VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 11, SECTION 1
Five Angles, Part One, the Enterprise Type Against the Enfeoffment Type
The centralized authority of the earlier chapters has stayed at the level of the state. This chapter sets another deeper claim: centralized authority is not only the matter of politics, it is the root running principle of every organized group. From the state to the enterprise to the family to the army to the ball team, all use the same principle. This section covers two angles, one the deepest distinction, the enterprise type against the enfeoffment type, and one about the position and form of the center itself.
The state runs through centralized authority. The enterprise runs through centralized authority, a CEO plus a board plus a management team. The army runs through centralized authority, a supreme commander plus a command headquarters. The family runs through some centralized authority, the couple, or the parents, or the elders. The school, the hospital, the ball team, the orchestra, the research team, the religious organization, all use the same running principle, centralized authority. These groups range in scale from a few people to hundreds of millions, in culture from East to West, in history from a few years to a few thousand, and yet they all use the same running principle, a principle crossing the category of politics to become the root running mechanism of every organized group. To be honest, cross-domain study of centralized authority is not the invention of this book, scholars having studied cases of government, church, large enterprise, and cross-national unions, management long discussing the balance of centralization and decentralization in the enterprise, and military study discussing the dialectic of concentrated command and dispersed decision. But the existing study is mostly within a particular field or among a few concrete cases, and what this section does is, through five distinctive angles, open centralized authority as the running principle across every organized group into a complete framework of understanding, one the reader can take and apply to any organization they are in. This section covers the first two angles.
To speak of cross-domain centralized authority, one must begin from the deepest distinction, the enterprise type against the enfeoffment type. This distinction was buried as a foreshadowing in the section on the enterprise in Part Two, and this section opens it in full. The enterprise-type organization exists for the purpose of completing some venture, profit, research, production, service, its members combined to complete that venture, its leader chosen by who can best advance that venture, its positions able to be flexibly adjusted as needed. The centralized authority of the enterprise-type organization can run fully by merit selection, can adopt the complete principle of the examination. Its samples are the enterprise, the research team, the ball team, the orchestra, the medical team, all existing for the purpose of some concrete venture, their leaders all chosen by who can best advance that venture. This is why the enterprise, the research body, the ball team, and the orchestra today can do a high degree of merit selection, not depending on origin, family, or bloodline. The enfeoffment-type organization does not itself exist for some concrete venture, it exists to keep its own continuation, its purpose of existence itself including protecting the positions of its inner members, its leader's position often closely tied to the stability of the inner members, and once seated hard to replace lightly. The centralized authority of the enfeoffment-type organization can adopt the examination principle only in part, a great many positions protected by the logic of enfeoffment. Its samples are the state, existing to keep the survival, safety, and continuation of the people. The family, existing to keep the survival of its members, to raise the next generation, to hand down. And the religious organization, the tribe and clan, certain associations. This is why the state cannot, like the enterprise, freely adjust all official positions by exam and by performance, because the existence of the state itself must protect some positions, such as citizenship, welfare eligibility, the rights of particular groups. This is why the family cannot, like the enterprise, reallocate the positions of father, mother, and child by who can best fill them, because the existence of the family itself must protect the continuation of these positions.
The enterprise type and the enfeoffment type decide that centralized authority takes different concrete forms. The centralized authority of the enterprise type can change leaders fast, assess fully by performance, and adjust the organizational structure fast, running highly flexible plus highly merit-selecting. The centralized authority of the enfeoffment type must follow the transmission rules of enfeoffment to change leaders, inheritance, election, inner consultation, can assess many positions only in part, must adjust the organizational structure carefully, running relatively stable plus partly protecting. An organization unclear about whether it is enterprise type or enfeoffment type easily falls into disorder. The first common disorder, running an enfeoffment-type organization as an enterprise type, for example some attempts to reallocate all government positions by efficiency and performance, finding that such a fully marketized government instead loses the state's due function of protecting the citizen. The second common disorder, running an enterprise-type organization as an enfeoffment type, for example some enterprises controlled by a family, the CEO position passed to a son, a daughter, a relative, rather than chosen by who can best run it, the enterprise gradually losing competitiveness and in the end eliminated by the market. This is the real thing in a CEO who staffs by kinship will perish, the enterprise being an enterprise-type organization that must run by merit selection, and once run by family heredity, violating the root nature of the enterprise-type organization. Angle one sets firm a conclusion: any organized group must first ask, is it enterprise type or enfeoffment type? This distinction decides what form its centralized authority should take. The enterprise type run as an enfeoffment type must be beaten, the enfeoffment type run as an enterprise type must fall into disorder.
The second angle is relatively common sense, but still needs to be made clear. The same centralized authority is a wholly different position and form in different groups. The state, the center is the head of government plus the legislature plus the highest judicial body plus the highest party decision-making body, several bodies making up a complex central tier. The enterprise, the center is the CEO plus the board plus the executive team, a relatively simple structure. The family, the center may be the father, the mother, the couple's consensus, or the elders, a very plural form, wholly different in different cultures. The army, the center is the supreme commander plus the chief of staff plus the command headquarters, running by a strict chain of command. The school, the center is the principal plus the academic system. The ball team, the center is the coach plus the captain, with an on-field commander on the field too. The orchestra, the center is the conductor plus the concertmaster. The religious organization, the central form of different religions is extremely various. This plurality of central form is itself an interesting observation. Groups of simple form, like the ball team and the orchestra, have a center of one or two people. Groups of complex form, like the great state and the multinational enterprise, have a center that is a complex network of bodies. Groups of distinctive form, like the family and certain religious organizations, may have no clear central form and yet still have a substantial center. What must be done is to see clearly what each group's center is, where it is, and how it runs, rather than assuming every group has a clear government like the state. Understanding the plurality of central form, you will not measure every organization by the same ruler, but will first see clearly what each organization's center actually looks like.
So here is the position this section lays down. We set the first half of this layer: centralized authority is not only the matter of politics, it is the root running principle of every organized group. The first angle, the enterprise type against the enfeoffment type, decides that the centralized authority of different groups takes different forms, the enterprise type able to run fully by merit selection, the enfeoffment type able to adopt the examination only in part, the enterprise type run as an enfeoffment type must be beaten, the enfeoffment type run as an enterprise type must fall into disorder. The second angle, the position and form of the center are wholly different in different groups, from a simple center of one or two people, to a complex network of bodies, to a family with no clear form and yet a substantial center. These two angles already begin to turn centralized authority from a political-science concept into a tool for analyzing any organization.
But this tool is not yet complete, and three angles remain to be added: what exactly the power of centralized authority is, what the irreplaceable functions of different organizations are, and how the laws of failure show themselves in various organizations. The next section adds these three angles, letting this framework of understanding fully take shape.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.