{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreict5l2illxrm2iwi4mcq2iuhwnmwoyww4tnogtyrpqphgj6gtytay",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:n345d6t2uj5zx327rkuvc76x/app.bsky.feed.post/3mddckrlbzhe2"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreicosqgiecu4hotx6ayiytl7obafowkm5vl27od64gf3q3bkk7en3u"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/jpeg",
    "size": 139681
  },
  "description": "Managing within a system in decline is a form of denial.",
  "path": "/from-managers-to-diplomats/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-01-26T13:03:13.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.circudyne.com",
  "tags": [
    "Last week's letter",
    "Ted Geiger",
    "You can optimize beautifully inside a structure whose premises no longer hold.",
    "producers, consumers, capital",
    "This is where courage lives",
    "incentive designs",
    "This is where durability gets encoded",
    "mythology",
    "jobs to be done",
    "This is where legitimacy is conferred",
    "Impulse Labs",
    "Circudynamics",
    "**Horizons**",
    "**Living Futures**",
    "**Catalysts**",
    "**Connection**",
    "**Craft**",
    "Subscribe now"
  ],
  "textContent": "Last week's letter ended with a claim: that leadership towards circular transformation resembles statecraft more than management.\n\nThis week, I want to explain what I mean by that; and why business leaders, specifically, are the ones who need to learn the difference.\n\n  * From Managers to Diplomats\n    * The best teacher I ever had\n    * Context prescribes conceptual framework\n    * Managers and diplomats\n    * Geiger's framework, mapped to enterprise\n    * A case in point: Impulse Labs\n    * The Circudynamics connection\n    * The work ahead\n    * Provocations\n\n\n\n## The best teacher I ever had\n\nTed Geiger taught at Georgetown's Walsh School of Foreign Service during my time there. I got to know him and study under him towards the end of his life. Early in his career he had played a significant role in the shaping of the Marshall Plan.\n\nPresent at the creation of the post–World War II order, he became an academic observer of how such systems hold together.\n\nWhat Geiger spent his career studying was a deceptively simple question: How do societies and intersocietal systems maintain cohesion over time? Not in the abstract, but in practice.\n\nHis answer was a framework I've carried with me ever since. Durable systems, he argued, depend on the ongoing alignment of three interacting domains: _identity_ , _institutions_ , and _culture_.\n\nWhen those domains fall out of alignment — when the tensions among them are ignored or mismanaged — systems decay _even while appearing functional._ The metrics still move. The incentives still clear. But legitimacy erodes, trust thins, and collapse arrives long after the conditions for it were set.\n\nThis is a framework built for moments like the one we're in now.\n\n## Context prescribes conceptual framework\n\nWhen you're operating within an established system, optimization is the appropriate mode. You tune. You improve. You compete on margins. The rules are known, the players are mapped, and the work is to perform better within that architecture.\n\nBut when the system itself is what needs to change, optimization stops working. Not because it fails on its own terms, but because it succeeds at the wrong task. You can optimize beautifully inside a structure whose premises no longer hold. You can hit every target while the ground shifts beneath you.\n\nThis is what I see happening across circular economy efforts today. The work is treated as a series of disputes to be resolved — over costs, over incentives, over compliance — rather than as a system to be rebuilt. Leaders approach the challenge like advocates in a courtroom: marshaling evidence, arguing positions, seeking favorable rulings within a given order.\n\nCall that mode _advocacy_. It has its place. But advocacy assumes continuity. It works within the architecture. It seeks wins inside rules that remain stable.\n\nWhat circularity requires is the redesign of the order itself. The reconciliation of competing interests — producers, consumers, capital — into arrangements that can hold. Durability that flows not from the hegemony of any one or subset of actors, but because the settlement itself is legitimate.\n\nThat is what I mean by statecraft.\n\n## Managers and diplomats\n\nThis distinction matters especially now because the leaders who will build the next system are not governments. They are not NGOs. They are not citizen movements, however necessary these all remain.\n\nIt is business leaders.\n\nThe infrastructure of daily life — how goods are made, sold, used, and recirculated — is shaped by enterprise decisions. If the circular economy is going to exist at scale, it will be because businesses designed it as a system that generates profits.\n\nWhich means business leaders face a choice about what kind of actors they want to be.\n\nThe default mode is _manager_ : optimize returns, manage risk, compete within known rules. This is honorable work. It is also insufficient to the moment.