Conversation

Kinda interesting how “President” in business began to suggest weaker levels of executive authority a few decades ago and was supplanted by “CEO.” Today if used at all it is often below CEO. Same with “Managing Director” (more common in the last with British style businesses).
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“President” (as in presiding over meetings) and “Managing Director” bith suggests a legislative/deliberative posture over executive, though not as much as “Chairman.” All 3 suggest more procedural ceremony than CEO. Kinda imperial. Boardroom or court (judicial or monarchical).
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All also suggest an intact chain of command. President/chairman/managing director/king/Supreme Court judge = you don’t need to leave the top-level context to govern, or translate words into other kinds of action. All action is speech acts. “So let it be written so let it be done”
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CEO suggests you are not confined to the boardroom or to fiat speech act orders for governance. You might sleep on factory floor, look at actual machines or code to help fix things. You’re vertically mobile in social context as well as action-context. Why the terminology shift?
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My suspicion: as orgs grow in complexity and stability, the ability to govern from top slowly erodes. Agency structurally devolves to middle bureaucratic layers. Governance gets increasingly confined to procedural speech acts. Top can give orders but middle controls the language.
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So top becomes increasingly ceremonial. Sometimes middle explicitly wrests authority from top (cf Magna Carta) but more often it just gets slowly drained of real authority via *procedural* modes. When this happens, current “top” title gets debased as a marker of real authority.
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The actual word, whether “King” or “President” or “Managing Director” begins to lose authority. Sometimes it can be reclaimed. Like when Philip IV took down Templars (an unaccountable, tax-free Europe-wide middle layer, a Deep State of its time) on trumped up (heh!) charges.
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Other times, the terminology shifts. Like King —> Emperor in Europe. In Indian history “Raja” (King) crept up to Maharaja (great King) and sometimes “Raja Raja” (King of Kings). I think “President” and “Managing Director” —> “CEO” in coroporate America was a similar drift.
Replying to
I’m fascinated by a similar drift in the perception of “President” in political sense between Obama and Trump. Middle layer (gerrymandered Congress plus civil service) took away so much authority that the President had to flail with executive orders.
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The last 15 years demonstrate steadily weakening Presidential authority. Authority draining away first to Congress and federal reserve, then to federal civil service, now to states/cities. The judiciary has held steady I think (with high authority).
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Besides executive orders, I think they responded mainly by trying to dismantle and privatize the parts of the machinery they couldn’t control, with the machine alternately fighting or colluding with them. At the same time ceremonial perception of Presidency increased.
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The rise of acronym “POTUS” I think reflects an attempt to refactor the role the way “CEO” did in corporate world. Except I don’t think it’s working. Reagan deregulated industry allowing CEOs to reassert authority over “Organization man” machine. Who will deregulate the state?
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Covid19 has been really clarifying in one sense. Previously I was mapping business leadership (CEO class) to medieval nobility and dismissing actual government nobility — governors and mayors — as irrelevent figureheads. Turns out I was wrong. They are still the actual nobility.
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Modern business class is no more free of political and theological control than medieval. MNCs are no more free than “free cities” of Middle Ages. Political world can reassert control at any time it chooses. The role of the theological institutions is played by the court system.
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Only thing that’s been changing is the level from which political control is exercised. Now governors and mayors tell F100 CEOs what to do. The business class is still subservient to the political class, on,y at a different level.
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The business world has not bought control of the political world through political campaign contributions. It has only bought specific indulgences — tax breaks, friendly regulations — that can be taken away easily. Politics is Bane.
Bane Dark Knight GIF
GIF
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The frustrated wishful dreaming of libertarians and neoreactionaries for “CEO monarch” type political authority tells you nothing like that actually exists yet. We’re seeing decades long reversion from imperial LBJ style presidency to Tamany Hall style city machines.
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But while we won’t have a CEO-President, “POTUS” will continue to grow increasingly frustrated as cyberpunk regionalism grows. Afaict there is no move available comparable to Philip IV taking down the Templars (that took a surprise military attack followed by fake heresy trials)
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One possible black swan way out — some new locus of real agency accidentally falls within Presidential scope by default restoring the balance. Like aliens landing on White House lawn and refusing to talk to anyone else. Or of course declared war (an increasingly obsolete idea)
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