A recent column by David Brooks in the New York Times shocked the hell out of me. And not for the reason that Brooks titled it “My unsettling interview with Steve Bannon”—unsettling because of the dangers it portends. (The interview is loaded with phrases ranging from a “populist revolt” to “totally and completely destroy…our enemies.”) Rather, it shocked me because I found myself—this quintessentially left-leaning liberal—on the same page as Bannon, the populist, at least in two respects, if not a third: his diagnosis of our troubles today (“ruling elites…detached from the living experience of the people”), and who should be dealing with this, namely concerned people in some sort of groundswell. (“Once [the people] have a purpose, you can’t stop this movement.”) Could I be a populist?

Where I part company with Bannon is in his prescription of how to deal with this. Like Karl Marx, Steve Bannon has the wrong solution for the right problem, if he has any solution at all, beyond anarchy. He was raised in the right neighborhood (working class) and went to the right school (Harvard Business School) and worked for the right company (Goldman Sachs) to appreciate how the privileges of the “hereditary educated elite“ have come at the expense of so many other people in society. In other words, he rails against social imbalance, as do I.

But does Bannon want to fix the problem, or just blow everything up and then hope for the best? His is a zero-sum game, with his tribe, the “winners,” while the current establishment will be the losers. If, however, imbalance is the problem, what’s the point of promoting another form of imbalance—to shift privilege from one group of winners to another? Have we not seen enough of this in recent history: in Russia, from the Tzars to the communists; in Eastern Europe after 1989, from the communists to capitalists; and now, in so many countries, from capitalists, or whoever has the power, to a parochial form of populism, whether religious (as in Iran, Turkey, India) or chauvinist (as in Russia and Hungary). In fact, Bannon’s solution could very well backfire, by exacerbating the very entitlements that he so bitterly opposes. The vacuum left by wrecking government would quickly be filled by powerful corporations. And then, with the ensuing frustration about yet more privilege, the result could be utter anarchy.

Anger, like greed, can make people dumb and dangerous. The Russians learned that from Stalin, the Germans from Hitler. Let’s hope that Americans will not learn it too, with the rest of us in tow. These times are too dangerous for that.

So, if not Bannon’s angry populism, then what’s the option? To stay the course, and make corrections at the margin, such as fixing capitalism, which we hear about ad nauseam? ¹ Capitalism certainly needs fixing, but fixing capitalism will no more fix a broken America than would fixing communism have fixed the broken regimes of Eastern Europe. It is society that needs fixing, by putting capitalism back in its place, namely the marketplace, and out of the public space. Surely, it must be obvious by now that we will make no headway on climate change, or income disparities, or the demise of democracy itself until we restore balance in our broken societies. And this will require a reframing of our politics as well as our practices.

The Need for Balance

To appreciate this balance, consider our most basic needs: for consumption, protection, and affiliation. Each is mostly served by a different sector of society. Just as private sector businesses provide most of our goods and services, so too do public sector governments provide many of our protections—for policing, of course, but also with regulations that hold powerful private interests in check. Bannon’s call for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (and a recent Supreme Court decision to do that with government regulations) is as nonsensical as was the deconstruction of private business under communism. Beyond these two needs lies the third, just as basic, yet often overlooked: our need for affiliation, through our social relationships. This is provided, not by private businesses or public governments, but significantly by the associations we create and join in our communities.

These associations belong to another sector that is both ubiquitous and obscure. Obscure, in part, because it suffers from a mixture of confusing labels, including “civil society,” the “third sector,” and the sector of “non-governmental” as well as “not-for-profit” organizations. Call it the plural sector, and we can see it taking its place alongside those sectors called public and private, for the sake of maintaining balance in our societies, also to restore that balance in the first place.

And ubiquitous because there is a great variety of such associations, which have a major impact on all our lives.  Belonging neither to the state apparatus nor owned by private investors, some of these are owned by their members, as in farmer cooperatives and clubs, while a great many others are owned by no-one: think Greenpeace, Wikipedia, the Mayo Clinic, and more generally, foundations, food banks, and social movements. Many of us may work in private sector business and most of us may vote for public sector government, but all of us live much of our social lives in plural sector associations, for example, when we work out at the Y, receive treatment in a community hospital, attend some religious service, volunteer for a charity.

This sector has also been obscured by our obsession with the linear politics of left and right. With collective interests on the left and private interests on the right, where to put the community interests of the plural sector? Certainly not in the center, as some sort of compromise between left and right. We will have to get past this simplistic rendition of our politics, with domination on either side, or else paralysis in the center.

left ______ center ______ right

Imagine, therefore, abandoning this tired old line in favor of a circle, around which the three sectors can be seen to collaborate for balance (as in public/private/plural partnerships, or PPPPs), while holding each other in check. Put differently, a healthy society balances public sector governments that are respected with private sector businesses that are responsible and plural sector associations that are robust.

Exacerbating Imbalance through Angry Populism

American society, like a number of other “liberal democracies”, is not healthy. It suffers from severe imbalance that favors private sector interests. Just consider the extent of legal bribery in the country after the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to retain the private funding of public elections. Bannon’s angry populism will not correct this.

If the problem is the mistreatment of many American workers, who struggle to make ends meet and retain their jobs, why “deconstruct” government, whose responsibility is to protect its citizens? Challenge, instead, the private interests that are hindering government from doing this job, by their lobbying to reduce its services and to reduce its progressive taxes on the wealthy while maintaining regressive taxes on everyone’s purchases and properties.

In a letter of 1816, Thomas Jefferson recognized “the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength...” Two centuries later, Bannon et al fail to recognize that business has won this trial. His angry populism rails against big business while attacking government, thereby exacerbating the very problem he claims to address.

Progressive Populism for Balance

Instead of exacerbating the current imbalance, we need to restore balance, across the three key sectors of society: governments to protect, businesses to supply, and communities in which to affiliate. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville recognized the key role of community associations in sustaining the new Democracy in America, writing prophetically in his two-volume work by this title that “… civilization itself would be endangered” if people “never acquired the habit of forming associations…” While Americans still form associations galore, the health of their civilization, and many others, is damaged by private interests that undermine government protections and community affiliations.

Bannon is right in claiming that major social change has to begin on the ground, with what can be called communityship, in the plural sector, ahead of the established leadership in the public and private sectors. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly replied when asked by a community organizer to support his cause: “I agree with what you’ve said. Now go out and make me do it.” Not to deconstruct, but to reconstruct, positively, with an abundance of local initiatives in the plural sector that spread—“go viral”— to drive governments to do what is necessary and businesses to do what is responsible. There do exist significant precedents for such grounded change, for example, in the 16th Century Reformation in Europe and the 20th Century civil rights movement in the United States. And then, once balance is restored, not for this sector to dominate—we have had enough of that—but to take its place alongside the other two sectors to maintain that balance.

So, what am I to do with this epiphany of mine, having discovered at this late stage that I share two-thirds of Bannon’s populism? That’s easy: reframe the third, in favor of another kind of populism. In place of the angry, regressive populism that would take us backward, to some other imbalance, let’s promote a constructive, progressive populism that can take us forward, to balance. For the sake of survival, we shall have to rally around our sectors, to make ourselves and our authorities do it.

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Heeding the old adage about there being nothing new under the sun, after I had settled on the term “Progressive Populism”, I looked it up on the Web, and found several recent uses of the term, all in much the same spirit, but not about balance across the sectors.²

© Henry Mintzberg 2024 with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. See Rebalancing Society that diagnosis the imbalance and RebalancibngSociety.org that prescribes a path to balance. I am also working on a pamphlet that will elaborate on this progressive populism.

^{1. For example: Accountable Capitalism, Breakthrough Capitalism, Caring Capitalism, Compassionate Capitalism, Conscious Capitalism, Creative Capitalism, Customer Capitalism, Flexible Capitalism, Humanistic Capitalism, Inclusive Capitalism, Pluralistic Capitalism, Progressive Capitalism, Regenerative Capitalism, Stakeholder Capitalism, Sustainable Capitalism, and my favourite of all, Democratic Capitalism (since capitalism is the noun, democracy, the mere adjective).↩}

^{2. For example, in a journal review article, a Globe and Mail commentary, and two books on populism.↩}

Here is my latest article, just published in the Journal of Management Inquiry, open source. It’s rather ambitious, but nothing else seems to be working!

If power tends to corrupt, then imagine what superpower can do. Three superpowers, each imbalanced in its own way—toward state communism (China), private capitalism (United States), and national populism (Russia)—vie with each other for global supremacy, all with a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons under the control of a single individual. Whether malevolent or mistaken, any one can provoke World War III. We shall, therefore, have to think outside the superpower box, for example, by favoring grounded communityship over centralized leadership, and global governance beyond antagonistic superpower.

You can read the full article in The Journal of Management Inquiry - a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the field of management with an emphasis on qualitative research.

Donald Trump is back again, hence this blog is back again, with minor editing from the 2018 version, to bring what little has changed up to date.

Can a loose cannon have a strategy? Sure, once we realize that we use the word strategy in a way that we never define it.

Strategy may be defined by intention, but it is realized in action.  An intended strategy looks ahead, as some sort of plan or vision into the future, whether or not it will actually be realized. A realized strategy looks back, to some pattern in action, namely consistency in actual behavior, whether or not it was intended. A company, for example, might intend to go up-market with higher prices, but then get into a price war and keep cutting prices, and this becomes its realized strategy.¹

How about Donald Trump? While president, with regard to migrants and refugees, he certainly had a strategy, intended as well as partly realized: keep them out and get them out. In other words, his actions were consistent with his stated intentions. With regard to much else, however, by the dictionary definition of strategy, as intended, Trump was a loose cannon, shooting off his mouth in all directions, frequently contradicting himself. Where’s the intended strategy in that?

As for realized strategy, a host of Trump’s actions in office spoke louder than his words, and differently, in fact, some of them rather consistently. Consider the following actions: picking fights with established allies while cozying up to autocrats; challenging existing trade agreements and long-standing alliances; repeatedly attacking the FBI, the Justice Department, and the intelligence agencies; emasculating the Department of State by leaving so many posts unfilled while proposing drastic reductions in its budget; and championing tax cuts that could weaken the government.

