The older I get, the more I respect Darth Vader as a leader. I mean, sure, he choked a few people out, but if you were really paying attention, it was usually during a board meeting when someone wasn't following his orders. I've worked with a few people whom I would have liked to have choked out as well — it doesn't make President & CEO Vader a bad guy; he's just a little demanding.
Darth Vader wanted two things: to destroy the Jedi and to build a nice little round-shaped skyscraper he so affectionately referred to as the Death Star. I don't think he was asking too much from the team to hit some deadlines, keep the project under budget, and ensure that all details were taken care of. Perhaps if his team had paid attention to those details, Luke Skywalker wouldn't have been able to fire a shot into a tiny space and ultimately blow the entire thing up. I mean, who was responsible for that section?!
When he said to Obi-Wan Kenobi, "When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the master," that was just his way of saying, "Hey bro, thanks for training me, but I'm on top of the leaderboard now." We've all seen it where the intern eventually rises up and kicks the veterans to the curb — this was no different.
I think it's important to note that his boss was a dickhead. Emperor Palpatine was a micro-managing, narcissistic prick. The guy traveled with his own security in fancy red capes. If you are allegedly the most powerful with the whole force thing — shooting lightning and everything — why do you need four bodyguards to protect you? Seems like some diva stuff to me.
And yet, even with all of that chaos above him and all of that inconsistency around him, Vader still showed up every day and tried to execute. That is more than I can say for half the leaders I've seen who crumble the second things get a little uncomfortable and start blaming the market, the product, or their team instead of taking ownership of what's actually happening right in front of them.
Because if we're being honest, Vader didn't lose because he lacked vision, and he didn't lose because he didn't care — he lost because he never figured out how to get a group of people to operate at the level he expected without making them feel like they were one wrong move away from becoming a case study. And that's the part that separates the intense leaders from the effective ones.
There's a version of this where Vader slows down just enough to build alignment, to create clarity, to actually teach people how to think instead of just reacting every time they fall short. In that version, maybe someone raises their hand and says, "Hey, quick question — should we maybe not leave a direct path to the core of this multi-billion-dollar space station?" and everyone has a quick laugh, fixes it, and we all move on.
So yeah, maybe Darth Vader wasn't the monster everyone made him out to be. Maybe he was just a high-performing leader stuck in a broken system, trying to force results out of a team that wasn't built to sustain them. And if you're reading this and nodding along just a little too hard, the takeaway probably isn't to start breathing heavier in meetings — it's to figure out how to keep your standards high while actually bringing your people with you. Because unlike Vader, you don't get to rebuild the Death Star after it blows up.