In the United States, a barbecue and family time seems more urgent than the latest hot take on business transformation. It is hard to be inspired when confronted with a three-day weekend. The last official weekend of summer is more appealing than sitting down and focusing on something to say which has meaning to many people. Something happened this week that you might have missed. Mikhail Gorbachev died at the age of ninety-one. For those who don’t remember Gorbachev, he is a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Time Magazines Man of the Decade in 1990, former president of the Soviet Union, and, oddly enough, the star of a vintage Pizza Hut commercial.
It is hard to explain to young people today the terror you felt growing up in the 1980s during the end of the cold war. The nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other with a hair trigger. Planes were flying round-the-clock missions, so the launch codes for a counter-strike would be ready if the other nation attacked. The number of nuclear missiles ready to extinguish all life on the planet numbered tens of thousands. A misunderstanding could kick off a series of escalations each day, eventually ending all life on the earth. It was a scary time with the future promised to no one, but you still had to do your algebra homework if you wanted to go to college.
The Soviet Union was communist and, between 1982 and 1987, had gone through three presidents. Brezhnev was corrupt but wanted to get along with the west. Yuri Andropov was a hardline communist who made his reputation in repressing freedom movements in Hungary. Andropov was confrontational, but his poor health meant he spent most of his time in a hospital bed. Andropov’s successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was in even worse health and died of emphysema and heart disease less than thirteen months after he replaced Andropov. Gorbachev was young by communist party standards, in good health, and the ultimate insider, rising through the ranks of the communist party with smiles and handshakes instead of bullets and threatening to deport people to Siberia.
When he took over, Gorbachev confronted a colossal mess. Crops were rotting in fields. The Russian computer program could not compete with western systems run with a new-fangled technology called microchips. The war in Afganistan had devolved into a stalemate. Finally, the Soviet Union faced destruction at the hands of the United States. If it wanted to survive the cold war, the nation had to be protected from attack and provide basic economic necessities to its people.
According to people who work with alcoholics, Gorbachev had “a moment of clarity.” The nation would starve from within or face a nuclear attack from Americans unless something changed. If it were any other person, they might have picked fights with the west and ignored the situation at home while enjoying the trappings of power. Gorbachev wanted to put long-term fixes into place to preserve the Soviet Union for future generations. It meant reforming the communist party to be more accountable to the citizens, creating an economy that could meet the basic needs of its people, and foreign policy, which reduced the likelihood of war. It would be the ultimate transformation project of the Soviet Union into a modern power.
It was an incredible gamble. If anything went wrong, the entire nation would collapse. What made this gamble more spectacular is that Gorbachev was born and raised in the system and advanced through the ranks, saying the right things. The intimacy with a corrupt system and the power it gave him could have blinded Gorbachev to what he needed to do. Instead, he decided to institute reforms hoping to save the only way of life he knew.
Glasnost and Perestroika are footnotes to history, but they represent a reasonable faith effort to reform a flawed system. I have no illusions about Soviet Communism, which killed millions of people and enslaved half the world in the aftermath of World War Two. Nations under communism required over thirty years to integrate with the World economy, and Russia today behaves more like a corrupt petro-state than a great power.
If you are wondering what any of this has to do with agile, it is this; to make a change in corrupt systems takes courage, and it is up to all of us to have moments of clarity and incite change. Influential people need to experience moments of clarity, and the agile movement has the moral credibility and technical experience to make the change. Corruption and failure happen if we allow them to happen.
The world is a better place, thanks to Gorbachev. The number of nuclear weapons has decreased by a factor of six. A war that will extinguish the human species is still possible but will be a conscious decision instead of an accidental blunder. The world has faced a global pandemic with halting success, and the war in Ukraine has not boiled into a worldwide confrontation. We are concentrating on more long-term problems like climate change and wealth inequality.
It is the legacy of Gorbachev. A safer world with fewer nukes and more cooperation. It is far from a perfect world but allows us to concentrate on longer-term problems and make reforms. People can, in good faith, institute change, and it is up to each of us to act.
Have a great labor day, and until next time.
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