The world is a much more complicated place today, than during the time of kings, and the accumulating data is going to keep revealing the complexity is too much for one man or woman to be responsible for it all.
But when a Deepwater Horizon type event happens and the whole herd starts baying for blood, are we sophisticated enough to say hey look at the data whats the point of lynching one person?
Of late the US seems to have attained that level of maturity, given how they have dealt up with Wall St after 2008, or the Pentagon for the 20 year war or dear Mark Zuckerberg. So maybe it's time.
I don't see older firms changing but newer firms might turn less hierarchical.
:Of late the US seems to have attained that level of maturity, given how they have dealt up with Wall St after 2008, or the Pentagon for the 20 year war or dear Mark Zuckerberg. So maybe it's time."
I don't think 2008 was a sign of maturity when the people who caused and benefitted from the meltdown got bailed out and could keep their money. Maturity would have been that the people who ran the banks before the crash would have lost all their money since it turned out that their contribution was overall negative. We have reached a point where the people who make the most money can hide behind big faceless corporations. They reap most of the profits while the losses go to the rest.
It's an interesting thought. Object oriented responsibility is as archiac as object oriented data analysis because since the rise of ML we know that the larger objects were just mental models for human decision making. However they erred by covering through averaging of more granular inputs that had conflicting information. I.e. if I'm a CEO and 3 of my VPs are good but one is terrible is it my fault that only one has become a risk. Under current object oriented thinking, yes but with granular analysis no it's the VPs fault.
Neither the President nor the Pope have a considerable amount of power.
The office of the pres. was specifically designed to 'not be a king' and he's highly constrained by the other wings of government. The US was supposed to mostly about the states.
The Catholic Church generally gives a very wide berth as to the operational artifacts of Parishes. He's also to some extent a figurehead.
CEO means such different things at different scale, at different organizations, it's really hard to compare.
I suggest the issues may have a lot to do with short-term vs. long-term incentives.
Also - 'average' pay isn't so helpful when there are a few with massive, massive pay packages that skew all of the data.
> Neither the President nor the Pope have a considerable amount of power.
Depends on which president you're talking about. The presidents of France and the US have a lot of power, the president of Germany has practically none. Monarchs in modern democracies often have less power than the German president.
And while presidents are highly constrained by other branches of the government, many pre-democracy kings didn't have any sort of absolute power either. Ultimately of course, any ruler can only rule with the consent of the people he rules; the real difference is to what extent those limitations are formalised in a law, like the US Constitution or the Magna Carta, and how far those limitations go.
In many companies, both the real source of a CEO's power and the real restrictions on his power come from outside the company, not from other employees of that company. The outside law supports the CEO's right to dictate how the company will be run, but also limits how much he can oppress or exploit his workers.
The world is a much more complicated place today, than during the time of kings, and the accumulating data is going to keep revealing the complexity is too much for one man or woman to be responsible for it all.
But when a Deepwater Horizon type event happens and the whole herd starts baying for blood, are we sophisticated enough to say hey look at the data whats the point of lynching one person?
Of late the US seems to have attained that level of maturity, given how they have dealt up with Wall St after 2008, or the Pentagon for the 20 year war or dear Mark Zuckerberg. So maybe it's time.
I don't see older firms changing but newer firms might turn less hierarchical.