Bitter experience over the decades working in and with a variety of institutions has taught me the immutable truth of what is known as O’Sullivan’s Law, laid down by my friend the writer John O’Sullivan in 1989 to explain why organisations such as Amnesty, which were created to be impartial, go nuts: “All organisations that are not actually Right-wing will, over time, become Left-wing.” It’s to do with the Left always being more driven, single-minded and intolerant than the Right.
That might be part of it but is not, I think, the real reason. The left don’t get that thing about the free in free markets. Which is that anyone can pitch up and have a go. Therefore the left is lax in founding new organisations. The preference is to take over those that exist.
I’d also mutter something about this being a more general failing. They say that BP must build solar plants – for example. Energy will be, in the future, provided by those who produce energy now. Money made from producing energy now should stay in the same company and be used to produce the new energy, the new way, within the same company. They’re not grasping the idea of a new thing to be done, let’s have a new organisation, optimised to do that new thing.
It’s possible to carry the muttering further. The misunderstanding about society itself. The current disposition of everything must be made fairer. More perfect perhaps. Without understanding that we also – perhaps more so – want society itself to advance rather than just become more equitable at this particular stage. Some of those perceived unfairnesses being the very features which encourage that advance.
Of course, this all becomes close to a theory of everything and those are always toss. But I do think there’s a distinct something to this. It’s the other side of that common observation of mine that there’s nothing so conservative as a lefty. They seem entirely incapable of grasping that change tends to come not from reforming the extant but from starting anew and through competition destroying the extant. This is true of companies and tech – the new near always comes from new orgs, not olds, the iPhone and IBM PC being used as contra-examples precisely because they’re so rare – but is a more general observation about society itself.
Of course, it could also be that the left are just too damn stupid to be able to set up a new organisation and that has explanatory power too.
This is not a specifically left thing (although Melbourne City Council definitely qualifies) but there is a huge amount of whining about ‘reviving’ the Melbourne CBD.
Apparently baristas and sandwich shops are all going broke because lots of previously office based workers are quite happy with working from home arrangements and because the technology (widespread broadband, fast enough computers, etc) now support that, by and large employers are more or less giving in to it. And mostly it has worked pretty well, at least for the type of employee who did 95% of their job over the phone or email anyway.
But no, we have to ‘save the CBD’. Why? Used to be the most efficient way of doing things, now it’s not. Just another example of we’ve always done it this way so we should continue to do it. Blinkered thinking.
This ties in with the observation there’s no-one so conservative as a left winger; the idea of creative destruction fills them with horror
There are lots of skeins on this loom. One of them though is “it is the only thing that they can do.” Looking at some of my alumni from Uni at Linkedin, the heavy bias is working in acadenia or the public sector. A couple moved into IT, some went into marketing.
Look at the Labour front bench, how many “human rights” lawyers are there ?
Leftists have a tendency no to be able to think outside their owm limited scope, which is why their “solutions” to problems are always the same as those that have failed in the past andis also why they are incompetent in positinsof authority.
“that change tends to come not from reforming the extant but from starting anew and through competition destroying the extant. This is true of companies and tech – the new near always comes from new orgs, not olds, the iPhone and IBM PC being used as contra-examples precisely because they’re so rare”
Not convinced these are the world’s greatest examples. Lots of PDAs knocking around from the likes of Psion and 3Com before Apple tried with the Newton. Which went well. The Mac IIs didn’t exactly set the world alight either. IBM didn’t invent the concept either – they reacted to the likes of Tandy, Commodore and Apple. Whereupon Dell, Compaq et al ate their lunch. And Apple’s.
I thought O’Sullivan’s Law was that you naturally wind up alone.
“The preference is to take over those that exist.”
There’s also the innate leftist belief that diversity of provision is evil. 40 different pizza toppings? Decadent sinful wastefulness. 20 different women’s magazines? Horrendous! 50 different cats charities? Such an evil waste! 3 different fuse ratings? Yehwahhh???? There should be ONE women’s magazine, ONE cat charity, ONE health system, ONE bus company, ONE international water aid charity, ONE food provision to poor people system, ONE model railway scale.
