(Author's note: This is an essay about the urgent need to challenge the assumptions that limit businesses ability to sustainably create wealth. I am not attempting to justify the morality or rationale of empire, or make a case for colonialism. The reader’s temporary suspension of resentment against, or devotion to, the founding fathers is deeply appreciated.)
233 years worth of yesterdays ago, a group of rebels made a simple declaration: "The assumptions are wrong." We call them patriots, but on July 4 1776 many thought of them as heretics. Our founders were questioning the very foundations of a system that was taken for granted as essential for safety and commerce. But the system couldn't adapt and so it was challenged.
Our "traitors" weren’t just demanding lower taxes or a chance to have their voice heard. They were demanding that the very people who had profited most from British colonial rule challenge the very assumptions by which they had been granted power and influence. They were asking people to question themselves and the world they lived in.
The British monarchy had delivered wealth and power to its figureheads and supporters. And the people who were challenging that system, our founders, had prospered under that system. They were challenging themselves.
It is difficult to conceive just how extraordinary it is for a group of people invested in the status quo to stand up and proclaim "The assumptions are wrong." And yet that is exactly what gave the founder’s Declaration power and resilience: the insurgents were the insiders. The Declaration was created and supported by the elites at the core of the establishment. This insider status gave credibility to their revolt.
When the pillars of the establishment say “The assumptions are wrong”, if those most invested in the present system are willing to risk their prosperity for a better future, even though the fruits of that future be nothing but dreams and promises, then perhaps that is worth notice.
Our elites, our founders, stood and claimed "The assumptions are wrong." They stood against the long-held belief of the inevitability of monarchy and enumerated many complaints against the status quo. Perhaps the most compelling of those arguments was that their comfortable system, the system of divine monarchy that had made most of the insurgents powerful and rich, was not suitable for the future. A young people, standing on the edge of an entire continent of wealth and opportunity, yet to unleash their full creative potential and to bring forth a greater prosperity than could have been imagined before; those people could not achieve their potential under the yoke of tyranny.
The heretics challenged the assumptions of power by asserting Locke's argument that power arises from the governed, not the government, and only the governed can grant license of power through their own free will. Yet the desire that compelled that argument from theory to practice was a feeling that the people needed to be free to do even more. "Unshackle us so that we may rise to the opportunity offered by our future." The old system was holding them back.
And so America’s founders acted upon the belief that more people would receive more benefit over time from a new system based on new assumptions than from the old system based on old assumptions.
The assumptions they challenged had been withstood the tests of time, written in stone in churches and meeting halls in countless cities on every populated continent at the time. These shibboleths had fostered a set of institutions, structures, principles and cultural norms that were successful by many measures. The old assumptions, that all power derived from monarchs, that those monarchs were unassailable in their wisdom and purpose, and that there was no law greater than the monarch's will... those assumptions had lead to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the discovery of new lands and the enrichment of many people.
Were the founders crazy to question their benefactors? Weren’t they sure to kill the proverbial goose that was laying their golden egg? Are people who stand to profit from the present crazy to demand a different, better future? Certainly. But the belief that the monarchical system was more limiting that a democratic system was ultimately proven to be true. Only time tells whether one is crazy or visionary.
Today, 233 years and some days later, here we are, pillars in a system of our own making, a system that is showing signs of wear and that may no longer be equipped to deliver the most benefit to the most people. That system is the western economic system of business, our business system. It is a system based on certain assumptions: the efficacy of central planning and central control, distributed power that is granted from the top, distribution of wealth largely based on fealty to the system and ability to manage personal risk, selection based on congruity to past masters, the primacy of profit over purpose, functional alignment of work, and workers as important, but ultimately interchangeable, pieces of a whole. These assumptions, and the system they helped create, have produced an extraordinary amount of wealth and progress for millions of people. It is not a system to be challenged lightly.
And yet the future we bequeath to our children must provide at least as much opportunity as the past and present that were created for us. We cannot sit idly by and ignore that the business system is rapidly coming unhinged. Its not just perp walks and bailouts and the growing disparity between rich and poor and the extraordinary amount of waste that is being poured into our skies and streams. It is not just our feeling that business institutions are not worth the investment of our hope and spirit, ineluctably devolving from creators of wealth to temples of mindless greed and intellectual torpor. Those reasons have meaning, but ultimately they are tainted with outsider reasoning and outsider language. The people within the present business system, the ones chartered by the system to protect the flanks and staff the barricades, can easily dismiss the critiques of those who have little invested in business’s success even as they demand cheaper products and services.
