by Alan Briskin | Business, Collective Wisdom, Community, Conflict, Leadership, Photography
Robert Moffat, senior vice president of IBM systems and technology group, was recently arrested by the FBI for conspiracy involving insider trading. The arrest sent shock ways through Wall Street exposing illicit, back channel dealings between prominent high tech executives and hedge fund managers. My information comes directly from Fortune Magazine, also seemingly shocked by it all, and reminding me of the policeman character in Casablanca played by Claude Rains who closes Rick’s Café by telling Humphrey Bogart, “I’m shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on here.”
Robert Moffat apparently was a hard working and respected executive considered a potential successor for CEO at IBM. The Fortune article describes him as a numbers cruncher, former Eagle Scout, and a man weighing in at 6-foot-2 and 265 pounds – a solid guy on all fronts. He had become sexually involved with a woman who worked for a hedge fund and she was quoted saying that trading business information was for her “like an orgasm.” The tale becomes more complicated as she was in love with her married hedge fund boss but it didn’t work out. Shocking.
One of Moffat’s attorney colleagues summed it up best: “There was no planet on which I could have understood what was being said about Bob. I just shut down.”
So we have insider trading among millionaires and billionaires, an Eagle Scout who seems to have it all risking everything, a woman who finds stimulation rubbing shoulders (at least) with powerful men, and another man who simply cannot comprehend how a straight shooter like Bob could go wrong. Well, there certainly is a lot to be shocked about. What we have here is a collective collapse. Most disturbing to me is the notion expressed by Bob’s colleague that he knows of no planet to understand what happened?
SEARCHING FOR NEW PLANETS
To be simply less shocked is not an answer to collective collapse but instead an even more cynical and destructive position. Following the lead of Bob’s attorney friend, I propose we look for new planets in which this behavior can be understood. We must also look for planets in which terms such as business ethics and collective wisdom are real practices as opposed to oxymorons.
PLANET INNER GALLEON (named after a hedge fund, Galleon Group, involved in the scandal):
On planet Inner Galleon, people are acutely aware of self-deception and self justification. Business schools take seriously the Arbinger Institute’s caution that “Over time, as we betray ourselves, we come to see ourselves in certain self justifying ways.” People on this planet have become comfortable acknowledging that collective folly is always a possibility in groups and that while we are capable of extraordinary acts of grace and kindness, we are also capable of acts of cruelty and deception. People on this planet embrace this paradox and thereby become more capable of wisdom.
They are also acutely aware that unlike the mythic view of the alpha male protecting the troops, spearheading the hunts, being exemplars, and keeping order among the group, the top ranking males are closer to their baboon ancestors in looking after themselves, seeking access to females, and always scouting for the highest and safest spot in the tree to protect themselves. This collective self knowledge allows them to speak intelligently about rules and regulation for the group and for choosing wisely those people who will administer the regulations. Even more critical, an ethic of doing what is right is reinforced constantly among the members of the group who deal directly with power and money because everyone recognizes its seductive influences. The community realizes that self deception and collective folly do not happen overnight but build slowly within a community and take root when no one seems to notice or care.
PLANET SAVATTHI (named after an ancient city in India)
On planet Savatthi, there is great regard for community and a deep understanding that all of us can get caught up in addictions of alcohol, drugs, gambling, and careless sexuality. There is a belief that guides them that these addictions represent an inner suffering and must be addressed by finding the proper antidotes within a loving community, including prayer, meditation, and healthy conversations. The people of Savatthi pay great attention to their physical and emotional environment, always cultivating beauty and reverence mixed with earthy humor and outright irreverence. On this planet, looking out for oneself or just your immediate friends and relatives is considered selfish. Both the community and planet itself is viewed as medicine, if taken properly.
On planet Savatthi, people take seriously that to lead a happy life one has to live in the company of wise and caring friends and that a community should honor those who truly contribute to the greater good of the whole. They understand one must constantly practice speaking generously from the heart and that words and deeds must be aligned.
To seek happiness on this planet means to live a simple life and to constantly marvel and delight in small things. To remain humble is understood as the greatest asset and that to pretend humility is an act of serious insincerity. Children are taught that when they speak, they should not hope that no-one disagrees with them, because without disagreement, self righteousness can flourish.
To persevere and to be open to change is considered the greatest gift and the greatest challenge. Everyone is asked to contribute their particular talent or gift and everyone is expected to cultivate their talents and apply them to a craft or profession.
