Why DO Idiots Eat Their Young? And, Is it a Bad thing?

Why DO Idiots Eat Their Young?
And, Is it a Bad thing?
If we compare the typical "idiot" in business to the starving family patriarch in the cruelest of winters, interesting parallels start to surface. Consider the challenge of feeding a family to the typical business leader that must financially feed his or her team. Imagine the bad winter as analogous to the challenging business climate and the story starts to sizzle.
While we love our children dearly, in rare cases there are those families that take for granted what most of us consider to be precious. Many parents would sacrifice their own lives without hesitation to protect those they have brought into this world. Yet, there are strange and tragic cases that cause a parent to defile or even destroy the untouchable. What causes a parent to take for granted what most could not imagine losing?
Consider the horror of a large starving family beginning to cannibalize the youngest of children in order to survive the darkest of winters in the wilde
ess. With children in plentiful supply, the family is presented with a horrific and ominous opportunity for survival. The rationalization may be multiple. Attachment to these children has not been maximized and contact has been limited. The strongest of bonds (those created over time) have yet to develop.
On paper and in most polite conversations, leaders agree that the quality of your business team or organization is based on the quality of your people. Yet, this statement is contradicted many times each day by "idiotic" leaders all over the world. How easy is it for leaders to undermine the lives they impact daily? Can they become as cruel and inhumane as the fictitious family in this article?
As leaders lose value for the people they serve, they begin to harden attitudes and the people can, over time, become less valuable than the machines or other property in the organization. This is a subtle and gradual process that is magnified in cyclical businesses repeatedly. Imagine a business serving a market that peaks and valleys every two to three years. And, imagine the employment level in this business adding and losing 70% of its employees each time the market falls. It is only natural over 20-30 years for the leaders to become callused to the value of the individual. These leaders may even choose to limit human emotion in order to make the next round of layoffs easy on themselves. They may resist forming attachments to people they know will be gone with the next swing of the market. This is no different from the soldier that resists a friendship with the new soldiers in order to save his own emotional loss if the new soldier dies in battle as is likely for the "Newbies" in a long, protracted war.
This loss of human value is the heart of the thinking for this article. If we are not careful, we can lose value in what is most precious--our people. We don't necessarily do this on purpose. We simply become "battle scarred" during tough economic times and rationalize the unimaginable. World-class companies know that the best people are going to allow the best companies to weather this economic storm. These great leaders will re-clarify and re-amplify the value of the best people on the team. They will certainly not take this talent for granted or even worse, remove them from the team to save a myopic buck! Idiots on the other hand find no value in the people that make them successful each day. They only see the financial statements without regard for the lives behind the numbers.
Back to the story...
This family patriarch in the worst of conditions is analogous to the leaders that manage many companies today. They see only themselves as valuable and begin to undervalue the smallest among them. The undervalued are the weakest and most vulnerable therefore it makes sense to let them die so that strong may live. Great leaders will weather the storm and even sacrifice themselves in order to protect the smallest and most fragile among the group. Where are these leaders? DO they exist? That's the next article so stay tuned...
Genetically speaking, is it a bad thing for idiots to eat their young? A mature and less emotional view may be NO. We do not need these genes in the future anyway!