“Tradition has it that whenever a group of people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security, and prestige, it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie   and accept that it alone is entitled to privilege.” –Steven Biko

Are You “Privileged”? Yes? No? So What?

“Privilege” is a hot topic today – around the dining room table as well as in the mainstream media. One thing that I’ve noticed is that the people that have the strongest feelings about it seem to have the most trouble defining it.

Merriam-Webster defines privilege as “a right granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor.” As in, “Driving, my reckless son, is a privilege, not a right.”

This, of course, is not what privilege means to those in academia and the media that have made it an integral concept in social commentary. Privilege in that sense is the idea that in America there are certain groups (i.e., white men and to a lesser degree white women) that are entitled to social, economic, academic, and health advantages that (a) they did not earn and (b) are denied to other groups (people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community).

If you listen exclusively to Fox News, you might think this is a novel form of radical lunacy. It may have become wacky in recent years, but it’s hardly a new idea.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that while African-Americans were very aware of white Americans and conscious of racial discrimination, white Americans hardly thought of African-Americans at all. Nor did they think much about the effects of racial discrimination. The social privileges white Americans enjoyed, he contended, included courtesy and deference, unimpeded admittance to all public functions, lenient treatment in court, and access to the best schools.

There is no question that white Americans did indeed enjoy all sorts of privileges denied to black Americans at the turn of the 20^th century, when Du Bois published his famous book. The wackiness emerged in 1988, when Peggy McIntosh published an essay titled “White Privilege and Male Privilege.” In the essay, she listed 46 privileges that she believed she enjoyed as a white woman in the US. Among them: “If I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me,” and “I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism.”

Her essay has since been credited with getting academics interested in the study of “privilege theory,” which includes the concept of intersectionality – i.e., that every individual has a mix of privileges and disadvantages depending on his gender, color, and sexual preference. Thus, a black woman has less privilege than a black man, and a black homosexual man has less privilege than a black heterosexual man.  And a white man… well, he sits on top of a stack of every social privilege there is.

One of the criticisms of intersectionality (advanced by the moral philosopher Lawrence Blum) is that its categories are too broad. It does not distinguish between Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and Vietnamese, for example. They are all grouped together as Asian-Americans, even though their relative economic, social, and academic success in America varies widely by group. (The same case is made with respect to black Americans by social philosopher Coleman Hughes, who notes the differences in advantages – i.e., achievement – by Caribbean blacks compared to African-Americans.)

Another criticism of intersectionality is that it is too narrowly focused. It does not include the obvious advantages of being good looking, for example, despite overwhelming evidence that physical beauty plays a major role in social, economic, and even academic achievement. Proponents of privilege theory also give a surprisingly low intersectionality “rating” to personal wealth, arguing that a wealthy black man or woman has less privilege than a poor white man or woman.

Also rarely discussed is being able-bodied and healthy – which anyone that lives a life so compromised recognizes as a huge privilege. And nowhere in the discussion is the recognition of perhaps the greatest privilege of all: having extraordinary intelligence.

It’s a messy area of inquiry, to be sure. And although it’s an easy concept to sell to college students, it’s much harder to get those on the higher end of the privilege scale to accept. (Especially if they are not particularly smart and well spoken, or if they are not, or were not, wealthy.)

Privilege theorists dislike having conversations about these sorts of privilege. They often argue that the mere mention of other privileges or disadvantages is invalid as it comes from people that are in some ways privileged themselves.

What they prefer to talk about is their views on a solution for social inequality – a solution that is usually a demand for advantages that are above and beyond what the privileged enjoy (e.g., preferential treatment in education, job placement, and social welfare assistance).

These are difficult conversations because there are all sorts of social inequities. And despite decades of legislation and trillions of dollars in funding, programs designed to fix the problem have failed to achieve their goals. In fact, the result has been greater inequality.

Still, one wants to believe that we can move towards a social environment where there is more equity in terms of such privileges. Or at least eliminate any actual institutional hindrances to people based on color, gender, or sexual preference.

So what can be done?

In a future essay, I’ll attempt to answer that question on a larger scale.