Intellectual insurgents such as Gary Hamel and Michael Malone have sought to work within our present system, to participate and therefore become accepted, only then to point out that the present system isn't working well for ANYBODY. Hamel helps managers understand that companies that challenge the old assumptions are doing better over the long run. Malone helps us to understand how many different ways there are to organize work, and how authoritarian systems are not always the fastest or most efficient. They have delicately sought to point out that the present system all too often has not produced optimal returns on investment, not generated the needed levels of innovation and failed to create a platform for sustainable profits for the next 5 years, no less the next century.
And yet, those gentlemen, mighty as their pens may be, are ultimately ensconced in their ivory towers. They are people who have the time and luxury of developing theories and challenging dogma as academics and executive consultants. This is what is expected of them. And their contribution, while significant, still lacks the credibility developed by the people who struggle and innovate to survive as they serve internal and external customers. If the revolution is going to turn from declarations to a constitutions, then we must include the property owners, pamphleteers and generals. We must find our Washingtons, Jeffersons and Henrys.
These new business insurgents must confront the present business system’s inability to meet with increasingly unpredictable and complex change. They must proclaim that what the 21st century business system, the new way, needs is institutions, principles, structures, strategies and owners who evaluate financial and legal risk, market opportunities and brand identity through the lens of talent first and foremost, and not only through the lens of lawyers and accountants. Who view all people, whether they be customers, shareholders, employees or contractors, as investors who are freely giving of their own time, attention and money based on a expected and personally relevant return. Leaders who are clear with everyone about the purpose of their enterprise and what that means for all investors.
These heretics will demand that the needs of the talent investor be brought into alignment with the requirements of the financial investor with the demands of the customers investor, and that all three will be aligned by the defined and practiced purpose of the enterprise, not by get-rich-quick schemes and the worst devils of our nature. Marketing will be a two-way, transparent dialogue between the different investors, and PR will constantly be asking questions rather than trying to create an emotional need for something of little value.
The new founders will say enough to our consumerist miasma, which has built so many chimerical organizations and so created so much unnecessary suffering. They will demand the end of a system that mindless seeks to profit from people who are buying things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, from vendors they don’t trust. And finally and perhaps most importantly, these founders will see that it will no longer be advisable to achieve individual prosperity by shifting costs onto communities, burying the inefficiencies and waste of their operations and processes in the air, the water and the people.
It feels a fleeting dream, all the more so because this revolution will not start in the board room, or in the executive staff. How many times have we desperately looked up in the org chart and demanded that they change their ways? It will never do, for the reality is that pressures of the present systems demand that these lofty insiders are enlisted to be the ultimate defense against change. We, the HR insurgents, must be the first to take to the barricades, to positively and persuasively, but forcefully nonetheless, to show our clients a better way, a better system of commerce. We are the translators between the talk of the boardroom and the voice of the talent.
Yet HR, more than any other function except possibly finance, is typically aligned with the protectors of the status quo. Our assignment, which we often blindly accept, is to keep the insurgents out, to ensure that management’s law is enforced through policy and fiat, and that the finance department’s need to react to a spastically distracted Street be taken for granted as the ultimate purpose to work towards.
The assumptions are wrong. We fail to question the belief that head management is the same as cost management, and thus our friends lose their jobs and fall into despair. We nod in mindless agreement when managers demand that we only hire people like them, and thus those who haven’t been to the right schools and developed the right friendships are confirmed in their belief that they have no opportunity. We bow low when investors tell us that the only thing that really matters, the talent, OUR talent, is a cost to be controlled and minimized and not an asset to be explored and optimized. We cry and wail that people don’t get talent, just don’t understand how to treat people, even as we secretly wink in our own social circles about how it is always, ALWAYS, HR that is the worst at people-focused capabilities and accountabilities. We berate managers when we tell them that they have to share their talent and compete for the best, even as we jealously hide our own talent and lash out blindly at those who would dare to try to “poach our people.”
We are part of our own business system, the old system. We don’t do these things because we are evil or have bad intent. We do these things because they worked in the past, sometimes despite the assumption and sometimes because of it, but always as one and the same. We have been taught by time, practice, custom, mentorship and habit that this is what HR does, that this is who HR is. We are told in a thousand different ways “You are not the rebels! You are the administrative functionaries who do the evil bidding of the CFO and don’t understand the business and think about payroll and picnics! You are HR, the paper pushers and people executers and job fillers! Get back to your work. Your value is in how fast you react to my frightened whims. We will let you know when we need you next!” And eventually, like a guard who is no longer horrified at the thoughtless jailor they have become, we assume that this is us, and this is what we do, and that because we do it, it is right.
