Does Longevity Dim Vigilance?

The Weight of Eminence

This appears to be the third in a series of blogs I have written on the use of power.

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Imagine you are the co-founder and head of the second most valuable company in the world by market capitalisation. In fact, your company is the first to breach the $5 trillion mark.

Today, that company sits at the forefront of the AI revolution, manufacturing the kind of product that defines the technological rivalry of the global superpowers military, political, and economic to the extent that the product itself is highly secretive and closely protected.

Power Confers No Immunity

There are very few people in this position of power, and with that power comes great responsibility, both personal and public. The need to be aware and wary of the associations and friendships you keep must be uppermost in your mind, besides the counsel you keep to remind you of that Latin phrase, 'memento mori'.

To be the master of all you survey does not automatically exempt you from the travails of our humanity, with the vulnerabilities and lapses in judgement this entails. The quantum of power that dogs us is such that it is sometimes necessary to understand how associations and persuasions present a risk to all involved.

Consider, for instance, which of those involved has the most to gain or lose when presented with a situation that, in the bright light of day, would create such suspicion and concern that all that power is put at risk.

Samson, Joseph and Desire

Yet it is the oldest lure in human history, the one of desire, the appeal to our vanity that leads to a momentary loss of control. We have a name for it now, the honey trap, though only the name is modern; the method is ancient. It has needed no refinement in three thousand years, because the weakness it works upon has not changed.

It is the Samson and Delilah dynamic, where she prevailed on her lover to reveal the secret of his strength, then disclosed it to her kinsmen, who had paid handsomely for it. That betrayal led to his capture and to his suicide.

Then consider the Joseph and Potiphar's wife situation, where he resisted the lure, the desire and the urge, and ended up in prison for his trouble. Yet in that act of integrity he met with such good fortune that a man sold into slavery became second in command to the Pharaoh of Egypt.

The moral here is to be careful rather than carefree or careless. In the theme song of the James Bond film 'The Spy Who Loved Me', we hear the words 'Nobody Does It Better', and we see how easily we can be swept away in the mist of that delusion.

The Confession

So, here is the issue. The CEO of Nvidia in the United States has just confessed to an affair with a businesswoman whom US intelligence officials are reported to have designated a Chinese spy; an allegation Beijing dismisses as unsubstantiated.

We are assured that no secrets have been lost, but no one can say what is exchanged in the nonsensical incomprehensibilities of sweet nothings whispered into the ear of a paramour; the pillow talk in which the man desires the liaison and the woman, apparently, aspires to the information. It is a black box which, if opened, might reveal more of the lurid than of the facts.

What gives the matter its particular sting is that nothing of the sort has attached to him before. In 33 years at the helm of the company he founded, there has been no whisper of impropriety, nothing to suggest a man careless of his position or his name.

At risk is a 41-year marriage to a woman he fell in love with 46 years ago, a position he hopes to keep for a long time to come, a fortune, should this lapse lead to an ultimate schism, and reputations well beyond the principal dramatis personae.

Does Longevity Dim Vigilance?

Which raises a question I cannot answer but am unwilling to leave alone. Does longevity in power dim one's vigilance to susceptibility and temptation? Three decades of unblemished conduct might be read as evidence of character, and perhaps it should be. Yet it might equally be read as three decades of accumulated confidence in one's own judgement, which is a very different thing and a far more fragile one.

The man who has never fallen may simply never have been pushed, and he may come to mistake the absence of a test for the possession of immunity. Deference compounds the problem. The longer one is unquestioned, the fewer the people willing to ask the awkward question, and the easier it becomes to believe that it does not apply. Vigilance, after all, is a discipline, and disciplines atrophy when they are never called upon.

Perhaps that is the real lesson of eminence. The hazard is not the temptation, which anyone can see coming. It is the quiet erosion of the instinct that would have recognised it in time.

Stewardship, Not Invincibility

Power does not confer invincibility, even if you seem all-powerful; neither does it preclude accountability, even if none can question you. The board keeps faith with its founding CEO, but an investigation is necessary to ensure that a weakness in resolve has not done more damage than an unfortunate fling.

Power is a great responsibility. Its stewardship demands both discipline and the humility to appreciate its transience. Above all, to whom much is given, much more is expected.