O’Sullivan’s Law was that you naturally wind up alone.
There’s a second law about baby sitting.
The “proper” O’Sullivan’s law is that the one wearing a noseband coming up on the rails will win by a short head.
The left takes over extant organisations because they, or at least the part that takes over other organisations, are bone idle. Its far easier to steal other people’s hard work.
previously office based workers are quite happy with working from home arrangements and because the technology (widespread broadband, fast enough computers, etc) now support that, by and large employers are more or less giving in to it.
For now. Employers are going to push back sharply as they come to realise that many of their homeworkers are less productive at best and skiving at worst. And workers will be rather less demanding as the economy worsens.
The real challenge to CBDs is dealing with moribund retail.
Most of the left are a bunch of spoiled rich kids with a few weirdos thrown in. Few of them have ever done any sort of productive job of any seniority. And they’re rich enough to waste it.
I do think there’s something about “All organisations that are not actually Right-wing will, over time, become Left-wing”. I don’t like “left” and “right”, but let’s frame “right wing” as people who make a thing people want and get paid well for it. Organisations, whether capitalist bastards or charities, are started by these people. They see a problem and come up with a solution. They grow in that state.
At a certain point, the lefties notice that the organisations have lots of power and would like in, but they can’t get in because it still demands people be useful and productive, and it attracts serious people either with rewards of money or power.
But what I think mostly happens is that the lefties get their break with organisations as they become redundant. Like I’m never sure Amnesty was a particularly useful organisation, but it’s become more and more redundant as democracy and human rights have improved over the past 30 years around the world. Serious people who want to change the world probably aren’t so attracted, which leaves a vacuum that the crazies fill.
It’s the same with theatre in the 80s getting filled with plays about Fatcher, or art in galleries after 1942 or opera. The BBC is overrun by the left, but who cares now? You can keep it, I’m using YouTube.
They move into organisations they perceive to be powerful just at the time when that power has peaked: heavy industries, the media…
I think a big reason (perhaps the main one) is this – say you’re a physician, spent about 10 years working your ass off to get into & through med school, internship, residency, etc.
So, guess which political types decide they want to sit on boards or work for non-profits rather than actually do doctoring?
Leftists want to order other people around, it’s in their DNA. So, they go to work for the AMA rather than treating patients and instead of the AMA focusing on real medical-related issues it’s woke.
I thought this was Robert Conquest’s second law?
Either way it needs updating to just ‘ All organisations will, over time, become Left-wing’
Existing corporations often have resources that the leftists believe they ought to be able to control. Founding a new entity means trying to convince investors to fund your flaky idea.
There was a far-left nutjob on The Times comments pages around the Brexit era, handle was Andrew Wilson and he claimed to be a vet who’d worked for the EU all his life doing animal welfare and food safety stuff. I knew a few people who trained to be vets – most of them wanted to help sick animals, some saw it as a lucrative career. I can’t imagine anyone doing all that training in order to become an EU apparatchik, but I guess if you’ve failed at being a vet, there’s always that option.
I thought that one of the points about being right-wing is that you don’t want to be subsumed into an organization. You don’t want anyone organizing you. While the whole point of being left-wing is that you want to subsume everyone else into an organization, with you being the one doing the organizing.
If I’ve got it right, then any right-wing organization will by definition not remain that way.
Why BP should morph into the energy business: Kodak and Blockbuster being just two examples of companies that failed to connect the dots.
In my career as a turnaround and startup guru, I found that most failing businesses failed to adhere to the two most basic principles. 1. Find a customer who will give you profit. BP has the customer base. As Jimmy Carr said on Top Gear, when the needle goes into the red, the motorist doesn’t stop to question whether this time it should be petrol, hydrogen, electricity or unicorn farts. The motorist wants energy and for obvious reasons will be intensely loyal to the existing supplier. 2. Know what business you are in. Consulting engineers and language schools are both in the labour broking business. BP and Ecotricity are both in the energy business.
The business of business is to create value, which can be turned into money. You don’t create value by tossing in the wheelie bin that customer, that market share, that you fought so hard to get. When you have a customer who gives you profit, the competition will have to rip that customer out of your cold dead hands.