Invisible = Saving Free Speech In Corporate America.

If you work at Google, Apple, Amazon, Disney, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, Exxon Mobile, The Harvard Endowment, Kleiner Perkins — any iconic American institution — can you say what you think, write what you think, without putting your career in jeopardy?

Hi! My name is Francis Pedraza: I’m an animal rights activist, and Free Speech is the endangered species I care most about saving. Free Speech is all but dead in Corporate America. Although it is enshrined in the First Amendment, although we’ve fought wars in the name of freedom… can a freedom be said to exist, if it only exists in theory, but is never exercised in practice?

I receive emails all the time with disclaimers like this:

DISCLAIMER
The views and opinions included in this email belong to their author and do not necessarily mirror the views and opinions of the company. Our employees are obliged not to make any defamatory clauses, infringe, or authorize infringement of any legal right. Therefore, the company will not take any liability for such statements included in emails. In case of any damages or other liabilities arising, employees are fully responsible for the content of their emails.

Not only is this aesthetically disgusting, as it clogs up communication with mumbo-jumbo, it sets a hostile, Orwellian, tone. The subliminal message:

1. Don’t speak freely.
2. Anything you say, you say on behalf of the company.
3. Don’t say things that your colleagues will disagree with.
4. Any opinion that is not politically correct is a Legal and PR risk.
5. If you mis-speak, we will disavow you.

I want Invisible to be different. To succeed in business while also flexing my freedom of speech: that is my American Dream. Frankly, I feel it’s my goddamn god-given right! And I don’t want to be the only one in my company empowered to speak freely. I want to be free to say things my team members will disagree with. I want them to be free to say things that I disagree with. I want to be free to speak on behalf of the company, without feeling like every single thing I say needs to be universally agreeable or correct.

Easy! I’m just going to tell everyone to add THIS disclaimer to their emails:

DISCLAIMER
Hi! I’m an individual. I have opinions, and I say what I think. Sometimes I’m right. Sometimes I’m wrong. Some of them you’ll agree with. Some of them you won’t. We both win when I’m right and you disagree, and when you’re right and I disagree: that’s why we’re talking — because nobody has a monopoly on truth, there are gains to trade from dialogue. I work for Invisible. Invisible values my opinions, that’s why they hired me, and keep me around: the day I stop sharing my opinions is the day I stop doing my job. I don’t always agree with all of my co-workers, and they don’t always agree with me: that’s why we need each other. When we don’t agree, we talk, and if we still don’t agree, somebody decides, then we execute. Execution is the minimum agreement.

Ah! I wish it was that easy. But it’s not. It’s hard.

Why is it so hard?

Speech is powerful, so speech is dangerous. If someone at Lockheed Martin starting writing about The 21st Century Military-Industrial Complex, that would be damaging to the company, and so naturally, it would damage a career there. It turns out that many companies are “captured” in this way. Any regulated or subsidized industry has to be careful about what its people say in public about government policy. Any consumer products company has to be careful about what its people say in public, period, because public opinion affects sales; and the internet has made everything PR-flammable.

Speech is powerful, because speech provokes agreement and disagreement. The Corporation, as an invention, is an alignment technology. It aligns the interests of stakeholders — the public, the state, customers, team members, investors — towards a wealth-creating mission. If to speak freely is to risk mis-alignment, then the adaptive behavior is sanitized speech, devoid of any strong opinions outside of the consensus.

Consensus! Attune thyself to consensus! This is the First Commandment of Political Correctness. And the Second? Hierarchy. Receive consensus from Above. The third is: Only say things people agree with, and thou shalt prosper!

Agree with your manager. As long as she agrees with her manager. As long as he agrees with the CEO. As long as the CEO agrees with the Spiritual Leader Of The Nation. Which is normally the leading Progressive politician. When such a Figure is absent, Signal comes some combination of The Mainstream Media, Hollywood, and Academia; broadly, “The Elite.”

How come The Elite all seem to agree with each other? The same reason: Corporate Tribalism. They went to the same schools, prepared for the same jobs, and rose through the same ranks. For half-a-century after WWII, the economy mass-produced high income “jobs” at iconic institutions, and the skills for these jobs were mass-producible by elite schools, that fed supply to the job market. So, if you wanted to live “the American Dream” of retiring as a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, there was a simple recipe to follow: 1) work hard, 2) get into Yale, and 3) don’t rock the boat.

