WHY COULDN’T ANYONE SAY THE EMPEROR WAS NAKED?

Today, talking with an old-guard telecom friend who worked at Motorola, we reminisced about those effervescent years — 1997, 1998 — when the telecom market was boiling. The privatization of Telebrás, GSM towers sprouting by the thousands, commercial internet exploding, the world rediscovering what it meant to be connected.
And then he said that name: Iridium.
Six billion dollars. Sixty-six satellites in orbit. Less than a year of commercial operation. Bankruptcy.
But it wasn’t the magnitude of the financial collapse that hooked me. It was something else — a question that has refused to be silent since that time, when I myself was entering the market as an engineer and saw, with my own eyes, the obvious screaming.
Cell towers multiplying. Costs plummeting. Viral coverage. And Motorola putting satellites 780 km in altitude to sell $3,000 devices with calls at $8 per minute.
When terrestrial cell phones cost pennies and fit in your pocket.
It was obvious.
So the real question was never “why did they get it wrong?”. The question is: why couldn’t those who knew speak up?

THE PRICE OF INVISIBLE NUDITY
The numbers are known. Motorola invested $5-6 billion between 1987 and 1999. Launched 66 operational satellites. Projected hundreds of thousands of users, perhaps millions. Got 10 to 55 thousand. Filed for bankruptcy in August 1999, less than a year after commercial launch.
In 2000, Dan Colussy — an aviation executive, not a tech genius — bought the wreckage for $25 million. Today, Iridium generates $600-700 million annually, is worth billions, just launched 75 new satellites for $3 billion, and is planning the next generation.
The same technology. The same satellites (they worked until 2019).
What changed?
It wasn’t the technology.
It was who was listening. And what they were willing to hear.
It is statistically impossible that no one inside an organization of thousands of people saw what was obvious to outside observers. Engineers seeing terrestrial towers multiply while working on expensive satellites. Analysts seeing projections not matching reality. Salespeople trying to sell $3,000 bricks when customers wanted something for $200.
Someone saw.
My friend confirmed: “There were people who saw, Marcello. Not everyone was blind. But… you know how it is. It wasn’t the kind of thing you said in a meeting.”
And there lies the anatomy of the disaster.
The project moved forward. Without a pivot. Without correction. Without public questioning of premises. Until bankruptcy.
Not for lack of information.
But because the cultural architecture made it structurally impossible for that information to alter decisions.

THE SILENCING MACHINE
Elite technical organizations develop invisible epistemic hierarchies. At the top: C-level, PhDs, prestigious consultants. At the base: those in the territory — the field, sales, implementation, those who see the day-to-day.
The brutal paradox: those closest to reality had less power to influence. Those furthest away — in strategic rooms, looking at spreadsheets — had more decision-making power.
And those in the territory learn quickly: contesting the leadership’s map is not seen as “bringing valuable information.” It is read as a lack of vision, negativity, misalignment.
Organizations don’t need to explicitly censor. It’s enough for the structure to send clear signals about who has the right to define strategic truth. And silencing becomes automatic.
Then emerges that seemingly reasonable, structurally devastating norm: “Don’t bring problems without solutions.”
In practice, it means: see that the strategy is wrong but don’t have a fully formulated alternative? Stay silent. Detect contradictory signals but can’t prove it in terms the leadership accepts? Stay silent. Feel dissonance but can’t articulate it in the corporate grammar? Stay silent.
Critical information never arrives. Not because it was censored, but because it was self-filtered as unproductive. The culture created an immune system that rejects dissonant information before it even enters.
Each organization develops its own grammar of prestige — ways of speaking that confer legitimacy.
In Motorola’s Iridium, prestige came from: “long-term vision,” “disruptive innovation,” “thinking big,” “connecting the planet.” There was no prestige in: “market limitations,” “advantages of terrestrial infrastructure,” “commercial pragmatism.”
Those who spoke the second language were read as small, visionless. So the perception was either translated into accepted grammar (distorting the message) or ignored. And in translation, urgency is lost. Criticality is diluted. Dissonance becomes a “manageable concern.”

THE EMPEROR IS NAKED
You know the fable: the emperor is naked, everyone sees, no one speaks, until a child shouts the truth. Why? Because each adult thinks: “everyone seems to see clothes; if I say there aren’t any, I’ll look incompetent.”
In organizations, this amplifies exponentially.
Engineer A: “Maybe the leadership knows something I don’t.”
Analyst B: observed others being marginalized for questioning.
Manager C: performance depends on showing alignment.
VP D: already publicly bet on it; backtracking destroys credibility.
Everyone sees. No one speaks.
And the bigger the elephant gets, the more impossible it becomes to mention it — because now you’d have to explain not only the problem, but why no one spoke up before.
The behavioral economics were clear.
Incentives to stay silent: job security, being seen as aligned, promotion, bonuses tied to technical milestones (not market), status, avoiding being labeled a troublemaker.
Incentives to speak up: no positive ones; all negative.
The structure statistically guaranteed silence. Not because people were cowards. But because they were rational within the system they operated in.

WHEN DISCOURSE AND LIFE DON’T CONVERSE
Here is something most organizations confuse — and this confusion costs billions.
Culture = declared values. Motorola celebrated “bold innovation,” “technical excellence,” “thinking big.”
Climate = lived real experience. Probably: “don’t question the plan,” “show alignment,” “if you see problems, you are the problem.”
Culture is what they say in town halls and what’s on posters.
Climate is what you feel in your gut when you think about saying the strategy is wrong.
And climate always wins.
Because climate is where promotions really go. Climate is what happens to those who express doubts. Climate is who has a voice and who doesn’t.
And if the climate says “stay silent,” you stay silent. Regardless of what posters declare.

