Ever since I've first learned about his story in-depth, this idea has also fascinated me – but I've never seen anybody else raise it unprompted!
The analogy with software is right-on, in my view. He crated a system that was complex, sure, but very manageable and powerful if you understood it in sufficient detail.
For a fast-and-loose comparison, he was running foreign policy in Vim/Emacs, while his contemporaries were using Notepad, and of course he did a damned good job. His biggest fault is that he never taught any of his subordinates how to use Vim/Emacs.
He didn't seem to have a succession plan for himself. It's a mystery to me why (hubris, lack of interest?), but it regardless goes down as a fault against him, IMO.
Fascinating analogy, but you're being intriguingly vague. Come on, be honest, take your comparison one step further, a little faster and looser, and tell us what you REALLY think: do you believe Eric Schmidt is more like a Vim user or an Emacs user? And which text editor would Bismarck have used? ;)
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.
The analogy with software is right-on, in my view. He crated a system that was complex, sure, but very manageable and powerful if you understood it in sufficient detail.
For a fast-and-loose comparison, he was running foreign policy in Vim/Emacs, while his contemporaries were using Notepad, and of course he did a damned good job. His biggest fault is that he never taught any of his subordinates how to use Vim/Emacs.
He didn't seem to have a succession plan for himself. It's a mystery to me why (hubris, lack of interest?), but it regardless goes down as a fault against him, IMO.