169. What is Leadership? [Updated 16-10-25]

Possibly the most critical element in any organisation, but it is also one of the most rare. This is especially true in high nepotism industries like game dev and Hollywood. So how to identify it?

A few papers back when I was explaining the critical elements of making Games as a Service, I dedicated about a third of that paper to emphasizing the importance of strong leadership. The topic is increasingly coming up in discussions on LinkedIn. I felt it was time to explain what Leadership is, as it is difficult to have/find it if you don’t know what it looks like.

There are a number of primary characteristics that go into leadership. Here are the biggest ones, I won’t try to rank them because these are essential:

• Setting a Proper Example of Work Ethic:

• A lack of Entitlement or Privilege. In the gaming industry (as with Hollywood) many people get their jobs because of who they know, not what they know. This makes them intrinsically Privileged and also intrinsically bad leaders.

• Empathy. If you aren’t sensitive to the people around you, you can’t lead them. You can only direct them. This is not the same thing.

• Discipline. If you are empathetic but not disciplined, you will get led, not the other way around. This is also linked to strong work ethic.

• Virtue. If you have it, the others on the team will respect you and look up to you. They will want to be led. Unless they have a poor work ethic, then they should be replaced quickly.

I will give you some examples from my Olympic years so as to show how this works, and to also avoid calling out anyone in the gaming industry.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos

I started college at the same time I started high school. I did both in parallel. I was also a student athlete during this time, a competitive performing musician, and homeless from the age of 17 on. I had to give up music when I became homeless. It was a busy time, but also formative.

My first college track coach was legendary world record holder and black rights activist Tommie Smith. Following their wins in the 1968 Mexico City 200m track sprint, Tommie, Peter Norman (Australian), and John Carlos did a black rights protest on the award podium that rocked the Olympic family and the global stage. 1968 was a wild year full of change.

I would later come to be very close with John Carlos also (see below) a few years later. I’ve never talked before about my relationship to these two legends, but I feel confident in saying I know a lot (possibly more than anyone else alive now that Peter has died) about Tommie and John’s relationship. So, for the sake of history, and just to be safe in case something should happen to me, I’m going to share that history here while I use the dynamic to teach what leadership is. I also wrote a paper on Tommie for a writing assignment while I was still at Santa Monica College, so I did a bunch of research on him including an interview more than 40 years ago.

Like all Olympians, Tommie had inhuman levels of work ethic. As a teenager he worked in the fields picking strawberries. He raised himself up from literally dirt to become the world’s fastest man. He represented the pinnacle of work ethic, and perhaps even Virtue. There is an Asterix there that I will explain. And if he reads this, it was an honor to have been coached by him, so I mean no disrespect.

When Tommie stepped onto the track, his whole team was instantly inspired. Everyone wanted to be their best man under the leadership of Tommie. No one could claim that they worked harder than him, and thus Tommie’s work ethic pulled everyone up to be better than they otherwise would have. If 100% effort was what normal people aspired to, the bare minimum for Olympians is 200%. For Tommie, he was pushing 250%, at least up until 1968. I mean no disrespect to my readers when I say, you likely won’t ever personally experience what that’s like, or be led by someone at that level.

Since I was homeless, I was surely the poorest person on the team. I lived in the dirt like Tommie had. But Tommie never cut me even the tiniest slack, even when I was hungry and malnourished. There was no Affirmative Action on his team. You were judged by your effort and accomplishments. One of the younger/smaller men on the team once told Tommie post workout that the reason we had done poorly that day was because “we were tired”. We were. One of Tommie’s biggest weaknesses as a coach was his lack of empathy. So we were constantly overtrained and would run our best times on vacation, not in races.

Tommie responded by punching his fist about 6 inches (15 cm) into the very sturdy wall just an inch from the face of this young man. Then Tommie got his face next to that runners face, both of them trembling, and stared right into his eyes. Tommie left his fist in the wall, and I am sure he was injured. But pain just fuelled Tommie.

I don’t think it would be fair to say this young man wished in that moment that he had never been born. I think it was more like he wished his mother had never been born.

Those two would later reconcile, but no one ever complained about anything ever around Tommie again. For years. Well, we did complain about Tommie’s soda stunt, but I will keep that secret to myself while Tommie is still alive.

Tommie embodied work ethic, discipline, and Virtue. He lacked empathy and… his greatest weakness (which he hid extremely well) was some remnant of entitlement. It’s the last thing you would expect from such a great man, but then I know Tommie’s secrets. You see, that 1968 protest wasn’t Tommie’s idea. John talked him into it. John even claims that John pulled up to make sure Tommie would win the race (and that’s when Peter slipped by him also) to make sure Tommie would join the protest.

This means that while Tommie consented to the protest, he didn’t informed consent to it. He had no idea what would happen to him. But John did and knew Tommie would eject if he also knew. Tommie wanted to return to the USA a hero, and reap all the fame, rewards, and women. John would end up with over 30 baby mammas world-wide and Tommie imagined he would live the dream too. But instead Tommie was blacklisted before he even stepped foot back on USA soil, and received a constant stream of death threats. This was in a year when great black men were dropping like flies in the USA.

