The Centralization-Decentralization Dialectic

Why is it that attempts to decentralize often seem to result in an accumulation of power at the centre? There are several possible explanations.

1. In some instances, the decentralization agenda may be completely fraudulent. Popular leaders may spout the rhetoric of decentralization as a means of permanently gathering more power for themselves.

2 Alternatively, the leadership may believe that a temporary centralization is a necessary step towards what Lenin called The Withering Away Of The State. "Although leaders such as Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher may have been inspired by liberal mentors - Thatcher being directly inspired by Hayek - they nonetheless were decision makers who benefited from power." (Marciano and Josselin p xvi)

3. As a third possibility, the leadership may genuinely believe in the desirability of decentralization, both short-term and longer-term,  but find themselves frustrated by larger system forces. Emerging system behaviour somehow manages to nullify any planned intervention that challenges the essential purpose and identity of the larger systems: Stafford Beer coined the term POSIWID to refer to this phenomenon.

4.  We may note that there is always a paradox in imposing a decentralization agenda from the centre. Mark Bray observes that "the terms centralization and decentralization usually refer to deliberate processes initiated at the apex of hierarchies. However, sometimes patterns change by default rather than by deliberate action. Also power may be removed from the centre either with the acquiescence of or in the face of resistance by the centre."

5. There are various trade-offs involved. For example, Jan Zábojník discusses the trade-off between the distribution of information and the distribution of motivation.

6. Centralization and decentralization often take place alternately, creating a kind of oscillation, or even simultaneously. For example, Paul Corrigan talks about Centralising and decentralising the NHS simultaneously (October 2011), and asks how to work with that?

7. Or perhaps we need to stop thinking about centralization-decentralization as a simple polar choice. Writing on IT centralization and decentralization (HBR July 2008), Susan Cramm says it's time to kill off this centralized versus decentralized IT debate. No longer should we ask, "Should we centralize or decentralize IT?", but rather, "How do we decentralize IT in a centralized manner?"

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Bob Avakian, Centralization, Decentralization and the Withering Away of the State (2004)

Mark Bray (2003),  Control of Education: Issues and tensions in Centralization and Decentralization, in Arnove, Robert F. and Torres, Carlos A. (eds) Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local, second edition. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp.204-228.

N McGinn and T Welsh, Decentralization of Education UNESCO 1999

Alain Marciano, Jean-Michel Josselin (eds), Democracy, freedom and coercion: a law and economics approach Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007

Richard Saltman, Vaida Bankauskaite, Karsten Vrangbaek (eds) Decentralization in Health Care: Strategies and Outcomes. Open University Press 2007.

Jan Zábojník Centralized and Decentralized Decision-Making in Organizations (pdf),  Journal of Labor Economics, January 2002

There is always another story 2

James Allworth (and apparently Clay Christensen) believe that Steve Jobs solved the innovator's dilemma (HBR October 2011).

Allworth's simplified version of the Innovator's Dilemma (as explained with greater precision in Christensen's book) is that successful innovators are led astray by the pursuit of profit. Jobs supposedly disdained profit, along with any number of other business school best practices, and produced "a company that looks entirely different to almost any other modern Fortune 500 company". In an unrelated article on Steve Jobs and the purpose of the corporation (HBR October 2011), Ben Heineman has asserted that "Apple existed to delight customers first — benefits to other stakeholders, including shareholders, followed".

Jobs' original expulsion from Apple may well have been partly caused by his failure to respect the traditional gods of management. On his return, he characterized the difference between Sculley and himself in terms of profitability versus passion. Jobs later told Walter Isaacson, his official biographer: "My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. The products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything." [via Huffington Post October 2011]

But as I indicated in my previous blogpost (There is always another story), Jobs was outstandingly good at constructing simple either-or narratives of this kind, and persuading everyone to believe them. His former colleague Bud Tribble called this a Reality Distortion Field. We sometimes have to work hard to avoid taking such narratives at face value. Like many wealthy rock stars or religious gurus, Jobs may have enjoyed creating the impression that he didn't care about wealth. But we don't have to believe it.

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James Allworth, Steve Jobs solved the innovator's dilemma (HBR 24 October 2011)

Note: Professor Christensen tweeted James Allworth's HBR article without further comment, so I take that as indicating broad agreement with the article's main premise. See also Evgeny Morozov, Form and Fortune - Steve Jobs’s pursuit of perfection and the consequences (The New Republic, February 22, 2012).

