There is a universal conversation, murmured at the coffee machine of every company in the world: the one where people wonder, in hushed voices, how competent the people running things really are. Frustrated fantasy or insider lucidity? Both, obviously. But what looks like simple corridor grumbling tells a much bigger story if you take the trouble to follow it all the way. A bad boss damages a team; a bad executive weakens a company; and when the same flaws settle in at the top, an entire economy picks up the bill. The mechanism doesn’t change. Only the size of the invoice does.
Incompetence, carefully manufactured
Let’s start by doing the frustrated employee justice: the feeling is often well founded. People are promoted for their performance in their current job, never for their aptitude for the next one. So we take the best salesperson on the team, make them team leader, and are then surprised when they lead badly. We forget that excelling at selling and knowing how to lead those who sell are two different jobs. The promotion rewards precisely the skill that becomes secondary in the new role. Incompetence, here, is no accident: it is the predictable result of a system we tuned ourselves to produce it.
The trouble is that the subordinate is often wrong too. They see their boss’s mistakes in broad daylight, but know nothing of the constraints that explain them: budget trade-offs, pressure from the floor above, information that never reaches them. A decision that looks absurd from the office downstairs sometimes turns out to be perfectly rational from the one upstairs.
Hence the only test truly worth applying. Ask yourself: is my boss making bad decisions, or decisions I don’t understand? The first points to a competence problem. The second, to an information problem, and a good opportunity to cultivate a little humility before mentally drafting their dismissal letter.
The complete manager is a very useful myth
So what would it take to lead well? Combining four perspectives at once. The technician, who knows what is actually feasible on the ground. The administrator, who keeps hold of execution and the numbers. The politician, who arbitrates between interests and knows how to win people over. And the strategist, who has the courage to choose a direction and, above all, to give up the others.
Beware the trap that whole regiments of executives fall into: managing is not a strategy. Management asks: how much can I save this year? Strategy asks: what will I still need in twenty years? You can steer a ship to perfection, crew standing to attention, accounts spotless and every indicator green, while it heads straight for the reef.
The problem is that this four-talent manager doesn’t exist. Or hardly ever. Everyone has a dominant mode, the very one that earned them the promotion, and, in its shadow, blind spots they are always the last to hear about. Real competence is therefore not an individual quality but an architecture: knowing your default mode, distrusting it under pressure (because that is when you fall back on it), and having the intelligence to surround yourself with specialists better than you.
On one condition, a single but decisive one: granting them the right to be right against you. Because this is where most executives trap themselves. They do surround themselves with experts, but experts carefully selected to confirm what they already thought. The result is a brilliant assembly of talent whose real function is to hold up a flattering mirror to the boss. Blind spot included, reflected faithfully.
Reality rewards the exact opposite
So much for the fine theory. In real life, the system most often rewards the opposite of what works. A brilliant subordinate who dares to contradict is a risk; an average but loyal one is peace of mind. Insecurity always hires below itself. And the short term reigns supreme, for an unassailable reason: the bill for a bad decision arrives, as if by magic, only after the person who took it has been promoted. A sense of timing one can only admire.
The result: organisations do not select their best managers. They select those best adapted to the way they themselves work. One bad manager is a problem; a system that promotes the wrong profiles, neutralises dissent and rewards error is a reproduction mechanism. At that stage, incompetence is no longer an individual weakness. It is a culture.
On a small scale, you destroy a team
The first damage is easy to see. The bad manager discourages the best people, favours the most compliant, blurs responsibilities, and gradually installs a climate where everyone learns to protect themselves before learning to perform. The good ones leave. The cautious ones go quiet. The rest adapt. And, with a bit of luck, the person in charge will then be promoted for having “stabilised the team”.
It costs customers, time, energy and a lot of coffee drunk with a sigh. But climb the hierarchy: the mechanism stays identical, only the bill changes in size. A mistake at the bottom of the ladder costs a day. At the top, it costs a factory. One floor higher still, it ends up in the history books.
From the office to the nation: same mechanism, different multiplier
Take the West. Thirty years ago, it was the big chain store dominating the market, comfortably spread over all the available ground. Then, year after year, it gave up positions. And not only on the edges of the territory: strategic stores, key locations, handed to a small competitor first regarded with condescension, whose name was China.
Why this retreat? Not technical inferiority. Misaligned interests. Production was offshored, technology transferred in exchange for market access, entire supply chains entrusted to a strategic rival. Each of these decisions, taken in isolation, was rational: better margins, cheaper products, delighted shareholders. Everyone could go home with the pleasant feeling of having optimised something. But a series of individually rational decisions ended up producing a collective dependency. That is the whole difference between a mistake and strategic incompetence: the latter is not about taking a stupid decision, but about brilliantly optimising the wrong time horizon.
The executive pocketed his bonus; the worker, his region and his country paid the bill, much later. When the person who decides never pays the bill, he naturally optimises for himself. Nothing could be more logical. Nothing could be more devastating.
Let’s be fair: China also built its power itself, through its infrastructure, its education and its long-term vision. But let’s grant it one thing: we made its job easier with remarkable enthusiasm. It conquered some positions. For others, we moved the furniture ourselves. And left the keys on the table.
The real turning point: the day vice becomes a principle
Neither greed nor error is a Western invention. That would be doing us too much credit. Corruption thrives in every latitude, and bad decisions have never needed a passport. If they became toxic here, it is for two very specific reasons.
Greed first, the day it stopped being a flaw people tolerated and became a principle people proclaimed. The idea, asserted with great confidence, that a company’s only duty is to enrich its shareholders: the famous “greed is good” promoted to the rank of moral compass.
Error next, the day it escaped all sanction. Every system produces errors; the decisive question is what happens afterwards. A solid organisation detects the error, corrects it and draws the consequences. A fragile organisation hides it, rationalises it, rewards its author and then explains that nobody could have foreseen it. Bonuses paid despite failure, golden parachutes opening over fields of ruins, executives vanishing just before impact: the message is remarkably clear. You may be wrong, as long as someone else pays the bill. No one should then be surprised when the same mistakes come back. They have simply learned that they pay.
Legitimised greed provides the motive; impunity removes the last brake. The result is a beautifully oiled machine for rewarding those who extract value, at the expense of those who create it.
Make no mistake: self-interest will always be the engine of every economy, including China’s, which hardly hides it. The question was never to switch it off, but to bound it. To make sure that the person who decides truly wins when the company and the country win, and truly loses when they lose. A simple idea. Almost naive. That is probably why we forgot it.
The real lesson
A society is not judged by the absence of vices: it will never be rid of them. It is judged by what it decides to do with them. And it begins its decline on the precise day it raises one of its vices to a virtue while exempting the other from sanction.
The most troubling part is that this holds on every floor. The manager who doubts their boss, the company that sells off its know-how, the nation that liquidates its positions: the same mechanism, at different scales. And on every floor, the same truth holds: competence, the real kind, is never a title handed to you at a ceremony. It is a craft. One that is learned, maintained day after day, and passed on.
Because incompetence does not become any smarter as it rises through the ranks. It simply gets a bigger budget.