Episode 34: The Business Advice Pyramid

Let's pull back the curtain on the “expert economy” — that shiny world where everyone is suddenly a coach, consultant, or “thought leader.” From promises of million-dollar blueprints to endless coaching-of-coaches, I'd like to ask: Who’s actually doing the work anymore?

Links: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult#As_a_metaphor

Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will release globally on July 29, 2026. 

#DecodingTheUnicorn #DagHammarskjold #BusinessAdvicePyramid #CoachingIndustry #Entrepreneurship #Authenticity #CreativeLife #ThoughtLeadership #DoersNotTalkers #PyramidSchemes 

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

In Episode 34 of "Decoding the Unicorn" podcast, host Sara Causey critiques the "business advice pyramid," highlighting the trend of people teaching others to teach, often leading to pyramid schemes. She contrasts this with the example of Dag, a doer who actively engaged in his work. Causey argues that modern business advice lacks substance, often preying on people's desperation. She suggests five ways to avoid such schemes: verify what's being sold, look for proof of practice, beware of recursive promises, honor the slow path, and stay close to the work itself. She criticizes the superficiality of "thought leadership" and LinkedIn influencers.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Business advice pyramid, doers, expert economy, pyramid scheme, coaching business, cargo cult, thought leadership, LinkedIn, high-ticket coaching, tangible skills, proof of practice, recursive promises, slow path, mastery, actionable steps.

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn Podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, Hello and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 34 of decoding the unicorn the podcast, I appreciate you tuning in. In today's episode, I want to talk about the business advice pyramid and asking the question, What happened to the doers. If everybody is teaching everybody to teach everybody else, or everybody is coaching everybody to coach everybody else, who are they teaching? What are they teaching? Who are they coaching? And coaching people to do what? Well, very often it winds up as a pyramid scheme. I'm going to teach you to teach people, and then you make a business teaching people to teach people. I'm going to coach you so that you can coach people. And then you set out a shingle to coach people on how to coach people, and it only works if you keep getting fresh meat people who are desperate. It just strikes me that this so called expert economy and this business advice pyramid is so shady, it's it's really quite depressing, and this ties back to DAG, because dag most certainly was a doer. Yes, he was a planner and a thinker. He didn't like to do ready, fire, aim. He wanted to think something through and not shoot from the hip. But that didn't mean that he sat back and delegated everything to everybody else, or that he was the logistical planner, but he relied on everybody else to do the actual doing. That's simply not the case. When he was Secretary General, he flew all over the world, frequently into war zones, places that other people could not go or would not go. Dag did go. He knew the risks, and he went anyway, because it was part of the job. It was part of the duty that had been assigned to him that he took on willingly. Now that doesn't happen if everybody's talking about doing something or teaching people to teach other people to teach other people, and that's one of the reasons why I'm sitting here in 2025 scratching my head like, well, what's happened to the actual doers

Searching for your next great read - the kind of book you can't put down? Check out Sara's award winning biography, Decoding the Unicorn on amazon.com. Now back to the show.

