🧠Rethink Leadership for Real-World Wins

 Charisma ≠ Competence. How you increase your ability to create wins.

S3T PodCast July 25, 2025

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This issue in 30 seconds:

🔮 Charisma, Reality & the Call for Discernment
America’s long infatuation with charismatic leaders—from revivalists to modern politicians—often leads to mass delusion, overlooked warnings, and eventual disillusionment. Consequences always follow, no matter how convincing the voice.

⚠️ When Leadership Invites Error
Recent tragedies—from floodplain policy failures to meme coin crashes—show what happens when authority figures enable or excuse poor decisions. Nature, markets, and math do not respond to charisma.

🛠️ Disciplines: Fudge vs. Force-Based
There are two kinds of expertise:
• Fudge disciplines (law, marketing, consulting) shape perception.
• Engineering disciplines (tech, data, physics) must face immovable realities. Only one gets punished when things break.

📉 The Accountability Gap
Non-technical leaders often dominate decisions while technical experts are sidelined—leading to misalignment, shallow progress, and fragile strategies.

📈 ROI Favors Technically Literate Teams
Organizations that bring engineers, data SMEs, and emerging tech specialists into planning—not just execution—achieve faster, more durable outcomes.

🤝 Bridge the Divide
Break down IT vs. business silos. Cross-disciplinary collaboration (AI, crypto-finance, analytics) builds resilience and unlocks complex problem-solving capacity.

🌍 Geopolitics Is Now AI-Powered
Nations are reallocating energy infrastructure—from oil to renewables—not for climate, but to power AI. Saudi Arabia, UAE, and China are all racing to fuel AI dominance.

📜 AI Governance Watch: Signal & Scrutiny
The U.S. AI Action Plan includes vague "free speech" restrictions that appear political, but also important steps: open-source encouragement, incident response playbooks, and required CISO-AI team integration—signals of future federal procurement standards.

[perspective]

Charisma in American History

Ironically, America has always had a thing for charismatic authority figures

In her new book “Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Molly Worthen takes us through a whirlwind history of America's long running infatuation with charismatic leaders: 19th-century frontier revivalists and prophets, 1970s spiritual gurus, and of course today's political cults.

Worthen describes a pattern that plays out repeatedly:

• An unlikely but charismatic figure reveals new vision for fixing everything
• Followers are seduced and join in propelling euphoric movements
• Followers suffer (as a result of the leader's errors and limitations), and the movement fades.

In the aftermath, sobering realities return: Charismatic authority figure can't protect us from the consequences of error.

Euphoric infatuation with charismatic authority figures leads people - with a range of intelligence levels - to ignore obvious warning signs and suspend their better judgment.

A few examples:

• It became fashionable in late 2024 to downplay climate change and the environment as lower priority than business and economics. Mother Nature clearly isn't onboard, sending harsh reminders that without the environment there is no economy. In the aftermath of tragic floods in Texas and NC, evidence emerges of failures on both sides of politics: during the Obama administration and again during the first Trump administration FEMA granted multiple requests to remove Camp Mystic facilities from flood map designations...literally paving the way for less protections and vigilance against the kind of flood that took 27 lives on July 4.
• Crypto exchanges rushed to list the Trump meme coin and did so in suspiciously short turnaround times, all while claiming they were still thorough. That ..."thoroughness" now, of course, gives zero comfort to the people who saw their "investment" decimated as the meme coin price imploded.
• Finance institutions are gamely embracing a new dump of T bills to accommodate the higher debt ceiling, blindly trusting that the system will magically sustain itself - even as more and more of government revenues are required to pay interest on the US debt.

When authority figures lead us (or give us permission) to go in the wrong direction, the universe does not magically rearrange itself to prevent negative consequences. This is true regardless of how powerful or how virtuous the authority figure may seem. One way or other, the consequences will come.

How do we protect ourselves and others?

So how do we learn to protect ourselves and others from being swept off our feet by enticing voices and visions? Where's the line between good teamwork / citizenship vs following a delusion?

And how do we work effectively to create wins for ourselves, our teams, and our communities?

Here is a good starting point: Learn the difference between 2 categories of professional disciplines, and then using this understanding to improve your discernment and learning.

This is a crucial lens for change leaders to understand, and it benefits individuals and organizations.

The 2 Categories of Disciplines: Accountable vs Everything's Negotiable

Step back and think about all the learning available at a typical university - and all the professional disciplines that exist...notice how they fall into 2 big categories:

• Disciplines whose primary function is to convince and coordinate humans. These disciplines focus on using numbers, words, visuals to create narratives that are convincing to humans. We'll borrow the term "humanity disciplines" to label this category of discipline (might not be perfect match for the academic term "humanities" but close).
• Disciplines whose primary function is to harness the forces and materials of the universe to achieve some purpose. Most people refer to these as the engineering disciplines, so we'll use the term "engineering disciplines" for this category.

There is a huge difference in the accountability of these two disciplines. Both are valuable, but its important to understand this difference in accountability:

Engineering disciplines interact with the harsh immovable non-negotiable realities of physics and math. Gravity, momentum and brick walls, the relentless ticking away of time and chances, the closing of opportunity windows. If your code is wrong it won't compile. If your math is wrong, your bridge will collapse. Your plane will crash. If your burndown figures are wrong, your company will run out of money. Your failure and its consequences will be large, obvious, unforgiving and non-negotiable.

As a result of this highly accountable working environment, engineers learn - sometimes the hard way - to work with a precision mindset, and to never expect that they can fudge and get away with it.

Humanity disciplines by contrast interact primarily with the intellect and limited attention span of humans. There is a lot more room for fudging: The right presentation, the right tweet, the right spin, misdirection, or the right legal framing can get us out of any bind. These "fudge" disciplines get away with a lot:

• Accountants can cook the books and make the finances seem fine when they're really not.
• Lawyers can bury things in fine print or construct emotional appeals and artfully selective uses of evidence to confuse juries.
• Consultants can sell you powerpoints that make you feel smart without confronting the elephants-in-the-room and festering issues that hold your company back.

Underneath the shiny appearances, the unresolved issues accelerate, proliferate, and do their damage, chewing away like unseen termites until there is a tragic reconciliation with reality.

Implications for your workforce

Many organizations today have fallen into a practice of relegating