Yet long before Silicon Valley began touting “high agency,” Dostoevsky explored the same idea. In "Crime and Punishment," the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov argued that extraordinary people, like Napoleon, are entitled to violate moral rules in pursuit of a greater purpose. It was his belief that he was one of the chosen that led him to commit cold blooded murder.

Elon Musk is the epitome of the high-agency ideal. He ignored the critics and overcame incredible odds to build great companies like Tesla and SpaceX, but those same impulses also led him to the DOGE cuts, which epidemiological models estimate to have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and predict will result in millions more, while not cutting the deficit in any meaningful way.

If anything, the cult of high agency seems to be gaining strength. Recent books like Theo Baker’s "How to Rule The World" and Sarah Wynn-Williams’ "Careless People" portray many Silicon Valley denizens as so out of touch that it borders on solipsism, driven by greed and oblivious to the damage that they cause. Like Raskolnikov, they believe that any collateral harm is a small price to pay for their genius.

Yet Crime and Punishment is not a happy story and Raskolnikov, in the end, became a cautionary tale, repenting in search of redemption and spiritual rebirth. I don’t see that happening in the tech world any time soon, but there are signs of a comeuppance. According to Pew, attitudes have hardened against AI and Fortune reports that even the technologists themselves are having misgivings.

And, as Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine suggests, people who consider themselves to be high agency tend to keep doubling down until the universe gets the best of them. As I have long maintained, Putin is not a rational actor. It takes a significant amount of self delusion to think that you can easily conquer a country of nearly 50 million highly motivated and technologically sophisticated people.

Feeling empowered to make choices isn’t the same thing as acquiring the wisdom to make good ones. We shouldn’t confuse exceptional survivorship with exceptional achievement. In the end, the universe will win out.

Things that change the world, or even a small part of it, always arrive out of context for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. That’s why great leaders need to be great communicators, because an idea that doesn’t gain traction is an idea that fails.

That’s easier said than done. As the award-winning author and broadcaster Fareed Zakaria has put it, “Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them.”

Clearly, if he struggles, we all do.

The role of a leader has changed. It is no longer enough merely to plan and direct action. You need to inspire meaning and empower belief. That requires leaders to communicate clearly and powerfully by stripping away everything that doesn’t need to be there, speaking to shared values and meeting your audience where they already are.

In "Cascades," I wrote that the key to transformational change is small groups, loosely connected but united by a shared purpose. The job of leaders today is to help those groups connect and forge a common purpose. Every transformational change begins when enough people start telling themselves the same story about the future.

Yet enemies are rarely truly vanquished and, at some point, you must make peace. Every ideology and methodology is flawed, whether it is a Soviet-style command economy or the latest management fad. Eventually, you need to adapt, make adjustments and focus on new problems to solve. That requires agility.

That’s why strong leaders create shared identities rooted in shared values. Riling people up through emotion or ideological purity can drive action, but eventually they need something more sustainable. Values are how an enterprise honors its mission. At some point, you need to go beyond “us and them” and build a larger sense of “we together.”

“Identity can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate,” Francis Fukuyama wrote in his book on the subject. The challenge of leadership has never been to make people think alike. It is to help people with different backgrounds, interests and perspectives see themselves as part of the same story.

That is how shared identities are built, and how institutions endure long after any single victory has been won.

Every organization, whether consciously or not, develops norms and rituals that shape behaviors. In a positive organizational culture, norms and rituals support behaviors that honor the mission of the enterprise. Negative cultures undermine that mission. To change an organization, you need to change its culture.

The problem is that culture is made up of things that you can’t see, while behaviors are more obvious. That’s why managers usually focus on incentives to change them, because there is a clear causal relationship: you do these things that we want and you get a carrot, but do other things that we don’t want, and you get the stick.

Yet incentives are often problematic. People want to feel they are living up to the standards of the groups they belong to and being the kind of person they aspire to be. The communications professionals in Alberta weren’t trying to undermine the new strategy. They were trying to be the kind of professionals the organization had spent years teaching them to be. Asking people to stop being who they think they are is unlikely to be successful.

That’s why if you want to change behavior, you need to redesign the rituals that encode the norms that drive it. Culture changes when people find new ways to honor the mission they already believe in.

The problem is that as we build ideas on top of ideas, the forces of accretion and interaction can create complexity, and things begin to get bogged down. This, in turn, creates norms, rituals, and behaviors that favor what’s come before rather than what could be. That’s why the status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully.

Yet there are also a number of strategies that  leaders can employ to help their organizations incorporate and act on new knowledge, while also avoiding needless complexity that gets in the way of getting things done. In the Friction Project, Sutton and Huggy Rao recommend building subtraction tools, such as “good riddance reviews, in order to get rid of requirements or procedures that get in the way. Amazon developed the concept of single threaded leaders to limit troublesome interactions.

Increasingly, the knowing-doing gap is being recognized as a serious and important problem. There have also been a slew of books that have come out about it recently, including Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book "Abundance," Jennifer Pahlka's "Recoding America," Marc Dunkelman's, "Why Nothing Works" and "Hack Your Bureaucracy," by Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai. All offer helpful insights and suggestions.

