Are Leaders Today Really Leaders?

I thought this was funny, so I’m asking your opinion. As blogged by ExecuNet on LinkedIn, Lauryn Franzoni, ExecuNet vice-president and executive director of membership, recently attended the World Business Forum in New York City where she had the pleasure of interviewing Nando Parrado about his experiences as a plane crash survivor and entrepreneur. I thought that Nando’s story was inspirational and worth sharing with you.

After you view the video, read this comment from ExecuNet member Matt Jackson:

Jackson posted this:

A touching and pointless story. Corporate executives should look at Parrado and the Chilean survivors as the EXACT OPPOSITE of everything they represent. A bunch of pampered and pretentous B-school pr**ks sitting in offices trying to glom onto any example of courage and leadership because they have neither. What "commitment" does the audience have? Commitment to make money at any cost? Commitment to work 15 hour days and suffer all manner of abuses and beurocratic indiference in the constant fear that their livlihood will be taken away on some vice presidents whim?

What's the message here? Through someone else's staggering neglect and incompetance your life could become a total disaster? That to survive you will need to eat your fellows? That you have no choice but to put up with a bunch of crap or die?

Every corporate executive fancies himself to be a modern reincarnation of Ernest Shackleton, Neil Armstrong or Douglas MacArthur or... whoever. The fact that they typically have NONE of the qualities of great people who accomplish great things is the reason most of them are sitting in an office somewhere.

So: what do you think about leadership today? Gutsy, or gutless?