Pattern may be in the eyes of the beholder, but it is tough not to behold one here, however outrageous it may seem: Donald Trump appeared to be taking down the government of the United States of America. This was not the usual neo-con agenda of less government, more like a concerted attack on government itself.

Why would he, as president of the United States, do such a thing? In his own terms, what was in it for Donald Trump? Maybe more to the point, what was in store for Donald Trump if he didn’t do this? To answer these questions, please understand that realized strategy can be driven by the force of circumstance, even by the intentions of some other person able to exercise power over that actor.

Who might have been able to do that? The answer seems obvious enough. Were Vladimir Putin the president of the United States instead of Donald Trump, could he have been doing any better for Russia? “Trade wars are good,” said Donald Trump. Sure, for Putin’s Russia. Could Donald Trump’s realized strategy for America have been the execution of Vladimir Putin’s intended strategy for America?

The Mueller Inquiry indicated that the Russians were determined to see Donald Trump elected. But why would they want a loose cannon in the White House, such an obvious threat to their security? Because, in Putin’s pocket, Trump proved to have been, not a loose cannon at all, but a straight shooter—consistently in the direction of Russian interests.

What might Putin have had on Trump to evoke such obedience? Some revealing video shot in a hotel room, perhaps? Undisclosed evidence that Russia colluded to get Trump elected? The capacity to call in loans that would have bankrupted Trump’s businesses? Regardless of the reason, what mattered was what Trump did. What mattered more was the threat this posed to the security of all of us.

What matters now is that Trump could be on his way back into office. Re-elected, he would likely hand Ukraine to Putin on a silver platter. And then, what would happen with NATO? Expect anything from this looser and looser cannon. Who’s to stop him? Maybe Putin, to save Russia from a humiliated Trump who finally points the cannon his way?

© Henry Mintzberg 2024, 2018, with a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. i.e., no rights reserved.

I wrote at the end of the 2018 version: “Following on this, I am preparing an article entitled "Donald Trump is not the problem." It turned out to be five blogs in all, one of which might follow, likewise updated. 

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¹. I have written more extensively on this. See an earlier blog, also Of Strategies, deliberate and emergent, and the full version in Tracking Strategies.↩

In June of 2021, I posted a blog by this title. I adapt it here now, regrettably finding little that needs to be changed.

Yet again there is war in the Middle East. Yet again nothing will change until this conflict is recognized for what it is: between extremists and moderates no less than between Israelis and Palestinians. And yet again, as the extremists provoke each other by going to greater extremes, they further marginalize the moderates—those people who had managed to remain open to dialogue.

Anyone who fails to see the rights and wrongs on both sides is blind to what has been going on for decades. Blind on one side are those extremists determined to drive the Jews into the sea, and, on the other, those extremists who lay claim to territory because, millennia ago, it was Jewish for several centuries. Both are delusional; neither will get their way. But that does not stop them. Netanyahu is determined to wipe out Hamas, yet by traumatizing so many children, he is creating its next generation.

The extremists on the two sides have common cause, perhaps now more than ever. As Thomas Friedman put it in a 2021 comment in the New York Times, which could have been written today:  Netanyahu and Hamas have “each exploited or nurtured their own mobs… [Both] have kept power by inspiring and riding waves of hostility to ‘the other.’” The moderates on the two sides also have common cause: to get on with building their lives, peacefully. But the latest hostilities have shunted them further aside, or else driven more of them into the extreme camps.

This pairing of extremism on two sides is hardly restricted to the Middle East; it has become pervasive in so many areas of conflict. Every society has always had its extremists, but what we are seeing today is a proliferation of mindless extremism that is silencing moderation. Every once in a while, humankind goes mad. This is one of those times. Even some of the comfortable, educated people welcome the blatant lies of the demagogues, while much of the regular leadership, so-called, fails to get past repeating the mantra of "This has got to stop”, while nothing stops.

What is dumbing us down? This could be the question of our age. We had better answer it before the voices of moderation are drowned out altogether. To stop what is going on—not just for now—we shall have to figure out how to marginalize the extremists—to drown out their cacophony of stridency. Eventually, this happened in Northern Ireland, so why not elsewhere? Get the extremes off center stage.

To take control, the moderates will have to get their collective act together: to speak up, doggedly, even to humiliate the hate. Decisive could be the voices of women concerned about their children and youth concerned about their future. But their voices will have to be manifested in targeted pressures beyond generalized marches: for example, progressive protests that challenge intolerable behaviors.

How about this, to start: Ban the word “they”, as in “Look what they just did!” Who is this “they” anyway? Everyone on the other side? Or a few zealots? Even just one? Instead, how about “Look what we can do!”

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© Henry Mintzberg 2024 with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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I am a Canadian who usually votes literally Liberal. Had I been voting in America, it would probably have been straight-up Democrat. Here is why my vote for 2024 would go to Nikki Haley.

It’s not about “anyone but” Donald Trump. Joe Biden is that. It’s not just because she is decades younger than these men, and maybe smarter too, which could bring some fresh air to the White House. It’s mainly because America is in deep trouble, desperately in need of a change of course, and she is more likely than any other candidate to be able and willing to do that. I may not share much of Nikki Haley’s political views, but this concern pales in the light of America’s current crisis.

America suffers from a dangerous class divide, not between left and right so much as between the comfortable and the angry—essentially those who feel part of the status quo, from which they benefit, and those who resent it, including some who also benefit from it.

The comfortable do well, and live well, no few beyond what they contribute. Some of them don’t bother to see past their entitlements, while others do care about this divide. As for the angry, some of them are just-plain-angry, for whatever reason, even if they are well-off, while others have reason to be angry: they feel betrayed by a system that has been stacked against them, sometimes from Day 1. Even many in the middle class have legitimate worries—for example, about losing their job or incurring unbearable health care expenses—while many just struggle every day to make ends meet, as food costs and mortgage rates rise. Who can blame them for asking why, as their country gets richer, they get poorer?

Economists tell them about rising tides that lift all boats; what they see instead are the yachts rising ever higher while their dinghies, anchored below, are getting swamped. Hence, those who feel betrayed join those who are just-plain-angry to support Donald Trump. He has, after all, given them voice, even if, as president, not much more.

^{llustration by S. Brovkin.}

How did the great American dream—democracy of the people, by the people, for the people—come to this? A decent society maintains protections for its citizens, supplied significantly by government, with economic opportunities for advancement, supplied significantly by business. This used to be the United States: consider the welfare programs after World War II, in a flourishing economy. No longer, thanks to three fixes that have been breaking America.

First, in the 1980s, the Reagan presidency weakened government while decimating the unions. There were excesses to be corrected, for sure, but he didn’t stop with correction. As has become so common in the country, he took change to excess.

In 1989, the year that Ronald Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall fell, an event described by pundits at the time as “the triumph of capitalism,” even “the end of history.” Hardly so, on both counts. Soviet communism collapsed under the dead weight of its own imbalance: public sector government was far too powerful. How ironic that the very problem that brought down communism in Eastern Europe has since been bringing down democracy in America, just on the other side of the political spectrum. Capitalism has been triumphing since 1989, at the expense of government, and balance.

Then came the tipping point in 2010, when the Supreme Court, in its Citizens United decision, opened the floodgates of private funding of public elections. In effect, the Court legalized bribery in America. Legal corruption has had a field day ever since.

Today, politics in America, and many other countries, swings between left and right, leaving paralysis in the center, which enables private entitlements and individual rights to run rampant at the expense of shared responsibilities. Don’t ask for permission or even forgiveness in America today; just barrel ahead with whatever serves yourself.

Hence the need to recalibrate, and here is where Nikki Haley could come in. There is a natural alliance to be had, quite possibly a winning one, of the bitterly beleaguered with the comfortably concerned. This could bring back into the fold decent Americans who feel betrayed, and can be moved. Who better to promote such an alliance than an unusual president who is not quite establishment, yet astutely constructive. (A respected Canadian diplomat who worked with Nikki Haley describes her as a great interlocker.)

Of late, the pundits have been pondering Haley’s sudden escalation of attacks on Trump: what Machiavellian intentions can be behind this? I haven’t seen another explanation: that she could be genuinely concerned about the danger of this man being elected again. Imagine that!

By offering hope beyond despair, she might just be able to pull this off: to begin the process of restoring sensible balance in America. Joe Biden, in contrast, cannot stop the hemorrhaging—in fact, it has stopped him—let alone Donald Trump. I am not holding my breath for a Haley presidency, but I do know that American politics is forever a crapshoot: it ain’t over till it’s over.

Why would a Republican president create such an alliance?  Maybe because only a Republican president can do this, just as Richard Nixon was the one who could go to China. With politics having become so vile, the only way out may be to bypass its conventions: get past left versus right, to collaboration for the restoration of sanity. Why would responsible business support this? Because, for the sake of sustainability, business needs a country in balance, not one in perpetual crisis.

In the 1930s, in times of great strife, not so dissimilar to those now, Americans got a New Deal. Today, across the political spectrum, Americans need a Decent Deal.

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© Henry Mintzberg 2024. No rights reserved: This has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Part B.  Enough of MORE: We can do BETTER

Adapted from Enough of MORE: Better is Better, posted here on 9 November 2017.

^{llustration by Sergei Brovkin and DALL-E}

Imagine a country full of the corporations described in PART I, let alone a whole planet of them—all grabbing for MORE, no matter the consequences. We’re getting there.

By hogging resources that could be recycled to build vibrant new enterprises, these corporations are distorting our economies and debilitating our societies. Why can’t these corporations just die of quick strokes instead of prolonged cancers?

One-dimensional companies, like one-dimensional people, are pathological: they are an invasive species that has no business in a healthy society. Edward Abbey said it best in 1975: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Why build engaging enterprises only to jettison their engagement?

Imagine, therefore, a world of getting BETTER, instead of grabbing MORE—a world without excessive production and consumption, with all its destructive waste and warming. We can do BETTER.

So let’s go back to our entrepreneur, at the leadup to that fateful decision about the IPO. You have been a real leader as you built your enterprise. Why become a follower now, with yet another IPO? Must you really be beholden to the narrow demands of the stock market?

