On Being Careful What You Wish For

After a 700-word paean ("Leading With Two Minds") to the way he believes the military has transformed itself -- in the face of catastrophic failure and up the bloody slope of a murderous learning-curve -- into a flexible, agile, lesson-driven, pragmatism engine, Bobo ends with this...

"It’s a wonder that more institutions aren’t set up to encourage this sort of alternating life. Business schools do it, but most institutions are hindered by guild customs, by tenure rules and by the tyranny of people who can only think in one way."

OK, two things.

First, I worry when I read columns like this that David has apparently been asleep these past 20 years. Because even before Michael Hammer and James Champy published their odious, 1993 manifesto ("Reengineering the Corporation") giving senior company officers everywhere the permission and vocabulary to conduct organization-wide mass-firing auto de fés in the name of "flexibility", "transformation" and "creative destruction", corporate America, universities and even lots of local gummints had already arrogated to themselves more than enough power to rearrange their houses in ways that would rebuild them into the kind of try-test-change-institutionalize-repeat powerhouses that Bobo professes to admire.

If they chose to.

Some did.

Many did not...do not...and will never...precisely because it would put at risk the fortunes and privileges of the mediocrities at the tops of those enterprises who have used every one of those new permissions and words to insulate and enrich themselves and their cronies at the expense of everyone else in the organization who was not in the League of Glad-handing Douchebags.

The thing is, organizations where those at the top can exercise nearly unfettered, godlike power over of the lives and careers of their subordinates are just about the only places where change can and does come very quickly.

When the people at the top have the authority to --

1. Clearly circumscribe the organizations' mission;
2. Provide easy-to-understand guidelines that reward innovation and hard work;
3. Put a premium on brutal honesty, measuring what's important and dispassionately discarding what doesn't work

-- you'd be amazed at how fast things can change in any institution.

But, when the people at the top make it abundantly clear that suck-up/move-up is the Royal Road to success, and competence, integrity and disagreeing with the boss' pet projects and biases is the quickest route to unemployment...well, things change even faster.

The innocent suffer.

And the guilty -- as always -- float away Bill Kristol-like to their next soft landing.

And second, speaking of fortunes and privileges, woe betide the fate and future of mediocrities like Mr. Brooks' if the media ever becomes one of those institution that jettisons "guild customs", "tenure rules" and "the tyranny of people who can only think in one way."