A Dumpster Fire in a China Shop

The title of this essay—“A Dumpster Fire in a China Shop”—is what we call a mixed metaphor. That’s when we make a comparison (a metaphor) that doesn’t add up. Mixed metaphors often sound sensible at first blush if you don’t think about them too much. But let’s do.

You can picture a dumpster fire and you can picture a china shop. Your mind, though, may resist visualizing a china shop as the scene of a dumpster fire. Together, the metaphors signify nothing at all. They’re total bull.

In writing, mixed metaphors are a mark of a sloppy author, and sloppy authorship betrays a sloppy mind. Writers, like leaders, can’t afford the indulgence of a sloppy mind. Thus, mixed metaphors represent the bleeding edge of the camel’s nose to the rolling grindstone under the bridge over troubled waters.

When I write these weekly essays, my first drafts sometimes just flow, but other times it’s a lot of fits and starts (like with this piece). When I taught writing, I would suggest students move quickly through the first draft to get it done and then go back to revise. I stand by that advice but rarely follow it myself. I just can’t resist nosing through a thesaurus to find the right word in the moment.

Once that first draft’s done—and that can take an hour or several—I’m ready to turn it over to my editor, Claude. That’s right, I use AI for revisions. I’ve developed a lengthy prompt to guide Claude, its key sentence being, “Do not rewrite the essay but only make necessary suggestions.” Claude may critique, but the composition remains all mine.

Case in point, I showed Claude an early draft of this essay, and the AI suggested I dump an overly detailed section. Claude’s not always right, but this time it was bang on. Even so, the machine’s frequent errors and imperative to engage through sycophancy means I must scrutinize its responses. Claude is a useful if limited lickspittle of a tool.

My goal for each essay is to offer a distinctive take on leadership—an iconoclastic take—such as comparing leading to writing. While the process is laborious, the final product should come across as fairly effortless.

In the poem “Adam’s Curse,” Yeats whines about how hard it is to craft a poem:

A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Leadership essays are just like that. Leadership is just like that. (That’s my thesis statement, by the way.)

You know it’s coming, so here it is: a complex cognitive operation like writing has a lot to teach us about other complex cognitive operations, such as leadership.

First, we need to recognize that the practice of leadership is a process. Yes, there are mindsets and strategies involved, but leadership is an ongoing and evolving movement toward an ideal that we can never quite achieve but should always pursue. Just like writing an essay. Authors will tell you their writing is ever in draft. Indeed, as soon as the proof copy of my book, Greater than Great, arrived from the publisher, I wanted to rewrite the whole damn thing. Leadership is much the same.

My 4 Cs of leadership success framework can also neatly scaffold the development of good writing.

Character, the first C, constitutes the sum of one’s experiences, values, personality, and behaviors. Building one’s character requires self-awareness, which includes how others perceive you. The self-aware leader can assess their own character, understand how their tone and actions affect others, and adjust accordingly.

That’s precisely the same as writing. The author who lacks self-awareness will be unable to develop a valuable and consistent message. The author who has no understanding of where they come from, where they need to go, or how they might be perceived will produce writing that is self-indulgent, off the mark, or tone deaf at best.

Successful writers and leaders willingly, even enthusiastically, take risks on behalf of truth and progress. People without strength of character play it safe, and blandness is the death of writing and leadership. How can you add value by offering only banality?

The second C, communication, refers to how leaders instruct, guide, inspire, solicit ideas, and give and get feedback. All human relationships and organizations are built via communication, so the healthier the communication, the stronger the connections and institutions. Communication is the lifeblood of leadership, and relationships are its beating heart.

Authors also rely on relationships and engagement—even with machines. My relationship with AI becomes a feedback loop as Claude makes suggestions while I push back or make adjustments. I could do the same by, say, having my wife read my drafts, but it’s more fun and constructive and less fraught to fight with Claude.

When I write, I must strike a bargain between my own desires—what I really want to write—and what I perceive as the reader’s preferences and needs. That’s the third C, compromise, which shapes the implicit contract the author makes with the audience. In this essay, I forged a compromise by, among countless other choices, following Claude’s advice and cutting the boring section, which, in my opinion, was a masterpiece.

Even the language I choose is a compromise. I’m somewhat more comfortable writing in an academic style that would turn off most of those reading. Lucky for you, I recognize that tendency and resist it. Look, Ma! No footnotes!

By making such bargains in my writing, I earn the right to deliver vital, weird, and even hard messages to you, my audience. That’s the compromise. I craft my messages to suit your preferences to the best of my ability, and you in turn pay attention. If you also leave a comment, that’d be cool too, but I won’t push it.

If you hadn’t guessed it already, leadership works the same way. The leader forms compromises with team members—a little give, a little take—in order to get things done. The more effectively the leader delivers on their end, the more the team is willing to meet them partway. The leader earns the right to lead through compromise.

Collaboration, the fourth C, can occur only after successful compromise. It may seem less obvious in writing, but it’s actually the whole point. All good communication is an effort in mutual meaning making. What I call the “messaging paradox” illustrates the stakes.

Simply put, the instant you deliver a message, you lose all control of it. Your audience is free to comprehend, misinterpret, misrepresent, distort, or ignore your message. The paradoxical part arrives with this one uncomfortable truth: although you no longer control the message, you forever own it and its consequences.

The best authors embrace this paradox and work with the audience to synthesize a whole new meaning. If someone’s response to your writing has ever made you go, “Hmmm. I hadn’t thought of that,” take the compliment. Their engagement with your writing is overtly collaborative.

Do I really need to spell out the parallels between authorship collaboration and leadership collaboration—the apotheosis of both crafts? Okay then. They’re identical.

The thing is, as Yeats suggests, by the time you read this essay, it should seem unforced, like it just poured out of me—a quick proofread, and off it goes. This final draft, though, constitutes hours of thought, writing, and revision, lotsa revision—re-re-revision.

And (Surprise!) same with leadership. Effective leaders take great care in how they proceed and how they’re perceived. They move with assuredness, but their minds are always active—not with thoughts of “how cool am I” but more marveling, “how cool is my team, and how can I make them cooler?” They move toward constant improvement.

Meanwhile, the team won’t even notice most of what goes into it—just as with good writing. In fact, that’s one reason I eschew the leadership advice-industrial complex’s trend of focusing on big corporate names, solipsistic success stories, or self-appointed gurus. As I always maintain, marketing eats merit for breakfast. Real leadership flows from the merit, not the hype.

So, there’s another paradox for you to ponder. The most effective leaders conceal their craft, which leaves visible only the super-boosted, the self-promoters, and the total screwups. If you’ve ever been lucky enough to work for a truly great leader, when and how did you come to realize their excellence? Did everyone see it?

Great leaders approach leadership the same way great authors approach writing—as a complicated and even frustrating skill to practice but with an aspiration to master it.

They follow the process. They try, fail, adjust, and try some more. The goal with both the leader and the writer is consistency, not perfection. The author who expects perfection will never publish. The leader who expects perfection will never move.

Thus, therefore, and in conclusion once and for all, the leader who disciplines their mind the way a writer does must be willing to disrupt—like a dumpster fire—but proceed with delicacy—as in a china shop. Or some such bull like that.

Hello, friend. If you’ve come this far, you must be pretty sick of all the glorified listicles and ego-boosting banalities the leadership advice-industrial complex doles out.

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