Success Quote by John F. Lehman, Jr.

“Power corrupts” is the kind of moral proverb people deploy to sound vigilant while staying safely outside the blast radius of real decision-making. Lehman’s tag-on - “Absolute power is kind of neat” - punctures that self-congratulating posture with a businessman’s dry candor. The word “neat” does the heavy lifting: casual, almost adolescent, it shrinks the grand ethical warning into something like a guilty pleasure. That tonal mismatch is the point. He’s not arguing that power doesn’t corrupt; he’s admitting why the corrupting offer is so hard to refuse.

The intent reads as a wink at the audience who already knows how institutions actually run: people say they fear concentrated authority, but they fantasize about its efficiencies. Absolute power means no meetings, no compromise, no board politics, no voters, no regulators - just clean lines between desire and outcome. That’s “neat” in the way a frictionless app is neat: elegant, fast, and quietly dehumanizing.

Subtext: our public ethics are often PR, while our private incentives are about control. Coming from a businessman, it lands as a critique of managerial culture that worships “decisiveness” and treats accountability as drag. Contextually, it echoes Lord Acton’s warning only to show its modern afterlife: the danger isn’t that we don’t know power corrupts; it’s that we keep finding reasons to enjoy the corruption’s conveniences.