So Tommie felt entitled to something he didn’t get. I can’t blame him, that was really John’s fault. John threw Tommie under the bus for the Greater Good. Because John chose that Fate, he never complained about it and ended up being a very happy and popular man. The thing about entitlement is… it doesn’t matter if you are entitled to being entitled. Entitlement is still poison. Perhaps the greatest of all poisons, especially when it comes to leadership. Now it’s been 40 years since I’ve talked to Tommie, so he may have made peace with what happened in 1968. I doubt he’s made peace with John. Those two will likely never reconcile. I think that is a great tragedy.

I had lunch with John Carlos every day for two years when we both taught at Palm Springs High School. It was a strange twist of Fate that brought us together, and he was a brilliant mentor. He never sugar coated anything and possessed a large world of knowledge.

The Principal

While John and I were teaching at Palm Springs High (PSHS) we both ended up not getting along with the principal of the school. It didn’t help that I made a joke about his height in front of his wife. He had a very thin skin. I agreed to coach there one season and had to report another coach for fondling multiple female students. Those students complained to their parents and the principal still didn’t protect them.

So I stopped coaching there, and John had already done the same. It must have been odd to have two Olympic coaches at the school and not have either of them want to coach there. I was on the Principal’s shitlist and he showed it in various ways. He thought it would be a great idea to show movie classics to the entire school body on a monthly basis. Myself, and my students, were not allowed to attend.

This became a problem because one of the first movies shown was Excalibur (1981). The reason this was a problem was because I was the only person on campus that knew this movie was not the story about King Arthur that you think about as wholesome educational viewing. I saw the uncut version when it was released in 1981, it made a big impression on me. It’s the first and last time I had ever seen a woman get raped by a man wearing plate mail.

If I had been in the audience I would have sprinted to the projection room and blocked the projector with my body. Since this scene happens very early in the movie, my speed would have come in handy. Since I wasn’t there, hundreds of students saw this scene, while at school, at the direction of the principal. The entire scene. A class action lawsuit was filed against the school district and this would be the end of the very privileged Principal’s career. He made sure to have me fired as his last action while he was still in power.

I bring up this example because it doesn’t matter if you have a PhD in education or if you have the most seniority. None of that makes you a good leader. The reverse becomes true if you feel like the power entrusted to you allows you to lord over everyone “below” you. This scenario is so common in major gaming companies that it is almost the norm. The symptoms of this lack of leadership typically includes employee bullying and harassment. The person running the show not only feels that they are superior to everyone else, but also puts their interests above that of the organisation.

This is such a huge problem in game development that I devoted a large portion of a recent paper on the topic. But today I don’t think even that was enough. Thus this paper where I try to explain what good leadership looks like. It’s something that has to be earned, it can’t be granted. It’s also critical that the motivations of a leader are just as critical as their qualifications. Having the proper motivation and mind set really is the most paramount qualification. Making a technical error or a lapse in judgement can be forgiven, but harming others for your own benefit cannot.

This is one area that HR increasingly struggles with as it becomes automated. AI will similarly struggle here because it does not have sufficient empathy to identify the “right and wrong” of a candidate. Due to the enormous amount of catfishing, there is a lot of pressure to hire people you know. But that’s just another way of describing nepotism. A flavor of privilege. There is no substitute for a thorough vetting. But who does that vetting? Without a strong leader, how do you vet other leaders? In our industry we often vet the technical skills of candidates, because that’s what we know. We can’t evaluate what we don’t know.

This is what was so amazing about growing up in the Olympic family. Competition is entirely merit based (if you rule out drugs and such). Your character is tested every day and is well known to all. I talked a bit about what this was like at UCLA during the Olympics, back in a 2017 paper on oxytocin. There I explained why FloJo’s world record probably wouldn’t get broken.

In the same paper I also explained how having a strong team, mentally and emotionally, was more important than skill or technical ability. The latter can be learned and transferred from elders to newer members. A similar lesson is taught in the Moneyball movie and my related papers.

If you have that, then the issue of “To Crunch or Not to Crunch” disappears. People will rise to the occasion without being asked, because they want to. They will also help each other.

[I published this paper yesterday. I continued to ponder. I think I have an answer to my own riddle. We all understand that being in a leadership role comes with perks. Power. Power over others. We also have the ability to become the Main Character in the narrative of our team or company. We have all seen this.

Most “leaders” do so because they want those perks. The Power. They don’t necessarily want the responsibility that comes with Leadership. A strong Leader is someone that embraces that responsibility, and does not see it as a negative. It is their role. Simultaneously, they are not Power seeking. They subordinate their desires to the Common Good of their team. They use that Power to bolster their team, not exclusively themselves.

This ultimately prevents them from harming their teammates, because they understand that to do so would mean harming themselves. There may be times when a difficult decision has to be made, that will harm someone on the team. This is a Responsibility, not a Perk. It is understood by the Leader that the pain caused will be shared across the entire team, not directed at an individual.

Demonstrating this degree of Leadership instils this understanding in the junior members of a team. This places the seed of Leadership in them, and accelerates that potential. This is a critical step in the Circle of Life. We are all mortal. Leaders strive to pass their power on, to make it Eternal, not horde it so that it Ends with them.]