Posts from — January 2009

Sociopaths see the financial collapse as a way to despotism, with them on top. It’s an opportunity for Hidden High Potentials with moral compasses, too. Some notes from a colleague on what’s going to happen and how long it may last.

You gotta love anyone who can talk about “past inflationary collapses” and mean the 14th century. He thinks it’s the end of a cycle that started with the last big collapse c. 1872.
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strategy+business, the Booz Hamilton rag, has some interesting folks listing their top picks for 2008 biz books. The list is interesting because the range of people picking them.

Still, I’d rather hear from people I think are interesting. So, what did you read last year that you recommend? Post your list in the comments and I’ll do an interview with you about your list for the next occasional podcast.

Since I burned through a startup, started my own, and had a daughter turn 1 during 2008, I find upon review that I didn’t read any new books during the year. Lots of old ones, of course, but nothing new that springs to mind.

So what’s your recommended reading from 2008?

Did the American Evangelical megachurch adopt the unchecked executive model because it wanted to emulate Disney World and its fantasy of American small town life? It’s a charge that’s worth looking at because it can shed some light on this issue. I’m going to be unabashedly churchy in this, so comment if you need a translation of the Evangelical jargon.

In my quest to understand why American Evangelicals have rejected the balancing of powers that the Reformation developed for the Strong Executive model (which we can even call the “Infallible Pope model”, and will when we look at Lord Acton’s lectures), I have returned to some books on Christianity and post-modernism written during the last decade by some friends of friends who teach at Evangelical-associated universities.

David Wells was a Distinguished Professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and an ordained as a Congregational minister. He can be expected to argue for stronger theology among Evangelicals in his books. Or even any theology at all: many Evangelicals scoff at the need for “all that theology stuff”, which in his mind explains a lot.

In his Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World, Wells discusses how the megachurch is a response to the new religious “consumer”. Religions of all types in America have seen massive amounts of “switching”, people who used to call themselves adherents to a particular faith but now don’t. Sometimes this is to another faith — and I’ll lump “atheist” in this — but it is increasingly to “non-aligned”. The switching isn’t just at Christian churches: in 2001, 33% became Buddhists while 23% left it.

[These numbers come from CUNY's 2001 The American Religious Identification Survey and the Pew Forum's 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. We'll cover this in a later post.]

Wells argues that this has driven Evangelical churches to be increasingly focused on how the newcomer feels when coming to the church. He believes:
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Burnham and Root’s Reliance Building in Chicago, 1894

Maybe it’s obvious, but humans built organizations because they helped them achieve things. Networks are nice, and very useful, but the Organization (which is a subtype of network) works in more specific ways.

Daniel H. Burnham, the famous Chicago architect, felt something of this. Donald L. Miller, in City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (1996), notes that Burnham and Root started building a large organization, unlike most architectural firms before it in the city.

“From the hour that the ground for a new building is put at his disposal the work of construction must go on at the highest rate of speed,” sid Montgomery Schuyler fo the time pressures on Chicago architects. “And so the successful practitioner of architecture in Chicago is primarily an administrator.” And that is what Daniel Burnham became. “My idea is to work up a big business,” Burnham told Louis Sullivan when they first met, “to handle big things, deal with big business men and to build up a big organization, for you can’t handle big things unless you have an organization. Peter Wight would later describe his former draftsman as “one of the greatest businessmen of all time. . . . As an organizer and promoter he stands with the commercial and financial giants of the day.”

Even as he worked on the Montauk project, [probably the first modern high-rise office building,] Burnham was putting together the largest, most professionally run architectural practice in the city, with an extensive research library and a team of draftsmen and consulting engineers, a growing practice he housed in the top story of the Montauk. “He was the dictator,” an associate captured him in his prime, “who organized the work of various mechanical and technical experts who contributed to the making of tall buildings.”

[pp. 325-6; ellipsis in original]

It’s interesting because Burnham is both part of his time, when organizations were growing beyond their Level 3 state to something larger, and yet also showing something of a general truth.
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With all my thinking about democracy and its underpinnings, it totally slipped my mind that the 60th Republic Day was approaching. It is worth celebrating any democracy’s robust survival. This Republic Day is especially important, following as it does terrorist attacks of last November.

India, like its friend the United States, has many problems. Fortunately, many of the worst problems have better chance of being addressed in a robust democracy. India has a long history of loving freedom, of course. 1,900 years ago Arrian wrote:
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The GO Society has revamped its website. It looks great, and they’ve put up some great new materials.

The Wilfred Brown management films, Exploration in Management, is now available in a new format (and a new link). I’ve excerpted from these before and think that they are probably the clearest way to understand Brown’s particular point of view. They also give a very clear overview of how Work Levels work at a largish factory.

I’m not sure that’s a new URL, but the underlying technology has changed.

