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I think that part is unquestionably true, but one thing I keep coming back to is just how easy it is to avoid or shift blame for catastrophic outcomes when the people making the decisions are in offices answering emails and doing spreadsheets thousands of miles from places where their consequences will be seen and quite often spread through several layers of bureaucracy between themselves and implementation of the policies they set in an e-mail while looking at numbers in a spreadsheet.
To be blunt about that part of the problem, the buck doesn’t stop there if someone in the C-suite hires a person incapable of the work, he knows he’s not going to be personally responsible for the outcome. He can blame those below him — the hiring manager, HR people, the hired person themselves— for anything that actually happens. He didn’t cause the near miss on the runway. It was all those people below him who didn’t implement his ideas properly. It’s quite often that those who defend the idea of DEI say that they don’t intend to lower quality, but to get more minorities who are capable into those positions. It’s the fault of those below for not seeing through the “hire diverse or else” rules to find competent candidates. If the C-suites were held responsible for failures, there would be less of a quality decline, because like everyone else the executive would value his reputation and keeping his job.
Well said. Venkat Rao talks about this in the Gervais Principle. Basically, the modern corporate world is a shell game where sociopathic corporate execs strategically move other people around like game pieces in order to wage a clandestine war with each other within an organization. It's chilling once you realize the scale.
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