Why anarchists need to pay attention to management literature

Go to Chapters, or Borders, or Barnes and Nobel.  You don’t have to buy anything, I just want you to have a look around.  Go to the management section, particularly the “Leadership” shelf.

Getting over “no leaders”

Oh, I have set off alarm bells in the heads of anarchists already.  Aren’t we against leadership? I’m only going to spend one paragraph on this subject, and if you aren’t convinced by the end of it then I won’t be surprised if you don’t like the rest of this piece, either. (Unless you already agreed with this point.  In which case, please carry on.)

It is my belief that the concept known as “leadership” is an appropriation of a natural human urge to respect people who are good at what they do.  It is a very rational thing for us to do in some ways, in some contexts, but like all other aspects of the human experience (dancing, having sex, building families) can be used for the advancement or detriment of an individual or group. Leadership is really useful to me as a healthcare worker.  I am completely comfortable with listening to people who have been doing my job for years, who have extra experience and training that I lack, and I enjoy their guidance in sticky situations.  I don’t want o be on a completely level playing field with everyone I work with.  Some people deserve a larger voice.  However this comes to be problematic when this kind of relationship is based not on respect but on title.  I have also come across people with years of experience and training who apparently have shit for brains.  I don’t know how they have kept their jobs so long!  I do not accept their leadership at all.

In summary: leadership can be build in a way which is positive and liberatory and affirming for all involved. For a more indepth exploration of this concept please consult the book Truth or Dare.

What managers can teach us

OK now that is over with.  So you are in the bookstore.  Let’s use Amazon since this is the interweb.  I did a search for management leadership and here are three results from the first page of hits, along with their thesis statements are derived from the reviews. (I have not read any of these books.)

Strength-based Leadership

The most effective leaders are always investing in strengths.

The most effective leaders surround themselves with the right people and then maximize their team.

The most effective leaders understand their followers’ needs.

Leadership Skills for Managers

Exhibit the poise and presence required to “get others to march”

Step outside the status quo–to visualize and implement true improvements

Cultivate valuable professional bonds via benchmarking and community networks

The Five Dysfunctions of  a Team: A Leadership Fable

The story is about a female CEO who is hired to bring together a dysfunctional executive staff to work as a team in a company that just two years earlier had looked promising. The scenarios that follow are recognizable and can be applied anywhere teamwork is involved, whether it is a multinational company, a small department within a larger organization, or a sports team. The five dysfunctions discussed are absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.

You are probably thinking what I do whenever I leaf through management books—no manager I ever had must’ve read these!

The really interesting thing about these books is that they are often based on sound evidence, but have common theme of the author saying, “if everyone would just do this, things would be so much better!” Which is true! The central problem to all these books is that the authors always take capitalist and corporatist economics for granted.  So when you read them, you can just know that and account for it.

It’s kind of sad actually, all these really smart people with an incredible knack for interpersonal dynamics, an understanding of power structures and an evident desire to see others prosper trying so hard to convince business people to run things differently.  They don’t seem to get that the system will always encourage a certain kind of organizational behaviour.  It’s the nature of the beast.

Capitalist literature promotes syndicalist ideals

I was thinking of this again cause I was listening to an interview Nora Young of CBC Spark did with Daniel Pink who wrote a book called Drive which uses scientific evidence (in as much as you consider sociology a science ) to argue the following three things are what makes people do things well and properly:

Autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives

Mastery - the urge to get better and better at something that matters

Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

Doesn’t that sound like the background principals behind various kinds of democratic anarchist economics to you? It is missing our emphasis on decentralization of authority, and our vigorous anti-oppression politics. (Although I do have to say I have seen big sections in not a few of these books devoted to recognizing different sorts of privilege in interpersonal relationships, and how to minimize and cope with these in a group while recognizing historical power imbalances—really! It makes business sense.)

But you know when you are talking to someone about how else the economy might work “after the revolution” and they say something about “human nature” and how it’ll never work without a competitive and individualistic economic system?  There are hundreds of books being written for entirely the wrong audience which seek to disprove this notion and offer ways of running things which emphasize worker control and autonomy.

Also on this theme, I recently listened to a This American Life podcast episode about NUMMI, a joint Toyota/GM car factory where GM learned about how giving workers significant amounts of job control increased productivity like mad.

What we can learn

Of course these publications are also interesting because they give us lots of insight into the running of our own organizations.  Honestly, all you have to do is ignore the parts about profit.  There are a shit tonne of books being written today about how to run non-hierarchical, grassroots organizations.  Too bad they will never have significant impact in their desired market.  But I think as anarchists we can use them as tools to prove our theoretical points and to help us develop practical strategies for working better.