Their Last Full Measure
Page 41
This is a cycle that repeats itself through history, time and time again. An empire will rise, try to stabilise itself and - eventually - be brought down through a combination of internal problems and outside threats. This tends to happen because the empire’s rulers either forgot what was important or were simply unable to maintain the factors that allowed their empire’s rise to power. The Romans, for example, faced no peer power ... but internal decay weakened their defences to the point barbarians were able to overwhelm them. The French and Germans built their various empires on military force and, when they lost the ability to impose themselves, they lost their empires. The British built their empire on naval power and trading and, when they lost command of the seas, lost their empire. The French, Germans and British understood very well what maintained their power, but were economically unable to pay for their ships and troops.
Indeed, the British Empire’s experience provides a foretaste of what America might expect in the coming decades. On paper, the British Empire was the clear winner of the First World War. The British controlled, directly or indirectly, a quarter of the planet’s surface. The British army and navy were the most advanced fighting forces in the world. It all looked very impressive, if one didn’t look too closely.
The appearance of strength masked a far less stable reality. The British Empire was simply unable to maintain its power, relative to the rest of the world. Maintaining the empire - and the military force that held it - was a colossal drain on British resources. The British invented concepts like aircraft carriers and tanks, but were unable to develop them further; other powers took the concepts and ran with them, developing carriers and tanks that were better than anything the British produced. Britain was, on paper, the strongest power on the planet, but she couldn’t concentrate enough force to win a war against a major power without weakening herself fatally elsewhere. And, worst of all, the British public was no longer willing to make the sacrifices required to maintain the empire.
At base, empires - and corporations and suchlike - cannot afford to rest on their laurels. They must continue to develop, to explore newer and better ways of doing things. They must imagine themselves farmers, farmers wise enough to understand the danger of eating their seed corn (thus feeding themselves at the cost of being unable to eat the following year). They must be open to new ideas, ready to allow fresh blood into high places and - at the same time - remove senior figures who are too ossified in their thinking. Done properly, this allows for a steady evolution that combines older ideas and reasoning with newer and better concepts.
Organisations that lose track of the need to evolve start running into problems fairly quickly, as - metaphorically speaking - their arteries start to clog. Bureaucrats cut costs without any real concept of what is actually important, ensuring that quality starts to slip and - when purchasers notice - sales start to fall. HR representatives enforce codes of conduct and hiring that are based on abstract notions, not a clear understanding of what the organisation wants and needs. Marketing departments start making promises the organisation can’t keep or, worse, get the company entangled in political and social justice issues that cannot help alienating large swathes of the customer base. And, worst of all, the combined effect of all these is to sow distrust and contempt for management. A manager who is widely disliked can still be respected for doing a good job, but a manager who is held in contempt will be roundly mocked and ignored as much as possible.
The first signs of looming disaster are easy to see, if you bother to look. On a corporate scale, sales will start to fall. Honest review sites will be filled with acidic comments about your products. Your best employees will start to look elsewhere for better jobs. Your primary departments will start to shrink, while your support departments will begin to grow bigger and more and more intrusive. Your customer base will also shrink, even if you bring out a new product. You’ve acquired a bad reputation and most of your attempts to fix it are misaimed. And pulling out of a collapsing spiral isn’t easy.
On a national scale, there are more significant signs of trouble. The government can no longer afford to maintain its military and police forces. The military and police forces are in trouble because the people promoted to lead are not experienced in actual military and police work. The economy is stumbling, a sizable percentage of the working population is unemployed or underemployed, expenditure on maintaining what one has is so high that money cannot be spared for R&D ... once this starts happening, you can rest assured that there will be trouble in the future. And yet, dealing with it is difficult. In some ways, the people who are charged with dealing with the problem are the ones causing the problem. They do not, of course, want to give up their power.
If you do not learn from history, you are condemned to repeat it. And if you forget what’s important - and how you became powerful in the first place - you are condemned to steadily lose power until you either collapse or get invaded by your more powerful neighbours.
Christopher G. Nuttall
Edinburgh, 2019
PS.
And now you’ve read the book, I have a favour to ask.
It’s getting harder to earn a living through indie writing these days, for a number of reasons (my health is one of them, unfortunately). If you liked this book, please post a review wherever you bought it; the more reviews a book gets, the more promotion.
CGN.