<story><title>Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza</title><url>https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/monumental-record</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>guerrilla</author><text>&amp;gt; Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India&lt;p&gt;How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there&amp;#x27;s often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I&amp;#x27;m willing to go out on a limb and wager that&amp;#x27;s the way it always is actually. Everyone&amp;#x27;s a product of their environment and their times, standing on the shoulder of giants, workers and peasants alike.</text></item><item><author>gherkinnn</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m torn.&lt;p&gt;Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there.&lt;p&gt;And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It&amp;#x27;s been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It&amp;#x27;s all cliffs, Private Ryan, and Eisenhower. They put 150,000 men across the channel in a single day. And nobody seems to know about the how.&lt;p&gt;Original poem: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lyricstranslate.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-lesenden-arbeiters-lyrics.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lyricstranslate.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-l...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Our Time on Persepolis, with a rather critical take on Alexander (the Great | of Macedon): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;programmes&amp;#x2F;b0b4z075&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;programmes&amp;#x2F;b0b4z075&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;13 Minutes to the Moon, a BBC production about the moon landing. A good amount of detail about the invisible work that went in to the spectacular feat: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;programmes&amp;#x2F;w13xttx2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;programmes&amp;#x2F;w13xttx2&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>MichaelMoser123</author><text>This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Questions From A Worker Who Reads

    Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
    In the books you will find the names of kings.
    Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
    And Babylon, many times demolished
    Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
    of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
    Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
    Did the masons go? Great Rome
    Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
    Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
    Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis
    The night the ocean engulfed it
    The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

    The young Alexander conquered India.
    Was he alone?
    Caesar beat the Gauls.
    Did he not have even a cook with him?

    Philip of Spain wept when his armada
    Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
    Frederick the Second won the Seven Year&amp;#x27;s War. Who
    Else won it?

    Every page a victory.
    Who cooked the feast for the victors?
    Every ten years a great man?
    Who paid the bill?

    So many reports.
    So many questions.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Spooky23</author><text>But someone leads. Look around you. Most leaders are really managers phoning it in.&lt;p&gt;But when the right person with the right resources at the right time is there, magic happens. All three legs of the stool have to be there.</text></comment>
<story><title>Monumental Record: the lives of the workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza</title><url>https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/monumental-record</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>guerrilla</author><text>&amp;gt; Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India&lt;p&gt;How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there&amp;#x27;s often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I&amp;#x27;m willing to go out on a limb and wager that&amp;#x27;s the way it always is actually. Everyone&amp;#x27;s a product of their environment and their times, standing on the shoulder of giants, workers and peasants alike.</text></item><item><author>gherkinnn</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m torn.&lt;p&gt;Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there.&lt;p&gt;And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It&amp;#x27;s been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It&amp;#x27;s all cliffs, Private Ryan, and Eisenhower. They put 150,000 men across the channel in a single day. And nobody seems to know about the how.&lt;p&gt;Original poem: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lyricstranslate.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-lesenden-arbeiters-lyrics.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;lyricstranslate.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-l...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Our Time on Persepolis, with a rather critical take on Alexander (the Great | of Macedon): &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;programmes&amp;#x2F;b0b4z075&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;programmes&amp;#x2F;b0b4z075&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;p&gt;13 Minutes to the Moon, a BBC production about the moon landing. A good amount of detail about the invisible work that went in to the spectacular feat: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;programmes&amp;#x2F;w13xttx2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&amp;#x2F;programmes&amp;#x2F;w13xttx2&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>MichaelMoser123</author><text>This reminds me of a poem by Berthold Brecht:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Questions From A Worker Who Reads

    Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
    In the books you will find the names of kings.
    Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?
    And Babylon, many times demolished
    Who raised it up so many times? In what houses
    of gold-glittering Lima did the builders live?
    Where, the evening that the Wall of China was finished
    Did the masons go? Great Rome
    Is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them? Over whom
    Did the Caesars triumph? Had Byzantium, much praised in song
    Only palaces for its inhabitans? Even in fabled Atlantis
    The night the ocean engulfed it
    The drowning still bawled for their slaves.

    The young Alexander conquered India.
    Was he alone?
    Caesar beat the Gauls.
    Did he not have even a cook with him?

    Philip of Spain wept when his armada
    Went down. Was he the only one to weep?
    Frederick the Second won the Seven Year&amp;#x27;s War. Who
    Else won it?

    Every page a victory.
    Who cooked the feast for the victors?
    Every ten years a great man?
    Who paid the bill?

    So many reports.
    So many questions.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>api</author><text>There are some great recent counterexamples to this. Here are two: when Steve Jobs took the helm of Apple in the early 2000s, and Elon Musk with reusable rockets and rebooting space in general.&lt;p&gt;We seem wired to rally around leaders to get things done. Most people seem to wait around to be told what to do. This makes modern people very uncomfortable (for some very rational reasons) to the point that we engage in denialism about it.&lt;p&gt;In ancient tribal societies with group sizes close to Dunbar&amp;#x27;s number, this probably worked out much better than it does now. People had direct relationships with the leader and could see clearly what was happening, and if a leader lost favor they had to face people directly. Sometimes the results were brutal.&lt;p&gt;In modern society we have systems so large with so many layers of social and economic abstraction that it&amp;#x27;s very easy for leaders to abuse their power and to hide that abuse for a long time. It&amp;#x27;s also very easy for leaders to lose sight of the &amp;quot;ground truth&amp;quot; and&amp;#x2F;or for the people to lose sight of what the leader is doing. I&amp;#x27;m sure sometimes leaders don&amp;#x27;t set out to abuse their power but kind of &amp;quot;back into it&amp;quot; for various reasons. It gets pretty dysfunctional but when you think about it it&amp;#x27;s kind of astounding that we are able to scale at all to societies this large given our species&amp;#x27; background.&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;p&gt;I also wonder if there&amp;#x27;s an ego protecting mechanism at work. When Elon Musk says he&amp;#x27;s going to build a reusable rocket, we can get behind him and work for him... but if the effort fails we can blame the whole thing on him. If we succeed the leader gets the credit, which is the part we hate, but if we fail the leader also gets the blame.</text></comment>