Organizational exhaustion… and internal exile
I wrote earlier about the loss of creative ability of the firm. This loss and the growing reliance on a command and control management style are obviously not without impact for an organization. In his political essay “The Power of the Powerless”, Vàclav Havel writes about a simple everyday experience he had in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. In the window of a local grocery store, he observed a poster of the Communist party that read: “Workers of the world, unite!” Havel asked himself, “Why does the grocery manager do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?” Obviously, the greengrocer was not a communist militant (in that era there were not so many around).