The Value of Leadership: A Mountain Story

Leaders act as Maxwell Demons in organizations, reducing entropy through the injection of information and direction, fighting against the natural tendency of systems to move towards maximum disorder

When people ask me about leadership, I usually grimace. Like most things that become buzzwords in business, "leadership" has been emptied of meaning through overuse.
But occasionally you stumble upon a truth about leadership in unexpected places. For me, it was in the Swiss Alps, surrounded by fog so thick I couldn't see my own hands.

Here's the thing about fog in the mountains: it transforms a straightforward hike into a psychological endurance test. Every step becomes a negotiation between what you think is there and what might actually be there. Your brain, desperate for reference points, starts playing tricks on you. You start to hate your lovely activity. You doubt a lot. Are you still on the trail? Is that next step solid ground or a void?

I was on this hike with my partner. The conditions were terrible - we'd started late (a bit of a mistake) and found ourselves caught in what I can only describe as a white wall of nothingness. We had another 600-700 meters of elevation to cover. For context, I'm not exactly what you'd call "ultralight hiker, I do love to eat a lot and drink." On a good day, a kilometer of elevation gain is manageable. In this fog? It felt like I have to write a will.

And this is where I started thinking about leadership, real leadership, not the kind you read about in airport business books.

The problem wasn't the mountain. The problem wasn't even my fitness level (though that didn't help). The problem was the fog - the uncertainty, the inability to see where we were going or how far we'd come. Sound familiar? It's exactly what kills most startups and big company initiatives. Not the actual challenge, but the psychological weight of uncertainty.

Good leaders - and I mean genuinely good ones, not just people with "Leader" in their titles - do one thing above all else: they clear the fog. They might not be able to make the mountain smaller or make you fitter, but they can make sure you know where you're putting your feet.

This is harder than it sounds. In startups, like in mountaineering, you often don't actually know what's ahead. But here's the counterintuitive truth: making a clear wrong decision is often better than leaving things foggy. At least with a wrong decision, people can see where they're going, even if they end up having to backtrack.

Bad leaders create fog. They hedge their bets, speak in ambiguities, leave room for interpretation. They think this create a room for creativity, I don’t thin so. It just makes everyone else's job harder.

Good leaders are fog machines in reverse. They take complex, uncertain situations and make them navigable. They might say "We're going this way" even when they're not 100% sure it's right, they have to say it with 200% certainty, cause they know → You can fix wrong decisions, but you can't fix paralysis. But by making the decision clear, they make it possible for everyone else to focus on the actual work instead of the uncertainty.

In the mountains that day, we made it to our destination. Not because we were particularly skilled or brave, but because we kept moving forward, one step at a time, in what we were thinking was the right direction. The fog never lifted, but we had a clear rules: keep going up, check each step, maintain contact, don’t cry, and never stop cause paralysis is very hard to fix.

The next time someone asks me about leadership, I'll tell them about the fog. Because that's what real leadership is about - not only giving inspirational speeches, but simply making it clear enough for people to do their work. Everything else is just noise in the fog.

This is probably also why management and leadership are different things. Management is about executing within known parameters. Leadership is about making those parameters visible when they're obscured by uncertainty.

The irony? The best leaders often make themselves seem unnecessary. When everything is clear and everyone knows what they're doing, it can look like no leadership is happening at all.
But try removing it, and watch how quickly the fog rolls in.