Why Darth Vader’s management strategy doomed the Empire from the start

This may not be an entirely original post, but I felt compelled to write after going to Secret Cinema Star Wars on Sunday evening with a few colleagues from Makers Academy.

After re-re-re-watching the movie I realised Darth Vader’s management strategy was bound to fail the Empire. Essentially, humans run on incentives and it seems that in the Galactic Empire, the incentive is to not-die. So if you don’t want to die, better not be at the bottom: stormtroopers get shot all the time. Nice armour, nice look, nice helmet… but your risk is big. Not a good strategy.

If you’re smart on the other hand (whether or not you’re dedicated to the mission of the Empire or left with no other choice) and you’re a fan of being alive, then you’d do well to show you’re worth more than a little bit of shooting and guarding here and there. But here’s the problem: if you’re too smart and move up the ranks to Vader’s inner circle, your chances of dying suddenly increase again to such extent that being a stormtrooper becomes an attractive proposition. It’s the bell curve of survival in the Empire: all the people in the middle are relatively safe, while those at the top and the bottom are expected to lay down their lives for their overlord.

So if I was a smart guy navigating the ‘job market’ in the Empire, I’d secure myself a nice, comfortable middle-management job, entering some data in some weird computer or looking at a glass-window that pretends it’s tracking every meteorite and spaceship in the galaxy. But I’d definitely avoid offering any of my more ambitious ideas, for fear of being spotted by someone in senior management and duly promoted into the murder-fraught upper echelons. No no, here’s more comfortable and less risky, far from Vader’s powers of telekinetic strangulation.

So all his direct line of commands are either egotistical power-grabbers or would-be martyrs for the cause. Either way, it feels to me that Vader surrounds himself with the worst people and it seems to me that any new recruit worth his salt would be aiming for a quiet, comfortable and safe role in middle management. Interesting set-up for the Peter’s principle I would say.

This said: I don’t think Vader minds so much. I mean, he has an uber spaceship already.

On a more serious note, what got me thinking about all of this is how my understanding and approach to management (which I see all around) got [rightly] shattered to pieces in the past couple of months. I have been reading books such as The Birth of the Chaordic Age (by the founder of VISA) and Let my people go surfing (by the founder of Patagonia) for a number of years. But it’s only when I found myself attracting talented individuals as part of my team at Makers Academy that I realised how management by itself was a broken concept (basically when I went from theory to practice). I started asking myself a few questions: who am I to tell someone how much they deserve to earn? Who am I to tell someone what to do? I want to help my team, I want to inspire them but I don’t see the point of telling them what to do, especially as I believe I am often wrong.

And thanks to Frederic Laloux’s piece with Reinventing Organisations as well as blog posts by the likes of Buffer and many others, I realised there indeed was another way to run organisations.

Makers Academy is now moving to a [managerless, self-management, teal, evolutionary] organisation and I’m excited about implementing the necessary processes for all of this to become reality without having anarchy or consensus.

The opposite of Vader’s fear-based strategy? Trust! Read more on this by Evgeny, Founder and CEO at Makers Academy.