There are better ways to finance enterprise. (a) Find some patient, decent capital, that will allow you to grow responsibly and sustainably. (b) How about growing qualitatively instead of quantitively—give better quality, or better service, for which you can charge an honest premium? (c) Or do an IPO that keeps the analysts at bay by issuing two kinds of stock, as did Tata in India and many famous companies in Denmark, with family trusts that control a majority of the voting shares. (d) You can also convert to B or Benefit Corporation status, with a commitment—legal in one case, voluntary in the other—to respect social and environmental needs. My own publisher, Berrett-Koehler, successful in a difficult industry, took the legal, B Corp route. It actually offered its stock directly to its own authors and other stakeholders. (Disclosure: I am an owner of my publisher.) (e) This suggests another option—crowdfunding, where many people each buy a little bit of the ownership.

As for start-ups: (f) Consider relying on funding by loans and retained earnings, at least if you don’t need heavy investment. Cooperatives do it. (g) Indeed, how about creating the business as a cooperative, with one share each owned by the customers (as in a credit union bank), or by the suppliers (as in a farmers’ cooperative), or by the workers (as in the Mondragon Federation, with 81,000 worker and sales over €14 billion). By the way, even in free-market America, there are more cooperative memberships than people.

Here’s an idea that may not be as outrageous as it sounds: (h) Give your company away to its employees—you know, those people who actually care about the place, unlike the day traders who own it. Imagine carrying this kind of legacy to your grave. The John Lewis Partnership in the U.K. did this in 1950. Since then, while so many chains of department stores have come and gone, it continues to be the largest in the country. (i) One step farther is to dispense with ownership altogether and create a social enterprise in the first place— a business set up as a trust that is owned by no-one. Look around—social enterprises are proliferating.

Economists insist that MORE is the way forward. Nonsense. It is the way backward, economically as well as socially. We don’t have to destroy our progeny and our planet for the sake of this senseless dogma. Sure, we need development and employment, but responsible development, with robust employment. A healthy society is sustained by a diverse, responsible economy, not one driven by the mercenary force of one-dimensional growth. Stock markets have done enough damage.

There are many impoverished people all over the world who need more: more food, more employment, more housing, more security. But not MORE disparities of income, locally and globally.

We would do well, then, to shift our economies from MORE toward BETTER. While MORE is about quantities, BETTER is about qualities. They lift us up instead of dragging us down. We can invest our efforts and our resources in more durable products, healthier foods, personalized services, properly-funded education. Rather than reducing employment, a shift to BETTER can enhance it, with higher paying jobs in more beneficial enterprises. When we work better, we feel better, and so we do better, and thus live better.

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© Henry Mintzberg 2023. No rights reserved: This has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

PART A. The Scenario that is Killing our Companies

Adapted from Enough of MORE: Better is Better, posted here on 9 November 2017.

^{llustration by Sergei Brovkin and DALL-E}

I am finding it increasingly difficult to trust many of the large enterprises with which I deal—retailers, phone companies, airlines, others.  Some I find trustworthy, many I don’t.

For example, I shop at Costco, in which I have full faith. Just about everything that I have experienced there, consistent with what I read about the place, has left me with the impression that they are working for me. So if I see something there that fits my need, I just buy it. No investigation.

Not so Amazon. Their website is a free-for-all, with prices for the same product all over the place, plus little tricks here and there, like discovering after I ordered something in blue that it’s twice the price of what was displayed in gray. Amazon’s tagline should be: “Buyer beware!” So I shop there only when I must, annoyed that I have to investigate everything very carefully, while I wait for a convenient competitor to arise. (Amazon beware: I am not alone.) 

Why is this happening? I put it down to “the dumbest idea in the world.” So declared Jack Welch, the revered chief of General Electric (until he left), who a decade earlier with his fellow CEOs famously championed the idea called shareholder value, which has much to do with shareholders but nothing to do with values.

Only the shareholders count, not the customers, not the workers, not the local community. And count these shareholders do, every quarter. Miss the targets in one quarter, and the pressures arise to make up for it in the next—for example, by throwing a few thousand workers to the wolves of Wall Street, or finding some clever new way to rip off the existing customers. (Who says the airlines aren’t creative? They are masters at inventing new add-on changes for existing services.) 

Consider this scenario, all too common in the business world today.

Stage I: Creating the enterprise 

You have a compelling idea and lots of energy, so you create an enterprise. You may not have much money, but with the help of an understanding local banker, alongside your own sweat capital, you succeed. Your customers are delighted, your employees are engaged, you take great pride in having built a decent company within your local community, and the economy benefits too. Win-Win-Win-Win.

As the enterprise grows, however, you become concerned.  What if you get hit by a truck?  Or you wish to retire in the manner beyond that to which you have become accustomed. Or you are determined to grow faster than your existing resources will allow. Your financial friends tell you to do an IPO, an Initial Public Offering: cash out, and get the cash in. Let outside shareholders fund faster growth. It sounds good, so you agree. This becomes the turning point.

Stage II: Grabbing MORE  

The first sign of trouble is the realization that, while you just wanted some more, the stock market is intent on grabbing MORE. It doesn’t care about your ideas or your customers or your workers, except as a means for relentless, one-dimensional growth—for the sake of that Shareholder Value. You are running a publicly-traded company now, so you must keep feeding the beast.¹

As a consequence, a different feeling is enveloping your enterprise, replacing its sense of community. The mercenaries have taken over. The analysts are analyzing, the day traders are trading, the sharks are circling, the stock market is demanding—better performance every three months. Every three months! How can anybody manage a company this way? Was that IPO really worth it?

But it’s too late. Anyway, you are getting greater growth, albeit accompanied by greater pressure. Eventually you find yourself running out of the usual customers, and it’s tough to get new ones with the old ideas, and to get new ideas with this new Value—no spirit, no soul. And so comes the key question: How to get MORE when there is no more to be had, at least not in the way that you built the enterprise?

Stage III:  Ravaging the enterprise  

The answers are all around you: just look at other IPOs. (1) Exploit the existing customers. Bamboozle pricing is a good idea—customers can’t figure it out. And how about nickle and diming the customers—charge for everything conceivable. (“Will it be a gratuity of 20% or 25% for this automated service?”) (2) Trash the brand, to bring in new customers: sell it to those who were not willing to pay for the high-end quality of which you used to be so proud. In other words, get MORE by giving less. (3) If you can’t increase the revenues, you can certainly reduce the costs: cut maintenance, cut research, cut everything out of sight, except the executive perks. (4) And don’t forget to squeeze the workers, by putting them on short-term contracts at lower pay, without benefits. Better still, fire the whole lot of them and outsource. To hell with your community within its community. (5) And when all else fails: Diversify. Get into all kinds of new businesses you don’t understand. So what: you’re big now, with lots of money to throw at them. After all, the market analysts love the drama of mergers, until they flop—which so many do.

Stage IV: Ravaging society and self 

Your enterprise has now become a great global corporation, with obligation to no country, least of all your own, where it no longer pays taxes anyway. So why not go whole hog, so to speak? Do well by doing bad: (6) Collude with your competitors to create a cartel, or better still, buy them out altogether—in the name of competition. (7) And, in the name of free enterprise, lobby governments all over the globe to grant subsidies to your industry, also to rid it of those annoying regulations. (8) If you do eventually go bankrupt, which can happen to companies that exploit, fear not: you have become “too big to fail.” Thanks to your political donations, the government you betrayed will bail you out, shifting the costs of your failure to society at large (a grand example of what economists, right in step with these shenanigans, call an “externality”).

One day you wake up to the realization that, above all, you have been ravaging yourself. “Could I have been responsible for all this, by doing that IPO? I used to love my business. We had a great time serving the customers I worked so hard to keep. I had pride in our place, our products, our people. Now the customers write me nasty emails and the workers glare at me when I see them (which is rarely). For what reason have I cashed in my legacy: to amass all this money that I can’t even spend?”

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Coming next:  Enough of MORE: We can do BETTER (Part B)

© Henry Mintzberg 2023. No rights reserved: This has a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

^{1. In March of 2015, a deranged pilot flew a Germanwings airplane into the face of a mountain, murdering 150 people. Just over a month later, a New York Times article reported from a shareholders’ meeting that “at a time when Lufthansa faces urgent commercial challenges…many shareholders expressed concern...that the Germanwings tragedy risks detracting management from its turnaround efforts.” One portfolio manager claimed that Lufthansa management “will have to come back to reality.” The murder of 150 people was apparently a distraction; reality is getting back to creating Value for shareholders.↩}

As the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Milton Friedman winds down, might the dogma of his doctrine finally wind down too? Or shall we continue to believe that greed is good, markets are sufficient, and governments are suspect?

Fifty-two years ago, Friedman published “A Freedman Doctrine: The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” (in the New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1970; his book Capitalism and Freedom followed in 1962). Six years later, he won the so-called Nobel Prize in Economics.

Thirty years ago, I wrote a critique of this doctrine (published in my book Power In and Around Organizations). Time to try again. I excerpt from the original here, with minor editing, beginning with Friedman’s most famous passage.

… in a free society … “there is one and only one social responsibility of business―to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase the profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” (1970: 33, 126, quoting from 1962: 133)

Friedman referred to corporate social responsibility as a “fundamentally subversive doctrine” promoted by businesspeople who serve as " unwilling puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades” (1970: 126,33). Arguably, that is what the Friedman doctrine itself has been doing for five decades, by offering an either/or choice between two ideologies: subversive socialism and free enterprise. In this world of black and white, there could be no middle ground. This doctrine was based on three questionable assumptions—technical, economic, and political.

Technical Assumption: The fallacy of shareholder control. Among the technical assumptions of this doctrine are (a) that shareholders will be willing to control the corporation formally, (b) that they, in fact, can, and (c) that such control will make a difference.
     For quite some time, the trends in stock ownership seem to refute the first two assumptions. Many shareholders see their role as suppliers of capital in search of a stable return; if they do not find it in one place, then they simply move on to another. It has been easier to change their stock than the behavior of the large corporation. In effect, a free market does exist in stock ownership, and it serves to detach ownership from control.
     As for formal shareholder control, specifically through the board of directors in the widely held corporation, most directors lack the time and information necessary to exercise close control of the management. At best, they name the chief executive, to whom they leave the making of specific decisions.