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From Oosterbeek to Manchester, We Will Remember Them

A Voice at the Lectern

This morning, I was honoured to take the Second Reading, I Thessalonians 4:13-18, at the Remembrance Sunday service at Manchester Cathedral. It could have been a daunting task; my voice is still affected over two years after radiotherapy, and there is the almost terror of hearing your own voice amplified in the cathedral nave, something that has the capacity to leave you tongue-tied in nervous fright.

There were probably a few hiccups, but I am glad that people still came to commend me for my reading. Yet there is more to this occasion than my standing at the lectern in traditional garb, which someone suggested looked quite regal.

Connections Near and Far

An uncle, the husband of my mother's baby sister, was in the Nigerian Army. He may well have fought in the Nigerian Civil War, but no one sat us down to tell stories of war, triumph, or human suffering. We were in England then, and the most I learnt of the Civil War came from the photojournalism of Peter Obe, compiled in his photobook, "Nigeria: A Decade of Crises in Pictures".

I had a partner from Lancashire in the 1990s, whose family history was intricately linked to the Second World War. His maternal grandfather, a soldier in the King's Own Scottish Borderers, 7th (Airborne) Battalion, participated in Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands. He died in combat and is buried in the Arnhem Oosterbeek War Cemetery.

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His mother in England was born on the day her father was declared missing in Holland. For years, I would meet his grandmother, who travelled from England to Arnhem when the family came over every September, for the memorial services. This built into my psyche: the words, "We will remember them."

A Tradition Kept

Even after we broke up, we remained friends, as we are to this day. I did have a close attachment to his family, and for the friendship we had developed, I was invited to, and did attend, the obsequies for his grandmother, a dear woman of such strength and character, independent to a fault, with a resolution forged out of the tragedy of war.

My friend would come over to the Netherlands when I lived there to continue the tradition his grandmother had observed for some 35 years. There was one time when he invited me to Oosterbeek to visit his grandfather's grave with him. It was a solemn and moving occasion, and I was already in such pain that it presaged my hospital admission barely a month later.

Before the White Headstone

We stood before the grave and read the inscription to a young man of 29 who had a wife, a boy, and a newly born daughter, as well as parents, all of whom would have been waiting for his safe return home. War rips lives apart and tears hearts out. Man's inability to find reconciliation without the shedding of blood, much of it innocent, is exemplified in that white headstone, and in the hundreds or thousands crowded out of view by the cynosure of what brought us there.

Then my friend became emotional. He promised me this had never happened to him before, but in that moment there was a different kind of reckoning: memories and connections to a man from whom he descended, yet who had died over 25 years before he was born.

The Weight of Remembering

This memory is why I appreciate the weight of responsibility and circumstance; to remember, to acknowledge, and to honour those sent into battle to help the greater minds in power come to some sort of compromise to end all hostilities.

I am a pacifist, and yet I do see circumstances where aggression must be met with force, though I am ambivalent, if not trenchant, about how young blood is sacrificed to the ends of men, accepting that resolution cannot come at the shooting of guns but at the meeting of minds.

Blood That Cries Out

As a person of faith, I also think about how much innocent blood has been shed in many lands, and who, in the eternal scheme of things, should have been held accountable for these crimes against humanity. Like the blood of Abel, I believe the blood of the many, shed and spilt to the ground, cries out to heaven for vengeance and justice.

The wrath that awaits some leaders who have initiated war will be unimaginable. This abominable tragedy unleashed on the earth, even into the present, cannot go without divine retribution of eternal consequence.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Excerpt from For the Fallen - By Laurence Binyon

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Stewarding the Use of Power

Responsibility rarely appreciated

With power, it is said, comes great responsibility, which I am afraid is rarely appreciated by those who hold it. It is understood instead by those on the receiving end of it, and sometimes only once that power has been lost.

People have wielded power without any consideration of the qualitative and quantitative consequences of what that exercise of power affects.

Authority that resists questioning

Understanding power is an interesting concept. I find myself in situations where people with administrative authority, and therefore essentially powerful, enforce their will expecting never to be questioned, daring anyone to challenge their decisions.

Whilst I am rarely confrontational, I can be quite persuasive. There is something about life, experience, and the ability to communicate that allows for a rather subtle use of power, one that can change the effect of how others use theirs.

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Months of quiet resistance

For months, I was under the stressful and overwhelming use of power from above to implement solutions I was neither comfortable nor confident in.

The change itself was a worthy one, intended to improve the user experience of remote users across the board, in an environment where the inefficiencies were costing an estimated £1m a week. The pressure, in that light, was understandable. It was also pushing us towards a solution that was not ready.

