I decided a long time ago that I would never be done in life. Never satisfied, never retired, never done. Human life is too precious for me to waste it at the beach sipping margaritas. I want to make this life count. Actually, scratch that, I HAVE to make this life count.
For me, the pursuit of perfection guides my decisions. Jobs I take, books I read, people I talk to, people I coach, the friends I make, the relationships I nurture are all about becoming the best version of me. The perfect leader. I also know for a fact that I will never become this perfect leader. I don't think there is any leader, dead or alive, who has all these attributes and skills. But that doesn't deter me. I will pursue it forever until I am ashes to ashes and dust to dust, and that is good enough for me, because I know that pursuing this perfection will allow me to make an impact. It will let me make a small and memorable dent in the corner of my universe. I have always known what my definition of a perfect leader is, but surprisingly, I have never written it down. Well, here it is.
The Hype Trap
In my observation, the vast majority of tech leaders chase hype. They see something trending and want to signal to their investors and customers that they're at the bleeding edge of whatever is new, moving quickly to insert the trend into their product or marketing—often against the recommendations of their internal teams. We've all been in situations where bosses wanted to sell shovels in a gold rush, even when the team was saying there's no gold in those hills. Chasing hype never ends well and sometimes results in negative press and customer backlash. The NFT craze of 2021-22 is a perfect example. Companies tried to ride what they thought was a wave, only to realize it was a cliff. Every company (and entitled celebrity) that embraced it ended up at the bottom.
The best leaders do the opposite. They're comfortable telling investors and board members "no" when asked about the latest trend because they can see through hype to spot genuine innovation. They recognize and visualize what the future should actually look like. Andy Grove is a perfect example. When he led Intel, the company's core business was memory chips, but they faced intense pressure from Japanese competitors dumping memory chips at rock-bottom prices. The conventional path would have been to compete head-on—innovate on memory chips, cut prices, and sell more. But Grove knew the future wasn't in memory chips; it was in microprocessors. Back then, microprocessors represented a small but rapidly growing market segment. Grove saw the future clearly, went against conventional wisdom, and bet everything on microprocessors. The results were staggering: under his leadership, Intel's market cap grew 4,500%, from $4 billion to $197 billion.
The Multi-Product Paradox
Most companies struggle to become multi-product companies, even though it is a proven tactic to reduce risks and cultivate new channels of growth and revenue. It is common knowledge that the product adoption curve plateaus after 8-15 years. In other words, there is only so much revenue juice you can squeeze from a single product. Only 25% of public companies generate more than 20% of their revenue from outside of their core offerings (source: https://www.tidemarkcap.com/post/the-paths-to-multi-product). So why don't companies eagerly adopt a multi-product strategy? The answer is, it is freaking hard. It takes an enormous amount of conviction and financial discipline to keep investing in a secondary product line, knowing that you won't see any returns from it for multiple years. In the case of AWS, it was decades! For a company to have this level of conviction, it needs a special type of leader. Most leaders will flinch during a downturn and reallocate resources to their core product offering. Only the perfect leader will stay invested in alternate business lines even if their board members are yelling at them to change tactics.
His wedding invitation might not be innovative or unique, but Jeff Bezos's multi-product strategy and conviction are one for the history books. He launched Kindle during the 2008 downturn. When companies were shutting down, cutting costs, and refocusing on their core business, Jeff launched Kindle because he was convinced that there was an unmet need there. Along with launching Kindle, he didn't pull back on investment in AWS, which had been announced just two years prior. Lastly, he made some blockbuster acquisitions, including Zappos, which he acquired for a whopping $1.2 billion in 2009. All of these have paid off. Amazon has grown ~2,500% from approximately $25 billion in revenue in 2009 to $640 billion in 2024.
Master Capital Allocators
Here's a fun activity. Ask your CEO (or any senior leader), 'What do you do?' Most will mention leading teams, driving growth, or setting vision. But the leader who answers, 'I allocate capital to create maximum returns' truly understands their actual job. Everything else—the meetings, the strategy docs, the team building—is just tactics serving this one fundamental responsibility.
The best leaders not only deeply understand their core responsibilities as capital allocators but are excellent at it. They put deep emphasis on cash flow versus earnings. They keep costs down by tapping into cheaper global markets for talent. They aggressively buy back stock to signal to the market that the shares are underpriced and thus drive the overall share price up and keep the company's capitalization healthy. They decentralize decision-making but keep capital allocation central. They patiently wait for a good price on acquisitions. They don't rush into any financial decision. And lastly, they are painfully frugal.
Henry Singleton, the founder of Teledyne, Inc., is widely considered one of the best capital allocators in business. As an example, he used the overvalued Teledyne stock in the 1960s to aggressively pursue acquisition targets, and when the stock became undervalued in the 1970s, he aggressively purchased it back, ultimately retiring a whopping 90% of the company's stock, which ultimately drove up the per-share price. This required enormous conviction to buy aggressively when his own stock was beaten down while competitors were expanding. As a result of his shrewd financial acumen and operational focus, Teledyne stock achieved an 18% compounded annual return between 1966 and 1991—12x the S&P 500! Everyone mentions Jack Welch's name as someone who consistently beat the market, but he can't come near Henry Singleton's results. In the time Jack Welch was CEO, GE stock performed 2x the S&P 500. Still impressive, but nowhere close to what Henry Singleton was able to achieve.