Incentives, incentives, incentives! They explain everything. It was not always so. From the Founding Era through to the Civil War, there were few institutions, and those that existed, including the government itself, were small; the American economy was fragmented: composed of individuals, families, and small businesses. After the Civil War, the first modern corporations were born, the nation began to industrialize, the population urbanized, and cultural evolution accelerated. After World War II, America became increasingly corporatized. And corporations tend to reward convergent thinking over divergent thinking.

Alas, if only I had the time to write a full sociological analysis of The Origins of Institutional Pathology in Post-War America! But regardless of how it came to pass, this is the strange world we find ourselves in. So the practical question is, is there anything we can do about it: what’s the alternative?

Half the solution is embodying free speech. Leaders need to speak freely in public, think freely in public, converse freely in public, debate freely in public, write freely in public, and not be afraid to express views that are outside of the consensus. This is quite literally leadership, both in the sense that progress can only come from new ideas — “as times are new, we must think and act anew” — and in the sense this act involves sacrifice, in the form of social risk-taking. There is always the risk that one will be wrong, or worse, right, but misunderstood, taken out of context, disagreed with vehemently, disavowed and forsaken.

Leaders are right to fear the mob. In 2019, the mob exists — everywhere, through the internet — it is powerful, and it is hungry: it demands catharsis, it is hunting for its next scapegoat to blame everything on, and punish, in an act of righteous revenge. Mobs love lynching. Yes, leaders are right to fear the mob. But they are wrong to let the fear of the mob silence them. The mob’s power comes from the consent of its victims. The leader must actively reject the values of the mob, and replace them with higher gods. Defiance is hard to kill.

The ethical motivation alone should be sufficient. Progress that comes at the cost of freedom, in my mind, is not progress. For the same reason, I don’t want to win in business if I cannot maintain my freedom of speech! I simply refuse that Faustian pact. Also, for the same reason, I do not believe we should abandon democracy because authoritarianism makes progress more rapidly. A free society does not need to agree on telos, on the goal, on the definition of progress. It just needs to agree on ethos, the mode of progress. And this is it. This is the how, the mode, we have agreed upon… and in a sense, we have made it an end-in-itself. We don’t know where we’ll end up, but let’s stick with it, and see where it takes us. The virtue of this mode is that it empowers individuals to become the agents of telos in society, to use their speech and their actions to provide, advance and debate their own goals.

Any leader who embodies the ethos of free speech, elevates its mythos: The American Dream becomes real for me when I see Elon Musk say whatever he wants on Twitter — when I see him strap his car onto his rocket-ship and send it into space, an extreme act of free speech — it literally inspires me to go and do likewise. The legend grows, and with it grows the freedom itself. Every leader that values the exercise of freedom over the risk of freedom, grows the legend of freedom.

Does freedom exist, if it only exists in theory, but is never exercised in practice? Freedom exists, not where it is protected, but where it is practiced. In the moment that Musk tweets, in the moment that he sends his car-rocket-progress-idol into space, freedom exists. He is literally bringing freedom into the world, as an invading force from Aeon, by practicing it as a way of life. He is creating a clearing, making it safe for others. The ancient Greeks believed that the gods of Olympus depended on mortal sacrifices to gain strength; the god that wasn’t worshipped would die. Libertas, she too is a god, and when we make sacrifices to her, she grows in strength, and invades the world through us.

By the same logic, America is less free today, perhaps, than it has ever been. Because Americans are afraid to practice freedom. We worship Phobos, the God of Fear, instead.

Thankfully, there is an incentive for taking these risks, it is not just an act of martyrdom (although, in my experience, it is that, too).The incentive is that innovation both requires and rewards divergent thinking. And the 21st century is different than the 20th: the United States MUST innovate to maintain its relative advantage over authoritarian China, whereas China merely needs to globalize to catch up; and more broadly, the world MUST innovate to remain at peace, instead of going to war over scarce resources.

The other half of the solution is minimizing the need for convergence. Markets themselves are great examples of this. In a marketplace transaction, the buyer and seller don’t need to agree on anything except for the price. So the advance of markets is correlated to the advance, not just of economic freedom, but of expressive freedom.

This is especially true for blockchains. Every startup that finds a valid use case for blockchains eliminates the need for trust, and thus liberates us from unnecessary convergence.

Markets, like entrepreneurship, reward divergent thinking in a way that internal corporate politics doesn’t: which is why free speech still exists among fund managers and traders. They literally need to debate to survive; the very activity of trading is a form of disagreement — and their measure of success is whether the market bears out the truth of their predictions. But as markets become more efficient, index funds — consensus capital — are replacing underperforming fund managers, so that soon, only the divergent-and-correct will survive.

