Underprivileged Leadership

Today, the U.S. needs a few less-privileged leaders from Washington state to Washington, D.C. and Wall Street to Las Vegas.

Regressing from "adversity & craftsmanship" to "dexterity & speed"

The nineteenth century version of success stressed the value of compensating for disadvantage.  If you wanted to end up on top, the thinking went, it was better to start at the bottom, because it was there that you learned the discipline and motivation essential for success.

Andrew Carnegie insisted that there was an advantage to being "cradled, nursed and reared in the stimulating school of poverty."  According to Carnegie, "It is not from the sons of the millionaire or the noble that the world receives its teachers, its martyrs, its inventors, its statesmen, its poets or even its men of affairs.  It is from the cottage of the poor that all these spring."  He believed that poverty provided a better preparation for success than wealth did; that, at root, compensating for disadvantage was more useful, developmentally, than capitalizing on advantage.

In the 20th Century, human dexterity & speed was all that was needed to mass produce goods and services cheaper if not better.  Henry Ford's mass production of automobiles in Detroit attracted human bodies that could use their muscles with speed.  A high school graduate could easily land a well paying job in the automobile factory, using little brain power.  These factory workers would become the chief consumers of the cars, trucks and recreational vehicles produced.  Generations moved from high school to factory to retirement during this prosperous century....hardy ever having to use their brains.

Success was (and still) seen as a matter of capitalizing on socioeconomic advantage, not compensating for disadvantage.

The mechanisms of social mobility---scholarships, affirmative action, housing vouchers, Head Start---all involve attempts to convert the poor from chronic outsiders to insiders, to rescue them from what is assumed to be a hopeless state.  Nowadays, we don't learn from poverty, we escape from poverty.

My factory-worker father was not the only one who assumed that businesses were based on social ties that reward cultural insiders.  That is one of the reasons we no longer think of poverty as being useful in the nineteenth-century sense; no matter how hard you work, or how disciplined you are, it is difficult to overcome the socially marginalizing effects of an impoverished background.  In order to do business at the highest levels, it really helps to have been a powerbroker's classmate at Yale.

Yet, the underprivileged minority has none of those advantages or constraints of high society.  The minority is free to keep social and financial considerations separate.  He can call a bad debt a bad debt, or a bad customer a bad customer, without worrying about the social implications of his honesty.  You can't tell the chairman of a FORTUNE 500 company that he's an idiot if you were his classmate at Yale.  That is why truthtelling is easier from a position of cultural distance.

The idea that outsiders can profit by virtue of their outsiderness runs contrary to our understanding of minorities.  But there are clearly also times and places where minorities benefit by asserting and even exaggerating their otherness.  The election of the first African-American president of the United States, is the latest example of otherness wanted and needed in a time of global crisis.

Source: The Uses of Adversity by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, November 10, 2008