Economic Assumption: The fallacy of free markets. The second set of assumptions rests on the conventional views of economic theory. At the limit, this postulates the existence of free markets and full competition, unlimited entry, open information, consumer sovereignty, labor mobility, and so on. The debate over whether or not all of this is myth has raged long and hard, and both sides have scored points. Evidence can be found in industrial societies of both extremes, from the competitive grain merchant to the monopolistic power utility. One point, however, favors the skeptics: the larger the corporation, the more it can manipulate the market.
     In 1776, Adam Smith wrote: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages” (1937: 14). One wonders what he would write today in the light of the immense size and market power of so many of the world’s largest corporations. How would Smith have responded to the massive use of advertising expenditures to restrict entry into an industry, and the forming of cartels?
     We now have technologies that require massive investments to come online. We have governments granting huge contracts for defense equipment. In such cases, the thought of returning to arm’s length competitive markets―of corporations coming and going like Adam Smith’s brewers―while perhaps desirable, seems rather quaint.
     As for the assumptions of the sovereignty of the consumer and the mobility of the worker, again something has gone wrong on the way to the market. Freidman asserted: “The political principle that underlines the market mechanism is unanimity. In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate” (1970: 126). If only…
    When the corporation knows more than its clients do, there is room for deception. A good deal of advertising can be described as manipulative in nature, that is, designed not to inform but to affect― to create emotional need or dependency. To the extent that this kind of advertising works―expressly as it is designed to― then to use Friedman’s terms, it coerces the consumer and evokes involuntary cooperation, thereby distorting consumer sovereignty. 
    As for the mobility of the worker, to argue that they cannot be coerced by the large hierarchical organization―that he or she can always change jobs―is a little bit like saying that if the tree does not like the soil where it is rooted, it is free to move on. The employee makes a financial and an emotional commitment to a community and a job—far more than the vast majority of the shareholders. He or she may have roots in a factory town, may have skills unique to the company. The decision to change jobs is hardly a casual one to the average employee. In an ironic twist of conventional economic theory, the worker is the one who typically stays put, thus rendering false the assumption of labor mobility, while the shareholder is the mobile one, thus spoiling the case for owner control.

Political Assumptions: The fallacy of isolated economic goals pursued by enterprises that are private. This final set of assumptions underlying Friedman’s position are also ideologic in nature, but more explicitly so. These are the essentially political assumptions that the corporation is amoral, society's instrument for providing goods and services, and more broadly, that a society is “free” and “democratic” so long as its leaders are elected by universal suffrage and do not interfere with the activities of business.
     At the basis of Friedman’s argument is the assumption of a sharp distinction between social and economic goals, the one to be pursued by elected leaders, the other by private business people. This distinction ignores the reality in favor of tidy conceptualization. Social and economic consequences are inextricably intertwined in the strategic decisions of large corporations: hence many of these decisions cannot be described as amoral so much as the vehicles of an economic morality. In effect, Friedman ignored three fundamental arguments:
     The first is that, in the world of corporate activity, means and ends interact. The corporation is not just a machine that ingests resources at one end and discharges products and services at the other with a certain level of efficiency. Along the way, all kinds of social events take place, with both positive and negative consequences for the society at large. Jobs get created and rivers get polluted, buildings get built and workers get injured, some individuals rise to their full potential and the talents of others get wasted.
     Some of these social “externalities” can be measured in economic terms, with the result that the corporation can be penalized or induced financially to respond to society's wishes—if governments so wish, and are not held prisoners of corporate lobbying. But many cannot, and so society must find means that do not have to work through the profit mechanism.
     The second criticism of the political assumptions focus not on specific behaviors of the single corporation but on the influence of the whole corporate collectivity. When Adam Smith wrote that the pursuit of self-interest promotes the “public interest,” he had something very special in mind, as did Friedman―society’s economic goals. Social goals were to be left to another sector. But to many critics, that neat division of labor has proved inequitable; the cards are stacked in favor of the private sector: the  economic goals of society dominate the social ones.
     The final political criticism is perhaps the most fundamental: Why the owners? If the power of the giant corporation is to be legitimized, why should it be concentrated in one group of influencers? Such control would only restrict the enormous benefits of corporate power to one already privileged group, and in the process reinforce society’s economic goals. Besides, property is not an absolute right in society: in a fundamental sense, the shareholders no more own the corporation than do the secretaries or the customers. Society's laws have defined one kind of ownership, and society’s institutions―judicial system, police forces, and so on― have protected it. That same society has every right to change the definition of ownership if it so chooses, to be more inclusive. Many of the laws pertaining to the giant corporation developed before it did. Maybe now is the time to make laws suited to the power it has attained.
     Who, then, should control the corporation? Conventional economic theory sees ownership as the reward of endeavor. He who exerted the energy to build the empire should own it. That is an appealing argument, to reward success. But how about the builder’s progeny: Should they own the corporation because they happened to be born into the right family? How about the stock market operator who did something clever one day? Should one clever stunt in the stock market count for more than forty years of sweat in the foundry?
     Increasingly, the debate over who should control the corporation is addressing fundamental questions of democracy. What is that word supposed to mean in a highly developed society? Should it be restricted to formal government, or broadened to encompass any institution that has significant influence on the citizens’ daily life? Should a society be called democratic if these citizens must spend one-third of their awake hours in institutions which are not democratic, in which they are “subordinates” to “superiors”, ultimately to a handful people at the “top” selected by like-minded people?
     To conclude, the Friedman doctrine rests on some rather shaky assumptions. It seems quaint in a world of giant corporations, managed economies, and dispersed shareholders, not to mention one in which the collective power of the corporations is coming under increasing scrutiny, in which the distinction between economic and social goals is being readdressed, and in which fundamental questions are being raised about the role of the corporation in a society that claims to be democratic.
  _______________________________________________

This is adapted from Chapter 33 of Power In and Around Organizations (pp. 632-644), in a section of the book called “Who Should Control the Corporation?” The book is out of print, but can be accessed free of change in PDF form. See also RebalancingSociety.org and Donald Trump is not the Problem.

Consider the power of a comma. In a letter to the European Union on 29 May 2017, British Prime Minister Theresa May wrote that “Perhaps now more than ever, the world needs the liberal, democratic values of Europe.” With the comma, this statement might have been true. But how about without it? We need democratic values that are liberal, but do we need Liberal Democracy?

My Oxford Dictionary lists various definitions for “liberal”, the first two diametric opposites: (1) “favoring individual liberty and limited government involvement in economic affairs”, (2) “favoring…a significant role for the state in matters of economics and social justice”, and (3) “open-minded, not prejudiced.” Many eminent liberals and conservatives alike believe that we can have all three—liberal markets, liberal societies, and liberal minds—this they call the “free world.” Conservatives, in fact, believe we get them in sequence: liberating our economies liberates our societies which liberates our minds.

In other times and places, especially to get past autocratic regimes, Liberal Democracy worked, more or less. A rising tide of economic growth did raise many boats. Now, however, the yachts on top are swamping the dinghies below, as avaricious private interests use their power to dominate their workers and customers, and especially our governments. In the United States, the great Liberal Democracy, the Supreme Court legalized bribery by opening the floodgates to private donations in public elections. Many economies have thus become liberal to the point that they are undermining democracy and closing minds. The enterprises are free, but how about the people?

Globally, liberal markets empower corporations, which are restricted by no countervailing power. There is no substantial global government to speak of; indeed, the most powerful international agencies—the WTO, IMF, OECD, and World Bank—are cheerleaders for this economic form of globalization. This has enabled global corporations to ride roughshod over national governments, for example, by forcing them to keep reducing taxes on private wealth. Thus starved for funds, these governments have had to cut social services while turning to regressive forms of taxation, such as sales taxes, which has further squeezed the very people already brought to their knees by other practices of globalization, such as the weakening of unions and job security.

As a consequence, a new tide has been rising in the world—of populist governments elected by angry, frustrated people. Anything but Liberal Democracy. Populism may be worse, but it does express a somewhat justified outrage. Even the British recently challenged Liberal Democracy by turfing out a new prime minister intent on cutting taxes for the rich, in the name of that bogus rising tide.

Hence the time has come for that comma, to liberate our minds and our societies from that oxymoron called Liberal Democracy, in order to rethink democracy—or maybe just to remember that it is about free people, and the governments that represent them, above free enterprise. For my perspective on how we might proceed, please see RebalancingSociety.org.

© Henry Mintzberg 2022.

We are obsessed with leadership, yet that is what has taken us into the current crisis, and seems incapable of getting us out of it. What if we entertain the unspeakable thought that leadership is the problem more than the solution?

Putin is a leader, at least in the opinion of most Russians, as is Zelensky, more justifiably, in the opinion of most Ukrainians and people elsewhere. Meanwhile, Biden and many other leaders have been working earnestly to stop Putin. Yet he carries on.

In this nuclear age, leadership empowers one individual to destroy us all. For whoever misses this, Putin keeps reminding us that he has that one last card to play. (In fact, he has been playing it from the beginning. Where would he be without it?) The fact that our survival lies in the hands of such a person, or anyone else’s for that matter, is sheer madness—based on the harebrained belief that we must get them before they get us. Someone, somewhere, someday will play that card for real, perhaps even a decent leader who makes a catastrophic mistake. Shall we just carry on, hoping for the best? Or act, finally, to avert World War III instead of delaying it again?

Leaving this aside, one leader makes a disastrous decision, and in the face of repeated failure, in a country incapable of correcting him, persists, throwing the entire world into turmoil. Call this Leadership 21st Century style!

We talk incessantly about thinking outside the box, yet rarely do we act outside our boxes. Deep as this crisis is, I see no reframing, no rethinking, no proposals commensurate with the severity of the situation. Just the same old, same old… It’s not that unorthodox ideas don’t exist; it’s that they don’t get through, to the mainstream media and the established leadership, hence to public opinion.

