7 Management Secrets From 'Atlas Shrugged' That Beat Misinterpretations - Robert Tracinski, The Federalist Society:
July 25, 2017 - "Business and management is not the subject or theme of Atlas Shrugged, but it is the setting. As one of the few novelists to make a serious and sympathetic attempt to portray people who run businesses, she frequently sets up her characterization and plot points by showing us how the heroes and villains operate in the business world, how they make important decisions, and how they treat their employees. We can look at that and derive a few basic rules for how an Ayn Rand hero does business. Call it 'The Management Secrets of ‘Atlas Shrugged'....
1. Know the business from the ground up. Many of Ayn Rand’s business heroes ... worked their way up from the bottom.... Hank Rearden rose up out of the iron mines before becoming a mine owner.... The same goes for Ken Danagger, who is described as having started work in the coal mines at age 12.... At age 16, railroad heiress Dagny Taggart starts a summer job as the night operator at a rural train station. Francisco D’Anconia, heir to a vast copper fortune, spends his college years working at a dilapidated copper foundry.... This is why the heroes in Atlas Shrugged are able to start up again in Galt’s Gulch..... They can readily downshift into the roles of foremen and mechanics, and they have no compunction about walking to work swinging a lunchbox....
2. Earn respect.... Rand’s heroes are clearly inspirational leaders, but it’s not because they jet off to Davos or give TED talks about 'thinking outside the box'.... It’s because they earn the respect of their employees and business partners.... Rand’s heroes inspire their employees because they lead from the front. They never demand that anyone give more, in terms of knowledge, work, or devotion, than they give themselves....
3. Always take responsibility.... This is one of the reasons why the business heroes in Atlas Shrugged all have their businesses named after them — Rearden Steel, D’Anconia Copper, Wyatt Oil, Taggart Transcontinental — while the villains run companies with vaguely collective names like Associated Steel. Part of the point Rand was making is that behind every productive organization there is a person who created it and keeps it going. But from the characters’ perspective, they name their businesses after themselves as a way of stressing their responsibility, the idea that everything their company does is literally done in their name.... The whole method of the business villains in Atlas Shrugged is to evade responsibility, constantly whining that 'it wasn’t my fault,' or 'I can’t be blamed.' We can see this most clearly in the Taggart Tunnel disaster, which happens because, with Dagny briefly gone, a whole chain of Taggart executives from Jim on down pass the buck....
4. Deal with the best talent. If Ayn Rand’s heroes expect a lot out of themselves, they look for the same qualities in the people they hire and do business with. At the beginning of the novel, the basic plot idea is introduced to us in the form of Dagny’s struggle to find and retain talent.... Later, in Galt’s Gulch, Dagny realizes that the foreman at Andrew Stockton’s foundry is the disappeared coal tycoon Ken Danagger.... 'She glanced at Stockton with curiosity. "Aren’t you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?" "That’s the only sort of men I like to hire…. Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find is a cheat who’s in a business where he doesn’t belong"'....
5. Set an innovative vision. Rand’s business heroes ... are visionaries who are looking for revolutionary new machines and the kind of innovations we would describe nowadays as 'disruptive.' There are two such disruptive innovations that embody this idea. Roughly the first third of the novel’s plot is driven by Hank Rearden’s invention of a revolutionary metal alloy that is strong[er], lighter, cheaper, and longer-lasting than steel.... By the end of Part One ... Rearden Metal is now regarded as a proven technology [and] it is time for our innovators to move on to the next big thing, ... the revolutionary motor they find abandoned at the Twentieth Century Motor Company.... The search for the motor drives the plot up through the end of Part Two and brings us into Part Three.... So the business leader’s search for innovation is at the heart of the novel and is the key driver of the plot.
6. Make every deal win-win. This is a point that very few of the casual mainstream commentators get.... If you actually read Atlas Shrugged, you notice that her heroes are very insistent on making mutually beneficial deals and never trying to get something for nothing out of their customers or business partners. They expect the other guy to pull his weight in any business deal — and they expect that they will have to provide a lot of value in return.... It is the government officials and the altruistic 'humanitarians' who keep trying to set up deals in which one side gets all the benefits and the other side takes all the losses.... Rand makes a specific point to show why these one-sided altruist set-ups have to fail. If you create a deal in which one side takes all the burdens and all the losses, you are ensuring that one of the parties to the deal will eventually be unable to fulfill its obligations and the whole thing will collapse.
7. Don’t prop up the Jim Taggarts.... This is shown in Atlas Shrugged, not by the positive example of her main protagonists, but by their biggest error. In taking heroic action intended to save the railroad and the economy, Dagny actually ends up bailing out her worthless brother, time and time again.... This isn’t about claiming credit or public glory. This is about not accepting a role as the person who always bails his boss, colleagues, or business partners out of their own mistakes, putting them in the position to make more mistakes that need more bailing out in the future ... In the current therapeutic terminology, the person who always bails a chronic drunk out of trouble is 'codependent' or an 'enabler'....
"So Rand did have a few things to say about management, after all.... Ayn Rand uses the business decisions of her heroes as a way of moving forward the plot and characterization and of expressing her big philosophical themes.... Observers of the business world can debate how well these management ideas work and which companies and CEOs truly implement them."
