The Society, The Family, The Individual.

It’s all about me! A historical comparison of the achievement of value, its impact on a team, and lessons for leadership.

Recently, I’ve been reading a lot more broadly. I normally read a lot of maths books, theoretical physics & self-empowerment type books. But in the last few months, three authors have really caught my attention:

• “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” - Peter Frankopan
• “Fall of Giants” & “Winter of the World” - Ken Follett
• “Sapiens” & “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” - Yuval Noah Harare

I’m surrounded by historians & purveyors of the arts. My girlfriend is an Art History graduate with a keen interest in architecture, and my brother an indelible knights & castles enthusiast who became an Ancient & Medieval History Graduate & Law postgraduate. Being a scientist at home, disappointingly, makes me a minority. This has, however, given me a respect for cultural influence and the importance of communication in all walks of life - especially software. But software and computers are just a way of making information flow faster. As a Data Engineer, the world looks to me like a network of information. That information has a scope, a speed and a density, and what I am about to describe is an example of a cultural by-product of an exponential increase in all three of those dimensions over the space of a few short centuries.

My reading of the last few months has made me think about the changing attribution of attainment in the last thousand years of society - at least in Britain. In Medieval Times and before, an achievement might have been attributed to a society. Empires would conquer cities, land masses & peoples in the name of the Empire. God would grant an Army speed and swordsmanship in battle, the conquerors assumed their divine right to rule and their position in the inter-societal hierarchy relative to the vanquished.

At the dawn of the industrial revolution, this started to change. Achievements could be made within the span of a century, maybe even a few decades. The likes of JM Sainsbury, J.P. Morgan, Mayer Amschel Rothschild and Thomas Twining founded extra-societal organisations, or ‘companies’, that would be resilient enough to outlive and outlast more than ten monarchs, two world wars, countless financial & biological crises, the British Empire, and some may even argue the concept of Empire. Over the course of a few centuries, the attribution of attainment became less in the name of an Empire, a Society or a Country, and more in the name of a family, or a brand as we might know it today. So why do I think this was? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - in Britain in particular - the flow of information sped up. Medical advancements meant that an individual or family could be relied upon to last a period of time and retain information, and education was such that those that could afford it could learn enough in a short enough space of time to take over a business, increase its value, produce an heir and pass it to their children.

And then came the twentieth century. Post-war and post-empire, the old families that had ruled Britain for so many centuries were out of favour with society. Civil rights movements purged the country of inherited attainment and in many cases - family brands. The tried and tested iterative process of training up your own blood to keep your brand in situ now required that those descendants make their own credentials. In addition, medical improvements increased life expectancy to the point that a person could be born, educated, found and grow a brand or value within the space of a single lifetime. The invention of the silicon chip and Von-Neumann architecture produced machines that could alter, publish & transport information at a rate and volume never before dreamed of, which in turn sped up the acceleration of brand value to bring international recognition into the scope of a few decades. The result? The channelling of the attribution of attainment from Society to Family that had taken place a few centuries beforehand took one step further, and the iteration cycle of birth, education, foundation & recognition was now fast enough to fit into a single lifetime.

What do we think of now when we think about success? Few people would describe an iconic family as an idol. For most of us, individual brands and personas make up what we picture when we think of ambition, attainment & success. Celebrity culture and the concept of the ‘Celebrity CEO’ often attribute achievements such as the creation of a product line, the distribution of a service or the organisation of a people to a single individual. ‘Churchill won the war’, ‘Jobs built Apple’, ‘Boris did Brexit’. These impacts on society involved thousands if not millions of individuals with wide ranging expertise. A normal ‘Small to Medium sized enterprise’ is the product of millennia of man-days of education. Yet so often we attribute it to one brand, one person or one name.

The next time you think about achievement or are attributing credit, consider whether you may be oversimplifying. Powerful systems are rarely powered by a single core, value is more like a neural network: the output is a weighted sum of many inputs. Is your chosen creditor really so heavily weighted in the attainment of the given value as to be worth exclusivity? When you ask yourself - ‘who do I want to be?’ Consider that leadership is just one role in the pursuit of value. Being a leader does not mean that you were the sole executor of the tasks required to achieve - in fact the role of a good leader is to enable others to execute tasks by providing them with the means and direction to do so. The modern view of value as attributable to a single individual leaves the vast majority of the inputs in shadow, often causing them to feel more of a spectator to someone else’s goal than the driver and owner of the challenge. And with a lack of ownership comes a lack of motivation to succeed. It’s not just the right thing to weight credit properly, it’s also more likely to help you become the leader of a successful team.