I was having this conversation earlier with a friend, and I said, it seems to me that so much modern business advice sounds like it's a pyramid scheme. It's like these people get on YouTube or whatever social media platform and they'll say, sell your knowledge to others. Somebody will pay you for it. Somebody out there wants the knowledge that you have in your brain. It reminds me of a carnival barker standing outside the tent, come in and see the acrobats come in and see the lion tamer. Somebody somewhere will pay for the knowledge you have build a coaching business to teach other people how to be coaches. And I find it tedious and exhausting. And my friend was like, it's kind of like how people will say, if you're having a blizzard, go sell snow shovels. It was almost like the lowest common denominator of stuff, and it really turns into a hall of mirrors or an echo chamber. Everybody's just all selling the same thing, which is nothing. It's just a pyramid scheme, really. And that led me to the question of, if everybody is teaching, if everybody is trying to teach, other people to teach, who's doing, and then also, where is the experience coming from? One of the analogies that I used was a concert pianist. Let's say that this classically trained concert pianist wants to make some extra money by setting a shingle out to be a teacher. And maybe they want to teach beginners, or maybe they say, I don't have the patience and the skill set for complete beginners. I want to take somebody that already knows how to play the piano, but they want to really next level it. They don't want to just play a little bit at parties or maybe play in a lounge. They want to make a career out of this. I want to teach those people how it's done. In that scenario, somebody, a pupil, is going to actually sit down and play the piano. They're going to work together on an actual tangible skill. But in this business advice pyramid, it's crazy, because it's like, I'm going to teach you a skill that's really, you know, in my opinion, a bit nefarious. I'm going to teach you how to prey on somebody else's desperate. Somebody else's fear. They want to start their own business, or they're trying to get a side hustle. They're trying to escape corporate America, or perhaps they've been the victim of a layoff, and they don't know what to do next. So it's like these teachers and coaches come along and they try to imitate or play act, forms of success, courses and frameworks and webinars. And it's like, but where's the substance? You're using a lot of flash and a lot of jazz hands, but where's the actual substance behind it. There's also a concept called a cargo cult. If we go to Wikipedia and we look at how this concept is used metaphorically, we find the term Cargo Cult is widely used negatively as a metaphor outside anthropology, usage often relates to the ideas of desire, particularly for wealth and material goods, And relatedly, consumerism and capitalism, ritual action and the expectation of rational results from irrational means. Richard Feynman used the term to describe situations where people focus on superficial aspects of a process without understanding the underlying principles, he specifically cautioned against Cargo Cult Science, warning that adopting the appearances of scientific investigation without a self critical attitude will fail to produce reliable results. So doesn't that sound familiar to what we're talking about here with the business advice pyramid? It's the substance, it's the superficiality of so called success. I have a series of courses, I have a framework, I have a webinar, but it becomes a pyramid scheme, because the only way that it works is to continually get new blood coming into the system, to recruit people who then recruit other people, who then recruit other people. And it's like, but what are we actually doing? The job itself becomes recruiting new recruits to pay a fee to come in and line the pockets of whoever is actually at the top of the pyramid. And one of the other things that I think is so diabolical about all of this is that you wind up with an entire group, or an entire ecosystem of people who are trying to sell the map to a place they've never even visited. They're just selling flash and concepts without anything really behind it. And the barriers to entry for that kind of thing are quite low, because whenever you have these YouTubers and influencers saying somebody somewhere is going to pay for your experience. By golly, it's like, well, wait a minute. Is my experience really so different from the basic human condition? Are we really all so different that you have some experience that nobody on planet earth has ever had before? I'm thinking of the scripture that there's nothing new under the sun. Have you really had an experience that's so very different from any other person on the planet that it's a million dollar idea? Maybe I can't sit here and definitively say that you couldn't or that you haven't. It just seems to me that somebody might be selling you snake oil when they say that kind of thing. Now it's not to say that you can't use your knowledge to further your career or to further your creativity. Of course you can. What I'm talking about is using it as part of a pyramid scheme, because they can dress it up in all sorts of magical language. This is monetizing your knowledge. This is thought leadership, which what? What does that even mean anymore? It really cracks me up when somebody refers to themselves as a LinkedIn thought leader, because it's like to me, this is just my opinion. Okay, that's all. This is just my opinion, but it's about like saying I'm the nicest rusted out car in the junkyard. LinkedIn is just such a cesspool of rot. In my opinion, people posting nonsense and then saying agree and trying to get a war going in the comment section, or posting AI slop that they haven't even edited. It's just it is a junkyard to me, and so saying that you're a thought leader on LinkedIn, it's like, right? So you're the car with the least rust on the junkyard lot. Okay, good looking out. I guess I. High Ticket coaching. I'm going to show you how to target entrepreneurs to coach them, because they're the ones that actually have the money. Are they selling anything other than hopium? Are they? I'm asking an open ended question to you, because to me, it seems like it has all the features of a Ponzi scheme. What are they actually selling? So to wrap this episode up, I want to contemplate five ways to potentially avoid getting sucked into the business advice pyramid. If you're between jobs, you're trying to start something of your own, maybe you're not sure what that looks like. Do you have to go in the direction of recruiting other people into an MLM or a pyramid scheme? Well, no, you don't, and that's the good news. You can choose to do something else in life. So a number one always ask, what are they actually selling? If the answer is not a real skill, a service or a product. And I want to emphasize the word real if it's not something real, but it's like a vague promise of pie in the sky. You can unlock your genius. You can achieve financial freedom. That is a is a real potential red flag straight away, because real teachers will ask you or help you to do something tangible, like playing the piano. I'm going to take lessons from this person to learn how to play the piano. I'm going to take lessons from this person to learn how to write the great American novel. But even that can be dicey, because anybody can call themselves a book coach. You still want to caveat him tour, but there should be some tangible skill. I'm going to learn carpentry from this person. I'm going to learn how to I'm trying to think of things off the top of my head, which is difficult, because we do live in such a economy of pyramid schemes and intangibles. I'm going to learn how to change the oil on my car. I'm going to learn how to change the tire on my car. That's a real skill. You have a tangible ability at the end of that, whereas a grifter is just trying to help you buy into something, and at the end of the program, it's going to be the way that you make money is by referring other people to come here. Number two, look for proof of practice, not Polish, not pizzazz. Anybody can say they're an expert in anything now, but do they have some portfolio of consistent, tangible work? A pianist would be playing the piano. A writer would be writing. They would have something published. A builder would have buildings. A carpenter would be able to point to something and say, I built that. I did that. So if someone's expertise, so called expertise, exists only in the form of courses, coaching packages and Masterminds, in my opinion, you're not looking at a craftsman. You're looking at a salesman. Number three, beware of recursive promises. So if the model that you're buying into depends on you teaching others to teach others, or you coaching others to coach others, that's a real pause moment, because that's not a business. It's a daisy chain. Sustainable knowledge will involve an exchange. It's like creating something of substance that exists outside that loop. It's not an Ouroboros of the snake eating its own tail number four. Honor the slow path. If that's the path that you're on, honor it, because not everything is going to move 90 miles an hour. And as an American, as somebody firmly in the Western world, that can be difficult for us, because we're so used to quick, fast and in a hurry. Right now. I want it right now. I want it on demand, but real mastery takes time. And yeah, I'll use the P word patience. That's not sexy. That's not something that's going to move a lot of coaching packages for you. It doesn't always fit into some five or seven step framework in a webinar, and one of the best things that you can do to avoid getting conned is to respect your own timeline. The quick fix is the bait. Depth is the antidote to that. We could also think about diet programs or diet apps. If you lost the weight and kept it off, you would delete the app. You would stop paying for the program. If you went into maintenance mode and you said, Well, I know what to do to maintain this weight loss. I don't need this program anymore to just keep reminding me they lose money, and they know that. It's not like they're unaware of it. So last but not least, number five, stay close to the work itself. We can think again about Dag. Dag wasn't coaching diplomats. Thoughts on how to become coaches, or coaching people, on how to coach people, or teaching people on how to teach people. He rolled up his sleeves, literally many times, and did the work, negotiating, traveling, listening, mediating. He did. He was a doer, not just a planner and a thinker, but a doer. Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty. Stay close to whatever it is, right, your instrument, your page, your craft, because the more you are rooted in the doing, the less likely you are to be seduced by the noise, the less likely you are to get pulled into this business advice pyramid. Just some food for thought for today, take good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

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