The Pathology of Immature Power in the Business World

In today's business reality, where uncertainty and the need for continuous evolution define the course of organisations, the quality of leadership plays a crucial role. The ability to lead does not automatically arise from the title one holds, nor from the formal authority one is granted. Instead, it is intrinsically linked to maturity, self-awareness, and a commitment to the development of the whole.

However, practical experience reveals a timeless phenomenon: the rise of individuals to positions of responsibility who lack the fundamental characteristics of true leadership. When power falls into the wrong hands, minor duties are transformed into opportunities for authoritarian displays. Limited successes are projected as monumental achievements. Insecurity is masked by excessive control and the belittlement of others.

Common manifestations of this pathology include excessive micromanagement, blame shifting, credit stealing, and the obstruction of the development of capable individuals. To these must be added practices such as deliberately avoiding responses to critical messages, covert detachment from problems, and the use of manipulative techniques aimed at preserving personal control at the expense of collective progress. Excessive controlling management creates an atmosphere of mistrust and stifles autonomy. Blame shifting corrodes the sense of justice. Credit stealing undermines motivation and trust. Systematically blocking talented individuals entrenches organisational stagnation.

The academic literature has extensively analysed these phenomena. According to the theory of Transformational Leadership (Bass & Avolio, 1994), authentic leaders do not seek control, but rather inspire vision and empower others. Edgar Schein (2010) emphasises that culture is the foundation upon which an organisation is either built or collapses. In environments where superficiality and subservience are rewarded, the rise of mediocrity becomes inevitable, while innovation is sidelined. Amy Edmondson (2018) adds that psychological safety is a fundamental prerequisite for team learning and organisational development, a prerequisite undermined by behaviours of excessive control and personal promotion.

Immature exercise of power has profound consequences on the internal dynamics of organisations. It creates toxic cultures, weakens employee motivation, and obstructs the maintenance of innovation and agility. There is perhaps no better reminder that power, when not accompanied by substance and humility, becomes a caricature of itself.

In such environments, the gap between perceived and actual value is deafening. And there, as aptly captured by Greek folk wisdom:

"The fly grew an ass and shat on the whole world."

This saying, harsh yet disarmingly accurate, reveals the essence of arrogance that develops when smallness attempts to masquerade as greatness.

The need to redefine leadership is urgent. An organisation that invests in authentic leadership, humility, and service to the collective good fortifies itself against the decay brought by superficiality and insecurity. The true strength of a leader, and by extension of an organisation, is not judged by the noise it produces, but by the value it creates and the longevity it secures.

References

1. Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1994). Improving Organisational Effectiveness through Transformational Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

2. Einarsen, S., Aasland, M. S., & Skogstad, A. (2007). Destructive leadership behaviour: A definition and conceptual model. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 207–216.

3. Greenleaf, R. K. (1977). Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. New York: Paulist Press.

4. Schein, E. H. (2010). Organisational Culture and Leadership (4th ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

5. Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organisation: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Light as an Information Carrier: Why Photonic Technology Is the Future of Computational Power

The modern technological landscape is defined by an ever-increasing and accelerating demand for greater computational power. Applications such as artificial intelligence, big data processing, physical simulations, and autonomous computing infrastructures require systems capable of performing complex operations with speed, precision, and high energy efficiency. The historical trajectory of microprocessor advancement relied on the continued miniaturisation of transistors and the growth of circuit integration, in line with the so-called Moore’s Law. However, over the past two decades, the effectiveness of this classical strategy has declined, constrained by the fundamental limits of matter, thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics.

 Photonic technology, the use of light for information transmission and processing, emerges within this context as a fundamentally different computational paradigm. Electronics are based on the motion of charged particles through conductive materials and are therefore subject to resistance-related losses, heat generation, and temporal delays due to capacitive and inductive effects. In contrast, photons—being massless and electrically neutral particles—interact only minimally with the medium through which they propagate. This enables the nearly lossless and ultrafast transmission of information at the speed of light, provided the optical medium is appropriately designed.

The application of photonics in computational architecture offers fundamental advantages. Information can be transmitted with minimal energy consumption and virtually no heat production. Furthermore, the inherent property of light to support multiple wavelengths within a single optical channel—known as wavelength division multiplexing—allows for massive parallel information transfer, which is infeasible at similar densities in electronics. Similarly, photonic systems enable the simultaneous propagation and manipulation of multiple signals without interference, as distinct wavelengths can remain isolated within the same physical path.

