Leadership is overrated.
Much of what we see, admire, and call leadership is little more than a Ponzi scheme. One group throws its scruples overboard, climbs aboard a train it knows is unlikely to reach its destination, and convinces itself that momentum is the same thing as progress.
Then there is the other kind: those who have spent so long inhaling the stink of their own farts that they eventually mistake it for perfume. They believe their own story. They become convinced that conviction itself is evidence.
Their often extravagant compensation packages, collected just before the venture meets its untimely end, make me question that conviction rather more than they seem to.
Leadership is overrated.
What is actually missing is grit.
Not the theatrical variety sold in keynote speeches and plastered across motivational posters. Something harder. The willingness—and the capacity—to withstand the abrasive forces of defeat without being destroyed by them.
Grit is the intelligence to recognize a wrong turn and correct it. It is the strength to swim against the current when the current is carrying you somewhere you should not go, and to swim with it when resistance has become nothing more than vanity.
It is knowing the difference.
That distinction matters because persistence without intelligence is merely stubbornness. And leadership without the capacity to absorb failure is often just confidence on borrowed time.
We do not need more Ponzis.
But Ponzi schemes are not entirely useless. Not all of them, anyway.
Most leave nothing behind but debris. Capital is burned, promises evaporate, careers are damaged, and the wreckage is eventually forgotten. Pure destruction.
But occasionally, something more interesting happens.
A failed venture can contain useful machinery.
Even when the whole thing goes belly-up, others may come along and pick through the carcass. They find the components that actually worked. They separate the useful from the fraudulent, salvage the technology, the ideas, the methods, the lessons—and reanimate the Frankenstein.
And, with a little luck, the monster becomes something useful.
It changes how things are done.
SpaceX is such a Ponzi.
Yes, it is a Ponzi in almost every way that matters to the analogy: enormous ambition, extraordinary capital requirements, relentless promises about a future that does not yet exist, and a tolerance for risk that would look irrational almost anywhere else.
But it has also changed the world.
And it may actually make it.
Every once in a while, one does.
That is the uncomfortable part.
Because what it takes to make such a venture real is not leadership alone. Leadership is too clean a word for it. Too respectable. Too easily packaged.
Sometimes it takes something closer to madness.
The useful kind.
The kind that keeps going when rational people have already calculated the odds. The kind that can absorb failure without worshipping it, change direction without surrendering the destination, and continue building while everyone else is busy explaining why it cannot be done.
Perhaps that is what we have been calling leadership all along.
Perhaps the better word is grit.
And occasionally, madness.