Our infantile fixation on leadership boxes us in in two respects. First, leaders generally attain power by conforming to some established set of norms, not bucking them. Why do we keep expecting established power to take us past established thinking? And second, when we say the word “leadership”, we focus on an individual—not us, but him or her. Is there nothing more to changing collective behavior than individual initiative?

There is. Communityship can function beyond leadership: collective action by concerned people on the ground, beyond some individual at the “top”. There can be wisdom in these crowds, quite different even from that of wise leaders. This is the time to tap into it.

Putin has been unnerving us, so how do we unnerve Putin, and the likes of him elsewhere?  Not by marches, but by actions. How about this? In 2019, when a corrupt senator in Paraguay escaped impeachment, a group of women, fed up with the country’s enduring corruption, began pelting his house with eggs. Eventually the smell got to him, and he resigned.

Imagine all the people around the world who are capable of throwing eggs at Putin, in one way or another. 20 to 30 million Russians live abroad and untold numbers of other people have friends, relatives, and business acquaintances in Russia. All are capable of speaking truth to people, about the smell emanating from the Kremlin. 

Imagine a relentless campaign that makes clear the stakes of this conflict to millions of Russians, one-by-one, with polite reminders that, soon, they too will be suffering at the hands of their leader: an army of authenticity that reaches over Putin's propaganda machine in every way conceivable—by email, mail, calls, whatever. Every time his censors block one channel, find two more.

Putin may be villainous, but he is human. There has to be something that can get to him, something that he cherishes beyond his mythical empire. Somewhere someone must know something particular about him, or else has a particularly clever way to deal with such bullies. (Read Blueprint for Revolution, by Srdja Popovic, for a wealth of possibilities.) Whatever works could become a model for popular movements to bring down autocrats everywhere.  (#UnnervePutin)

This silly little example in Paraguay may not be as silly or as little as it may seem. Many an idea that first appeared to be incongruous has proved to be eventful. How about this, more ambitious?

All the leading international associations are made up of establish powers and led by superpowers—the G7, G20, five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and especially NATO, that contributed to the current crisis. Is this leadership also boxing us in? The Economist Index of Democracies lists 21 nations as “full democracies”, most of them small, such as Uruguay, Mauritius, and Costa Rica. No superpower makes it to this list, while Japan, the largest country that does, is only the eleventh most populous in the world.  What if these countries formed a D21, an association of SmallerPowers, as an alternate voice, for world peace instead of national jockeying? 

Between women throwing eggs and a community of SmallerPowers lies a world of ideas, one of which could put us on the road forward, instead of backward. To survive, we may need to listen to the voice of communityship instead of the bluster of leadership.

© Henry Mintzberg 2022, with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, i.e., no rights reserved,
(with a minor revisions on 06 June 2022).

The closest model for the kind of change that the world needs now is probably the Reformation of the 16th century.

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Here we have the biggest joke in climate change. But climate change is no joke, so we had better stop planning and start acting.

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Yet again there is a cease fire in the Middle East. Yet again nothing will change, at least until this conflict is recognized for what it has increasingly become: between extremists and moderates more than between Israelis and Palestinians. And yet again the extremists on both sides have claimed victory, and with good reason: by further engaging each other, they further marginalize the moderates—meaning those people who remain open to dialogue.

Anyone who fails to see the rights and wrongs on both sides is blind to what has been going on for decades. Blind on one side are those extremists determined to drive the Jews into the sea, and, on the other, those extremists who lay claim to territory because it was Jewish for several hundred years, millennia ago. Both are delusional; neither will get their way. But that does not stop them.

The extremists have common cause, perhaps now more than ever. As Thomas Friedman put it in a recent comment in the New York Times:  Netanyahu and Hamas have “each exploited or nurtured their own mobs to prevent…a cabinet that for the first time would have included Israeli Jews and Israeli Arab Muslims together…. [Both] have kept power by inspiring and riding waves of hostility to ‘the other.’” Yet Hamas and Netanyahu “don’t talk. They don’t need to. They each understand what the other needs to stay in power and consciously or unconsciously behave in ways to ensure that they deliver it.”

Yet again the concerned “leadership” of the world lined up to repeat the mantra of “This has got to stop.” We get that. How will it stop, not for now—for good? Greater courage to speak truth to all the extremes would help, better still, more decisive support for the voices of moderation, to drown out the cacophony of extremism. Decency needs all the help it can get.

The moderates on both sides have common cause: to get on with building peaceful lives. To take control, they will have to get their collective act together: to speak up, loud and clear. The influence of women concerned about their families and youth concerned about their futures could be decisive. But such voices will have to be manifested in more than marches. Targeted pressure will be necessary, the likes of which we have rarely seen since Saul Alinsky was community organizing in the United States decades ago. They can engage in progressive protests that challenge intolerable behaviors, for one hour more each day. They can humiliate the hate. They can get clever.

This kind of conflict is hardly restricted to the Middle East; it has become pervasive. Every society has always had its extremists. What we are seeing now, even in the United States and the United Kingdom, is a proliferation of mindless extremism that is silencing moderation while coopting more moderates. Many people today have good reason to be aggrieved, thanks to the imbalances that impede their capacity to live decent lives. They have had it with the income disparities and the job insecurities. But how about the swelling numbers of comfortable people who have also become mindlessly extreme, so strident, so shrill?

What is dumbing down so many people? How to explain the intense, unprovoked angst and anger in the world, with its propensity to welcome the blatant lies of the demagogues? This could be the question of our age. We had better answer it before the voices of moderation are drowned out altogether.  

© Henry Mintzberg 2021 with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 

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Smoke may be playing a significant role in the spread of this pandemic, not least in India, with its many funeral pyres. I post this blog because I believe that all of us, our Indian friends especially, are in desperate need of informed inference to reframe our approach to this pandemic.

“Smoke and mirrors” is an old expression, in reference to magicians’ use of them to deceive their audiences. But in this pandemic, might smoke act a mirror that sends the virus back unto the local population?

Last year, after reading an account about an elevated incidence of influenza when farmers in Brazil were burning their trees, I started noticing the presence of smoke in a surprising number of prominent local outbreaks of COVID-19: in and around hog plants in the United States that smoke pork, in a Chinese open-air market that roasts meats, in the American embassy in Saudi Arabia after a birthday BBQ, in the closure of several fire stations in Toronto, perhaps also in vaping and other forms of smoking on college campuses (There has also been speculation about wildfire smoke.)  Particularly curious, the outbreaks in some of the towns near the hog plants were more extensive than in the plants themselves, thus suggesting that the smoke, more than the workers, might have been carrying in the virus? (Our investigation suggested that the towns were downwind from the plants.)

Smoke is, of course, one kind of air pollution. A study in Italy early last year reported that the virus could adhere to particles in polluted air, and thus possibly be carried by that air, also that the early outbreaks in Italy tended to occur in regions of extensive air pollution. (Support for this comes from Peaks of Fine Particulate Matter May Modulate the Spreading and Virulence of COVID-19.)

With the horrific spread of the pandemic in India right now comes the obvious question of its possible association with smoke from the funeral pyres of people who died of COVID-19. To put it more bluntly, might cremating the dead be sickening the living? Are we seeing a particularly vicious circle here?

What might be the association between cremation and infection? Most obviously, the virus can spread in the crowd of mourners, much as had been seen in some funerals in New York City, except here possibly carried farther by the smoke. It is possible that a few people whose health has been compromised by living for a long time in polluted air could get infected by a low dose of aerosols carried in the smoke and then go on to infect many other people through direct droplet transmission.

But how about the corpses themselves? I was told by physician-researchers I consulted that the virus is unlikely to be emitted by the deceased, and even if it was, would be inactivated in a minute or two by the heat—although that might be time enough to bond with the smoke and escape the heat. (A “fact check” article in India likewise questioned this association, while nonetheless referring to a WHO guidance that “any body fluids leaking from orifices in the cadaver must be contained”, also quoting an advisory of a local government that there is no risk of infection at cremations if “the protocol prescribed is followed.” Sound familiar?)

All of this may not constitute proof, but surely it indicates the need for investigation, and more so, action to test the effects of curbing smoke—in India and elsewhere. Some obvious actions could shed light on this quite quickly. Where religious belief would preclude the outright cessation of open-air cremation, greater attention to masking and distancing at such events would obviously be in order—perhaps with no greater success than in some other countries. Alternately, some of the pyres could be moved away from populous areas, or, at the very least, the mourners could be kept upwind.

Could this itself be smoke and mirrors? Orthodox scientists might be inclined to say so, even that posting such ideas is irresponsible. After all, the dismissal of outlying ideas has been a feature of this pandemic from the very beginning.  (Witness the WHO’s early refusal to recognize asymptomatic transmission of the virus and its continued resistance to recognizing aerosol transmission.) Under the current circumstances, however, I believe it is irresponsible to dismiss inferences that could be plausible, or else to insist on protracted research before any investigative action can be taken. The use of normal science to supress postulation is smoke and mirrors.

For the full story, please see Pandemic and Pollution.
© Henry Mintzberg 2021 with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. The new sentence “It is possible that a few people whose health has been compromised by living for a long time in polluted air might be able to get infected by a low dose of aerosols carried in the smoke and then go on to infect many other people through direct droplet transmission.” was added on May 2.

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Getting past the pandemic

Or, read the full story.

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Recently, with much fanfare, the Business Roundtable—the association of CEOs of major American companies—discovered stakeholders beyond shareholders. Or, at least, rediscovered them, again. For this roundtable, what goes around really does come around. Here is an excerpt from each of its four proclamations over the years. Together, they are telling.

This year, The Purpose of a Corporation avowed that “While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.”  

In 2012, the Principles of Corporate Governance avowed that “it is the responsibility of the corporation to deal with its employees, customers, suppliers, and other constituencies in a fair and equitable manner…”¹

In contrast, the 1997 Statement of Corporate Governance declared: “The notion that the board must somehow balance the interests of stockholders against the interests of other stakeholders fundamentally misconstrues the role of directors. It is, moreover, an unworkable notion because it would leave the board with no criterion for resolving conflicts between interests of stockholders and of other stakeholders or among different groups of stakeholders.”

