Annotations (26)
“The fall of Imperial Songhai happened completely and all at once. Its complete dissolution came only 8 years after the death of its second greatest king, Askia Dawud. It burst like a bubble from a single puncture.”
History & Geopolitics · Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets
DUR_ENDURING
Fragmentation after collapse invites predation
“Askia Muhammad was the polar opposite of Sunni Ali. Whereas Ali had only been a conqueror, Muhammad was a diplomat and an administrator. He sought to reconcile the differences of the people in his empire. He befriended scholars and sought counsel from them. Muhammad made peace with the persecuted scribes of Timbuktu, bringing banished families back from exile. He was pluralistic and outward-looking.”
Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making · Culture & Society
DUR_ENDURING
Inclusive coalition building beats domination
“The Songhai force likely topped over 40,000 men, some sources put it at as many as 80,000, enough to fill a large modern sports stadium. The ground would have shaken with the force of their footfalls. They had come up with a plan: send a stampede of 1,000 cattle towards the Moroccan lines to soak up musket fire and panic the foreigners into retreating.”
Strategy & Decision Making · History & Geopolitics · Technology & Engineering
DUR_ENDURING
Old tactics against new technology equals disaster
“One of the greatest challenges any society faced up until very recently was royal succession. For most of history, countries have been ruled by kings. When a king died, the question over who would rule could become lethal. If the king had an heir, this person needed overwhelming support from lords and nobles. If a king died without an heir, multiple challengers might present themselves, the country would divide, and this would lead to war.”
Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making · History & Geopolitics
DUR_ENDURING
Unclear succession destroys organizations from within
“Towards the end of his life, Askia Muhammad became blind. According to West African law, this would have disqualified him from ruling since a king was expected to lead his army into battle. But Muhammad was reluctant to give the crown to any of his sons. He began to heavily rely on his powerful royal vizier. Eventually one of his sons, Musa, grew tired of waiting and moved to seize the crown, deposing Muhammad and banishing the blind old man to a mosquito-infested island.”
Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Delaying succession planning breeds civil war
“What caused the ruin of the state of Songhai? It was their failure to observe laws, the injustice of slavery. The most grave crimes were committed there, as well as the pride and arrogance of the great ones. As civil wars raged, the country's wealth began to run dry.”
Economics & Markets · History & Geopolitics · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Crisis forces liquidation of strategic assets
“The Moroccan invasion was actually led by a Spaniard, Judar Pasha. He was born Diego de Guevara but was captured by Moroccan slave raiders as a boy and brought up in the Sultan's service. From there, he rose through the ranks and proved himself a shrewd military commander.”
Technology & Engineering · Strategy & Decision Making · History & Geopolitics
DUR_ENDURING
Technology asymmetry beats numerical superiority
“Askia Muhammad managed to bring the Muslims of Timbuktu over to his side, but he never truly renounced the ancient magic of his ancestors. He fused together an empire that looked like it might truly last the test of time.”
Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management · Culture & Society
DUR_ENDURING
Bridge competing factions instead of choosing
“The introduction of camels transformed the economy of the Sahara. They could carry enormous weights of up to 150 kilograms, and this meant that large-scale trade was now possible across the desert. The West African economy was already flourishing, but now it was suddenly linked up to the rich markets of the Mediterranean. Trade across the Sahara relied on caravans of around 1,000 camels, but they could grow as large as 12,000. An oasis was a spot where underground water appeared on the surface.”
Strategy & Decision Making · Operations & Execution · Economics & Markets
DUR_ENDURING
Controlling bottlenecks gives outsized power
“In times of peace, during the long reigns of its great kings, West Africa flourished. But the death of its kings virtually always led to disaster.”
Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management · History & Geopolitics
DUR_ENDURING
Stability masks fragility in leadership transition
“This was the beginning of the Imperial Cycle. An empire is a violent phenomenon. It occurs when one kingdom or state becomes more powerful than its neighbor. It then invades and conquers them and rules over both territories by force. The original nation, the imperial center, will usually extract resources and wealth from their conquered subject and impose its culture on them. Empires grow in this way, absorbing neighbors and turning them into client states.”
History & Geopolitics · Strategy & Decision Making · Economics & Markets
DUR_ENDURING
Imperial expansion contains seeds of collapse
“Gold in West Africa wasn't mined from a single source, but from countless tiny gold mines and panning stations across the land. During the long dry season, when plant life died and agriculture was impossible, many farmers would hang up their farm tools and go prospecting for gold instead. These part-time prospectors would gather their tiny amounts of gold dust and wait for trading caravans to pass through.”
