Of course I’m OK, I reply; with 15 million people in the city, my chances of being hit by a terrorist bombing are similar to my chances of winning the lottery. The main difference is that I don’t have to buy a ticket to get killed by a bomb.I never did hear about my friend, but the report said that five members of the Youth Parliament of Pakistan were killed in the crash. That sad waste of potential wouldn’t have struck me much, either, except that this weekend sees the start of the 5th World Youth Congress Türkiye 2010. I wondered if the young Pakistanis had been on their way to Istanbul for this congress. I called and wrote but never did learn one way or the other.
The public relations people sent me a flyer on the youth congress: lots of talk about leadership and democracy but no details on exactly where these young people will gather. The press release did say that the United Nations gives the highest importance to this congress.
I hope the youth learn real leadership. It’s my experience this week that a person can make it way up near the top of the corporate ladder by faking it. You can have a person making $40,000 a month and not even doing their job. For example, a chief executive will cite lack of time as a reason not to do something absolutely vital to the company, something that falls squarely under their job description.
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely -- a friend and I disputed the provenance of that remark; he won with Lord Acton. He wrote his now famous statement about power in 1887, explaining why he stood against Pope Pius IX’s promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility.
“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases,” wrote Lord Acton.
Corporate managers can act as if they believe in their own doctrine of executive infallibility, often in cases of the most obvious wrongness. Such willful ignorance is weak leadership.
Sometimes managers can be so bad that their incompetence prompts workers to believe that the company would be better off with no one at the top, but that has dangers, too. A physical lack of leadership creates a power vacuum, and you’d be surprised at the wimpy underlings who try to take advantage of such a situation. Maybe the person wants more money, or power or prestige, but they have no knowledge or ability to win their desires.
A friend of mine recently saw this phenomenon. The general manager had been sacked and there was no new boss for a couple weeks … and one day a beady-eyed woman from human resources asked her if she could do a job that was way below her level, busywork fit for an intern rather than a woman with decades of experience. My friend said no, she could not do it, and when asked why not she said that it was not her job. Almost immediately another low-level manager tried to get her involved in a pointless project, and she parried that as well.
Fortunately for her she had the trust of a few board members, even if her role in the company was on a consultancy basis rather than full time staff. Only her decades of experience enabled her to sidestep these corporate landmines. Just think how easily young management trainees can lose their way in the maze of business life.
And speaking of consultancy contracts, cheap-o outsourcing, that’s grist for another column. Meanwhile, everyone forget the heat and keep trying to learn more: The life you save may be your own.
