Putin’s Principles of Management II

If you’re starting to climb the management ladder and need to know how to crawl over the bodies of the competition, let’s check in on the latest trends in leadership from Dear Leader Vladimir.  Because you should know what not to do.

Those of us who have inhabited the world of management in almost any kind of organization, public or private, can easily observe the symptoms of failure from afar.  We know from painful experience what’s going on inside Putin’s Russia because we’ve lived it ourselves. 

Let me start by stating explicitly that for Putin success is not an option.

The sequence of collapse starts with the Dear Leader’s ascent to power:

1. A smart, ruthless, and very sane leader achieves power simply by giving the existing elites what they want, and also by being the luckiest of the competitors.
2. Because of his intelligence and brutality, the results of the organization may actually improve for a while and everyone is happy.
3. Dear Leader then doubles down on the tactics that got him to the top.
4. He eliminates all potential competition.  In Russia they don’t even call the leadership structure a pyramid.  It’s called the power vertical.  Only the chosen few are even allowed access to Dear Leader.
5. Those chosen few are selected for their abject groveling and ability to tell Dear Leader exactly what he wants to hear.
6. Because Dear Leader has disconnected himself from reality, the results that looked so good immediately after his ascent to power start to crumble.  It takes a while before that reality penetrates through the vertical of power to Dear Leader.  The messengers are all shot and then replaced by even more pathetic boot lickers.
7. Eventually even Dear Leader senses that all is not well.  He then decides that “If you want to get a job done right, you have to do it yourself.”  He therefore bypasses the power vertical and begins to direct operations in the area of concern himself.  He calls the shots himself for even the most miniscule of decisions.  We call this micromanaging.
8. The symptoms of this micromanagement are that:
   1. 1  Dear Leader becomes overloaded with work,
   2. 2  The people in the field who have to execute the work have to wait longer for decisions, which means that they are continually being outwitted by more nimble, empowered organizations,
   3. 3  The decisions get worse and,
   4. 4  Willing workers become baffled by the stupidity of the decisions coming from management and lose motivation.
9. Dear Leader’s organization either gets defeated by competitor organizations, or Dear Leader is defeated within his own organization.

Putin was in Step 6 when he made the stupid decision to invade Ukraine.

He recently decided to bypass his own power vertical and start directing the war in Ukraine on a day-to-day basis himself.  That puts him in Step 7 now.  His path forward is clear.  We have seen this movie before.  Let’s hope we can limit the collateral damage. 

The point here, folks, is not to make a political comment.  We're all business here.  If you haven't seen Putin's style emulated over and over again in the business world, you haven't been paying attention.  All Authoritarian managers are somewhere on this progression and all will end up in Step 9 eventually.  Their failure is a feature, not a bug. 

If you work for a boss like Putin, get out like those poor draftees lining up at the borders of Russia.

How about you?  Do you have a similar story?  What has worked best for you?  Comment below.