What the Tudors Knew About Systems, Leadership, and the Long Game

I’ve been reading Good to Great by Jim Collins — a book about what separates companies that make the leap to sustained excellence from those that don’t. One of its central findings is the concept of “Level 5 leadership”: leaders who are modest, disciplined, and almost pathologically focused on the institution rather than themselves. They don’t give rousing speeches. They don’t lead dramatic turnarounds. They build flywheels — quiet, compounding systems of cause and effect — and then they get out of the way.

Collins frames this as a discovery about corporate leadership. I think it’s older than that. Quite a lot older.

Three monarchs, one question

Consider three rulers of sixteenth-century Europe, each navigating existential uncertainty with wildly different approaches.

Henry VIII is the one everyone knows. He waged wars in France and Scotland, played dynastic chess with Spain, and went against the Pope himself to found an entirely new church. Henry was a man of grand gestures: dramatic, expensive, unmistakable.

What did any of it achieve? The French wars cost fortunes and gained nothing permanent. The divorce from Catherine of Aragon set England on a collision course with the most powerful empire on Earth. The Reformation he triggered — one he had no personal theological conviction about — nearly drowned the country in blood for generations. Henry’s reign was driven by ego and almost nothing else. Historians don’t dispute this; it’s practically the first thing anyone learns about him.

Elizabeth I, his daughter, eventually inherited the wreckage. She is remembered as one of the greatest leaders in European history. But here is the strange thing about Elizabeth: she barely did anything. At least, not in the way we usually define “doing things” in leadership.

She made no conquests. She formed no dynastic alliances. She fought no wars of aggression. She chose no husband, had no heir, and spent decades frustrating every advisor who wanted her to do something decisive. Her motto was Semper Eadem — always the same.

What Elizabeth actually did was stabilise. She defended in Europe rather than attacking. She practiced religious tolerance within careful constraints. She endured. And then, almost as a side project — call it a diversification strategy — she empowered a handful of privateers and explorers to go see what they could find on the other side of the world. That turned out rather well for England.

Her father killed the King of Scotland in war. Elizabeth allowed the dead king’s grandson to peacefully succeed her on the English throne, uniting the two countries forever and ending centuries of conflict that generations of warfare had never resolved. None of this was weakness. It was the long game, played with a clear north star.

Catherine de Medici is the third figure, and in some ways the most interesting. She was not born royal. She was Florentine, married off to a French prince, and spent her early life as an outsider in one of Europe’s most treacherous courts. When her husband became king, he was ineffectual. When he died, her sons who succeeded him were worse. Catherine ended up ruling France for decades — not through authority she was granted, but through influence she built without it.

History does not remember Catherine kindly. If people think of her at all, it is often through the lens of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose political philosophy is commonly associated with her family’s playbook. She is remembered as a schemer, a manipulator, a woman who operated in shadows. And it’s true: Catherine’s methods were not Elizabeth’s.

But consider the constraints. Elizabeth inherited a throne in her own right — hard-won, contested, but legitimate. Catherine had no such luxury. She was a foreign non-royal consort in a court that never fully accepted her, managing a kingdom through a series of unfit male relatives who held the actual title. Every tool available to Elizabeth — the legitimacy to set a direction, the authority to say no, the structural position to simply endure — was structurally denied to Catherine. You could equally say she created whatever power she could find in order to protect France from the greater damage her husband and sons would have caused acting alone.

Elizabeth’s outcomes for England were ultimately better than Catherine’s for France. This is not in dispute. But the lesson shouldn’t end there. This is also a story about constraints — about how strongly systems define viable paths, available toolkits, and the consequences that follow from both.

The real lesson isn’t about who’s better

Collins argues that the difference between good and great companies is leadership. Specifically, it is a certain kind of leader — humble, institution-first, allergic to ego. I believe this. But I think it misses a layer.

It’s tempting to read these stories — corporate or Tudor — as tales of individual character. Elizabeth was wise; Henry was vain; Catherine was ruthless. But character doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Elizabeth could be Semper Eadem because her position allowed for patience. Catherine defaulted to Machiavelli because the system offered her nothing else. Henry could indulge his ego because the system placed no real constraints on a king.

The question that matters isn’t just “who is the right leader.” It’s: does the system make it possible for the right leader to lead?

I’m a regulatory economist by training, which means I think about the world in terms of incentives, constraints, and equilibria. Not incentives as in money or quid pro quos — incentives as in the building blocks of how people understand cause and effect within a system. If I do X, Y likely happens. Constraints aren’t negative things; they’re the rules of the game, the agreements made in advance, the laws of physics. They serve to focus.

Excellent systems don’t require Elizabeths. They produce Elizabeths — or at least, they create the conditions where an Elizabeth can rise, lead effectively, and sustain her approach without being forced into Catherine’s playbook. And poor systems don’t just fail to produce good leaders; they actively select for the wrong ones, or they take the right ones and strip them of the tools they need.

Collins found that great companies rarely correlated with dramatic restructurings, grand visions, or charismatic hero-leaders. They correlated with flywheels — patient, compounding, systematically reinforced cycles of discipline. That’s not a finding about people. It’s a finding about systems. The people matter because they build the systems. But once the systems work, the people don’t have to be extraordinary. They just have to keep turning the wheel.

One more thing about mottos

I don’t have any tattoos. But the only one I’ve ever seriously considered is Semper Eadem.

There is something about Elizabeth’s motto that feels almost unambitious in a twenty-first-century context. Always the same? Where is the disruption? Where is the bold pivot? The ten-year moonshot?

But “always the same” isn’t about standing still. It’s about consistency of purpose. It’s about deciding what you’re protecting, what you’re building toward, and then not getting distracted by the wars in France — however dramatic, however tempting, however much they look like leadership to everyone watching.

The world Elizabeth navigated was one where she didn’t have enough raw power to win in a crowded market through force. She couldn’t out-spend Spain or out-fight France. What she could do was not waste resources on battles she couldn’t win, stabilise what she had, and make a few carefully chosen bets on the other side of the world.

Henry played every round as though it were the last. Elizabeth understood that the game is an unending series of rounds — and that the right choice in any single round depends entirely on whether you believe there is a next one. The flywheel, not the grand gesture. The system, not the hero.

And in the twenty-first century, we have something Elizabeth and Catherine didn’t: we have more power over systems. We can design the game, not just play it. The question is whether we use that power to build systems that select for Elizabeths — or whether we keep waiting for one to show up on her own.