But on an individual basis, I think it’s fairly obvious that progress can be made, because it has been made. Virtually every proponent of privilege theory that is not a white man is proof of that.

What can you do? What can I do?

I think it starts with making an honest effort to recognize whatever privileges we have, as well as the ways – consciously and unconsciously – that we take advantage of them.

Here are 14 questions that might give you some insight into your own sense of privilege, regardless of your gender, race, sexual preference, income, etc.

1. What goes through your head when you see a police car behind you?
2. Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated at work – even though you are doing as well as your peers?
3. If you’re a Liberal, do you believe that your views on political issues are morally superior to those of Conservatives?
4. If you’re a Conservative, do you believe that your views on political issues are morally superior to those of Liberals?
5. Do you think a really interesting book could be written about the stories your grandparents/ great grandparents told about coming to this country and pursuing the “American Dream”?
6. Do you feel slighted when someone doesn’t remember your name?
7. Do you think it’s okay to cut in line because you are in a rush… as long as you smile and apologize?
8. Are you insulted when someone cuts in front of you… even if they smile and apologize?
9. In terms of your lifestyle, would you describe the coronavirus shutdown as (a) annoying, (b) devastating, (c) Shutdown? What shutdown?
10. In terms of your finances, would you describe the coronavirus shutdown as (a) annoying, (b) devastating, (c) Shutdown? What shutdown?
11. Do you believe that your children are gifted?
12. When someone who makes more money than you is paying the bill, do you feel justified in ordering a more expensive meal than you normally would?
13. Do you believe that your lack of success in life has been caused by circumstances beyond your control?
14. Do you believe that only a smugly privileged white male could have come up with these questions?

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Note: The following essay is an excerpt from the upcoming new and revised edition of Ready, Fire, Aim. 

Tribal Dynamics in Business 

 “The person who knows HOW will always have a job. The person who knows WHY will always be his boss.” – Alanis Morissette

When a start-up business grows, problems arise. Many entrepreneurs believe they can solve them by hiring additional people to deal with them. Sometimes that works. Often it doesn’t.

There are invisible challenges that come with a growing employee base – challenges that can hobble communication, reduce cash flow, and threaten profits. But if you understand the natural stages of entrepreneurial growth, you can anticipate and manage such challenges before they damage your business.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell looked at several anthropological studies of primitive societies that showed an interesting pattern. When tribes grew to more than 30 members, they tended to split into two smaller tribes, each with its own leader that was loyal to the original chieftain. One split into two. Two split into four. The smaller tribes were able to live and work together under the chieftain until the total size of the group exceeded about 150 individuals.

At that point, the unity of leadership broke down.

The researchers explained it this way: With no more than 30 tribe members, the chieftain has direct control over every one of them. When the group grows from 30 to 150, he can still exert significant influence over the entire group by communicating directly with his subordinates – the leaders of each smaller tribe. He maintins conrtol over the 150, but at a single degree of separation.

Once the group exceeds 150 tribe members, there is an additional degree of separation. The tribe leaders (and their followers) that report directly to him are still loyal to him. But the next level of leadership is now separated from him by three degrees. And their followers have little to no allegiance to him.

Contemporary research shows that a similar connection exists in the modern workplace. At three degrees of separation, communication breaks down.

There’s also some related research suggesting that there is an optimal number of employees that any executive can effectively manage: about six to eight.

When I first read about those studies, I was intrigued but doubtful. I was running a business that had about 300 employees. I felt sure that I was effectively managing them all. But when I took a closer look at what was actually going on, I had to admit that I was managing only six or seven people. And that I could identify, by name, fewer than 150 of our employees.

The more I observed, the more obvious it was that I was managing within that same ancient, tribal hierarchy. The success we were having was the result of making the connections between each level of leadership work. The failures we were experiencing were the result of broken links down the line of command, communication, and supervision.

Keeping on Top of the Expanding Hierarchy 

In a typical start-up business, the founder hires a handful of people to help him get it off the ground. There are seldom strict job descriptions or formal titles. Everyone is expected to do whatever needs to be done to move the company forward.

As the business grows, some sort of division of labor takes place. The founder puts one person charge of sales and marketing, another in charge of research and development, another in charge of production, another in charge of customer service, and so on.

