Your Ride or Die

Hap Arnold ran the Army Air Forces through the Second World War, and he kept company that made the rest of the Army uneasy: civilian scientists, the men the regular officers called long hairs. George Marshall was an infantryman by trade and not used to that company, and he asked Arnold what on earth he was doing with people like that. Arnold's answer was that their minds could build instruments for his airplanes that his own engineers couldn't, and he wanted them close enough to argue with. The best known of them was Theodore von Kármán, the Caltech aerodynamicist Arnold put in charge of a scientific advisory group in 1944, whose report the next year, Toward New Horizons, set the Air Force's research agenda for a generation. Arnold was collecting people who knew things his own people didn't and would say so. Most of us collect the opposite, and we call it loyalty.

Ten years of hiring and promoting for loyalty and you have a team that will ride with you anywhere, and not one of them will tell you a customer is leaving until the customer has left, which is the one thing you needed them for.

The loyalty you collect

Ride or die, results be damned.

It's a compliment when someone says it about you. It means you stay when staying costs something. It's a diagnosis when it describes the people you've gathered around a decision, because it means they'll stay with the decision whatever the results, and the results are the one thing you needed them to notice. Declaring one's faithfulness does not correspond to their actual faithfulness.

Think of the six people you talked to most last quarter about the decisions that mattered. Now count how many disagreed with you on any of them. Not pushed back and came around by the end of the meeting. Disagreed, and were still disagreeing when the decision went out. Some of you will count three. For a fair number it's zero, and the zero didn't happen by accident; it took 10 years and a lot of promotions.

You hire for loyalty, because loyalty is what you can see from where you sit, promote the people who made the last three decisions easier, which is a polite way of saying the ones who agreed, and keep close the people who make your week comfortable, and the comfortable ones are the ones who agreed. Picture the year the bridge was out: 11 people in the Tuesday meeting, a plan everyone had signed, and the one person who would have said the customer was leaving had taken a package in the spring.

Bernard Schriever, who learned from Arnold and went on to build the Air Force's missile program, kept a rule for every job he was handed: find the right man to solve the problem, and no yes-men, because "yes-men won't tell you the truth."

How the team gets built

Most of that team you built on purpose. You hired for alignment and culture fit, and both are real virtues right up to the meeting where the aligned, well-fitted team can't tell you no. The rest happens because people learn what the leader pays for, and they learn it fast.

A vice president watches the one colleague who argued at last year's offsite get a smaller bonus and a smaller title. He decides to pick his battles, and then finds there aren't any worth picking. By the third year he's the one briefing new hires on which topics the leader doesn't want to hear about, and he thinks of it as being helpful. Nobody in the building is lying; their jobs depend on his being right.

A friend is different in one way. They don't need you to perform. Their livelihood is not tied to your success. Most of the people around you do need you to perform, for that reason and no worse one.

Charlie Munger had a name for what that team does to the man at the head of it. "Crowd folly, the tendency of humans, under some circumstances, to resemble lemmings, explains much foolish thinking of brilliant men and much foolish behavior." Among people he chose, the crowd makes the brilliant man unanimous, and unanimity among people he chose is his own opinion coming back to him in six voices.

Proverbs 16:13 has the same dependence from the king's side. Those in power are dependent on those in their court, cabinet, and advisers. Trustworthy, integrity, true, and right are hard to come by and are a delight to those in power.

What a friend costs

Proverbs puts the two kinds of company side by side.

Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.

The people who never cost you anything feel like the safe ones, and the verse says they're the ones to watch.

Three chapters earlier there's a second kiss:

Whoever gives an honest answer kisses the lips.

The verse pairs the two words on purpose, and the pairing is the point. An honest answer is like a kiss. This is the kind of kiss we want, the kiss of honesty.

A good friend has a great imagination for you. The wound comes from someone who can picture you better than you are now and will be disliked for a week to say so. The kiss comes from someone with an agenda of his own, and for whatever reason the agenda requires not telling you the truth.

Who it usually is

The ride-or-die rarely looks like a flatterer. He looks like the person you'd most hate to lose.

Picture the partner from the early days, the one who was there when there were four employees and a truck. He can't tell the founder that the founder has changed, because he'd be saying it about himself, and he has as much invested in the old story as anyone. His silence reads as loyalty, and it's sincere.

Picture the number two whose whole career is the leader. He came in at 30, he's 50 now, and every promotion he ever got was the leader's decision. He's a man with one employer and a clear view of what disagreement has cost other people. If the leader is wrong about the acquisition, the number two loses an argument; if he's wrong about the leader, he loses 20 years.

Picture the board seat filled from your phone. A friend from the club, a man who has been to the house. He was recruited because you trusted him, and he took the seat because he liked you. Neither of you was thinking about the day he would have to tell you something you didn't want to hear, and when the day comes he'll say it to your spouse at a dinner before he says it to you in a meeting.

None of the three is disloyal, which is what makes it hard to see. Nobody at the table gains by telling you you're wrong, and you're the only one who pays for not hearing it.

What the honest one needs from you

A team that disagrees on everything is no fix either. Picture a founder who decided he needed disagreement and hired three contrarians, and now every meeting is a fight and nothing ships. That team is ride-or-die too, riding against him, results be damned, and it's as useless as the one that agreed. What you need is the truth, and some of the time it sounds like disagreement.

Schriever's rule had a second half: find the right man, "then win the man's loyalty and back him up while he does the job." The people who told Arnold what his engineers couldn't do were people he kept close after Marshall asked him why. They could afford to tell him the truth because he'd made it safe to, and because none of them needed a promotion from him to keep a professorship.

Powerful and Kind, not just kind. If you want people around you who tell you things you have to be both, and most of us have one. The kind one gets people who like him and say nothing. The merely powerful one gets people who fear him and say nothing.

The thing that makes it safe is trust, and the employee who could tell you is the one with the least of it to spend. Without trust, everything is a "no." The friend who tells you the hard thing knows you'll still be his friend on Monday. The employee who could tell you doesn't know that, so he doesn't.

What Arnold was doing

Marshall's question is the one you get asked when you start keeping that kind of company. What on earth are you doing with people like that? Arnold's answer still holds: people whose careers don't ride on your being right, who will say the instrument can't be built the way you want it built, and then build the one that can.

Of the six you counted, the one still disagreeing is the one Arnold would have kept.