I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city built where three rivers meet. The Allegheny and the Monongahela (“The Mon”) rivers join downtown to form the Ohio River. As a kid, I never gave much thought to which way The Mon was moving. It flows north, about 130 miles from West Virginia up to Pittsburgh.
I thought about The Mon on a recent trip to Egypt, where I spent three days on the Nile River. The Nile flows north too, more than 4,000 miles from the heart of Africa to the Mediterranean Sea.
Rivers follow gravity. They run downhill toward the nearest sea, so terrain sets their direction. Siberia’s biggest rivers flow north to the Arctic. So do Canada’s Mackenzie River, much of Europe’s Rhine River, Florida’s St. Johns River, and The Mon in my hometown.
So, why does the myth stick that south-flowing rivers are more common? Perhaps it’s that our maps put north at the top. A river heading north looks like it’s climbing the page and defying gravity, so we file it away as strange. The map shaped what we believed was normal.
The ancient Egyptians solved that problem. They named their land by the river. Upper Egypt sits in the south, near the Nile’s source. Lower Egypt sits in the north, where the river empties into the sea. To them, “up” meant upstream. Their map started where the water started.
Leaders can learn something from that. The direction you call “up” depends on where you stand. Your team, your customers and your board each read the map from a different spot. Before you decide someone has it backward, do some perspective-taking. What is their point of view?
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Take organizational charts, for example. Many companies put their C-suite at the top and show the hierarchical flow toward the bottom of the page—all the way to frontline employees and their customers. I can’t help but think of smart leaders who have turned the org chart upside down and put the customers at the top and the CEO at the bottom.
Frank Blake, former CEO of Home Depot, is a great example. Blake reinvigorated the company’s service culture by putting customers at the top of the company’s inverted pyramid, employees immediately below, and management at the bottom. By repeatedly showing this image within the company, he reinvented the collective perspective and who was the priority. Blake knew that if employees leaned into what the customers said, all roads would lead to improvement.
The Great Pyramid in Egypt has held its shape for about 4,500 years because its weight spreads across 13 acres of ground. It was built to honor one leader, and thousands of workers did the heavy lifting.
Blake and other leaders who share his approach put an emphasis on an inverted pyramid and the many people they serve at the top. So, which way is up? That depends on whom you’re building for.
