"When ordering lunch, the big executives are just as indecisive as the rest of us"
About this Quote
Power loves to cosplay as certainty, but put a CEO in front of a lunch menu and the mask slips. Feather’s line works because it punctures the most bankable myth of corporate hierarchy: that the people at the top are different in kind, wired for decisiveness, immune to the petty frictions that stall everyone else. He doesn’t attack executives for greed or malice; he chooses something almost insultingly small. That’s the point. Indecision over lunch is low-stakes, universal, and faintly comic, so it becomes an x-ray of how much “executive presence” is performance rather than essence.
The subtext isn’t “executives are dumb,” it’s “executives are human, and the system benefits when we forget that.” If leaders are just as likely to waffle over soup versus sandwich, their authority can’t be explained by superior clarity alone. It’s explained by incentives, institutions, and the cultural habit of granting competence to people with titles and tailored suits. Feather’s framing - “big executives” versus “the rest of us” - deliberately mirrors the way class and workplace status carve people into categories, then quietly dismantles that separation with one mundane scene.
Context matters: Feather wrote in an America obsessed with managerial efficiency, business hero worship, and the romance of the “decisive” captain of industry. His joke lands as a small democratic corrective. If the boardroom runs on the same hesitations as the cafeteria line, then maybe we should interrogate which decisions really require genius - and which merely require permission.
The subtext isn’t “executives are dumb,” it’s “executives are human, and the system benefits when we forget that.” If leaders are just as likely to waffle over soup versus sandwich, their authority can’t be explained by superior clarity alone. It’s explained by incentives, institutions, and the cultural habit of granting competence to people with titles and tailored suits. Feather’s framing - “big executives” versus “the rest of us” - deliberately mirrors the way class and workplace status carve people into categories, then quietly dismantles that separation with one mundane scene.
Context matters: Feather wrote in an America obsessed with managerial efficiency, business hero worship, and the romance of the “decisive” captain of industry. His joke lands as a small democratic corrective. If the boardroom runs on the same hesitations as the cafeteria line, then maybe we should interrogate which decisions really require genius - and which merely require permission.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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