WHEN THE LADDER IS LEANING ON

THE WRONG WALL

What a generation's frustration is actually telling us — and what it gets wrong about the remedy

One of my adult children is 25. They have a marketing degree, work hard, and have had three proper jobs since finishing their studies. They left two because the stated values and the actual behaviour were so far apart that staying felt like a slow erosion of something they needed to keep. The third fired them on the spot for telling a manager that something he said was not accurate. He had also taken credit for their work.

A few weeks after that they said to me: "Climbing the ladder when it's leaning against the wrong wall has taken a big toll on me."

I have been thinking about that sentence ever since. It is the argument of the book I have spent the last year writing, stated more precisely than I managed anywhere in the book itself.

The ladder is not the problem. The wall is.

I am 72. I have watched systems behave across five decades and more industries than most people attempt in a lifetime. To anyone that age reading this: your frustration is structurally correct.

The 2008 financial crisis showed in the clearest terms what happens when consequence is removed from the people making the decisions. Banks made loans they knew were unsound. The people who packaged and sold them were insulated from the outcome when they failed. The losses were absorbed by institutions, governments, and taxpayers — and ultimately by a generation entering the workforce, taking on debt, or trying to buy a first home at exactly the moment the floor disappeared.

The people responsible kept their jobs. Several were promoted. The system was preserved, at enormous public cost, largely intact.

Since then: asset prices have risen in ways that make home ownership unreachable for people doing everything they were told to do. The cost of credentials has increased while the return on those credentials has declined. The people managing these systems are predominantly drawn from a generation that entered when conditions were different and has little personal experience of what those conditions now feel like from the inside.

The diagnosis is correct. The ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

The conclusion many people are drawing is that the system itself — market capitalism, private ownership, the structures of commercial life — is the problem. That more central coordination, more redistribution, more protection from market outcomes would produce better results.

I understand why that feels logical. If the system is producing bad outcomes, replacing it seems reasonable.

But the failures my child experienced — a manager who took credit for their work, workplaces where accountability was absent, being fired for saying something accurate — are not failures of capitalism. They are failures of adulthood. They are what happens when the people in authority are not required to carry the full consequence of their decisions.

Centralised systems don't fix that. They make it worse.

Run the same test on any system that concentrates authority and removes market consequence — where the people making decisions are further from the outcomes, where failure is absorbed by the collective rather than by the individual responsible. What you find, reliably, is the same failure at larger scale.

The manager who took credit was not doing it because markets exist. He was doing it because he was not accountable for it. Make the system larger and more centralised and you do not reduce the number of people like him. You increase their insulation from consequence.

Both systems fail the same way: when adults leave the room. When consequence is removed from the people making the decisions. When stewardship is replaced by extraction.

The answer is not a different system. It is insisting that this one operates as it was supposed to — with real consequence, real accountability, and real adults in the positions that require them.

My child's first three workplaces had lost something structural. The rules existed. The values were posted somewhere. But the behaviour of the people with authority bore no relationship to those values because nobody was requiring it to.

A functioning system — what I call Grown-Up Capitalism — is not a system without ambition or competition or the possibility of failure. It is one where the person making the call carries the outcome. Where accountability has a name attached to it, not a department. Where honest feedback travels upward and the person delivering bad news is not punished for doing so.

They found a fourth job. They are building something now in an organisation run by people who are close to the work and accountable for their decisions. That did not happen by accident. Someone built it deliberately.

That is what is possible. What the generation currently concluding that the system has failed them should be demanding is not a different system but this one operating as it was supposed to — honest enough to let consequence land where it belongs, on the people making the decisions, not on the people working below them in good faith.

The ladder is not the problem. Build the right wall.

J. Bruce Eickelman is the author of The Return to Grown-Up Capitalism, forthcoming. For information about 12X Decision Architecture, visit 12xclarity.com.