Chad Leader Dies Fighting

Balaji shares a story about the Prime Minister of Chad to illustrate the concept of leadership alignment and skin in the game.

"The Prime Minister of Chad died on the battlefield, and there were all these memes about it. Of course he's a Chad - he died in conflict with his soldiers. Imagine some Western leader doing that - they don't have skin in the game.

It was a joke and sarcastic, but it had a really penetrating aspect of truth, which is the degree of disalignment between Western leaders and their citizens. It used to be that a huge aspect of being a king or leader was you were willing to go into battle. Even in World War 1, there was this concept that the nobility and aristocracy were supposed to actually go into battle.

Of course we don't want wars - wars are not good - but the concept of alignment is a very fundamental one."