09 Jun looking for a paragraph or two summary of this reading please
Question
looking for a paragraph or two summary of this reading please
Niccolo Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy on May 3, 1469. In 1498, he was appointed secretary and second chancellor of the Florentine Republic. In 1512, the Medici family regained power in Florence, and Machiavelli was accused of conspiracy, arrested, and tortured. With the intention of bringing him back into favor with the Medici family, Machiavelli then wrote “The Prince,” a guide to creating and holding onto a principality. Due to his controversial statements favoring a lasting regime over noble ideals, Machiavelli came to be widely regarded as the Devil’s servant. “The Prince” has become the bible of real politics, a frightening and useful source of inspiration.
In Chapter Four, why the kingdom of Darius, which was conquered by Alexander, did not revolt against the successors of Alexander after his death, Machiavelli states that all principalities have either been governed by one absolute prince, or else by prince and nobles. He states that a principality ruled by one absolute prince is difficult to enter, but once conquered, it is easily held. Whereas a principality ruled by prince and nobles is easy to enter, but difficult to maintain.
To what extent do Machiavelli’s thoughts apply to the roles and responsibilities of modern leaders from different countries, cultures, and trades? What are the advantages and disadvantages of a top-down or a flat organization in terms of communication and decision making? And just how dependent is the organization on the leader, and vice versa? Discover the mind of a leader.
Chicago and New York gangs are more of a top-down organization, they have the structure and the leadership that you might see in a corporation. But our West Coast gangs, especially in Southern California, have a flat organizational system. I describe it as two pyramids. In Chicago and New York, they have that pointed pyramid that we’re all familiar with, with a tip, a sharp point at the top. But in a Hispanic community, which most of the gang members from southern California are modeled after, we have an Aztec pyramid with a flat top. And that flat top is veteranos, or O.G.s, in the black gangs. And they’re not really leaders, they’re only figureheads. And they’re only given any authority because they have tenure.
When I think of leadership today, one thing that I think has occurred, at least, in America is that when I was a young boy, I think the model of leadership was very much top-down. There was the boss, and the boss had all the answers and would tell people, you do this, and you do that. Almost more of a military type of structure. In today’s world, especially in this country, I think that you find that there’s much more of a flat level and that the skill of being able to collaborate with others is far more important than just being the one who sits on top of the mountain and tells the people below, this is what you should be doing.
So in my role as the president of the foundation– and plus, I wouldn’t have made a good boss in the sense that I’m hopefully not bossy. Meaning telling people, you should do this, and you should do that. I don’t think that’s my personality. Fortunately, I think my style is probably more in alignment with what I see happening in America today. And that is that you really want to work with people as partners.
I would take the point of departure of my experience, which is under what circumstances do you get the highest number of talent? And I’m a strong believer– that’s also my personal experience– in having sets of organization where the capability is [INAUDIBLE] at a very early stage. My point, in a reasonably flat structure as you have within some organizations, you are quicker in looking out the number of talent you have around you. In a very top-down organizational structure, the risk is that on the one hand, those who are reaching up there are very robust and very talented. But the loss could be that maybe you’re losing someone on the way which, after some period, would be even more capable than the few who are getting at the top in these very rigid structure.
We in our company sabotaged ourselves, because I found I was the oldest member of my community. I think I was, when we were getting successful, in my 40s and everybody was in their 20s. So I’ve tried to find ways to get them to challenge me. So when they had their employment manual, there were six red envelopes in their employment. It says this is what you should do, this is what you can’t do, this is what the Body Shop stands for. There were six envelopes. And any time that they were angry about anything that they saw, or any bullying, or any patriarchal control, they would write to me or the board and within 24 hours, we saw them. So this really cut down bullying, it’s cut down the hierarchy of organizational structure, which works a lot in manufacturing plants.
Well, we’re a small company, so as a CEO I end up doing lots of things. Whatever is necessary, basically, in addition to typical management responsibilities. We do have a few other managers, so there is a bit of a structure there. But it tends to be an organization and a culture where hierarchy and managerial structure exerts itself only as needed, or when necessary. And the rest of the time, it’s fairly invisible such that for instance, we don’t have meetings. We don’t hold meetings because we find that– well, I don’t like meetings. No one else here seems to like meetings. So we don’t have meetings. And there are a lot of things about the way we run things that are very unusual, at least in my experience from working for other companies and larger companies, et cetera.
