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In 2000s, there was an ownership dispute between stakeholders of a major Polish telecom (PTC at the time, now part of T-Mobile). It resulted in the company having two sets of CEOs and board members for a couple of years, with all the chaos at the highest levels of the company that could result from it. And yet, the firm plowed on successfully, didn't lose market share and is to this day very healthy.

It makes you wonder how important those big wigs really are. In my current company (a big bank), from what I'm seeing the execs are so far removed from reality by layers and layers of middle-managers who distort and manipulate facts to their favor when reporting upwards, that what the execs think they're managing is really some kind of alternative-universe avatar of the bank. Essentially they're operating in a Matrix created for them by their army of underlings.



There was a nice story that made me realize that in John Brooks' "Business Adventures"

The one about electric companies colluding, where the execs kept telling their subordinates not to collude with competitors, while said subordinates thought it was some sort of inside joke and just kept doing it.

Funniest part is, the execs apparently did not know, while their subordinates thought they were "clearly" communicating they were.

The morale, to me, was that management, at any scale or level, really only has as much power as their subordinates let them have.

And that implicit meanings, in communication, are absolutely and deeply unreliable.




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