June 20, 2007, on this blog: Ashgabat airport
That applies as well, I think, to corporate America. Authoritarian leadership styles discourage competence. Competence requires the existence of an independent set of standards, those of a given craft. Leaders, or corporate managers, who insist on authoritarian control refuse to defer to such standards, and when the importance of those standards is reduced, the craft suffers.
This happens a lot, whether at the Ashgabat airport or in FEMA under the Bush administration. (I’m trying to state this in the abstract, but I’m also a copy editor for the largest newspaper chain in the country, so it’s not an entirely abstract point for me.)
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