The Dawn of Everything

Quick update on the “I'm running out of books to read” post back in December.  I just finished your first 10 recommendations– a couple of which inspired entertaining detour reads.  

A huge thank you(!!) to this community for sharing the books you’ve loved! 

I’m now a tiny, tiny bit more dangerous. 

Need an example?

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Book #9 was The Dawn of Everything.  And I’ve been trying to apply some of its ideas to modern work life.  The key word there— as you’ll soon see— is trying. 

If you haven’t read it, spoilers ahead. 

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The book had a ton of insights— many of which I’m sure were lost on me— but I did glom on to a couple.

The first was that throughout “conventional” history, leaders relied on one (or more) of 3 forms of domination to control their citizenry: the control of violence (sovereignty), the control of information (bureaucracy), and/or personal charisma. 

Oh, and I put the word conventional in quotes because the second insight (and the core argument of the book) is that people– from the beginning of time– have always had an alternative organizing/governing principle (rarely celebrated by historians) that explicitly rejected domination in favor of more egalitarian principles. Some Native American traditions for instance.  

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So what’s that have to do with how we work?

Maybe nothing. 

But it’s fun to think of companies as microcosms of our larger society— ones that quietly carry the burdens of our historical legacy of domination. 

If nothing else, it makes me think about how often I’ve heard that “work is not a democracy.”

It could be.  It’s just not. 

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Corporate culture has its own parallels to violence/sovereignty, knowledge/bureaucracy and charisma/celebrity.  I think of them in the context of operating models, operating disciplines, and leadership. 

Even though it's not a business book, The Dawn of Everything reaffirmed (for me at least) that the default operating model in business doesn’t have to be unapologetically top-down, command-and-control. The default operating discipline doesn’t have to compensate for a lack of trust with a stifling bureaucracy that further erodes trust. 

We just need leaders with moral imagination— who lean egalitarian and who are committed to changing the current default from hierarchy, bureaucracy and autocratic leadership, to a model we haven't yet seen.  One that is networked, distributed, and participatory.  One that values freedom and autonomy.

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Look… I could blather on and on and on about this stuff… thanks to ideas that were completely foreign to me before reading a book that I would have never picked up on my own. 

Suffice it to say that companies can— in their finer moments— be experiments in creating a brighter future, rooted in egalitarian ideals, in equity, in inclusion.. and in all the things that a legacy of domination has robbed us all of.  

It just needs more of us to pick up a good book.

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Enough writing. Back to reading.