Leaders need another lesson in discipline

A question with which to begin your week: How disciplined are you? 

Good discipline supports a robust mindset, one that is able to focus on the short term with an eye on the long. It normally prevents the type of flighty behaviour that reacts to the peaks and troughs of a daily news cycle. It also scaffolds willpower against externalities, particularly those voices that are rich in volume but poor in veritibility. We often discuss the need for leaders to tune in; disciplined leaders know who to tune out. 

And the trick to understanding any principle like discipline lies in studying its opposite. Subtle details are thrown into sharp relief within the faux-familiar territory of a mirror sibling. At the very least we see un-amiable qualities that we wish to reverse. But many stumble at the first hurdle: how to falsely recognise an opposite in the first place. Again, there is a trick to this: look for intentionality. Not doing the principle in question is not enough. The opposite is most likely to be where the subject actively achieves the inverse.

In this case, the opposite of discipline is not undisciplined, that passive state of drifting through life, but libertine; that is, purposefully unrestrained.

And if I may be so bold as to assign a label to 2025 it would be this: libertine. 

Nation states need now more than ever to be fiscally responsible. Instead? US President Donald Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ is now able to be signed into law. As a controversial piece of tax-cutting legislation it is estimated to add more than $3T to the US deficit over the next 10 years. The UK is reversing (its third U-turn in a year) over £6B in planned cuts to benefits following an uproar from voters and its own MPs at a time it can scant afford a percentage of that, and even Japanese parties are promising voters cash handouts and cuts to sales taxes in anticipation of its upper house elections. Its public debt is over two and a half times the size of its economy.

Any new borrowing is taking place in an era of elevated interest rates. Meanwhile, trade wars and global uncertainty today is impacting growth. Tomorrow? Aging populations. The public debt-to-GDP ratio across all advanced economies is at around 110 percent—and rising.

Adding to the large debt piles of nations built up during the Covid pandemic now feels a little like living next to a ticking time bomb we are being told is merely a clock. Discipled it ain't. 

It is not just the political class. Executive leadership is showing worrying signs of reneging on pre-financial crisis rules.

the Securities and Exchanges Board of India has banned Jane Street from dealing in securities in the country, accusing the trading firm of a “sinister scheme” to manipulate derivatives markets after a long running investigation. It has asked the New York-based firm to put over $500M in an escrow account, a sum India feels is “illegal gains”. It amounts to one of the largest rulings against a major foreign trader in India.

Singapore is reeling once again from a money laundering case as it hits nine financial institutions within its wealth management sector, the country’s second largest collective penalty. Monetary Authority Singapore, the state’s regulator, claimed to have found “deficiencies” in how certain institutions carried out money-laundering risk assessments for new clients, how they corroborated clients’ sources of wealth and how they handled transactions flagged as “suspicious” by their own systems. Down under, British health insurer Bupa has agreed to pay a A$35M fine after it admitted to “unconscionable conduct” by denying legitimate patient claims over a five-year period.

Tracking undisciplined actions is not always enough to teach leaders the value of discipline, a time-tested deliverer of well-gained value. May I present, instead, libertinist leadership.