> "this must be an Australian" ... It's the rejection of authority that's so characteristic.
Your stereotype is 100% wrong. They emigrated to Australia from Southeast Asia according to: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/merry-christmas-ya-filthy-an...
... so they're Australian now.
Calling someone Australian is deeply offensive to many people in the world.
And working in a country usually doesn't make you a citizen. He hasn't got an Ocker passport AFAIKT.
Re:Leadership is a hell of a drug
by jimwhite42 on Thursday March 07, 2024 @05:48AM
(#39627440)
> IMO actual leaders are just people who think ahead so when other people don't know what to do they have some sort of answer. They may not be in positions of authority at all.
That's a really great pithy summary. It gels with one popular definition of software architecture: good software architecture anticipates which bits of a codebase/solution are likely to change more effectively than bad software architecture.
I moved here, but I love this about Australia. There's a lot of boot-licking in corporate settings, but one of my first experiences here was someone holding the door open on a train for fun, preventing us from leaving the station. Back home, this would have been a huge ordeal while we waited for the police or someone to arrive, as we all quietly waited and tried to avoid making a scene.
But in Australia, the driver got out of the front carriage and screamed "OI, DICKHEAD!" and that rapidly resolved the issue.
IMO actual leaders are just people who think ahead so when other people don't know what to do they have some sort of answer. They may not be in positions of authority at all.
They have to stick their necks out a bit otherwise their forward thinking is of no use. That requires a bit of arrogance and some people have lots of arrogance of course but without it how could we deal with uncertainty?
In real life who really @#$# knows what will happen or what we truly need to do to succeed? Success may be more accidental than planned. If one is to get people to work together however, there has to be a degree of belief in what they're working on and that starts with "leaders" - who are forced to bullshit just as politicians are and then get blamed for doing so. If they didn't nobody would begin to listen to them. Then the group would not work together and no goal would be accomplished.
Authority is another matter. Who is going to take responsibility? There's a problem - who is going to take time out of their day to solve it? Who should have made sure it didn't happen in the first place? Authority is just the supposed answer to these questions. And at the end, who will be able to get everyone to a decision so that discussion doesn't go on for ever. At the end when their decision turns out to not save the day, who will accept the risk of blame for a failure?
You do get people who "don't believe in leadership" or authority or whatever but I am a bit suspicious that they are the ones who in practice do a lot of leading and pushing people around and are successful at doing so whilst avoiding responsibility. So they want more of that obviously. To be fair I probably do a bit of it. Nobody is wholly wonderful.