Two of the most iconic companies of our time — Wells Fargo and Volkswagen — had their employees faking accounts and rigging emissions data, respectively. Not because they were corrupt, but because nobody could challenge the master plan.
Conventional wisdom will have us believe that there’s a master strategist — some heroic persona with a genius for foresight — up there who puts together some grand plan that everyone’s waiting to execute.
And this feels undeniably true because we all suffer from the “fundamental attribution error,” where we tend to look for a source for the good or bad things happening to us. So, in organizations, we attribute success to the strategic genius of the CEO — their vision, their discipline, their execution.
In times of crisis, we instinctively crave the comforting presence of a strong leader who knows where we’re headed. That’s probably why business books, magazines, and podcasts are full of leadership lore that portrays individuals as chess grandmasters who outthink their competition.
My problem with conventional wisdom is that it relies too much on the cult of personality of the so-called master strategist. Followers wait for this person to get inspired so they can execute. That leaves the organization an intellectual playground for one person, rather than leveraging the company’s collective intelligence.
Our corporate culture also has a hard time accepting that strategy is iterative — that the best strategies are often wrong and incomplete at the outset, but the key is to get feedback, course correct, and repeat until the mission is accomplished.
That’s what happened at Wells Fargo and Volkswagen — ambitious top-down targets, no room for disconfirming data from the front lines, and employees who couldn’t challenge the plan without consequences.
All this makes me wonder about the celebrated genius CEOs of our time — were they really patient enough to trust the process — iterative, wrong, course-correcting — until they got somewhere?