I feel a bit smug that I thought "this must be an Australian" about 5 paragraphs before I found out :-D It's the rejection of authority that's so characteristic

I feel a bit smug that I thought "this must be an Australian" about 5 paragraphs before I found out :-D It's the rejection of authority that's so characteristic. I am in a Japanese owned company where I must seem far more extreme to them than the OP seems to me so I'm not criticising. IMO actual leaders are just people who think ahead so when other people don't know what to do they have some sort of answer. They may not be in positions of authority at all. They have to stick their necks out a bit otherwise their forward thinking is of no use. That requires a bit of arrogance and some people have lots of arrogance of course but without it how could we deal with uncertainty? In real life who really @#$# knows what will happen or what we truly need to do to succeed? Success may be more accidental than planned. If one is to get people to work together however, there has to be a degree of belief in what they're working on and that starts with "leaders" - who are forced to bullshit just as politicians are and then get blamed for doing so. If they didn't nobody would begin to listen to them. Then the group would not work together and no goal would be accomplished. Authority is another matter. Who is going to take responsibility? There's a problem - who is going to take time out of their day to solve it? Who should have made sure it didn't happen in the first place? Authority is just the supposed answer to these questions. And at the end, who will be able to get everyone to a decision so that discussion doesn't go on for ever. At the end when their decision turns out to not save the day, who will accept the risk of blame for a failure? You do get people who "don't believe in leadership" or authority or whatever but I am a bit suspicious that they are the ones who in practice do a lot of leading and pushing people around and are successful at doing so whilst avoiding responsibility. So they want more of that obviously. To be fair I probably do a bit of it. Nobody is wholly wonderful.