No. The assumptions are wrong.
The assumptions are wrong. It is us, you and me, who bear the responsibility to challenge the system and bring about a more prosperous and sustainable world. We cannot afford to sit in the shadows and let our consciences die with the memories of our dreams. It is us, because we have the biggest club, the largest lever, the loudest bullhorn. We have talent. We are talent.
Yes, the change will start with talent: with the way we identify and engage the people investors of every type. That is our job, our purpose. The primacy of capital, of avoiding risks to capital at the expense of our humanity and expertise, and of accruing ever more capital to a special few, that day must give way to the day of talent. Capitalism must become Talentism, or we will need to find another purpose.
Change is never easy, but in our case it will be especially hard. Many of us, including myself, have tripped and fallen into our present roles. On my way to be a writer I found myself sitting at a security guard’s desk during the swing shift at a friend’s company. Yes, I started in HR in the security department. Your story is different, but we most likely share a common experience of finding ourselves in HR on the way to some other place. Some of us are closet social workers, trying to feel that our work makes a difference as we leave the messy business of commerce to the “B school guys.” Others tried to put a foot in both worlds, working the craft of compensation while still wanting to be close to the business of people. I have met psychologists and sociologists, frustrated economists and resigned sales people. Whatever your story, you may have felt the sting of the outsider, knowing that your work makes a difference no matter how much the bean counters whisper otherwise.
It is not just that we feel we are ill-equipped to meet the challenge of revolution. It is not just that we didn’t sign up for the fight. It is that the ability to be insurgents has been trained out of us. We have been evaluated, taught and counseled that our role in HR is to develop new policies, new procedures, new systems and new guidelines. We have been trained like Pavlov’s pets to salivate at the first sign of complex, enterprise level “strategy” work. Our value is reinforced by the rewards we get from making things bigger and more complex.
Yet this is another trap. Insurgents do not bring about change by lining up in rank and file and forming more elaborate formations. As insurgents we must heed the words of Einstein who said “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.” We must fight the assumption that putting together a enterprise-wide engagement program is more important than showing the courage of fighting against waste in our own departments.
We must constantly be on guard against the grand design that accompanies local ignorance. Ask yourself... When was the last time you went up to someone in your department and asked them “What did you want to do when you were a kid? How can I help you turn that passion into something of value for this company?” Perhaps the most recent project to quantify the people around you has made you forget that simple questions, kindness, empathy and genuine desire to make other’s lives better are by far the most powerful motivating tools we have at our disposal. But our assumptions, the assumptions of our system, is that only the self-important engagement program with its measures and metrics will bring about greater productivity. The assumptions are wrong.
Life is truly unfair. We find ourselves confronted with a situation we never really wanted to be in, deep inside a system that rewards us for doing the wrong work. But if we fail to rise beyond our state of continual victimization, our angry murmurs about not being at the table drowning out our own desire for real significance and meaning, then we will all be irrelevant. Transactions get automated. Dishes go in dishwashers, payroll is cut by computers, and people are starting to turn to computers to answer their benefits questions. Managers are being told by their managers that it is cheaper to source, hire, manage and fire themselves than it is to rely on the perpetually backwards HR department. We, you and I, are betting that complete people transaction technology and automation won’t become implemented before we retire. Yet that is surely a more fantastical dream than believing we can help make tomorrow’s businesses better than todays.
And so the moment is now, for our children’s future but also for ours. We hope that we can hide and believe that some day some magical soul will rise through the ranks, climb the ladder, and they will “get it” and save us from the future. And yet time has always taught that those who rise through the ranks, who claw their way to the top, must comply with the pressures of the old system or lose their ability to have any influence whatsoever. And so we sit there, waiting for the savior, whispering that the day will come when the crisis of leadership will end. And all the time, we were the crisis. Not our leadership, the pillars of today. It was us, the solution for tomorrow.
It is us. Us is we. And if we don’t undertake to challenge our assumptions, to build a more sustainable system, then we will live with the consequences. You cannot hide from your own system. You may hope to rise with it’s successes, but we will all definitely fall with its failure.
The assumptions are wrong. But you can change that.
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