Prabhu Guptara points today to a series of video speeches from Vishal Mangalwadi. He says that although

I disagree with a lot of what Dr Mangalwadi says. But what matters is neither my agreements, nor my disagreements. What matters is that, in his very winsome way, he makes you think!

The most useful thing he provides in these videos is easily-understood and very valuable correctives to many popular illusions about democracy in the USA.

The talks are a pretty good description of the basic trust that is necessary for Western economies to work. Since Elliott Jaques and Wilfred Brown were interested in promoting trust through their structural changes in organizations, these are relevant to our thinking here.
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Here’s a repost from 2006 that didn’t make it over. It describes a set of studies that so disturb the basic religion of MBA that it required replication across the world to get published. With minor revisions.

American business rewards competitiveness.

That may seem like a know-nothing statement. Markets reward people with the best product. Most people in America believe that markets are a place of true competition. Conservatives believe that they should be pure competition, with little or no restraints. So it shouldn’t be surprising that American business loves competitors.

So regardless of your political orientation, you probably think that this is a good thing.

The problem is that business isn’t a competition. It’s about making profit.
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The Rev. Dr. John Morgan is the head pastor of a growing independent Evangelical church in New Mexico that uses the mega-church model. Morgan wrote a chapter in the GO Society book (disclosure: I edited that piece) that does a good job describing his efforts and how Work Levels play out in independent churches.

In these churches, the local congregation is the only authority over the pastor. They may belong to a loose association (less organized even than Baptist associations) of similar congregations but do not have a larger hierarchy. His church is based on the Congregational model, where the entire membership votes on major issues. (Or at least it used to be: I can’t imagine how this works in a church above 800 or so.)
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Schütz, John Howard. 2007 [1975]. Paul and the Anatomy of Apostolic Authority (New Testament Library). Louisville: Westminster John Knox. Pp. xxvi+307 (paper). ISBN 0664228127.

I heard about this in Wayne A. Meeks (1983), The First Urban Christians: The Social Life of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University Press), where Meeks notes:

John Shütz, in his important monograph on Paul’s authority, shows that authority is “the interpretation of power.” The person in authority focuses and directs the power of those who recognize this authority, not under force, but by their acknowledgement that his directives are “right”. Authority is thus “a quality of communication,” which entails the belief that the “rightness” of the communication could be demonstrated if need be. [pp. 122]

Review of Shütz’s Paul is available from the Review of Biblical Literature. It’s interesting to think that Shütz’s book has not been taken up. I’m wondering if it supplies any decent ideas to how power works. (Thinking that it will.) It’s available at the Christopher Center Library, so I’ll probably find out.

I’ve mentioned the idea that XLF must lose at least 80% of its value from peak for the US economy to have bottomed out. Yesterday, perhaps as a house-warming gift to Pres. Obama or a moving present to Pres. Bush, the markets tanked and XLF fell to its all-time low of essentially 8. Since it peaked at almost 32, that’s close to 20% of its value.

Two ways to look at this:

1. XLF has hit 20% and bottomed out. We’re in the recovery!
2. XLF didn’t actually hit 20% and should really be closer to 5 before a recovery starts. We have a long way to go.

I can’t say which is true but note that the UK has scared the financial world with this week’s revelations. There are many more skeletons left to be found. It’s like Belle Gunness’s yard out there.

My guess, which is entirely speculation and should not be treated as anything but that, is that XLF won’t have bottomed out until at least March, perhaps May. A bottom closer to 10% of peak seems more reasonable, given what was wrong in the financial sector.

This means that you have only a limited amount of time to revamp your career for the recovery. Time to get started if you haven’t already!

You can’t see it until you see it. And once you see it, you can’t not see it!

Last fall, Dr. Warren Kinston wrote a note on Democracy at the request of some of the dissident leaders in Thailand, where he has a home and spends about a quarter of his year. This is a rough draft, but he has allowed me to post it here for our benefit: Democracy and its Difficulties by Warren Kinston (draft)
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Today Mr. Obama was sworn in as the President of the United States of America. It’s a rough time by anyone’s measure. Tt’s going to be an even harder job than it is usually (and it’s usually a tough roe to hoe). It’s a historic point in American history that Robert Kennedy got right on: forty years on and here we are.

There are a lot of people who have always felt disenfranchised and many surviving who really were, who feel a lot of pride today.

May God grant you wisdom, Mr. President.

Michael Bates is a sometimes commenter here, a software developer, ex-candidate for office, radio personality, blogger, amigo and columnist for the Urban Tulsa Weekly. And he’s being sued for libel, along with the weekly and its owner, by the Tulsa’s daily newspaper, Tulsa World.

Again, he’s being sued for libel by a newspaper. As someone has said, on the face of it that sounds a bit like “Man Bites Dog”.