But the most important thing to remember is that the knowing-doing gap is, above all, a leadership challenge. It is very rare for people to come into work without wanting to achieve anything meaningful. Their ability to perform is, in large part, a result of the culture you create and you prepare and empower them to succeed.

Many did not trust him or feel any connection. He felt distant, like some mysterious authority from Kafka’s Castle, someone from outside their community looking to dictate their behavior. Meanwhile, others signaling similar authority, wearing white coats, and claiming similar credentials felt closer on social media while offering very different advice. Fauci, in the eyes of many, became a nefarious figure.

In the early days of mobile phones and social media, we celebrated technology’s ability to undermine authoritarian institutions in the color revolutions and the Arab Spring. Now, as Moisés Naím has noted in The Revenge of Power, authoritarian governments have learned to undermine democratic institutions using those same tools. Through “populism, polarization and post-truth,” claiming to represent “the real people” against corrupt elites, experts, institutions, immigrants, and other outsiders.

Today, people reject information from institutions they feel alienated from and leaders need to lead differently. Power no longer flows primarily from the top-down, but emanates from the center of networks, and you gain power through connecting out. You can’t simply project authority from a podium. You need to build connections to communities in ways that respect and affirm their identities.

We desperately need to earn back trust. It is no longer enough to merely plan and direct action. We need to inspire meaning and empower belief. That requires connection not through mass media or high-flying campaigns with clever slogans, but through small groups, loosely connected, united by a shared purpose.

The true story of change is that of a strategic conflict between your future vision and the status quo, which always has inertia on its side and never surrenders its power gracefully. It has had years—and sometimes decades or even centuries—to build up the sources of its power and it will be ruthless in defending it.

That’s why we always start every transformational effort by doing a resistance inventory, working to anticipate who will resist, what form that resistance will take, and how we can best mitigate it. Then we map the institutional forces that support the status quo, those that are open to the future vision, and those that are still on the fence. We also identify cultural triggers and how best to redesign rituals to encode new norms.

Genuine change is possible, but you have to approach it clear-eyed and hard-nosed. You can’t just wordsmith fancy slogans, set up some training sessions and expect people to drop what they are thinking and doing and start thinking and doing something else. You need to build a thoughtful strategy, execute it wisely, and adapt as things develop.

In the real world, most change efforts don’t fail because of a lack of heroes, but because they ignore the system they’re up against. If your strategy relies on heroism, it’s probably not much of a strategy.

We all know that life is messier than that, but that’s the type of thing you really have to learn for yourself. The management professor Henry Mintzberg once observed that we expect management to be like a conductor with an orchestra, with the leader on a pedestal directing each movement with expert precision.

“But,” he argues, “management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.” The truth is that you don’t want things to go exactly as planned. It’s the off-key notes that you learn from most and lead to your biggest opportunities. Here are four things I’ve learned from a very messy career that produced wonderful surprises.

Today, it’s easy to see how many things have gotten better, but it’s just as easy to see how others have gotten worse. While in the aggregate, incomes have improved, most of that has gone to top earners, leaving many households feeling worse off. While we have amazingly cool gadgets, costs for basic needs, like housing, healthcare and education, have soared.

The truth is that we’ve very good at innovating in the digital space because it’s fast, cheap and low risk. But the biggest opportunities are in the messy, physical world. So we’re ending up with lots of incremental digital innovation and not enough transformational change in the real world.

In sum, it’s hard to see how we’ve become meaningfully better off over the last 50 years. For all of the Silicon Valley blather, most American families are materially struggling and our mental health is declining. This isn’t because of some exogenous shock, but because of choices we’ve made. We have the technology to improve our lives, but the benefits are not accessible to most.

What we have to reckon with is that the world is not digital. We live, eat, travel and breathe in physical spaces and no amount of algorithms and data centers will change that. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out long ago, technology is less a creation than it is an uncovering. It brings us possibilities, but it is our responsibility to enframe and direct them in ways that will benefit us.

We live in a world of atoms, not bits. Technology only matters if it makes our lives better.

Yet the far more disturbing reality is that the Blockbuster leadership team was neither stupid nor lazy. In fact, they were innovative, made good strategic decisions, and executed them skillfully. If not for a seemingly minor compensation dispute, things could very easily have turned out very differently. I think the key to understanding what happened is something Antioco told me about an earlier initiative when I interviewed him for my book, Cascades.

“The experienced video executives were skeptical. In fact, they thought that the revenue-sharing agreement would kill the company," he told me. "But throughout my career, I had learned that whenever you set out to do anything big, some people aren’t going to like it. I’d been successful by defying the status quo at important junctures, and that’s what I thought had to be done in this case."

In other words, over the years he had been put in positions of authority and was able to implement changes and deliver results fast enough that he was able to overpower any resistance. Yet in Blockbuster's battle for survival with Netflix, key stakeholders—namely franchisees and shareholders—defected, and the floor fell out from under him.

Antioco had all the formal authority he needed to deliver genuine transformation. But it was the difficulty of managing and aligning stakeholders that led to Blockbuster’s demise. The truth is that change isn’t top-down, nor is it bottom-up. It goes side-to-side as it propagates through networks.