Leading On The Road To Hell
I’ve come to the conclusion that the road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions; it’s paved with ”leaders with intentions”—good, bad or indifferent.
I figured this out based on media coverage of leaders. After all, have you ever seen a media treatment of a follower?
Media co-opted ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ decades ago and increasingly diluted the meaning until it disappeared.
Along with dilution, the media gave those they termed leaders the same treatment that was previously reserved for extraordinary athletes, celebrities and rock stars.
In doing so they created the monstrous, indestructible, uncontrollable ego found in every leader who bought into their hype; and reflected in compensation packages more fit for royalty than for business people.
And in case you haven’t noticed, you can find many of those massive egos in (surprise, surprise) investment banking, hedge funds, insurance and other sectors of financial services. But you knew that.
In fact, ego-mania has percolated throughout all industries, with little consideration for the size of the organization or its mission.
Further, in throwing the leader term around so loosely the media helped enlarge politicians’ already super-sized egos still more and extended the ego franchise to religious heads.
Not only are those egos super-sized, they also seem to be bulletproof.
How many of these ‘leaders’ have actually taken responsibility for what they’ve caused?
Have you seen them apologizing for their share of bringing down the global economy? Did I miss it? Boy, I hope you Tivoed it for posterity.
But the media’s gone pretty silent on the subject; lauding corporate heads seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. But dodos aren’t the only extinct bird, the phoenix is, too. And like the phoenix, media leadership hype will rise again just as soon as we all forget—which, unfortunately, we will and that’s a historically proven fact.
By the way, I’m not the only one; Jim Stroup noticed the silence, too, only from a different perspective.
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Image credit: sxc.hu
Tags: ego, Jim Stroup, leaders, leadership, mediaRelated Stories
POSTED IN: About Leadership, Communication, Ethics, Followers, Leaders Who DON'T
1 opinion for Leading On The Road To Hell
The difference between corporate culture and reactionism | Managing Leadership
Nov 25, 2008 at 3:31 pm
[...] by the dysfunction expectations we are encouraged to have of leaders, please see Miki Saxon’s article on where all of that is taking us – a strongly expressed and effectively organized assessment of the current [...]
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