Everybody Wants To Rule The World
A LinkedIN post by Antionette Wiebel made me sit up this morning. She was highlighting a paper entitled “Fascism as a management philosophy”.
Well, that’s a title that grabs the attention, right?
I often think we have a view of what organisations are about that we cling onto long after the observable facts tell us otherwise. We have an image that softens their harsh edges and imbues them with relatively benign motivations, whilst recognising they fall woefully short of these ideals. We ascribe their harmful effects to incompetence, dysfunction and falling systems.
This is what I thought I might write about this week. How we delude ourselves in this way as a kind of protection mechanism, a way of preserving our sanity and some feeling of safety. We have to believe organisations are essentially benign because otherwise we’d have to acknowledge we are putting ourselves in harm’s way every day, and we can’t cope with that (although I believe it is often the reality).
But what if the underlying motivation was actually dark and sinister?
Whoa! Run for the hills!!
Antoinette summarises the paper as follows:
“In a provocative new paper Dirk Matten argues that while today’s tech elites aren’t overt fascists, their style of leadership, treatment of stakeholders, and view of the future eerily echo fascist ideology: strongman authority, glorified purpose, contempt for democratic messiness, and the fusion of power with moral destiny.
This isn’t just about bad people. It’s about the ideological structure of management itself.”
The paper argues that management philosophy were based on enlightenment ideals of balance, professionalism, stakeholder negotiation. However, these have been eroded and replaced by the philosophy of fascism. This has been led by the Tech Industry, where many leaders reject the enlightenment ideas and have written extensively about that (Peter Thiel’s writings and Marc Andreessen’s ‘Techno Optimist Manifesto’, for example).
What this has led to are founder cults and ‘a management style that is charismatic, anti-political, and aggressively utilitarian.’
These people are damned by their own words and not just in their writings. Wiebel highlights this:
‘Late-stage neoliberalism … made way for a new logic: visionary founders as sovereigns, answerable only to their mission.
🔹Elon Musk: “When I ask for something, you fucking give it to me.” Authority becomes destiny.
🔹Peter Thiel: “Competition is for losers.” Stakeholders become means to an end.
🔹Mark Zuckerberg: Society, he says, is “neutered”—we need more masculine energy.
🔹Marc Andreessen: “Everything good is downstream of growth.” Tech becomes moral compass.’
Week after week we see new lows being plumbed in the way these companies treat their employees. We see new heights of crazy in the way organisations work. People report new levels of expectations, exploitations and exhaustion. Not just in Tech but everywhere (because Tech paves the way for others to imitate).
It looks like it’s unsustainable, that it can’t persist, that it must collapse under it’s own contradictions at some point. The dysfunction can’t increase indefinitely, otherwise organisations will cease to function.
But that’s under the pre-existing philosophy, according to enlightenment ideals. If the underlying philosophy has changed, then why can’t the current trends continue? It would make sense of what we see happening today, wouldn’t it? If the apparent dysfunction isn’t a bug but a feature. If the ‘CEO as King’ isn’t a flaw in the system but the objective.
There is no doubt that the Broligarchy believe they should be running the world, unfettered by rule of law or any other constraints, including any consideration of individual and collective rights we already have. That’s why they threw their weight behind Trump, who shares much of their worldview.
This is definitely a thing but I don’t think it’s everything. There are other forces, movements for more human-centred and fairer organisations. There’s still quite a lot that can be explained by incompetence, dysfunction and failing systems.
But these ideas are spreading. And these are the guys that are in charge of AI.
What a time to be alive.
Monkey Man
Talking of Trump, if we must, I was listening to a recent discussion about his decision to bomb Iran. When questioned about it beforehand, he gave the immortal (and telling) reply “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said that morning. “Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”
To which everyone added, soto voce, “Including you”
It was suggested that this was a deliberate strategy by Trump as a means of control, of keeping everyone guessing and wrong-footing them so they could not outmanoeuvre or manipulate him.
Which is something I talked about in this newsletter from February, where I talked about ‘Chaos Monkey’ as a management style.
The examples I gave of ‘Chaos Monkeys’ were Boris Johnson, Elon Musk and the Mango Mussolini himself, Donald J Trump.
So if you want to stay up with what’s going on, read the rest. If you want to know what’s coming up next, read it here.
(That’s enough smug self-congratulation! :Ed)
Hold Back The Night
Microsoft have introduced yet another new term - the ‘Infinite Workday’ - in their latest update of the Work Trends Report 2025. They have analysed the telemetry on their systems and found out that the workday now stretches from 6am to 8pm and beyond and spills over into the weekends.
They also found that people get an average of 270 messages over the course of a day and that the majority of meetings are held during the most productive times of the day. They calculate that people are interrupted by a message, email or meeting every two minutes.
They suggest that this affects performance (no shit, Sherlock!) and say that AI could improve it - but it could also make it worse.
Let’s look at what this tells us about the world of work today.
It is utterly insane !!!
We have created a way of working that goes against everything we know about how to work effectively. We have introduced a whole load of technology that purports to make us more productive that is having exactly the opposite effect. Around half of employees and managers feel their work is chaotic and fragmented. I’m amazed it’s as low as that.
How does anyone do anything? Apart from process messages and sit in meetings. Well, the answer seems to be that largely they don’t.
Will AI improve matters? Well, let’s look at how all the technology we’ve introduced so far has helped us. Oh, it hasn’t. That doesn’t bode well does it? Especially once people tap into AI’s ability to endlessly create rubbish content and send it to everyone. If everyone has Agentic AIs doing work for them and sending out stuff, then we’ll have increased the number of nodes on the network by, what, 2x? 3x? 10x? Anyone heard of the network effect????
No doubt Microsoft will use this to sell more technology to solve the problem. However, the more logical conclusion to draw from this is that we should rip out what we have already and start again. Making the machine run even faster is not going to stop it breaking components, it’s going to increase the rate of failure. And the weakest components are - the people.
Working like this is going to crush everyone. Although, to go back to where we started, maybe that is now the point.
Bits And Pieces
A new episode of WorkPunks has dropped and this month we tackle the question “Is there such a thing as too much autonomy?”. Ben Simpson of VitalOrg, Paul Jansen of Trust Works and myself spend 15 minutes tearing this apart and putting it back together again.
You can watch it on You Tube on this link or download it as a podcast via your favourite platform.
You can watch this and all other episodes on the Work Punks YouTube channel - subscribe now and never miss any of these gems!
CEOs acting as supreme leaders sadly isn’t a new thing, but in the past they didn’t admit it so baldly.
I’ve worked for an MDs who regularly ripped the phone out of the wall and threw it at his senior managers heads, a couple that managed out all the female managers, one that was open about giving pay rises/offices/promotions to his favourites, one horrendous bully and one crook.
One CEO was so bad that my whole team grabbed a visiting from our Head Office and complained. My boss was severely reprimanded for talking to the team (aka the rest of us in the room) and was lucky not to lose his job.
All these appalling leaders were ‘moved on’, some of them very suddenly but guess what? They all got new jobs as CEOs somewhere else almost immediately.
I’ve had plenty of good CEOs too, but that’s because they were decent people, not because anyone else held them to account.