In an interesting post on self-delusion and leadership, he writes,
if leaders are so often self-deluded, how come so many organizations succeed, or at least don’t collapse?
Pointer from Jason Collins. Some thoughts:
1. Perhaps we are looking at survivorship bias. There may have been hundreds of CEO’s, each with “reality distortion fields,” playing the tournament that Steve Jobs wound up winning.
2. Bureaucracy may provide a check against self-deluded leaders. Bureaucracy tends to err on the opposite side of overconfidence. Anyone who has ever tried to sell something to a big company has found that one “no” vote can cancel out many “yes” votes. Every CEO faces what Lewis Gerstner of IBM called a “culture of ‘no’.”
Very perceptive, very true. The same holds for political bureaucracies, which play an important role in maintaining sobriety in the face of politicians generating Storm and Stress. We urgently need accounts (including those from an economic perspective) that explain not only why the political order has flaws but also why it works.
For more: http://redstateeclectic.typepad.com/redstate_commentary/2015/05/hamlet-without-the-prince-of-keynsian-economics.html
This is pretty much the story of post war Japan. Although things are changing now with Abe.
Perhaps the quandary begins in not distinguishing “Leadership” from “Management” in large business enterprises.
Where much of the functions are administration (bureaucracies), politically determined, “Leadership” probably consists of defining elements that differ markedly from the defining elements required in commerce (though some similarities in kind, if not degree, may be observed).
It is possible that the most common form of “self-delusion” is found where managers, with limitations, presume they are “Leadership.” In business, Leadership requires constant testing of the status quo for “improvements” in performance. Management requires careful balance of the status quo to maintain performance.
In bureaucracies, maintenance (and possible expansion) of the status quo is essential. So “leadership” takes on a different description.
If all leaders are semi delusional then no company is at an advantage, but then no company is at a disadvantage. Success in the market is generally defined as better than your peers, not a definite success like landing a man on the moon for less than a billion dollars.