In response to
Venkatesh Rao's Blyg · Venkatesh Rao · “Ontological Inventiveness I sometimes wonder how I end up “leading” so many rand…” · item 3bsgmfd5d6540eyxsq7e796fp0, v1 · <https://venkateshrao.com/blyg/t/3bsgmfd5d6540eyxsq7e796fp0/> · retrieved Oct 27, 2026
very loose goals, good-enough standards, and no interest in either control or credit, which allows me to easily co-opt what others are doing anyway. I’m very easy to align with.
from Venkatesh Rao's Blyg ↗ · excerpt of v1
FWIW your leadership style seems high on the direction setting and purpose and putting people in places where they don't need to be managed. That's very different from the leadership required in many orgs, more often really management without significant steering, particularly the corporate forms that form the water in which we swim.[1]
Btw saying you're not good as leadership is a classic humility move and makes us enlightened Losers more eager to follow you into the pits of Protocol Mount doom. Hehehe :P I am reminded of one of my all time favorite leadership essays that came from a speech at West Point.
"Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people's ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas."
That's William Deresiewicz in "Solitude and Leadership," from The American Scholar:
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Regarding ontological inventiveness, naming is a powerful creative act and one of the few things leaders can really do. We have far less control over ourselves let alone the world than our language suggests.
New categories, new names and new ideas offer potential followers a choice, which really is the only thing they can ever do.
I recently wrote a blyg as part of the glass bead game that gets at the idea of going beyond frontiers at the imagined communities scale.[2] Neologisms offer perhaps something more mesoscale and tractable. https://blyg.pioneeringspirit.xyz/t/1yqq1cfkx3cz1s18rw96sd3aee/
[1] corporate forms have taken over the private sector and won the assumtion of effectiveness so completely that most nonprofits now have CEOs and now governments like the county of Los Angeles will have an elected CEO. Also never forget: CEOs don't steer.
[2] Benedict Anderson's idea, from his book Imagined Communities, is that a nation is a community "imagined" because its members will never meet most of their fellow members, yet each carries in their mind a sense of belonging to the same whole. He argued that print capitalism (newspapers, novels, and a shared vernacular language) let millions of strangers picture themselves moving through time together, which made the modern nation feel natural and solid even though it is a constructed, shared story.
Maybe the nascent aliveness machine is where digital media enables leadership through idle stargazing aka blygging and reading lololol.