Peter Block wouldn’t like the title of this blog. In his newest book The Answer to How is Yes, he asserts that how is the wrong question, one that keeps us back from doing what we really want to do, what we were meant to do, waiting for someone to show us how. “The boss doesn’t have what you want”, he tells us. The new book is based on one chapter of a classic 1993 Peter Block book Stewardship, which I’ve just finished reading. Way back then, Block had already learned what I was a decade from realizing, that entrepreneurship is natural to all of us, and that hierarchy, money, growth and self-interest are not necessary ingredients of true entrepreneurship but rather obstacles to its effectiveness. Stewardship attempts what might just be an impossible task: The converting of large, established companies into what I call Natural Enterprises. Chapter by chapter explains how to dismantle the obstacles to true entrepreneurship, slowly convincing the people in the enterprise that you are absolutely committed to radical change, that you mean it (lots of big companies talk a good empowerment story, but have absolutely no intention of acting on it). One of the hardest parts, he says, is convincing managers to give up managing (in favour of stewardship) and at the same time, ironically, convincing line employees to give up comfortable dependency, where they’re not really responsible for anything. It’s a difficult trade-off, and I am sure it would take enormous patience to pull this off, but Block is the master, and he’s covered all the angles. The question of course is why bother to convert established totalitarian enterprises to democratic Natural Enterprises — why not just start fresh and build a new Natural Enterprise from scratch? Then you don’t have to undo all the things that are wrong with the old model, and you can start with the people you want to make a living with, instead of trying to remake a pool of employees into what they are not (and can’t be too unhappy not being, since they’ve stuck around in the old enterprise). Even if I were the owner of a very successful traditional enterprise, I’d be more inclined to quietly start up a completely separate ‘side business’ using the Natural Enterprise model, cherry-picking the people who I think would be most inclined to accept the responsibility and egalitarian principles of such an enterprise, instead of trying to convert everyone. Block devotes much of Stewardship to methods of dealing with, and turning around, “cynics, victims and bystanders” — people who don’t believe Natural Enterprise can work and poison it with their negativity, people who say they can’t do anything or won’t take responsibility unless they’re given more power, and people who withhold commitment until the Natural Enterprise concept has been proven to work by others. These people will kill you. Better, I think, to start fresh and not let these people into your organization in the first place. Block puts a wonderful perspective on all this. The traditional corporate governance system is fundamentally wrong for us, and for our society, he says, for three reasons:
The cult of leadership drives us to think that hierarchy works, that those at the top of the hierarchy can really wield substantive change, and that the organization is best served when the rest of us just do what we’re told. These are all untrue, of course. Instead, Block points out:
Even well-intentioned leaders quickly get sucked into the mythologies of the old model: They start telling subordinates how to behave, view management as essential to all organizational change, use education as indoctrination, and use performance appraisals to ensure compliance. Block’s stewardship model, like my Natural Enterprise one, is one of equal partnership of all co-workers. Block outlines five principles for such partnership:
He then moves on to operating principles for organizations that are governed by such partnerships. I’ve ‘radicalized’ these principles a bit, because I think Block tends to get a bit mired in traditional operating methods, and compromises the statement of these principles to the point they lose some of their power:
It’s great to read this kind of principled idealism from someone who has worked with real organizations for decades. He is at once pragmatic anduncompromising. No wonder Dave Smith is such a fan of his. |
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This is all great stuff, and a useful checklist to see how the organisation that I work for is going.However, I’d like to criticize your idea of needs-based compensation. Why should somebody with kids and a mortgage get more? They chose to have children, and to buy a house. Perhaps the 60-year-old with no debts would like to donate to a charity, or fund a new natural enterprise his friend is starting. Or any number of other good things.
I grew an enterprise with all these ideals at the start. The enterprise was very successful, but many of the details you advocate got lost in the process. It is very hard to compensate everyone the same when some are working 70 hour weeks, studying and inovating brilliantly, while others barely put in their time and don’t have any interest in learning more.Total openness worked until the group got larger than 25. At that point too many people were business illiterate to understand the context of decisions. There were too many contexts for everyone to understand everything. We were still open when anyone asked, but we stopped volunteering all info to everyone.
For anyone interested in a real life example of a highly successful corporation built on similar principles, check out Yvon Chouinard’s “Let My People Go Surfing”. It came out last year and tell how http://www.patagonia.com was built. Yvon and Paul Hawkins are two of my favorite role models for entrepreneurship.
In my experience, the “followers” resist these ideas as much as the “leaders.” I have one coworker who uses papal and divine metaphors when referring to senior managers of the company. This person will not make decisions, even when asked to do so!