Gaucho Dialogues on Leadership and Management
145 pages
English

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145 pages
English

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Description

Lessons on leadership, strategy and people management from militia-led insurrections in Latin America provide as seen through the eyes of two iconic literary characters.


Saladeros were the 17th–19th–century Pampa beef industry businesses where the beef was sun-dried or “jerked.” Alfredo Behrens suggests that in such lifeless routine work there was little glory to be found, at least as capable of enthusing workers to perform to their highest potential. The trouble, Behrens argues in “Gaucho Dialogues on Leadership and Management,” is that most subsidiaries in developing countries are managed as modern saladeros. Latin Americans are brought up in the medieval Catholic tradition of detachment from worldly material gain. Profit is disdained, largesse and martyrdom are praised.


Behrens illustrates the Latin American organizational how-to through a dialogue attributed to two famed nineteenth-century iconic literary characters, Martín Fierro and Don Segundo Sombra. Fierro is construed to espouse the passionate, nonpragmatic, xenophobic attitude popular among many Latin American leaders of the twentieth century. Sombra, on the other hand, espouses a more nuanced affection toward old ways, suggesting that they may be responsible for some of the economic and technological backwardness of Latin Americans. “Gaucho Dialogues on Leadership and Management” carries the reader through militia-led insurrections from Argentina and Uruguay through Brazil, Venezuela, Central America, and Mexico. Fierro and Sombra comment on the insurrections and draw lessons about leadership, strategy and people management in Latin America. While the book’s argument covers the ethos prevailing in the Americas, both North and South, Behrens believes it may be relevant elsewhere among similar societies where people prefer to act as members of clans than as autonomous individuals. If so, the book’s argument may be relevant for the vast majority of humankind at work.


Preface to the English Edition; Preface to the Portuguese Edition; Acknowledgments; Introduction; Chapter 1 Fierro and Sombra Head for Mexico; Chapter 2 The Unquenchable Thirst for Honor: The Gladiator; Chapter 3 Martin Fierro Inspires Perón’s Leadership Style; Chapter 4 The Siege of Montevideo; Chapter 5 Fierro and Sombra Discuss Leadership Theory; Chapter 6 Fierro and Sombra Follow the Federalist Revolt in Southern Brazil; Chapter 7 The Unquenchable Thirst for Honor: The Bullfight; Chapter 8 In Venezuela Fierro and Sombra Assess the Marcha Restauradora; Chapter 9 Panama Secedes from Colombia and Fierro Looks for Heroism in Costa Rica; Chapter 10 Fierro and Sombra Discuss the Leadership of the Mexican Revolution; Chapter 11 Contrasts with American Military Leadership: The Punitive Expedition; Chapter 12. Epilogue; Glossary; References; Index.

Sujets

Informations

Publié par
Date de parution 15 décembre 2017
Nombre de lectures 1
EAN13 9781783087129
Langue English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Gaucho Dialogues on Leadership and Management
Gaucho Dialogues on Leadership and Management
Alfredo Behrens
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© Alfredo Behrens 2018

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-710-5 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-710-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
I dedicate this book to my teachers and students, through whom I have learned so much; to my wife Luli, who inspired the book and saw me through its creation; and to my children Jimena Camila Cecilia and Pedro, hoping their lives will be led by truth and loyalty, even when it might not pay in the usual mercenary sense.
… he welcomes us,
with a deep, wise and hard silence
that displays an old truth,
strength lies only within us. 1

1 Translation of a fragment of the last stanza of Mario Benedetti’s poem, The Leader and His Men (El Baquiano y los suyos; Benedetti, 2001 , 112).
Contents
Preface to the English Edition

Preface to the Portuguese Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Fierro and Sombra Head for Mexico

2 The Unquenchable Thirst for Honor: The Gladiator

3 Martín Fierro Inspires Perón’s Leadership Style

Lessons on Fierro’s Role in Argentine Leadership
4 The Siege of Montevideo

Lessons from the Siege of Montevideo
5 Fierro and Sombra Discuss Leadership Theory

6 Fierro and Sombra Follow the Federalist Revolt in Southern Brazil

Lesson: The Rehashing of Leadership When the Situation Changes
Lessons: Authentic Leadership, Communication, Recruitment, Sense of Timing
7 The Unquenchable Thirst for Honor: The Bullfight

Leadership Lessons from Bullfighting
8 In Venezuela, Fierro and Sombra Assess the Marcha Restauradora

Four Decades at the Helm: Lessons on Change Management, Recruitment and Motivation
9 Panama Secedes from Colombia, and Fierro Looks for Heroism in Costa Rica

Costa Rica
Lesson: Inauthentic Leadership Stunts Organizational Development
10 Fierro and Sombra Discuss the Leadership of the Mexican Revolution

Lessons on Mexico: Locally Grown Leaders Have the Flavor of Authenticity
11 Contrasts with American Military Leadership: The Punitive Expedition