There are some people who want much more order, or there’s some people who much less order, but just want to– anyway, we’re going to get kicked out in three months, so why should we, blah, blah, blah. The song we have heard for 20 years. And it’s also been looking sometimes like it was actually going to end. But we’re here now, and somebody says it’s impossible to decide anything when we have to talk for 10 hours every time. We end up sending back 20 people, deciding something is wrong, and we just call somebody for a new meeting. It might be like this. But the things that we actually have been agreeing about through these almost 36 years that we actually decided it is like this. Everybody agrees. Regardless of what anybody says, I would say maybe it’s not the ideal way to lead and maintain, but at least it’s another way to do it. That works. It works.
All principalities, of which we have any accounts, have been governed in one or two ways; viz. either by one absolute prince to whom all others are his slaves, some of whom as ministers by his grace and consent aid him in the government of his realm. Or else, by a prince and nobles who hold that rank not by the grace of their sovereign, but by the antiquity of their lineage. Such nobles have estates and subjects of their own, who recognize them as their liege lords and have a natural affection for them.
The organization for me, too, has to be flat. You can’t have a span of control where nobody gets to meet with you on a regular basis. You have to have an organization that is flat enough that people feel that there is a way to reach you at some point, other than in meetings and so on. So our organization is pretty flat when you consider we have 4,500 employees or whatever. But I’m talking about one that includes people on a team level working on projects and issues and processes to improve their work. And that produces much better results than the top-down approach.
In an organization where you’re representing talent, it is very important to have both the top-down, and also the people who are working directly with the talent and the clients have a fair amount of flexibility. So the part that’s top-down is the vision you’re going with, how you want to service certain clients. There are different clients who have different needs which you can almost categorize. And then within that structure that’s set up, your employees have total flexibility. And so somebody who wants to represent a certain type of model may think rates should be– because we are constantly negotiating rates– they will make judgment calls all the time about one particular talent and the rates they work for. That has to be very flexible because you can’t be running back and forth to the leader to discuss each rate. So within each individual there needs to be some flexibility, as long as the parameters have been set.
In terms of our emergency preparedness, we clearly couldn’t have 25 people making decisions about the helicopter that went down in the East River. Clearly, there is one identified person who is the person who gives out all the directions. Very top-down in that way, because that is the way it has to work around emergency situations. Clearly, if we’re dealing with trauma or some other kind of major issue for the hospital, there is one single person who gives the orders and everyone has to respond. And they do. But we understand those structures because we train people around them all the time, and they work very well in those situations.
It’s the organizational structure is I think what’s important when you’re producing a film. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the same structure on every film. And different people do different jobs on different films. And a lot of that starts with the director because some directors will oversee every aspect of the production, and everyone’s reporting to them, and that’s how they work. Other directors want to focus on directing the actors, and they’re really relying on the director of photography to bring the ideas of how to shoot the movie, and to the editor to bring the ideas to edit the film and has those types of relationships. So that’s one thing.
Then there are different producers who have different reasons why they have come to the project as a producer and different roles they’re playing. Each movie has a different relationship with the studio, or if it’s independently financed, with your financiers. So that’s part of the fun and challenge of the job of producing, is as the movie gets going, you’re creating, but also discovering, probing, learning about, what is the organizational structure of this film? Who are the players, what do they do, who’s got the power, who thinks they have the power, who wants the power, who doesn’t have the power, and how can I recreate that to be what it should be? Or in some cases, if you’re stuck with something, then you’ve got to work around that. It’s putting together the flow chart, and you don’t know what it’s going to be. And you want to have the flexibility to create whatever organizational structure is going to be the best for that movie.
But you do, I believe, want to get to a place where people, at some point, as soon as possible, understand who’s doing what, who’s reporting to who, who’s in charge of what areas, and then also what is the forum for a decision making. That goes from the extreme of a movie where the director makes every decision and no one has any say in anything on one side, to a movie where every decision is made by committee. Where 12 people stand around the monitor that you’re looking at the shot and discuss. I wouldn’t want to work on a movie in either of those two extremes, but they certainly exist. And fortunately, most of the movies I’ve done are somewhere in the middle. But every movie has its own unique system and structure, and that’s our job to figure that out and create it simultaneously.
We have seen that many leaders prefer a flat organizational structure in order to secure sufficient communication, motivation, and flexibility. However, this flexibility in terms of making changes or decisions also implies that flat organizations emphasize setting a firm direction to ensure that everybody is working in the same direction. But just how dependent is the organization on the leader and vice versa? What are the advantages of taking over a flat as opposed to a top-down organization or country?
