Winners Take All
Elites change surface, keep power. Watch foxes guarding hens.
businessThere is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, by the cold logic of numbers, among the more predatory in history. By refusing to risk its way of life, by rejecting the idea that the powerful might have to sacrifice for the common good, it clings to a set of social arrangements that allow it to monopolize progress and then give symbolic scraps to the forsaken—many of whom wouldn’t need the scraps if the society were working right.
AQ's take: Hit me cuz I've chased elite nods while real progress stays gated.
Jun 17, 2022Elites, Gurría writes, have found myriad ways to “change things on the surface so that in practice nothing changes at all.” The people with the most to lose from genuine social change have placed themselves in charge of social change, often with the passive assent of those most in need of it.
AQ's take: Reminds me of my agency days, fixing symptoms not systems.
Jun 17, 2022The only thing better than controlling money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money and power. The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.
AQ's take: Ouch, that's me advising bosses on 'change' that keeps them rich.
Jun 17, 2022It was that they were braver, bolder than you—some might say ruthless—willing to take on power, no matter the cost. Citing Travis Kalanick of Uber and Elon Musk of Tesla, he said, “They are most comfortable in the uncomfortable places. What that means is, they’re very comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. And most of us want to just be kumbaya, everything’s great, I’m happy, you’re happy, we’re good, besties, BFFs—and it’s like, ‘No. Fuck that. Let’s challenge each other. What’s going on here? What is the truth?’ When things get uncomfortable, the reason it’s getting uncomfortable is because there’s a conflict between something that’s true and something that’s not true. And the only way to suss that out, figure it out, is to poke at it. And people like that who make big ideas happen don’t run away from those conflicts. They actually embrace it.”
AQ's take: Burns cuz I've been the fox pretending to guard the henhouse.
Jun 17, 2022When your leader still wears the beret from his days in the rebel army, you should be afraid.
AQ's take: Stings remembering beret-wearing bosses who crushed us rebels.
Jun 17, 2022David Heinemeier Hansson is the cofounder of a Chicago-based software company called Basecamp, a successful but modest business that stayed relatively small and avoided the lure of Silicon Valley and of trying to swallow the world. “Part of the problem seems to be that nobody these days is content to merely put their dent in the universe,” he has written. “No, they have to fucking own the universe. It’s not enough to be in the market, they have to dominate it. It’s not enough to serve customers, they have to capture them.”
AQ's take: Echoes my Basecamp envy, craving dent not domination.
Jun 17, 2022It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it. —UPTON SINCLAIR
AQ's take: Salary blindness? That's my old job trap exactly.
Jun 17, 2022If you want to talk about the structural power of sexism, first make people think of their daughters. “People want their daughters to have every opportunity, but they don’t feel like that about their female coworker,” Cuddy said.
AQ's take: Daughters vs coworkers? Explains my blind spots on sexism.
Jun 17, 2022Generosity entitles the winners to exemption from questions like these.
AQ's take: My 'generous' consulting hid ugly self-interest.
Jun 17, 2022Émile Durkheim helped to confirm with his landmark book Suicide: that “people who are more tightly bound by ties of family, religion, and local community have lower rates of suicide,”
AQ's take: Ties explain my Karachi roots keeping me sane.
Jun 17, 2022Naomi Wolf writes in her book The Beauty Myth that “whatever is deeply, essentially female—the life in a woman’s expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin—is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease.” This perceived ugliness is, she notes, good for business, because industries like retail and advertising—not to mention salons and plastic surgeons—are “fueled by sexual dissatisfaction.” Wouldn’t true equality for women be a win for women but a loss for Dermalogica?
AQ's take: Beauty as disease? Saw it kill my team's confidence.
Jun 17, 2022Where do we go from here?—is: somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than the people who have been leading us.
AQ's take: Where we've been sucks, need new leaders like yesterday.
Jun 17, 2022“For me, it is equivalent to have a master who denies people the right to freedom, and then, however, justifies that by saying, ‘I’m a benevolent master,’ ” she said. “So I actually support slavery, but once I have the slave, I really treat them well, and, actually, they live under great conditions.”
AQ's take: Benevolent slavery? My old bosses' playbook.
Jun 17, 2022And MarketWorld’s private world-changing, for all the good it does, is also, for Cordelli, marred by its own “narcissism.” “It seems to me that these days everyone wants to change the world by themselves,” she said. “It’s about them; it’s about what they do. But there are other people around you, and you owe it to them to support institutions that can, in the name of everyone, including in their own name, secure certain conditions for a more decent life.”
AQ's take: Narcissistic solo-hero? Guilty of ignoring team institutions.
Jun 17, 2022