·Psychology & Behavior
Section 1
The Core Idea
Pride, greed, wrath, envy, sloth, gluttony, lust — Pope Gregory the Great codified these seven failure modes in 590 AD. Strip the theology and what remains is a taxonomy of predictable human failure that has outlasted every management framework invented since. Fourteen centuries of evidence suggest Gregory identified something real: not divine punishment, but the recurring patterns through which intelligent people destroy value, relationships, and organisations.
In business the mapping is direct. Pride — founder can't pivot because identity fused with the vision. Greed — short-term extraction at the expense of long-term compounding. Wrath — revenge hiring, revenge firing, hostile acquisitions driven by ego. Envy — copying competitors instead of solving customer problems. Sloth — deferred decisions, strategic inertia disguised as patience. Gluttony — overexpansion, feature bloat, capital consumption beyond what the business can metabolise. Lust — chasing shiny objects, serial pivoting, the inability to sustain commitment to an unsexy problem.
This is not moralising. It's pattern recognition.
Warren Buffett: "It's not greed that drives the world, but envy." The insight cuts both ways: envy is the sin that produces the worst return — it motivates action without reward, consuming energy while delivering nothing. And greed gets the blame when envy is often the operating variable. The framework works as a checklist for organisational dysfunction. When a decision goes catastrophically wrong, trace it back: which sin was the operating system?
The sins compound. WeWork's collapse wasn't purely Pride — Pride attracted Greed (extracting hundreds of millions before the IPO), which enabled Gluttony (WeLive, WeGrow, wave pools with no coherent thesis). Each sin creates conditions for the next. The framework works best as a system: the presence of one sin is a leading indicator for the others.
Charlie Munger treated the seven sins as a diagnostic checklist for human irrationality. "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome" — and the sins are the incentives the brain generates internally. Pride is the incentive to overestimate your own judgment. Greed is the incentive to extract value now at the expense of value later. Envy is the incentive to measure yourself against others instead of against your own potential. You don't need to be stupid to succumb. You need to be human.
The framework's power is in its completeness. Most cognitive bias lists are exhaustive but unstructured — 188 biases on a Wikipedia page, none prioritised. The seven sins compress the most consequential failure modes into a memorable, hierarchical checklist. Useful as a pre-mortem: run the list before committing. Pride that rejected feedback? Greed that traded the future for the present? Envy that defined strategy through comparison? Sloth that mistook inertia for stability? The answer is almost always one of the seven.
