₦airaland Forum

PointZerom:
Even buhari dey beg British doctors to heal him.

LionDeLeo:
Hmm.

Why won't they beg in another man's country when they disrespect their own country.

Do you know some girls bluntly refuse to do domestic chores in their fathers' houses only to end up being used as beasts of burden in their bf houses?

They will be in Nigeria calling her all sorts of unprintable names but when they finally move to other countries and things aren't as rosy as they had expected, the next thing is to start some very dehumanising jobs to survive because the shame of going back to the country they had condemned wouldn't be bearable.

NaijaEfcc:
Mehn I wan cry!!! God punish our past and present leaders!!

paskyboy:
Our institutions are failing us
Let’s start with the good stuff: the problem. It isn’t just the pervasive political dysfunction. It’s “something deeper and more existentially disruptive: the near total failure of each pillar institution of our society.” The financial crisis and the economic depression it has precipitated are just the most recent instances of the failure. The cumulative effect of these failures is a national mood of exhaustion, frustration, and betrayal… There is a collapse of trust in institutions in the wake of a war based on lies and a financial bubble that went bust.”

Nor is it just the government. Hayes notes that the private sector is in similar difficulty: “from the popping of the tech bubble, to Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing, to the Big Three automakers, to Lehman Brothers, subprime, credit default swaps, and Bernie Madoff, the overwhelming story of the private sector in the last decade has been perverse incentives, blinkered groupthink, deception, fraud, opacity, and disaster.”

Hayes sees the emotional disquiet ensuing from these disasters playing out in different registers on the right and the left, but across the ideological divide there is a deep sense of alienation, anger, and betrayal directed at the elites who run the country. We do not trust our institutions because they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy.

The villain? Meritocracy
Why are we having these problems now? This is where we start to run into problems. Hayes blames it all on the meritocracy. “Three decades of accelerating inequality,” he says, “have produced a deformed social order and a set of elites who cannot help but be dysfunctional and corrupt… Our fundamental, shared beliefs about how society should operate are deeply elitist. We have accepted that there will be some class of people that will make the decisions for us, and if we just manage to find the right ones, then all will go smoothly.”

Hayes believes that there is “something very wrong with the people running the country… Despite opening the doors to women and racial minorities, what emerged when the dust had settled was a model of the social order that was more open but still deeply unequal... The ethos celebrates an ‘aristocracy of talent,’ a vision of who should rule that is in deep tension with our democratic commitments.” The result is “a cohort of socially distant, blinkered, and self-dealing elites.”

Recruitment into the top ranks of the meritocracy “cultivates a disposition to trust one’s fellow meritocrats and to listen closely to those who occupy the inner circle of winners. This faith in the expertise and judgment of the elites has been the Achilles’ heel of the Obama administration.”

Equality of outcomes through income redistribution
What to do about this terrible plague of meritocracy? While starting with an ostensibly bipartisan diagnosis, Hayes’s prescriptions are straight out of the liberal playbook: equality of outcomes through income redistribution.

“The policies needed to reduce inequality aren’t particularly mysterious,” writes Hayes. “In Latin America, neoliberal reforms and financial crises in the 1990s increased inequality on a continent that was already the most unequal in the world. But over the last decade a variety of leaders were elected to power on explicitly egalitarian platforms. They went to work putting their platforms into practice with an emphasis on increasing redistribution via payments to the poor, and the result is that across the continent, inequality fell. This at the same time inequality was increasing almost everywhere else in the world.”

With greater income equality, there will be, Hayes believes, a new cadre of leaders who will be more in touch with the people. Right.

A problem of institutions, not just individuals
This liberal agenda of taxing the rich may not be particularly mysterious, but even if the political support to implement it could be mustered, itself not exactly a slam-dunk, would it actually work? It would still leave our failing institutions in the pretty much the same shape that created the problems that we now have. What reason is there to think that the institutions and their leaders will function in any fundamentally different way, simply because they are run by different people with different backgrounds?

Thus experience shows that you can’t change institutions just by changing the individuals in them. That’s because institutions are stronger than individuals. Institutions mold individuals to their culture. To achieve true organizational transformation, you have to change the organizations’ goals, structures, processes, systems and values, in effect the whole way the organizations are run.

