Deconstructing the Supermeme of Leadership: A Brief Invitation
to Creating Peer-Based Communities & Leaderless Organizations
Jeffrey S Nielsen
Author Bio
Jeffrey Nielsen explores existential questions and experiences through his writing. He is a philosopher educated at Weber State University and Boston College. At Boston College, Jeffrey was a Teaching Fellow where he taught courses in logic and critical thinking, the history and philosophy of art and science as well as in ethics and epistemology. He has also taught in the philosophy department at Brigham Young University, where he taught courses in the ethics of leadership, reasoning and writing, as well as in the history and development of science.
Jeffrey also consults with organizations around the world on management issues and assists organizations in developing peer-based managing, moral decision-making, and ethical problem solving models. Professor Nielsen has traveled internationally training with many of the Fortune 500 companies. His book, The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations, offers a new paradigm in peer-based management.
His most recent book, Deconstructing the Supermeme of Leadership: A Brief Invitation to Creating Peer-based Communities & Leaderless Organizations,presents a more philosophical and historical account of his peer-based model.
Description
This short work is meant to be the instigator, I hope, of a global dialogue on how better to live and work together in the twenty-first century. We need to convene a conversation on leadership and rank-based authority and the sooner the better, if we hope to solve the pervasive problems we face, before it’s too late. This book is also about the art of being human in community—the art of living beautiful lives of purpose and value in our organizations.
I should say what a supermeme is. It is an unexamined belief, which is widely held by a society, or even by entire cultures. It governs how people see and think about reality, and so it determines how a people engage with others, community, and the world. Given their unexamined nature and that they are widely accepted as true, supermemes can cause a dysfunctional status quo to emerge, which may last for generations, if not millenniums. They are able to push out other ideas and block genuine reflection and thinking on better ways to live as human beings. Supermemes harm human happiness and flourishing. In this book, I will argue that we are prevented from solving our extremely difficult, but not impossible, problems, by the supermeme of leadership—our ongoing concept of leader and practice of leadership governing life in our communities, nations, and work organizations.
So, everywhere we look we see countries and governments polarized and dysfunctional with few, if any, thoughtful and wise strategies to deal with the world’s growing political problems. We see economies struggling to provide most persons with decent jobs and livable wages, while at the same time grossly enriching the already wealthy. Even the economic recoveries of the last fifty-years have left the middle and working classes with a diminished standard of living. Now the effects of human induced climate change are about to make our problems even worse. We are approaching the climax of a perfect storm of bad things. In the face of these worldwide challenges, our concept of leadership and practice of leaders and professional managers are failing us. In fact, it is our practice of leadership and concept of leader, including the idea of professional managers, which is a major part of the problem.
Many believe the system is rigged against them to benefit those who already possess wealth and power. They are right. But what they don’t realize is how they do the rigging themselves! We all do, actually; by the way we permit power to be distributed in designing and managing our communities and work organizations. A primary objective of this book is to make people aware of the unquestioned rank-based conception of authority, justified by the supermeme of leadership, which we all accept as the proper and only way to distribute and exercise power in our shared lives together. So we give the few leaders and managers the power to control the decision-making affecting our lives and to command the resources we all need to live well. Should we be surprised that the powerful few grow in wealth and influence, while the many powerless find only evaporating opportunities? We will be examining the dynamic of the rank-based conception of authority, how it leads to unfair and immoral outcomes, and, most importantly, how our concept of leader and practice of leadership manipulates us into conspiring in our own repression. This work will require a serious ethical-political engagement with the very presuppositions of our living together as human beings.
My thesis, though difficult to imagine, is quite simple. Our concept of leader and practice of leadership is harmful to the majority of persons living in leader-based communities and working in leader-based organizations. In this book, I will explain why.
Book excerpt
The supermeme of leadership is creating explosive contradictions within our democracies, which turn them into nothing more than representative oligarchies with polarized populations. The supermeme of leadership is creating lackadaisical decadence in western countries and religious extremism in developing countries. The supermeme of leadership benefits from conflict, and so we shouldn’t expect it to find real solutions to global problems, whether war, climate change, or economic inequality. There is no peace in many regions of the globe for it would not be in the interests of the leaders of the various warring factions, or political leaders of nations to no longer have an enemy to generate support for the leaders’ continued power and privilege. I can only imagine if it were up to the majority of ordinary people in the world, there would be peace and an end to poverty overnight.
In a rank-based world, undeserving fools and immoral charlatans more often than not gain power, wealth, and positions. In a world governed by these immoral fools, there will be much violence, cruelty, and injustice. It will be up to the wisdom and morality of the majority to engage in the heroic action required to create worthwhile and fair communities and work organizations dedicated to the well being of both present and future life on this good earth. We need to understand that violence, cruelty, and injustice are a result of how we allow power to be organized, legitimized, and exercised in our communities and organizations. They are not necessary or unavoidable, but a consequence of the unexamined cooperation of the many and the greedy choices of the few. Ultimately the power to bring peace and prosperity to the inhabitants of our world rests, not with the political and corporate leaders, but with the people. We simply need to refuse cooperation with those who use violence, war, and economic extortion to get their way. But such refusal requires our awareness of an alternative to how we currently arrange our lives together in community and work organizations.
Author Website
http://www.peer-based-communities.blogspot.com/
Best place to buy your book
Deconstructing the Supermeme of Leadership: A Brief Invitation to Creating Peer-Based Communities & Leaderless Organizations