Rebuilding the Middle Class the Army Way
Interestingly, as laid out in what may be the single most important book of American business history, Alfred Chandler’s ‘‘The Visible Hand,’’ this military model was copied a century ago as the model for the hierarchical American corporation. In particular, these organizations borrowed the delineation between executives tasked with strategy — the corporate equivalent of colonels and generals — and tactical workers (enlisted soldiers) and midlevel managers, who played the role of captains, majors and lieutenant colonels.
.. But then came global trade, computers and the Internet, and we learned that the military-inspired corporate hierarchy didn’t work so well when information needed to flow far more quickly throughout an organization and decisions had to be made with haste. Many of the structural economic challenges we face today can be explained by the decline of this organizational form. Uber, Airbnb and Google are examples of new corporate forms that scramble the roles of managers and managed, strategy and tactics.
.. Put simply: The disappearance of middle management is a central part of the disappearance of the middle class. Without large corporations that have a place for people at many levels of skill and ability and a reasonably clear path of promotion, tens of millions of Americans are left underemployed and underpaid. For much of the 20th century, companies would employ young people with few skills and invest in them, knowing that they would most likely be paid back over the employees’ long tenure. Today, the United States military is one of the few employers in America that still makes this kind of investment in a demographically broad group of people.
.. The students were discussing a common frustration: the intransigence of supervising officers, even when presented with evidence that they were wrong about a decision. Then, one officer said something that seemed like a bizarre non sequitur: ‘‘We need to change the pensions.’’ Everybody — except me — began to nod and agree enthusiastically.
.. So, we have a military in which nearly everybody in their 30s has a huge financial incentive to keep his or her boss happy, no matter how wrong that boss might be.
.. Some of the reforms seem so obvious that it’s shocking they didn’t happen before. People will get a retirement plan even if they don’t stay in for 20 years. Some will be offered the chance to leave active duty for a year or two to go work and learn at Google or some other private company and then return. Also, the military hopes to design something a lot like LinkedIn, so that officers can apply for jobs and be selected for them based on their interests and abilities, not just their ranks.