PIERCING THE VEIL
No doubt these planets are obscured by heavy mist and clouds, but we are capable of knowing they are there just as we would not forget the moon exists because of a cloudy evening. We can and must look beyond our current world or we will shut down, caught in confusion and disbelief. We are explorers by nature; let us travel together in wisdom.
Further Resources:
The Power of Collective Wisdom: And the Trap of Collective Folly
Leadership and Self Deception by Arbinger Institute
Dangerous Liaisons AT IBM: Fortune Magazine, July 26th, 2010
Two Treasures by Thich Nhat Hanh, including his explanation of the Mangala Sutta
Pure Water: Poetry of Rumi, Coleman Barks – mp3 found on i-tunes
by Alan Briskin | Collaboration, Collective Folly, Collective Wisdom, Conflict, Conscious Capitalism, Consciousness, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Sixteen
The Dark Prophet
Part II: Capitalism’s Shadow
Time Range: 1867-1883, 2012
It is easy to dismiss Marx as a revolutionist or even as a theorist of socialism, but much harder to ignore his warnings about capitalism. He had discovered the Achilles’ heel of economic arrangements that celebrated their ability to create prosperity, generate innovation, and provide a bounty of goods and services as well as jobs. Capitalism proclaimed itself the final act in the history of economic evolution. Marx refuted the claim. His diatribes, as painful and polarizing as they were, force us to become conscious of capitalism’s other consequences.
We are confronted with capitalism’s shadow, the dependence on jobs defined solely by the marketplace, the depletion of natural resources, and the addiction to material gratification and personal glory out of sync with spiritual, community, and personal growth.
Yet, for all these dark prophecies, they are still within the imagination to address. There is ample evidence of the power of human collaboration combined with science and social purpose to tackle even the most difficult social issues. The darkest prophecy that Marx left us was not about economic concentration, ecological destruction, or the effects of inequality. It was about ourselves. It was about human polarization, the nature of privilege, and feelings of revenge – things Marx understood deeply in his bones.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
His prophecy of successive business crises, continual warfare between nations, depletion of the earth’s resources, and mounting cynicism among the middle and lower classes was all predicated on the belief that government would do nothing about it. He believed that government would be a protector of the dominant classes — even as the dominant classes battled each other — or at best impotent, paralyzed to do anything significant about the crises that would unfold in waves.
Government officials railed Marx, in tones similar to a tormented Dr. Seuss, could not, would not stand up to the monied interests that supported their rise to political power and punished these same politicians if they deviated too sharply from the social narrative of economic growth. And that narrative was synonymous, questionable as it was, with progress, social good, and most critically the belief that money should never lie fallow but grow through investment, resulting in individual wealth accumulation. The hero’s journey, in capitalist mythology, overcame hardship in order to gain material wealth. And in gaining wealth gained wisdom and character. If only it was true.
Marx, often unkind, jealous, suspicious, even wrathful, staked his entire claim on the inability of individuals and social groups to see the predicament they were in. There could be no genuine conversation about altering the rules of capitalism in any significant way. Was he correct?
There is a final irony in all this. Capitalists and workers alike would follow the psychological script Marx laid out while believing they opposed his ideas. As groups on the right and left organized to battle the perceived dangerous actions of the other, they were fulfilling Marx’s prophecy. As unions became more organized, aggressive, and even violent in the early 20th century, they were following exactly Marx’s claim that capitalism would spawn its own detractors as workers learned to leverage their power. As certain capitalists fought against living wages for workers, initiated offshore production to increase their surplus value, and battled regulations for protecting the safety of workers as well as the environment, they were fulfilling Marx’s interpretation of how a ruling class would operate. As governments swung from welfare programs to austerity policies, their basic incompetence or incapacity to act was revealed.
Marx’s assumption was that individuals were not free to think beyond the shackles of their immediate self-interest. Given the structure of profit making, Marx asserted that individuals would choose to maximize their gain at the expense of others, regardless of the consequences. This makes nearly everyone operating within the capitalist system Marxist — at least in behavior. If there was an exception to his declaration about the lack of human agency, it was himself. Confounding his followers, he declared a few years before his death, “I am not a Marxist.”
by Alan Briskin | Collaboration, Collective Folly, Collective Wisdom, Community, Conscious Capitalism, Health, Leadership
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Fifteen
Moving from Factions to the Whole: Paying Attention in New Ways
Part III: Social Perspectives>
Time Range: 1811, Current Times
FLASH POINT
“If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Duane, 1811
Social Perspective: How Inequality Gets Under Our Skin
What societal pattern might connect a heightened sense of mistrust, poor health, violence, diminished life expectancy, and low job status? If you guessed social and economic inequality, then we are beginning to think collectively together. But why? Why should this be the case? We would need to explore the multiple interlocking factors that determine and influence the frequency and distribution of this kind of pattern. We would need epidemiologists willing to use their training to identify the root causes of illness and other health-related events in social and economic circumstances, unrelated to any particular economic theory or ideology.
