Danger of Abstraction

In Leaders Eat Last, Sinek draws on Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments of the 1960s. Volunteers were told to give what they believed were electric shocks to a learner, and Milgram varied how close the two were. When the learner was in another room, most volunteers went all the way; when the learner was in the same room, and especially when the volunteer had to press the learner's hand onto a plate, far fewer did. Sinek argues that large organisations build the same distance into their structure. A target set at head office becomes a budget line and a headcount, and nobody in the chain sees the person who will carry the cost, so the Circle of Safety quietly shrinks to the people the leader can see. His counter-example is Barry-Wehmiller under Bob Chapman, which, by Sinek's account, met the 2008 downturn with four weeks of unpaid leave for every employee instead of layoffs. The concept is not a rule against hard decisions, which are sometimes unavoidable. It is a warning that abstraction feels like objectivity, and a reminder to put names and faces next to the figures, to meet some of the people affected, and to look for ways to share a cost before placing it on a few.