Return to Community

“What can be expressed in words can be expressed in life.”  -- Henry David Thoreau

We are only limited by our thinking. This is a self-imposed limitation. Whatever we can conceive, we can eventually achieve. Today’s dreams become tomorrow’s realities. So we must be careful what we dream. We must be cautious of what we conceive and express in words for what we imagine become seeds scattered in the winds of time, which eventually come to fruition in the plans and deeds of future generations. We could list the things, which are commonplace today, but only a few generations ago would have seemed impossible. Air travel, space travel, the Internet, cell phones, 3-D printing, and the list could go on for pages and pages! Among them are a few things that I believe have not been beneficial—the professionalization of management, work viewed as career, the collusion of big business with big government. It struck me just now as I wrote those words that the positive innovations have been in the area of technological products, while the negative innovations have been cultural, or in the realm of ideas and values by which we understand, use, and manage the technology.  

It reminds me of something E. O. Wilson said: The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

It seems we have lost our ability to understand and then love nature and other human beings. Or, at least, we’ve allowed this ability to become withered and starved in our blind pursuit of the external goods of money, power, and status, where we seek to understand nature and other human beings only in order to exploit them more efficiently.

The wealth of nations is found in productive labor in local communities and in work done as vocation. Today global capitalism punishes productive labor and rewards those who trade in speculation and profit off the imbalance in markets and the exploitation of financial markets—all of which feeds off of productive labor without adding any value itself. Our political system will not fix this nor will big business. The only solution lies with ordinary people turning away from big government and big business and engaging in local economics and local self-government.  

We don’t need to work for large corporations. We don’t need to cooperate with a predatory mass consumer culture. We can return to and create authentic local cultures in our local communities. Work done in local communities, with local resources, and with local management becomes a vocation; work becomes healing and even sacred. Of course, work in local communities cannot be managed by professional managers and rank-based leaders. Work as vocation and genuine community require peer-based organization, design, and management, where we all share and participate in the competency of managing ourselves and our labor and in making the decisions, which govern our shared lives together.

I imagine neighborhoods, each having a corner lot with a multistoried vertical farm, where all the food they need year-round is grown. Next to it is a shop with a 3-D printer where all the equipment to maintain the vertical farm is made. I imagine local communities governing themselves through community councils and ensuring the well-being of each and every member of their community. Where education, food, shelter, health care, and even entertainment originate and are managed by the local community. In such authentic community, each person comes to feel irreplaceable in the affection and esteem of others, and everyone enjoys the satisfaction of his or her basic existential needs for security, respect, and meaningful freedom.

I have said and imagined more about this idea in my book: Deconstructing the Supermeme of Leadership: A Brief Invitation to Creating Peer-Based Communities & Leaderless Organizations. You may find the book here--http://goo.gl/qOeaue

The Destructive Consequences of the Professionalization of Management and the Loss of Work as Vocation – Further Negative Effects of the Supermeme of Leadership

To live in community and to work in organizations requires the arrangement, design, and management of human cooperation. The question is: How will we choose to arrange, design, and manage human cooperation? The supermeme of leadership leads us to believe the only way to do so is through the rank-based authority of leadership positions, where some one or some few are placed in charge over others to do the commanding and controlling of their cooperation. The supermeme of leadership is so unquestioned and all-powerful that most people cannot even envision any other way to order human cooperation and manage work than through leadership positions.   

In the twentieth century, with the rise of large and complex business organizations, the supermeme of leadership naturally led to the professionalization of management. This, I believe, has been disastrous for human wellbeing, and the twenty-first century is witnessing the catastrophic failure of this, now global, management system. The professional management taught in our business schools has systemized unsustainable business practices and created economies, which can no longer produce good jobs at livable wages.

With the professionalization of management, we also lost the notion of work as a vocation, where the work itself provided pleasure, meaning, and fulfillment. Today the goal is promotion, to advance up the ranks of management, and the work is secondary to maximizing profit. Work no longer possesses intrinsic value, but is to be manipulated to give the appearance of value, where the only measure of success is profit regardless of the affect on workers, society, or the environment. 

We need to recover the notion of the intrinsic value of work – that the skillful practice of our work is worthy of our commitment and care. We must realize that we can bring this attitude of skillful practice to almost any job to both ennoble the work and ourselves in the process. Work as vocation is to see the worth of work and the nobility of our dedication to produce meaningful goods and services, to improve our talents, and to serve others through the skillful practice of our labor.  

