Each person has unique feelings and opinions, so a group’s purpose doesn’t necessarily resonate with each person. However, each group promotes a set of values, and every member has at least some association with at least some of those values.
A group is made of its members, so every individual person entering or leaving a group changes the group’s culture. A large and long-standing group won’t change as much from 1 person, but the progressive changes of the group through membership always express a trend over months and years.
Since fear binds people together, and fear is rarely subtle, most massive groups tend to operate as diametric opponents of one another (e.g., conservative/liberal, Christian/secular, Star Wars/Star Trek)
As groups scale, leaders must adopt a hands-off approach. They must make better decisions over the people they appoint, and fewer decisions about anything anyone actually does.
Large group leaders must juggle far too many competing values and subcultures to maintain much sense of order. For this reason, groups that scale become ever-increasingly awful at doing what they were originally purposed to do.
An executive needs many specific background elements that allow you to perform and relate:
- Change many job functions across many jobs, but stay in one industry.
- Have either over a decade of relevant management experience or an MBA from a pedigreed university.
- Live in a large metropolitan melting pot (e.g., New York City, Mumbai, Singapore).
- Avoid living in culturally homogenous metro areas (e.g., Houston, Washington DC, Madrid).
- Gain a slight advantage by being male.
To determine a high-quality leader, observe someone’s small-group leadership first, which often goes back to their parenting skills.
Leaders can’t create ideals for their entire group. They must consider their members’ purposes and their public image, along with other groups’ power over them. Thus, they’re not entirely responsible for anything the group does, and serve more as an image of the group’s goals.
Most large organizations create homogeneous experiences to promote a shared image and value system. This will usually knock off some personality from the formerly small group, but will also permit it to grow indefinitely.
The CEO of McDonald’s has more in common with the CEO of Ford than the service workers of McDonald’s. A CEO’s job is the same in both: decide with several layers of abstraction from any work done the public can see, often with nearby assistants performing research for them.
Over time, large groups must make dramatic decisions that transform everyone in the group. There are many factors to consider, so most successful leaders consume high-quality creations, sharpen their intuition, and trust it profusely. This usually works, but a leader’s bad day through the influence of 1 relatively unimportant person’s failure can affect thousands or millions of people.
People individually can only handle so much change over a small window of time before they lose their mind. Organizations are the same, proportionally to the aggregate of their openness to new experiences minus their failings in communication.
Gossip travels quickly, so an organization that lies will rapidly become dysfunctional.
As of 2022, the USA’s Income Tax Code socially engineers every resident of the USA to become the following:
- Married with 2–3 children
- College graduates with a student loan
- Working a career as an educator
- Paying off a mortgage on a house
- Investing into a retirement account, preferably a 401(k) or 403(b)
- Generally unaware of the above
Since large-scale leaders must be self-conscious, their personalities are usually not very interesting, which is why the elite class of a free society is made of the same cut of boring, influential workaholics.
There are only two ways to make large-scale changes in a large group:
- Sacrifice your reputation and influence in a spectacular public display in the hopes of influencing others toward your beliefs after you’re gone.
- Find like-minded people and break off with them as an entirely separate group, which is only possible if you have the power to do it (or the creativity to find a way).