Business bestseller lists are heavy with tales of inspirational leadership but a group of academics is gleaning lessons for management from the "dark side" by studying the methods of Pol Pot, the dictator responsible for the "killing fields" of Cambodia.
As commander of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot orchestrated the genocide of an estimated 1.7 million people, killing one in five in the then Kampuchea in five years, in pursuit of his "utopian vision" of a classless, peasant society.
Totalitarian regimes are not only social and political movements but also "organisational projects", says the research director of the Centre for Management and Organisation Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Business School, Professor Stewart Clegg.
"The processes that produced [the killing fields] can and should be analysed," says Professor Clegg. "Scholars in the field of organisational studies have an ethical responsibility to analyse not just the best in organisations but also the worst. There are things we can learn to enable us both to avoid those sorts of outrages in the future and to avoid the worst excesses that organisations are capable of."
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http://www.smh.com.au/national/management-by-terror-20140212-32hvp.html
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