How Fools Rise and Fall in the Hierarchy of Power
A Remark That Refused to Leave
About ten years ago, I met an old colleague for lunch.
We had once worked for the same multinational company, although in very different corners of the business. He was a trader. Our company had built a highly specialized trading floor out of necessity, balancing gas portfolios that had grown too large and too complex for improvised solutions. He was the first genuine trader they ever hired, brought in to inject professionalism into a function that had previously relied more on enthusiasm than expertise.
I, meanwhile, was responsible for Business Development.
I had been hired for an altogether different reason. The company had begun encountering problems it had never faced before, and I had developed a reputation for finding solutions to challenges everyone else considered impossible. Our daily work rarely overlapped, yet over the years we had acquired something far more valuable than frequent collaboration: mutual respect. We had spent enough time observing the same machine from different vantage points to recognize competence when we saw it.
As these reunions so often do, the conversation drifted toward our former employer.
We traded stories. We laughed about management decisions so spectacularly misguided that they had somehow survived committee after committee before finally being blessed into existence. We revisited office intrigues that had once seemed like matters of life and death but had long since settled into the comfortable mythology shared by former employees. There was the obligatory badmouthing of ex-bosses, a few colleagues whose careers had ascended with breathtaking disregard for their abilities, and that peculiar amusement which comes only when enough time has passed for old frustrations to become entertaining.
Neither of us had much interest in living in the past.
During my years there I had often noticed former employees lingering around the cafés near the office, dropping in unannounced, finding excuses to mingle with people who still worked there. There was always something faintly melancholy about it, as though they had never quite accepted that their chapter had ended. It made them look like people waiting for an invitation that was never going to arrive.
I never did that.
Neither did my friend.
We left, closed the door behind us, and got on with our lives.
So reminiscing over lunch was exactly what it appeared to be: light-hearted banter accompanied by the occasional smirk, nothing more.
Then he said something that broke the rhythm entirely.
It has stayed with me ever since.
“You were never a manager.”
It was not an insult.
Nor was it criticism.
It was a diagnosis.
At the time I failed to recognize it as such.
I laughed.
“I literally was a manager.”
He slowly shook his head.
“No,” he said. “You managed people. But you never had the mindset. That’s different.”
It took me years to understand what he meant.
The Wrong Assumptions
When I joined that company, I carried with me the standard illusions of youth.
Like many people who enjoy solving difficult problems, I assumed organizations existed for exactly that purpose. It seemed almost self-evident. A company that rewarded competence should outperform one that did not. A manager’s responsibility, I believed, was to identify obstacles, remove them, improve processes, make better decisions and, in doing so, create more value.
Reality, as it turned out, had attended an entirely different management seminar.
Over the years I became remarkably good at solving problems everyone else had quietly accepted as permanent features of corporate life. I enjoyed dismantling inefficient processes, connecting departments that barely acknowledged each other’s existence, and designing systems that allowed ordinary people to produce extraordinary results simply because fewer obstacles stood in their way.
Looking back, I eventually realized what I actually was.
An expert disguised as a manager.
The distinction matters.
Experts and managers often occupy identical offices.
They are not the same species.
Experts are fascinated by reality.
Managers are frequently fascinated by organization.
Experts ask whether something works.
Managers ask whether something fits.
The difference appears almost trivial until one discovers how often those questions produce entirely opposite answers.
If I found a broken process, I wanted to repair it.
If a process produced reliable results, I considered the matter settled.
Politics scarcely entered the equation because results seemed to me the strongest argument anyone could possibly make.
Eventually I learned that results are merely one of several currencies circulating inside large organizations.
Visibility is another.
Predictability is another.
Loyalty is another.
And perhaps most valuable of all is the ability to reduce uncertainty for your superiors—even if the uncertainty you eliminate has remarkably little to do with solving the problem that created it in the first place.
The Immune System of the Organization
Over time, headquarters began to notice me.
Budgets became larger.
Responsibilities multiplied.
Projects grew more visible.
