Leadership Philosophy

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thesis I

I think the corporate meeting culture as such is nothing but a farce.

The most serious problem with people falling and crawling through these never-ending meetings is that they lose the sense of what it actually means to meet someone or something.

A meeting is always thematically predefined, logically structured, very efficient, noted (minutes!) and thus recorded. It is an encounter between units of labor force... precisely what a real meeting is not.

I believe that we, as team leaders (at least those of us with a Kafkaesque approach to reality), should turn this corporate meeting culture into what it truly is: a tragicomedy. In my own leadership practice, I’ve introduced several techniques. Feel free to experiment with them:
- entry music, exit music;
- mandatory clapping for anything (especially for nothing);
- calling the “central committee” from a wired phone that has no signal;
- mandatory optimism when the project is obviously collapsing;
- continuously issuing certificates for trifles;
- in testing phase: 2 minutes of obligatory office disco as intermezzo mid-meeting - like in Ben Stiller's series, Severance.

You might think it’s madness. But remember what Žižek taught us:
when we do not take things seriously, when we maintain an ironic distance, that’s precisely when we are doing them the most.

thesis II

Leadership theory is such a bullshit industry these days.

It’s built on one basic assumption: that teams consist of units of labor force — mechanical beings whose only purpose is to work more, just with better lighting and a big-big smile.

So we invent entire frameworks for it:
→ motivational blurbs (to make them work happily)
→ capacity-building dumps (to make them work better)
→ self-management and team-building Coelhos (to make them work more effectively)
→ feedback mantras and reflective rituals (to make them work more consciously)

But the end goal is always the same: to make them work more and more efficiently.

This whole tradition forgets something essential — that people’s existence does not consist solely of work. And even when they are at work, they don’t always work.
And that, my friends, is perfectly fine.

Over the past couple of years, several studies found that office employees spend only about 30–40% of their time actually working.

The rest is spent eating, chatting, playing, daydreaming, not to mention the time spent on the toilet. One study even claims 15% of the time goes to looking for new jobs.

As Claire Hall writes in The Guardian, maybe we should stop motivating people to work more, and start motivating them to work less. And guess what? When people work less, things actually go better.

So next time someone tells you to improve office productivity, remember:
sometimes leadership means letting the floor stay messy for a while.

Can you imagine how much time we spent cleaning up after this incident?

thesis III

Absurdity, when owned, protects us from the real surrealism of corporate culture.

Here are my 5 + 1 leadership tips and tricks I partly learned from playing avant-garde punk with my lovely band.

Some of the best practices I know still come from the land of distortion pedals and broken strings.

1. Always listen, listening comes first, and with your heart fully open! Also, find the ways to make your people open up. Ask with real curiosity. Then be responding and responsible. Be a shield between them and the heights of the solfège bureaucracy.

2. Expose yourself! Give in, show subjectivity. Leadership is not something you do, it is something that emerges from how you invest yourself in relations of co-creation.

3. Make your point softly! To point is also to point gently toward some-thing other, something different. Gift them with a terrifying philosophical horizon or a comforting thought, a compass (see Latin com-passus), that is a shared step forward.

4. Make space for great solos! Elevate your team. Push them to the margins of posssibility, and make the impossible imaginable. Share the (im)possibility of invention and take full responsibility for it.

5. Improvisation is gold! But only if it is surrounded with structure. Like setting the rules of a game so that free play can emerge. Play with them. Play freely. Enjoy each other’s presence as much as possible. Leadership is the initiation of co-creation, not command.

+ 1. Introduce Kafkaesque rituals! Clap after a failed deploy. Order a mandatory office disco after a fatal error. Print meaningless certificates for nonsense achievements. Because absurdity, when owned, protects us from the real surrealism of corporate culture.

If you have any surrealist ritual in mind I could introduce (like asap), please share, because the Central Bureau is already under investigation for the current ones, and they’ll probably be erased soon anyway.

thesis IV

Embrace the crack.

Get ready to explore THE 2+1 tricks I’m generously putting out for 100% DISCOUNT on how to become the most successful team leader of the decade (assuming the decade continues to exist).

