1995; 260 pages
ISBN: 0-385-46964-0
POWER is one of the three uncool-but-essential topics to understand around organizations (the other two are rank-relationships and judgement). Hillman regards
For action to be direct and single, thought must be diverse and plural. |
power as inevitable, legitimate, and at its best when handled with subtlety and complexity. He rightly blasts those who narrowly wield power-as-control, say, or power-as-efficiency.
Hillman is a polytheist, favoring the ancient Greek pantheon. He regards the old gods and goddesses as powerful ideas writ into complex characters, and those ideas continue to wrangle and decree within us and our organizations just as they did in the eternal soap opera on Mt. Olympus. Note, for instance, Hillman's retelling of the tale of the futurist Cassandra: "If we don't know who is at work in an idea, we more easily get caught by its power. We become identified with that idea, defend it, fight for it, and soon we have become ideational fundamentalists.... Myths can account even for that feeling of certainty. It, too, comes from the gods, says the story of Cassandra. Apollo wanted her and gave her the gift of prophetic insight by wetting her lips with his tongue. But she then refused his desire and so he gave her as well the curse that no one would believe what she saw so certainly. Although she could surely foretell what was to come, her warnings fell on unheeding ears. She could only tell the truth and was considered, by her fellow Trojans, insane."
I like Hillman's writing. It's lucid and gritty, compassionate and harsh, probing to the meat of what matters. Read his chapter on Efficiency, for instance.
—Stewart Brand
Quoted from the text
This book addresses the psychology of business. As a writer on psychology, I am turning to business for my audience because that is where I believe the most vital and challenged minds are at work and where issues of power are most central.... The drama of business, its struggles, challenges, victories and defeats, forms the fundamental myth of our civilization, the story that explains the underlying bottom line of the ceremonies of our behavior.
When we predict, we project. In fact, future studies are often called "projections." The projection-making factor is in the subjective mind as much as it is in the objective data, and since the deepest structures of the mind are probably archetypal patterns, appearing so regularly and universally in art and thought, ritual and behavior, dreams and madness, we can expect them to display themselves as well in projections about the future. Let's review a few of these familiar fantasies: Cyclical Return... Gloom and Doom... Hopeful Greening... Apocalyptic Catastrophe... Well-Managed Rationalism...
