The New Realist Podcast

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/

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Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

~John F. Kennedy Jr.

President John F. Kennedy said this in an address in the White House on March 13, 1962, at a reception for the diplomatic corps of the Latin American Republics.

Of the many memorable quotes by Kennedy, this is one of my favorites because it reminds us of two things. First, how important it is that a governmental system facilitate peaceful progress and reform and second, the danger of not doing so.

This, almost universal truism, is even more relevant in the American system because we were born in revolution and, as a result, have a long history of justifying acts of violence, although clearly illegal, as legitimate.

For this reason, it is even more important in our system that we work to insure there are robust pathways for peaceful progress and change.

To see how well we are doing on this score, consider the following.

In the Spring of 1982, former Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon delivered a commencement address at Tufts University. The focus of his talk was our constitutional system and its inability to address the problems facing the nation. More than forty years later, it is stunning that so many of the issues he spoke about, issues on which the government failed to act in 1982, remain problems today: the budget, deficit, energy, social security, foreign relations, and gun control.

In the context of gun control, Dillon spoke about how unconscionable it is that the federal government failed to enact legislation despite “polls showing that it is desired by at least three quarters of the electorate.”

That was 1982.

Since that time the nation has experienced nine of the eleven deadliest mass shootings in modern history including the 2017 killing of sixty people at the Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, the 2016 massacre at an Orlando night club which left forty-nine dead, the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 which left thirty-two members of the campus community dead, the 2012 rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School which left twenty-six dead, including twenty, six and seven year old children, and another horrific school shooting, this time in Uvalde Texas when nineteen third and fourth graders and two of their teachers were killed, along with another seveteen who were wounded.

It was not until after the slaughter at Robb Elementary in Uvalde – four decades since Dillon’s address - that the federal government finally passed gun control legislation, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

Consider another issue, illegal immigration.

For decades, people from the left and right, Republicans and Democrats, have agreed that our immigration system is in crisis and badly needed repair. In 2000, President George W. Bush was elected in part on his promise that as a border Governor he had the knowledge and background to fix the nation’s broken immigration system. Despite eight years in office, however, the situation only continued to worsen.

Bush was followed by Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and now Donald Trump again (albeit six months in) – all of whom committed to fixing our broken immigration problem and none of whom were able to work effectively with Congress to pass common sense immigration reform. They have, in some cases, acted via Executive Order and action, but fixing the system requires federal legislation, which has yet to occur. This is still the case today, even though for years, millions of Americans have said this is a critical issue that needs to be addressed.

We can substitute in countless other issues, and each time we will find that outside of crises, the US government is at best very slow to respond to the needs of its people or, at worse, completely unable. It is in many instances, if not most, unresponsive to the majority will. Something which, as President Kennedy tells us, is dangerous because when you make peaceful change, reform, and progress difficult, you incentivize violence and revolution.

The question we should ask ourselves is why is change so difficult in our system? Is it just that we keep electing ineffective people to office? Or is there something else more insidious at play?

_____

Notes:

John F. Kennedy, Jr. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-first-anniversary-the-alliance-for-progress

Donald L. Robinson https://www.abebooks.com/9780813371146/Reforming-American-Government-Bicentennial-Papers-0813371147/plp

Deadliest Mass Shootings, Axios https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/deadliest-mass-shootings-modern-us-history

Bipartisan Safer Communities Act https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/2938/text

The New Realist is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeannesheehanzaino.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeannesheehanzaino.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeannesheehanzaino.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeannesheehanzaino.substack.com/subscribe