How is it possible to minimize the need for convergence, within a corporation? It is possible. I assert that it is, because without it, my American Dream is not possible, so it is an article of faith. But also a Guiding Question, that we’ve been actively trying to figure out and embody at Invisible.

The first step is transparency. Speech itself is a form of transparency. The more speech and information is shared in the historical commons, the less risky new speech and information is, because everything is contextualized.

Establish a minimum ethos of shared values, principles, references and information to create trust on a human level.

When I say “shared values and principles,” I have not written down a definitive Document like The Ten Commandments. I don’t have a fixed understanding of the truth. The way I understand the truth will change over time. So instead, I prefer the archeological approach of layering. Every new conversation, every new document, every new speech and action, is a layer in the historical truth of the company. This body of historical speech and actions is formed, not just by me, but by everyone in the company. Instead of “Our Mission” and “Our Values” being a Founding Document written at a single moment in time, which every new hire has to read and agree with, we constantly return to these questions, answering them again and again, in different ways and formats, iterating both on our understanding, and its expression.

If Invisible has a Corporate Church, it is our weekly Conversations meeting. For one hour, the entire partnership meets, not to discuss any immediate practical business, but to… talk. About different topics. This builds a body of historical understanding.

We are also always sharing things: music, articles, books. Every morning, I send out a daily reading from a book written by a dead person. I have done my best to emphasize the Lindy Effect, which explains why you should READ THE CLASSICS. Most people have an Information Diet that consists of Junk Food: from pop music to social media influencers to Netflix to bestsellers — almost all the media that is consumed in 2019 is of very little lasting value. Instead, I’ve done my best to encourage everyone at Invisible to read as many books by dead people as they can get their hands on, and to make these books references in their thought and decision-making; connecting Corporate Conversation with The Great Conversation.

I have also done my best to encourage us to PUBLISH OR PERISH! Everything from product deployments, to reports, to dashboards, to essays. This creates a shared Situational Awareness and Hive Mind. It also builds an anti-fragile culture that is comfortable with bad news, conflicting narratives, viewpoints, data points, and paradox in general.

We’ve created clear guidelines for publishing — no client data, no personal compensation data, no security data — but otherwise, everything is fair game, until told otherwise.

When it comes to publishing your own views, the same rule applies: express yourself, until told otherwise. Everyone is afraid of expressing the “wrong” opinion: of saying something that people might judge or disagree with. But Until the hierarchy tells you to fall in line, keep going, and develop your arguments, because you never know when a breakthrough in thinking might occur.

By building this huge body of shared interaction and history, there is a large surface area for people to engage, discuss, debate, disagree, and hopefully, ultimately, align with.

Divergence is valuable, but so is convergence. To be “of one mind” accelerates decision-making. All activity in a corporation stands on economic ground. Everything has a cost. Speech, discussion, debate — it has a cost. Decisions cannot be deliberated forever. By making small investments in the Hive Mind over time, divergence is maximized, and deliberation-per-decision is minimized, because everybody has the context they need to rapidly find alignment.

The second step is hierarchy. Ultimately, decisions need to be made, and alignment will not always be easy to find. Hierarchy determines who gets to make those decisions. If somebody isn’t in charge, nobody is in charge. It is vital that the decision-maker not be captured by consensus. The decision-maker must retain the initiative, or the tail wags the dog. Although a decision-maker should be comfortable not only exercising hard power, but when necessary, pushing it to the limit; every decision-maker is also a politician, and before exercising hard power, does well to avoid exercising it at all by finding minimum alignment. The threat of hard power is often all that is necessary to prompt alignment discovery.

Conversely, the threat of departure is often all that is necessary to prompt a decision-maker to seek alignment, instead of forcing a decision. In a free society, every individual has the right to exit. If companies are alignment technologies, then the ultimate failure of leadership is for alignment to collapse, because power put consent to the test, and pushed it past its breaking point. Sometimes situations require such tests, but good leaders know where that limit is.

The third step is evolution. The organization becomes a meta-individual, as it does its technology-magic of aligning, assimilating, integrating and absorbing more and more individuals into a corporate decision-making body. As context gets built and decisions get made over time, the organization naturally develops white blood cells that act as a defense mechanism. Every new hire is like an organ transplant that the host either accepts or rejects. Those that it accepts, bring with them something new — a new divergence, a new diversity, a new set of values and principles and frameworks, a new personality and style of leadership.

The individual’s operating system ultimately needs to mesh with the organization’s, otherwise alignment won’t be reached, or will be too expensive to maintain, and the relationship with end.

