You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square — But when a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there! T S Eliot Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
We’ve talked about setting ridiculous deadlines and generally messing with timing. We’ve talked about exaggerating benefits and hiding the risks. The final important thing that sociopath/leaders do is to take the credit for work that others have done when things go well and to pass the blame on to others when things go badly.
This is something that Venkatesh Rao calls the “Heads I Win, Tails you Lose” strategy. Of course, this is the very opposite of the commitment and consistency that the leader/sociopaths seem to be expecting from others. They expect others to honour their word and when they say that they’re going to do something by a certain time, then to do it. They use ridiculous timescales, the polishing of a vision and hiding of risks to get things moving. And then when things go well, they are around to take the credit, when things aren’t going so well, they’re nowhere to be seen.
One interesting wrinkle about this distribution of praise and blame is that, although it is generally in the best interests of the leaders to attach praise to themselves when things are going well, it’s rarely safe, or helpful to attach the blame to any particular person. Only when there is a truly massive stink, and something very bad has gone wrong, would a sociopath find it necessary to point the blame at a single person. Even in this situation, it’s sensible to simultaneously give the impression that someone is being fired, or being moved to another department because they messed up on a project, whilst at the same time communicating that this isn’t the reason. Why?
Because the last thing that the leader/sociopath wants is for the blame game to get forensic and evidentiary.
If someone is fired because of some particular offence, that someone may lawyer up and start gathering evidence to prove that they didn’t make that particular mistake, or that if they did, there were a string of other people who were also responsible.
How could there possibly be any benefits to such behaviour? This would seem — although I’m sure we see it in our colleagues every day, very bad behaviour indeed. But it’s important to understand that this behaviour is valuable because it is closely connected to other sociopath/leader behaviour. If there wasn’t a chance that the leader could take the credit when things go right and avoid the blame when things go wrong, there would be no incentive for the sociopath to persuade people in his or her organisation to embark on projects that are inherently risky and uncertain (and this is almost all projects). This pay-off isn’t guaranteed to the leader, but since attaching the praise to himself and ducking the blame will be the entire focus of their activities, they think there’s a good chance that they can pull this off.
So the benefits of “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose” are the same as the benefits of ridiculous aggressive timescales and mirage-like benefits and hidden risks — it allows risky stuff to happen — some of which is disastrous, but some of which pays off.
So before we get all high and mighty about how unethical it is for a leader/sociopath to overstate the benefits and soft-pedal the potential risks and costs of a project, safe in the knowledge that if things go right they can take more of the credit than is due and if things wrong they can duck the blame, we should remember somthing. None of these projects would happen if it were not for the energetic cooperation in the polishing of the fata morgana, the elevation of the shining vision and the hiding of the risks and costs that almost everybody involved in a project seems to help with.
The disadvantages of “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose” are main measured in the stress and emotional wear and tear on the people involved in a project who don’t realise that this is what’s going on. Occasionally, just occasionally, a project is so expensive and so disastrous that it sinks a substantial-sized company, but similarly, occasionally a project is so successful that it pays for a dozen failures.
Of course, the stakes are a bit higher for people working in start-ups, where for the apostate losers, there is a genunine chance of simultaneously working yourself so hard that you make yourself sick and missing a mortgage payment because the overdraft at the cool startup didn’t get it’s overdraft extended. Thinking about it in this way makes it especially clear how hard apostate losers should be thinking about the deal that they have with any start-up that they work for. If you’re a smart person who cares about doing a good job and you work for a start-up you should maybe asking yourself:
OK, I’m getting paid less than I would if I worked at a bank, yes the work’s more interesting, but there’s a far higher chance that when I come to work on Monday the bailiffs will have slapped a padlock on the office door. I have to shoulder pretty much all of the risks and costs of this baby going bust. How much of the win do I get if it succeeds?
If you’re under any illusion that this can happen take some time to read about the life and career of Nicola Tesla. He pretty much invented everything that you think Edison invented.