Ben
Ben
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

The key problems here are the creation and identification of sufficient skill, together with ensuring the next founder has inherited a position of sufficient power to remake the institution.

The identification component is hard (see the “Market Rate” section of Hiring Is Obsolete), and I don’t think our present society is particularly good at it.

In 2015, I was at a large annual conference held by a charity organization. The founder had left the project a few years before, and I learned that he had originally funded the organization by taking on credit card debt. Shortly after, the leadership held a Q&A session. An audience member asked why the charity’s projects had recently become more conservative, and expressed worry that the charity was losing the distinctiveness that made it valuable. The leadership explained that they’d recently lost some funding and had to lay off staff, and so they were dropping the more radical programs to avoid upsetting donors. (I got the impression that they were very worried about their own jobs.)

I was struck by the contrast between the founder’s boldness, which allowed the organization to grow, and the successor’s timidity. Few institutions today would even consider handing off power to the credit card debt guy, even when he’s the only one who can get stuff done; “Disruptive technologies are developed by disruptive people”, to quote from the same Paul Graham essay, and this isn’t just true of technology. On the other hand, credit card debt guy’s competent boldness would be noticed and rewarded if he were in, say, the Roman Republic or colonial America, both of which fit your prediction of having “a less harsh trade-off between stability and innovation”.

    Ben

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