” one key reason why the presidents of large corporations do not control the United States is that they do not control their own corporations…when implied organisational skill and power are deployed and the desired direct effect flows, all that we have witnessed is the same kind of sequence as to what we observed when a clergyman is fortunate enough to pray for rain just before the unpredicted end of a drought…”
– Alasdair MacIntyre
We incline to see history through the lives of great men. That inclination blinds us to the real complexity of politics , business and finance. So we find intentionality and design where there is only chance and improvisation; directness where there is obliquity. By describing Napolean’s Russian campaign through the eyes of individual participants, Tolstoy denied the deterministic notion of history. Of the battle of Borodino he wrote: ‘It was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of his orders were carried out and during the battle he did not know what was going on…..It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will’
John Kay from ‘Obliquity’
