Spiderman’s uncle, Ben Parker, expressed it well, if too often: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Hold that thought.
KJR Club member Roland Cole, responding to last week’s column about privilege, bureaucracy, and business governance made a good point — that nothing in my column distinguished privilege from the simple exercise of authority.
Let’s do that, starting with a few random threads:
- Privilege, you’ll recall, means “private law.” Bureaucracy is what you get when form triumphs over substance — when following the process is more important than achieving the desired result.
- The ancient Greeks differentiated dictators from tyrants. The former established the law through the raw exercise of authority; the latter simply exercised raw authority.Which, I suppose, means that a business leader who makes ad hoc decisions without respecting the need for consistency or policy is, in a sense, a tyrant. One who establishes the policy manual through the exercise of personal authority is a dictator. Oh, well, nobody ever said a business should be run as a democracy anyway. As last week’s column pointed out, the first requirement of a business is to be competitive — it’s in government that the first order of business is fairness.
- In addition to tyranny and dictatorship, the ancient Greeks defined, and tried out all of the “x-cracies.” There’s plutocracy (rule by the wealthy); aristocracy (rule by a hereditary nobility); democracy (rule by the majority); and meritocracy (rule by the best-qualified). Of course, the ancient Greeks got to everything first, including public sanitation systems, so don’t feel bad about it.
- In the absence of monopoly or collusion, business ends up being fair whether or not a particular business is fair, in that both customers and employees get to vote with their feet. The absence of competition is why government must regulate monopolies, and assuring competition is why government must prevent collusion. A business needn’t be fair, but the business community, as part of our society, must be. We aren’t supposed to be a society of privilege.
Which gets us to the clarification suggested by Mr. Cole: The exercise of authority doesn’t automatically constitute the establishment of privilege. That’s determined by how you exercise authority, and in favor of whom. It’s privilege when someone get their way because of who they are rather than because of the merits of their case. As Americans we rebel against this kind of thing: It means something a lot like an aristocracy is in charge.
A lot has to do with how you choose your inner circle. If it’s a bunch of like-minded souls, shame on you. To quote the un-Ben-Parker-like Lyndon Johnson, “If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.”
Public governance, emphasizing fairness, should be democratic. Business governance, emphasizing effectiveness, should be meritocratic. Which points to how you should create your inner circle: Choose highly capable people who frequently disagree with you.
Quite a few readers discussed the ethics of the matter. That wasn’t part of the column, and for a good (to me) reason.
While ethical behavior is a frequent topic in this column, I rarely appeal to ethics as a reason for either choosing or avoiding a particular course of action. That’s because your ethical code, like your religious choice, is a private matter. It’s likely different from mine, but no less valid for being so. Whenever someone appeals to your ethical code (or, even worse, your religious beliefs) when trying to persuade you, they’re making assumptions, many of which are likely to be false. Chances are good they’re also trying to persuade you to act in their best interests rather than your own: “Do the right thing,” is ManagementSpeak for “Do what’s best for me.”
I’m certainly not against ethics. Ethics are a good thing. By definition. In the absence of a professional code of ethics coupled with revocable credentials, though, an appeal to ethics is an exercise in futility. We’re all good people in our own eyes. Extraordinarily few people consider themselves to be evil or their behavior unconscionable — even serial killers manage to rationalize their behavior to themselves. The notion that Satan causes the evil that happens on this earth is quaint, but fails the test of Occam’s Razor. We humans do a fine job of it on our own.
If you do want to think of this as an ethical matter, Ben Parker points you in the right direction: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
It’s eloquent, even if it does plagiarize Winston Churchill’s, “The price of greatness is responsibility.” But then, if you plagiarize Winston Churchill, whatever you say will be eloquent.
And worth hearing.