A Field Manual for Founder-CEOs Who Own the Future

CEO Field Rule Number 1

Do not mistake power or visible success for competence that is relevant to your mission and vision.

Power is contextual. Success is path-dependent. Neither transfers by proximity or association. A person can accumulate influence, wealth, or status by winning entirely different games—political survival, capital aggregation, social signaling, institutional navigation—without possessing any competence that applies to what you are building.

Competence is domain-specific and mission-bound. It only counts if it directly reduces risk, improves decision quality, or increases execution velocity along your exact path. Anything else is noise. The moment you allow affiliation, access, or borrowed credibility to substitute for verified capability, you introduce unpriced risk into the company.

This failure mode is subtle and asymmetric. People who carry power or prior success are accustomed to deference. If not actively constrained, they will project frameworks that served their incentives onto your system, reshaping direction to protect their status, comfort, or timelines rather than your mission. This is how founders lose control without ever formally giving it away.

Your judgment, trust allocation, and internal moral, mission, and vision compass must be immune to money, access, status, and social leverage. Authority must be earned through demonstrated behavior under your constraints, with consequences borne alongside you. Once those anchors become leverageable, the company is no longer being led; it is being steered by whoever stands closest to perceived power. This is not good for you, your mission, vision, and team. The mission and vision must remain pure and untouchable by the social and power dynamics of the rest of the world.

CEO Field Rule Number 2