Brussel Sprouts
Or How a bit of arrogance prompted the development of a leadership framework
\These days, I find myself wandering down rabbit holes in the early morning hours. There’s something about working with a partner who is always available and willing to go down there with me.
My use of LLMs feels so much like a superpower that I want to run out and buy some tights, a cape, and some brightly colored underpants. With the LLM as my mental exoskeleton, I get to explore the inner reaches of ideas. This morning, I focused on leadership.
The prompt? I have a very good friend who is a PhD candidate. We have fantastic conversations about the content and structure of leadership. We started a long time ago with a probing question about the relationship between fear and integrity. The TL:DR is that courage is largely about maintaining your integrity as risk increases.
The other day, he sent me a short clip of a piece of an interview with Marc Andressen, the founder of Andressen-Horrowitz, the massive Silicon Valley Investment firm. Andressen made his money by converting the CERN originated web browser into Netscape. He’s had an incredible ride and is worth billions.
In the interview, he bragged that he had no introspection. He described introspection as a guilt derived boondoggle for thumb suckers. He claimed that his lack of self-awareness made it possible to be always moving forward and never looking back.
He was bragging about being a sociopath. And, the truth is that there is a correlation between sociopathy and CEO success. Just ask Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, or Travis Kalanick.
I love to question the places in my life where I experience disgust. That’s how I learned to love Brussel sprouts. I enjoy investigating those places where I have a strong, negative emotional response.
My immediate response to the Andressen interview was to think, ‘Oh, one more guy who thinks that being rich makes him a great man and an authority on what’s smart.’ I threw a little bit of the current anti-billionaire fervor. I even added a strong subtext of envy.
This is all for a fellow who happened to be in the right place at the right time and recognized/commercialized someone else’s work. It’s a pattern in Silicon Valley’s wealth creation playbook. I tickles that part of me that wishes I’d been clever enough to be lucky.
So, I engaged Claude, my current late night sparring partner, in a conversation about leadership. As is often the case in my interactions, Claude had challenges keeping up with the question flow. We pushed back and forth to create an idea. Like it usually does, the finished product emerged as the completion of dozens of rounds.
(One of the ways I tell if a question is good is if the LLM quits in the middle of the answer. I particularly enjoy trying to find the shortest question that causes the most work. In spite of that tendency, Claude and I came up with an interesting idea.)
In the end, we developed.a spectral view of leadership. In this framework, there are 10 pairs of complementary opposite values/behaviors. Where I thought that Andressens assertions were way over the top, I landed understanding that the key to leadership is knowing how to weave a path through those opposing values.