Business & Entrepreneurship · Economics & Markets · Operations & Execution
DUR_ENDURING
Aggregate countless small producers for scale
“Mali had always been a single ethnicity project. While it ruled over a large variety of regions and tribes, its kings and social elite were all drawn from the Mande people. They used the empire to project their power over other groups. This meant at the first sign of trouble, these other groups would seek to throw off the yoke of Mande rule. During the succession crisis, the average king ruled for barely more than a few years, and the authority of the empire collapsed.”
Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making · Culture & Society
DUR_ENDURING
Homogeneous power structure breeds fragility
“Mansa Musa traveled with an impressive retinue of 60,000 men, including 12,000 slaves carrying golden staffs. He had a baggage train of 80 camels, each carrying 300 pounds of gold, worth around $500 million at today's rates. At every city he stopped at, he handed out this gold to the poor in huge amounts. His generosity had inadvertent effects: all along his route, he left economic chaos.”
Economics & Markets · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Massive supply injection crashes market
“The great capital city of Gao slowly faded and shrunk into obscurity as its population left. Sycamore trees and silk cottons put down roots into cracks in its walls.”
Philosophy & Reasoning · History & Geopolitics · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
All empires follow the cycle
“Recent research has found that today, up to 20% of people in the upper echelons of the corporate business world exhibit signs of psychopathy, compared to only 1 in 100 in the general population. When violence was so often the key to power in the Middle Ages, there's no reason to believe that this number would be any lower among medieval kings.”
Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_CONTEXTUAL
Power selects for ruthlessness
“Sunni Ali made no secret about his intentions for Timbuktu. He sent a messenger ahead to deliver a warning: 'This is the sword of the king. I have been ordered to cut the throat of anyone who stays the night in this town.' In the blink of an eye, all the town's inhabitants fled.”
Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Culture & Society
DUR_ENDURING
Destroying expertise creates vacuum for rivals
“The Moroccans descended on Gao, sacked it, looted its treasures, and burned its buildings before moving on to Timbuktu and Djenne where they looted and burned in similar fashion.”
History & Geopolitics · Economics & Markets · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Asset stripping without governance destroys value
“During Muhammad's reign, he established standardized trade measures and regulations and began policing trade routes to keep them safe, as well as establishing an organized tax system. He divided the empire into states and appointed a governor of each one. He appointed ministers for finance, justice, agriculture, and other areas of government.”
Operations & Execution · Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Standardization plus specialization enables growth
“Sunni Ali was determined to modernize his military. He had seen the Mali Empire collapse after its access to horses fell apart, so he resolved to begin large-scale breeding of horses in Africa. He built large stables to shelter horses from disease-carrying tsetse flies and pioneered crossbreeding to generate a breed well suited to the African environment. He also introduced cavalry soldiers wearing iron breastplates beneath tunics.”
Operations & Execution · Strategy & Decision Making · Technology & Engineering
DUR_ENDURING
Integrate backwards to control key inputs
Frameworks (3)
The Imperial Cycle Framework
A repeatable pattern of empire growth and collapse
A systematic framework for understanding how empires (or dominant organizations) grow, accumulate power, become unstable, and ultimately collapse, creating opportunities for successor powers.
Components
- Expansion Phase
- Consolidation Phase
- Overreach Phase
- Fragmentation Phase
- Succession Phase
Prerequisites
- Honest assessment of current organizational phase
- Historical perspective on similar cycles
- Willingness to act on uncomfortable insights
Success Indicators
- Early recognition of overreach phase
- Proactive succession planning during consolidation
- Maintenance of client state loyalty through genuine inclusion
Failure Modes
- Denial about which phase the organization occupies
- Assuming this time is different
- Mistaking stability for permanence during consolidation phase
Source Triangulation Method
A systematic approach to truth-seeking from biased sources
A methodology for extracting reliable information from multiple biased, incomplete, or politically motivated sources by overlapping them in conversation with each other.
