Reading your thoughtful reply - I twigged to your reference to trucking - it occurs to me that my reaction to the original piece might be a bit parochial. In the business I work in, a lot of firms function on what one trade writer recently called 'The Jesus Model', in which someone very internally driven and talented tries to leverage his or her personal asset by building a company around it. In this setting, you're not trying to institutionalize values or processes; you're actually trying to create a cult of personality, because that's precisely and conditionally what your customer is paying for.

Faced with that challenge, you can understand why an entrepreneur might get a bit wistful at the idea of dictatorship...