Page 99 - Cultures and Organizations

More Equal than Others 81

The Italian Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) is one of world litera-
ture’s greatest authorities on the use of political power. He distinguished
two models: the model of the fox and the model of the lion. The prudent
ruler, Machiavelli writes, uses both models, each at the proper time: the
cunning of the fox will avoid the snares, and the strength of the lion will
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scare the wolves. Relating Machiavelli’s thoughts to national power dis-

tance differences, one finds small-power-distance countries to be accus-
tomed to the fox model and large-power-distance countries to the lion
model. Italy, in the twentieth-century IBM research data, scores in the
middle zone on power distance (rank 51, score 50). It is likely that, were
one to study Italy by region, the North will be more foxy and the South
more lionlike. What Machiavelli did not write but what the association
between political systems and citizens’ mental software suggests is that
which animal the ruler should imper sonate depends strongly on what ani-
mals the followers are.
Karl Marx (1818–83) also dealt with power, but he wanted to give it
to people who were powerless; he never really dealt with the question of
whether the revolution he preached would actually create a new powerless
class. In fact, he seemed to assume that the exercise of power can be trans-
ferred from persons to a system, a philosophy in which we can recognize
the mental software of the small-power-distance societies to which Marx’s
mother country, Germany, today belongs. It was a tragedy for the modern
world that Marx’s ideas have been mainly exported to countries at the
large-power-distance side of the continuum, in which, as was argued ear-
lier in this chapter, the assumption that power should yield to law is absent.
This absence of a check to power has enabled government systems claim-
ing Marx’s inheritance to survive even where these systems would make
Marx himself turn in his grave. In Marx’s concept of the “dictatorship

of the proletariat,” the dictatorship has appealed to rulers in some large-
power-distance countries, but the proletariat has been forgotten. In fact, the
concept is naive: in view of what we know of the human tendency toward
inequality, a dictatorship by a proletariat is a logical contradiction.
The exportation of ideas to people in other countries without regard
for the values context in which these ideas were developed—and the impor-
tation of such ideas by gullible believers in those other countries—is not
limited to politics; it can also be observed in the domains of education
and, in particul ar, management and organization. The economic success of