1. Attend to the tiny cracks where democracy tries to emerge.
In my leadership practice, I’m always scanning for moments of workplace democratization, collectivization, moments of becoming a demos, sometimes even a cooperative. The corporate giant will crush these impulses anyway, so why not cherish the faint afterglow of the love and solidarity we’ve already lost for good? If the system won’t give us democracy, we can at least rehearse it in stolen seconds.

2. Illuminate the art of not taking corporate work too seriously.
Man, these are just jobs, not life-and-death questions. But the ruling class, together with its Central Management Büro for Accumilation Logging, loves to pretend their rituals are sacred. My experience? They’re usually just highly paid amateurs who believe their own PowerPoint spells.
You know what is serious?
Reading a corrupted log file and deploying a fix from your Balkanian countryside hut after a two-hour commute from the office, using a 1 Mbps internet connection.
That’s serious shit.
Corporate elites will never know anything that real.

+1. Celebrate collapse as a collective rite.
I try to embrace moments of failure, not with the usual corporate cheerleading of “joy,” “positivity,” and “we’ve got this team,” but by fully accepting the truth: we are doomed. A code failed. A deploy crashed into a fatal error. So be it.
This is where we traverse the fantasy, hit on the Real, and enter the sacred ethos of hopelessness. In my team, we don’t run away from collapse, we celebrate it in a perverse manner. I order mandatory despair, clap for our incapacities, and clap even louder for our gloriously empty pockets.

Because if you are leading people, you already know (even if you’ll never admit it publicly) that most of the time we lead through cracks, collapses, and small catastrophes. That is our actual duty.

Don’t forget: the old Germanic witan/weid root of “to guide” means “to show the way” but also to see. To guide is not to cheerlead. It is to witness.

So stop acting like a motivational-keynote clown, a corporate slave dressed up as an inspirational prophet.

Embrace the crack. Embrace hopelessness. Celebrate it. Clap loudly at every fatal error. That is leadership.

thesis V

Find joy in collapse.

The emotional register, especially humour is still dramatically underconceptualized in leadership theory.

Yes, the field has evolved since the 1990s, finally recognizing emotions and humour as central tools of influence. Before that, in rationalist, stoic leadership models (from trait theories to the “great man” nonsense), emotions were treated as noise, and humour was dismissed as either a distraction or a loss of authority.

The rise of the Emotional Intelligence discourse changed all this as you know. It revealed that authentic leaders must serve as emotional compasses. And that humour is not frivolous, but on the contrary! It’s one of the highest EI skills, functioning as a buffer against burnout and as a cognitive stabilizer in high-stress environments.

According to the literature, humour is essential:

– to build high-quality relationships;
– to create an in-group lalanguage (esp. for my Lacanian followers);
– to cultivate trust (humour is the mediator through which the trust-ship travels);
– to sustain resilience during change;
– to signal transparency and humility;
– to demonstrate humanity (genuine humour compresses power distance);
– and, crucially: to challenge the status quo without triggering fear.

But the best leaders don’t “use humour” by telling jokes or performing some cringe comedic persona. (OMG, if you’re doing that, please stop.)

Real humour emerges by noticing the absurdities of reality itself and signalling: you are safe here; we can breathe here, thus we can laugh.

Derrida once wrote that deconstruction is not an act but something that takes place, and we have to be attentive enough to witness it. I think humour works the same way. It’s not something you “do” (I have never successfully laughed at stand-up comedians for instance). It’s something that erupts from the cracks of reality, from the tiny fractures where the absurd and nonsense becomes visible. And those cracks hold absolute joy.

Do you remember, when the creators of South Park had to step back in 2017 because, as Matt Stone said on ABC’s 7.30 Report:

"It’s tricky now, because satire has become reality. It’s really hard and (…) we were really trying to make fun of what was going on but we couldn’t keep up and what was actually happening as it was much funnier than anything we could come up with."

I think this holds in general to the reality as such (and I mean in an ontological sense minus AI, which is anti-humour par excellence).

We have to make the unbearable absurdity of the workplace joyous.

Last Updated 24.10.31

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