Thx for the note.
So, I tend to separate a 'process' from a 'ritual'.
Most organizations would have 'rituals', but not processes in the context I noted above.
A 'ritual', is a process without clear goals, and without compliance and compensatory controls.
So, when a company has a pow-wow annual product strategy meeting, driven by a new CEO... or a technology group holds bi-monthly Architecture board meeting, or a data governance meeting -- those are mostly rituals. Not processes.
Rituals, masked as 'processes' are bad, of course.
They take oxygen out of the cult-of-the-process and move it back, again, to the cult-of-personality.
Which, then creates very similar 'profile' to the one of an organization that depends on a 'hero/mover and shaker/brilliant CEO'.
I do challenge myself at times, to compare how my disdain for the culture-of-personality would work at a war time..
Do general win wars, or do the troops?
I am going to say, at I need to learn quite a bit of more historical facts before, I can approach that subject.
Which is also why, I believe, solid bias-free education in history is almost essential for the work in management consulting, large organization transformations, and even creative consumer-oriented product design.
--
WRT my point on entertainers.
Their talents today, are not fundamentally different than the same talents that were appreciated 3000 years ago.
Because these are bound to physical human abilities (and I include comedian/actors there as well).
This is in stark contrast to the professions that leverage scientific knowledge to achieve their expected outcomes
(eg engineers, medical doctors, etc).
There is no net-positive-to-society economic model, where we can justify an actor making more than 1000 science teachers or a 1000 soldiers.
As I noted above, I think the entertainers benefited greatly from technologies, that allowed them to multiply and extend their performances in space and time.
For non-sportsman entertainers , additionally the copyright system , put them on the same footing as engineers leveraging the patent system (both systems are now heavily abused to install mafia-like control over engineering or entertainment content).
Lack of wars among the super-nations, and using entertainers as vehicles for political agenda, also gave them additional compensation leverage. Last 50 years, in western societies, have been exceptional for those professions.
And I find their current compensations whether it is Messi or Bill Maher, or Tom Cruise -- just repulsive (and even more so, than of mediocre or even talented CEOs).