Privilege means, literally, “private law.” If most of us are honest, we want it for ourselves and resent it in others.

The political philosopher John Rawls proposed that a fair and just a society is one whose rules each of us would endorse without knowing in advance what position we would occupy in it. Privilege is the alternative: A society whose rules are designed by some for their own advantage.

The distinction between privilege and a just social design is just one of the reasons the tired proposition that “government should be run like a business” is fallacious. Government is an instrument of society. Its first responsibility is to be fair, and only after that is it allowed to be efficient. The practicalities of running a competitive business, in contrast, mean fairness takes a back seat to efficiency.

Which is to say, government should be run in a business-like way, but shouldn’t be run as a business. Businesses should be run as fairly as possible, but not at the expense of competitiveness.

What does this mean to you?

When an organization defines its governance — how it goes about making decisions — it generally comes down to one of two alternatives. It can make them through relationships and personal judgment, or it can make them through processes and well-defined rules. Decision-making through relationships and judgment is quick and efficient. Decision-making through processes and rules is deliberate, consistent, and fair.

That’s how the proponents of each would state the case. Their detractors would claim, respectively, that when you make decisions through relationships and judgment you’ve instituted a system based on privilege; systems based on processes and rules are bureaucracies.

One of your most important responsibilities as an IT leader is establishing how decisions will be made. What’s it going to be? Privilege or bureaucracy? Efficiency or fairness?

There is no single right answer; no “best practice” that will save you from having to make a very difficult set of trade-offs.

The first place to look is at how many people are involved. If you run a small IT shop — say you have five people reporting to you — then everyone knows everyone. It’s easy to talk over a problem and come to an equitable solution.

Now imagine you’re responsible for five hundred people instead. Five hundred people can’t easily talk things over, so instead you establish clear rules and criteria through which you’ll make decisions, and a well-defined process for applying them. That’ll solve the problem, won’t it?

Only if no actual human beings are involved. Once you add people to the system it isn’t that simple. As anyone who has written a capital proposal knows, you always include the obligatory paragraph that explains why your idea is consistent with the company’s business strategy, regardless of the strategy and the idea.

So your process has to include a due diligence component, to ensure proposals are what they say they are. Voila! you’ve created bureaucracy.

The crucial element that’s missing when you try to make decisions through a fair process is trust. When you have few enough people involved that everyone knows everyone else, you can evaluate ideas in the context of your trust of their source. That’s just one reason so many leaders, faced with organizational growth, prefer to create an inner circle to a system of rules and processes: It’s a lot easier, and probably safer, to trust people you know than to trust a system that treats close friends and total strangers equally. Faced with decisions, these leaders convene their inner circle. The system is for people they don’t know personally — their friends live by a different, private set of rules.

In a word, they’re privileged.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Say it again: The first responsibility of business is to be competitive. Businesses should be as fair as they can without losing that, and while creating privilege for those you know sounds improper, trusting the motivation and judgment of strangers just as much as those of people with whom you’ve worked closely is naive. You don’t build success on naivete.

The secret is to maintain your balance. With no inner circle you’ll run an ineffective bureaucracy; worse, you’ll consider all ideas to be equal. And intellectual relativism, while a growing social trend, is, simply put, stupid.

But too often, the inner circle, being inner, starts to think it can ignore everyone else. That’s a problem, and a very common one: Privilege begets ignorance among the privileged.

And you’re even less likely to build success on that.

Credit where it’s due: I first encountered the etymology of “privilege” in one of Terry Pratchett’s fine Diskworld novels, all of which are worth the time spent in their reading.