On Power

I recently read “The feast of the goat” by Maria Vargas Llosa. Although it is quite dark, I recommend it. It is a novel, set in the chaotic last days of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. I had never heard of him, but he ruled for thirty years ending in 1961.
The book provides a graphic description of how and why these regimes evolve and survive. Trujillo becomes popular using populist causes such as fear of immigrants. People of talent are attracted to him as a means of getting things done. He is a genuine success for a time. He gets the constitution changed to consolidate power. He courts outside stakeholders, the US, and the Church, with flattery and a promise of stability. Then he uses emergency powers to dominate all media, restrict movement, and immaculate opposition. The secret police spy and kill with impunity. He believes these are necessary steps to make progress for the country.
Only his own hubris brings him down. His family come to own much of the economy. He starts to believe his own narrative, surrounded by fawning acolytes day and night. His family become high maintenance. People become his plaything, men killed and girls raped at his whim. Mistakes are made and enemies created. In the end, the outsiders can take no more and exert a squeeze, but he is only brought down by a hapless bunch of conspirators whose plan is solely to kill him. Afterwards a chaos ensues which is even more bloody than the regime itself, at least to start with.
I was lucky to read this as the crisis in Egypt unfolded, as it helped me to understand what it must have felt like in Mubarak’s bunker. The parallels in the story are almost complete. Let us hope a character or coalition emerges in Egypt now to lead the nation on a good path. That is far from certain.
It is tempting to look at Egypt or Dom Rep and scoff that this is a feature of the less developed world only. Think again. True, the developing world has the most obvious cases, with much of Africa, some of Latin America and Russia presided over by despots. In China it is a cabal not an individual, but the features are otherwise similar. But it was only seventy five years ago that European nations surrendered what amounted to absolute power to Hitler and Mussolini. Since then, many of the most enduring leaders have been anything but consensual. Think of Thatcher, De Gaulle, Berlusconi.
The phenomenon is more widespread than that. It took a Mandela, a Ghandi or a Walesa to create a revolution. In sport, Alex Ferguson is seen as the quintessential manager. Even religions create dangerous power structures, none more so than Christianity. Come to think of it, that might be the root cause for the prevalence of the power model around the world. And if you think the US is immune, just look at the gerrymandered shape of congressional districts.
By the way, I’m not accusing all the names mentioned here of all of the excesses of Trujillo. But even the generally benign ones share some features.
As usual, companies mirror countries more closely than we might want to believe. Jack Welsh epitomised the dominant CEO. Money often follows such characters. The City seems happy with highly loose corporate governance, no separation of Chairman and CEO roles and cavalier personalities.
I saw and felt this in my own career. Much bureaucratic life revolves around seeking power. Those who gather power attract followers as a way of getting things done. And, inexorably, the powerful become cavalier with due process and somewhat hubristic. Further, many managers simply could not operate effectively in a situation where authority was ambiguous.
Hence the famous quote attributed to one baron Aston. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. But here is a more recent quote, from an interview published last Sunday, in fact.
“I need to say this – you shouldn’t trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.”
Who said that? It was Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister of the UK and leader of the liberal democrats. Well said, Nick. This should remind many of us why we might have voted for his party last year and supported the forming of a coalition. Maybe we have forgotten that in our annoyance over tuition fees?
The problem is, in practice, an opposite quote can be equally true. “A power vacuum inhibits progress. An absolute power vacuum causes complete sclerosis”.
Who said that? Me. Just now. I’ve seen that too. Shell has been notorious in its insistence on checks and balances. It comes from its dual country origin, and from the Dutch Polder model, which loosely means a consensual culture. Over time, I’ve seen the advantages. And our darkest days have come when we briefly abandoned many of the principles in the era of Phil Watts and untruthful reserve reporting. But Watts was a product of the failure of the alternative. Shell was lamentably slow in driving through necessary changes, retaining powerful little country empires and a leadership by a committee long past their sell by date. And, at times, it did feel like the whole edifice conspired against decisions and actions.
The downside of a power vacuum applies in countries too. Belgium now appears ungovernable. India’s democracy dissolves into local autocracy. And, in the US, wonderful checks and balances appear to endlessly defer facing up to existential threats such as structural deficits or climate change.
Herein lies the problem. We have yet to develop a more effective management method than a power based one, and managers still learn, and people respond to, power based techniques. So far, the global track record of organisations eschewing power is pretty poor.
Perhaps that would be a good global project to support, promoting a model based on things other than power. Maybe the growing influence of women in the world can lead the way, though it certainly hasn’t happened yet, at least not outside Scandinavia. Open media must be helping, especially things like Wikileaks, with its ruthless exposures of abuse of power.
This concept could revolutionise schooling or management training, and spawn new political models (don’t try to tell me that Democracy, as currently practiced, does the job).
Now that would be something special for people to develop. Trouble is, we’d get nowhere. We lack the power.