For
the last eight
years, the US treasury has been plundered by the thieves of the Bush
Administration, doling out handouts to corporatist friends (and undoing
legislation and refusing to enforce what little corporatist regulation
remains) in return for campaign contributions, future jobs and other
favours. Bush has pursued an unjustifiable private and personal
ideological war that
has cost a million lives and a trillion dollars. The US is now
technically bankrupt, public services have been hollowed out to the
point they are dysfunctional to non-existent, and the country's
reputation internationally is in tatters.
This is the legacy of a regime that promised a new form of leadership
both before and after 9/11. There could be no better demonstration that
relying on self-serving and self-proclaimed 'leaders' to do things for
you is a ruinous path.
Yet what are Americans rallying around now? Different self-serving and
self-proclaimed leaders ambiguously promising 'change'. How far will
the cult of leadership in the US (and it's spreading worldwide, like a
toxic disease) go?
In business, 'leaders' are paid obscene sums of money (tens to hundreds
of millions of dollars each per year) to offshore jobs, reduce quality
and
services, close down operations, merge with other organizations with
their own self-serving 'leaders', and otherwise cripple the US economy
in the interests of 'maximizing shareholder value' (no accident that
these 'leaders' are paid mostly in shares, so it's their value they're
maximizing).
Millions blindly follow religious 'leaders' who preach hatred and
suppression of basic human rights and freedoms, and the popularity of
such 'charismatic' despots is growing by leaps and bounds.
Drug addled professional actors, singers and athletes attract groupies
and awards and fortunes and the adoration and emulation of millions, as
part of the celebrity leadership cult, and this popularity can often be
parlayed into political or business 'leadership'.
And universities charge extravagant sums for 'executive' programs that
presume to teach 'leadership and management', while meanwhile, because
of a desperate shortage of entrepreneurial skills, most graduates can
look forward to a life of wage slavery working for these 'executives',
many of whom had their 'leadership' positions bought for them by rich
parents.
As I reported a couple of years ago, Peter Block, one of the founders
of the discipline of Organizational Development, thinks
that, in business at least, it's absurd:
"Leadership"
is a well-developed misconception. The dominant belief is that the task
of leadership is to set a vision, enroll others in it and hold people
accountable through measurements and rewards. It's a patriarchal system
used to create high performance through centralization of power. Most
leadership training focuses on how to be a good parent. We teach how to
"develop" people, as if they were ours to develop. We do a lot to
create the notion that bosses are responsible for their people. All
that parenting has the unintended side effect of creating deep
entitlement and having employees stay frozen in their own development.
Most management techniques are ways of controlling people so they feel
good about being controlled.
These are the most common questions
I get from my clients. "How do I get people to â¦" and you
can fill in
the blank after that. My favorite is, "How do I get people on board
with my ideas/visions/whatever." My response is, "How do you know
youâre in the boat?" These are the wrong questions. They're
the
questions of a parent about recalcitrant children. As soon as you
start the sentence, you're acting as a sovereign. All of these are
components of the patriarchal way of thinking that dominates our
culture. Put this in boldface: They
are not your children. Once you realize that, real
engagement is possible.
We don't need 'leadership' or 'leaders'. What we need is experimenters.The
way to create working models that work better than the dysfunctional
ones we have now, in a complex system where no one is in control and no
one has the answers, is to try things. A lot of small-scale
experiments, bold, different, even wacky. And then compare notes with
each other about what works (and why) and what doesn't (and why not).
That will allow the successful experiments to spread, virally, and be
adapted and improved. Eventually, bottom-up, it will allow us to create
decentralized community-based self-managed political, economic,
educational, and social systems that actually work well, for each
community.
Unlike most 'leaders', experimenters are:
- collaborators: they don't do anything alone
- facilitators and coaches: they help others to learn
and discover how to do things better
- demonstrators: more than just communicators, they show how it works
and what it means
- ideators: they imagine what's possible, and tell
stories to bring those ideas to life
- innovators: they take those good ideas and realize
them, make them real
- researchers: they study what's been done, in nature,
by other cultures and communities, and what's needed, and spread that
knowledge
- connectors: they bring people together who were meant
to work together
- model-builders: they design and build something that
can be understood, replicated and adapted by others
- founders: they start new things -- enterprises,
communities, different ways to do important things; they build
something new rather than criticizing what exists
That's
what we need. We won't find it in one or a few people. We have to find
it within all of us. To do that we have to give up on 'leaders' and
take charge of our own lives, collaboratively, as peers. Who's 'leading'
in government, in business, in religious and educational and social
organizations doesn't matter.
The power is in all of us.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