\n\nThe alternative is _diplomat_ : design lasting settlements, reconcile interests, build legitimacy across constituencies whose reasons for cooperation are nonobvious. This is harder. It requires a conceptual framework that treats alignment as the work, not the precondition.\n\nCircular transformation is an invitation for business leaders to punch up their game. From managers to diplomats. From advocacy to statecraft.\n\n## Geiger's framework, mapped to enterprise\n\nGeiger's three domains translate directly to the stakeholders that circular strategy must reconcile:\n\n**Identity systems** correspond to _producers and brands_ : leadership, intent, values, and the trust that accumulates or erodes over time. This is where courage lives — or doesn't.\n\n**Institutional systems** correspond to _business models and capital_ : ownership structures, incentive designs, contractual arrangements, and the time horizons that govern investment. This is where durability gets encoded — or undermined.\n\n**Cultural systems** correspond to _consumers and meaning_ : norms, mythology, jobs to be done, and the stories people tell themselves about what a good life looks like. This is where legitimacy is conferred — or withheld.\n\nThese three domains are interdependent. Pressure in one shows up in the others. A brand that signals circular intent (identity) but operates an extractive business model (institutions) will eventually face consumer skepticism (culture). A subscription model that captures value for capital while stripping sovereignty from consumers will erode trust regardless of how efficient it becomes.\n\nDurable outcomes require alignment across all three. Not optimization of any single constituency. Alignment.\n\n## A case in point: Impulse Labs\n\nI've been watching Impulse Labs for this reason.\n\nThe company builds a battery-equipped, software-defined induction cooktop: a durable good. Their approach to incorporating batteries into white goods is their start of an energy distribution disruption on behalf of consumers. For the price of an appliance that does miraculous things, Impulse enables their customers to permissionlessly roll their own virtual power plants.\n\nTo capture the benefits and allay the costs of their software development over time, Impulse has chosen a subscription strategy. That raises a question I suspect many consumers feel: does this disruption mean energy sovereignty, or monthly payment serfdom?\n\nSubscriptions applied to durable goods signal customer lock-in. The pattern is familiar enough to trigger suspicion on contact.\n\nFrom an advocacy standpoint, this looks like territory to be won or lost. A moat to be dug. Zero-sum.\n\nFrom a statecraft standpoint, it looks like a positive-sum negotiation in progress. It calls for the delicate balancing of optionality between parties.\n\nThe ongoing subscription obligation introduces what you might call an _optionality debit_ : a claim on the consumer's flexibility. The permissionless VPP model introduces an _optionality credit_ : an expansion of what the consumer can do. Consumer sovereignty is preserved when the optionality balance is positive.\n\nIt needs to be designed into the DNA of the strategy. For that, Impulse needs a diplomat.\n\n## The Circudynamics connection\n\nConsider the five domains of Circudynamics in the context of statecraft.\n\n**Horizons** asks: What would have to be true for this arrangement to hold across time? What conditions must obtain for producers, consumers, and capital to remain aligned as the system scales?\n\n**Living Futures** asks: Can people experience what this arrangement feels like before it fully exists? Can the case be made for the future it proposes?\n\n**Catalysts** asks: Are the enabling conditions present — technological, economical, regulatory — for this settlement to become viable?\n\n**Connection** asks: Does this resonate culturally? Does it tap into existing desires and emerging norms, or does it ask people to become something they don't recognize?\n\n**Craft** asks: Is the execution beautiful? Does every touchpoint reinforce the legitimacy of the whole? Is the organization designed to fulfill its obligations over time?\n\nStatecraft, in Geiger’s sense, is what happens when you hold all five of these questions simultaneously and design for their intersection rather than optimizing any single dimension.\n\n## The work ahead\n\nCircular initiatives keep stalling because they aim too low. They argue within the system when the system itself is what's under negotiation.\n\nIf the task is to build arrangements that endure between producers, consumers, and capital, then diplomacy is not a metaphor. It is the appropriate mode of leadership.\n\nIn moments of systems change, the work is not to advocate harder for better outcomes. It is to design settlements that support their own weight, and withstand the unexpected.\n\nThat is what statecraft looks like in enterprise form. And it is what the circular economy is waiting for its leaders to learn.\n\n* * *\n\n_For Dynamo members: provocations that illuminate statecraft as a strategic capacity for circular transformation. Thank you for your support. You make this work possible._\n\n### This post is for subscribers only\n\nBecome a member to get access to all content\n\nSubscribe now",
  "title": "From Managers to Diplomats",
  "updatedAt": "2026-02-22T18:48:19.178Z"
}