This was horribly written. Succinctness is a virtue.
>>> CEOs are orientation locks. The opposite of steering is orientation locking. To enforce Newton’s first law, the inertia one, on dancing human systems inclined to violate it. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t inertia that’s the problem for most companies, it is lack of sufficient inertia in the right direction. Enough to punch through any resistance that might be encountered. And the reason they lack the inertia is that CEOs aren’t steady enough in their jobs as orientation locks, providing a steady True North signal to everybody else doing more local kinds of steering work.
>>> The primary CEO function, and the trait the good ones are selected for, is to provide the gyroscopic stability required to keep a company vectored in the chosen direction. They end up in the jobs they do because they counterbalance an organization’s natural tendency towards distraction, ADD and momentum dissipation. A typical company is a wandering, wobbling hive mind, liable to spend all its time chasing distractions if you let it, before dissolving into a bunch of clever tweets about crappy prototypes.
>>> As the orientation lock, the CEO becomes the human locus where momentum compounds; the psychological platform others build on. They are the steward of whatever snowballing network effect or unleashed natural wealth-creating dynamic is the company’s raison d’être. Their primary job, and ideally their only one, is to protect and feed that dynamic, and get everything else out of the way.
>>> Every act of steering leaks or drains at least a small amount of momentum, no matter where in the company it happens. But steering at the CEO locus truly hemorrhages momentum, creating serious, possibly existential, vulnerabilities. Because by definition there are no systems for doing it well. If there’s a system, it would have kicked in before things got to CEO level. Worse, steering at CEO level might actually kill whatever compound-interest dynamic is driving the whole show, killing not just live momentum, but its source of renewal and growth.
> In case it wasn’t obvious, this post has been something of a parody of the business writing form I’m talking about.