Remarkably, this is exactly what epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett set out to do in their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. With mind-numbing charts, diagrams, and statistical comparisons, these two professors documented why, by virtually every measure of well-being, the distribution of wealth far outweighs the importance of overall wealth in a community, region, or nation. Boiled down to its core, the results of these studies demonstrate how social and economic factions fracture the whole and make it worse off for everyone.
How so?
Social
and economic inequality creates exaggerated differences in social
standing, and social standing — our place in groups — has a dramatic
influence on our health, intelligence, well-being, and positive images
of the future. Here are three dramatic examples from animal and human
studies drawn from Wilkinson and Pickett’s work:
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
- At Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina, 20 macaque monkeys were initially housed in individual cages and then placed in groups of 4. Observers noted social hierarchies that developed, with special attention to the evolution of dominant and subordinate characteristics. They performed scans of the monkeys’ brains before and after the monkeys entered their social groups. Next, they allowed the monkeys to administer cocaine to themselves by pressing a lever. The results were unmistakable. The dominant monkeys, who showed evidence of increased dopamine activity in their brains after becoming dominant, took far less cocaine than the subordinate group. A plausible hypothesis was that the subordinate monkeys were in effect “medicating themselves against the impact of their low social status.” Conversely, the dominant monkeys were producing natural forms of stimulation and required fewer external boosts.
- In 2004, World Bank economists reported on a remarkable experiment. Three hundred twenty-one high-caste and 321 low-caste male children from rural areas of India were asked to solve various puzzles involving mazes. They did this without any knowledge of the other children’s caste, and the results were similar, with the lower-caste boys doing slightly better. Then the experiment was repeated, but this time with the announcement of each child’s name, village, and father’s name and caste. The results were dramatically reversed, with the lower-caste children’s performance dropping significantly. The epidemiologists noted the profound effect on performance and behavior in education based on “the way we feel we are seen and judged by others.”
- The Whitehall studies in England followed civil servants to assess the impact of job status on health issues. The initial study, which followed only men over a ten-year period, attempted to investigate the causes of heart disease and other chronic health problems by looking at job-related responsibilities. The initial hypothesis was that heart disease would be correlated with the stress of the highest-status jobs. The exact opposite was shown. Men at the lowest pay grades had death rates three times higher than their higher-grade administrators. A second study, Whitehall II, which included men and women, showed lower-status jobs related to higher rates not only of heart disease but also of some cancers, chronic lung disease, gastrointestinal disease, depression, suicide, sickness, work absence, and back pain. The study revealed that not only were the lower-status civil servants more likely to be obese, smoke, and have higher blood pressure, but these obvious health risks accounted for only one-third of the subjects’ increased risk of death. Poverty and unemployment were not factors, as these were all working people. The epidemiologists concluded that job stress and “people’s sense of control over their work seem to make the most difference.”
Wilkinson and Pickett highlighted the multiple ways in which heightened degrees of inequality lead to social disaster. The social disaster cannot be changed through techniques of mass psychology or medication or even education, which tends to replicate the existing social status of parents. What mitigates the effects of inequality is greater equality and greater signs of respect.
Greater economic equality might mean a goal of shrinking the economic disparity between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% of a nation to a ratio closer to 4:1, as it is in Japan and Scandinavian countries like Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and less like 8:1 or 9:1, as it is in Singapore, the United States, and Portugal.
Respect might indicate behaviors that demonstrate an understanding that how we are seen by others is a major factor in physical and mental health, including anxiety levels, drug use, depression, the use of violence, and the experience of pain. Signs of respect are indicated by the presence of greetings, curiosity, honest feedback, and positive regard for others, and the absence of condescension, aloofness, and constant negativity. Dignity is a universal human need, and regard for the dignity of others is a foundational element of healthy social groups.
