Saturday, August 10, 2013

From Dictatorship to Democracy #GeneSharp

My connection with Gene Sharp's work:

In 2011, I was with an educational NGO that started getting very corporate, top-down and dictatorial. I came across "Dictatorship to Democracy" at the time and used some of the tips there in exposing our management's malpractices through an organization-wide email and disclosure campaign and successfully got an unfair termination of a colleague reversed.

The book came especially handy in analyzing and predicting the behavior and priorities of the managers and the upper leadership, and gave me an insight that ran contrary to what most colleagues were advising, but turned out to be accurate. It saved me a lot of time and energy and disappointment.

I've made a video of my experiences : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2fy7pY3iqc (don't think I've mentioned the book anywhere though)

Of course, by then the core concepts of the organization itself had been exposed to be serving the opposite of what was claimed; and in keeping with this, the managers responsible for the unfair termination did not get sacked despite having been exposed and they even tried to set me up. So I walked out once the campaign was over and feel it was a good decision.

You can download a copy of the book from here: http://www.aeinstein.org/organizations98ce.html

Reference: https://www.facebook.com/howtostartarevolution/posts/516250738441894

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