Lessons from the Galactic Empire

Why the scrappy rebel alliance was always destined for victory

A failure of leadership?

Those who know me will know I’m a Star Wars fan. A friend of mine, back in my Netscape days, and I would compete to insert Star Wars quotes into meetings. As I’ve spent more time in management, however, I’ve realised that the Galactic Empire is the archetype of a large number of crippling organisational dysfunctions. In fact, when I was talking about organisational dysfunction at Google I used to use the Empire as my example to describe behaviours I was starting to see at Google and wanted to highlight. That way I was less likely to get organ rejection (companies like Google, Facebook, Apple are quite cult-ish on the inside as people are heavily invested in them).

So why did the Empire lose? I believe that their demise was inevitable. They simply weren’t set up to succeed and the culture and behaviours were so toxic that it was only a matter of time. The small scrappy and motivated Rebel Alliance had every disadvantage you can imagine. They were smaller, less advanced, no market position and under constant pressure from their larger more established rival. What can we learn from this?

Purpose. What’s the purpose of the Empire? Those in the rank and file might say their purpose was to keep order in the galaxy. But it’s pretty hard to square that away with the behaviour of the…