Enjoyed reading this article, all valid points. However, the one thing that stood out to me in this area was how light I was in effective principles of management and leadership. As a CTO of an organization of more than a handful of people you eventually "get things done" largely via other people rather than being hands on yourself. Had to read a lot of Harvard Business Review to gain the skills and confidence for that. Just like programming, there are indeed tangible skills to learn. It's not just common sense and you're not just born with it.
It’s funny how, as you progress through a career and gain responsibility, those HBR articles go from seeming like a bunch of Markov chain corporate-speak to being on-target for that exact problem you had last month with the leadership team.
Are you sure they really have any more meaning, or are you just ascribing them meaning that exists more in your "evaluation context" than in the text itself?
Compare: the way meditation is usually taught. There is something "there" to communicate, but meditation teachers mostly fail to communicate it. To use an old phrase, they are "pointing at the moon"—but, to stretch the analogy a bit, they're doing this pointing indoors, where the sight-picture you get by following the tangent of their finger does not, in fact, contain a visible moon. You have to imagine taking the thing they're doing (pointing), and reframe it in a context where there is a hypothetical moon to see. Whether that helps you find the moon is more about what you know about the sky and fingers and angles, than it is about how well the meditation teacher can point. And this is why the teachers end up failing to communicate: they did not, themselves, figure out how to "reach enlightenment" by absorbing a verbalized lesson, but rather by pondering a gestalt mess of ideas that have little in the way of words associated—so they can't just turn that gestalt mess back into words.
So: are HBR writers pointing at a visible moon, or are their words Markov-chain-speak because they're trying to backwards-chain the gestalt mess of their own mostly wordless understanding into a verbal lesson?
What is up with the disrespect I constantly hear for wordless understanding? Not everything is best communicated verbally. There's a reason traditional education is often described as a series of falsehoods.
There's nothing wrong with wordless understanding per se; the thing that's "wrong" is thinking that you have words (i.e. a teaching) that can effectively, repeatably communicate a concept, when you actually just have a wordless understanding.
The problem of meditation teaching is false positives: people experience enlightenment while pondering some koan, so they think that that koan actually helped, and pass it on. It's superstition. Anything could have helped. Something that truly helps, should help more people than average, more often than chance—and if you've got that, you've got words.
False dichotomy. Understandings aren't completely wordless or wordable. They fall along a scale.
> Anything could have helped.
If something helped a person, and they want to pass it along, even if it's difficult to communicate in a tangible fashion, I'm not going to stand in their way.
Sure, but If I want to learn a difficult-to-communicate lesson, I would hope that the people who have a wordless understanding would keep their communicating to themselves—unless-and-until they come up with some coherent words to match their thoughts, that they can be sure can be used to reconstruct those thoughts without their brain there to help.
People don't yet know what they don't know, until they know it—so it can't be the learner's task to preemptively avoid vacuous lessons. That responsibility has to fall to the teacher.
However, a good writer should be able to convey even the most advanced topics in accessible ways. Often when I see someone relying on jargon and insider language too much, they strike me as a poor writer, regardless of their grasp of the source material.
The risk you run here is internally over-emphasizing events that happened more recently as more important. That could make them more relevant to your recent experience but not necessarily something of more value than the problems you were solving earlier in your career.
I have also found increased risk of bikeshedding. The higher you go, the more likely you're working cross-disciplinary with ego-intellects. That also leads to suppressing dissent (hierarchy relationships more than experience-based), leading to worse decisions.
Please don't listen to the HBR articles, they're generally very terrible and often can be summed up by survivorship bias.