Lessons from the Punitive Expedition
12 Epilogue

Glossary
References
Index
Preface to the English Edition
Ever since Plato discovered that the best way to record the brilliance of the philosopher Socrates was to set down his teacher’s imaginary conversations in the Academy, conversational question and answer has been humankind’s primary teaching tool. Over the millennia, Socratic Dialogue has been celebrated, reinvented, deconstructed—even lampooned—in a long tradition stretching back through Monty Python, Samuel Beckett, Laurence Sterne, Isaac Walton, Shakespeare and others.
But Alfredo Behrens’s timely book must surely represent a new landmark in this ever-growing dialectical genre of “Socratic variations.” His mission is to advance our cultural understanding of Latin America and the home-baked spirit of its business and political leadership models, by means of the imaginary dialogues of two fictional heroes from the pampas. They are cowboys who in these parts are named Gauchos. If you want to name their style, you might call it “magical realism meets management theory.” Yet The Gaucho Dialogues is more than a study of organizational behavior, seen through a Latino lens. It hitches a ride on literature and history too.
The first intention of the writer—an academic teaching business leadership—may be to lay bare the reasons why empirical Anglo-Saxon management methods seem so often doomed to failure when adopted south of the Rio Grande. Yet—most intriguingly for our own times—the writer uses Latin America as a chilling case study in how nationalist, right-wing populism can take root and corrupt any society. He shows too, how political leaders everywhere can seize and hold power by appealing to darker emotional forces driving voters. So this critical examination of Latin America’s political foundations—which have made this region both the alma mater and “patient zero” of destructive populism—is doubly relevant in an age in which voters in Northern Hemisphere democracies have begun to greedily devour these very same ideas.
Behrens brings to life Martin Fierro—all mustachioed machismo , knife-wielding bravura and homespun wisdom from the campsite—by pillaging the eponymous 1872 work of José Hernández, Argentina’s poet laureate of Gaucho culture. Fierro’s less fiery counterpart and imaginary interlocutor is the more educated Don Segundo Sombra, a literary figure created half a century later by Ricardo Güiraldes, also an Argentine writer who but for his untimely death might have achieved the status of an Hispanic Rudyard Kipling.
Mounted on horseback, these two embark on a jazzy, 200-page riff on the nature of leadership. It is an airy, playful construct showing blatant disregard for that other lynchpin of classical thought: Aristotle’s unity of time and place. As they ramble across the historical and metaphorical landscape of the South American continent, the two heroes of this book—Fierro and Sombra—slip effortlessly through time and space. The book weaves its conversational path from the exploits of Argentina’s founding dictator Juan Manuel Rosas in the 1830s, all the way to the World War II campaigns of General Patton. Rebellion, slavery, honor and loyalty all make their appearance in this analysis of what makes great leadership.
One moment they are observing the Italian liberator Guiseppe Garibaldi cutting his revolutionary teeth with a ragamuffin band of Neapolitan rebels during the 1842–48 defence of Montevideo. Next they are tracing the origins of Argentinian caudillo Juan Perón’s populist style in the 1940s. Turn a page or two and the Gauchos are arguing the finer points of 1990s American management theories of transactional or transformational leadership with modern-day social scientists, before plunging into a debate on the origins of charisma and its use in industry. Largely forgotten figures such as Gumercindo Saraiva (Brazil’s “Napoleon of the Pampas”), Pancho Villas and General Pershing all make cameo appearances.
But if this mix of ideas sounds too eclectic, too effervescent, or simply too unfamiliar, Behrens builds a solid narrative base by retelling a southern version of an early-twentieth-century story we all know well. This is the extinguishing of the freedom-loving life of the American cowboy out West; the Range Wars and the land grabs triggered by railways and industrialization; the misery of day-laborers in Chicago’s meatpacking yards; the funnelling of former agricultural workers into the great industrial plants of modern capitalism; the emergence of modern management techniques designed to squeeze ever more productivity and profit from human beings.
These same changes—mirrored in social and economic revolutions sweeping through South America’s flatlands—form the darker and more gruesome ballast to this book. For centuries, the economic basis of these lands was the export of salted beef, jerky and meat extracts. The institution that made this possible was the saladero , or slaughterhouse and meatpacking station .
Before these institutions evolved into the great mechanized conglomerates such as Anglo Meat Company, Liebig or Fray Bentos, every district across the pampas had its local saladero. It was here that herds of cattle were brought in from the plains of Argentina and Uruguay by wandering horsemen for slaughter; and it was here too that the old freedom-loving, anarchistic lifestyle of the Gauchos collided with the oppressive characteristic of a place of fixed, repetitive, mind-numbing work. It was here that city bosses first learned how to organize and exploit peasant labor, co-opting local leaders to enforce their will. Later they used these same tricks to command politics.
The saladeros have long vanished from the Latin landscape, replaced by car plants, call centers and steel mills, all managed by MBAs from the best universities, using state-of-the-art organizational behavior strategies. Yet Behrens’s chilling perception is that deep beneath this superficial modernity there may yet lurk an unreconstructed mindset that harks back to the meatpacking era. This, he suggests, may provide an answer to the unsolved question of why foreign management methods always struggle in Latin America. And why, in terms of national politics, transformational, charismatic paternalists have regularly trumped by-the-book, results-driven

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