Corporate leadership failures usually target the wrong people
This isn't just about one person's bad luck; it’s about a systemic pattern where the people causing the chaos remain untouched while the resilient, high-output workers are the ones who actually pay the price. In this specific case, the victim was an incredible manager who scaled from an individual contributor to leading 30+ people. She was the definition of a "linchpin" employee, yet she was sacrificed to fix a budget deficit created by a leader who has a track record of failing at every previous role.
The survival of the incompetent
It raises a massive question for anyone observing these AI-driven industry shifts: how do these individuals consistently survive their own self-inflicted disasters?
When we look at these corporate structures, we see a recurring pattern:
- Decoupled accountability: The higher up you go, the more the consequences of your decisions are "absorbed" by the layers below you.
- The "Chaos Shield": Some leaders are so chaotic that by the time the fallout is quantifiable, they have already moved on to a new project or even a new department.
- Budgetary scapegoating: When a project fails due to bad strategic direction, the easiest way to "fix" the numbers for the next quarter is to cut headcount, not to fire the strategist.
In the scenario I'm seeing, the executive in question has a history of leaving a trail of destruction behind him. He moved into this role after a failure elsewhere, and within two years, he steered this entire division into a cul-de-sac. Instead of the company addressing the source of the mismanagement, they forced the most reliable manager to fire her own team in weekly increments before finally letting her go herself.
Is it ruthlessness or just bad design?
I used to work in big tech before going self-employed, and while I've been out of the ecosystem for a decade, this feels like a deeper rot than just "bad luck." It’s a failure of the internal feedback loops. If an LLM agent or an automated workflow identifies a massive error in a codebase, the system flags it immediately. But in human corporate hierarchies, the "error" (the incompetent leader) is often protected by the very system it is breaking.
It isn't necessarily that these leaders are geniuses playing a long game. Often, they are just mediocre players who have mastered the art of being "too big to fail" or too deeply embedded in the bureaucracy to be easily extracted. They navigate the chaos by letting the people beneath them act as shock absorbers.
This is a massive drain on talent. When the most resilient and liked employees realize that their hard work and extra hours provide zero job security in the face of executive incompetence, the smartest people leave. They move to startups, go freelance, or join smaller firms where accountability actually exists. It's a losing strategy for the giants, even if it keeps the quarterly spreadsheets looking temporarily balanced.