None of my misgivings were intended to stall anything; they were there to inform, and they informed to the extent that what was beginning to look like the abuse of power eventually eased off.

It was not one single event, but a progressive occurrence of battling the odds against expediency, until eventually the people involved drew up chairs to listen to my concerns.

When urgency met reality

At the same time, management were pushing for emergency and immediate implementations, even as issues that could not be ignored emerged.

There was also a miscommunication that almost put everything we were trying to do in jeopardy. What we were planning to do and what was relayed to the user community were not the same thing, and the gap between them caused panic. The whole communication had to be revised completely.

Providence, not luck

It would be easy to call what followed luck, but it was not. It was the combination of the persuasion, the issues, and the miscommunication that created a perfect storm of providence, one that applied the brakes and forced a fundamental review of everything we were doing.

It was the kind of rethink that returned us to what should have been due process all along. Everything had been moving towards unreasonably immediate implementation, but the rethink bought us more than a week to put the proper processes in place.

Suddenly, I had more than a breather. I had the scope to do things right, as I shepherded the proposal from technical review, through approval, and on to the mass deployment that starts tomorrow.

Stewardship over naked power

The power of persuasion does hold significantly more influence than the naked use of power to achieve ends for ends' sake.

However, it is the stewardship of power that matters more. Stewardship includes the understanding of restraint, the willingness to be accountable, and knowing the responsibility that comes with having custodianship of power rather than ownership of it. It is knowing when to use that power, and when to hold off before it becomes the reckless use, or abuse, of it.

So much can be achieved when you understand the power of use as distinct from the use of power. I find that life does equip you with a great deal more wisdom, and wisdom is considerably more powerful, even when others seem to wield power without the background that life and experience give you for the just use and exercise of responsibility.

Related blogs

Blog - The Folly of Promises Before Practicalities

Blog - Authority Without Consent

Blog - Badly Designed Systems Are Just That

Blog - You Do Not Get A Painter to Fix Another's Art

Blog - A Picasso No One Can Repaint

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Out Of Africa

Returning With Know-How

On my first return to England, the country of my birth and childhood, I was visiting to acquire equipment and software for a company in which I held a 30% stake as the Technical Director. We called the company NextStep, and the know-how I was bringing to it was large-scale desktop publishing, intended to replace antiquated printing workshops.

Every computer shop I walked into looking for a high-spec computer, a laser printer and a scanner was staffed with people who could lay out the spiel. Rarely could they answer my technical questions, and least of all demonstrate the early SCSI interface to the scanner I wanted to buy. It fell to me, with my technical and hands-on repair knowledge, to do what I needed to do to see things work.

The Phrase Du Jour

What this also revealed to me was that I had expertise and marketable skills, and it accelerated my decision to return to the UK soon after I had accomplished my mission. Finding a job, however, was difficult. Beyond the difficulty of accepting that out of Africa came this vastly knowledgeable chap, there was the pushback that I did not have "UK-acquired experience"; that was the phrase du jour.

What use is experience if you do not know how and why things do not work in the first place, and then how to fix them? I was apparently of no use if I was not going to drive to customer sites replacing electronic boards and panels by trial and error. I was not going to waste my knowledge on that. Eventually, I was given an opportunity where most of my knowledge of hardware and software was useful. Out of Africa too easily gets ignored.

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Dipping A Toe

Almost forty years later, I asked a question of a professional services firm that considers itself global, yet whose footprint in Africa and South America amounts to little more than dipping a toe in the water and withdrawing it before the temperature has registered. I phrased the question along the lines of whether there was no concept of talent or of a market in these geographies, and I was given the concession that talent exists.

The company, however, was more determined to grow its market in the United States. That was where the money and the opportunity were. I appreciated the answer, candid as it was to my hearing, and I do not pretend the difficulties are imaginary. The cost of entry is real, currencies move against you, regulation varies from one border to the next, and fees do not always compare with what the same work commands elsewhere. None of that is trivial, and anyone who waves it away is not being serious.

Still, I read more between the lines: the firm had offices in only four countries in Africa, three in South America and two in Central America. A global company in 50 of the 195 recognised countries in the world today, which is to say a quarter of the world, and the richest quarter at that. That is hardly global. And in a professional services firm, the people are the product. There is nothing else on the shelf.

Share Or Creation

What I heard in that answer was a preference for taking business from competitors rather than creating business where none yet exists. These are not the same ambition. One is a contest over an existing pot, where every gain is someone else's loss and the margins are argued down year on year. The other is the harder, slower work of being first, of shaping how a service is understood in a place before anyone else has bothered to turn up.