With this kind of social perspective on the nature of factions, we turn on its head the conventional ideal of who we should seek to emulate and why. In an article titled “The Pay Gap Is Vexing, but Don’t Blame the Rich: A Defense of the 1%,” Fortune magazine editor Nina Easton makes the more typical argument. She writes that while blaming the rich is convenient, it misses the point that this group of people demonstrates a level of talent, advanced degrees, and two-income, two-parent families that should be the envy of everyone.
To her credit, she points out that the nearly 1.4 million households in the United States that make up the 1% are quite a diverse lot, some with household incomes that, while substantial, are nothing near those of the billion-dollar-a-year hedge fund executives who have become the symbol of this faction. She concludes, however, on a point that is simultaneously misleading and dangerous: “It’s entertaining to wail about fat cats and the greedy rich. But if we’re serious about addressing widening inequality, we should figure out what the 1% is doing right — and apply some of those ideas to closing the gap.” (Nina Easton, Fortune, April 30, 2012.)
The remark is misleading because regardless of the diversity of this group, what makes them special is their household income, not their talents or degrees. We can’t all be in occupations that provide us with incomes offering more than the other 99% of the population. Further, based on the data provided by Wilkinson and Pickett, we would expect to see the group with the highest income demonstrate higher levels of education and lower rates of divorce. We would expect to see greater time and devotion to the success of their offspring. This is how class is replicated.
It is also to be expected that the higher-status group will be fascinated with why they are more successful than others, believing it must be their character, intelligence, or work ethic rather than the arbitrary nature of economic distribution or rights associated with privilege. The danger of this form of analysis is that it reduces the argument over economic distribution to one of simple human envy.
A dangerous social narrative is created that castigates anyone who dares to criticize economic arrangements and pivots the discussion back to the psychology of the individual. “Oh, you’re just upset because you don’t have a million dollars and a second home on an island.” This recourse back to the individual is supported by two deeply rooted assumptions: (1) there is no system better than the one we have, and (2) we cannot change human nature.
These may be comforting narratives for the status quo, but they ultimately fall into conflict with leadership theories on transformation. A transforming leader is one who willingly confronts uncomfortable issues with a belief that positive change can occur if people work together. Greed and self-interest may be obvious realities of human beings, but they need not be the basis for constructing our social world.
Factions destroy the ability to work consciously toward a union capable of holding disparate elements. In the end, it is not about the 99% against the 1%; it is about saving the dream of prosperity from collapsing into all-out warfare. Prosperity for all, in all the different ways that might be manifested, is a goal worth working toward. The majority of the 1% simply benefited from the arrangements granted them, and like any group of privileged human beings, they are not inclined to simply give them up. So be it. There are many among the 1.4 million wealthy households who would embrace a system that truly included them rather than putting them up on a pedestal or violently threatening to take them down.
Let there be no doubt that there is common cause for creating a world that works for all — on a relative if not absolute basis. So much creativity is yet to be released by working across sectors of business, government, and community initiatives. If there is to be sacrifice, it must be for everyone. The privileged should be the last group that seeks to be spared. Beyond sacrifice, however, there is much to be gained by truly unleashing the talents and passions of groups working on behalf of healing this planet that we inhabit together. This is the image of the future that we should hold dear.
This ability to hold an image of a positive future for all is deeply embedded in the collective psyche of this nation and this world. The Founders of the United States were for the most part privileged white men who negotiated a common cause at the expense of others, most specifically African slaves, whose freedom they denied. Yet among them were extraordinary figures like Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. None of them were pure; all of them were tainted by the prejudices, animosities, and conflicts of their time. Yet, they shared an almost mystical understanding of union and common cause. This is the meaning left behind by Jefferson’s words to William Duane:
“If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object …”
Never forget the true purpose of the journey. Do not be deluded by the long, winding, indirect path that must be followed. We can only reach the goal in mass.
“… but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.”
Be ever alert to individuals and factions promising a more direct route or advantages to only a portion of the collective. Stay united, even in your differences, or you will be subject to those who will return us to tyranny and unadulterated privilege.
Sitting off in a corner on a barstool is a disgruntled gentleman. He’s not one of the 1% or conservative guardians of privilege. No, it’s our old friend Karl Marx, and he’s not a bit happy.
NEXT WEEK: The Dark Prophet
Growth was virtually the only means to deal with shrinking profits, and it would engineer the need for excessive consumption of energy and other natural resources as dictated by the needs of the marketplace. Although Marx is not known for addressing ecological concerns, he predicted that the absence of any mitigating influence on capitalist laws of motion would result in undermining the “original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”
