ACAI Booster Shot #5: Karkera's Law

Same Idea, Different Seat: Introducing Karkera's Law

Category: Leadership

Author: Alok Karkera

Picture this: a junior colleague raises an idea in a meeting. It gets a polite nod, and the discussion moves on. Twenty minutes later, a senior leader says much the same thing. The room leans in, someone writes it down, and by the end of the meeting it has become the plan.

If you have spent enough time working in corporates, you will almost certainly have experienced this, either as the hapless junior employee or as the visionary leader.

In May this year, I first shared what I called Karkera's Law in a tweet, along with a short blog post and a LinkedIn post. Since then, I have felt the idea needs more clarity than a short post could give it. This Booster Shot is that fuller version.

From perspective to standing

Rufus Miles was a senior US federal administrator. His law is eight words long:

"Where you stand depends on where you sit."

It explains why our views tend to follow our roles. The opposition politician becomes a minister and starts defending policies he once attacked. The team member who called the targets unrealistic is promoted and starts defending those same targets. Part of the shift is new information. Part of it is simply the chair.

Miles' Law is about how the seat shapes what you see. It says little about how the seat shapes the way others see you. That second half is a corollary to Miles' Law, which I call Karkera's Law:

"Where you stand depends on where you sit, and so does your standing."

By standing I mean three things: credibility, authority and legitimacy. How seriously people take what you say. How readily they follow. How much latitude they give you. Karkera's Law states that all three come largely from the seat, and only partly from the person or the idea.

A seat need not be a job title. It can be your role, but it can equally be your origin or roots: the country you come from, your community, the school you went to, even your accent. It can also be the size and name of the organisation behind you, or even the platform you happen to be standing on.

I offer the law as a statement of fact. It describes how people and organisations behave, and it assigns no blame to anyone.

Researchers have documented parts of this for decades. Robert Merton's "Matthew effect" showed that eminent scientists get more credit for the same work. Edwin Hollander's "idiosyncrasy credits" showed that high-status members of a group are allowed to bend its norms.

More recently, in Messengers (2019), Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks showed that we judge a message by the person who delivers it. Karkera's Law goes further. The seat shapes how we read what people do as well as what they say: how they are labelled, how much latitude they get, and whether bending a rule is called vision or violation. It brings these threads into a single sentence that anyone in a meeting room can recognise.

Where the seat shows up

The original post gave four examples, which I called the Global, Boardroom, Market and 5:30 PM seats. Between them, they cover the three kinds of seat:

• Role: A strategy from a junior analyst is heard as noise, and the same strategy from the CEO is heard as vision. A well-known banking CEO spoke proudly of leaving by 5:30 PM, while thousands below him, by most accounts, knew that leaving before 8 PM was frowned upon.

• Origin: A professional moving from the Global South to the West is usually called an immigrant. One moving from London to Mumbai or Singapore is usually called an expat. The journey is the same.

• Scale: When a large technology company works around a regulation, it is often called disruption. When a small family business does the same, it is called non-compliance.

The mechanisms differ, from hierarchy to history to the setting itself, but the outcome is the same: standing follows the seat. In each case the act is identical, and the seat decides how it is read.

Beyond the office

The law holds well outside corporate life. In a well-known 2007 experiment by The Washington Post, violinist Joshua Bell played a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius in a Washington DC metro station. Commuters hurried past, a handful tossed in spare change, and few paused to listen. Three days earlier, he had filled Boston's Symphony Hall, where good seats cost about $100. In economics, a central banker's reassurance usually outweighs an outsider's warning, even though the banker may be choosing words to calm markets and the outsider may be closer to the truth. Even within families and communities, the eldest or most prosperous voice often settles the matter, whatever the merit of the argument. These are simply facts of life.

A filter, and usually a necessary one

More often than not, the seat is a filter we need. Three constraints make it so:

• Human cognition: No one can assess every idea from first principles. We rely on mental shortcuts, and the seat is one of the more dependable ones we have.

• Organisational resources: Time, management attention and budgets are finite. An organisation cannot test every suggestion, so it prioritises by the track record a seat implies.

