I was asked to write a brief opinion essay on a thematic shift in US politics for a class today. Thought I'd post for comments. Here are a couple bits & pieces:

On January 2, 2010, the New York Times published an interview with Gordon M. Bethune, former chief executive of Continental Airlines. Correspondent Adam Bryant asked Bethune asked about the metric by which the CEO hired people for his company. Bethune responded:

The really good people want autonomy — you let me do it, and I’ll do it. So I told the people I recruited: “You come in here and you’ve got to keep me informed, but you’re the guy, and you’ll make these decisions. It won’t be me second-guessing you. But everybody’s going to win together. We’re part of a team, but you’re going to run your part.” That’s all they want. They want a chance to do it.

Bethune describes an unconventional business model. Throughout the 20th century, business efficiency was partly—if not mostly—considered to be dependent on management. Bethune describes a rare but contagious business model that is popping up at companies around the world, where productivity and innovation is caused by intrinsic motivation of workers (autonomy of self, mastery of one’s craft, purpose in one’s work) rather than traditional extrinsic motivation (rewards, bonuses, demerits). Daniel Pink points to a business practice used by Atlassian, an Australian software developer. Several times each year, the company tells its employees to drop everything they’ve been assigned for 24 hours, and work on something totally unrelated. Engineers work on anything they want, without supervision. They return the next day with the opportunity to pitch their own ideas and are given the opportunity to direct the trajectory of Atlassian’s next big project. They call these days "FedEx" days, because you have to deliver within 24 hours.

Both companies are acting on cultural shifts described in Joe Trippi’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: “power is shifting from institutions that have always been run top down, hoarding information at the top, telling us how to run our lives, to a new paradigm of power that is democratically distributed and shared by all of us” (Trippi 4). This shift cannot be typified to a single element. It is not just democratization.  It is democratization, decentralization, engagement, empowerment all at once. And whereas Daniel Pink and Gordon Bethune are two thought-leaders that advocate applying this shift in the private sector, there is perhaps more to be learned within the arena of public affairs and political campaigning.

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American politics has a formula: “race to raise money from one-quarter of one percent of the wealthiest Americans and corporate donors in exchange for dictating the policy of the country;” “the team that raises the most money buys the most television ads, then uses these blunt instruments to pummel the most Americans into not voting for the other candidate” (Trippi xvi, 79). This efficiency-seeking system lends itself to political disengagement: it requires the activation of only 1% of the country to win a presidential election. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals writes in Jacobus v. State of Alaska (2003): “A failure to regulate the arena of campaign finance allows the influence of wealthy individuals and corporations to drown out the voices of individual citizens … causing the public to become disillusioned with and mistrustful of the political system.” It has separated the ends—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—from the means: an insider’s game of internal polling, reports, briefs and bills. “The deepest error of our political thinking [is] to talk of politics without reference to human beings,” wrote Walter Lippman in his first book, A Preface to Politics. Yet this is where American politics is today.

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It’s hard to walk through the streets of Boston without being stopped by a young man or woman with a clipboard who, full of optimism and vigor, asks if you care to save the children, save the environment, or promote some other equally worthy cause. Yet all the inspiration you might feel from talking to this altruistic youth quickly fades when you realize this person does not want your participation. This person wants your money, to pay for someone else to participate for you. As Stephen Duncombe writes in Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, “young people recruited to save the environment find themselves working for third-party professional fund-raising companies. Their participation is then limited to soliciting contributions for professional activities who do the real action” (Duncombe 66). This is precisely the world that the elderly, cynical Walter Lippman so feared. Political campaigns and advocacy groups are enchanted with efficiency, spending more time on the strategic allocation of resources at the top than on engaging and activating their memberships. There is no room for them in professionalized politics.

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