Friday Fun: The Gollums of Tech

Every organisation has at least one Gollum. Not evil. Worse. Someone who clings to a system, a domain, or a piece of code with a devotion completely disconnected from reality. They cherish what they built years ago and refuse to acknowledge that the market has changed, the company has changed, and the needs around them have changed. They are frozen in time, locked inside the illusion that their old relevance still matters.

The Archetype

The Gollum in tech is easy to spot:

• They hold onto a legacy domain as if it were a birthright.
• They confuse tenure with authority.
• They protect their past work more than the company’s future.
• They resist every change that threatens their comfort.
• They harm teams not through malice but through insecurity and fragile narcissism.
• They weaponise expertise, turning themselves into gatekeepers.

They whisper the same line, again and again: "My precious".

The Signs Are Already There

You can detect a Gollum long before the damage becomes visible:

• Their communication becomes verbose and intentionally unclear.
• Their planning serves their domain, not the organisation.
• They push accountability away and shield themselves from ownership.
• They create endless chains of excuses.
• They point fingers instead of identifying solutions.
• They resist any change that reduces their symbolic territory.

These patterns exist to protect them from evolution, collaboration, and transparency.

The Damage They Cause

This behaviour spreads. It harms. It drains energy from those who are actually trying to build.

Gollums:

• Block modernisation because it threatens their identity.
• Undermine other leaders to defend their realm.
• Create toxic pockets of outdated logic.
• Resist collaboration even when others pay the price.
• Play political games to preserve relevance.

The lone engineer who owns an obscure system is a local risk. A Gollum is a systemic one. They drag organisations backwards because they defend theatre, not truth.

The Leadership-Level Gollum

Not all Gollums hide in code. Some sit in leadership. These are the most dangerous ones.

They do not cling to a system. They cling to how the company used to work.

They built their influence when the organisation was smaller, tribal, and dependent on informal control. In that environment, their intuition, shortcuts, or personal network once worked. As the company scaled, their sphere of influence grew wider than their competence, yet never wider than their ego.

This leadership-level Gollum:

• Bottlenecks decisions because everything must pass through their historical territory.
• Blocks modern structures because old ones made them powerful.
• Resists delegation and alignment out of fear of irrelevance.
• Repackages nostalgia as strategy.
• Frames modernisation as “risk” while refusing to acknowledge that stagnation is the real danger.

The organisational symptoms are immediate:

• Decision latency everywhere.
• Teams working in the present while leadership clings to the past.
• Middle management paralysis.
• Innovation frozen behind legacy authority.
• High performers quietly leaving.

This is not chaos monarchy. Chaos monarchy is a localised choke point.

Leadership-level Gollums operate at organisational scale. They do not block a subsystem. They block the organisation’s evolution.

A company cannot outgrow leaders who refuse to outgrow themselves.

The Leadership Truth

As expressed in Gears, Triggers, and Systems, in the Aerospace chapter, progress is never born from comfort.

“These achievements were not the outcome of convenience. They were the product of concentrated intent, prioritisation, and sacrifice.”

The same principle applies to organisations.

If there is one lesson that echoes throughout the book, it is this: growth requires sacrifice. Leaders grow only when they release what they once cherished most: the systems they built, the domains they ruled, the comfort they enjoyed, and the identities anchored in the past.

Gollums never sacrifice anything. They cling to what once made them valuable. They do not listen. They do not adapt. They protect ego, not the company.

Why This Matters

The real danger is not incompetence. It is people who refuse to evolve while pretending to defend the organisation. They create inertia, confusion, and political tension. They make others pay the price for their fear.

Companies that succeed choose truth over theatre. They build systems, not kingdoms. They move with the market instead of hiding in a cave clutching a "precious" that no longer matters.

Famous Examples

History is full of Gollums who clung so fiercely to their "precious" that they slowed or sabotaged the organisations they served.

• Nokia’s Symbian Obsession: Tenure masqueraded as superiority. The cost was the company’s throne.
• Kodak and the Death Grip on Film: Nostalgia became fatal.
• BlackBerry and the Keyboard Cage: Identity turned into a prison.
• Yahoo and Its Fiefdom Wars: Politics defeated progress.
• The QA Empires: Manual armies defended headcount instead of quality.
• The Internal Chaos Monarchy Engineer: Insecurity became everyone’s dependency.

Clinging is not loyalty. It is fear disguised as stewardship.

Modus Operandi: How to Prevent Gollums (or Cut Them Cleanly)

Organisations do not create Gollums by accident. They create them through weak boundaries, avoidance of conflict, and rewarding possession over progress.

• Define hard boundaries: Vague domains become kingdoms.
• Break dependency monopolies: Document, automate, cross-train.
• Anchor roadmaps to strategy: Plans must serve the organisation, not individuals.
• Demand clarity: Ambiguity is camouflage.
• Reward those who dissolve silos: Promote people who unblock others.
• Address insecurity early: Silence guarantees decay.
• Cut cleanly when needed: Delay only deepens the cost.

Conclusion

Gollums do not destroy organisations through sabotage. They destroy them through stagnation. They freeze systems in the past, distort incentives, block evolution, and exhaust those who want to build.

Leadership means knowing when to preserve, when to evolve, and when to let go.

Growth demands sacrifice. Clinging guarantees decline.