Coming back around to 1981, the Statement on Corporate Responsibility avowed that “Balancing the shareholder’s expectations of maximum return against other priorities is one of the fundamental problems confronting corporate management. …giving enlightened consideration to balancing the legitimate claims of all its constituents, a corporation will best serve the interest of the shareholders.”

If the CEOs were right in 1981, why did they go wrong in 1997? And if they reversed that wrong in 2012, why do they have to repeat that reversal now? The abuses of Shareholder Value did not exactly diminish in the last seven years, so why should we take the latest proclamation any more seriously?

Most telling is the claim in 1997 about having no criterion for resolving conflicts among different stakeholders. How about judgment? Did the CEOs of America lose their judgment in 1997? Jack Welch apparently did. I have been told that this renowned CEO of GE—no longer quite so renowned with his company’s subsequent performance—championed that 1997 statement. Then in 2009, he came around, declaring Shareholder Value to be the “the dumbest idea in the world.” Whoops, looks like he made a little mistake in 1997. Sorry about that!

Will the CEOs of America regain that judgment now, so that their stakeholders will get a fair shake this time around? We had the words in 2012; will we get the actions now?

Here’s an idea for action: Reserve half the seats on the board of American corporations for elected representatives of the workers. No, I have not lost my mind. I am simply stating what Germany did in 1976:  By law, employee representatives have been filing 10 of the 20 board memberships in companies of more than 2000 people. The German economy has hardly been suffering ever since.

If the CEOs of corporate America don’t like this idea, here’s another: Get rid of executive compensation schemes and quarterly reports that drive their attention toward short-run gains in the stock price, so often at the expense of worker security. And another:  Stop lobbying for tax changes that favor corporate shareholders over other people in society. And, while you are at it, support a living minimum wage for workers. How about ending the lobbying that has being doing so much damage to American democracy? The possibilities are endless…for leaders who deserve that label.

These days, words go round and round while behaviors carry on. Being bombarded with proclamations and so much else, we lose memory, alongside judgment. The CEOs of corporate America now have the opportunity to come around finally: put their actions where their mouthpiece is.

© Henry Mintzberg 2019. For my own record on this, please see "Who should control the corporation?” (1984: 517-645; book out of print but available as a pdf free download)

¹ Quoted in “Why Corporate Social Responsibility isn’t a piece of cake”, but removed from the Business Roundtable site.

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So…can a loose cannon have a strategy? Sure, once we realize that we use the word strategy in a way that we never define it.

Strategy may be defined by intention, but it has to be realized in action.  An intended strategy looks forward, as some sort of plan or vision into the future—whether or not it will be realized. A realized strategy looks back, to some existing pattern in action, namely consistency in behavior—whether or not it was intended.

How about Donald Trump? With regard to migrants and refugees, Muslim and Mexican, he has certainly had strategy, intended as well as partly realized: keep them out and get them out. In other words, his actions have been consistent with his stated intentions: With regard to much else, however, by the dictionary definition of strategy, Trump has been a loose cannon, shooting off his mouth in all directions, frequently contradicting, not only reason, but also himself. Where’s the strategy in that?

As for realized strategy, a host of Trump’s actions speak louder than his words, and differently, in fact rather consistently. Consider the following ones: picking fights with established allies while cozying up to autocrats; challenging existing trade agreements and long-standing alliances; repeatedly attacking the FBI, the Justice Department, and the intelligence agencies; emasculating the Department of State by leaving so many posts unfilled while proposing drastic reductions in its budget, alongside that of other major departments; and championing tax cuts that could paralyze the government and wreak havoc in the society.

Pattern may be in the eyes of the beholder, but it is tough not to behold this one, however outrageous it may seem: Donald Trump appears to be taking down the government of the United States of America. This is not your usual neo-con agenda of less government; it looks to be a concerted attack on the American state itself. 



Why would the president of the United States do such a thing? In his own terms, what’s in it for Donald Trump? Maybe more to the point, what’s in store for Donald Trump if he does not do this? To answer these questions, please understand that realized strategy need not be driven by an actor’s own intentions; it can be driven by the force of circumstance, even by the intentions of some other person able to exercise power over that actor.

Who might be able to do that? The answer seems evident enough. Were Vladimir Putin president of the United States, could he be doing any better for Russia? “Trade wars are good” said Donald Trump. Sure, for Putin’s Russia. It looks like Donald Trump’s realized strategy is executing Vladimir Putin’s intended strategy.

On the other side of this coin, the Mueller Inquiry has indicated that the Russians were determined to see Donald Trump elected. But why would they want a loose cannon in the White House, such an obvious threat to their security? Because, in Putin’s pocket, Trump has not been a loose cannon at all, but a straight shooter—consistently in the direction of Russian interests. (Has his recent rash of actions in the Ukraine, Syria, and the sending home of Russian diplomates changed that? Coming suddenly and all together, they look suspicious: a smokescreen to obscure his real agenda?)

What might Putin have on Trump? Some video shot in a hotel room? Undisclosed evidence of Russian collusion in the Trump election? More likely, the capacity to call in loans that would bankrupt Trump’s businesses. Regardless of the reason, what matters is Trump’s behavior. What matters more is the threat this poses to the security of all of us.

© Henry Mintzberg 2018. Following on this, I am preparing an article entitled “Donald Trump is not the problem.”

[Another version of this was posted on hbr.org last week under the title “The U.S. cannot be run like a business.”]

Dear Mr. President

As a neighbor in Canada who has long worked with businesses and governments around the world, I have some important news for you. America is not suffering from too much government so much as from too much business―all over government. Please understand this to avoid pouring more oil on the fires of America, and this planet.

Business in its place is essential, just as is government in its place, which is not all over business. Now, however, thanks to you and your cabinet, business need no longer just lobby government to get its way; it is government. You were elected to challenge the establishment; will the executives who came into your cabinet from ExxonMobile and Goldman Sachs do that? They are the establishment: that other, more powerful business establishment that has now displaced the weaker political establishment.

This is an old problem now being carried to a new extreme. In the early days of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson expressed the hope that “we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength...” Instead, later in that century the U.S. Supreme Court recognised corporations as “persons” in the law. Not long after that, in the new century, President Teddy Roosevelt was railing about the power of corporate trusts in American society, and in the 1960s President Dwight David Eisenhower warned of the “unwarranted influence…by the military-industrial complex.” Nevertheless, in 2010 the Supreme Court gave those corporate persons the right to fund political campaigns to their heart’s content. When “free enterprise” in an economy becomes the freedom of enterprises as persons in a society, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, government of the real people, by the real people, for the real people perishes from the earth.

Should government even be run like a business, let alone by businesspeople? No more than that business should be run like a government, by civil servants. As you well know, when an entrepreneur says “Jump”, the response is “How high sir?” You are now finding out what happens when a U.S. president says “Jump”. So far, so bad. Governments are relentlessly subjected to a plethora of pressures that many businesses, especially entrepreneurial ones like your own, cannot easily understand.

Business has a convenient bottom line, called profit, which can easily be measured. What’s the bottom line in government, say for terrorism? (Countries listed? Immigrants deported? Walls built?) What’s the bottom line for climate change? (Do you really believe it is jobs created?)

Running government like a business has been tried again and again, only to fail again and again. You must remember the debacle in New Orleans when Homeland Security was run by a businessman…of sorts. How about when George W. Bush’s Secretary of the Army promised to bring in “sound business practice”? He came from Enron, just before its spectacular collapse.

In the 1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara introduced PPBS (Planning-Programming-Budgeting System) to run government like a business. The obsessive measuring led to the infamous body counts of the Vietnam War. That bottom line was about as low as it can get. Then in the 1980s came the “New Public Management”, a euphemism for old corporate practices: isolate activities, put a manager in charge of each, and hold him or her responsible for the measurable results. That might work for the state lottery, but how about foreign relations or education, let alone, dare I mention it, health care? And now, at your request, your own son-in-law heads yet another effort to run government like a business. Back he comes with that old buzzword of citizens as “customers.” (Al Gore was using this misguided metaphor when he was vice-president.) You know what? I am not a mere customer of my government, thank you, as if I buy services at arm’s length. I am an engaged citizen of my country.

The place of business is to supply us with goods and services; that of government, aside from protecting us from threats, is to help keep our marketplaces competitive and responsible. Do you really believe that recent American governments have been overdoing this job, let alone even doing it?

I have a little book for you, Mr. President, called Rebalancing Society. It contends that a healthy society balances the power of respected governments in the public sector with responsible businesses in the private sector and robust communities in what I call the plural sector (“civil society”). The most democratic nations in the world today function closest to such balance, including ours in Canada and those in Scandinavia, likewise your own when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the community “associations” that helped to maintain democracy in early America. Indeed, during the decades following World War Two, the U.S. was far better balanced, as it experienced striking prosperity and development—economic as well as social―despite high taxes and generous welfare programs. Now, however, the country has lost that balance, and needs the plural sector to offset the fruitless swinging back and forth between left and right—government interventions by the public sector and market forces in the private sector.

Think back to the Berlin Wall, Mr. President. That wall fell on our Western democracies, because we misunderstood what brought it down. The pundits of the West claimed that capitalism had triumphed. Not at all. Balance had triumphed.  While the communist states of Eastern Europe were utterly out of balance, on the side of their public sectors, the successful countries of the West retained a relative balance across the three sectors.

But with this misunderstanding, capitalism has been triumphing since the fall of that wall, and throwing America and many other countries out of balance the other way, in favor of their private sectors. Look around, Mr. President, at income disparities, climate change exacerbated by excessive consumption, and the unregulated forces of globalization running rampant around the globe. That is why we have seen votes like Brexit and your own, by distraught people unsure which way to turn, except against the “establishment”.

When enough people realize what has been going on, if not you, then a subsequent president, will have to restore the balance that made America great in the first place.

Sincerely

Henry Mintzberg
Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal

© Henry Mintzberg 2017. For elaboration of these arguments, please see Rebalancing Society…radical renewal beyond left, right, and center. Also my Harvard Business Review article “Managing Government, Governing Management”. 