Culture Conviction
The perfect leader is obsessively opinionated about culture—not the feel-good values plastered on conference room walls, but the actual behaviors that determine how work gets done. They understand that culture isn't what you say; it's what you tolerate. And they're willing to be almost ruthless in protecting it. The way these leaders embed culture into their organizations borders on the fanatical: it determines who gets hired, who gets fired, how decisions are made, and how employees are expected to behave with each other. To outsiders, it might look cult-like. To insiders, it's what makes the impossible possible.
A great example of culture driving everything a company does is Amazon. To be clear, I am not suggesting that it's a great culture. I'm just saying that it's a great example of a culture where it is extremely clear to employees what they should and should not do. Amazon didn't stumble upon this accidentally. They refined and re-refined their culture over many decades. They wrote down how employees should work and behave. They use it in recruiting, performance management, investment decisions, and everything else in between. Another key insight I learned during my time at Amazon is that their cultural values (leadership principles in Amazon parlance) are not a reflection of their entire company but rather a reflection of the key attributes and skills possessed by the early leaders at the company that brought it its initial success. Essentially, the leadership principles adopted by Amazon were basically the key traits of the early executive team that Jeff hired. They figured out what brought them success and doubled and tripled down on it. When ex-employees complain about the culture of Amazon, it is considered a feature and not a bug.
The ultimate test of cultural conviction comes when leaders must choose between popular opinion and their stated values. A lot of CEOs easily fall into the trap of virtue signaling. Take any social justice issue—Black Lives Matter, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Gaza conflict—and chances are, companies and CEOs are publicly supporting the most popular side to earn some cheap marketing wins. Make a token donation, change your company logo on LinkedIn, and boom, virtue signaling complete. It takes a special type of leader to go against the grain and take the heat for it.
A good example of this is Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase. At the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, Brian sent his now-infamous "No Politics" memo. When every company was publicly supporting the racial justice movement, Brian went the other way. He told his employees that Coinbase would keep its focus on solving for its customers and wouldn't take any political stances. He also offered severances to employees who were uncomfortable with his "No Politics" memo. About 5% of Coinbase took the severance and quit, and that was okay with Brian. This example shows both the power and difficulty of cultural conviction. While Armstrong stood firm on his principle, his own inconsistencies—like posting political content shortly after his memo—highlighted how challenging it is to maintain perfect cultural alignment. In general, though, I think it's a good example of a leader standing up for what they believe in and dealing with the consequences without regrets.
Talent Obsession
This is somewhat connected to the previous section, but it's worth calling out that the best leaders are extremely opinionated about who gets hired and who has to go. They are willing to break the bank for the best talent and don't hesitate to cycle out people who are not good fits for the company.
A great example is Reed Hastings of Netflix, who spent months courting Patty McCord to become Netflix's Chief Talent Officer. She kept saying no, but Reed kept showing up at her office and inviting her out for coffee, bringing other Netflix executives along until she relented.
On the flip side, Reed Hastings is also the leader who went to extreme lengths to ensure Netflix has a low tolerance for poor performers. He implemented the 'Keeper Test,' where he would ask managers if they would fight to keep an employee from going to another company for a similar job and pay. If the answer was 'no,' the employee would be let go with generous severance. Steve Jobs also had a very direct approach—he would fire people on the spot for poor performance and sometimes even eliminate entire product lines if he thought they weren't performing up to his standards. Some readers might find these steps extreme, and to be sure, there is a real human cost to these tactics. But there is no question that Netflix and Apple have tremendously benefited from having a high bar for talent.
The Human Equation
For a leader to be able to do all the things I described above, they also need extraordinary personal skills. They need to be warm, welcoming, charming, forceful, and decisive simultaneously.
Think about it. Convincing a board to co-sign a risky multi-product strategy during a downturn requires both analytical rigor and the ability to inspire confidence. Firing someone while maintaining team morale demands both decisiveness and empathy. Rejecting popular trends while keeping investors engaged requires charm paired with unwavering conviction.
The best leaders master this paradox of being simultaneously supportive and demanding, patient and urgent, humble and confident. Without these interpersonal skills, all the strategic brilliance in the world becomes academic—because leadership, ultimately, is about getting exceptional results through people.
Conclusion
I started by saying I'll never achieve this perfect leader ideal, and that's precisely the point. The leaders I've described—Grove, Bezos, Singleton, Hastings—weren't perfect either. They made mistakes, had blind spots, and faced countless failures. But what made them exceptional was their relentless pursuit of these principles, even when it was uncomfortable, unpopular, or uncertain.
The beautiful irony is that by accepting you'll never be perfect, you free yourself to take the extreme actions that perfection demands. You can tell your board 'no' on the latest trend because you're not trying to look smart—you're trying to be right. You can fire underperformers because you're not trying to be liked—you're trying to build something lasting.
So pick one (or two) of these areas and start obsessing over it. Become unreasonably focused on capital allocation, or culture, or talent. Make it your thing. Because in the end, the leaders who change the world aren't the ones who do everything well—they're the ones who do a few critical things extraordinarily well, and have the conviction to keep doing them when everyone else thinks they're crazy.
Until next time!