Quick ask before we start: I'm putting together my 2027 speaking calendar. If you programme a tech or PE conference (or know who does) hit reply.

Tobias runs a software company, a bit over 300 people, second year after the growth round. The employer brand is care. Careers page, the language of looking after each other, the whole “soft” palette. It's why people apply, and why they stay.

None of that was a marketing decision. It was genuinely him! Back when he started, he gave new people far too much room, hired for whether he'd still want to work with them in ten years, and paid in being looked after rather than in salary. Eleven people became three hundred on that.

For most of this year, every session has opened the same way: Tobias is disappointed in his people. His leaders avoid the hard conversations — most of them just aren't built for bad news, he says. They carry someone underperforming for a year because that person is nice, and the whole team pays for it. He wants an organisation that runs without him and gets one that waits for him. It's starting to eat him up.

He threw his hands up in frustration and almost shouted: “Julius, we pretend to be a different company from who we actually want to be!"

This whole story made me reflect on what being in power does to us. And I found some very unsatisfying, et inspiring things.

Here are two principles about power. Both feel true to me. But they are contradicting themselves, and that’s what made them stuck in my head:

1 — Those who show care gain social status, and with it, power.

Dacher Keltner spent two decades at Berkeley arguing that we don't seize power — it gets handed to us. Groups lift the people who are generous, attentive, useful to others. Power and status are the result of value provided to the group.

2 — Once you are in power, caring less fortifies your position.

Whoever cares less in relationships sets the terms. You know this from every negotiation you've been in — power is the other side's dependence, and the moment you stop needing the deal you can name the price. Every organisation runs on relationships, and in each of them the one who cares less holds the power.

So care is doing two opposite jobs.

Which makes the winning position maximum visible generosity with minimum actual dependence.

That's good old Machiavelli, almost word for word. A prince doesn't need the virtues, he only needs to appear to have them. Machiavelli didn't think this was cynical. He thought it was obvious, and he'd find it funny that we needed the studies.

We promote the people who can perform warmth without needing anyone, and call the result good leadership.

I find that perverse, but I also think it is true.

Find the moment your position stopped being at risk. The round that closed, the year you became profitable, the title. You'll know the month.

Now name three things you did routinely before that month and don't do anymore. Not tasks you delegated — things you did for other people that cost you something at the time. Picking up work that wasn't yours. Answering everyone. Making the introduction with nothing in it for you.

Next to each one, write down who noticed you stopped.

That last column is the exercise. Nobody tells you when you stop, because by then it's expensive to tell you. Pick one and start again this week, without announcing it.

Yours,