In the 2 1/2 years since the scandal broke, his critics have argued that even if didn't know about the traffic scheme, he created an atmosphere in which his underlings believed such tactics were acceptable.
This year has already thrown up a brace of surprisingly dystopian blockbusters in The Hunger Games (in which impoverished underlings fight for their lives on primetime TV) and The Dark Knight Rises (in which the villain foments a people's uprising in Gotham City).
Nasr seems to forget that there is a pecking order in government bureaucracies regarding who reports to whom and the extent to which an underling's advice is taken by policy makers.
In his verdict Thursday, Judge Seo Kyung-hwan referred to a corporate culture at Hanwha in which Mr. Kim's underlings viewed him as a "God-like figure" and treated him with "unconditional loyalty".
In the absence of vengeful novels about their office behaviour, we cannot be certain that Anna Wintour's abrasive treatment of underlings, which she prefers to pass off as "decisiveness" in kittenish television interviews, would be such as to make her significantly more unsuccessful in any future diplomatic work than her male predecessors and competitors.
She always says, "Please," "Thank you," and never takes the last French fry, even when she's in a room full of her underlings (which is every room).
Yet he did take time to make decisions about music, personally approving — and, more often, disapproving — the suggestions of underlings about which performers should be recorded.
In doing so he broke a sacred Bell Labs rule—"absolutely never to compete with underlings"—for which he was never forgiven.The men of Bell Labs (the scientists were overwhelmingly male) are brought to life by Jon Gertner in "The Idea Factory", his wonderful history of the most influential corporate-research lab the world has seen.
According to legend, the stuffed bird had become so shopworn (or foul-smelling) by the mid-eighteenth century that someone at the Ashmolean tossed it onto a bonfire, at which point a visionary underling snatched the head and leg from the blaze.
The F.B.I. files make an appearance as well, but much of their heat — like a phony letter about Jane and a Black Panther leading a chant of "We will kill Richard Nixon," which J. Edgar Hoover authorized an underling to send to Daily Variety — has already been generated.