A practical photonic computing system requires a complete architecture: highly stable light sources, modulators to encode digital information into optical parameters such as intensity, phase, or polarisation, waveguides to direct the light, switching elements and filters for targeted processing, and detectors for final signal reading. Crucial components like microring resonators allow for the dynamic selection of specific frequencies, functioning as tunable filters or even elementary memory cells under certain conditions of stability and reversibility.

Of particular interest is the ability to execute mathematical operations through the physical propagation of light across structures that act as optical analogues of linear operators. For instance, matrix multiplications can be implemented as transformations of phase and amplitude in waveguide lattices or through interferometric devices. This capability renders photonic systems exceptionally efficient in domains such as neural network training and inference, which are dominated by repetitive large-scale linear operations. Whereas a conventional processor must sequentially carry out memory retrieval, multiplication, and accumulation, a photonic system can achieve the same transformation in a single pass of light through the optical structure.

Despite the documented advantages, the realisation of a fully photonic computer still faces practical and theoretical challenges. While light is an exceptional medium for transmission and modulation, it does not inherently provide mechanisms for persistent storage or state retention equivalent to those in electronic systems. Developing stable optical memory elements, enabling reversible and rewritable storage, and addressing the high thermal and mechanical sensitivity of nano photonic components remain open areas of research. Additionally, the interaction of light with matter requires materials with high refractive indices and low propagation losses, the fabrication of which at nanoscale dimensions is technologically demanding.

Advancements in photonic circuit design have led to solutions compatible with silicon-based manufacturing technologies, making large-scale implementation more realistic. At the same time, progress in non-linear optics and higher-order photonic effects enhances the prospects of creating logic-capable photonic components, potentially replacing classical gates with optical equivalents. Hybrid architectures—combining electronic control and storage with photonic transmission and processing—currently appear to be the most feasible near-term solution.

In summary, photonic computing is not a futuristic promise but a technological evolution grounded in physical and engineering reality. The ability to sustain or even accelerate computational power without increasing energy consumption is crucial for the long-term viability of digital infrastructure, especially in the context of energy scarcity and sustainability imperatives. Light, through its intrinsic physical properties, provides a medium that merges speed, efficiency, parallelism, and reliability. If electronics were the vehicle of 20th-century information systems, photonics is poised to become the foundational mechanism of the 21st. Not as an alternative, but as its natural and necessary progression.

References

1. Miller, D. A. B. (2017). Attojoule Optoelectronics for Low-Energy Information Processing and Communications. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 35(3), 346–396

2. Shastri, B. J., Tait, A. N., Ferreira de Lima, T., Pernice, W. H. P., Bhaskaran, H., Wright, C. D., & Prucnal, P. R. (2021). Photonics for artificial intelligence and neuromorphic computing. Nature Photonics, 15(2), 102–114.

3. Jalali, B., & Fathpour, S. (2006). Silicon photonics. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 24(12), 4600–4615.

4. Sun, C., Wade, M. T., Lee, Y., Orcutt, J. S., Alloatti, L., Georgas, M. S., ... & Stojanović, V. (2015). Single-chip microprocessor that communicates directly using light. Nature, 528(7583), 534–538.

5. Thomson, D., Zilkie, A., Bowers, J. E., Komljenovic, T., Reed, G. T., Vivien, L., ... & Marris-Morini, D. (2016). Roadmap on silicon photonics. Journal of Optics, 18(7), 073003.

6. Bogaerts, W., & Chrostowski, L. (2018). Silicon photonics circuit design: Methods, tools and challenges. Laser & Photonics Reviews, 12(4), 1700237.

7. Notaros, J., Yaacobi, A., Timurdogan, E., & Watts, M. R. (2021). Programmable photonic circuits. Nature, 591(7849), 70–71.

The Cosmos Within

 

translation of "το σύμπαν εντός"

 

Inside me, there is silence
not peace, but open violence.
There once were voices in the air,
now only shadows echo there.

I only breathe, I only stare
into a void that's always there.
It spreads inside, devours me whole,
and slowly swallows all I call soul.

It is a cold and heavy rain,
thoughts falling soft in quiet pain.
A mute, relentless shade of night
that broke me down and dimmed my light.

And somewhere deep within the hush,
a breath still stirs beneath the crush
as if the night has yet to pray
its deepest prayer… and slip away.

 from the collection
"The Natural Thereafter"
titled "The Cosmos Within"

 

(*) The poem is an interpretation of the inner universe.
In a personified cosmos, where the observer stands as the point of origin, the observable universe becomes the Hermetic “as without,” one direction of the axis—while the other is “so within”: all that resides inside.