Follow this TWOG on Twitter @mintzberg141, or receive the blogs directly in your inbox by subscribing here. To help disseminate these blogs, we also have a Facebook page and a LinkedIn page.

Donald Trump is not a new phenomenon in the United States, just an extreme form of an ongoing one. For years theatre has been prominent in the country’s public life, although never quite like this. This latest farce may be entertaining, but it could prove to be disastrous. The so-called “leader of the free world” will soon be a loose cannon loaded with nuclear warheads.

The winner of the presidency loses the election (although not, conveniently, in four key states—kind of makes you wonder).   The great tax evader is expected to stop the evasion of taxes. He accused his opponent of giving speeches to the very bankers who are staffing his new administration. A hunt is already underway in the Environmental Protection Agency for whoever has dared to protect the environment. And please welcome ”clean coal” back to an atmosphere near you.

This is quite literally business as usual. Just look at the stock market: it’s having a ball.

Business as usual began early in the Republic. It was barely a quarter century old when Thomas Jefferson expressed the hope that “we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength...” A half century later, Abraham Lincoln “tremble[d] for the safety of my country….  Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow…until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.… God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless.”

Instead, two decades later, the Supreme Court granted corporations the right to personhood. Not your usual personhood, however: corporate persons do not go to jail when they commit a crime (otherwise the ranks of the great enterprises would have been decimated by now). More recently, for anyone who missed its message, the Supreme Court granted these persons the right to fund political campaigns to their heart’s content. Do you think Brazil is corrupt? Its corruption is criminal, and is being prosecuted. The corruption in America is legal, and therefore beyond challenge: the U.S. Supreme Court legalized bribery.

There is noble America and there is nasty America: on one hand, the America of World War Two, the Marshall Plan, and the upholding of basic freedoms; on the other hand, the America of repeated incursions all over Latin America and into Vietnam and Iraq, and at home travesties from McCarthy to Trump.  Yet even rather liberal commentators have been blindsided by noble America. “Somewhere in the back of their minds, a lot of people seem to be realizing that the alternative to a United States–dominated world . . . is a leaderless world” (Thomas Friedman).¹ “To regain the identity it enjoyed during the Cold War, the United States ought to become the leader of a community of democracies…. [It] would still need to retain its military might, but this strength would serve to protect a just world order” (George Soros).² Shall we all sit back and hope that Friedman and Soros will not have to eat their words?

Guess what? Nasty America is on its way back in. Indeed, 2017 is looking to be the year of the bullies: Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Duterte, and the rest. Will people around the world who care about this planet and our progeny finally realize what has been going on and do something about it?

What has been going on is imbalance. Private sector forces now dominate the “free world” much as public sector forces dominated the communist world of Eastern Europe. In the name of globalization, “free enterprises” ride roughshod over free people and sovereign nations. Something is rotten in the state of democracy.

No wonder so many people are angry about globalization. The trouble is that they don’t know where to turn, so they vent their rage indiscriminately—in favor of the likes of Brexit, Trump, and Le Pen. The world is on fire and the inclination is to pour oil on it (all too literally in the case of climate change). Many of the more  established people don’t turn to reckless leadership; they are just waiting for corporate social responsibility to fix it—as if CSR will compensate for all the CSIrresponsibility we now see around us. These people should be taking tranquillizers (on patent). 

How to escape what Albert Einstein defined as insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”? There may, however, be a silver lining in the Trump election: it issues a wake-up call, that we shall have to do things differently, sooner or later. Given his latest Twitter pathology about the American nuclear arsenal, sooner looks better.

Doing things different is possible. Imagine, for example, a council, a coalition, and communities.³ The Security Council of the United Nations is an insecurity council, arguably a war council. All five permanent members have large arsenals of nuclear weapons and histories of bullying—whether in the form of colonialism or belligerent incursions. They are also the five largest exporters of armaments in the world. Aleppo is their most recent accomplishment. Imagine instead  a Peace Council, made up of democratic nations with no nuclear weapons and no recent history of belligerence. Vested with legitimacy by concerned people all over the world, such a council could shift the whole thrust of international relations.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) each have their own cause: human rights for Amnesty International, the environment for Greenpeace, the medical consequences of calamities for Doctors Without Borders. Yet these problems share common cause, namely the imbalance that distorts the world today. Imagine if a coalition of respected NGOs issued a compelling vision forward—a manifesto for action to restore balance—around which these concerned people everywhere, left and right, could coalesce.

One message of the Trump, Sanders, Brexit, and other votes is that never before have so many regular people been prepared to act on the resentment they feel. With such a vision to replace the deceptive rhetoric of populist politicians, there could emerge a groundswell of people in communities, connected around the world, intent on restoring decency and democracy. They could pressure their governments to legislate and regulate for better balance, promote an international Peace Council, and support businesses that act responsibly while targeting those (and governments) that do not. We should be using the marketplace, with boycotts, to let the sellers beware.

Is any of this utopian? All of it is. But that makes none of it impossible, not when the alternative is to hope for the best. Everything in Donald Trump’s behavior indicates that what we see is what we are going to get.

It must have seemed impossible in 1776 that a popular groundswell could create a new form of democracy that would change the world. Thomas Paine, pamphleteer for that effort, did write that: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And so they did. And so we can.

© Henry Mintzberg 2016. Some of these ideas are elaborated in my 2015 book Rebalancing Society. 

Follow this TWOG on Twitter @mintzberg141, or receive the blogs directly in your inbox by subscribing here. To help disseminate these blogs, we also have a Facebook page and a LinkedIn page.

We in Canada, alongside other people around the world, did not get to vote in the recent American election. Yet we are meant to suffer the international consequences of it. Shall we sit back, as usual, and watch events unfold, including the possibly catastrophic effects of climate change left unchecked?

Moreover, shall we continue to look on, in Aleppo and elsewhere, as communities are blown apart while a few great powers maneuver behind the scenes? Now another of these powers will have a bully at the helm—a loose cannon with his finger on the nuclear button. Bullies may admire each other, but what happens when they cross each other?

On the other hand, perhaps Donald Trump has done the world a great service, by bringing to a head long festering problems that can no longer be tolerated.

Enough of the Great Global Powers    Imagine a city with weak government and no police force. Gangs would roam the streets, seizing territory and battling with each other for advantage. Well, this is the world we live in today. Three political powers roam the globe, exercising their influence, while an economic force called globalization empowers the affluent of the world to ride roughshod over everyone else.

We all know about noble America, the defender of freedom, as in World War II and the Marshall Plan that followed. Nonetheless, we had better not forget about nasty America, with its wars in Vietnam and Iraq as well as its repeated incursions throughout Latin America. Are we about to experience another round of nasty America—America made great again? Power does corrupt, whether it speaks English, Russian, or Mandarin.

We may not choose the leaders of the great powers, but we can certainly challenge the outsized control that they, and globalization, exercise over our destinies. Consider a council, a coalition, and connected communities.

A Council of Peaceful Democracies    Five countries dominate the United Nations: the permanent members of the Security Council. This should be called the War Council, since all five have large arsenals of nuclear weapons and histories of bullying—whether in the form of colonialism or belligerent incursions—and are the five largest exporters of armaments in the world.

Imagine instead a Peace Council, of democratic countries with no nuclear weapons, no history of military incursions in recent times, and relatively insignificant exports of armaments.  

Does this sound impossible? It could be made possible simply by creating it. Imagine if Pope Francis, perhaps the most respected leader in the world, convened an initial meeting of several such countries, to define the mission and determine the membership of such a council. This could include countries that have been particularly active in peacekeeping (such as Sweden and Canada), democracies in South America and Africa (for example, Uruguay, Ghana, and Brazil when it gets its political act together), Costa Rica (which got rid of its armed forces in 1948), and perhaps South Korea, from Asia (once it resolves its current difficulties).

Before ridiculing this collection of peripheral powers, consider how many such countries there are, and the influence they could have when working together for a safer world. Get your head around this form of influence—peace in place of power—and the ridicule could instead be directed at the obstinate permanent membership of the Security Council.

Such a council could take positions on issues such as the inequitable distribution of wealth in the world and the recent demise of so many democracies. With no official status, or even one day with it, the power of such a council would  depend on the efforts of institutions and people on the ground.

A Coalition of Engaged NGOs   Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) abound in the world, each with its own mission. Amnesty International deals with human rights, Greenpeace with the environment, Doctors Without Borders with the medical consequences of calamities. Yet many of these problems share a common cause, namely the imbalances that pervade the world today: the domination of all things economic over anything social, the capacity of global corporations to intimidate sovereign governments, and the lop-sided influence of the three great powers. Imagine, then, a coalition of engaged NGOs that could champion the establishment of a compelling, constructive vision—a manifesto for balance—around which concerned people everywhere could coalesce.

Connected Communities of the “good folk”   One message of the Trump, Brexit, and other votes is that never before have so many people been prepared to act on the resentment they feel. What they have lacked, however, is this compelling vision to replace the deceptive rhetoric of populist politicians. That could provide a groundswell of collaboration among what can be called the “good folk” of the world—people concerned with decency and democracy.

Collaboration happens in communities, not networks. (If you doubt this, ask your Facebook “friends” to help paint your house.) Thus, the real force for change exists in community groups on the ground, albeit networked around the world. If Amnesty International alone has seven million members, think about how many other people now function in groups in particular communities, and how many more groups would form given a clear rallying call for change.

Well, then, what are we waiting for?   All the necessary elements are in place for a groundswell of global action: Peaceful nations perhaps now ready to work together; the mass media to highlight the excesses of our imbalanced world; the NGOs to articulate a compelling vision for change; community groups of concerned people determined to make the necessary changes; and the social media prepared to connect these communities into a worldwide movement.

These community groups could pressure their governments to legislate and regulate for better balance, to promote an international Peace Council, and to support businesses that act responsibly while targeting businesses as well as governments that do not. Think of how powerful the tool of boycotting would be—so well-honed by international alliances—when executed at the grass-roots level, across the globe.

Is this vigilante justice?  Not at all. It is making good use of the marketplace, a concept that corporations understand well, as does President-elect Donald Trump, not to mention Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. We do, after all, have the right not to buy, also to let the buyer be aware—and the seller too.

