Why nations fail ? ... and why companies fail ?
Why nations fail ?
In this very inspiring book, called why nations fail ?, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson demonstrate with a number of in depth examples that disappeared civilizations have failed because they have not been able to incentivise their citizens in creating value.
Extractive civilizations are the ones where the elites try to extract the larger value from the citizens without giving any thing back. Value is extracted not only through taxes but also in redirecting towards the elites all the possible value, controlling monopolies, not respecting property and in some cases not even respecting the human rights of their citizens.
In such a context, why should citizens be motivated in putting huge efforts in generating value when this value will be captured by the elite ?
Among the number of examples brought by the authors to illustrate this theory, one is fascinating : the Venice republic. This small town has been able within a very short time to expand its influence to whole Mediterranean area and in an even shorter time, they have collapsed completely !
Why ?
The reason why Venice republic has been so successful is that they have invented an inclusive governance in which the citizens were paid back from the efforts they put for generating value. As an example, Venice republic invented the joined venture: a shared model between navigators and merchants was in place to incitivise navigators to explore and trade with remote countries. Back to Venice those successful explorers were getting a reasonable part of the cake and were gaining influence within the city as the governance model was open to new comers.
This illustrates the creative destruction coined by Joseph Schumpeter.
Of course, creative destruction comes at the expense of established players and this is the very reason why elites are getting increasingly reluctant to support such an approach. They have climbed the ladder and they don't want to be challenged or even worse to be replaced by new comers.
This is exactly why, after years of success Venice republic failed : governance changes stopped the inclusion of new comers establishing a status quo among the established players. This froze innovation and growth and lead extremely rapidly to the decline.
What about companies ?
A strong parallel can be made with companies which are somehow similar to states : they set up a governance model which can be more extractive or more inclusive. Normally when they are small, they favour initiative and growth and tend to be more inclusive. Later, being established, they become extractive, extracting the more value possible from their employees and keeping the status quo as much as possible making them becoming in the end irrelevant.
This theory about inclusive vs extractive approaches also explains the success of transformational leadership which aims at developing employees instead of only extracting value from them.