Wednesday, April 23, 2014

The Rich Have Installed the Pathological


Washington's Blog ran a piece on how an empire implodes from within.  Two points resonated with my observations on the deteriorating state of leadership in organizations, both business and political.  They are:

3.  Self-serving institutions select sociopathic leaders whose skills are not competency or leadership but conning others into believing the institution is functioning optimally when in reality it is faltering/failing.
I've been surprised by my growing experience with these types in the last decade.  I'll add that these leaders optimize their personal power and income to the detriment of the organization, not to its benefit.  They also pressure others into creating and maintaining their fictions.  Anyone exposing elements of the truth are in for a world of hurt.

12. The feedback from those tasked with doing the real work of the Empire is ignored as Elites and vested interests dominate decision-making.   The point is that decisions made with no feedback from the real-world of the bottom 95%, that is, decisions made solely in response to the demands of cronies, vested interests and various elites, are intrinsically unsound and doomed to fail catastrophically.

PEUReport ran pieces on policy making billionaires, the Bush/Obama White House frequent hosting of and fawning over PEU's.  The average person's voice has been marginalized and ignored for at least a decade.  Neither the Red or Blue Team care to reverse this entrenched pattern.  It's a PEU world.  Greed, power and hubris are clearly on display.

Update 7-16-17:  Psychology studies show the impact of power on emotional intelligence.  It dumbs it down.  “Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence.

Update 10-23-19:  Washington's Blog will cease in part due to damage from being listed as a Propornot website, a bizarre anonymous high-tech effort to make Hillary Clinton feel better after losing to real estate barker Donald Trump.