Collateral Talent #3: People Don’t Destroy What They Hate — They Destroy What They Can’t Control

People Don’t Destroy What They Hate — They Destroy What They Can’t Control

By Gene Fliman, Practice Director at MCLI Technologies

Organizations rarely collapse because of bad ideas. They collapse because of control.

When leaders encounter something they can’t bend, can’t own, can’t fully contain — the instinct is often to eliminate it. Not because it’s wrong. Not because it’s harmful. But because it refuses to sit neatly inside their lines of authority.

We’ve seen this dynamic play out everywhere from Fortune 1000 transformations to the front pages of the Wall Street Journal. In 2024, several executives at xAI resigned after public clashes with Elon Musk’s advisers. Their departure wasn’t about incompetence — it was about authority. Who had the mandate, who was calling the shots, and who refused to be controlled. In the first quarter of 2025, a wave of CEOs across finance and tech quietly stepped down or were pushed out, leaving behind organizations that had ignored risk signals, insisted on rosy forecasts, and punished the people raising hard truths. Even Wall Street’s quant and AI teams, once prized as engines of innovation, now report growing frustration at being hemmed in by bureaucratic bottlenecks that stifle the autonomy they need to deliver.

The pattern is consistent: the very people capable of steering companies through turbulence — the high-autonomy operators — are too often treated as threats. They move too fast. They ask the wrong questions at the wrong time. They don’t wait for permission before fixing what everyone else knows is broken. And in systems built on hierarchy and narrative control, that looks less like excellence and more like danger.

At MCLI, we reject the reflex to tame. We don’t apologize for autonomy; we harness it. Our culture is built around protecting the operators who can actually deliver the outcomes enterprises depend on. We create arenas — clear mandates, protected space, aligned incentives — where these people can run at full speed without being dragged down by fragile egos or performative governance.

Because the truth is simple: you don’t fix systemic problems by clipping the wings of the people capable of solving them. You fix them by giving those people the room to fly — and by insulating them from the insecurity that would otherwise try to pull them back to earth.

This isn’t theory. It’s how we’ve stabilized multi-billion-dollar programs, rescued failing transformations, and turned high-stakes projects into repeatable wins. We know the market forces at work — the demand for AI and automation, the investor pressure for speed, the boardroom intolerance for missed forecasts — and we know they make autonomy more, not less, valuable.

The organizations that thrive in this climate will be the ones that stop trying to control their stallions and instead learn to build arenas where they can run.

At MCLI, we don’t tame stallions. We build arenas they can run in.

The Wall Street Journal
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