MGT and the Superclass
When I pine for Peter Drucker, wishing to add a few decades to his tenure, it is because I [might] prefer Drucker’s analysis to David Rothkopf’s. [Or at least, I would very like to interrogate Herr Drucker on the relativity of Management theory to the New Gilded Age and perpetuation of a Super Class. - 02.03.10]
From “The Rise of the Superclass,” a Salon review of Rothkopf’s “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making:”
Not everyone Rothkopf writes about in “Superclass” is a Davos man, but despite his efforts to remain impartial toward “the global power elite” he describes, you can tell that the elect milieu of the WEF gives him a palpable thrill. The book opens with a scene of the author making his way through the town’s frozen streets, recognizing CEOs, oil company executives and Harvard professors on his way to a fondue restaurant. Suddenly, he’s greeted effusively by a bestselling inspirational writer with whom he has been trading e-mail: Paulo Coelho, “an icon of the global literary scene”! (The literary scene? I don’t think so, though Coelho certainly is a publishing phenomenon.)
Rothkopf’s credible, if not especially original argument in “Superclass” is that over the past several decades a “global elite” has emerged whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments. They schmooze regularly at conferences like Davos, go to the same schools, serve together on corporate and nonprofit boards, and above all do business with each other constantly — to the point that they have become a kind of culture in themselves, a “class without a country,” as Rothkopf puts it. Furthermore, these people are “the new leadership class for our era.”
A former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and an officer in an assortment of “advisory” firms (including Kissinger Associates, run by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the consulting company Rothkopf himself founded, Garten Rothkopf), Rothkopf is an insider of sorts, well enough connected to sit in on meetings of power brokers without quite being one himself. He also writes Op-Eds on international affairs for major newspapers and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, positions that require the display of some critical distance. “Superclass” isn’t as condemnatory as Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization manifesto “No Logo,” let alone the conspiracy theorizing of “The Iron Triangle,” Dan Briody’s exposé of the Carlyle Group, but it doesn’t merely fawn over its subjects, either.
Rothkopf announces that he and his researchers have identified “just over 6,000” people who match his definition of the superclass — that is, who have met complicated (and vaguely explained) metrics designed to determine “the ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide.” These include heads of state and religious and military leaders — even the occasional pop star, like Bono — but the core membership is businessmen: hedge fund managers, technology entrepreneurs and private equity investors.
I would have also liked to ask Peter Drucker what he made of Madonna, travelling to Africa, to adopt a new child. “What, Professor Drucker, does this mean? What is the value of that baby?” I would have many questions to ask of Peter Drucker, about GM, about the redistribution of wealth occurring via the US Treasury to offset the asset-free credit boom precipitated by the rise to power in America of Ronald Reagan, the proto-conservative Christian de-regulator, privatizer, anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, anti-union, etc. I would want to know what books Peter Drucker opted not to write during his real lifetime, and what books he would publish in his dimensional lifetime.
[Dynamic Symmetry]
