The Megazord; or, the Tony Blair Institute
In the 2004 TV show Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, three teens in California find the Dino Gems, which turn them into Power Rangers.
Conner, Ethan and Kira become the red, blue and yellow Rangers, gaining the power of the Tyrannozord, Tricerazord, and Pterazord - giant dinosaur-shaped machines that help them battle the bad guys. Eventually, the Rangers learn to work together and combine into the Thundersaurus Megazord - a giant humanoid robot which follows the synchronised movements of the Rangers. When the Power Rangers punch, the Megazord punches too, but crucially, the Megazord is 46 metres tall. Six year old me thought this was just the most awesome thing ever.
Some organisations work a bit like a Megazord - they amplify their human pilot, actuating their desires at massive scale. When the boss wants something, the organisation gets it done. The rest of the org has no independent existence from the boss - they just extend him. The organisation exists to help the boss write more words, meet more people, have more ideas. Executive assistants, chiefs of staff, family offices all follow this pattern, but some organisations do it at an even bigger scale.
The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is one of them. The whole thing is just there to make Tony Blair more effective - but it has over 800 staff, $80m of donations from Larry Ellison, and £80m of revenue. When Tony wants to meet the president of some obscure country, the TBI makes it happen - and then executes the resulting consulting project. When Tony wants to influence the Labour Party, the TBI organises a conference. When Tony wants to write a book, the TBI …
What I find most interesting about the organisation is that nobody is there to disagree with Tony. The dynamic is that staffers do work, they bring it to Tony, and then Tony makes decisions. In the course of a short meeting, he reframes a question, asks a follow-up, and then decides whether a project lives or dies. If Tony wants it to happen, it happens, and if not, not.
If Tony doesn’t like something, it won’t happen.
The organisation is designed first and foremost to help him make more decisions, not to correct his decision making. This makes sense because Tony’s a generational political talent, and so his decisions are invariably really good. And even if any given decision isn’t good, it’s not worth slowing down the general conveyor belt of decision-making to question his judgement. Without institutional checks and balances, without committees and review boards, the TBI can work more quickly to put the boss’s ideas into practice.
Normally, people would frame this as a failure mode - the dictator surrounds themselves with yes men, loses touch with reality, and does something dumb like invading Russia. In the same way, we think that criticism and alternative points of view are really valuable. Diversity of thought! But if you’re working with a political genius, that might not apply.
The TBI is a way to create leverage for Tony, but not political leverage in the traditional sense - it’s leverage like a hedge fund. If you have a trader who’s consistently right 51% of the time, you want them to be trading with as much money as possible - not least because you might find it easier to give them more money than to make them right more often. The TBI works like this - given that we think Tony makes good decisions in the aggregate, let’s focus on having him make more decisions, not better ones. Let’s find a way to lever him up 30x!
Another framing is that any interference with Tony’s decision making would actually make the quality of his decision making worse, not better. This is the Founder’s Fund approach to venture investing: we will never vote against a founder, we will never remove a founder, we will give founders money to run their business and certainly not presume tell them how to do it. That was a controversial opinion in 2004, but became much less controversial over the next few years - not least because it’s probably the right strategy to adopt if you’re working with Mark Zuckerberg. If your CEO is the GOAT, you don’t want to be blocking them at every turn. And furthermore, if you think returns are power-law distributed, all the value is in the fat tails, and the key is to be contrarian, then you should encourage your crazy genius to be more crazy.
You can find a similar idea in Thomas Tuchel’s coaching philosophy - reflecting on his time as the manager of PSG, Tuchel says:
It’s very important that we don’t suppress creativity - the opposite! But in your room, in your space, in that moment where you are protected, please, find your solution. I will never tell Neymar what to do in a certain close space, because he will find a solution I never dreamed of. I will never tell Kylian [Mbappe]… why? Why should I?
Tuchel’s job as a manager was to find a structure for individual talent to shine - and in his case, that was positional play, the idea that each player works within a given Raum, or space on the pitch. Within his Raum, Neymar does what he wants, because he’s Neymar. You give Mark Zuckerberg millions of dollars, and you get out of the way, because he’s Zuck. You give Tony Blair eighty million dollars and eight hundred staff, and you don’t question his intuition.
But where does this leave the smart analysts at the TBI? What if they do disagree with their boss? Of course, sometimes they present evidence that changes Tony’s mind - even if it’s just missing context. Balance in all things. But the point is that the organisation as a whole is not geared to find a consensus between Tony and everyone else.
I think this works a bit like academic essay writing. If you’re writing a history essay, your job is to read the historiography, and figure out the main points of disagreement between the experts in the field - characterise their arguments, and come up with your own point of view. The weird thing, though, is that students are encouraged to find some kind of synthesis. “Expert A says XY, and Expert B says PQ, but I think they’re both wrong and the answer is XQ”. Now, that’s fun as an exercise, and probably pedagogically useful - but if it were that simple, wouldn’t A and B simply switch their views to XQ? Given that experts believe either XY or PQ, it seems much more likely that that the truth is either XY or PQ, not some chimera with elements of both. And hence if Tony - generational political talent - believes XY, and his analyst - smart 25 year old - believes PQ, then why bother trying to find XQ? Under time constraints, just default to XY in all cases!
Most people are going to have an instinctive reaction to (my framing, at least) of the TBI. Perhaps that reaction is determined by, like, your views on the Iraq War. Maybe it’s also determined by your experiences with authority. But it might also just come down to how you think about genius. If you believe in the existence of generational talent, that there are people who have extraordinary instinctive insight into their areas of expertise, then you should be all for institutions like the TBI. At that point you just need to decide whether Tony is the guy. But if instead you believe in team-work above all else, if you believe in diversity of thought and collective decision making, then you don’t think anyone should be empowered in the way the TBI empowers Tony. But at that point, you have to deny Neymar and Mbappe…
Consensus: The process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus’?
Margaret Thatcher