If you are in a very dictatorial regime in the first place, there is a great advantage in having a very simple and very clear structure of authority. And the only way in which you can have a very simple and a very clear structure of authority is to have one person at the top of it, and no one else alarmingly close to them. But actually, the dictatorial regimes of shared responsibility can be quite unstable because people are fighting each other the whole time to get right up to the top.
Turkey and France furnish us examples of these two different systems of government at the present time. The whole country of the Turk is governed by one master. All the rest are his slaves, and having divided the country into Sunjacs, or districts, he appoints governors for each of these whom he changes and replaces at his pleasure. But the king of France is placed in the midst of a large number of ancient nobles, who are recognized and acknowledged by their subjects as their lords and held in great affection by them. They have their rank and prerogatives, of which the king cannot deprive them without danger to himself.
That’s very true. Because you have a leader, you have a target to aim at. But he will insulate himself, just like the Italian mafia. They’ll use underlings to actually do the criminal acts that he only directs. So unless you make a case of conspiracy against the leader, it’s very difficult to take them out. But once you do, you’ve actually hurt the gang. And in the coalitions that we see in the West Coast, it’s much more difficult because you have so many different leaders and there’s no one authority figure that you can target. The leadership is not as clearly defined as people on the East Coast and the Midwest are used to seeing. On the East Coast, the gang members have a president and a vice president and a counsel. In Chicago, they have a king, his name is Larry Hoover. So it’s a very clearly defined organizational structure.
Not in the West Coast, not in Los Angeles. We have a very loose structure, like a Communist cell. A network of loosely aligned coalitions. So if you take out one person or one group or charismatic leader, the net just expands. It doesn’t destroy the group. In New York, if you took out the leader of the Latin Kings or one of the other major New York gangs, you would hurt them. Or in Chicago, if you arrested Larry Hoover– which they did, and put him in federal prison– they hurt that organization. But if you arrested the leader of some clique of the Mara Salvatrucha you’d do very little damage to Mara Salvatrucha or Florence, or 18th Street. So it continues to spread and mutate, and it actually is mutating to fit the environment that it’s operating in.
It’s certainly right that to take over a role of a very clearly defined kind at top of a highly organized structure, which has for a long time controlled a very large number of people very effectively, that it’s much easier to do that with the effect of continuing to control the people who were controlled previously than it is to establish control afresh from a standing start in a huge area where the people there don’t particularly, from their point of view, naturally belong together anyway and who have never been effectively controlled by anyone. So the contrast between occupy in Japan, for example, after the end of the Second World War where there was a particularly strong state tradition of a particularly integrated kind.
And much stronger and much more integrated historically than in the case of Germany for example, where the lender, in a sense reflect the much more plural, real history of Germany until the Wilhelm [INAUDIBLE] Reich, until Bismarck. But certainly, in taking over Japan, the Allies had no difficulty at all. Or General MacArthur, to put it slightly more concretely, had no difficulty at all in taking over, because he just said we’re going to leave the Emperor, but you do, as it were, what he told you to do before. When we tell you to do it, you just for him, read us for a moment. And we’ll go on from there. And that is actually more or less what happened, in terms of establishing the range of American requirement and tolerance for the Japanese population.
We are back to basics. If you want to have good leadership and if you want to have sustainable leadership, and leadership which also thinks of the next generation of leaders, then you’re best off if you have a reasonable, coherent structure. And this will be my major message. Coherence, in all its aspects, is one of the most important modern platforms of getting leadership which is robust, which is reasonably informed, intelligent, but in the broad sense, also skilled of understanding that leadership is not only to make the right decision at the right moment. Leadership is also, to be sure, that the decision you made is carried by people, is carried by society or organization so that it’s a part of your team’s decision. Not only your decisions.
In discovering the mind of a leader, we have witnessed various paths to success and found that some of Machiavelli’s thoughts still represent the way we think and act today. Top-down organizations that have previously been run by one clearly defined leader are difficult to take over. But once taken over, easier to control as they are already united and structured. Flat organizations, on the contrary, are easier to take over but difficult to control as they are hard to unite and direct. Many modern leaders prefer a flat organization as short internal communications spans, motivation, and flexibility within clearly defined frames are important elements.
So in defining the path to success, we may say that leaders who want to prevail must understand the advantages and disadvantages of governing a top-down and a flat organization, and hereby acknowledging that more modern leaders seem to prefer a flat organization, which fosters a faster decision making process, a higher motivation due to job rotation, and changing challenges, easier access to spot talents, higher flexibility, and a more humanized work environment where all levels work together more or less as partners.
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