Definition
The compartmentalized loyalty blind spot is a leadership failing where an executive values individuals solely based on their current, immediate utility to a project, disregarding their historical loyalty or foundational contributions to the company’s early success.
Why It Matters
It warns that treating people as disposable tools destroys the trust and historical glue needed for long-term organizational survival.
Core Concepts
- Bandwidth Allocation: Leaders with intense focus often devote all their “bandwidth” to the immediate work at hand, viewing people who cannot contribute to the current bleeding-edge goal as obsolete.
- The Equity Snub: A classic example is Steve Jobs denying founder’s stock options to early Apple garage employees (like Fernandez and Kottke) simply because they were currently hourly workers.
- Transactional vs. Relational: Treating employee value as strictly transactional (what can you build for me today?) rather than relational (what did we build together?).