Cassandra’s story has endured as a powerful metaphor for ignored warnings and the burden of seeing the future without the power to change it or to help others to see. Her fate is referenced in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (458 BCE) and Homer’s Iliad (8th century BCE), as well as later Roman interpretations by Virgil in the Aeneid (1st century BCE). 

The Cassandra Complex is a phenomenon that many visionaries face—seeing the future with absolute clarity but being ignored or dismissed. Leaders who predict industry shifts, technological advancements, or market disruptions often find themselves at odds with entrenched interests, unable to convince others of what they know to be inevitable. More frequently, those who possesses a strength in multi-order thinking, pattern recognition, and tactical acumen may find themselves at odds with those who don’t. These conditions lead to classic strategic foresight failures for an enterprise. 

One of the most striking examples of this condition is the battle between Edwin Howard Armstrong and RCA’s David Sarnoff. Armstrong’s invention of FM radio was a revolutionary leap forward, but his vision was suppressed, not because it was flawed—but because it was too disruptive to the existing business order. 

The battle between Edwin Howard Armstrong and David Sarnoff was not simply a corporate dispute or a clash of egos—it was a fundamental struggle between vision and entrenched power. Armstrong, like Cassandra, saw the future with clarity, but his breakthrough invention was met with resistance rather than acceptance. This story is not unique to the radio industry. Throughout history, innovators and forward-thinkers have been thwarted, not by the flaws in their ideas, but by the unwillingness of those in power to relinquish control. To ground this phenomenon more deeply, we start with one of the oldest and most tragic cautionary tales in history—the myth of Cassandra. Her story, immortalized in ancient texts, serves as both a metaphor and a warning for leaders who ignore those with the ability to see the future. 

The Myth of Cassandra: A Gift Turned Curse

In this famous painting Cassandra (1898) by Evelyn De Morgan, Cassandra is seen tearing her hair because what she has foretold has come true. Troy is shown burning in the background. To the left is the wooden horse in which the Greeks by trickery entered the city and the on the ground are blood red flowers. The painting is contained in the De Morgan Collection which is beautifully housed in the Cannon Hall Museum, an 18^th-century mansion just off the M1 about mid-way between Sheffield and Leeds near Barnsley.

Cassandra’s Gift and Curse to be Ignored 

Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, making her a princess of the doomed city. She was renowned for her great beauty and intelligence, but it was her prophetic abilities that set her apart. 

According to legend, the god Apollo fell in love with Cassandra and, in an attempt to win her affection, granted her the divine gift of prophecy. When she spurned his advances, Apollo, unable to revoke the gift, placed a cruel curse upon her: she would always see the future with perfect clarity—but no one would ever believe her. 

This curse became one of the most tragic fates in Greek mythology—to see disaster approaching but be powerless to stop it. 

Cassandra’s Warnings: The Fall of Troy 

Cassandra’s first major prophecy was the fall of Troy. When the Greek armies, led by Agamemnon, waged war against her city, Cassandra foresaw Troy’s destruction. She pleaded with her fellow Trojans to reject the wooden horse left by the Greeks, warning that it was a trap. 

“Do not bring the horse inside the walls! It is filled with armed warriors, and our city will burn!” 

But no one listened. The Trojans, convinced that the wooden horse was a gift and an offering to Athena, dragged it inside the city walls. You know the rest of the story. That night, Greek soldiers emerged from within, opened the gates, and sacked the city, bringing Troy to ruin—exactly as Cassandra had foreseen. 

Cassandra’s Tragic End 

After Troy’s destruction, Cassandra was taken as a war prize by King Agamemnon of Mycenae. She was enslaved and brought back to Greece, where she foresaw her own murder at the hands of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s vengeful wife. 

Once again, she spoke of the future: 

“Blood is in this house, and death waits within!”  

But just as in Troy, her warnings went unheard. As she predicted, Agamemnon was brutally murdered, and Cassandra herself was slain soon after, her prophetic gift proving useless once more. 

The Cassandra Complex in Leadership 

The Cassandra myth is a timeless revelation of the frustration faced by visionaries—those who see patterns, risks, and opportunities before others but struggle to be heard. Leaders today who predict industry shifts, market downturns, or cultural changes often find themselves ignored, just as Cassandra was. 

Leaders with high levels of Multi-Order Strategic Acumen possess a rare ability to see beyond the present, recognizing patterns, anticipating future challenges, and positioning their organizations for long-term success. However, this ability can also be a curse—a leader who sees the future too soon or too clearly may face resistance from those unwilling or unable to accept it.  

History is full of visionaries who saw what others could not, yet they struggled to bring others along. If Cassandra’s tragedy was seeing the truth too soon but being dismissed, then Edwin Howard Armstrong is her modern parallel.  

The Dawn of Radio Wave Technology and the Radio Corporation of America 

At the beginning of the twentieth century three Americans stood on the shoulders of a veritable pantheon of predecessors including Hertz, Marconi, and Sir JJ Thompson and their predecessors Faraday, Henry, and Maxwell and employed the scientific knowledge of the past to create the foundations for modern electronics and our digital age:  

• Lee de Forest, who had invented the three-element vacuum tube;  
• Edwin Howard Armstrong, the genius who discovered the fundamental circuits that made AM broadcasting and receiving possible, and  
• David Sarnoff, not an inventor but a sagacious entrepreneur who, as head of RCA and NBC, was at the forefront of technical and commercial development of equipment and broadcasting for half a century. 

The Cassandra of Radio: Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890 – 1954) 

Edwin Howard Armstrong possessed the force of genius in his understanding of electromagnetic waves. His discoveries unleashed the potential of electronic communication to the world. Understanding the properties of de Forest’s Audion tube that had eluded its own inventor, Armstrong created a circuit that turned it into a powerful instrument of receiving and transmitting radio waves. He created a novel way of tuning that is the basis of every radio and television today.  

Armstrong was not just a visionary—he was a quiet, self-driven genius, and a daredevil. Unlike the business leaders who controlled the industry, Armstrong was an engineer through and through. He spent years in the lab applying his ingenuity to solving technical problems and in the field balancing high atop radio transmission towers tirelessly testing and refining his inventions. He felt his work should speak for itself.  

Armstrong developed and revolutionized AM broadcasting through several key inventions: 

• The Regenerative Circuit (1912): Allowed radio signals to be amplified for long-distance transmission. 
• The Superheterodyne Receiver (1918): Improved signal clarity and selectivity, making radio more practical for mass use. 
• Super-Regeneration (1920): Increased radio reception efficiency, reducing interference. 

These breakthroughs made AM radio commercially viable. And by working in very close collaboration with David Sarnoff the President of RCA, they developed AM broadcasting into a national industry. By the 1930s, RCA had solidified its dominance in radio broadcasting, with over 40 million AM radios installed in American homes, generating immense profits from hardware sales and advertising revenues. Sarnoff and RCA could not have realized this lucrative market without Armstrong’s technical ingenuity. 

From Visionary to Entrenchment: David Sarnoff (1891 – 1971)  

David Sarnoff was Armstrong’s contemporary. He was the embodiment of ambition, hard work and resourcefulness. He possessed the energy, ability, shrewdness, and determination to be ranked among the most powerful and successful business builders of the twentieth century. No fiction celebrating the American dream could quite equal Sarnoff’s life story. A poor Jewish emigrant from the Pale of Russia, he landed with his family at age nine into the Dickensian poverty of a New York tenement. He was a visionary, an industry builder, and the prime mover behind RCA. In thirty years, he became president of RCA, and built it into the largest radio manufacturing and broadcasting company in America.  

For nearly five decades, the names RCA and NBC—along with Sarnoff’s own—were synonymous with American electronics and broadcasting.  

More than any other person in America, Sarnoff understood the meaning and impact of the new technology of radio. Initially, his farsighted proposal in 1916 for a “radio music box” and broadcasting met with little interest from his superiors who saw wireless only as means of transmitting and receiving telegraph messages.  

Sarnoff Realized His Vision 

What began in the fall of 1920 as a few broadcasts from a single station in Pittsburgh, became by 1923 the fastest growing industry in the United States. By the end of the 1920s, there were 618 stations all operating on the system of amplitude modulation or AM, and many affiliated with three radio networks that spanned the nation. Their broadcasts were heard in 12 million homes—more than 40 percent of American households. Over the next decade of the 1930s that number would grow to 28 million—more than 80 percent of American households. The signs of change could also be heard through speakers in American automobiles with the introduction of the car radio in 1930. Broadcasting had become what de Forest called an “empire of the air.” Throughout the depression RCA revenues from advertising sales would grow from under $5 million in 1927 to over $215 million in 1940. Sarnoff would let nothing challenge NBC’s commercial radio profits. Sarnoff needed the retained earnings from NBC, along with revenue generated by RCA’s radio equipment sales, to support the development of a new technology, electronic television. He fiercely guarded what he thought of as his company and would let nothing and no one get in the way of RCA’s success.  

The Relationship Between Sarnoff and Armstrong 

Sarnoff and Armstrong met in December 1913 when in their early 20s. Armstrong was a recent Columbia University electrical engineering graduate and protégé and assistant to Professor Michael Pupin. Sarnoff was Assistant to the Chief Engineer at the Marconi Company. Pupin and Armstrong were providing a demonstration of Armstrong’s powerful new regeneration receiver and Sarnoff pulled together a delegation of Marconi engineers to witness it.  

Sarnoff and Armstrong liked each other immediately. But their friendship blossomed when they spent the last two days of January 1914 at the Marconi Company’s high-power transmitting station at Belmar, on the New Jersey coast. The weather was bitterly cold, and the shack where they set up Armstrong’s regenerative receiver could not keep out the wind. But the messages they received through the air were most impressive: from 4 o’clock on the afternoon of January 30 to 5 o’clock the following morning, they listened to signals from around the world. When they connected Armstrong’s receiver to a speaker, they could hear the dots and dashes of Clifden from an adjoining room. Strong signals of a transmission from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon, came in clearly, even through heavy static.  

That frigid night sealed a friendship that would be slow to dissolve. The rapport between Armstrong and Sarnoff might appear unusual at first. Armstrong was tall, slow-speaking, cerebral, and gentle; Sarnoff was short, talkative, quick-thinking, and aggressive. Armstrong’s background was middle-class, Presbyterian, and American; Sarnoff’s was poor, Jewish, and Russian. But they were bound by a fraternal pioneering spirit and mutual respect for each other’s abilities. A little more than a year separated them in age: at the time of their first meeting, Armstrong was just twenty-three, while Sarnoff was not quite twenty-two. And David Sarnoff realized that Howard Armstrong had made a discovery that would revolutionize the entire art of radio transmission and reception. They would recognize together the anniversary of that monumental night, January 31, 1914, for the rest of their lives.  

Sarnoff had both the vision and the commercial acumen and – with the close collaboration of Armstrong – the technological ingenuity, to be the architect of the commercial success of AM radio. His 1920s vision of a national radio network became reality, not just transforming communication and entertainment, but establishing it from thin air.

Their creative fusion sustained their friendship as the AM network grew. Armstrong married Sarnoff’s secretary Marion. (See photo above) Armstrong’s AM inventions made him the largest shareholder in RCA at one point and brought him additional millions in royalties from other companies. Sarnoff, in turn, leveraged Armstrong’s innovations to build RCA’s empire. He admired Armstrong’s genius.  

‘FM (No Static at All)’ — Except Between Sarnoff and Armstrong 

Armstrong’s focus followed the old adage “necessity is the mother of invention.” All of Armstrong’s inventions were ingenious solutions to encountered problems. He was constantly trying to solve the static, hiss, and signal dropout problems with AM. With AM in place, he naturally shifted his attention to and began making great strides on what would be the solution and his greatest discovery: frequency modulation (FM) radio. FM radio provided crystal-clear sound quality and far greater fidelity. It was an undeniable technological leap forward.  

Although Armstrong was endowed with a remarkable ability for creative thinking that led to the fundamental inventions of modern radio, he was hobbled, and fatally so, by his inflexible will, his contempt for corporate maneuvering, and his belief that superior engineering would always triumph over business interests. He failed to understand the indomitable power of the corporation in the twentieth century to subsume the individual inventor no matter how momentous the discovery.  

And there was another problem—his FM radio threatened to make AM radio obsolete. 

Sarnoff, once Armstrong’s greatest ally, had by now become his most formidable opponent. FM radio was not merely a technological advancement; it was an existential threat to RCA’s dominance. Sarnoff recognized that FM could render AM radio obsolete, undermining RCA’s investments in broadcasting infrastructure, hardware sales, and lucrative advertising networks. If FM succeeded, RCA’s empire would be at risk. Sarnoff made a fateful decision: FM radio would not be allowed to succeed—at least, not under Armstrong’s control. 

The Betrayal: RCA’s War Against Armstrong and FM  

Despite having worked alongside Armstrong for years, Sarnoff now saw him as a threat. He and RCA actively pulled levers within their easy grasp to stifle FM’s adoption. The betrayal unfolded methodically: 

• Regulatory Manipulation: Sarnoff lobbied the FCC to shift FM radio to a different frequency band, rendering existing FM receivers obsolete and forcing Armstrong to redesign his system. This effectively delayed FM’s adoption for years. 
• Market Suppression: RCA refused to manufacture FM radios, limiting their availability and keeping AM as the dominant format. 
• Strategic Distraction: RCA shifted its focus to developing television, sidelining FM technology in favor of a medium it could better control. 
• Endless Litigation: RCA dragged Armstrong through years of costly court battles, contesting his patents on FM technology. This legal warfare drained his finances and mental resilience, forcing him to mortgage his home and exhaust his resources in the fight. 

Sarnoff did not need to prove Armstrong wrong. He merely needed to outlast him. And he did. 

The Tragic End: The Curse of Cassandra 

For years, Armstrong believed that superior engineering would ultimately win out over corporate resistance. But he underestimated the power of entrenched business interests. RCA had the resources to stall FM’s progress indefinitely in the courts. Armstrong, exhausted and financially drained, saw his fortune disappear. His marriage crumbled under the weight of his obsession and frustration.

Sunday, January 31, 1954, also marked an anniversary that Howard Armstrong was not likely to have forgotten. Forty years before, on January 31, 1914, he and David Sarnoff had spent that night together in a shack in Belmar, New Jersey, listening to his first black box—his regenerative receiver—and copying telegraph messages from all over the world. It had marked the beginning of their friendship, which had flourished in the 1920s. He had been the “coffee man,” the person who was always stopping by the Sarnoff house to talk of radio. He had sold Sarnoff and RCA super regeneration and they in turn helped him develop the superheterodyne. He had defended Sarnoff’s interests and vision, even in a shareholders’ meeting. And, on January 31, 1934, Sarnoff had marked the twentieth anniversary of their friendship. “Fix your gaze and energies on the next twenty years,” Sarnoff had told him then, so that the telegrams and letters exchanged at the end of the next generation would make them “feel that we are still young.” But twenty more years had passed; they were enemies in competition, and he had been defeated. 

Armstrong put on his best suit, overcoat, and gloves. He wrote a note to his wife, then opened the window of his 13th-floor apartment and stepped into the void. At 10:30 the next morning, a doorman found Armstrong’s fractured body on the roof of the River Club. His plunge had been the last defiant act of the lone inventor and a frustrated man. 

When David Sarnoff learned of Armstrong’s death, he was visibly shaken. At his office in Rockefeller Center, he stated, “I did not kill Armstrong,” he said directly to Carl Dreher, a mutual acquaintance who had known both men since the 1920s. Dreher quickly replied that no such thought had ever entered his head. But the weight of the statement lingered. Although Sarnoff had professed to be a friend of Armstrong’s at his deposition less than a year earlier, all personal contact with his former friend had long since ceased.  

At Armstrong’s funeral, attended by a small gathering of 150 friends, family, and industry figures, Sarnoff sat in silence. 

The mourners in the pew behind him long remembered how Sarnoff the legendary executive—who had built RCA into an empire—had wept openly. 

Epilogue 

“When the mountain moves, believe it; when a man changes his nature, believe it not.”

~ Chinese Proverb “山移可信，人性难移”  

History vindicated Armstrong. FM radio eventually became the global standard, exactly as he had foreseen. By 1940, radio technology was changing the way nations waged war. In World War II it became the standard method of communication on land and sea, and in the air. In preparation for war, Edwin Howard Armstrong pioneered the development of FM radio sets for communication in army tanks, jeeps, and hand-held walkie talkies, and in a moment of patriotism he gave his patents, including FM, to the federal government to use for the duration of the war without royalty. Manufacturers including RCA employed his patents in the radio equipment that they manufactured and sold at great profit to the government. The inventor chose instead to devote his energy and resources to the development of technology that after the war would be used in continuous-wave FM radar, microwave (wave lengths between 1 meter and 1 millimeter) relay stations, and space communications. It was continuous wave FM radar from World War II that helped to make space exploration possible.  

Edwin Howard Armstrong died thinking he was a failure. He never understood that he had been more successful than any of the people or interests he had been battling, or that his achievements would long outlive those of his rivals. Marion Armstrong knew differently. She spent the next quarter century redressing the wrongs her husband had suffered and ensuring that he received the recognition after death that had eluded him in life. She concluded the court process to a settlement that made her wealthy for the rest of her days. FM radio eventually became the dominant standard worldwide—exactly as Armstrong had foreseen.  

Edwin Howard Armstrong and David Sarnoff built upon the discoveries of Hertz, Marconi, and Sir J. J. Thomson, and many others who had gone before them. They looked further and built on the knowledge they had inherited to create a new world of radio, television, and communication. We cannot touch any of our electronic devices today without being touched by one of their discoveries and creations. They were giants, and they changed our lives profoundly. 

RCA thrived for decades under Sarnoff’s leadership, but his blind spots—suppressing FM radio, overinvesting in color TV, and failing to future-proof RCA’s leadership—ultimately led to its decline. He defended RCA’s dominance so fiercely that he failed to adapt to the very forces that made it great. By 1985, RCA, once an empire, was absorbed by General Electric, proving that even the strongest corporations are not immune to stagnation and miscalculation. 

While brilliant scientific discoveries over the last century have transformed communication, the same cannot be said for human behavior. As long as there are visionaries who see the future too clearly, there will be those who seek to silence them. The Cassandra Complex endures. 

Seeing the Future Is Not Enough—Navigating Power, Timing, and Influence 

The battle between Armstrong and Sarnoff was not just a conflict of technology and power—it was a test of leadership foresight, adaptability, and strategic execution. These dynamics are not relics of the past; they play out in today’s boardrooms, executive teams, and innovation-driven companies. The question is: how do we recognize, measure, and develop the leaders who will shape the future instead of resisting it? 

Contrast Between Armstrong and Sarnoff’s Leadership Styles 

 

Trait	Armstrong (The Visionary Inventor)	Sarnoff (Once the Innovator – Now the Gatekeeper)
Approach to Innovation	Technology should win on merit	Innovation must align with corporate power and direction
Strategy	Independent, focused on breakthrough tech	Market-driven, focused on controlling industry shifts
Strengths	Brilliant engineer, true pioneer	Master strategist, business empire builder
Weaknesses	Lacked influence, isolated, underestimated corporate politics	Became resistant to disruption, prioritized control over progress
Fate	FM radio was proven right but only after his death	RCA thrived for decades but ultimately failed to adapt. Sarnoff believed RCA’s dominance was unshakable and failed to plan for leadership succession and industry shifts.

 

The Competitive Advantage of Multi-Order Strategic Acumen 

What if you could measure and enhance the one leadership capability that separates companies that dominate industries from those that fade into irrelevance? 

Lyceum’s Multi-Order Strategic Acumen is not a generic ‘strategic mindset’—it is the rare ability for a leader to: 

• See several moves ahead in a complex and shifting environment. 
• Anticipate second- and third-order consequences before others do. 
• Influence and navigate organizational resistance to change. 
• Align vision, timing, and execution to avoid costly miscalculations. 

Most leadership assessments fail to measure this. They focus on tactical execution, past successes, or personality traits. But what about the ability to predict and shape the future? 

We apply our proprietary Multi-Order Strategic Acumen Framework inside our Executive Assessment & Development Program to identify, cultivate, and align this capability within leadership teams—giving companies a measurable advantage over their competition. 

• What if your board could quantify the depth of strategic foresight in your executive team? 
• What if you could detect where you are exposed—and where to invest in future-proofing your leadership? 

This is what we do at the Lyceum. We measure what others overlook. And we help organizations ensure their leadership is positioned for what’s next. 

Two Ways Forward – Which Path Will You Take? 

 

Path 1: Study the leadership lessons from Armstrong vs. Sarnoff	Path 2: Discover and Develop Strategic Excellence in Your Leadership Team
For CEOs – How to anticipate resistance to your vision and align strategy with execution.	What if you could measure and develop the rarest leadership competency—Multi-Order Strategic Acumen?
For Board Members – How to detect and develop visionary leadership without falling into cognitive traps.	Most firm’s executive evaluations miss this. Lyceum’s Assessment and Development program doesn’t.
For Innovators – How to navigate entrenched power structures and drive adoption of new ideas.	Would your leadership team have seen what Sarnoff saw?  Do your executives see several moves ahead—or just react to what’s in front of them?
The full leadership insights from this case—including strategic boardroom questions and executive foresight exercises—are reserved for Lyceum Circle of Leaders members.  Get exclusive access to leadership case studies, insights, and peer discussions.  Join a private network of executives and board members shaping the future.  It’s free. No obligation. Just your name and email.  Join Circle of Leaders	Identify, assess, and develop Multi-Order Strategic Acumen in your executives.  Lyceum’s Multi-Order Strategic Acumen is just one competency in our overall Executive Assessment & Development Program. If you’re ready to uncover and develop Multi-Order Strategic Acumen inside your executive team click below to learn more.    Click Here to inquire about Lyceum’s Executive Assessment & Development

 

 

Bibliography

Principal Sources:
This case draws primarily from the following works:

• Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio – A key source detailing the rise of radio, the battles between Armstrong, Sarnoff, and de Forest, and the broader industry dynamics. This book was also adapted into a PBS documentary by Ken Burns, which provides additional context. 
• Kenneth Bilby, The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry – A biography of Sarnoff that, while informative, is widely regarded as a hagiography (overly favorable account), necessitating a critical reading. Other sources provide background and additional insight into the corporate, technological, and historical dimensions of the Armstrong-Sarnoff conflict.

Supplementary References:

• Douglas, Susan J. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. 
• Lessing, Lawrence. Man of High Fidelity: Edwin Howard Armstrong. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1956. 
• Schwartz, Evan I. The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale of Genius, Deception, and the Birth of Television. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. 
• Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. New York: Knopf, 2010. Media & Documentary Sources: 
• Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. Directed by Ken Burns. PBS Documentary, 1991.
• The Great Radio War: Armstrong vs. Sarnoff. BBC Radio Documentary, 2017.

Online Articles & Reports: 

• “Edwin Howard Armstrong: The Tragic Genius Who Revolutionized Radio.” IEEE Spectrum, June 2015. 
• “The War Over FM Radio: Why RCA Fought to Suppress It.” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2018. 
• “David Sarnoff and the Corporate Control of American Broadcasting.” The Atlantic, December 2012.