I can’t help but believe that the faltering state of the U.S. political, economic, and social enterprise comes as a surprise to only the most naive among us. Maybe I’m the naive one, but I’d like to think that most people have, at some level of awareness, long sensed that our “greed is good” enterprise model is tragically flawed and that our failure to escape a downward death-spiral has been a consequence of nothing more than our inability or unwillingness to formulate any practical alternative.
At a most fundamental level our theory and methods for managing enterprise—personal, organization, and national—are founded on fallacious notions of how humans overcome the tides of entropy in order to produce service and product value (i.e. wealth). As a consequence of these fallacies, we are mired in a “top-down”, control-centered, management methodology. Variations on this top-down approach abound in the business sections of bookstores, but all amount to little more than control-freaks rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic as the ship sinks. So long as we keep doing things the way we have been doing them we will continue to produce the same results. Our first premise is a black hole of self-fulfilment.
I have heard a few talk about the alternative to “top-down” as something akin to “bottom-up” management, an idea that is at best simple-minded and more likely, insincere. But there is an alternative to this false dichotomy. I call it “Top-up” management. As we shall see, understanding and adopting a Top-up management methodology requires unhinging the prevailing paradigm and overturning the habitual methods of American management in order to build a new management regime—one that places leadership before our obsessive preoccupation with control and manipulation.
Top-down Management and the New Dark Age
Beginning in the early 1980′s, U.S. leadership has been engaged in a global “free market” propaganda campaign designed to enshrine the basest of human emotions; fear, greed, and envy, as the natural laws of human interaction and as the prime movers of all human enterprise. This resurrection of Spencer’s “Social Darwinism” should have been no more compelling than the transparent and easily debunked notions put forth by Creationists, but it has proved itself to be a comfortable and sustainable argument for those without the ability or desire to think critically. Along with fundamentalist religion (and it seems the two go hand-in-hand) the resurrection of Social Darwinistic theory, has been guiding us steadily downward into a new Dark Age.
The model, which is entirely reductionistic, asserts that every individual is motivated by fear, which derives from his or her survival instinct. Feelings of envy and avarice are intrinsic psychological responses that drive each person to compete with others in a desperate game of musical chairs in which some few will manage to amass ever-greater wealth, status, and power, thus staving off that fear. This, the free marketeers argue, creates the greatest good. Their “good” outcomes are of course, realized by way of a “natural” process of never-ending and intractable conflict, reductio ad absurdum—nation against nation, community against community, man against man.
Like the advocates of Intelligent Design, who try to recast Creationism in a more “scientific” form, apologists for contemporary Social Darwinism often complexify their central thesis, but this always turns out to be little more than dressing the donkey in fancy clothes. The advocates of Intelligent Design don the clothing of fake evolutionary biology. Social Darwinists cloak themselves in a pseudo-science of Economics.
The phase “survival of the fittest” lies at the heart of the Social Darwinist’s model. It imagines a raw law of nature dictating that every individual organism operates in its own perceived self-interest. I could write volumes debunking this incorrect understanding of Darwin’s work. Indeed, volumes were written by social scientists in the wake of Spencer’s publications. Rather then taking up your time explaining where Spencer went wrong, I’d like to move foward (top-up if you will) and look at a more useful management model.
Top-up Management
The following video (Battle at Kruger) illustrates top-up management. It’s a long clip but worth every second spent watching it. There’s a lesson to be learned here by those who want to explain human behavior as being in ”nature” of things!
Buffalo, lions, and crocs–Oh my!
Obviously the pride of lions is collaborative in it’s hunting behavior, but did you notice how the whole herd of buffalo came to the defense of the youngster? Even among these lumbering beasts, the instinct for survival is expressed in terms of the community of water buffalo, not the individuals!
This illustrates the fallacy of Social Darwinism. Action based solely on self-interest (e.g. greed) does not contribute to any greater good! It is rather, behavior that threatens the survival of the species. It was for good reason that Darwin titled his book “The Origin of Species” and not the “The Origin of Greg”. The instinct for survival inexorably interconnects individuals into a greater whole. A species is a system that is greater than the sum of its parts. (This interconnectedness is also at work between various species occupying an ecological niche, but that’s another story.)
Now, watch the video again. Notice how the leader of the herd initiates action, not though coercion, but by being out front. Were he to go it alone, he would become another victim but in collaboration with the followers, the lions don’t stand a chance. He’s is a top-up leader! He does his job and the followers do theirs. It’s as natural as can be.
So here’s a new thesis to consider when working toward a more useful system of management:
The biology and sociobiology of living organisms is based on collaboration—this is a rule rather than the exception. At the simplest biological levels, collective action is expressed automatically, but as biological complexity increases, voluntary collective behaviors tend to take precedence over action based on individual self-interest. Collaboration in reproduction, hunting, defense, protection of young, and in the human species, creation of wealth, are all expressions of the will to survive. In nature, the collaborative dance of willing individuals is the rule and, as with other living organisms, we human beings are pre-wired to act this way. When humans act otherwise, we must ask ourselves what it is that we are doing to perturb this natural tendency.
Consider how different our social, political, and economic theories and methods might be if we were to begin from this premise.
I can hear some of you saying that your anecdotal knowledge of human behavior doesn’t bear this thesis out, but I assure you that if you take the time to look, you will find a great deal of supporting scientific literature. Your search won’t be easy. This literature is not very visible in a society steeped in, and committed to a mythology of free markets driven by individual self-interest.
Check back again soon and I’ll give you a rundown on top-up management among our species.