Senior executives began asking for my opinion.
At the time, I interpreted all of this as recognition.
Today, I suspect much of it was something else.
Visibility alters the way an organization responds to you.
People above you begin wondering whether you might become useful.
People beside you quietly calculate what your ascent might mean for their own prospects.
People below you ask themselves whether attaching their wagon to yours might improve their chances of moving upward.
Most interestingly of all, those immediately around you begin searching for ways to contain you.
I sensed it long before I could explain it.
Meetings acquired an unfamiliar atmosphere.
Information arrived a little later than it used to.
Conversations stopped the moment I walked into the room.
Projects that had previously enjoyed enthusiastic support suddenly became entangled in mysterious procedural complications.
Nothing dramatic.
Nothing anyone could point to.
Nothing that would survive an accusation.
Just the slow, unmistakable appearance of resistance, like hairline cracks spreading across a wall long before the plaster finally gives way.
One afternoon there was a knock at my office door.
A colleague stepped inside and asked whether I had a few minutes.
I invited him to sit at the meeting table and offered him a coffee. He accepted. We exchanged a few pleasantries before he began speaking.
At first I struggled to understand where the conversation was going.
He spoke in circles, hinting at something without ever naming it. It sounded less like a discussion than someone carefully approaching a subject he would rather not be discussing at all.
He headed part of Logistics.
He was one of those rare people who got along with almost everyone. He had earned his position through expertise rather than political instinct, and I respected him for that. He was not naturally evasive, which made his hesitation all the more conspicuous.
After several minutes of words that seemed determined to avoid their own destination, the real purpose of his visit finally emerged.
He had not come on his own behalf.
He was carrying someone else’s message.
I interrupted him.
“Did Trading send you?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“Let me guess,” I continued. “They think I’m an asshole.”
He smiled awkwardly.
“I wouldn’t use exactly that word…”
“But yes.”
I knew immediately what this was.
Not an attack.
An invitation.
Or, perhaps more accurately, an attempt at domestication.
I had never played office politics.
That made people nervous.
Whenever Trading presented open positions to Risk Control, I had the inconvenient habit of asking questions that refused to fit neatly inside their carefully prepared narratives. They preferred discussions that ended with agreement. I preferred discussions that ended with understanding.
Those are not always the same thing.
Office politics, however, could not be used to pull me back into line because I had never entered the game in the first place.
I thanked my colleague for having the courage to deliver the message.
Then I told him I was pleased.
He looked genuinely surprised.
“Pleased?”
“Yes,” I replied. “If they thought I was a pushover, I’d be worried.”
I shrugged.
“I can live with being the asshole.”
Looking back now, I do not believe anyone involved was particularly malicious.
The organization was simply behaving the way organizations almost always behave.
Every living organism develops an immune system.
Organizations are no different.
Anything that alters the internal balance of power eventually provokes a response.
Not because someone necessarily plans it.
Not because conspiracies lurk behind every closed door.
But because institutions, like living creatures, instinctively defend their existing equilibrium.
I resigned in 2011 for personal reasons before that process had the opportunity to unfold completely.
Perhaps I escaped.
Perhaps I simply walked away before discovering how the story would have ended.
Either way, distance offers one remarkable advantage.
Patterns become visible that were impossible to see while living inside them.
The Product Becomes the Organization
Years after leaving, my friend’s remark finally settled into place.
“You were never a manager.”
What he had recognized was something I had failed to recognize myself.
I had never truly understood the game everyone else had been playing.
I believed the company existed to build products, solve customers’ problems and generate profits.
Many of the people climbing its hierarchy appeared to believe something entirely different.
For them, the organization itself had become the product.
Status had quietly replaced purpose.
Promotion had replaced achievement.
Visibility had replaced contribution.
The ladder had become more important than whatever building it happened to be leaning against.
Once that realization settled in, I found myself looking at almost every large institution through a different lens.
Corporations.
Political parties.
Universities.
Government departments.
Charities.
NGOs.
Religious organizations.
