You’ve probably noticed something sickening about modern corporate life. The people who cause the disasters never seem to suffer the consequences.
Consider the story of a woman who worked tirelessly for a Big Five tech company for 15 years. She was resilient, universally liked, and managed a team of over 30 people. She barely took vacation days because she was so dedicated to the work. Then, because an older executive two levels up made a string of chaotic, ill-advised choices, the budget collapsed.
Her punishment for his failure? She was forced to execute the layoffs of her own team in weekly chunks, breaking the news to colleagues she had fought alongside for a decade. Then, when the dirty work was done, they fired her too.
And the executive who ran the division into the ground? He’s still there. Untainted. Unpunished. Moving onward.
Meritocracy is the fairy tale corporations tell the workers they intend to exploit.
We look at these situations and ask a reasonable question: How do these people consistently survive their self-inflicted disasters? Are they just lucky? Are they secretly smart?
Here is the twist you need to understand: They aren’t failing at their actual job. Their job isn’t building great products, ensuring stability, or hitting long-term revenue targets. Their job is managing up and exhibiting ruthless self-preservation.
In large organizations, survival skills aren’t just ruthless—they are amoral. The people who operate at the highest levels do so by mastering the art of deflecting blame. When disaster strikes, they know exactly how to ensure the blast radius hits the people below them, not the people above them.
Incompetence at the top isn’t a bug in the system; it’s a feature of corporate feudalism.
The corporate world is tribal. If you want to understand why the nobles can do nothing wrong by default while the villagers are always blamed, look at homophily. It is infinitely harder to fire or punish someone the more they resemble you. The ruling class protects its own. They don’t see a failing executive; they see a reflection of themselves. The destruction of a 30-person team is simply an acceptable cost to maintain the power structure’s status quo.
Publicly traded companies will always prioritize short-term optics and internal politics over actual competence. If you believe the bullshit that output and resilience are what get you promoted, you are setting yourself up for a devastating fall.
The destruction of lower-level teams is an acceptable cost to maintain the power structure’s status quo.
Almost everyone operates within a corporate hierarchy, and almost everyone internalizes systemic failures as personal ones. You think you weren’t smart enough, or fast enough, or political enough. You think if you just worked harder, you wouldn’t have been caught in the crossfire.
Stop. The system runs on tribal politics, not merit. The sooner you stop internalizing the failures of your insulated superiors, the better you can navigate your own survival.
If you are working yourself to the bone thinking that pure output will save you, you are a villager expecting noble justice in a feudal system. You are playing the wrong game.
The next time you see a catastrophic failure at work and wonder why the architect of that disaster gets to stay, remember: he isn’t untainted by accident. He is protected by design. Stop playing the game of merit, and start playing the game of survival.
FAQ
Q: Isn't this just cynical? Some companies do reward hard work.
A: Of course, some do. But in massive, publicly traded organizations, the bureaucratic layers make managing up far more critical to survival than actual output. If you assume meritocracy is the default, you are gambling your career on a fairy tale.
Q: What's the practical implication for my career?
A: Stop internalizing systemic failures as personal ones. If you are let go to cover for an executive's blunder, it is not a reflection of your competence. Shift your energy from pure output to building political capital, managing up, and diversifying your own safety nets.
Q: Is incompetence actually a strategy?
A: Yes. In a feudal corporate structure, a certain type of incompetence—specifically, the willingness to destroy lower-level teams to protect the executive class—is rewarded with continued tenure. They survive because they are willing to sacrifice others without hesitation.