Death by Delegation
Institution as Scapegoat
I am going to take The Crowd in a different direction for 2026. I have been writing as a person in two worlds. In my business life I am a manager of corporate software projects. Most of my career has been spent as a consultant to large global pharmaceutical companies. In 2008 my reading switched from business to religion following a series of personal challenges. However my writing has always straddled both worlds. In 2026 I will try to merge these worlds in my writing.
Death by Delegation is a term I have used in my consulting to highlight why the large pharmaceutical companies make poor decisions. The VP delegates to the Director. The Director Delegates to the manager. The manager breaks the problem into pieces and delegates the pieces to various operations around the globe. At the end of day the janitor, or some hapless consultant is responsible for everything. The journey of the spiritual life is a journey to responsibility.
We are in a time in The United States where we have delegated everything. The only thing remaining in the US is the cash flows. In his recent speech Pope Leo made the statement “We are not in an era of change rather we are in a change of era.” I totally agree with the statement. Early in my career we divided business processes and sent them to operations around the globe. The projects I am seeing now are focused on bringing things home. I am old, and things are coming full circle.
One of the reasons I write under the name The Crowd is I do not want to indite these companies. They are good people. They often do not know what they are doing. The goal of this writing is to reflect on what is happening. One of my original titles for my Substack was “Provoking Change”. I call these writing provocations. The goal is to stoke a conversation, raise and issue and learn from the discussion that follows. I do not always know what I am saying. I am a Myers Briggs Extrovert hoping to get the answer from you.
One of the vehicles I want to use in this writing is my fake pharmaceutical company. I developed this in my consulting writing and will be using it here to protect the guilty and prevent having my butt dragged into court. I call the company PCC which stands for Potions, Concoctions and Contraptions. I am not where this is going, but as father drags me into retirement I hope to stop working in two worlds.
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After reading your post and thinking about it for a minute, the idea came to me that we delegate so we don’t have to take responsibility for the decisions or actions that are taken. I think we live in an age where people want to be responsible for as little as possible. Whether it’s a threat of being sued or fired, if I can point the finger at somebody else, I reduce the risk of something bad happening to me. Better yet, if I can find a way to claim that I’m the victim that’s even better. Imagine a world where everyone took responsibility for their own well-being.