Beyond a certain size they begin, almost without exception, to develop remarkably similar internal mechanics.
Officially, they exist to pursue goals in the outside world.
Unofficially, they devote astonishing amounts of energy to managing themselves.
Like medieval cities, they build walls not only against outsiders but also between neighborhoods within their own walls.
They invent rituals.
Titles.
Committees.
Approval chains.
Ceremonies.
Entire administrative ecosystems whose primary purpose is no longer producing anything of value but preserving the structure that already exists.
As this process advances, success becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from advancement within the institution itself.
The ladder quietly replaces the destination.
The Hierarchy’s Favorite Ingredient
That realization, however, raises an uncomfortable question.
If organizations increasingly reward success inside the hierarchy rather than success outside it, what qualities do they eventually begin selecting for?
The answer is not intelligence.
Nor is it competence.
Both certainly help.
But they are surprisingly unreliable.
Competent people are difficult to predict.
Experts develop inconvenient habits.
They ask awkward questions.
They challenge comfortable assumptions.
They notice contradictions others have learned to ignore.
Worst of all, they often care more about reality than they do about consensus.
Reality is a troublesome employee.
It refuses to attend strategy workshops.
It declines invitations to team-building exercises.
It has an irritating tendency to overturn beautifully crafted PowerPoint presentations with a single inconvenient fact.
Power generally prefers something more manageable.
Something more predictable.
Someone whose certainty remains dependable even when the evidence does not.
What I Mean by an Idiot
This is where the word idiot requires clarification.
I am not referring to someone with a low IQ.
History is crowded with highly intelligent fools.
Nor do I mean someone who lacks education.
Universities manufacture plenty of educated idiots every year with astonishing efficiency.
The idiot that interests me is something far more specific.
He is a person whose certainty exceeds his understanding.
Someone who has stopped asking whether he might be wrong because he has become convinced that standing on the correct side is more important than discovering the truth.
He mistakes conviction for competence.
Recognition for authority.
Visibility for influence.
He rarely invents ideas.
He adopts them enthusiastically.
He rarely examines principles.
He performs them.
He does not usually arrive at conclusions.
He arrives at allegiances.
He is not necessarily malicious.
Quite often he is entirely sincere.
Sometimes painfully sincere.
And that sincerity makes him extraordinarily useful.
Power has always depended less upon intelligence than upon dependable enthusiasm.
Intelligence asks whether an order makes sense.
Enthusiasm asks only where to sign.
Every hierarchy eventually rediscovers the same uncomfortable truth.
Competence creates value.
Certainty creates stability.
When institutions find themselves forced to choose between the two, they often begin, quietly and almost unconsciously, preferring stability.
Not because they despise competence.
But because competence introduces uncertainty.
A competent person might disagree.
He might discover a better way.
He might expose an uncomfortable truth.
He might force everyone else to admit they have been wrong.
Certainty asks for none of those things.
It merely asks for agreement.
And agreement scales remarkably well.
The Reliable Believer
Once you begin looking through this lens, certain patterns become difficult to unsee.
Organizations do not merely reward performance.
They reward predictability.
A brilliant engineer who continually questions established practice may produce immense value, but he also produces friction.
A merely competent administrator who faithfully repeats accepted doctrine creates far less value, yet almost no uncertainty.
One improves the machine.
The other reassures the machine that it is already functioning perfectly.
Large institutions have a remarkable appetite for reassurance.
Not because everyone inside them is foolish.
Most are not.
Nor because every manager secretly fears competence.
Many actively seek it.
The problem is structural rather than personal.
Every layer of management filters information before passing it upward.
Each filter smooths rough edges.
Each summary removes complications.
Each presentation becomes a little cleaner than reality itself.
By the time information reaches the upper floors, uncertainty has often been polished away until confidence appears to have replaced evidence.
The people most comfortable operating inside that environment are rarely those with the deepest understanding.
They are those least troubled by the absence of it.
The expert keeps discovering new complexities.