He’s garnering national exposure: Slate has started covering the issue.

Bates has a series of links about the lawsuit, including links to the original article. I am neither qualified nor knowledgeable enough to speak to the merits of the case, so I won’t.

He’s been threatened with a lawsuit by Tulsa World before over linking to and/or quoting from their online presence in his blog.

Anyway, best of luck to him in his defense.

It was Wilfred Brown’s understanding of power and authority that made me consider again one of the things that I find most frightening about current trends in American Protestantism.

American religious life differs in many ways from that in other Western countries. For one, while attendance is in decline, it’s not nearly as precipitous as in Europe. Religion still matters, which is why we have a strong political movement based in conservative Protestantism.

My concern is that the previous tradition of Democratic Religion has been replaced by the Great Man. It’s what Americans have come to want in corporate leadership, even though Great Man rarely works. The Great Man is troubling because religious life has always been important to America in helping to define its core democratic beliefs as the local congregations were important associations. While other associations exist, they have less community to them; that is, the associations work less like an extended family in caring for their members.
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Wilfred Brown’s structures for a decent work organization led to the speculations that I’m making this week. However, reading him again over the last two days, I’m not sure that these points are actually in his work. They are perhaps my own interpretations being read in.

Brown believed in Workplace Democracy. This wasn’t the simplistic ideas of others that you have heard before, because Brown wasn’t a simplistic man. He wasn’t an academic but a CEO tasked with building a profitable multi-national business who cared deeply about democratic principles and fairness. Brown advocated trio of structures within a organization to obtain the best results. The Executive structure would be organized pretty closely to what Jaques outlines in Requisite Organization. This management structure would have full management responsibility and authority. While controversial, nothing surprising here. It was in the other two elements that Brown changed Glacier.
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One of the things that impressed me about Elliott Jaques when I first read him was his stated desire to build democratic feeling within workers. It may have been the influence of Wilfred Brown at Glacier, as Brown was always interested in democracy and how to build it, leading to his great interest in workplace democracy which predated his work with Dr. Jaques. And Jaques certainly seems to have dropped many of the elements that Brown felt were necessary for participation, leaving it up to the managers to “do participation”, as it were. You’d think that anyone who would argue that structure can be paranoiagenic would also understand that you have to have structural elements that provide for participation, not just the goodwill of a manager to listen to his or her subordinates.

Still Jaques wrote about democratic society a little in several of his works. It’s what attracted me initially, so it’s worth revisiting at this point as I look into American democracy and the church.

Here’s what he says in the introduction to Requisite Organization:
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This week in the newsletter, I’ll be discussing how to level-shift your work so that you improve your chances of thriving in this wretched economy. If you’re a hidden high potential, it’s a great time because you have spare capability that you can use to change the game up (or down!) a level and sidestep all the competition. It’s the Kobayashi Maru solution for work: when you’re in a no-win game, change it so that it’s winnable.

If you’re not a subscriber to the newsletter, why not now? You can subscribe in just seconds from the Secret Rules of Career Success site and get special discounts, along with any white papers for new subscribers.

But here I’m going to be doing something a bit different than what I’ve done for the past couple of years and I wanted to warn those of you who would find it useless. This week I am going to be trying to raise a discussion about the role of Christian church models in the rise of democracy. I know that it has a limited audience but it fits, as it uses work levels (stratum) to discuss the problems confronting democracies. Some of the points are probably extendable to any community-based group, including other religious groups. However, I will be focusing on evangelical Protestantism. I meant to do this during Christmas but the Xmas Plague of 2008 sidelined me for an entire week.

So feel free to skip this week. Some of you are interested, and I hope that you will help out with the discussion.

Back in 2007, my alma mater’s football team (American-style) did something that garnered them national attention, quite rare for a 2,000 person university: they won a game with 2 seconds on the clock by having seven players run a ball 60 yards for the score.

Why should you care? Because you need to do the same thing that they did: you need to change the game. Trinity’s players made 15 laterals in that single play, a record for college football that’s not rugby. You can see the confusion on their opponents as they get bewildered and finally exhausted trying to keep up with a ball that they thought was downed by tackle again and again.

You’re going to succeed in this market by doing the same thing. You need to play by a different set of rules than everyone else. You need to change the game by changing the level of work it’s done at.

You can do this in a couple of ways. Both are possible to Hidden High Potentials but not everyone else, which is why you will succeed.
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The GO Society has quietly put up the Exploration in Management training films. These films, produced for the Glacier Institute of Management and narrated by Lord Wilfred Brown, the retired Managing Director of Glacier Metal Company and Prochancellor of Brunel University, show how the radical ideas Brown developed with Dr. Jaques work from a manager’s point of view.

I’m glad that these are finally available online.
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