My personal experience has been that the senior leadership of large organizations contains both legitimately good leaders and toxic psychos. I personally think that it’s pretty easy to differentiate them, but of course I wouldn’t know if the biggest psychos are really good at faking it! I have the privilege of being a white male and having a track record of success so I can and do push the envelope a bit at work because I have that security. I am not afraid to ask people, even senior people, “how will that work” and that more or less separates the good leaders from the toxic idiots IMO. Good leaders have enough knowledge and humility to lay out an execution plan, including acknowledging where various steps require the operational expertise of so and so, whereas toxic faking it leaders will respond with vapid generalities because that’s all they have.
The percentage of CEOs who come from wealthy families who put them through private schools designed to feed into the ivy leagues is way disproportionate from the population. Even the barriers to entry for becoming a surgeon are pretty high for a lot of people. Half the high school kids in this country will struggle to even go to college even if they had the aptitude to excel. I mean look at me. I had fairly well off parents who were able to foot the bill for my $90K engineering school that I barely got into because I was a mediocre high school student, now I’m clearing over 6 figures a year in a fairly cushy job. 0% chance I would have pulled off anything close to this if my parents didn’t have the money. I’d have likely ended up in the military or doing some hard laborious jobs for half the pay.
Pro sports is at least one of the more meritocratic institutions we have in this country. Even some of the most poor areas of our country have athletic programs, and often kids who show elite talent at sports get recruited into good high school programs.
On the athletic side of things, sure. On the business side of things, I would contend that it’s a pure reflection of business in general. How many poor head coaches/managers, GMs, and other front office personnel continue to receive and retain jobs based on 1) who they know, and/or 2) someone’s outdated and debunked ideas of what constitutes skill in those areas?
And how bad would a ton of teams be if not for getting to draft a generational talent due to their ongoing ineptitude?
The Oilers getting bailed out by McDavid being probably the best example.
Lane Kiffin made nearly $4 million in 2020.
Just chiming in to say I’ve enjoyed the discussion in this thread, and as usual @Riverman and @boredsocial are putting in work and dropping some knowledge bombs on all of us with real-world business and industry experience