More Pirates!

I mentioned in my previous post that James Surowiecki ’s article on the pirate papers focused on the role of the captain in drawing lessons for modern CEOs (top-down), rather than the role of the pirates themselves in drawing lessons for supporting democracy (bottom-up).

Leeson’s analysis of pirate governance focusses mainly on the way in which this system deterred self-dealing. But the pirate system was also based on an important insight: leaders who are great in a battle or some other crisis are not necessarily great managers, and concentrating power in one pair of hands often leads to bad decision-making.

Apparently there’s more to Surowiecki’s bias in taking the top-down perspective than just the particular audience he was writing for in the New Yorker:

Bottom-up behaviour seems illogical to Western minds - we have a hierarchical bias against self-organisation … [which is displayed in] our common understanding of how human change happens, especially in organisations. Our popular management magazines are filled with stories of the omniscient CEO or leader who can see the opportunities or threats in the environment and leads the people into the light. [However,] self-organisation is critical to achieving [change].

Westley, F., B. Zimmerman and M. Quinn Patton (2006) Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed, Toronto: Random House.

Peter Leeson has now written a follow-up to his original papers in which he explores more deeply this question of how anarchy leads to order, beating me to the punch and giving some interesting views on how welfare in Somalia is actually better under anarchy than government. That particularly claim clearly needs a little more examination…

(Hat tips to Ben Ramalingam, Harry Lucas, Toussaint Reba, Uncle Tom Longley and all.)