The real art of delegation | Managing Leadership

Putting Power Down

Or, perhaps we should say, pushing it down throughout the organization. That’s something that Mary Parker Follett identified as an important way of increasing an organization’s overall power, or capacity. The follow-on to Managing Leadership will spend a lot of time on what this means and how to make it work. As it happens, the topic has also been taken up by a new book reviewed in BusinessWeek.

First, a few cautions: This book appears to focus on the decentralization of authority, and so perhaps misses much of what Follett teaches about power. It also appears to be mainly concerned with the dissemination of information and authority in a way that allows the intelligent exercise of central policy. This is a notable and worthwhile effort that every manager should seek to understand, but it still doesn’t go far enough in understanding how leadership in organizations really works (despiting touting “leaderless organizations” in the subtitle).

Moreover, the authors have taken on the colorful, but unfortunate, marketing habit of using the names of critters in the title (the book is entitled “The Starfish and the Spider”). In a revealing review of the genre, The Economist rightly lambasted business books generally for grasping for riches and glory on the basis of shallow thinking and hollow ideas, concealed behind flashy titles such as this (see the review: “How 51 Gorillas can make you seriously rich“). It is indeed embarrassing and lamentable that authors feel the need to present cartoonish morality-tales to us, advising us to seek out “starfish” like organizations, and to avoid “spider” like ones. But, then, we buy them, and we use the jargon they offer, don’t we? So, perhaps we should cut the authors some slack and ask ourselves what we think we’re doing.

While I agree with The Economist review, both about the awful state of thinking and writing in the business field generally, and the hint that books with numbers, animals, or colors in their title are almost certainly to be avoided, this particular book may be an exception. I invite you to visit the review (linked at the beginning of this post) and decide for yourself.

One thing of note pointed out in the review is the authors’ reference to a couple of websites established by American military small-unit commanders in Iraq. These were set up to help disseminate lessons-learned and practical information about developing events, and to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences. These sites, according to the authors, quickly became widely used vehicles for these commanders, more useful to them than the formal channels provided by the military chain of command.

There’s a lesson in that. It’s one we spend time attempting to address here, as well as in articles and interviews on the topic. While one must be careful to uncritically transpose military lessons to the civilian world, especially with respect to the peculiarly tenacious notion of individual leadership, it is true that there is much to be learned from the military, in a general sense, about how organizations work and, in particular, how individuals work within them. We’ll be discussing this in more detail, here, soon (once we’re all able to emerge from the corporate governance morass highlighted by the HP scandal).

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