I spend a significant amount of time immersed in historical documentaries. While my professional life is rooted in risk and operations, my personal curiosity lives in the mechanics of power. I have studied the rise and fall of almost every autocrat in modern history.
When you look at these figures through a strategy lens, a striking pattern emerges. The tactics used to consolidate power in a failing state are often identical to the management practices found in toxic organizations.
An autocracy is a high cost and low efficiency organizational structure. It relies entirely on coercive power. While this can illicit immediate compliance, it is the most expensive and fragile way to lead.
The reason some seemingly intelligent people do not see the danger is often due to a failure of long term risk assessment. Within a business or a large organization, the high performers often believe they are immune. Because they are hitting their numbers and maintaining the KPIs, they assume the underlying management style does not apply to them. They disassociate from the toxicity because, for the moment, they are the protected class. They are the sales stars and the rainmakers who the system currently needs to survive.
In a toxic organization, these high performers feel insulated. Much like certain ethnic or social groups in the early stages of an autocracy, they believe their utility makes them untouchable. They tell themselves that the fear and the micromanagement are meant for the weak or the underperformers. They buy into the narrative that as long as they remain valuable to the regime, the regime will remain valuable to them.
But as a strategy, this is a failure to account for systemic risk. A system built on fear has no psychological safety. This means it has no feedback loop. When a leader suppresses dissent, they are also suppressing the truth. This creates a massive information asymmetry where the person at the top is making decisions based on filtered and fraudulent data.
In the corporate world, we see this in organizations that optimize for short term results while destroying their organizational health. It works until it does not. The moment a crisis occurs, such as a health issue, a family loss, or an external market shift, the machine lacks the empathy and agility to adapt. The high performer who thought they were safe suddenly finds that the coercive power they ignored is now turned on them. The system does not recognize your past service once your current utility is compromised.
There is a false narrative currently circulating in places like Minnesota that suggests a tyrannical shift is inevitable because people are weak. History teaches the opposite. The side that wholeheartedly embraces the mechanisms of tyranny often does so out of a lack of historical literacy. They have not read the books that explain how these systems actually collapse once the protected class is finally consumed by the machine.
To understand this dynamic, I recommend three essential texts. First is The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, which explains that the more a leader relies on a small circle of cronies, the more fragile their position becomes. Second is On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder, which offers a manual on recognizing the early warning signs of institutional decay. Third is The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, which reveals that power held through fear is a debt that eventually comes due.
The reality is that we are in a period of high volatility. But from a risk management standpoint, autocracy is a project with diminishing returns. It is a model that requires more and more energy to maintain for a lower quality of output.
True leadership maturity is the realization that a system requiring the suppression of truth is already in a state of failure.
You can feel better knowing that while autocrats can illicit fear, they cannot synthesize the trust and innovation required for a society or a business to thrive in the long game. They are curators of a crumbling throne.
Are you focusing on the noise of the coercion or the strategic reality of the fragility?
I am a Canadian insurance and investment professional and the President and Chief Executive Officer of Chazz Financial Inc. and Chazz Capital Assets. I write about leadership, markets, insurance, investing, and decision making, with a focus on how structure and incentives shape outcomes.
I hold a business degree and I am a Fellow of the Canadian Securities Institute (FCSI®), a Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU®), a Chartered Financial Planner®, a Certified Health Specialist and a Mutual Fund Investment Representative.
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