Leadership: A Critical Text by Simon Western

Author:Simon Western
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446293300
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Published: 2013-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

The dominance of the neo-liberal economic agenda stays with us. In spite of the failure of their best economists and business leaders to predict and prevent the financial collapse in 2008, they proclaim more of the same, more extreme Controller leadership to solve the crisis. Italy and Greece both suspended democracy to be controlled and governed by ‘neutral’ technocrats imposing austerity measures dictated by the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank, to ensure these countries efficiently controlled their budgets. As the New York Times (2011a) put it, ‘roiling financial markets have upended traditional democratic processes’. David Skelton (2011) writes in the New Statesman:

Government of the technocrats, by the technocrats, and for the technocrats is hugely undesirable and, by its very nature, bad for democratic legitimacy ... Rule by technocrats has replaced rule by the people – with unelected, economically orthodox international bodies like the European Commission and the IMF working with unelected technocrats now heading up national governments to implement tough austerity measures that have never received public backing.

The abandonment of democracy in favour of technocrats demonstrates the faith in the Controller discourse in spite of the failures that led to the financial crisis. The game of numbers extracted from reality, the application of ‘instrumental rationality’, the chasing of the ends (short-term profit) without reflection on the means, to impact on business and society in general. What became apparent was the irrationality of this ‘rational’ number chasing approach. The banks lost their identity and focused on their core business, i.e. as safe places to invest money, and became sites of commerce, and, worse, casinos, gambling with and losing our pensions and savings. Numbers showed huge success, and numbers also managed to hide huge risks and debts. A failsafe system based on logic, mathematics, computerized risk-assessment, with complicit ‘independent’ credit agencies, proclaimed the banks safe until days before they fell. In simple terms, the increasing mountains of debt were unsustainable and in retrospect sure to fail. When leading by numbers becomes divorced from the social, from people’s lives, there seems to be a snowball effect, and those involved lose sight of what’s important or real.

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