Is your boss a dictator? Are you?

“Dictator” seems the wrong word. It is reserved for harsher milieus than the corporate. Names like Hitler, Stalin and Kim spring to mind. Company executives, at worst, commit “power harassment” — not quite the same thing, we’re inclined to think.

Actually very much the same, says the business magazine President this month. The difference is in degree rather than kind. Power is a drug to the powerful, a scourge to the powerless — more and more so as the gap widens between the two, as it is widening in Japan.