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The mythos of leadership

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Re: The mythos of leadership

#41

Post by satvikpendem »

compiler-guy wrote: post #34
marmaduke wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just read some summary of his points elsewhere and had a hard time taking it seriously. For instance, > rule seven—which is basically that once you have power, money, and success, people will forget and forgive how you got there—is such an important rule is that it frees you to do everything else. This rule says that at the end, if you are successful, success excuses almost everything.

The "rule" is about how people behave. Not a moral judgement. It's more like: "People excuse almost anything for those in power got into power." instead of: "It was morally OK to do the things that led them to obtain that power."

Indeed, it's descriptivism versus prescriptivism.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#42

Post by pompino »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #35
pompino wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this argument is all that great - most rational people have already internalized that luck plays a role for everyone in the world. To start with there is the "i was born healthy, wasn't malnourished, wasn't in a war zone" kinda luck. Then there is the "being at the right place at the right time" kinda luck - which is part luck, part perseverance and persistence. You won't be in the right place if you ne…

This is essentially arguing that systems ultimately select for competence, given a long enough timespan. And I'd agree! But I lack faith that the system produces people that I look up to. They did well at their game, I can respect that. It may not be my game, though.

I directly addressed what I thought was the main point you were making about luck. Who people "look up to" is a more complicated issue.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#43

Post by mxwsn »

marcellus23 wrote: post #23
marmaduke wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just read some summary of his points elsewhere and had a hard time taking it seriously. For instance, > rule seven—which is basically that once you have power, money, and success, people will forget and forgive how you got there—is such an important rule is that it frees you to do everything else. This rule says that at the end, if you are successful, success excuses almost everything.

Could you explain why you think that's not worth taking seriously?

Not the parent, but I wonder if it's too simplified. It's true for absolute power, but that's effectively impossible to obtain in reality, and a far cry from middle managers climbing over each other. Donald Trump is powerful but far from immune from everything he's done to obtain power. Mark Zuckerberg is powerful but doesn't have full control over his reputation. More broadly, I think seeking power will likely create enemies, whose behavior you can't control even if your power increases. Lots of leaders fall from grace all the time, in part for things they did to obtain power.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#44

Post by pompino »

zoeysmithe wrote: post #37
pompino wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this argument is all that great - most rational people have already internalized that luck plays a role for everyone in the world. To start with there is the "i was born healthy, wasn't malnourished, wasn't in a war zone" kinda luck. Then there is the "being at the right place at the right time" kinda luck - which is part luck, part perseverance and persistence. You won't be in the right place if you ne…

Except there is incredible luck and bias. Being born to rich or connected parents. Being white. Being male. Business culture has rarely been a meritocracy. Like the post above you said, there really isn't a lot going on here that millions others don't have. Its luck, failing upwards, and cultural biases and corrupt business culture making these people leaders. Scientifically, the only trait we've found these people h…

You are presenting your own bias and opinions - which is fine, everyone is biased and has opinions, but you're smuggling them as objective moral truths about the universe. Sorry, it doesn't work like that. People absolutely do not agree on what objective moral truths there are, or even if they actually exist in the universe.

>Scientifically, the only trait we've found these people have in common is that they're all low empathy, dark triad types, sociopaths, etc. That is to say, to climb to the top, like in the royal courts of old, the system tends to choose not those with the most merit, but those who are the most ruthless and dishonest socially.

There is no "scientifically" here. It's peoples opinions and self-reported views. Cultural contexts, human experiences, personality traits, opinions, feelings, views are highly variable throughout the world are are nowhere near deterministic. Science is about determinism and discovering objective truths about the natural universe. Frankly this is not science, and is an abuse of the term.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#45

Post by mattgreenrocks »

marmaduke wrote: post #11
mikpanko wrote: post #7

Highly recommend Jeffrey Pfeffer’s books about power and leadership. He has developed a great mental model about how leadership works in the real world, which explains the pitfalls of common ways to think about it. Humans want to believe in a just world and those in power are happy to provide narratives to that end. Meanwhile they are not correlated with how power is actually gained in the real world.

Just read some summary of his points elsewhere and had a hard time taking it seriously. For instance, > rule seven—which is basically that once you have power, money, and success, people will forget and forgive how you got there—is such an important rule is that it frees you to do everything else. This rule says that at the end, if you are successful, success excuses almost everything.

