There
have been times, I confess, when I vainly feared that I was the only person who
saw it - the misunderstanding, misappropriation and misapplication of power -
but then reassurance and a vestigial hope has been granted by such as a letter
to a popular magazine or a posting on a blog.
In
Back Chat (Good
Weekend letters to the editor, 27 October 2018), Jane Hosking of Tinonee,
NSW wrote:
'Someone
has finally called out what I call the "MBA curse"… the main problem
in the working world today. People are employed solely because they have
management training, based on an erroneous belief that if you are a trained
manager, you can manage anything.'
Whilst
on avc.com (13 February 2012), a guest post by well-known 'tech' blogger Joel
Spolsky (edited for some brevity) observed:
'Most
management is of the “command and control” variety. The CEO makes a decision,
and tells his lieutenants. They convey this important decision to the teams,
who execute on the CEO’s decision. It’s top-down management. All authority and
power and decisions flow from the top. How could it work any other way? Turns
out, it’s positively de-motivating to work for a company where your job is
just to shut up and take orders. Thus, the upside-down pyramid. Stop thinking
of the management team at the top of the organization. The “management team”
isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call
them administration instead
of management,
which will keep them from getting too big for their britches.
Administrators
aren’t supposed to make the hard decisions. They don’t know enough.
Administrators exist to move the furniture around so that the people at the top
of the tree can make the hard decisions. You don’t build a [business] with one
big gigantic brain on the top, and a bunch of lesser brains obeying orders down
below. You try to get everyone to have a gigantic brain in their area, and you
provide a minimum amount of administrative support to keep them humming along. Attempting
to see management as the ultimate decision makers demotivates the smart people
in the organization who, without the authority to do what they know is
right, will grow frustrated and leave. And if this happens, you won’t notice
it, but you’ll be left with a bunch of yes-men, who don’t particularly care (or
know) how things should work, and the company will only have one brain - the
CEO’s.
It
is not, as it turns out, necessary to be a micromanaging psychopath with
narcissistic personality disorder (or even to pretend to be one) if you just
hire smart people and give them real authority. That doesn’t mean lowering your
standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart
people who get things done - and then getting the hell out of the way.'
What's
most strange about both the above quoted 'revelations' is that we see them as
such - new insights upon perplexing dilemmas - when in truth the knowledge has
been with us for centuries if we only looked. Dreams of singular glory have
repeatedly blinded many among us to the wisdom of our forebears.
From
the east, verse sixty-six of the Tao Te
Ching (trans. Jonathan Star), the foundation text of Daoist philosophy reads:
'Why
do the hundred rivers
turn
and rush toward the sea?
Because
it naturally stays below them
He
who wishes to rule over the people
must
speak as if below them
He
who wishes to lead the people
must
walk as if behind them
So
the Sage rules over the people
but
he does not weigh them down
He
leads the people
but
does not block their way
The
Sage stays low
so
the world never tires of exalting him
He
remains a servant
so
the world never tires of making him its king'
And
from the west, among the opening stanzas of Beowulf
(trans. Seamus Heaney), one of the foundation works of poetry in English,
we find:
'Beow's
name was known through the north.
And
a young prince must be prudent like that,
giving
freely while his father lives
so
that afterwards in age when fighting starts
steadfast
companions will stand by him
and
hold the line. Behaviour that's admired
is
the path to power among people everywhere.'
Age-old
advice indeed, yet here I am, certainly with no delusions of new-found wisdom or
claims of original insight but none-the-less a sense of obligation, to raise popular
awareness once more to the truth as to wherein our power actually lies.
Because
in reality, as all these examples illuminate, if anything has more potential
than power it is empowerment. Power over others requires the investment of energy
to protect that power, however the empowering of others creates a unified body
of equally enabled contributors who in combination have a strength far greater
than any individual and which is not threatened by usurpation - all its energy
investment is productive and not wasted upon protective measures.
But we're never going to see broadscale
realisation of this simple truth, or better still, action to adopt its message
as a standard modus, unless we start to teach it to our young from the earliest
possible opportunity. As we all know, there is no better lesson than actual
practice. It is pointless within an MBA course to preach bottom-up management
within a top-down educational model. And tertiary level institutions are way
too late to be commencing such an endeavour anyway. This is an undertaking that
needs to be addressed from the first day of schooling.
However our current education model was
'Designed during the Industrial Revolution', as has been frequently observed in
the past and restated most recently in Sharon Bradley's article Lessons in Learning (Good Weekend, 3 November 2018), 'It
smacks of factory-process management: ringing bells tell students when to clock
on and off and mark the times at which they must move from one stage of their
manufacture to the next - 45 minutes of Algebra 1 in this room, 45 minutes of
William Blake in that one; the periodic table over here; logarithms over there.
Even the batch size, the class itself is determined not by the most obvious
thing that a group of students might have in common, their ability, but by
their own dates of manufacture - their birthdays … After 13 years of formal
education, the batch has reached the end of the assembly line and, regardless
of whether it has been well fabricated or not, is despatched into the outside
world.'
Little wonder then that 'Australia's academic
performance has gone into sharp decline.' She adds, 'Disengagement lies at the
heart of the rot' with students who 'feel like a cog in a machine' reporting 'a
poor sense of autonomy'. This is most certainly not empowerment. This is not
how best we can prepare our young to be engaged and enthusiastic contributors
to, and members of, a dynamic, supportive and genuinely powerful and empowered society
and culture.
Thankfully, moves are afoot to at least
attempt the beginnings of change within our schools but change of this sort,
within a bureaucracy of such scale, is notoriously glacial. This is not however
a task which should be left to our schools alone. This is a global challenge -
but which can and should be tackled at every scale and at every opportunity. It
is the undertaking for which the phrase 'think global, act local' may best have
been coined.
Throughout history, the most powerful
developments in human achievement and potential have been those that empowered
the most people. Power over others, conquest, has consistently resulted in
conflict; Empowering of others repeatedly engenders progress, leading to
prosperity. If we don't, as a species, learn and learn quickly to work
collaboratively and cooperatively - a globally unified and empowered force
seeking betterment for all - we are doomed through our own vainglorious pursuits
and deliberate ignorance to languish and flounder, taking down with us a broad
diversity of dynamic environments and a veritable wealth of living species
alongside whom we evolved over millennia past.
We need to decide now whether what we truly
desire is the emptiness of power or the extraordinary richness of empowerment because,
as Yuval Noah Harari concludes in Sapiens:
A Brief History of Humankind 'We have advanced from canoes to galleys to
steamships to space shuttles - but nobody knows where we're going. We are more
powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with that all
power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made
gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no
one. We are constantly wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding
ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never
finding satisfaction.
Is there anything more dangerous than
dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?'
Submission for New Philosopher Writers' Award XXI: Power
