A colleague on a mailing list forwarded
this TED talk by Daniel H. Pink.
I'm going to try to say what I have to say about this in a
single sentence... sort of as an experiment. After all, if you
can't express your idea in a single sentence, can it really be a
good idea?
Here goes ... Because business purpose must be achieved either
by 1) grafting that purpose onto its constituents or 2) preparing
"scaffolding" so that when a group of constituents with that
purpose arises, a pre-adapted organization is ready to launch, only
a subset of businesses and their domains can ever successfully
apply this (autonomy, mastery, purpose) management technique.
Hm. OK. That doesn't read very well; but it's a legal sentence
and says what I need it to say. I.e. Business consists largely of
man-handling some natural resources (including cognitive skills)
and squeezing them through a Play-Do device to produce a thing with
an externally imposed purpose. Pink even implies this in his talk
by pointing out that management is like a television. It's an
invention. What he really means is that management is, like a
business, a tool.
Businesses are means, not
ends. The natural resources we abuse to construct
these tools are, by contrast, ends in and of themselves. (And
although you may balk at the idea that a rock or a piece of iron
ore is somehow NOT merely a tool, available for unlimited use and
abuse by us, you may want to re-think your position on
environmental and ethical positions to be sure those constructs in
your mind are consistent. ... I'm just sayin'.)
Now, I'll allow that some of the phenomena we call "businesses"
do, indeed, arise naturally from the mechanisms of their
constituents. Perhaps even most of them do so, though I find that
unlikely because I think we'd see a much higher overall success
rate for businesses, in general, if that were the case. But (at
least) some (if not most) businesses are examples of a small clique
of people grafting purpose onto a collection of natural
resources.
I.e. There are at least some businesses (I'd argue most of them)
whose job it is to turn people into
tools, ends into means.... to bend others to their
will.
Kant's universality test for ethical behavior asks: If this
behavior were universal (everyone behaved that way), would the
result be sustainable? (Yes, I'm paraphrasing shamelessly.)
It seems to me the question to pose is: What if
every business was acquired and executed its
purpose in this (intrinsic motivation) way? What would result?
Would the result work? Would we have made the scientific and
technical progress we've made so far? Sure, it's a no-brainer to
admit that if some businesses operate this way,
they'll work and the system in which they sit will sustain. (And
they get to take the sanctimonious high road in comparison to their
fellows.) But what if ALL of them did it or
attempted to do it?
When I hear talks like this, I have what I think is the typical reaction... something like "Yeah! What he said!" But, in the end, my skeptical homunculus wrests the wheel back from the gullible one and puts me back on course. Although the two homunculi are equal brothers, co-CEOs if you will, only the skeptical one has a driver's license for this class of machine.