Empowerment
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Less in the sense of touchy-feely yogababble about how we should all be actualised to be the best versions of ourselves, but in the sense of having the autonomy and authority to make pragmatic decisions to move an organisation on.
In any commercial collective, there is an enduring tussle between the (sadly) resistible force of subject matter expertise — wielded limply by those who know what they are doing, understand the proximate ramifications of their actions and derive professional pride and no small amount of job satisfaction from the very act of exercising small nuggets of authority — and the hardly moveable object of policy, process, precedent and sclerotic infrastructure that trusts no such executive agent further than she can be thrown, and is stout in the resistance of any kind of risk, however theoretical or academic.
Those two forces — forces of substance and form — wrestle in any organisation; the bigger and older the firm is the more likely young executive is to lose. She may want little more than the opportunity to stand on the deck, in the sun, blowing wistfully into the sail, that by itself will vouchsafe ineffable meaning in her grim working life but it will be denied her. She will be worn down, institutionalised, broken, will start muttering distractedly, using the world “leverage” when she means “use” and will eventually accept her fate, nosing boulders up an inclined slope.
We all know the feeling. The credit department that insists on cross default in a spot contract. The custodian that seeks an indemnity for all conceivable consequential losses on a trade-matching agreement. In each case the negotiators handling these terms know them to be preposterous, but know just as thoroiughly that the means to dispensing with them is so monstrous as to be unthinkable, so they externalise the suffering to their clients’ legal eagles who, presented with such manifest enstilted nonsense, have no choice but to object to it: it is their sacred covenant to protect their firm against reckless endangerment — theoretical, juristic endangerment, not practical endangerment: inhouse legal has no mandate to look the other way on the grounds that it would be unthinkable for a servce-provider to take this clause to its logical, legal conclusion.