The problem is not one of the particular individuals who happen to be filling the leadership positions today. It’s a problem of the institutions themselves and the way they function. Hayes cites David Brooks: “My own trust in our political leaders is at a personal low. And I actually know and like these people. I just think they are trapped in a system that buries their good qualities and brings out the bad.”

The practical question is: how do you create organizations that bring out the good in people and suppress the bad? To answer this question, we need to understand why our institutions are out of sync with our needs.

Insurrectionists vs institutionalists.
Hayes makes the intriguing distinction between insurrectionists and institutionalists.

Institutionalists want to preserve the existing order and make small improvements within it. David Brooks writes that “the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of.” Institutionalists live in fear of a society without central repositories of authority, one that could collapse into mob rule at any time. Institutionalists believe that the people at the center of power are doing a better job than they’re given credit for.

By contrast, the insurrectionists want a rethinking of our major institutions— our government, our corporations, our civil society.

Curiously, Hayes’s solution to institutional failure is merely to change the people—i.e. have a different and more diverse group of people running them. Hayes thus comes across as a closet institutionalist. His book is missing a vision of the kind of fundamental rethinking that is necessary to change institutions.

The venal elites
The book is tightly focused on today’s self-interested elites. His argument that these elites have become more venal and self-interested than they used to be is plausible. One is more likely to hear today’s incumbents of the C-Suite ask, in the reverse of JFK, not what they can do for the country but rather: what can the country do for them? I and others have written about how they have grabbed an undeserved slice of the economic pie and now maintain an unwarranted sense of entitlement to keep it.

Yet I have a hard time believing the meritocracy is as bad as Hayes says it is, and an even harder time believing that it is the source of all evil.

That’s in part because I believe, as Hayes himself writes, that “People should get jobs and positions based on their ability to do the jobs. The ranks of airline pilots should be staffed with those who are best at flying, the ranks of surgeons with those best at performing surgery. And so on. Such a social order obviously benefits us all by keeping us clear of plane crashes and mangled operations.” If anything, we need more competence, not less.

I suppose my doubts also stem in part from the fact I am guilty of wearing the blinders of a beneficiary of the global meritocracy. I had the knack as a kid, through no fault of my own, of passing exams and getting into good schools. Having climbed up the ladder to modest level of success, I should, on Hayes’s thesis, now be trying to find ways to “pull the ladder after me, or to selectively lower it down to allow [my] friends, allies, and kin to scramble up.”

In fact, I am a committed insurrectionist—I am dedicated to fundamentally changing the way organizations are run. In the Christopher Hayes worldview, I shouldn’t exist. Indeed since Hayes is a member of the meritocracy himself, how come he is writing this book instead of building on his elite education and spending all his time trying to get his kids into Hunter and Harvard?

Making the elite colleges less elite
But even if you did believe in the thesis that the meritocracy is the source of all evil, you might need to be doing more than just raising taxes on the rich. Barry Schwartz has an interesting suggestion in this month’s The Atlantic: lotteries for college admissions. Not every deserving teenager can get into Harvard or Princeton. There just isn’t enough room. The solution? A lottery. Every applicant who is good enough gets his or her name put in a hat and the “winners” are chosen at random. Instead of having to be better than everyone else, they merely have to be “good enough”. The lottery wouldn’t remove the injustice of a pyramidal system in which not everyone can rise to the top. It would however make explicit that luck is a big part of it.

It might also help to show, over time, that the supposed superiority of an Ivy League education is highly over-rated. It would help show that the handful of the very “best” schools don’t generally offer any better education than scores of “good” schools. The elite schools have social cachet precisely because the elite find ways to get into them. In time, people would see that the very top schools are like those celebrities who are merely famous for being famous. Harvard would be recognized for what it is, the Justin Bieber of higher education.

The world has changed but our institutions haven’t
In any event, self-interested elites are only a part of the story of pervasive institutional failure. An even more important part of the story is the fact that our world has changed and our institutions haven’t. The lumbering hierarchical bureaucracies of the 20th Century that worked reasonably well fifty years ago aren’t nimble enough for today’s interconnected, mercurial world. Why should we be surprised that they keep failing us?

In the private sector, globalization and the availability of instant reliable information about the choices along with the ability to communicate with other customers has a resulted in a fundamental shift in power in the marketplace from seller to buyer. If the customers aren’t delighted, they can and do go elsewhere. The implications for big hierarchical bureaucracies in the private sector are devastating: change or die! At least half of the current Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist by 2020.