Components
- Identify Source Types and Their Biases
- Look for Points of Agreement
- Analyze Points of Divergence
- Apply Contextual Plausibility Filters
- Synthesize Provisional Conclusions
Prerequisites
- Access to multiple independent sources
- Humility about limitations of individual sources
- Analytical discipline to resist confirmation bias
Success Indicators
- Increased confidence in high-stakes decisions
- Early detection of deceptive information
- Ability to articulate confidence levels in different conclusions
Failure Modes
- Analysis paralysis from endless source gathering
- False confidence from sources that appear independent but share common bias
- Overweighting educated or official sources
The Pluralistic Coalition Framework
Building durable organizations through genuine inclusion
A strategic framework for building organizational coalitions that last by genuinely incorporating diverse stakeholders rather than dominating them through force or extraction.
Components
- Map the Constituencies
- Reject Single-Faction Domination
- Create Symbolic Unity Rituals
- Bridge Rather Than Choose
- Institutionalize Cross-Constituency Governance
Prerequisites
- Honest assessment of constituency power dynamics
- Willingness to share power genuinely
- Long-term perspective beyond quarterly results
Success Indicators
- No single constituency can unilaterally change direction
- Constituencies defend each other during crisis
- Coalition survives founder transition
Failure Modes
- Symbolic inclusion without real power-sharing
- Reverting to single-faction domination during crisis
- Creating governance so complex it becomes paralyzed
Connective Tissue (4)
Ancient oases as strategic chokepoints analogous to modern infrastructure control points
In the Sahara, oases were spots where underground water reached the surface, enabling human settlement. These tiny settlements became crucial stopping points for trade caravans crossing the desert. Military control of these oases meant control over entire trade routes and their accompanying wealth. The parallel to modern infrastructure: controlling cloud computing infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), payment rails (Visa, Mastercard), or internet exchange points (IXPs) confers disproportionate power over the entire ecosystem that depends on them. Just as ancient kingdoms fought for control of oases, modern companies and nations compete for control of digital infrastructure chokepoints.
Discussion of how camel caravans relied on oases as mandatory stopping points during trans-Saharan trade
Gunpowder weapons at Tondibi paralleling asymmetric technology advantages throughout history
At the Battle of Tondibi in 1591, a Moroccan force of 4,000 musketeers defeated a Songhai army of 40,000-80,000 using firearms. The Songhai cavalry and infantry, equipped for traditional warfare, were mowed down before they could close distance. This pattern repeats throughout military history: Mongol composite bows against sedentary armies, European steel against bronze, machine guns at Omdurman, precision-guided munitions in Desert Storm. The business parallel: when one competitor has a significant technology advantage (software eating hardware businesses, mobile disrupting desktop, AI transforming traditional services), numerical advantages in people, capital, or distribution become irrelevant. The technologically superior force can achieve victory at ratios that appear impossible under conventional analysis.
Description of how 4,000 Moroccan musketeers defeated up to 80,000 Songhai warriors equipped for traditional warfare
Songhai's cattle stampede tactic paralleling fighting the last war
At Tondibi, the Songhai attempted to neutralize Moroccan muskets by stampeding 1,000 cattle toward their lines, hoping to absorb musket fire and panic the foreigners. When the Moroccans fired their cannons, the cattle panicked and stampeded back into the Songhai army, killing many of their own soldiers. This is the quintessential 'fighting the last war' failure. The Songhai developed tactics for previous conflicts (perhaps against cavalry charges or traditional infantry) and applied them to a fundamentally different threat. The business parallel: companies optimizing for the previous competitive environment while the battlefield has shifted. Blockbuster's real estate strategy against Netflix streaming. Nokia's hardware focus against iPhone's software platform. The pattern is universal: applying yesterday's tactics to today's reality because you cannot psychologically accept that the rules have changed.
The catastrophic failure of Songhai's cattle stampede tactic against Moroccan firearms
Timbuktu's manuscript preservation through chaos paralleling knowledge resilience through institutional collapse
After Songhai's collapse, Timbuktu's scholarly families hid their manuscript collections in private libraries, protecting them through centuries of warfare, raids, and regime changes. The dry desert climate preserved the pages perfectly. These family guardians maintained collections at great personal risk, and as a result, the Timbuktu Chronicles survived to tell Songhai's story. The parallel extends to knowledge preservation during any institutional collapse: the Library of Alexandria's partial survival through private collections, the preservation of classical texts in Irish monasteries during Europe's Dark Ages, or the modern equivalent of individual engineers maintaining critical open-source projects when corporate sponsors collapse. The principle: knowledge survives collapse not through institutions but through dedicated individuals who see themselves as custodians rather than owners.
Description of how Timbuktu's noble families preserved manuscripts through centuries of chaos