$6 BILLION IS NOT A METAPHOR
It is the documented cost of the absence of psychological safety — that shared belief that it is safe to question, disagree, bring bad news.
The symptoms were observable: project proceeding to failure without a fundamental pivot, without public questioning of premises, without correction when data contradicted projections.
This doesn’t happen because everyone is incompetent. It happens because the cultural architecture made it impossible for dissonant information to circulate and alter decisions.
And so you sail blindly toward the iceberg. Even when half the crew sees the iceberg. Because no one can say. Because speaking up has a high personal cost and uncertain collective benefit.
And you sink.
With $6 billion.

WHEN SOMEONE FINALLY LISTENS
Dan Colussy bought the wreckage for $25 million in 2000 — 0.4% of the original investment.
He did one profoundly simple thing that Motorola didn’t do: he asked “where does this really matter?” and listened.
He didn’t arrive with a ready-made map. He didn’t impose a grand narrative. He asked the territory.
And the territory answered: aviation over oceans (post-9/11 regulation), maritime on the high seas (no alternative), military in zones without infrastructure, global IoT, operations in extremely remote areas, emergency services.
Colussy completely repositioned. Not competing with terrestrial cell phones. Serving niches where satellite is the only viable option. High margins, lower volume, realistic expectations.
The same technology that “failed” became essential and profitable. Not because satellites changed. Because someone was willing to listen.

THE INEVITABLE OBJECTION
“But today’s Iridium does the same thing it tried to do in 1998. And Starlink, OneWeb, Amazon Kuiper are deploying satellite constellations. So wasn’t Motorola right?”
Answer: everything changed, except the technology.
Starlink solves a different problem: broadband for 3+ billion without access, in areas where terrestrial infrastructure doesn’t exist or will never reach. With radically different economics: reusable rockets ($1-2 million per launch vs. $50-100 million), smaller satellites in lower orbit, $500 terminals vs. $3,000, latency of 20-40ms vs. over 1 second.
The economic physics simply didn’t exist in 1998.
Iridium today does a similar service, but: the target market changed completely (from urban executives to operations with no terrestrial alternative), the value context changed (same price, but for a ship on the high seas it’s essential, not extortionate), trends created markets that didn’t exist in 1998 (post-9/11 mandatory aviation regulation, explosion in maritime transport, emergence of industrial IoT), the financial math changed (buying for $25 million vs. building for $6 billion completely changes the break-even point), and 20 years of painful learning taught where it works.
Motorola had the right technology. Launched at the wrong time, for the wrong target market, with the wrong positioning, the wrong cost structure, and without the organizational capacity to adapt.
Because no one could say the emperor was naked.

WHAT THIS DEMANDS FROM THOSE WHO LEAD
If you lead — a team, division, company — here are questions you cannot avoid:
First: Technical competence without psychological safety is a guaranteed path to disaster. The best professionals in the world won’t save you if they can’t speak up when they see problems. Motorola proved it with $6 billion.
Second: Real culture is not what you declare. It’s who can speak when you are fundamentally wrong. Test: can a junior analyst question a fundamental strategic premise without career risk? If not, you don’t have innovation. You have performative compliance.
Third: The role of leadership is not to protect the narrative. It’s to destroy it when the territory has changed. Not to defend the map to the death, but to have the courage to burn it publicly when it no longer corresponds to the territory. And to create a culture where anyone can light the match.
Fourth: Organizational climate is more determinative than declared strategy. Brilliant strategy on paper doesn’t matter if the climate says “stay silent when you see problems.” Climate is what separates organizations that adapt (Google killing products, Amazon experimenting, Netflix pivoting) from organizations that sink (Blockbuster, Kodak, Nokia, Motorola).
Fifth: Concrete actions to create structural psychological safety:
• Institutionalize dissent (formal red teams, devil’s advocate with performance incentives tied to quality of critique).
• Invert the epistemic hierarchy (those in the field have a heavier vote in market decisions).
• Make changing your mind the highest virtue (celebrate executives who backtrack when the territory changes, include in evaluations “how many times did you change your opinion based on evidence?”).
• Measure the real climate (anonymous surveys: “do you feel safe disagreeing with your manager in public?”, “have you ever withheld critical information out of fear?”).
• Create hierarchical bypass (critical information reaching leadership without the filter of intermediate layers).

THE EMPEROR IS STILL NAKED
The tragedy of Iridium was not technological. It was not financial. It was epistemological. It was organizational. It was psychosocial.
$6 billion were lost because someone — probably many — saw the obvious. And couldn’t speak up. Or spoke up and wasn’t heard. Or was heard and dismissed as “lacking vision.”
Not because Motorola was evil or led by incompetents. But because the cultural architecture made silence structurally safer than uncomfortable truth.
Until it cost $6 billion.
Dan Colussy turned “historic failure” into billions not by changing technology. By changing who was listening.

Finally,
The question for your organization — 5 people or 500,000 — is not “do we have the right strategy?”
The real question is: “If our strategy is fundamentally wrong… who can say? Would they speak up? Would they be heard? Would anything change?”
If the honest answer is “no one,” “no,” “no,” “no”…
You are not building the future.
You are building your own Iridium.
And somewhere — perhaps in your team, on the floor below, in the office no one visits — someone already knows.
But cannot say.
Because the emperor cannot be naked.
Even when everyone sees.
Want to explore the invisible architectures that determine whether organizations evolve or sink? Access hundreds of articles on human and organizational cognitive behavioral development at marcellodesouza.com.br
Because beautiful maps save no one.
Only the courage to burn them when the territory has changed.
And creating structures where anyone can light the match before it costs $6 billion to discover the obvious.
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