Leadership development resembles a Hollywood franchise—a $150 billion global industry where business schools, consultancies, and coaching firms jostle like film studios, hyping the next Blockbuster. The scripts change little: heroes pledge radical transformation, sequels repackage the same buzzwords, and audiences leave excited, yet fundamentally unchanged.

The cast is as familiar as a family comedy. On one side a controlling Father-in-Law: rational, obsessed with metrics, steeped in the MBA catechism of shareholder primacy and strategic analysis. He represents the “head” paradigm of leadership—logical, disciplined, technocratic. His mantra: optimize performance, deliver shareholder value. Opposite him the Therapeutic In-Laws, champions of “emotional intelligence,” authenticity, and psychological safety—the “heart” paradigm. Expressive, empathic, and psycho-spiritual, their credo is: empower, include, feel.

Like in Meet the Fockers, the comedy unfolds as a clash between Freud’s Superego and Id. Jack Byrnes, the patriarch, turns love into surveillance and marriage into a loyalty test; Bernie Focker, his free-spirited counterpart, collapses everything into instinct, play, and instant gratification. The young couple—like modern HR—inherit a fragile truce: empathy workshops grafted onto performance dashboards, mindfulness nestled next to quarterly KPIs, and “purpose” sold as the latest growth hack. Everyone smiles for the wedding photo.

But beneath the laughter is a quiet tragedy. Leadership today trains us to be Greg Focker: the awkward Ego caught between repression and indulgence, survival and appeasement. Greg “wins” acceptance, but only by playing the script. He does not transform the parental paradigms—he is normalised by them. Like Greg, leaders wobble between control and coaching, producing ever more neurotic competency frameworks.

Here, Plato still matters. In the Symposium, agape is not mere preference or care, but restless striving toward the Good. Without telos, ethics collapses into psychologism or communitarianism. The leadership industry, likewise, teaches managers to control or soothe—but fails to reorder power toward justice or responsibility for the flourishing of future generations.

Wisdom—the missing protagonist—would crash the wedding. She would ask: What covenant truly binds us? What structures embody the Good? In the marriage of modern society, wisdom is guardianship: separating power from authority, transforming eros without domination, affirming care without emotivism. It requires dialectical integration of justice and love into a compass oriented by character.

Yet Hollywood, like the leadership industry, does not fund moral depth; it peddles entertainment. So the franchise grinds on, replaying the same saga: head versus heart, duty versus passion, while our social contracts and organizations collapse into sitcom—endlessly rehearsing reconciliation in the name of box office returns.

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