By this I mean, organize around some single person for leadership, or in other contexts focus on a popular figure. Even societies that tend to be described as more collectively-organized/oriented tend to do this.
People are people and are as flawed as one another, so this pervasive tendency to elevate others is odd to me. It can be fun and goofy as a game, but as a more serious organizing or focal principle, it just seems extremely fragile and prone to failure (e.g. numerous groups falling into disarray at the loss of a leader/leader & their family, corruption via nepotism and the like, etc.).
Leadership is hard. Really hard. It is very easy to be a bad leader, hence the common perception of bad managers. Everyone can identify bad leadership, but ask someone what makes a good leader. It is hard to define and hard to do.
Leadership also requires taking responsibility for others. Many people do everything they can to avoid responsibility.
Put these two factors together and it becomes pretty obvious why most people shy away from leadership. It is hard and when something goes wrong it is your fault.
Even this I think is a little questionable. People frequently mistake their failures as failure of leadership.
Got my first taste as a kid leading the pack, alpha nerd.
Summer mornings I’d pick up the phone and school phone book and start dialing, or I’d get called first. It was on me to decide what we would do that day and get it together. Herding nerds is a hella chore. If we had fun, great! If the day didn’t work out? All on me. And guess who was the default dungeon master?
It quickly got to the point where I was responsible for our fun. Now translate that into leading a company’s success.
Lemmy: “CEOs are useless and should die in a fire!”
Hey, I’m pretty darn leftist (democratic socialist, not tankie) and pretty opposed to the current state of affairs regarding CEOs, so I feel this is targeted at me… and yet totally misrepresents the position.
CEOs are not useless. CEOs absolutely set the “tone at the top” and create the entire culture for a company. At the same time, CEOs do not work 400 times harder than the average worker, yet that is what they are paid. CEOs are also capable of doing great abuse to those beneath them, and have next to zero accountability for it. CEOs are kings in their little fiefdoms, and I say down with all monarchy. Note that “down with kings” does not mean “down with leaders”, nor does it say or even imply that kings aren’t leaders, or that leadership is useless to have.
Yep people complain about CEO salary when they don’t realize that is how much it cost to pay them to leave their current (successful) situation in order to take on that role elsewhere. Not always the case, some come from within and get paid well to stay, too.
Salaries are definitely too high in a lot of cases, but you’re paid based on what you can command on the market and not a penny less. But yeah it fucking sucks haha.
For sure, and I failed to really get at this more in the OP, but it’s because of those difficulties that in part made me wonder, “Well, what’s an alternative look like?”
Individual leadership in particular seems primed for either abuse from above or below (i.e. a scapegoat for people’s avoidance of responsibility).
Yep, well said. For OP’s question… It’s pretty common to see a leader bring his whole group with him/her wherever they go and people follow because having a good leader is pretty tough to come by. I know a lot more people loyal to a particular person than a particular company.