Of course, to recover the notion of work as vocation and to create authentically valuable work will require we reject the professionalization of management. To alienate decision-making from the work itself and locate it in some separate management position turns the skillful practice of work into the empty and meaningless repetition of coerced movements, robbing the worker of joy and the labor of significance. No, the management of decision-making must be both the responsibility and competence of every community member and each worker in our business organizations.

For more insight into these topics, please see my book - Deconstructing the SUPERMEME of Leadership: A Brief Invitation to Creating Peer-Based Communities & Leaderless Organizations. Available at amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Deconstructing-SUPERMEME-Leadership-Communities-Organizations-ebook/dp/B00MUGGEJ8/ref=cm_sw_em_r_dp_tMjfub0SPHME5_im

Reimagining How We Live & Work Together

We live in a world of incredible beauty, abundant resources, and much human goodness. Yet, too often life for many people is filled with ugliness, scarcity, and cruelty. There is a joy inherent in the simple fact of our existence and a happiness present in each moment. Yet, too often many people are caught up in anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. It doesn’t have to be this way.

A chief obstacle to living better, more productive, and flourishing lives is how we allow power and authority to be distributed and exercised in our communities and work organizations. We made a mistake when we decided that management should be a profession, instead of the competence of every single person residing in our communities and working in our organizations.

When management becomes a profession, power and authority get distributed through rank-based leadership positions, which distort the productive flow of information and resources through the community or organization. Unwittingly every business school, management curriculum, and leadership program contribute to the further decline of a healthy and robust economic system.

One telltale sign of the dysfunction of our professionalized management system is the continual need to regulate business and large corporations. A healthy system is self-regulating. The fact that we must regulate business and corporations today, otherwise they would destroy themselves and harm everyone else, reveals that they are unhealthy and dysfunctional. Government intervention in the economic system is not the answer.

We must fundamentally reimagine how we design and manage our communities and work organizations. This will be the great challenge of the 21^st century if we ever want to reach the potential present in our human nature and the possibilities found in our common human destiny.

That is exactly what I present in my new book, Deconstructing the Supermeme of Leadership: A Brief Invitation to Creating Peer-Based Communities and Leaderless Organizations. You’re probably asking yourself, “What the heck is a supermeme and what does he mean by deconstructing it?” Well, I invite you to purchase the book where those questions are answered. Join me in this exciting new project of creating communities and work organizations where beauty, abundance, and human goodness are the measures of our success, and each person is able to experience the joy and happiness present in each moment.  

Here is a look at the table of contents: 

Forward: Deconstructing Leadership

Chapter One: Supermemes, Idols, & Myths

Chapter Two: Power

Chapter Three: Power Relationships

Chapter Four: Conceptions of Authority—Rank-based versus Peer-based

Chapter Five: Emergence of Management Theory in the Twentieth Century

Chapter Six: Leaders, the MBA, & Leadership Programs in the Twentieth Century

Chapter Seven: Human Nature & the Nature of Community

Chapter Eight: Creating Peer-based Communities & Leaderless Organizations

Appendix One: Key Questions Regarding Leaderless Organizations

Appendix Two: The Practice of Localism in Peer-based Communities

Afterward: Becoming the Kind of Persons Who Can Flourish in Peer-based Communities and Thrive in Leaderless Organizations

You may find my book here: http://www.amazon.com/Deconstructing-SUPERMEME-Leadership-Communities-Organizations-ebook/dp/B00MUGGEJ8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409422684&sr=8-1&keywords=jeffrey+nielsen

The Rise of the Cult of Profit & the Loss of Business Purpose (An Opportunity for Localism)

What are the basic requirements for people to flourish as human beings and live good, meaningful lives of purpose and value? The simple answer is a person needs a few basic goods and services such as food and water, shelter and sanitation, along with education and health care. A person also needs the freedom to pursue his or her own unique goals and dreams and the opportunity to be respected as a valued member of their community. When so simply stated, it follows that work in organizations is an effective way to satisfy these basic needs and flourish as human beings. 

            This answer also illuminates why people need meaningful work to thrive. We discover three reasons why we need to work: one, to earn the income to acquire the basic goods and services we need to live a good life; two, to develop the talents and abilities to exercise effectively the freedom to achieve our dreams; and three, to make a lasting contribution to the wellbeing of others and become respected and valued members of our community.

