing to do the effort anymore and I just want to fulfill my affiliation urge.
It’s a pretty straightforward values distinction.
When confronted with a situation where you have to choose, do you choose the exercise of power over being liked, or do you choose being liked over exercising power? In his formulation nice people tend to choose the latter.
But the OP (or McClelland who is cited in the OP) is more about power as an end in itself. That’s something very different, and IMHO very detrimental.
Occasionally you get someone with real creativity, but mostly you just get assholes. And they are ultimately responsible for the mediocrity of most organisations. They make noisy but poor decisions for personal reasons, and resist any change that inconveniences their personal ambitions and self-image.
I've been reading a history of Commodore, and at one point Jack Tramiel effectively destroys the brand by refusing to do a deal with a national computer distributor. He threw away the chance to compete with Apple and IBM because he refused to go into a partnership that threatened his aggressive one-up narcissism.
It's a persistent pattern. The story of Tramiel's companies is one of perma-drama, with constant swings between boom and bust. He was good at growing the pie up to a point, but not good at sharing to make the pie even bigger.
> If you do want to be a bystander, you still have a responsibility to make sure that power goes to people with a grow-the-pie mindset...
If wealth always goes upwards, one fine day people will reach for their pitchforks and those who are on the other side of the wealth destructors will loose everything.
It's an equilibrium we should aim at, neither wealth destruction nor up flow to the already powerful
IDK why people find it hard to imagine something worse than losing your savings, seems pretty easy and history is ripe with examples.
Sri Lanka banned fertiliser the other month, in a tea-snorted-through-the-nose decision. Bad time to be poor in Sri Lanka. If sane people don't try to keep control, that is the sort of decision making that happens.
This seems almost like a tautology. If people aim to get what they want, obviously people who want power will get senior positions (Ie, power). This power almost entirely lies on the back of those who seek achievement (because they want to do things), while those in senior positions reap the benefits.
In a way, it seems like the article is saying “if you want to be powerful, want power”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_...
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/02/17/planning-of-in...
It is a bit absurd what a decay there is here, from obviously good to increasingly conservative & closed models. But this discussion on power struggles was excellent yet lacked some of the larger context of what mode the business at large operates in, & Klein here had some semi-interesting if pointed ideas to get us thinking about modes of thr firm.
Unfortunately Scott- who is covering this has been pretty highly insensitive & crude repeatedly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6116063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29393152