When the organization rejects, either by not hiring, or perhaps even more visibly, by firing or failing to retain, it also sets precedent. Both the positive and the negative actions of hiring and firing, of gaining people and losing people, reinforce incentives.

Between these moments, of gaining people and losing people, management happens. Management also sets precedent and reinforces incentives; encouraging some behaviors and discouraging others.

The point is that a company is a giant network effect. An instrument vibrating at a unique frequency. A magnet attracting and repelling.

The goal is not to attract the maximum number of people. The goal is to attract the right people. And the only way to be sure that the people you are attracting are, in fact, the right people, is to repel the wrong people.

A company should not be universally attractive to prospective team members. That is not the goal. That is a bad company. That company will make consensus decisions and ultimately fail. A good company is not a home for everyone. A good company is home to a certain type of person.

That is why my view on diversity is not politically correct. The politically correct view on diversity is that a good company should attract racial, sexual, and gender minorities. My view on diversity is that a good company should divide every minority into two sub-minorities: those attracted, and those repelled. That way, the company will end up attracting representatives of every minority, gaining divergence, but will repel those that won’t align with the decision-making culture, gaining convergence.

Instead of trying to make every company a home to every type of person, if every company was a home to a different type of thinking, then every type of person would find a real home, where they could really be themselves.

In a world in which companies are truly unique, culture shock would be high, and it would be hard to switch companies. But we live in a world in which every company is embracing a single set of “Progressive” values, modeling itself after Google. Isn’t that odd?

Invisible is “saving free speech in corporate America,” not because all people and all speech is welcomed here. For example, it is not an acceptable view for someone at Invisible to hate Invisible: patriotism is important. We have a culture that filters out certain views. But my claim is more nuanced: I believe we have a cultural model, which, if successful, will spread, and if it spreads, will allow every company to attract a different type of thinker, and create for those thinkers a home to diverge as freely as practicable while converging to execute, retaining their sacred individualism and expression.

Does freedom exist, if you don’t have the freedom to be wrong, or to be disagreed with? In theory, we recognize the value of divergent thinking, and that divergence implies that sometimes everybody will be wrong, and that somebody will disagree with everything. But in practice, we want to agree with our leaders 100% of the time. Our companies become part of our identities, so we want to agree with our companies 100% of the time. So we sanitize our leaders, and we sanitize our companies, and we sanitize our branding, and we sanitize our communications. And we wonder why we’re not innovating fast enough, and why China, on a bad year, grows three times faster than the United States, on a good year.

Somehow, I’m becoming a figurehead. And in 2019, a figurehead is always at risk of losing his head, I figure. I don’t want to be a figurehead! I want to be me. I am the one being asked to play this role, to do this work, to make these decisions. So I am going to bring all of myself to work, including my mind, including my weirdness, including my divergence, including my opinions.

And now that I have created a clearing for myself — to be me without feeling guilty — I suppose I have created a clearing for everyone else in the company, and saved the soul of corporate America in the process. You’re welcome.

“Man is a political animal.” Aristotle spoke the-truth-that-cannot-be-spoken in corporate America today. It is not possible to have an apolitical organization. Because politics isn’t about what party you vote for in an election every two years, it is about human nature. Humans have opinions. Thinking diverges. Power forces the convergence of thought. Therefore, power is political. In the 75 years since WWII, we have attempted to separate the private opinions of The Individual, from the decisions that need to be made in The Workplace.

This compartmentalization is disingenuous and absurd. As a leader, I am expected to share my private opinions on Facebook (or not at all, as it turns out). But then to make decisions on Email. This is the separation of Church and State in 2019.

But the world has changed, and is more competitive, and requires more innovation. The Work itself has changed. It is more intellectual, more emotional, more creative — more personal.

So it is my belief that those corporations will thrive that don’t discriminate against Hedgehogs. “A Fox knows many things, but a Hedgehog one important thing.” The Era of The Fox, the leader that compartmentalizes, is coming to an end. The Era of The Hedgehog, the leader that contextualizes, is about to begin. The Hedgehog sees everything as One. Politics, Economics, Literature, Religion, Science, Art, Technology, Sex, Culture, Business, Philosophy… One.

The Hedgehog is the endangered species I care about saving, because The Hedgehog is the only animal foolish enough to think out loud. And I’m confident that as long as Hedgehogs are allowed to think out loud at work, Free Speech, as practiced, will be reborn in Corporate America, and America will save the world… again.

Sources
1. A wise friend.
2. Gerard. Scapegoating.
3. Tocqueville. Democracy In America.
4. Thiel. Straussian Moment. Stagnation. Zero To One.