Importance of Political Capital & Horse Trading

Riding high on a few different substances with a clean slate on a Friday night and I can feel the clarity of some lingering thoughts that I've been processing for a few weeks now. You get to a point in your career where your days skew from developing technical rigor to abstracted, strategic thought on how to build. Days were once spent learning, executing and perfecting the technical operations and functions. These days, I spend so much time thinking about how to orchestrate execution within systemic constructs. Developing and leveraging Political Capital and Horse Trading is what enables individuals to break through systemic constructs and build bigger than any competitive peer.

Political Capital gives an individual "access". The cumulative of your branding, networking and positioning efforts determines your political capital and transiently, your level of "access". Your level of "access" dictates whether or not you'll be able to get things done at scale within a large organization. An individual who was a former senior executive of my firm has given me a front row seat on how one leverages "access". This individual got bored and purchased a small startup. In order to expand the sales channels of the individual's firm, the individual simply calls the seated executive responsible for a brokered introduction to those actually carrying out the technical operations and functions of actualizing what the individual is looking for. The seated executive brokers the introduction because more than likely, those that came before you know someone above you and you'd rather not hassle with potential escalations. Plus, the individual is a former senior executive and served the firm for a commendable amount of years and you're expected to pay that respect forward. A directive / introduction from senior executives is an immediate top priority for any group. Fuck up the operation and function being inferred upon you and you will be viewed as insubordinate by your immediate management team and it will handicap your career's progression. This individual has leveraged this "access" to scale the resources of the startup company exponentially via mature and well capitalized Fortune 25. The individual's end product is good and once it starts turning revenue on corporate paper, nobody bats an eye. "Access" is the real deal.

When your political capital is not enough to move mountains on your own, you're going to need to trade horses. Horses are favors / levers that individual's need, but don't have the "access" to dictate or take from you. Powerful people interface with individuals who can execute complex business motions. String together branding, networking, positioning + horses to punch far above your weight class. The people who get stuck at the horse trading level and never have "access" are those who part with their horses for less value than they are worth or do not have the tact / strategic execution to stitch together complex business motions.

I've traded public speaking positions, intellectual property, strategic execution and institutional introductions / engagement as they have been low-cost / natural for me to generate. These are attractive horses to those with exponentially more political capital than I who need a component to stitch together their own complex business motion. For instance, when I can trade a patent disclosure for public recognition + "an ask" from a senior executive several ranks above me, I'm jumping on that. Turns out, the executive needed that component to hit top marks for an "innovation initiative" several ranks above him.

When you hit the inflection point of diminishing returns on your technical work products and increasing impact via strategic execution, you need to switch gears. The game you must now play is the abstraction of making shit happen at scale.