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What if the CEO had no authority?

Take it a step further: What if you had no authority either? Same job, same responsibilities. You gauge success the same way you gauge it today. The only difference is that you can’t exert your authority and make it stick.

How much would change? Very little, I hope. Those who frequently rely on their authority to make decisions and make them stick are “leading” (in quotes because they aren’t leading in any meaningful sense of the term) a dispirited collection of unmotivated second-raters whose hearts aren’t in their work and heads aren’t in the game.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

I just finished Leonard Susskind’s The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. If you enjoy having your mind explode, you need to read it, because your mind will detonate at least three times while you do. Probably more.

The Black Hole War re-introduced me to grok — Robert Heinlein’s term (from Stranger in a Strange Land) for understanding something deeply and intuitively. Susskind used it to explain why people have so much trouble with quantum-mechanical and relativistic concepts … they have no way of grokking them.

It’s also a reasonable way to understand why many IT departments loathe a technology that might solve two long-running business challenges.

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