Augusto Pinochet: controversial change agent
I am taking an employer-sponsored two-day change management class next week. I am reading my employer-assigned change management book, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading. It is a pretty thin gruel, but I was prepared for that.
Then I got to page 112, wherein Messrs. Heifetz and Linsky conclude their summary of FDR managing tension within a productive range and then segue into this:
"We can see the same principle at work in a very different, and ethically disturbing, example. General Augusto Pinochet of Chile came to power in a 1973 coup d'état amid the political and economic disarray at the end of the Allende administration. Like Roosevelt, he found the level of chaos (rampant unemployment, labor strikes, inflation) intolerably high. Indeed, his rise to power was an explicit effort to restore order in a nation caught between superpowers and riven with conflict. He used his authority—that is, military might and political repression—to restore order. The cost in human lives and individual freedom was enormous.
However, Pinochet understood that too much order would make meaningful change impossible. So while he treated dissenters brutally, he used the stability he created to challenge the traditional power elites on the economic front. He proceeded to turn up the heat on the private sector, eliminating protective tariffs and government subsidies, thus forcing business to adapt to international competition or die. Some did die, but others adapted, and many new businesses and industries flourished in the new environment.
Pinochet deserves to go down in history as a controversial figure. After seventeen years of forcibly guiding his society through an adaptive transformation, Pinochet's repression outlived whatever usefulness it might have had, and political democracy was restored. His technique for restoring order was savage and criminal, but there is no denying that he understood the need to control the temperature in his country in order to accomplish needed economic change. Chile is growing again, with a modern economy more productive than before."
My employer has a reputation for being left of center on the political spectrum. I expected better of the institution. On the bright side, I have a new strategy for dealing with people at work who annoy me. I will have them tossed out of helicopters and into the Pacific.
Then I got to page 112, wherein Messrs. Heifetz and Linsky conclude their summary of FDR managing tension within a productive range and then segue into this:
"We can see the same principle at work in a very different, and ethically disturbing, example. General Augusto Pinochet of Chile came to power in a 1973 coup d'état amid the political and economic disarray at the end of the Allende administration. Like Roosevelt, he found the level of chaos (rampant unemployment, labor strikes, inflation) intolerably high. Indeed, his rise to power was an explicit effort to restore order in a nation caught between superpowers and riven with conflict. He used his authority—that is, military might and political repression—to restore order. The cost in human lives and individual freedom was enormous.
However, Pinochet understood that too much order would make meaningful change impossible. So while he treated dissenters brutally, he used the stability he created to challenge the traditional power elites on the economic front. He proceeded to turn up the heat on the private sector, eliminating protective tariffs and government subsidies, thus forcing business to adapt to international competition or die. Some did die, but others adapted, and many new businesses and industries flourished in the new environment.
Pinochet deserves to go down in history as a controversial figure. After seventeen years of forcibly guiding his society through an adaptive transformation, Pinochet's repression outlived whatever usefulness it might have had, and political democracy was restored. His technique for restoring order was savage and criminal, but there is no denying that he understood the need to control the temperature in his country in order to accomplish needed economic change. Chile is growing again, with a modern economy more productive than before."
My employer has a reputation for being left of center on the political spectrum. I expected better of the institution. On the bright side, I have a new strategy for dealing with people at work who annoy me. I will have them tossed out of helicopters and into the Pacific.