• Risk-taking ability: Backing an idea is a bet. Backing the senior person's idea, or the large company's, lowers your personal risk. If it fails, the seat shares the blame.

Filters exist for efficiency, and most of the time they work. A seat usually reflects some experience, some track record and some vetting along the way. In an age of information overload, that is exactly why we lean on it. The filter reads the seat before it reads the content, so even when two messages are word for word the same, the one from the bigger seat gets through. A seat is usually earned, but once occupied it confers standing well beyond what earned it.

The cost shows up at the edges. The same filter can screen out a good idea from the wrong seat. And standing, once gained, tends to compound: the seat gives you the microphone, and the microphone builds more standing. Seeing the law clearly lets us keep the efficiency of the filter while catching what it misses.

I have seen this up close.

Some years ago, a member of my team was the relationship manager for a "bank". Over several meetings, based on what we directly observed, I personally concluded that it was an unplanned, chaotic operation, and that it would prove to be a non-remunerative and risky relationship. I said so to my supervisor in plain terms. His reply was blunt. The founder, he told me, was a visionary, and next to him I was a nobody. If anyone did not know what they were doing, it was me.

A founder with a licence and a following carries more weight than a banker's meeting notes, and backing the founder may well have been a reasonable bet. What made it Karkera's Law in action was that the evidence was never examined. It was dismissed because of who brought it. Years later, that "bank" had its licence cancelled by the regulator. By then, the conversation was water under the bridge. The founder's seat had simply outweighed the evidence from mine.

A message for leaders

If you occupy a senior seat, your words arrive pre-amplified. That is useful, and it is also a responsibility. A few habits help, and none of them needs to slow routine decisions. Keep the filter for the everyday, and add friction where the stakes are high or the decision is hard to reverse:

• Speak last. Ask the most junior people in the room for their view first, before your own view sets the direction.

• Lend your standing. When a good idea came from someone else, say so by name. Credit carried by a senior voice travels much further.

• Separate the idea from the author. For important decisions, circulate a short written summary before the meeting, or have someone other than the author present it first, so the idea is judged before the seat. Beware of short circuits in decision-making.

• Lead by example. If you leave at 5:30 (and boast about it in the media), make sure your team can too.

For those still climbing, the law offers a practical lesson. If your seat is small, borrow a bigger one. Find a sponsor who will carry the idea into the room, publish where the platform has standing, and build a visible track record one result at a time. Seek leverage and use it, for example through pre-meeting alignment or co-authoring, though that is a topic for another day.

For boards, there is a governance question worth asking: are we hearing the best ideas in this organisation, or only the ideas from the best seats?

Naidu, Patel, Wong, Santos, Lee? Where art thou?

While writing this, I noticed something about the laws we quote in boardrooms. Parkinson's Law, Murphy's Law, the Peter Principle, Goodhart's Law, Miles' Law. Almost all of them carry Western names. The exceptions, such as Ishikawa's fishbone diagram or the Kano model, are tools rather than laws of behaviour, and the wisdom of Chanakya or Sun Tzu is quoted as ancient maxims rather than modern management laws.

Is naming a law after oneself a little pompous? Perhaps, though there is good precedent. C. Northcote Parkinson named Parkinson's Law himself, in a 1955 essay in The Economist, and Laurence Peter named the Peter Principle in his own 1969 book. More to the point, an observation without a name is hard to quote, test or argue with, which is why every law on that list carries one.

Leaders across India, Asia and the wider Global South have sat in every one of these seats, often several at once. We have the experience to add to the vocabulary of management, and we should. Consider Karkera's Law a first drop in that ocean.

The law also predicts its own reception. Whether it travels will depend less on how true it is, and more on whose seats it reaches. If it rings true for you, you now have some say in that.

What seat are you in today, and whose voice could you lend it to?

Listen: a companion audio discussion of Karkera's Law, generated with AI (NotebookLM).

Originally published at www.acai.sg (https://www.acai.sg/acai-booster-shots/acai-booster-shot-5)

ACAI: Mastering the fundamentals. Bringing clarity to leadership. (https://www.acai.sg)

#KarkerasLaw #MilesLaw #Leadership #PowerDynamics #WorkplaceCulture #OrganizationalBehaviour #ACAIBoosterShot