The first is defensible. It is measurable, it reports well each quarter, and nobody loses their job for pursuing it. The second is how firms become institutions. I would only observe that a business which only ever competes for share eventually inherits the market it fought over, and little else.

The Circle Closes

What struck me was not that an old phrase had survived, but that the assumption behind it had. In 1991 the objection was that my experience had been acquired in the wrong place, though it exceeded by some distance what was being asked for. Almost forty years later, the objection is that there is no one to hire, no bench, no pool to draw from. Both are versions of the same refusal to accept that out of Africa comes expertise.

The loop is neat, and it is self-sealing. A firm with no presence in a place has no sight of the people there. Having no sight of them, it cannot staff a project. Unable to staff a project, it does not bid. Not bidding, it books no revenue. Booking no revenue, it concludes there is nothing there. The absence confirms itself, and the conclusion arrives dressed as evidence.

More Than Raw Materials

It made me wonder what the Global South was good for, apart from the extraction of raw materials and resources. Yet for those too myopic to see opportunities in Africa, because the lure of spenders in other domains is too attractive to ignore, it is worth remembering that many seeds of human progress, knowledge and development were sown there.

The Romans had a phrase for it, ex Africa semper aliquid novi, out of Africa always something new, though they offered it as a remark about novelty and oddity rather than as praise. Two thousand years on, the continent is still credited with producing surprises and rarely with producing competence.

The richest man in the world today, who has at times recently breached the trillionaire mark, came from Africa. So did the yellow fever vaccine, and the mathematics behind the CT scanner that sits in almost every hospital you will ever visit. The first human heart transplant was performed in Cape Town in 1967, when the continent was supposedly incapable of such things. Mobile money was ordinary in East Africa years before tapping a phone to pay became unremarkable in London.

Nobel laureates in the sciences have come out of Africa too, by ancestry, by birth, or by having spent part of a childhood there, regardless of ethnicity. The point is not that any one of them proves anything. The point is that the list spans medicine, physics, surgery and finance across seventy years, and that it is still read as a series of exceptions.

Someone will say they left in order to succeed, and many of them did. Their African origin remains significant all the same. Something in that background gave them the impetus to strive, to persevere and to succeed in places that were initially alien to them, and that something did not travel with the aeroplane; it was already there before they boarded. Talent departing is not evidence that none exists. It is evidence that someone else saw it first.

The Buy Side

The talent argument is only half of it, because Africa is also a market, and a young one. The median age across the continent is under twenty, which means the customers of 2045 are already in school.

The habits of a market are formed long before its spending power is. Much of that market has leapfrogged a generation of infrastructure altogether: it never had the branch network, the landline or the chequebook, so it went straight to the handset. By 2022, roughly 28% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa held a mobile money account, against 13% across developing economies as a whole. That is not catching up. In places, it is being ahead.

Then there is the question of whether a market exists at all in the regulatory sense, and a continental free trade area signed by some 54 states is an answer to it, however unevenly it is being implemented. Add universities producing graduates faster than local economies can absorb them, and you have the two things a professional services firm claims to want: clients with problems, and people capable of solving them.

Out of Africa, for those who can see the potential beyond the easy pickings and low-hanging fruit of apparently developed economies, there is the scope to be a real global company, an early mover in certain domains as well as a matured competitor with the pedigree to seize the initiative. That is the case of having both the vision to see and the mission to accomplish.

A Poverty Of Need

Which brought me, unexpectedly, to an old line about how hard it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. I had always taken it as a warning about greed. I am no longer sure that is the whole of it. The difficulty with having a great deal is that you stop needing anything, and once you stop needing, you stop looking. Sufficiency is comfortable, and comfort is incurious.

That is the poverty in the riches: not a shortage of means, but a shortage of need, and therefore of attention. A firm with enough business in the places it already understands has no reason to learn a new one. It is not malice, and it is rarely even a decision.

It is simply what satisfaction does to curiosity, a self-sufficiency born of contentment with what you can already see. It comes at the cost of adventure and possibility in unexplored lands, where usurping others in saturated markets is thought worthier than creating entirely new markets.

So I am asking, and I am genuinely asking, because I do not think the answer is obvious: what would it take? If out of Africa is a difficult prospect, Africa is not the impossibly impenetrable continent it once was.

I come in peace.

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