I'm still reading the Churchill biography. And it occurs to me that he's a very dangerous example. I can very well imagine people reading this and thinking to themselves, "Gee, I've stood up for unpopular positions and limited my career because of it. I have stood on principle in direct conflict with current leadership. Maybe I'm going to be the Prime Minister of England and lead the world to victory through a terrible war."

Well, maybe they aren't thinking the last part. But if they think that Churchill's example is a recipe for success, they are being just as delusional. Certainly Churchill was willing to risk his career in order to highlight the Nazi menace, but very few career inflection points rank up there with Hitler. And for every Churchill there are a thousand similarly talented people who died bitter and disappointed.
 

There are other ways that Churchill's model doesn't work any more. Churchill was primarily a writer and orator. He structured his life and his work habits around maximizing his peculiar talents. He had research assistants and secretaries. He regularly had distinguished guests for dinner where he could hold court and hone his arguments and reasoning. To some extent, this is a valuable example in that he understood the power of delegation and focusing his energy on what he could uniquely deliver.

But what in his time was a way to magnify his unique genius, today becomes a bottleneck. There a role in software development called "Architect."  It's traditionally a "smartest guy in the room" kind of job where a very experienced developer has great influence over the design. They usually don't have to actually manage anybody or even write code. It was a role designed to maximize a unique person's brain power.

But that role has been subtly changing over the years. I've always felt uncomfortable with 'architect' as a career goal. I always wondered what you did when you weren't being brilliant. At least as a PM or a manager you had to make the trains run on time. But I think the romantic view of architect no longer applies, if it ever did. The best architects are social connectors and are capable of bringing the right people together. This is in some ways the exact opposite of the romantic view of brilliance combined with arrogance. Bringing the right people together sometimes means pulling in that front-line new hire into a meeting with an executive and knowing how to communicate and help the new guy present his ideas. You have to have humility to see the value in someone else's thoughts.

One of the best examples of this is Jim Gray. I only met him once, but for years it seemed I couldn't encounter a prominent person at Microsoft who didn't believe they owed their career to him. They all considered him a close personal friend, not just a colleague but a friend.  Even my best man who I met long before I came to Microsoft and is now a prominent astrophysicist got to know him and speaks very highly of him. There are so many intersecting circles of influence that center on Jim Gray and remain in place to this day that his influence continues even though he remains missing. His extraordinary influence didn't come from his undoubted intelligence. It came from his friends.

Back in Churchill's day education was limited, communication was slow, and travel was difficult. Indeed one of the benefits of having an aristocracy was to concentrate limited educational resources and to keep educated people in close contact with each other. Servants helped them focus on using their abilities to the fullest. Back then there were so few educated people that when one of them was brilliant, it made sense to organize societies around maximizing their influence. Today's world couldn't be more different. There is so much knowledge, so many smart people, and so many ways to communicate that social ability and connections are far more powerful that individual brilliance.