Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

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This sounds suspiciously like the law of averages. The reason that people lead within a hierarchy is not because they have the "initiative to lead", it's because they've been assigned to lead. Even if they lose any "initiative to lead" or lack any competence in leading, they will continue to lead as long as the person who pays the bills says so. This could be because that leader has a great track record, because the check-signer or someone they trusted sensed a special spark in that leader, because the leader is someone's nephew, or because the check-signer and the leader like the same music.

That's what hierarchy is - it's being named the leader. To tightly couple that with "leadership qualities" is a sort of capitalist religion.

If there's no hierarchy, maybe one person will lead on this, maybe another person will lead on that, maybe one person will be the nominal leader all the time, but actually materially limit their leadership to orchestrating the activities of a bunch of other leaders. It's not organization that's bad, it's arbitrary entitlement that's bad.

The sentiment you express here is "there will always be a King." No, there won't always be a king.

What you describe is still the emergence of hierarchy. There's no rule that it can't be a voluntary arrangement of followers electing a leader, willingly following. When said leader doesn't deliver they remove their support, and elevate another... i.e. name him. Leadership qualities absolutely will come in to play in that scenario.

Yes, bureaucratic structures can calcify a dysfunctional hierarchy; on the other hand the boss writing the checks exemplifies a hierarchy. The challenge is to construct a system that best maps to the natural variance in leadership abilities and successfully elevate best qualified leaders to positions of authority. The degree of mismatch is the degree of failure of the organization or system.

>The reason that people lead within a hierarchy is not because they have the "initiative to lead"

Sometimes this is the case though. How can you make a blanket statement it isn't true, given the assignment to lead & choice of bill-payer is certainly to a large degree informed by assessment of leadership ability?

A hierarchy among other things provides clarity on who is the leader of what, what their powers are and what they will be held accountable for. Most bad management is people finding ways to bypass those checks and balances. Scapegoating others, playing dirty politics to exert more power than they can on paper, etc. Removing even a semblance of structure and accountability just makes those things even worse.

Documenting the power structure and the social rules people must follow actually makes life easier for workers and not harder. You can even push back or negotiate those rules which is much harder if they are simply implied.

You make some great points. The arbitrary entitlement is an important and vital step in the growth of an organization. Not every basketball fan should play or work for a NBA team. There has to be some sort of gatekeeping otherwise a bad hire or misplaced promotion could become a cancer that kills from within.

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