There is always another story

Steve Jobs talks about death

"About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. ... It turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now." [Stanford University, June 2005]

But according to some sources, there is a critical omission from the story. The diagnosis was in October 2003. Jobs spent several months trying alternative medicine before agreeing to the surgery, which took place in July 2004. Some cancer experts believe this delay may have shortened his life.

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Polarity

Jobs himself judges the world in binary terms. Products, in his view, are "insanely great" or "shit." One is facing death from cancer or "cured." Subordinates are geniuses or "bozos," indispensable or no longer relevant. People in his orbit regularly flip, at a second's notice, from one category to another, in what early Apple colleagues came to call his "hero-shithead roller coaster." (Fortune Magazine 2008)

Some might think that this was at odds with his Buddhist beliefs: Polarity is an Illusion, Oneness is a Reality.

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Risk

It is important to understand the ways in which Jobs' attempts to manipulate his world pose risks for Apple - and thus its investors. They are evident in his difficult partnerships with music and television companies, which chafe at his insistence on setting uniform prices for their songs and videos on iTunes; in the real story of his battle with cancer; and in his deployment of stock options at Apple and Pixar, which exposed both companies to backdating scandals. (Fortune Magazine 2008)

The risks here come not only from the attempts to control everything, but from the polarity, delay and denial, which emerges from the way he tackled his cancer as well as in the way he ran Apple.

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Storytelling

Writing in the Guardian, in the week Jobs died, Charlie Kaufman reveals something important about story-telling. He wasn't talking explicitly about Jobs, but as Matthew Creamer points out, he might as well have been.

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

The other thing that happens is adjustment. You find out which part of the story works, which part to embellish, which to jettison. You fashion it. Your goal is to be entertaining. This is true for a story told at a dinner party, and it's true for stories told through movies. Don't let anyone tell you what a story is, what it needs to include. As an experiment, write a non-story. It will have a chance of being different.

Meanwhile, some reviewers of Walter Isaacson's authorised biography of Steve Jobs are questioning whether it is a true representation of the man - see revew roundup by Clare Spencer.

Is a single true representation possible - of anyone, let alone Jobs? Brent Shlender writes

"Most of us who wrote in depth about the brilliant career of Steve Jobs sooner or later came to realize that we were complicit in the making of a modern myth. ... Nevertheless, Steve was merely mortal. And his storied life was one of dissonances and contradictions."

Steve Jobs wasn't a visionary

I'm afraid I disagree with my friend @markhillary and countless others who have described Steve Jobs as a visionary. See for example Mark's piece Steve Jobs Succeeded Against all the Odds (Huffington Post, 6 October 2011).

If you want a visionary from the billionaire college-drop-out class of 1955, Bill Gates is your man. A computer in every home? A chip in every household device? Computers in schools? Business @ the Speed of Thought? Wiping out polio? Those are the kinds of goal we regard as visionary.

Jobs himself credited Gates' vision. "Bill was really focused on software before almost anybody else had a clue that it was really the software." (WSJ May 2007)


As Horace Dediu (@asymco) points out, Steve Jobs was not a visionary or a futurist. He just built the future, one piece at a time.

On his own account, he didn't even "put the dots together and saw where they led", as Horace (I think mistakenly) claims. The point of the calligraphy story in his Stanford Commencement address [Stanford University, June 2005] is that "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

Lucy Suchman talks about plans and situated actions. Situated action is "living in the moment", which Buddhism calls mindfulness, and Jobs himself called following your heart. (See PresentationZen). There is no grand plan, simply enormous attention to detail.

What he did connect was people and knowledge. @jonahlehrer says his secret sauce was Consilience. See my post From Convenience to Consilience.

That's not exactly vision. But it has a lot to do with what Gartner calls "ability to execute". After Steve's death, Dan Lyons (responsible for the brilliant and funny FakeSteveJobs blog) asked Woz what he thought was Steve's greatest strength. "Everyone else will say vision, and gosh darn that’s important but that doesn’t go anywhere without operational discipline. ... He organized the company to have good tight controls. Watching everything he could — that is operational excellence." (RealDanLyons, 11 October 2011)

Malcolm Gladwell agrees. "Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man." (Steve Jobs Real Genius New Yorker, November 2011) via @ironick


But of course you may disagree. There is always another story.