I'm sure you mean well, but this is exactly the the non-founder response I'm talking about. And maybe things were different 20 years ago, I don't know.

There's always something better I could have done as the person in charge, obviously. I've done a lot of reflection and self-critique, please believe me, and I realized I've made a lot of mistakes, from which the situations could have been recovered though.

Putting my faith in employees, expecting them to do maybe 80-90% of what I was doing as an employee 10 years earlier created an almost unrecoverable situation, that burned the entire runway to unscramble. Yet if I say that my biggest lesson was never to put trust in employees, as it's most likely impossible to create a good incentive system for them, most people won't believe me, as I'm sure you won't either.

I've come to think that the burden is no longer on anyone to create incentive systems, it's on society to reintroduce some morality. Only a limited amount of businesses have the luxury of aligned incentives.

> > employees simply doing what was best for them > No leader should expect anything different from their people

But then there are generals who lead soldiers to die so that a war is won. So at least there exists another mode of leadership not covered by your statement.