Academia is much less centralized. My lab is basically unconstrained as long as I bring in enough funding, and although I have a department chair he has limited

Academia is much less centralized. My lab is basically unconstrained as long as I bring in enough funding, and although I have a department chair he has limited power to make me do things. Similarly I have almost no power over my fellow faculty members, aside from bugging them to do things. A bad PI can make their students’ and post-docs’ lives miserable, and can irritate their colleagues. But they have nothing near the power that a C-suite executive (or hell a VP) in a corporation does, simply because they don’t have the same number of people under them. And no, you don’t see maniacal behavior everywhere. You hear a lot about the 5% who behave terribly because they draw a lot of complaints and make up approximately 100% of the reports you see on sites like RetractionWatch.