Am I dreaming in color? Sure, for good reason. The likely alternative could well be one of the nightmare scenarios that would destroy our planet and our progeny.

© Henry Mintzberg 2016. A similar version appeared in the Huffington Post on 22 November. See my book Rebalancing Society…radical renewal beyond left, right, and center. 

Follow this TWOG on Twitter @mintzberg141, or receive the blogs directly in your inbox by subscribing here. To help disseminate these blogs, we also have a Facebook page and a LinkedIn page.

It’s been said that there are two kinds of people: those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don’t. I don’t know about this. But I do know that there are two kinds of companies: those that believe in Customer Service and those that believe in serving customers (leaving aside those that believe in neither). I’ll call them CS and sc (asking government people to read sc as serving citizens, so as not to contradict last week’s TWOG).

Serving customers is not some sort of technique, not a program. It’s a way of life, a philosophy of doing business. Treating customers well because that makes you more $$$ is not sc; it’s CS. In contrast, sc is making more money because you treat your customers well. There’s a difference, namely what comes first in your head. Sure you charge properly for what you give, knowing that if your customers are satisfied, they will come back.

What do the employees see when a customer walks in the door: $$ or a person? Put those employees on commission and guess what they see. (“Now, how about a luxurious little Lincoln to go with your beautiful new Rolex watch? Try it on and see how good they look together!”) Put the company on the stock market, under the influence of people who can’t see past $$, and guess what everyone else is expected to see. Most big companies started with sc—that is what enabled them to grow big.  I admire the few that have managed to remain so after they went public.

I am told by someone inside Johnson & Johnson that it is one of these. Its website says that its Credo was developed by Robert Wood Johnson in 1943, “just before it became a publicly traded company…. Our Credo is more than just a moral compass. We believe it’s a recipe for business success. The fact that Johnson & Johnson is one of only a handful of companies that have flourished through more than a century of change is proof of that.” I can’t vouch for this, but the following, excerpted from the Credo, does sound right: 

We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services….

We are responsible to our employees, the men and women who work with us throughout the world…. They must have a sense of security in their jobs…. 

We are responsible to the communities in which we live and work and to the world community as well. We must be good citizens….

Our final responsibility is to our stockholders… When we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should realize a fair return.

What does sc feel like? That’s easy; you can’t miss it. For example, recently we couldn’t find an iPhone and reported it lost to our phone company. Later we we found it and called back. There was no voice saying “We appreciate your business” while forcing us to wait interminably. (If a company appreciates my business, why doesn’t it treat my time as important as its own?) Instead, Patricia (can’t remember her actual name) answered quickly and was genuinely delighted to hear that we found it. Genuinely—the two of us were charmed by the delight in her voice. I can’t speak for that whole company, but I can tell you that the Patricia’s of this world should be staffing the call centers, not to mention the executive suites.

Then there’s that wonderful waiter in a delightful restaurant in Quebec City, charmingly called Le Cochon Dinge (The Wacky Pig). The happiest, jolliest, friendliest waiter we have ever encountered. I can’t tell you his name because he was not programmed to say when we arrived: “Hello, my name is Mestipho and I will be your server today!!”

What does CS feel like? For me, alienating. How about the programmed greeters at the entrance to the Walmart stores. One time, on a weekday afternoon, I wished they had put this person inside the store, to clean up the god-awful mess of merchandise strewn all over the shelves. And then there’s our dear old airline, so devoted to CS. Try booking at the last minute an Air Canada flight from Montreal to Boston, which takes less than an hour in the air. The fare is $1066, one way ($2132 return, if you are not good at math).  Guess what:  Air Canada has a monopoly on that route. Guess what: Air Canada can’t see past this monopoly, to its customers who fly elsewhere too. To hell with those who need to go to Boston. How about to hell with Air Canada when we need to go elsewhere.

And this brings us to $CS$: treat well only those customers with tons of $$$ who spend it lavishly. This requires that they sort the customers the moment they walk in the door, between those who get CS and those who get dismissed. I said to a Honda salesmean [whoops, a typo!]: “Can you please give me your best price.” He replied: “Are you here to buy now? Otherwise, why should I tell you that. You will just go to another dealer and tell him our price.” I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that I am not allowed to do that. The nerve of me for trying to comparison shop for the second biggest purchase I make (after a house). So I went to another Honda dealer. He gave me his best price and I bought the car, right then and there. I couldn’t care less if the other guy’s price was lower.

Of course, there’s another side to all this: respecting sellers (rs). Customers who don’t do that, even ones with $$$, may get CS, but they don’t deserve sc. That is because, if the employees are not treated well, by the company as well as the customers, how can they truly treat the decent customers well? 

© Henry Mintzberg 2016  Follow this TWOG on Twitter @mintzberg141, or receive the blogs directly in your inbox by subscribing here. To help disseminate these blogs, we now also have a Facebook page and a LinkedIn.

The private sector offers another way to deal with the problem of climate change: markets. The very same markets that have been firing on all cylinders with carbon energy are supposed to save the planet from that energy—as if the money to be made in fossil fuels will disappear because there is money to be made in solar panels.¹ The problem is not markets per se, but the fact that markets have become so dominant in a world that requires balance across social, political, and economic forces. (See my book on Rebalancing Society and the TWOG on it.) 

Markets barreling ahead

If not governments or markets, then what other way can there be? Look in the mirror: you could be seeing the answer. We buy, we vote, we march. We can refuse, we can reduce, we can replace. As consumers, voters, and doers, we can change our own behaviors while driving our governments and markets to face their responsibilities—if we can act together.  

This will require recognition that there are three consequential sectors in society, not two. The battles that have raged for so long over public versus private—governments versus markets, left versus right, collective needs versus individual rights—have obscured the importance of this other sector, which functions largely at the community level. I believe it should be called the plural sector, instead of inadequate labels such as the third sector or civil society, to help it take its place next to the sectors called public and private.

While many of us work in the private sector and most of us vote in the public sector, all of us live in the plural sector—in our many groups and communities as well as associations (owned by ourselves as members, as in cooperatives, or else organized as trusts owned by no one, as in Greenpeace). This sector is also home to mass movements and to the many community initiatives we see around us, whether to encourage recycling or to support the poor.

Is it utopian to expect us to rise up in some sort of groundswell within this hitherto obscure sector? This question needs to be put differently: Is it really utopian to mobilize ourselves for the survival of our progeny and our planet?

We have seen significant groundswells before: in 1776 in the American colonies, in 1930 in the Indian salt march, in the Prague Spring of 1989. The best example may be the “Quiet Revolution” of Quebec in the 1960s, because of the remarkable shift it brought about in collective behavior. In that one decade, as the people threw off the yoke of the Catholic Church, the birth rate fell from among the highest in the developed world to one of the lowest.

In none of these movements did public pledges, commercial markets, or established leadership play the major role. People did, together. Tom Paine wrote in his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” How prophetic that proved to be. How prophetic that will have to be now.

It is not plans from some elite “top” that will begin the world over again, but actions on the ground. We are the feet that will have to walk all the talk, connected to heads that will have to think for ourselves. We shall have to confront the perpetrators of climate change—and that includes ourselves—not with violent resistance or passive resistance, but with clever resistance. Some years ago, the angry customers of a Texas telephone company paid 1 extra cent on their telephone bills. This tied the company in knots. It got the message.

Beyond resistance will have to come the replacement of destructive practices by more constructive ones, as has been happening with wind and solar energy. There will be more of this when we “human resources” pursue our resourcefulness as human beings. Imagine, for example, an economy based on growth in qualities instead of quantities, of better instead of more—in education, health care, and nutrition.

Facing the issue of imbalance last week in our program RoundTables for Experienced Managers.

That conference in Paris was not a wake-up call so much as an event. Pledges and plans will not not wake us up to the problem of climate change, nor will markets. We wake up when our house is flooded, or our crops fail. But surely we cannot await the pervasion of such calamities to drive our actions. Addressing the specific problem of climate change, and the broader problem of imbalance, will have to begin with ourselves, together—locally and globally.

Progeny on the planet

© Henry Mintzberg 2016. A version of this was published on HuffingtonPost.com earlier this week. Follow this TWOG on Twitter @mintzberg141, or receive the blogs directly in your inbox by subscribing here. I also just started a new Facebook page to disseminate these TWOGs.

I have Brazil on my mind, since I will be giving a major speech there in two weeks (which I will explain in next week’s TWOG). The country has been experiencing a serious scandal in recent years, centered around Petrobras, the national oil company, with many prominent people in government and business having been accused of bribery. The economy has been suffering, and Dilma Rousseff, the President of Brazil, is in danger of being impeached.

The question I wish to raise early in my talk is this. Which country is more corrupt: Brazil or the United States? This may sound irreverent, but I believe that in one critical respect, the answer is obvious, and it’s not Brazil.

The corruption in Brazil is criminal, and can be prosecuted. In fact, it is being prosecuted. Over a hundred people, including a former prominent executive of Petrobras and a former senior minister of the government, have been sentenced to prison terms.

The contrast with the United States is stark. The most significant corruption facing the country is legal, and its perpetrators cannot be prosecuted. The  “Citizens United” decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 threw the doors wide open to private donations—institutional and personal—in public elections and that is having a devastating effect on the country’s renowned democracy. The Supreme Court legalized bribery, and it has spread throughout the political process and is having dangerously effects in the society. The most evident manifestation of this has been the repeated refusals of Congress to legislate on gun controls, thanks to the money its members receive from the gun lobby.

Meanwhile, in September the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled that donations from private legal entities to electoral campaigns were no longer allowed. Eight of the eleven justices considered such private financing to be in direct violation of the country’s constitution.

For two hundred years, the United States stood as the world’s model for progress and democracy. Might Brazil now assume this role? It is in pursuit of the answer to this irreverent question that I will be going to Brazil.

© Henry Mintzberg 2016 Follow this TWOG on Twitter @mintzberg141, or receive the blogs directly in your inbox by subscribing here (link now fixed).

The Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America (Scalia has since passed away)

A prosecutor and justice of Brazil (as depicted by fans at Carnival)