One of the qualities I appreciate most about Napoleon Hill, author of "Think and Grow Rich", is his unyielding optimism. He wrote his book during the Great Depression so think of what the depths must have been if what we are getting now is a small taste of what that period was like. But what comes through in the book is how wonderful and infinitely opportunistic it is to be alive as a person in this world. Napoleon has a profound humanity about him that seems genuine and it comes through in whatever area he comments on. One of those areas is managing and leading people, which caught my attention because of my own interest and involvement.

A lot of management is fuelled by power, control, and fear and a lot of management theory is a disguised version of how to manipulate your people. I spent over a decade in management in a Fortune 100 corporation and then consulted in large and small companies, both public and owner-operated. The level of management thinking was pretty basic and derivative and 99.9% of the time was hierarchical. What I mean by this is that management saw their organization as series of ranks, each subordinate to the next, with themselves in the top ranks of course. And the way you maintain this artificial hierarchy is through power and control. So it was a great surprise to come across enlightened and enabling management and leadership thinking in Napoleon Hill's book "Think and Grow Rich".

For example, Napoleon talks about business needing reforming from the approach of force and fear which engendered the lack of faith that caused the Great Depression, in his opinion. He sees a future of cooperation where both labor and capital drop their destructive biases and labor is rewarded the same as capital for its contribution to production. The part about rewarding labor has come about piecemeal and, generally, not with a spirit of cooperation in my experience. (Of course there are exceptions but it is the general run of things that determines most of our lives so I focus on that). Management is still an exercise in force and fear for most people whether at the giving or receiving end. It is the exceptional manager that we remember most, the one who has managed to go beyond the culture, but they are still the exception. Most managers cannot imagine a culture they have not seen and so never move towards it. Likewise most employees still see themselves as wage slaves.

Another quote from "Think and Grow Rich" exemplifies Napoleon's life-affirming and inspired management insight - "The watchword of the future will be human happiness and contentment, and when this state of mind shall have been attained, the production will take care of itself". This is the management for our future, as exemplified by companies like W.L. Gore (of Gore-Tex© fame). The pursuit of happiness is the most extraordinary of the rights the Founding Fathers proclaimed. I think it is this that has made the United States extraordinary. Those that are frightened of this will always seek to emphasise life and liberty, focus attention and resources on them while downplaying or avoiding the pursuit of happiness. You can see this in the corporate world in approaches like "we'll deal with that (anything to do with the betterment of people) later when we have xxx (anything to do with bigger profit, beating the competition, launching the new xyz, etc)", or the classic "they should be glad to have a job".

Napoleon is 100% correct seventy years later. Companies need to be run by and for people; all the people in the company and their customers. The great transparency that the web is enabling will hopefully get rid of the vaingloriousness and egoism we constantly read about in business magazines about the king of this industry, the sage of that, the guru of the other. Hopefully this openness and the shock of the current recession fuelled as it has been by covert greed and open fear will move us to a mature discussion between mature adults about the management of business and care of the customer, as Napoleon Hill hoped for 70 years ago.