What If I Don’t Want to Succeed?
The managerial bias in success narratives
I look up at skyscrapers with fascination and dread. What’s it like to own one or likely several of these, or to sit at the helm of a multimillion-dollar company commanding hundreds to thousands of employees spread transnationally? My smaller mind can’t fathom the scale. Just thinking about the massive managerial load sends me reeling.
And that’s just thinking about management of the technical side of a business. What about the staggering ethical responsibility that comes with mobilizing mass human labor, large-scale abuse of the earth, cultural influence over prevailing mindsets that impact planetary material existence? All too aware of my brittleness and executive dysfunction, with terror and awe I stare up and wonder: how can sky-dwellers — the owners or high-level executives of mammoth entities — consider all this? Do they even?
Whether driven by greed or a sense of ethics, managerial genius seems to me ubiquitous in the way that others seem to have in abundance what one personally lacks. Take cities, economies, or governments — to my mind, if not for the abundance of managerial talent around managerial idiots like me, would civilization even be possible? Just the thought of building one of these towers blows my mind (never mind for a moment the organizational…