This is what social proof looks like: everyone believing that everyone else signed off on a successful person, thus they should continue to be seen as successful.

The cyclic nature is unavoidable, and to some, a feature, not a bug.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#46

Post by anonymouskimmer »

PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote: post #17
robertlagrant wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it was. Individualism is the last thing you want if you want people to act as though their lives are worth less than the king's / emperor's / state. You don't want people valuing themselves and having legal and economic standing, free to make agreements between themselves. You want them to do what you want them to do.

you may as well claim everyone in the US believes their lives are less important than the presidents. In truth, the president very rarely has any major effect on the lives of Americans, therefore they don't really care one way or the other. Or to put it another way, that food needed to be harvested regardless of who was king, as long as said king didn't interfere with the food harvesting, people might have opinions b…

I can't find them anymore, but I've read interesting articles on attitudes of slaves and minorities. One of these wrote of certain slaves valuing themselves less than their owners. Then there's the research on black children preferring white dolls to black dolls.

Huge numbers of people have a status quo bias. Anytime the leadership changes you're dealing with fear impulses.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#47

Post by anonymouskimmer »

satvikpendem wrote: post #40
smoothjazz wrote: post #2

This rings true because as someone without a religious background, I definitely feel the opposite: that progress is inevitable and the people who are "in charge" while it progresses are a commodity. I also find the "deification" of leaders (like say Steve Jobs) to be damaging to culture, leading to arrogance, political fighting and empire building. Trying to have a good life and be good to those around you, while rid…

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> However, if, for example, Cyrus the Great did not help build the Jewish Second Temple

And again, who was convincing Cyrus to do this? Why not call them the "great men" instead? Had Nebuchadnezzar the second never destroyed the Jewish temple would Cyrus had spoken as he did about the Jewish god? Had Cyrus not ordered it rebuilt, isn't it likely the Jews still would have survived to rebuild it later on?

There's a real question whether Jesus existed. One alternative explanation I've seen is that he was invented by one of the Flavian Roman emperors in order to more firmly draw the Jews into the empire. Not being a historian or even historical fictionist I could see something like this happening even without Cyrus.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#48

Post by anonymouskimmer »

mxwsn wrote: post #43
marcellus23 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain why you think that's not worth taking seriously?

Not the parent, but I wonder if it's too simplified. It's true for absolute power, but that's effectively impossible to obtain in reality, and a far cry from middle managers climbing over each other. Donald Trump is powerful but far from immune from everything he's done to obtain power. Mark Zuckerberg is powerful but doesn't have full control over his reputation. More broadly, I think seeking power will likely creat…

The higher you climb the larger the screwups and violations you're excused from. But as you say, this is a ladder, not an absolute.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#49

Post by anonymouskimmer »

ysofunny wrote: post #39

bear in mind that leadership is not the same thing as representation people in congress aren't "leaders" in the same way people in the executive power are leaders. in the executive power, the representative elected by the people must indeed be leaders in the full sense of the word. but in the legislative branch, the elected people aren't leaders but representatives, this is perhaps too subtle of a difference for most…

Most of what executives do is just rubber stamping, too. I could easily imagine a milquetoast executive who just does what others agree on. There is definite room for "leadership" in the legislative ranks, and it happens all the time with various legislators championing bills or protests.

Re: The mythos of leadership

#50

Post by anonymouskimmer »

farleykr wrote: post #28
empath-nirvana wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that outside of a religious perspective, that a reading of the Bible as any sort of coherent overall narrative makes any sense at all, given the circumstances of it's composition. Different books of the bible were written by different people at different times, many of them were almost certainly edited by others at different times, and then it was all collected at a later time by other people for their…

Redemption is absolutely baked into the Hebrew Bible. The claim that Jesus is the Christ is the Christian bit. The fact of multiple authors and time periods doesn't categorically negate the possibility of a coherent narrative. One may end up at the conclusion that there's no coherent narrative. But to correlate the impossibility of an overall coherent narrative with the fact of multiple authors over multiple time per…

I'm curious how the apocrypha fit into this. Books have been actively filtered in order to create a coherent narrative.
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