Three Sigma Systems

This post is a bit rocky and I have vacillated between whether to delete or not-to-delete. Since my blogging policy is to never delete (”The moving hand having writ, moves on..”), I will let it stand but I ask that you please read the comments accompanying this post, which may or may not help matters. If you use my secret of success, be aware  that I make no warranty, express or implied, that your results will be any better than those realized through random chance. Special thanks to John Dowd for thinking on this.

Today I am going to tell you the secret of success. When I say success, I mean the process of acquiring wealth, power, and influence that exceeds by orders of magnitude, that of mere mortals. Successful people are the top dogs that dominate the crowd and, because of their domination, they are often described as “leaders”, though that attribution is debatable. They are the corporate executives, politicians, financiers, gamblers, pundits and preachers who seem to end up running the show wherever the show is being run.

Over the course of my 30 year career as a business consultant I have rubbed shoulders with quite a few successful people. For most of that time, my relationship with these individuals was, as they say, strictly business. My knowledge of them was limited to the workplace. Although no one who knows me would ever accuse me of being obsequious, my relation with power tended to be one  in which I tolerated and even cultivated, a foggy subservience to those who retained me and signed my paychecks. To put it quite bluntly, my job was to give advice, but never to the extent that the advice given would  jeopardize my survival. I reasoned, as a favorite professor advised  many years ago, you can’t influence the system if you are cast out from that system. You also can’t pay the rent.

Everything changed in 2004. That was the year that I returned from an momentous six-year sailing hiatus that took me and my family halfway around the world and back again. I returned from my voyage to find my career as a business consultant, kaput. Deming was dead and the world was run amuck in financial wheeling and dealing. The few who had taken an interest in what I had to offer as a “Deming” consultant had evolved with the changing times and the promise of greener, more profitable, pastures.

After a good deal of struggle to resurrect my consultancy, I started up a side business as a sailboat captain. I became in effect, a consultant to those interested in seafaring and among my new sailing clients were a number of very successful people. Interestingly, the advice to be given and the lessons to be learned in the sailing enterprise are remarkably similar to those that apply to business enterprise. The only real difference was that in the high stakes game of offshore sailing, the bottom line is survival rather than profit.

At sea I could no longer restrict my relation with my clients to “the workplace” because at sea, everwhere is the workplace. With lives on the line, the fog of subservience that I embraced as a business consultant was no longer tolerable or possible. As a seafaring consultant, I had to deal with my clients as whole persons and this is how I came face to face with the secret of successful people.

The secret of being successful—in acquiring disproportionate wealth, power, and influence—-is opacity. Opacity is a quality that some people seem to be born with, as in case of Asperger’s syndrome, but far more people actually cultivate through careful study, training, and practice. Depending on how you look at it, opacity is either an ability or disability that effectively masks from others, one’s thoughts and feelings.

In any collaborative enterprise, people’s efforts at moving forward depend on transparent signaling between the members of the group. This transparency is what makes it possible for people to synchronize their actions through shared aims and methods. The role of leadership is to facilitate  the sharing of aims and methods in order to effectively focus the actions of an  enterprising group . The activity of sailing, in which everyone’s life depends on working together as a synchronous whole, provides one of the clearest examples of this phenomenon.

Transparency is at the core of what we think of as being human. It produces a symmetry of information in which people become able to make reasonable and responsibe predictions and decisions and direct their actions in concert with others. In a very real sense, symmetry places everyone on an equal footing. But what happens if a person is opaque? What if we cannot read his or her aims, intentions, and methods? When that happens, there is an asymmetry of information that makes the interaction between those who are transparent and those who are opaque, unpredictable. In other words, if I understand your aims and methods but you are unable to understand my aims and methods, I have an advantage over you. I can predict what you will do but you cannot predict what I will do. I can exploit your lack of knowledge to my advantage and that will allow me to become disproportionately wealthy, powerful, and influential.

At sea, opacity is a recipe for death. When the sh_t hits the fan, and it is always does, the ability of a crew to achieve information symmetry is crucial to survival. In teaching sailing to “successful” people, I consistently observed that they were unable to work toward that symmetry. They always held an ace in the hole. They always tried to retain some asymmetrical advantage as demonstrated in this story.

In retrospect, it has become clear to me that the opacity of successful people I observed in sailing has been true of all my relationships with successful people. I have come to understand that throughout my years of consulting, I embraced a foggy relationship between myself and my clients in tacit complicity with the asymmetry that enabled their advantage. Did the opacity of success serve the enterprise I was hired to help? I think not. The opacity of success contributed little to the success of the enterprise as a whole, though it served the successful individual very well.

Now you may say, “Hey, I know successful people who are not opaque”, to which I will respond that although some few may be successful through pure blind luck, most are indeed, skilled at opacity. Your belief that they are not opaque, is a testament to just how skilled they are at masking their aims and methods. They control the signals they send to such a degree, they you are unable to see in them, the qualities that are common to all. (Or maybe they just have Asperger’s syndrome.)

So, if you want to be successful, as defined above, cultivate opacity with the aim to produce an asymmetry of information between yourself and others. It doesn’t really matter what masks you chose to wear—impassive, genial, sage, clown or tyrant. All that matters is that your aims and intentions be opaque to others. Although intelligence, hard work, and great ideas can produce some modest success relative to others, such meritorious qualities cannot prevail over opacity. Opacity is the way to gain the decisive edge.

Study Questions

1. What are lessons we teach our children at home and school about being opaque?

2. What lessons do our children actually learn about being opaque?

3. What would happen if everyone were to become extremely skilled in opacity?

(Now that you know the secret of success, send some of your newly acquired wealth to me in recognition of my divulging the secret. Make cashier’s check payable to “Three Sigma Systems”.