In a blog for Labour List [New media command and control doesn't work: we need to embrace and engage] Lord Peter Mandelson said that
“when it comes to new media we have to recognise that the days of command and control are over. Instead we need to learn to embrace and engage.”
He preceded this remark, however, by saying that he was rather proud that
“...no-one has been more identified with message and campaigning discipline than myself, ... because, during the 1980s... we were in hand-to-hand combat with an almost universally hostile press,”
and that
“... we will still need loyalty and discipline, and that crucial other component, focussed, hard work.”
i.e. Mandelson still thinks he rules.
Predictably, the response from other bloggers was near-incredulity.One scoffed:
“Not command and control? This from the party that wants to intercept everyone's phone calls, intercept everyone's e-mails, intercept everyone's internet browsing, fingerprint everyone in the country?”
And another asked
“what do you propose to do, Peter, about Labour's reputation as the most commanding and controlling government of all time? You must know they are despised.”
No-one took the issue any deeper, and today, Sunder Katwala, the head of the Fabian Society told equally sceptical Guardian readers that:
“ The ideas we need in 2009 can not be brought back from 1909, the General Theory of 1936 or Thatcherism.”
He then went on to say that:
"They could help to inspire the new ideas that we need. But we will have to think of them ourselves.”
Thatcherism can inspire new ideas??? In the Fabian Society? Where have these people been? Still lobotomised by their membership of the British American Project for the Successor Generation - probably.
Like Mandelson and Katwala, Labour activists and would-be thinkers (and for that matter progressives in every society) have so far failed to grasp that the issue of Command and Control Leadership is at the heart of their lack of the kind of new ideas that are needed in the 21st century.
This brief response by WILLSON to Katwala's blog tried to start the ball rolling.
The Fabians need to begin to reflect upon why none of our existing leaders are capable of imagining and carrying through processes of transforming our societies into learning systems that are capable of adapting to the complex threats and challenges of the 21st Century.
Our current leaders operate within an obsolete Command and Control paradigm that has been shaped by thinkers such as Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, Newton, Smith, the Federalists, Clausewitz, Marx, Herbert Spencer, Rhodes, Milner, Carnegie, Weber, Nietzche, y Gasset, Pareto, Schumpeter, the Webbs, F.W. Taylor, Lippman, Keynes, Kennan, Carl Schmidt, Herman Kahn, Andrew Marshall, Hayek and Friedman.
The blinkers imposed by the Command and Control paradigm prevent them, and of course Fabians and journalists, from seeing that modern thinkers and practitioners like Stafford Beer, Horst Rittel, Peter Checkland, Joseph Tainter, W. Edwards Deming, Chris Argyris, Donald Schön, Peter Senge, Tarso Genroe, Karl Polanyi, Ricardo Semler, Dee Hock, John Seddon, Joe Trippi and Paulo Freire, Guy Routh, Steve Keen could provide them with the basis for a new paradigm of leadership our societies will need to survive and flourish in the 21st century and beyond.
The fact that most of the names in the third paragraph will be unfamiliar to members of the Fabian society and Guardian readers is a measure of the power and obtuseness of the Command and Control paradigm. For all those trapped in Command and Control thinking, a few hours spent googling those new names might begin to open up the possibilities for a whole new way of thinking about how to lead our societies out of the suicidal cul-de-sac down which the old paradigm is herding them.
Alternatively you can see a detailed account of how this new paradigm of Leadership might work at
Leading GAIAN REVOLUTION
to be continued
