Comment by AngryData
8 hours ago
Seems like a lot of luck could be framed as effectiveness. How much of the British empire was the result of the actions and ideas of the masses of the lower classes?
Think about how important some of the actions and ideas of regular employees of a company can be to the company's success. Now imagine your boss's boss wrote 90% of the future sources of your company's history. How much of the success of regular employees is going to be attributed to the leader versus the boss? How much is glossed over or forgotten just for brevity's sake? A company can still succeed even with a kinda shitty boss if it still has stellar employees, provided the shitty boss doesn't stand in the way. But how many companies can succeed with an amazing boss but shitty employees?
I'm currently reading Andrew Carnegies autobiography. Highly recommend it! He lived around the same age.
He benefitted from his employees ideas and initiatives. But that was by design. Both design of the organisation, design of the incentive structures, and the filters used for hiring.
Companies are just a collective of people trying to accomplish something. The idea that an incompetent boss, could attract talent that would be willing to force great outcomes, without due compensation/incentives, doesn't sound like a credible explanation for the mean story of success.
I was at the Carnegie museum in Dunfermline a few years ago. His childhood home was not particularly big and his origins in Scotland were ordinary. What was of interest was how some of his philanthropy parallels more recent versions... He wasn't just behind fantastic libraries and so on, he was pouring money into proto-globalist organisations much like the Rockefellers more recently.