At this point, the business may have, say, 50 employees. The founder feels no need to “manage” all 50 of them. He trusts his original team members to do that.

Although most of the employees do not report to him, he knows who these people are because he interacts with them – casually, perhaps – almost every week. These second-tier employees understand what their managers want, but they also understand what he wants. They have a sense of how he wants the business to grow. The smart ones can satisfy their own managers’ goals and also cater, in some way, to his ambitions.

But the business keeps growing. The marketing guy hires an SEO expert and a direct-response whiz. The sales gal hires six hungry salespeople. The guy in charge of customer service hires 12 reps to handle the increased volume of sales. Before long, the business has 100 or 150 employees, and some things are not running as smoothly as they were before.

Communication between the founder and his original team is still as close as it ever was. And the 40 to 50 employees that report to them are still working towards his overall agenda. But the other 50 to 100 employees have no idea what his ideas are. They rarely speak to him. They hardly know him at all.

By the time these third-tier employees move into management positions and start hiring and managing their own next-tier employees, there’s a good chance that they will be passing on their own, not the founder’s, core beliefs.

And if this continues unchecked, by the time the company has several hundred employees the “company culture” that was established by the founder is all but a distant memory.

This is not always a bad thing. If the founder is smart enough to hire superstars – smart, hardworking people that hire more superstars and pass down his ideas clearly and faithfully to them – the business can grow quickly and safely. But that is not the natural pattern of business growth. The natural pattern is entropy: starting with clarity and comprehension and then degrading into confusion and chaos.

There are traditional ways to curtail this sort of degeneration – procedures and protocols that are practiced in most large businesses and no doubt taught in most business schools. I’m referring to meetings and memos, reports and charts, training programs and employee manuals, retreats and seminars, and so on.

If you are a natural-born entrepreneur, you will loathe such solutions, as I did. But if you ignore them completely, I’m sorry to say, you will regret it.

I have spent my entire career rebuffing every effort to corportize every business I owned or ran or consulted with. And though I have had to concede that these remote-control management methods become to some extent necessary as a business grows, none of them can solve the problems caused by growth if the founder is not aware of the damage they do.

Corporate management is inherently anti-growth because it is designed for control. You cannot simply hire corporate managers and let them do what they’ve been trained to do. They will suck the marrow out of your business. They will solve the problems caused by growth by regulating, monitoring, measuring, and systemitizing everything they can get their hands on.

Of course, this is not true for every corporate manager. It is true only for nine out of 10.

So what can you do?

I don’t think you’ll find an answer in the Harvard Business Review. (I’ve been reading it for years and I haven’t seen one there.)

I’ll tell you what I have done.

First and foremost, I stay keenly aware of the primary objective of the business depending on its stage of growth. If it is proliferating products or advertising campaigns, I make sure that everyone that reports to me understands that his job is to support that primary objective, not to build out his domain in some way that suits his particular dreams.

Second, while obeying Pareto’s 80/20 Principle and giving 80% of my time and attention to the business’s primary challenge, I take responsibity for everything else.

If the business is in Stage One or Stage Two, I push hardest on cash flow and sales growth and product development. But I do not ignore or in any way denigrate operations and fulfillment and customer service and accounting. I make it clear to those that are running those departments that I expect excellence from them. I warn them that my lack of attention does not mean I don’t care what they are doing. On the contrary, I tell them, their jobs are vital to the business, and their responsibility to run those departments well is heightened by my lack of attention. I tell them that when we meet (usually once a month), I expect them to show me good numbers and be able to answer, with precision, any questions I have.

Meanwhile, no matter how strong those numbers are, I assume that their operations are falling apart, even when I have no reason to think so. I’ve been fooled before by slick reporting and positive presentations – and paid the price.

This is my personal approach. But it is based on the fact that, as I said, the natural pattern of business growth is entropy. It is nothing more or less than acknowledging that growth will always cause chaos, and that unless you constantly and continuously exert energy against chaos, entropy will out.

In other words, I obey Pareto’s Principle in my dealings with the top one or two priorities of the business at whatever stage it’s in… and I adhere to Murphy’s Law for everything else.

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