Am I late? The Sopranos went off the air in like 2007 and I’m only now finishing the series. On the upside, I’m not going to worry about any spoilers for you, the reader.

The show is good. It’s thoughtful. The language in it is cringe inducing 19 years later, and probably was at the time. Not really the cursing so much as the context.

I found the first few seasons tedious. The second half of the series is much more interesting than the first, primarily because you realize Tony’s northern New Jersey empire is collapsing under his poor leadership.

It could be because I work for a long established fortune 100 company whose leadership follows that Jack Welch model of trimming the fat until nobody wants to eat what you’re serving model of management. Everybody looks great with a rapidly growing margin until you run out of customers, but that’s what acquisitions are for… to buy more customers to disappoint. Needless to say, I believe this strategy to be lazy and unimaginative and I think Jack Welch was just dumb enough to convince the masses it was smart.

As much as I detest the Welch strategy, Tony Soprano never had one. He ran his business with zero interest in the future. He isn’t building anything, and puts no effort into maintaining the status quo. He inherits a declining business and very quickly drives it into the ground.

Nepotism is a mixed bag historically. Some businesses handed down from family to family have fared well, others have been total failures. You’re dealing with intergenerational sharing of knowledge, practice, and strategy, mixed with personality and the dice roll of genetics. Talent is too rare to trust it exists in your next of kin.

Nepotism is interesting because it is likely the most obvious form of poor assumptions with business. I’ve seen more poor leadership hires based on degrees, credentialing, and past work experience. The problem with experience, is that it is the old way of doing things, and the more effort someone puts in to learn those ways, the more ingrained they are, even if they’re lousy. It’s difficult to assess if a person is thoughtful or adaptive, and even impossible if you don’t probe for those qualities because your training hasn’t taught you to.

Tony was not built to run a mob. His father might have had panic attacks as well, but I doubt he was nearly as childish or impulsive as Tony and probably had more interest in generating business and wealth. The anxiety Tony has in the first season, which is the catalyst for the entire series, is caused by his awareness, that the leadership job he is about to take, he is not cut out for.

What do you want in a leader anyways? Someone who motivates people to do great work, with a vision for expanded success in the future, while sharing that success with the people who labor for them, and help develop those people to become masters of their own work and careers.

In contrast, Tony has no vision, not even to hold what his crew controls, let alone a plan for expansion or growth. He puts in no effort to develop his captains or crews, instead he promotes and then micromanages the work. He cannot lead his more independent managers so when there are disagreements, he murders them, even though they are his most successful earners. He’s left with an incapable crew, earning far less money, and completely dissatisfied.

I found the ending very satisfying. For years I’ve heard it was controversial, but I’m assuming maybe it was just misunderstood at the time. Tony tells Bobby a couple episodes prior that you probably don’t see your death coming, and probably don’t even hear it. That’s exactly what happens when he glances up to look as Meadow enters the diner and everything cuts to a silent blackout. That ominous, members only jacket wearing character going into the bathroom, which is the only person in the scene the camera cares to follow, ended Tony without anyone seeing it coming.

The ending is brief, as is the 21 hours of season six. Time is condensed, they rushed to get to the end of this thing. There is more clarity in the last two seasons of what this show is, than in the four before them.

The show starts with an exploration of therapy and it’s carried throughout. The engagements of Dr Melfi with Tony are always interesting. She presses him to explore his own ideas, and often only replies to deepen the discussion. Additionally, whenever he talks about the behaviors of other people, she asks him “them, or you” which reminds me of the concepts that the traits you like in others are what you like in yourself, the traits you dislike in others are the traits you need to work on yourself. It makes me think I should rethink my criticism of Tony’s management style, or look at my own.

Something else I found interesting, Melfi’s friends in the sixth season shame her a bit, as they reveal their beliefs that therapy only enables sociopaths to help them better justify the criminal work they are committing, rather than helping them be less criminal or destructive. This realization finally gets her to fire Tony as a patient. In reality, she helps Tony stick with the work, and stay in the game just long enough, to ensure the Soprano family completely falls under his leadership.

More than anyone, Dr Melfi ensures that the New York family will triumph and restore order to what’s left of the northern New Jersey mafia. Hopefully she recognizes that in time for her next dinner with colleagues and can rub it in their face.