THE LADDER AND THE WALL

What a generation's frustration is actually telling us — and what it gets wrong about the remedy

Bruce Eickelman

Drawn from The Return to Grown-Up Capitalism, forthcoming

My daughter Ellie is 25.

She has a degree in marketing and communications. She is intelligent, organised, and willing to work hard. Since finishing her degree she has had four jobs. She left or was pushed out of three of them.

The first two ended because the systems she was working inside were run by people who were not accountable for how they treated the people below them. In one case a manager took full credit for work Sophie had done. In another the culture was one where the stated values and the actual behaviour were so far apart that staying felt like a slow erosion of something she needed to keep.

The fourth job ended in a meeting. Her boss said something that was not accurate. Sophie said so. She was fired on the spot.

A few weeks after that she said to me: “Climbing the ladder when it’s leaning against the wrong wall has taken a big toll on me.”

I have been thinking about that sentence ever since. Because it is the argument of the book I have spent the last several years writing, stated more precisely than I have managed to state it anywhere in the book itself.

The ladder is not the problem. The wall is.

Ellie is not unusual. She is representative. There is a generation of people her age who are educated, capable, and genuinely willing to work — and who have concluded, not unreasonably, that the system is not going to honour what it promised them. I want to talk about that conclusion. Because I think they are right about the problem and reaching for the wrong remedy.

The diagnosis is correct

I am 72 years old. I have been watching systems behave across five decades and more industries than most people attempt in a lifetime. And I want to say directly to anyone Sophie’s age who is reading this: your frustration is structurally correct.

The 2008 global financial crisis produced the most visible demonstration in living memory of what happens when consequence is removed from the people making the decisions. Banks made loans they knew were unsound. The people who packaged and sold those loans were insulated from the outcome when they failed. The losses were absorbed by institutions, by governments, by taxpayers — and ultimately by a generation of younger people who were entering the workforce or taking on debt or trying to buy their first home at exactly the moment the floor disappeared.

The people who caused it were not held accountable in any meaningful way. Most of them kept their jobs. Several of them were promoted. The system that produced the crisis was preserved, at enormous public cost, largely intact.

Since then: asset prices have risen in ways that have made home ownership unreachable for a large number of people in their twenties and thirties who are doing everything they were told to do. The cost of credentials has increased while the return on those credentials has declined. Wages in many sectors have not kept pace with the cost of living. And the people managing these systems — in government, in finance, in large organisations — are predominantly drawn from a generation that entered those systems when the conditions were different and has little personal experience of what the conditions now feel like from the inside.

Ellie’s frustration at being in a workplace where a manager is not accountable for what they do to the people below them is not sensitivity or entitlement. It is accurate observation of a real structural failure. The system she was working inside was not functioning as a system that honours the people operating within it in good faith.

The diagnosis is correct. The ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

Where the remedy goes wrong

The conclusion that many people Elllie’s age are drawing from this diagnosis is that the system itself — market capitalism, private ownership, the structures of commercial life — is the problem. That a different system, one with more central coordination, more redistribution, more protection from the outcomes of market competition, would produce better results.

I understand why that conclusion feels logical. If the system you are operating inside is producing bad outcomes, the instinct to replace it is reasonable.

But there is a structural problem with the remedy that the book I am writing tries to name clearly.

The failures experienced — the manager who took credit for her work, the workplace where accountability was absent, the boss who fired her for saying something accurate — are not failures of capitalism. They are failures of adulthood. They are what happens when the people in positions of authority are not required to carry the full consequence of their decisions.

And here is the problem: centralised systems do not fix that. They make it worse.

Run the same test on any system that concentrates authority and removes market consequence — any system where the people making decisions are further from the outcomes of those decisions, where failure is absorbed by the collective rather than by the individual responsible, where there is no external pressure forcing accountability. What you find, reliably, is the same failure at larger scale.

The manager who took credit for Sophie’s work was not behaving that way because markets exist. He was behaving that way because he was not accountable for it. Make the system larger and more centralised and you do not reduce the number of people like him. You increase their insulation from consequence.

Both systems fail the same way. When adults leave the room. When consequence is removed from the people making the decisions. When accountability becomes abstract and stewardship is replaced by extraction.

The answer is not a different system. The answer is insisting that the system we have operates as it was supposed to — with real consequence, real accountability, and real adults in the positions that require them.

What a grown-up system actually looks like

Ellie’s first three jobs were in organisations that had lost something load-bearing. The rules existed. The stated values were posted somewhere. But the behaviour of the people with authority bore no relationship to those values because nobody was requiring it to.

A grown-up system — what the book calls Grown-Up Capitalism — is not a system without ambition or competition or the possibility of failure. It is a system where:

Decisions actually decide. The person making the call carries the outcome. If a manager treats the people below them badly and there is no consequence, the system has failed at the most basic level. The consequence does not have to be dramatic. It has to be real.

Accountability has a name attached to it. Not a department, not a policy, not a committee. A person. When something goes wrong in a healthy system, there is always a specific human being who owns fixing it.

Honest feedback travels upward. The most reliable sign of a broken organisation is that the people at the top have a more optimistic picture of what is happening than the people doing the work. In a grown-up system, bad news travels fast and the person delivering it is not punished for delivering it.

The stated values match the actual behaviour. Not perfectly — no organisation manages that. But close enough that the gap does not require the people working inside it to pretend not to see it.

Sophie found her fourth job after the others. She is building something now. The organisation she is in is run by people who are close to the work, accountable for their decisions, and capable of hearing something they do not want to hear without firing the person who said it.

That did not happen by accident. It happened because someone built the structure deliberately.

That is what is possible. And that is what the generation currently concluding the system has failed them should be demanding — not a different system, but this one operating as it was supposed to.

I worry about Ellie every day. Not because she is not capable — she is more than capable. Because the environments capable people work inside either develop them or erode them, and she has spent more time than she should have in environments that were eroding her.

What I want for her, and for the people her age who are watching the same systems fail them, is not protection from consequence. It is the opposite. It is systems that are honest enough to let consequence land where it belongs — on the people making the decisions, not on the people working below them in good faith.

The ladder is not the problem. Build the right wall.

The Return to Grown-Up Capitalism by Bruce Eickelman is forthcoming. For information about 12X Decision Architecture, visit 12xclarity.com.