Deep institutional knowledge has a weak exchange rate outside your company’s walls.
I recently wrote about my daughters and what I call The Golden Metric: work that feels deceptively easy for you but is a chore for others.
When I was a senior manager at Disney’s ESPN, I didn’t enjoy a lot of the mechanics of management—expenses, hiring, the grind. But I will always be grateful for the mandatory quarterly management training (Bristol, Connecticut or Celebration, Florida).
One session stuck.
A presenter put two diagrams on the screen:
In the first, a person stood in front of one giant bicycle wheel.
In the second, a person stood in front of six bicycle wheels.
Then he asked: “Which is better? To be connected to one wheel? Or to be connected to six?”
Most of us picked the one wheel. The logic was familiar: become an internal expert with deep internal connections. Become “indispensable.”
He paused and said: “One wheel makes you vulnerable—job loss, management changes, reorganizations. It’s always better to be as connected outside your organization as you are inside it.”
That was the moment I realized the flaw: internal indispensability can create external fragility.
Over the last 15 years, I’ve watched what happens when people ignore this. When job loss hits, they learn quickly that the calls don’t get returned once they no longer sit inside the old wheel.
The reminder I give friends and family is simple:
“Your next role is unlikely to come from relationships inside your current organization. Build relationships outside it.”
Career arbitrage (the only leverage that travels)
Career arbitrage is the gap between what you’re paid to do and the transferable advantage the market will pay for anywhere.
Most executives never build it because their identity collapses into a title and a logo.
If you want leverage before you need it, do three things:
Run the “easy for you” audit (executive edition)
Not tasks. Patterns. What do you see faster than your peers?
Incentives that guarantee failure
Decision latency that kills momentum
Structural causes being misdiagnosed as “culture”
That repeatable clarity is the asset, not your seat.
Externalize your method
The market cannot reward what it cannot see. Translate internal wins into a portable playbook: what you diagnosed, what you changed, why it worked, and what you would repeat.
Build validators outside the org chart
If every ally and opportunity is internal, you have no independent proof. Build relationships and credibility that survive leadership change.
If the market’s perception of you is “VP at Company X,” your leverage disappears when Company X disappears from your email signature.
Executives do not lose roles because they lack competence. They lose leverage because their competence never became portable.