In the public sector, stakeholders are making similar demands for greater responsiveness and timeliness. Problems are exposed instantaneously. There are no longer any secrets. People demand solutions now, not the stumbling delays of unresponsive functionaries.

A society in transition
Hayes rightly argues that “social change is a two-step process. In the first stage, those seeking change must convince the public that the current system, with its hierarchies and concentrated power, should not be trusted… In the second stage, once those who oppose the status quo succeed in weakening the authority of the existing order, they are able to bring about new social and legal structures that actually reduce its power. At the moment we are caught in a strange limbo between stage one and two.”

Herein lies the principal gap in the book: it gives us little information on what the new social and legal structures might look like.

Hayes writes that “we are going to find our way out of the present crisis, we will need more…political imagination. We will need to imagine a different social order, to conceive of what more egalitarian institutions would look like. We will need to construct coalitions, institutions, and constituencies that militate not only against the status quo but for equality.”

Yet Hayes’s book barely begins this re-imagination. There is little discussion of how organizations actually function on a day-to-day basis or how they can be changed.

The great phase change to a new kind of economy
One would never guess from this book that we now know a great deal about how to create more agile and egalitarian organizations. Or that we are in the midst of a massive ongoing phase change from an industrial economy, dominated by big lumbering steeply hierarchical bureaucracies, to the Creative Economy where the key to success is innovation, agility and the responsiveness to customers and stakeholders.

We now know how to run organizations that systematically achieve both disciplined execution and continuous innovation, while creating fulfilling workplaces, something that was impossible to accomplish with traditional management methods. Over the last decade, these management practices have been field-tested and proven in thousands of organizations around the world.

An institutional revolution in its early stages
Although this revolution is already under way, most big firms and the public sector agencies are still not part of it. They are still steeply hierarchical bureaucracies. They are not equipped to operate in the new environment. Most still have a factory mindset oriented to economies of scale. They are not organized for continuous innovation. Their way of managing is unable to mobilize the full creative talents of their employees. Their way of operating doesn’t fit today’s world. It is not surprising that these lumbering bureaucracies continue to fail us.

The new breed of organization is emerging is one that has mastered the management principles needed for continuous innovation that delights customers, with a different role for the managers, a different way of coordinating work, a different set of values and a different way of communicating.

Unless and until our institutions tackle the challenge of the Creative Economy, they will always be failing us. It will also seem as though the country is unable to afford to maintain its infrastructure, educate its children, provide health care for its people or care for its elderly citizens.

It’s not just the individuals who lead the organizations who are responsible for the today problems. It is the institutions themselves. To fix the problems, we must change the institutions, not just the individuals.

Most of the pain that we now feel from our failing institutions is part of this great economic phase change. While many of our leaders and the organizations they run are mired in the past, Hayes is right to signal that the electorate is coming to understand that a fundamental change is under way. What is needed now is leadership that focuses on the opportunities offered by the future. We need a clear understanding of the nature of the journey that we are negotiating and intelligent action to get through the transition as quickly and painlessly as possible. The Creative Economy is a huge opportunity that awaits us.

Ezechinwa:
And do you blame them?

Do you think if Nigeria could provide Good roads, 247 electricity, world class hospitals, quality universities, and other basic amenities , would they run away?


Or would you say Nigeria don't have the money to provide these things? cause Saudi Arabia have Oil like we do, its just our mindsets is corrupt and wicked.

PointZerom:
Even buhari dey beg British doctors to heal him.

LionDeLeo:
They will tell you Nigeria is bleeped, they are going to countries were milk and honey flows.

Travel agents are making it big from those guys.

LionDeLeo:
Hmm.

Why won't they beg in another man's country when they disrespect their own country.

Do you know some girls bluntly refuse to do domestic chores in their fathers' houses only to end up being used as beasts of burden in their bf houses?

They will be in Nigeria calling her all sorts of unprintable names but when they finally move to other countries and things aren't as rosy as they had expected, the next thing is to start some very dehumanising jobs to survive because the shame of going back to the country they had condemned wouldn't be bearable.

lavenjcrown:
if truly u are tired of Italy why can't you start coming back home, u Grady guys, trying to discourage others from travelling out

reyscrub:
Na wa oooooo.

Plis which country can someone go to find job do easily without stress?

Pidgin2:
Do you think he has transport to come back? Some of then tore their passports initially so that they won't be deported