I’ve also noticed that progressive companies and business leaders are embracing more distributed systems and management styles into their organizations.

Interestingly, in technology, I’m noticing the opposite happen as well. People with extremely liberal political beliefs and a strong bias towards centralized planning are embracing highly distributed organizations and control structures in their web 2.0 companies, largely because they map to the distributed architectures of their products and services.

Private sector free market thinkers often deride the wisdom of government programs because it’s centralized planning, bureaucratic, political, inefficient, etc. And yet those are precisely the behaviors exhibited within most private sector companies. At eBay, for example, they had committees dedicated to figuring out pricing, elaborate lobbying processes for doling our train seats, and teams whose job it was to rig the rules for certain desired outcomes.

The free market is supposed to be about meritocracy, survival of the fittest, and individual responsibility. But in practice, most private sector corporations rarely operate on those principles. Instead, they typically behave with hierarchical command and control systems that would make the Kremlin proud.

I think you may have come at this one with a little too much edge. If you re-read, you’ll see I wasn’t talking about Harvard specifically, except in the context of the fact that it uniquely has a unique, world-class graduate school of government, and a world-class graduate school of business. The takeaway here isn’t that either side is right or wrong (there are elements of truth in both positions), but that the logical frames of the positions are so far apart they literally miss each other. I’ve seen this pattern repeat over and over again in both business & political discussions.

As for HBS, I do not think there is any evidence that any misbehavior was disproportionally centered on the school or its graduates. Unless the more general point is that HBS graduates have a disproportionate amount of success in finance & business, so they are over-represented in the finance industry, period.

I’m pretty sure Chris “had kittens” in response to this post for three reasons. (1) He went to HBS, and blogs about it. (2) He has seen this same debate, and found it amusing & accurate the same way I did. (3) He’s a friend of mine, so he’s going to bias supportive.

Take care,
Adam

I’m not sure what the insight you intended to share from this post was (please do tell). But I’m guessing that what Chris took away that caused him to have kittens is far different than what I took away.

http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2009/07/best-post-ever-on-difference-between.html

This is one of the best explanations of how politics works I’ve ever seen!