At 11:44 PM -0500 on 12/6/98, Steve Schear wrote:
whereupon she said that my profile was an exact match with those who reach the highest levels of the corporate world. Then the bad news, its also the profile of a master criminal. I kid you not.
What a canard, Steve. I hope you don't actually believe it. That sounds to me more like a romantic leftist sociological pseudoscientific fantasy (I know, quintuply redundant :-)) about what it takes to run a large business than any actual scientific observation of human behavior. This "sociological" analysis probably went over really well at a touchy-feely corporate navel-gazing camp because it's more the way some grey-flannel men *wish* they were, than the way they actually are. Thus the prevalence on business bookshelves of titles like Machiavelli's "The Prince", or Sun Tsu's "Art of War", or actual dreck like, I don't know, "Accounts Receivable Secrets of Genghis Kahn", or something. The fact is, people who've *built* very large businesses more or less from scratch, like Sam Walton and Hugh Heffner, or even "criminals" like Rockefeller and Gates, even people who took daddy's money and made it outrageously larger, like J. Pierpont Morgan, Ned Johnson and Malcolm Forbes, are no more criminal in their intent, much less behavior, than my 77 year-old mother is. Like any real entrepreneur, from junkyard owner to dry-cleaner, these people are just motivated, and they work very hard at something they like. The size of someone's success in building a business is certainly more a function of brains -- and maybe a smidgeon of luck -- than brutality or ruthlessness. Most senior corporate *managers*, on the other hand, especially those at the top, are much more like blue-button mandarins than Genghis Kahn. They got there by facilly regurgitating the modern version of Confucian Analects back to their teachers, from kindergarten all the way through business and law school. Actually working hard would break their long fingernails. And, please, don't a confuse the time these mandarins spend at the Emporor's court with hard work, as most very high-level "meetings", like the corporate "retreat" above, are social functions in disguise -- parties, in other words. As a result, these modern mandarins would rather fantasize themselves as murderous feudal aristocrats -- or, more laughably, as the modern equivalent in organized crime -- to justify their existance, or more realisticaly, to relieve the tedium of supervising an enormous enterprise which usually makes much more money simply by leaving it alone than it does when actively "managed" or "regulated". "Greed, for the lack of a better term, is good", as Oliver Stone sarcastically said, damning progress with typical leftist Luddite faint praise. Yet, as Russell observed, leftist ideology [like Luddism] is just fuedalism's response to industrial progress. In that light, it makes much more sense to actually take Mr. Stone at his word, and ignore his post-modern "subtext". So, money and power begets envy. So, what else is new? People who can, do. Those who can't, teach Sociology and call those who can "criminals", much to the titilation of their customers in senior corporate management. Meanwhile, the only *real* criminal activities, force and fraud, are *bad* for business. Ask anyone living in Afganistan or Bosnia, or in North Korea or Iraq, or, within recent memory, in inner-city Boston or Chicago. Fortunately for us, the time is coming when people who invent *new* ideas will make more money and have considerably more aggregate power than people who live at the top of, or even those who create, large hierarchical organizations in order to finance, and market, and, eventually, regulate, *old* ideas. And, since society can axiomatically produce literal swarms of people who are creative and inventive, all in their own specialties, many more than it can a few mandarin senior managers and politicians at the top of very large hierarchical organizations, "power" itself, the ability to use force, or more recently, fraud, to coerce or extort behavior from someone else, will become much more diffuse. Except, that is, on occasions when almost everyone, probably using a market to do so, agrees on what must be done. And, anyone who's watched the capital markets lately knows how fast a market can act when the time comes. The reason for this change is simple. If infinitely-replicable information becomes more important than finite land or machinery, and, more to the point, if *new* information can be auctioned, for cash, at a higher price than old information, instantaneously, recursively -- and anonymously -- across an increasingly geodesic network, then the power, the very *glamour* of hierarchy -- and the snycophant court jesters it creates, like the aforementioned "corporate sociologist" -- will be as dead as Sun Tsu's middle-kingdom warlords, or Machievelli's renaissance princes. Or, more properly, Ming-dynasty blue-button mandarins. Cheers, Robert Hettinga ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'