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has more than its fair share of determined despots. Even more impactful on the culture of large commercial organizations is military influence on how they were structured and run. The Multi-divisional (M-form) organization that characterizes most large business enterprises today, owed its origin to7 (or shared its parentage with8) the structure of Napoleon’s army corps, as learned by military graduates at West Point, some of whom landed up managing large railway companies in the US in the 19th century. While blindly following the M-form has its own problems (particularly in managing international operations), its impact is not as pernicious as the absorption of the military’s culture of unquestioning obedience to orders and the strict observance of the chain of command. Perceptive observers have recognized the disastrous consequences this can have within the military itself – most legendarily captured in the story of the Light Brigade’s charge during the Crimean war. While fatalities may be less in the commercial world (other than to the life of the firm) the consequences of questioning authority can be no less career curtailing. Surely this description from Dixon’s 'On The Psychology Of Military Incompetence' sounds familiar to many of | July 2021
us: "A hazard of belonging to any rigidly authoritarian hierarchical organization is that, from time to time, the individual, out of dire necessity or from strong personal conviction, feels compelled to apply pressures to those above him. It is a hazard because the ethos of the organization … demands that pressure always moves in one way only, downwards rather than upwards. To buck the system, by prodding those above, can have unpleasant consequences."9
Ever wondered why innovation is delivered so painfully when midwifed by helping hands from a corporate bureaucracy? Unfortunately, what traversed across domains was not the genius of generalship (rare as that might be even in the armed forces) or the courage, fortitude, and presence of mind displayed by individual soldiers and officers. It was the rigidities of military command, with its insistence on 'obey first; ask questions – never', that were the easiest to transmit to and retain in the world of business. Ironically, modern militaries themselves have
moved on from their sole reliance on rigid hierarchies in recognizing the need for more flexible structures as they face the asymmetric battle conditions of tomorrow. A rarely mentioned part of corporate management’s Calibanish ancestry is the Sycorax of slavery. As Bill Cook points out "ante-bellum slavery is demonstrated to have been managed according to classical management and Taylorian principles."10 The Scientific Management credo, that thinking should be left to managers, "was specified thus: '[t]he slave should know that his master is to govern absolutely, and he is to be obey[ed] implicitly . . . he is never for a moment to exercise either his will or his judgment in opposition to a positive order' " 10 Change a few words and you have the operating philosophy of many largescale users of people and the precariat today. Business enterprises in India have had to cope with another overlay: that caused by colonial rule during the formative years of modern Indian industry. Here too, the railways were among the first large private sector employers but, apart from the osmosis of military as well as plantation structures and the unquestioning obedience they bequeathed, came the deference due to the white man. I have referred to this
