Do Right Over Easy

The consistency test

The operative rule, stated on taking over as chief executive of a large asset manager in 2021: "I want to be able to say the same thing in Texas as I say in California. It's too hard to remember a story. I would rather just be who I am."¹ This is a practical argument dressed as a values argument: an institution that tailors its stated position to each audience is running a memory and consistency liability that compounds with every new constituency, and eventually the positions collide in public. A single defensible standard is cheaper to operate than a portfolio of locally optimal ones, even if it is worse in any single room.

Two worked examples

The climate example reduces to one rule: "make it better, not worse. That's it."¹ Applied honestly, that includes the uncomfortable case: "it was hard to have said, we're going to make it better, not worse, but if that includes financing hydrocarbons, we're going to finance hydrocarbons." The structure of the choice matters more than the position itself: the easy options were the two absolutist poles, no carbon financing at all or no stated position at all, while a directional standard is harder because it requires a judgment on every transaction and satisfies no constituency completely.

The hiring example reduces similarly: it was easy to sign up for whichever specific metric was being demanded, and harder to state a standard of merit adjusted for distance traveled instead.¹

The observation about the business community

The sharper point is about how many of these commitments were made in the first place: "we saw people fall on the DEI sword in some instances, or on the climate sword. People became absolutists."¹ The implicit charge is that firms adopted maximal positions not from conviction but because a maximal position is easier to state than a considered one, since it requires no per-case judgment and is legible to whoever is asking.

Cost as a feature

The claim, in his own words: "I hope that this is now ingrained in our company, and it hasn't been cost free, but I don't think it should be cost free... anytime you raise your head above the parapet there's a cost to doing it."¹ The internal result reported, regardless of whether individual employees agreed with each specific position taken, was a strong positive response specifically on moral leadership, the argument being that people respond to the existence of a stated standard more than to its particular content.

Read skeptically

Saying the same thing everywhere is only a virtue if the thing being said is right; it is equally a description of someone who never updates, in tension with Strong Opinions Loosely Held. The specific positions chosen also happen to be the ones that reduce constraints on the business itself, since financing hydrocarbons and declining externally imposed hiring metrics are both cheaper than their alternatives, even though they are framed as costly. And the evidence offered for the payoff is internal feedback, reported by the person who set the policy.

Adjacent

Standards Over Rules captures the same preference for a judgment-bearing standard over a mechanical rule. Palmer Luckey's Preemptive Compliance is a harder-edged version of the same instinct, where taking a stated position doubles as a customer-sorting mechanism.