The rule is simple: Any job that has defeated two or three men in succession, even though each had performed well in his previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned.
~Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker is best known as one of the world’s leading thinkers on management theory and philosophy, not to mention a prolific author, speaker, and teacher.
He said this in a book called The Effective Executive which was primarily written for business executives. On its face, as the names suggests it has little to do with government or politics.
But what makes Drucker such a master, is that this ‘simple rule’ resonates well-beyond the board room.
At the end of the last video, I asked why is change, progress, reform so difficult in the US? Why is the government not responsive to the majority?
When you ask people what is wrong with the government today, most say it’s the people we elect, it’s the people running our government - they’re corrupt, incompetent, beholden to big business and lobbyists in Washington DC, and so on.
The implication is that if we just elected better people, everything will be alright. The government would be more responsive.
There is no denying that who we elect matters, but Drucker’s point is that is not all that matters. In fact, that may not even be our main problem.
In the context of business, Drucker’s ‘rule’ is a cautionary note, reminding people that when things go wrong in an organization, it is easy (some might say natural or human nature even?) to blame the people at the top of that organization for all that has befallen it.
He cautions, however, against this tendency arguing that when a job has defeated two or three men in succession, perhaps it is not the people in those jobs that are the problem, but rather the job itself. In Drucker’s words, the office is “unfit for human beings” and “must be redesigned.”
When we apply this rule to the political realm, the same lesson applies. Just as in business, there is a tendency in our political lives to blame the ills of society on the people in charge. This gives energy to the ‘throw the bums out’ notion that we see periodically in each election cycle. The idea being if we just get rid of those at the top and replace them with new people, our problems will all go away.
In doing this, however, perhaps we are missing the forest for the trees.
Perhaps the problem is not the people in office, rather the office itself. Perhaps what we really need to rethink is not the people but the nature of the office itself.
To do that, to rethink the office, we need to do something that is also not in our general nature, to stop focusing solely on what is happening in the present moment (every tweet or truth, every snide comment, etc.) and to upstream, back to the Founding and understand why the system was structured the way it was and how it may need to be reconsidered, revised, today
Upstreaming is a concept that comes from health policy.
In the classic ‘Upstream Parable,’ you and a friend are having a picnic on the riverbank. Suddenly you hear the cries of a drowning child. You jump in, put your arms around her and pull her to shore. Just as you get to the riverbank you hear a second child thrashing in the river and screaming for help. As you help the first child, your friend jumps in to save the second; and as the second child is pulled to shore, there are more cries for help from a third drowning child. So back in the river you go.
Again and again, without end, goes the sequence. You and your friend are so busy jumping in, pulling these children to safety at therivers’ edge you have no time to see who is upstream pushing them all in.
In another variant of the story, after saving several children from the rough current, your friend runs upstream. You call after her asking where she is going? She replies, to figure out who is throwing all these children into the river.
The fable helps illustrate the tension in the public health arena between responding to emergencies (i.e., rescuing the drowning children) and preventing crises in the first place (i.e., stopping children from being thrown into the river).
It also helps underscore a similar challenge we face in the public and political realm, how to insure we are not only focused on the crisis of the day/moment - the lack of responsiveness, the inability or unwillingness of the government to progress, reform, change even when its widely understood to be needed - but also looking at the root causes of the problem – what is it about the way our system was constructed that makes the government so unresponsive.
Upstreaming in this case means reconsidering and reexamining the system the Framers created.
To borrow from Drucker, it means embracing a simple rule: when a government falters over long periods of time, perhaps the problem is not solely or primarily the individuals in office, but the office and the system itself; perhaps they need to be reconsidered and revised.
In recognizing this, we must fight back another tendency, that is the tendency when things go wrong to blame the individuals. This is a very American idea – we have long fancied ourselves as an individualistic society, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, Horatio Alger, society.
But that is a myth. Just as, during the Gilded Age, Henry George reminded us that being poor is not the result of some individual flaw but rather the way the system is organized and structured; so too today do we need to remember that when the government is flailing, it may not be the fault of those at the top, but rather the system they are operating in.
So we are going to upstream to the Founding to try to better understand why the system is designed the way it is, why the government is so unresponsive generally, and what can be done to address it.
Before we do that, however, in the next video need to address a criticism that always crops up when you talk about critiquing the work of the Framers – that you are unpatriotic.
In a bit of a teaser, I can tell you, there is nothing unpatriotic about critiquing the work of the Founders, in fact they not only invited but expected it and rightly so.
Notes:
Peter Drucker https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48019.The_Effective_Executive
“A Case for Refocusing Upstream: The Political Economy of Illness.”
https://iaphs.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/IAPHS-McKinlay-Article.pdf
“The Venerable Upstream Parable Helps In These Trying Times, and Applies
To the Future of AI-Self Driving Cars.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2020/04/03/the-venerable-upstream-parable-helps-in-these-trying-times-and-applies-to-the-future-of-ai-self-driving-cars/#33bad86180e9
Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879) https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/george-progress-and-poverty
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, “Horatio Alger...” https://time.com/6305543/horatio-alger-myth-american-dream/
