Hero Worship?

[via How to Save the World]

One thing that seems to differentiate US culture from that of any other affluent country is the cult status of its leaders -- especially political and business leaders. Unlike in Canada or Europe, disagreement or criticism of one's boss in the US is treated as sacrilege -- a career-limiting move. And while Canadian and European television programs and cartoonists savagely ridicule and caricature their political leaders, and Canadian and European media go out of their way to unnerve and challenge these leaders, their US counterparts seem to treat their 'leaders' with deference bordering on hero-worship....

Many studies have shown that leadership has little to do with organizational success -- successful leaders, for the most part, just happened to be in the right place at the right time with a good group of people already working 'for' them (and when they move on to their next overpaid position, usually fail dismally to live up to expectations). No matter -- with a high 7-figure annual income, they can retire after one serendipitous success and spare themselves and their adulators the embarrassment of their inability to repeat their divine performance....

No one is in control. What gets done (for better or worse) gets done as a result of the staggeringly complex interactions and personal decisions of everyone. Even in the most hierarchical organizations, far more energy is expended finding workarounds for incompetent management decisions and policies (without offending management, of course) than is spent implementing the odd intelligent insight that management, with all the resources at its disposal, 'manages' to come up with. Employees, and customers (who are often treated only slightly less paternalistically than employees), actually have almost all the good ideas that would be needed to make any organization much more successful, but it is taboo to listen to them, to even be accessible to them. That would make the leaders look weak, as if perhaps they don't have all the answers. And that, of course, is unthinkable.