David Harvie: The Falcon's Club

What do you do with a system that worked?The leadership literature is well supplied with accounts of systems that fail. Bad incentives, perverse metrics, cultures that eat their young: these are comfortable objects of study, because the moral is available before the analysis begins. The harder case is the system that succeeded. It hit its numbers, it promoted its winners, it produced the results it was designed to produce—and it also broke people, including some of the people it promoted. That case is harder because it cannot be dismissed as a design failure. It worked. The question is what a person does afterwards, having been both its beneficiary and its casualty.The reason the question is rarely put well is that those best placed to answer it have every reason not to. People broken by such a system describe it as a machine for breaking people, which is understandable and incomplete. People who prospered describe it as a meritocracy, which is self-serving and also incomplete. The…