Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.
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Thought of the Week
“When the person who serves the purpose is silenced by the person who is serving the personality: strategy execution loses.”
Jim Lawless
TL;DR
When people serve the personality of their leader rather than the purpose of the organisation, strategy execution dies — quietly, politely, and with excellent meeting notes.
The Titanic sank, in part, because a radio operator was serving his wealthiest passengers and his employer, NOT the primary purpose his vessel existed to fulfil.
Our Symmetry.inc Hourglass places the executive team in the middle of the hourglass — not at the top (or bottom) of the pyramid. They are there to create and serve the purpose and strategy that supports them, and those they lead, to deliver Results.
The DARE Loop only works if the Result people are optimising for is the right one. In ‘personality-serving’ cultures, it isn’t.
How do you turn a global meeting into a personal strategic action planning session for 800 people?
Serve the Purpose. Not the Person
There is a behaviour so common in organisations that it has become almost invisible. It is so prevalent that it has even acquired an acronym.
Aligning with the HiPPO: The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.
In meetings across the world, at every level of seniority, the HiPPO dynamic, if culturally required, plays out the same way. The conversation orients around what will please the senior person. Alternatives are quietly shelved. Challenges are swallowed. Conflict is buried: along with high performance.
In some organisations, second-guessing what the HiPP will think becomes a cottage industry. Pre-meetings to sense-check the political weather before the real meeting begins. Energy that should be directed at the strategy is instead directed at the personality. Agendas are shaped not by what the purpose requires but by what the room calculates the most senior person will find comfortable.
The unit of transformation is the human.
The system here has taught the people that serving the purpose, when it conflicts with the imagined preferences of the authority figure above them, is a career risk.
So they serve the personality instead. They learn the tells. They manage upward. They become extraordinarily skilled at giving the boss what the boss wants — and the strategy gets what is left over.
This is the silent strategy killer that no engagement survey will ever surface. Because everybody is, on paper, fully aligned.
It is traditional to blame the HiPP for this. ‘Patriarchy’ gets whispered. But beware of your blind spots.
In March I was backstage with a well-known and extremely ‘low ego’ global CRO. She was lamenting the fact that when she explored some recent instances of odd decisions in her organisation, she was told that it was because she had said “X” in a conversation. This conversational comment had moved immediately from an opinion to a frequently repeated: “But Annie says…” *.
Now brace yourself for a story of ‘serving the personality, not the purpose’ that will make your hair stand on end…
*I’ve have changed the leaders’ name.
The Titanic’s Radio Room
At 11pm on the night of 14 April 1912, the SS Californian — stationary in an unexpected ice field, ten miles ahead of the Titanic — sent warnings by radio to the still-moving ship: “We are stopped and surrounded by ice.”
The Titanic’s radio operator, Jack Phillips, cut him off. “Shut up, shut up, I am busy.”
And poor old Phillips was busy indeed.
He was busy sending a backlog of personal messages for first-class passengers — messages that wealthy clients had paid to send and that his employer, the Marconi Company, was being paid to deliver.
The purpose his vessel existed to fulfil — to carry 2,224 people safely across the Atlantic — did not feature in the decision he made in that moment.
Even his own primary purpose: to be alive in the morning – was lost in the pressure to be ‘good’.
The Californian ‘shut up’ as instructed. At 2:20am, the Titanic was gone.
When the system trains the people to prioritise the imagined preferences of the authority figure over the purpose of the enterprise — they will do so.
Our Symmetry.inc Hourglass
Our Symmetry.inc strategy execution framework is confidential and cannot be reproduced here. But it places the executive team in a unique slot.
It is an hourglass, not a pyramid. Purpose and Strategy sit at the foundation. The executive team sits near the middle of the hourglass, just below the decision architecture that connects it to the SLT and the people who will deliver globally.
The executive team is not at the top. And it certainly isn’t at the base of an unstable inverted triangle.
It is the energising mechanism by which the purpose, strategy and tactics that it is there to create and serve are turned into thousands of DARE Loops: decision velocity at scale through a solid Second Strategy.
The DARE Loop: So, What is The Result?
The DARE Loop asks a deceptively simple question at the moment of every Decision and Action: what is the Result we are trying to deliver?
It is deceptively simple because in a personality-serving organisation, the honest answer is frequently not the one that appears in the strategy document.
The Result people are optimising for is: deliver what I think the boss wants, and that prevents me being the person who created a problem or a ‘conflict’. (Conflict is a reliable indicator of high trust, purpose and performance)
That is a rational Result. It is probably the Result that the system is built to deliver. It is just not the one that was agreed in the strategy workshop or published on the posters along with the new ‘behaviours.
Here is where that expensive strategy deck, and the ROI in talent, die.
The DARE Loop is ruthless about this. If the Result is unclear, or has been quietly replaced by a more politically comfortable surrogate, then every Decision and Action downstream is built on a false foundation. You do not have a slow organisation. You have a fast organisation — moving with great efficiency toward the wrong destination.
The fix is not a motivational intervention. It is a structural one.
When the Result is clear, and is clearly the consistent compass of the Leaders (the Second Strategy), the question in every meeting will slowly stop being “what is the HiPPO likely to be and how can I ‘align’?” and becomes “what does the Result require of us?” Those are different questions. They produce different Decisions. And they produce different Actions at a very different pace.
My Fortnight
How do you turn an event into a global strategic planning meeting?
Last time I promised you my postcard from San Diego where I was closing Indeed’s Global Leaders Meeting 2026. 800 Global Leaders came together to double down on their mission: Help People Get Jobs.
And there was a clear leadership mandate: Move fast, fail fast, fix fast to deliver that mission during a period of extraordinary uncertainty and change for talent professionals.
But at Indeed that intent is less slogan and more decision velocity architecture.
So we introduced the DARE Loop to the community through my Keynote on the final day. 800 Leaders then headed into 12 facilitated breakouts to build their personal DARE Loop plan to execute the strategy locally, and with their teams, once they left the USA.
One of the things that made this event exceptional for me was the leadership from the top.
Maggie Hulce, Indeed’s CRO, followed me onstage and the way she weaved the DARE Loop into her own message to her organisation with precision and insight was truly fantastic. That’s rare. And in my view, that care is what makes a keynote, and an event, deliver lasting change in performance across the world.
Thank you Indeed for committing 100% to your mission and to the DARE Loop, for your trust and hospitality, and your relentless drive to help people get jobs!
After San Diego – time for family and friends and, luckily for us, an Easter break spent in peace.
Book of the Fortnight
Collins and his research team set out to answer a simple question: what distinguishes companies that make the leap from good to great from those that do not?
One of the most striking findings was the nature of the leaders who presided over those leaps. Collins called them Level 5 leaders — and they confounded every assumption about what great leadership looks like.
Level 5 leaders combine fierce professional will with profound personal humility. They are utterly determined to make the organisation succeed — and utterly uninterested in personal credit for that success. When things go well, they look out of the window and credit their people. When things go wrong, they look in the mirror and hold themselves accountable.
The contrast Collins draws is precise. The celebrity CEO — the high-profile personality around whom the organisation revolves — frequently produces strong short-term results and lasting long-term damage.
The Level 5 leader builds something that outlasts and outperforms them, because the organisation was never organised around their personality in the first place.
It was organised around the purpose.
Write Your Story 🖋️
Jim