            A business then, whether for profit or nonprofit, is an organization of physical and financial assets, people, and knowledge, brought together in order to satisfy our need for work and to produce the goods and services we need to prosper. So we can state the purpose of business as four-fold:

1.     To produce profitably some good or service that benefits someone who wants them.

2.     To pay employees adequately so they are able to purchase the goods and services needed to live well.

3.      To develop the capacities of people so they can effectively exercise their freedom to make a difference.

4.     To contribute to the larger community, which both supports and is supported by the business in an interdependent relationship of society and economy.       

A successful business must effectively balance these four purposes. A business cannot be imbalanced for long without doing great damage to the people and world around it. It cannot neglect any one purpose for the sake of any other purpose, nor can it privilege one purpose at the expense of any other purpose. To do so harms the business, harms the people in the business, and harms society itself. The art of management is to balance the four-fold purpose of business and create the conditions for people to flourish as human beings. It seems obvious that we are failing.

Why are we failing? Our current “recovery” is pretty much a jobless recovery, as have been the last few economic periods following recessions. The jobs that are created tend to be part-time and/or low paying jobs, so people end up being underemployed and see their earnings and benefits shrinking. Since the 1970’s even though worker productivity has risen, middle class working families have seen their incomes stagnate or decrease, and poverty has risen to a 17-year high. Today the gap between the top 1% of income and wealth holders and the rest of us is greater than at any other time since the Great Depression. Yet, while most working families are barely hanging on to economic survival, CEO pay has risen 725 percent and now the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is 354 to 1.* By any objective reflection, this is neither wise nor sustainable.

Two great organizational thinkers, Charles Handy and Peter Drucker, both of whom are very much pro-business and could never be considered anti-capitalist, recognized this dangerous trend back in the 80’s and 90’s. The pursuit of profit and the enrichment of the individual at the expense of everything else was becoming the driving motivation in business practices. The cult of profit had enslaved the economy. As a young man in the 1980’s, I remember speaking with my friends, and all we could talk about was how to make a lot of money quickly and with little effort. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was a popular TV show of the time and characterized the ambitions and attitudes of many. In an essay entitled, “The Lure of the Zeros,” Handy said:

Money is not the root of all evil; St Paul was careful to say that it was the love of money which was the problem. But I wonder if you really can see straight with all those zeros in front of you, still disentangle right from wrong, above all still be true to yourself in spite of the numbers.

Drucker said way back in 1974 in his book, Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices:

The profit motive and its offspring maximization of profits are just as irrelevant to the function of a business, the purpose of a business, and the job of managing a business. In fact, the concept is worse than irrelevant: it does harm.

Of course, there is nothing wrong or evil with either profit or wealth. As Drucker pointed out, profit is a necessary measure of the validity of a business, but when it becomes the sole purpose, everyone suffers. Similarly wealth is both desirable and good, but not for its own sake, only in so far as it contributes to a meaningful life of purpose and value, which is possible even without great wealth. 

We could begin in our management councils to measure the performance of our businesses against the four-fold purpose and strive to find a balance. Sadly, it might just be that big business and large corporations are too committed to the cult of profit to adjust their business practices. It just might be that most CEO’s are too attached to the self-enrichment mindset to reign-in their exorbitant salaries. It just might be that our political system is too polarized and inefficient to make a meaningful difference. Yet there still might be a silver lining to the ongoing economic insecurity and hardship faced by the American middle class and workers around the world. As they see the wealth gap only increasing and their opportunities only decreasing, they just might realize the solution to their ongoing plight is to build business and economic security at the local level.

At the local level we can form businesses that will respect the human need for work and realize an authentic balance between business’s four-fold purpose. At the local level we can begin to produce the basic goods and services we all need to live well. At the local level we can create meaningful opportunities for people to develop their talents and abilities and contribute to the wellbeing of their neighbors. At the local level each person can be recognized as an esteemed and important member of the community. So we can continue to stagger on hoping without reason that big business and big government will save us in our current economic troubles, or we can seize the opportunity to recreate economic prosperity for all beginning at the local level.

*  Sources – U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey.” Money.cnn.com/2011/02/16. Stateofworkingamerica.org. huffingtonpost.com.