Review of Tribal Leadership
June 22, 2025
Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization by Dave Logan , John King and Halee Fischer-Wright.
The book proposes a simple model of humans and their organizations, sized 20–150, which the authors call tribes. In a nutshell, they propose 5 stages, defined by the mindset:
Life sucks
My life sucks
I’m great (and you're not)
We are great (and they are not)
Life is great
The main narrative is that the more aligned are the values and priorities of individuals within an organization, the greater is the performance. Hard to argue with that!
The proposed model is simple, and the description is excellent, which makes it very actionable. The model is usable in the sense that it is actually possible to make falsifiable predictions if you really try. Anecdotally, quite a few people and projects in my orbit fit nicely into the proposed framework, it really helped me to make sense of some recent observations.
The authors base their book on a study, very succinctly described in Appendix B, I couldn’t find it published elsewhere. The strong aspect of the study is that it’s not merely a description of correlations, but that the authors have actually conducted interventions and measured their impact. On the other hand, it’s very hard to assess the study without a more complete description. Judging by the Appendix, there was no control group, and also the impact of the intervention was measured through surveys, raising the possibility of socially-desirable answer bias.
You may have noticed how carefully I phrased above “a simple approximate model for a complex world”. This is, of course, not how it’s written. Like most business books, it’s written with a confidence of an Apostle writing a Gospel.
The book mixes facts and moralizing. Not only there are five stages, but some of them are presented as inherently better. This makes for a compelling narrative, but makes critical analysis harder. This also gives it a fairy tale vibe, where good simply and automatically triumphs. Using little tricks like tribal leader as a synonym for a good leader who does right things and becomes successful beyond measure is, personally speaking, off-putting. Although I must give the authors credit that they do mention inconvenient observations, such as the abundance of failed stage five companies during the dot-com bubble.
The book completely ignores the most basic conflict. Who gets to be the tribal leader? Even in the most “advanced stage 4 company”, where everyone is supposed to be embracing the collective greatness, for some totally inexplicable reason someone walks home with a million dollars, and someone with fifty thousand. The book acknowledges this conflict, for example: “The Tribal Leaders we met had all gone through Stage Three, including learning how to outmaneuver others and win at political games.”, but doesn’t offer a comprehensive solution. The book very conveniently talks from the perspective of the tribal leaders – people on top of hierarchy, and how nice it is when everybody is busy working on the common goal which coincidentally means working for them. As an old Soviet joke says: “The horse worked the most on a collective farm, but didn’t get to be the chairman”.
The alignment of private and group interest and values is, in my humble opinion, the central problem in social, economic, and biological sciences: the inherent conflict between individual incentives and the potential for greater collective well-being. The trillion dollar question is how to achieve it. “Tribal leadership” provides some tools, but those tools are not nearly enough.
Thank you for the recommendation, Serg Bell!
P. S. Historical tribes were violent, unfair and inefficient organizations, outcompeted starting with the Bronze Age by the other forms of societal organization, see The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker.