I saw an invitation to a conference on “leadership”. I scroll through the list of speakers and they all have something in common – colorless, tasteless, odorless corporate bureaucrats who have never dared to have an opinion on anything in their lives. Today, their carefully trained minds wouldn’t be able to even if they wanted to. Just flattering their superiors or the media. If we were looking for people in this republic who have shown the least leadership skills, they might be the ones.
There will be a hundred other corporate officials sitting at that conference, in lower positions for now, eagerly listening and practicing proper leadership skills…about like a school girl getting her teacher to check if she’s a proper rebel. And then there will be other people who absolutely don’t care and will try to sell something to the others.
Can you imagine Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle or Stalin speaking at conferences about leadership? They would have thought it was crazy. They didn’t talk about it because it was taken for granted that if you want to achieve something – win a war, build a national industry, bring electricity to every village, etc. – you have to persuade others to follow your vision. Conferences were held then, but they were about issues, not character traits.
But what about leadership in a world where the biggest possible goal is to give a great presentation or increase profitability by 3.6%? Notice that even those people who have a real goal (like destroying Russia) don’t advance it by talking about their vision and winning others over, but by scheming.
The whole mess about leadership is really just an obligatory part of the functioning of the bureaucratic apparatus. Every right cog in the machine must address leadership. Note that it is not about achieving something, it is about demonstrating that I am achieving it correctly.
Few things show so well the conditions prevailing within that social stratum. Not that those people are stupid and incompetent. Many of them are highly intelligent and could handle very difficult tasks if given time to adapt. But everything is geared towards pretending, pretending and pretending again. It’s worked for them throughout their professional lives. But it turns out there are limits. So far, it’s not just working for the poor guys herded to the eastern front, and it’s not working for the people fired from factories closed because of the green deal. But it’s going to progress. Even into the layers where the pretence has worked so far.