Significance comes with the executive’s emotional costume, and no, Dada is not here to cure you of it. Dada is here to start a new fashion.
Today I am talking about the significance craze. A craze is a fondness you overdo while taking it for a virtue, like a craze for cleaning. Executives have it for their own significance. It shows in three convictions.
I leave a mark.By the second year in office, the talk is already of legacy. Programs, buildings and transformations are given names tied to the person. Successors are chosen by who will carry the work on.
I am ahead of the others.“I said that three years ago.” In the room, they won’t be shown anything they haven’t long since seen. Announcements come early, because the timing of the announcement counts for more than its content.
What I put into the world has substance.There is no ordinary decision anymore: everything is strategic, historic, a turning point. A normal quarter gets a narrative, and the small hands-on task is delegated because it doesn’t look like substance.
Facade Fixation. Significance has to be visible, or it doesn’t count. The mark is laid out before anyone has left: the plaque, the name, the keynote.
Doubt Denial Reflex. The question “would anyone miss it?” is not asked. Whoever doubts that a venture is significant doubts, in this logic, the person who put it into the world. So nobody doubts, not even the executives themselves.
Grandiosity Spiral. Every deed has to be bigger than the last, and the obvious loses its value.
Overconfidence Syndrome. Being ahead is taken as given. Nobody checks whether anyone is following or whether the direction is right, and being ahead gets confused with being alone.
Irritability Overflow. One act of significance chases the next: restructuring, change of course, crisis. Without a horizon as a yardstick, none of them can be placed, so each weighs the same and there have to be more and more. Executives choke on them and become irritable. Questions, objections and delays then read to them as attacks, no longer as information.
What is significant then is not the tree planted and not the factory built. Executives are significant in admitting their contradictions: I built the factory, but in the long view it was wrong.
The mark then also holds what usually gets wiped away: the wrong calls, the illusions about what one can bring about, and the slips into cloud cuckoo land.