One of the things that I really love about the tech industry is the way so many companies have adopted a dual-track seniority system, where you can advance as a

One of the things that I really love about the tech industry is the way so many companies have adopted a dual-track seniority system, where you can advance as an individual contributor or as a manager. I'm not familiar with the history, but it almost sounds like Bismarck was a brilliant individual contributor to diplomacy. Maybe what he needed was to work with an executive who would know how to systematize what Bismarck did - and building an organization to systematize what one brilliant person can do is a skill in itself! But of course this perspective seems way more obvious now, more than a hundred years later, than it would have at the time. And even if you knew that this was what Germany needed, it would have taken a very, very well-run foreign ministry to pull it off.