Read more: http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/25/7-real-management-secrets-atlas-shrugged/
'via Blog this'
July 25, 2017 - "Business and management is not the subject or theme of Atlas Shrugged, but it is the setting. As one of the few novelists to make a serious and sympathetic attempt to portray people who run businesses, she frequently sets up her characterization and plot points by showing us how the heroes and villains operate in the business world, how they make important decisions, and how they treat their employees. We can look at that and derive a few basic rules for how an Ayn Rand hero does business. Call it 'The Management Secrets of ‘Atlas Shrugged'....
1. Know the business from the ground up. Many of Ayn Rand’s business heroes ... worked their way up from the bottom.... Hank Rearden rose up out of the iron mines before becoming a mine owner.... The same goes for Ken Danagger, who is described as having started work in the coal mines at age 12.... At age 16, railroad heiress Dagny Taggart starts a summer job as the night operator at a rural train station. Francisco D’Anconia, heir to a vast copper fortune, spends his college years working at a dilapidated copper foundry.... This is why the heroes in Atlas Shrugged are able to start up again in Galt’s Gulch..... They can readily downshift into the roles of foremen and mechanics, and they have no compunction about walking to work swinging a lunchbox....
2. Earn respect.... Rand’s heroes are clearly inspirational leaders, but it’s not because they jet off to Davos or give TED talks about 'thinking outside the box'.... It’s because they earn the respect of their employees and business partners.... Rand’s heroes inspire their employees because they lead from the front. They never demand that anyone give more, in terms of knowledge, work, or devotion, than they give themselves....
3. Always take responsibility.... This is one of the reasons why the business heroes in Atlas Shrugged all have their businesses named after them — Rearden Steel, D’Anconia Copper, Wyatt Oil, Taggart Transcontinental — while the villains run companies with vaguely collective names like Associated Steel. Part of the point Rand was making is that behind every productive organization there is a person who created it and keeps it going. But from the characters’ perspective, they name their businesses after themselves as a way of stressing their responsibility, the idea that everything their company does is literally done in their name.... The whole method of the business villains in Atlas Shrugged is to evade responsibility, constantly whining that 'it wasn’t my fault,' or 'I can’t be blamed.' We can see this most clearly in the Taggart Tunnel disaster, which happens because, with Dagny briefly gone, a whole chain of Taggart executives from Jim on down pass the buck....
4. Deal with the best talent. If Ayn Rand’s heroes expect a lot out of themselves, they look for the same qualities in the people they hire and do business with. At the beginning of the novel, the basic plot idea is introduced to us in the form of Dagny’s struggle to find and retain talent.... Later, in Galt’s Gulch, Dagny realizes that the foreman at Andrew Stockton’s foundry is the disappeared coal tycoon Ken Danagger.... 'She glanced at Stockton with curiosity. "Aren’t you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?" "That’s the only sort of men I like to hire…. Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find is a cheat who’s in a business where he doesn’t belong"'....
5. Set an innovative vision. Rand’s business heroes ... are visionaries who are looking for revolutionary new machines and the kind of innovations we would describe nowadays as 'disruptive.' There are two such disruptive innovations that embody this idea. Roughly the first third of the novel’s plot is driven by Hank Rearden’s invention of a revolutionary metal alloy that is strong[er], lighter, cheaper, and longer-lasting than steel.... By the end of Part One ... Rearden Metal is now regarded as a proven technology [and] it is time for our innovators to move on to the next big thing, ... the revolutionary motor they find abandoned at the Twentieth Century Motor Company.... The search for the motor drives the plot up through the end of Part Two and brings us into Part Three.... So the business leader’s search for innovation is at the heart of the novel and is the key driver of the plot.
6. Make every deal win-win. This is a point that very few of the casual mainstream commentators get.... If you actually read Atlas Shrugged, you notice that her heroes are very insistent on making mutually beneficial deals and never trying to get something for nothing out of their customers or business partners. They expect the other guy to pull his weight in any business deal — and they expect that they will have to provide a lot of value in return.... It is the government officials and the altruistic 'humanitarians' who keep trying to set up deals in which one side gets all the benefits and the other side takes all the losses.... Rand makes a specific point to show why these one-sided altruist set-ups have to fail. If you create a deal in which one side takes all the burdens and all the losses, you are ensuring that one of the parties to the deal will eventually be unable to fulfill its obligations and the whole thing will collapse.
7. Don’t prop up the Jim Taggarts.... This is shown in Atlas Shrugged, not by the positive example of her main protagonists, but by their biggest error. In taking heroic action intended to save the railroad and the economy, Dagny actually ends up bailing out her worthless brother, time and time again.... This isn’t about claiming credit or public glory. This is about not accepting a role as the person who always bails his boss, colleagues, or business partners out of their own mistakes, putting them in the position to make more mistakes that need more bailing out in the future ... In the current therapeutic terminology, the person who always bails a chronic drunk out of trouble is 'codependent' or an 'enabler'....
"So Rand did have a few things to say about management, after all.... Ayn Rand uses the business decisions of her heroes as a way of moving forward the plot and characterization and of expressing her big philosophical themes.... Observers of the business world can debate how well these management ideas work and which companies and CEOs truly implement them."
Read more: http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/25/7-real-management-secrets-atlas-shrugged/
'via Blog this'
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