The true believer keeps repeating old certainties.
One becomes increasingly cautious.
The other increasingly confident.
And confidence is infinitely easier to promote.
After all, hesitation rarely inspires committees.
Doubt does not energize quarterly reviews.
Humility seldom dominates performance evaluations.
Certainty fills auditoriums.
It wins elections.
It survives board meetings.
It sounds decisive, even when it is spectacularly detached from reality.
That is why certainty is so frequently mistaken for leadership.
It is easier to recognize than wisdom.
It speaks more loudly.
It requires fewer qualifications.
Most importantly, it allows everyone around it to stop thinking.
That is a service many institutions value far more highly than they would ever care to admit.
The Scaffolding of Power
That preference explains one of history’s most persistent and perplexing patterns.
Again and again, we watch people rise through institutions while displaying remarkably little of the competence one would normally associate with leadership.
Entire careers seem curiously immune to failure.
Projects collapse upward.
Managers survive disasters that would have ended anyone else’s employment.
Political movements elevate their loudest believers while quietly sidelining their most thoughtful supporters.
Universities produce administrators faster than scholars.
Corporations manufacture vice presidents at a pace engineers can only envy.
None of this is accidental.
The people ascending these structures are often not the most capable.
They are the most useful.
Useful because they defend the narrative.
Useful because they absorb criticism before it reaches those above them.
Useful because they enforce consensus with a conviction that never pauses long enough to become curiosity.
Useful because they mistake obedience for virtue and conformity for wisdom.
Every successful hierarchy eventually accumulates such people.
Not because it is necessarily run by idiots.
But because idiots make exceptional scaffolding.
Scaffolding is one of civilization’s least appreciated inventions.
Nothing of great height is built without it.
Yet no one mistakes it for the building itself.
No tourist photographs the scaffolding.
No architect frames it as the masterpiece.
No historian mourns its disappearance once construction is complete.
Its entire purpose is to support someone else’s ascent.
Then, when the structure can stand on its own, it is quietly dismantled and carried away without ceremony.
The tragedy is not that scaffolding exists.
The tragedy is that scaffolding rarely realizes what it is.
The useful fool imagines he is climbing.
Very often, he is merely being climbed.
The Unwritten Rule
There is an old rule that appears nowhere.
You will not find it in employee handbooks.
It is absent from political constitutions.
No revolutionary movement prints it on banners.
No university teaches it.
Yet it reappears with almost mathematical regularity wherever human beings organize themselves into hierarchies.
If you wish to climb, be useful.
If you cannot be useful, be visible.
If visibility proves elusive, then at least be certain.
Because certainty is contagious.
It attracts followers.
It reassures superiors.
It unsettles doubters.
Most importantly, it relieves everyone around you from the burden of asking difficult questions.
Once certainty becomes detached from understanding, the ascent begins almost automatically.
Not because the climber is exceptionally gifted.
But because certainty is easier to reward than wisdom.
Wisdom hesitates.
It qualifies.
It asks for more evidence.
It recognizes complexity.
Certainty does none of those things.
It marches.
Institutions often mistake that march for leadership.
The Ladder
That climb is what this essay is about.
Not stupidity.
Not intelligence.
Not even power itself.
It is about the peculiar ladder that appears whenever human beings build sufficiently large hierarchies.
A ladder climbed by people convinced they are ascending toward influence, while many are gradually becoming little more than the means by which others reach the summit.
Some ladders deserve to be climbed.
They lead to opportunity.
To responsibility.
To genuine achievement.
Civilizations depend upon them.
But there is another kind of ladder.
It appears throughout history with unnerving regularity.
Each generation paints it anew.
Each generation convinces itself that this time it leads somewhere different.
People queue eagerly at its base.
They compete for the lower rungs.
They celebrate every step upward.
From below, the climb appears noble.
The higher rungs disappear into smoke.
Only from a distance does the full picture emerge.
Only then do you notice what the ladder has been leaning against all along.
Not a monument.
Not a palace.
A furnace.
