Simon Caulkin on a book that shows how large firms now shape democracy
Taking office politics to the barricades
The Democratic Enterprise by Lynda Gratton (Prentice Hall)

It's commonplace that at work people put up with a democratic deficit that they wouldn't tolerate anywhere else. It's also a commonplace that this is inevitable: the alternative is anarchy and indecision, the failure to make hard choices that has undermined cooperative ventures from Triumph motorcycles to United Airlines.
In her timely book, Lynda Gratton tackles these assumptions head on.
The traditional "command and control" method of running companies presumes that the leader knows best and the management task is to get people to follow. This was conceivably true in more stable, less competitive times-but since the collapse of Enron, the dotcom boom and 9/11 we know that times are anything but stable.
As for competition, Konasuke Matsushita summed it up as long ago as the 1970s: "Your [Western] firms are built on the [F W] Taylor model. Even worse, so are your heads. With your bosses doing the thinking, while the workers wield the screwdrivers, you're convinced deep down that this is the way to run a business . . . We are beyond the Taylor model. Business, we know, is now so complex and difficult, the survival of the firm so hazardous in an environment increasingly unpredictable, competitive and fraught with danger, that its continued existence depends on the mobilisation of every ounce of intelligence."
This in a nutshell is one kind of democratic imperative. Those organ-isations with engaged, committed employees who have forged a stake in its future by helping to form its aims and conditions of association are more agile, adaptive and resilient.
They are better able to absorb large structural changes such as mergers and acquisitions that trip up so many traditional companies. In other words, they are better adapted to survive and prosper in today's turbulent conditions.
However, there is also another kind of imperative. Organisations, Gratton points out, are now the predominant fact of economic life, as important for individuals as the states with which we more usually associate the exercise of democratic functions. For the individual, "the possibilities of democracy are the possibilities of creating lives of meaning" - of becoming the best they can be.
Much has been made of the role of corporations in sustaining and destroy-ing the environment; more should now be made, she rightly says, destroying human resources.
The third democratic imperative is the need to enrich our shrivelled notions of what democracy actually is. A democracy exists for the benefit of its citizens, while also advancing the interests of the institution. As Gratton notes, the lesson of Athens is that the more citizens participate, the more skilled they become at decision-making, to the benefit of the body politic as a whole. In this perspective, our current version of state democ-racy-for most people reduced to the election of a leader every few years is a sadly shrunken one. The idea of renewing democracy through the corporation is unexpected but not impractical, Gratton insists, showing how some elements already exist in many firms, and how a very few are pushing further.
What holds the democratic enter-prise together? This is a fundamental question. In a command and control organisation, the answer is obvious: instructions from the top carried out by hierarchy and control. The relationship between organisation and individual is one of parent-child. In a democratic enterprise, based on individual autonomy and reciprocal obligation, the relationship is adult-to-adult, so power has to be negotiated.
In the absence of power and diktat, the organisational glue must be shared purpose and interests: "These autonomous, self-determining em-ployees do not exploit their colleagues or the organisation because the purpose and destiny of the company is also their purpose and destiny. And they choose to stay and provide their resources because the company . . . has a purpose that engages and interests them."
Shared purpose is critical, because it removes the need for the whole apparatus of command and control. The organisation moves to a different operating system, one that is internalised in the individuals that make it up. And this in turn opens up the possibility of fashioning what leader-ship writer Warren Bennis calls "delightful organisations" that people would want to join, and their children to join, for the opportunities they offer for individual development, community and meaning.
A pipedream? Remote technology, higher educational standards and, not least, generations of young people who aren't prepared to put up with the exploitative relationships that dogged their parents are three more reasons why the democratic enterprise may be an idea whose time has come. As De Tocqueville, quoted by Gratton, puts it: "I am tempted to believe that what we call necessary institutions are often no more than institutions to which we have grown accustomed. In matters of social constitution, the field of possibilities is much more extensive than men living in their various societies are ready to imagine."

Training for business Guardian Weekly, March 4-10, 2004