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Can Democracy Build Competitiveness?
| Article
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19646 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
4,710 Words |
| Author
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Charles Heckscher
Charles Heckscher is associate professor in human resources
management at the Harvard Business School. He is author of the
New Unionism (Basic Books, 1988). |
Democracy is widely believed to be good in human terms: that is, it appears to maximize the values of justice, freedom, and human development. My claim, however, is that it is also effective: that the way to competitiveness now lies through employee involvement. The reason is that democracy is the best structure for mobilizing intelligence.
This runs against common sense--or at least one aspect of common sense. Everyone "knows" that democracy is messy and inefficient: Factional battles, endless debates, and special interest claims all conspire to delay and distort. We see this every day in reading the morning papers. How often does it happen that we see what obviously needs to be done about some dire problem; how frustrating it is to watch this patently sensible solution sidetracked by expedient indulgence of vocal and self-interested minorities. How often do we say to ourselves, "If only I were running things, I would take care of it!"
Managers, who do run things, cannot tolerate this kind of incompetence. Their job is to make good decisions, and to implement them quickly and decisively to meet competitive challenges. They are not in the business of debating, nor of pleasing employees. As a result, they turn to the basic principles of bureaucracy, which Max Weber outlined a century ago and which remained unsurpassed for decisive implementation. A clear hierarchy of accountability, defined roles, rewards tied to performance--these are the ways to get the maximum effective effort from a large group of people. If you have the right answer, this is the way to go.
Yet there is a critical problem with this approach: A lot of the time, no one has the right answer. With the growing complexity of markets and technologies, strategy increasingly has to be pieced together. Those at the "top" of the organization, for example, have a wide view of competitors and long-term trends, but they generally are not in close touch with customers. This weakness has led many companies to grief. On the other hand, those at the "bottom" may know the customers better, and they may have a much better feel for operational inefficiencies; but they cannot implement change without knowledge of other parts of the organization.
In complex organizations there is no way to gather all relevant data into the head of one person, or even a few persons, for successful strategic decision making. If that is true, then good strategy must be determined by something else: by the presence of an effective process for building consensus among differing viewpoints. Such a
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