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.

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.