A magazine of forecasts, trends, and ideas about the future
Forecasts for the Next 25 Years
Harlan Cleveland
Harlan Cleveland, who served for many years as a member of the World Future Society's Board of Directors, died May 30 of myeloma at his home in Sterling, Virginia. He was 90 years old.
A Rhodes scholar at Oxford in the 1930s, Cleveland became a modern Renaissance man as he succeeded in one field after another. After service as an economic warfare specialist in Washington during World War II, he became a United Nations relief administrator in Italy and China in the 1940s. Later he became editor and publisher of The Reporter magazine and dean of Syracuse University's Maxwell School., and served as a New York delegate to the 1960 Democratic National Convention which nominated John Kennedy, one of Cleveland’s many friends, for U.S. President.
During the 1960s, he was Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs in the Kennedy administration and then U.S. Ambassador to the North American Treaty Organization. Later he served as President of the University of Hawaii and founding dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, among many other posts.
Through the years, Cleveland contributed articles on a variety of topics to THE FUTURIST magazine, and in 1989 he was elected to the World Future Society's Board of Directors:
"We were all enthusiastic about electing Harlan," recalls Edward Cornish, then the Society's president. "Both Sol Linowitz and Bob McNamara volunteered to help recruit him, but I claimed the honor for myself and was truly delighted when he accepted Board membership.
"During his years of service on the Board, Harlan proved extraordinarily helpful. His wisdom, dedication, and kindness were so extraordinary that he reminded me of George Washington at the 1787 convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution. As with Washington, Harlan let others do most of the talking, but his presence and perceptive comments always nudged our meetings toward judicious decisions."The following article by Cleveland ran in the September-October 2002 issue of THE FUTURIST.
There was a time when leadership was entrusted to people called leaders. Their numbers were tiny, their information scarce, their expertise primitive, the range of their options narrow, the reach of their power marginal, the scale of their actions limited. But they were at least presumed to be "in charge."
In those days it was possible to believe that policy was actually made by people called policy makers. The policy-making few made broad decisions, it was said. A much larger group of unsung experts, civil servants, and employees converted these principles into practices. The obligation of most people was to comply with the regulations, pay the taxes and prices established by the few, and acquiesce in the seizure of power by divine right, coup d'etat, corporate takeover, or elections sometimes bought or stolen.
In Aristotle's Athens, Confucius's China, Cicero's Rome, Charlemagne's Europe, and Jefferson's Virginia, the educated and affluent few did the social planning and made the destiny decisions that made the difference between war and peace, poverty and prosperity, individual freedom and collective coercion, minority rights and majority rule. The mostly uneducated "lower orders" of slaves, servants, peasants, workers, and merchants-and most women-were not expected and did not expect to join in conversations about policy. In those vertical, pyramidal societies, dogma, doctrine, and dictation were the natural style of leadership.
Somewhere along the way, the collection of processes we now call modernization made the vertical society obsolete. Man-as-manager learned how to manage the complexity that man-as-scientist-and-engineer and man-as-educator were making both possible and necessary. In a world of intercontinental conflict, gigantic cities, congested living, and large and fragile systems of all kinds, the traditional modes of leadership, featuring "recommendations up, orders down," simply did not work very well. Nobody could be fully in charge of anything, and the horizontal society was born.
The key to the management of complexity was the division of labor. The benefits of "modernization" were available only to societies that educated most of their people to function as specialists in a divisionof-labor economy. Thus there came to pass, late in the second millennium A.D., slaveless societies that responded to a technological imperative by giving citizenship to all their people and legislating education as an entitlement for all their citizens. Thomas Jefferson foresaw this macrotrend as early as 1813, when he wrote to John Adams, "An insurrection has ... begun of science, talents, and courage, against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt."
When every man and woman is entitled to earn through education an admission ticket to active citizenship, when leadership is not the province of a few hundred noblemen or a few thousand big landholders and shareholders, but is shared among an aristocracy of achievement numbering in the millions, decision making is done not by a club but by a crowd. So, the core issue of executive leadership is a paradox of participation: How do you get everybody in on the act and still get things done?
Leading by Doing
If the get-it-all-together people used to be born to rank and wealth, now they are mostly made, and self-- made, by competition and competence. This is true not only in the United States. Today, in all but a rapidly dwindling number of still-- traditional societies, men and women become leaders by what they do.
Even among authoritarian regimes, the nations still governed by extended families (Saudi Arabia and some of the emirates in the Persian Gulf) are greatly outnumbered by those ruled by self-appointed tyrants who got where they are by elbowing their way to power (often by coup d'etat), and usually to personal prosperity as well. The closest thing to a "ruling class" is to be found these days in totalitarian regimes; in each of them, a small group of people who have fought their way up the bureaucratic ladder maneuver for power and preferment and, when they get to the top, achieve only a precarious lifetime tenure-sometimes shortened by sudden death.
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