corporate colonisation

change continues, hopefully

I've been reading the book “The Siege of Krishnapur” recently. It begins by illustrating the daily lives of middle and senior managers of the East India Company and British government officials in occupied India. They lived in beautiful, large homes with their families, none of whom needed to work, and had to find ways to occupy themselves, such as writing and reciting poetry to each other or going on picnics.

This got me thinking about American colonisation and its use of corporations to exert and maintain power. I’m not the first person to draw a comparison between McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Amazon and the Indian companies, but I haven’t heard it for a while. I think it explains why many American companies were so quick to bend to Trump's will during his rampage against equity and DEI initiatives, because ultimately, these companies are an extension of the American government. If the president says the government has to stop doing something, that includes the corporations that extend out into the rest of the world.

Recently, the conversations have been more about technofeudalism. I’ve read the book, and the arguments are interesting. There are definite parallels between the serfs of land and the serfs of digital space. But this doesn’t feel like that paradigm.

(I apologise to my historian readers who may know more about this topic than I do; please bear with me while I think this through with my limited understanding.)

In medieval feudal times, power was relatively straightforward: it was based on muscles, land, and weapons. Alliances and favours greased the wheels, but control was mostly about who could muster the biggest bunch of tough guys at short notice. During British colonial rule, democracy was limited to those who owned land, and only males were allowed to own land. The messy details of managing the colonies were left to local elites, who could maintain order on the ground, in part through violence, but also through more peaceful coercion.

And now we find ourselves with the most universal suffrage we’ve ever seen. The force has continued to shift away from physical violence to yet more coercive tactics, at a massive scale. Now we see the will of the people swayed by a group of elites who bend us to create a future of their choosing, using devices that we’ve willingly invited into our lives, and whisper into our ears that the masses have too much power, and only they, the all-knowing elites, can save us.

I’ve spent a significant portion of my professional life embedded within large corporations. I often grapple with the thought that I’ve sold out. I started working in political domains while still in college and only left in my mid-20s when I realised the personal cost of entering the game of Changing the World was high, and the chances of winning were low. It was around this time that I became an agile coach and started targeting larger corporations, the kinds of firms that run the world like the colonial empire of old. I hoped that by entering these places as a transformative change agent, I would acquire a less costly ticket into the game and have a higher chance of winning.

Does my drive to change organisations from the inside out come at the cost of my supporting them in achieving their current goals? Is my presence a form of internal washing, to make my colleagues think the organisation cares more about them than it does? Would the powers that be hire me unless they believe it would increase profitability in some way?

Agile has always appealed to me, in large part because I interpreted it to be egalitarian, pushing as much power as possible to the lowest levels of the organisation. The roles of agile coach and scrum master are commonly misunderstood to be solely about adopting frameworks, increasing efficiency, or speeding up delivery. But in reality, these roles were fundamentally about getting bureaucracy out of the way so that people could do the work. The empowerment we talk of is about enabling individuals to recognise and leverage their existing authority and capabilities by supporting them in a way that allows them to believe they have the power they do and then act with it. It involves encouraging people to shape their environments, bolstering their courage to challenge entrenched ways of working, and nurturing the wisdom required to navigate and influence complex systems effectively.

It seems to me that governments need a coach to help them realise and believe they have the power and authority to implement policies and regulations that support the masses in building a better future. Currently, the only governments asserting their power are those supporting the elites of private industry in building a future that will likely benefit them alone.

Of course, no system is perfect, because humans. But we really did throw the baby out with the bath water when we implemented neoliberal and monetarist policies almost overnight. One government gave away the power of the masses to an elite that asset-stripped our nation. In agile, we talk about incremental iterative improvements. Well, we need to continue teaching the world about this idea. We are currently living through a visceral example of what can happen when you change too big. Not only is it impossible to be sure about which changes in policy caused which changes in society, but we also can’t reverse them with ease.

So now, we live in a time when no one has a clear vision of what the future will be, apart from the potential for extinction. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The only people professing a vision of how we can live better are those projecting a rose-tinted vision of the past, who claim that if we implement more of the same policies, we will somehow improve the quality of everyone’s lives. They demand we retreat in fear, and so far, we have been obliging.

Where is the hopeful inspiration to build the world of the next generation? Are we so certain that the world is going to end that we’ve stopped concerning ourselves with building for our children?

I was raised by parents who believed that not only do we stand on the shoulders of giants, but that we are the giants whose shoulders our children will stand on.

Surely, life is about creating a society we all want to live in. If people choose to try to build something, they should have everything they need to make their best effort. In a less consumer capitalist society, we would have safety nets such as healthcare and basic income in place, as well as support systems like education, allowing us to live a safe and healthy life and feel confident that pursuing a risky idea will not ruin our lives. This would mean we could, as a species, run more iterations of ideas and watch those that contribute a net benefit to society to flourish.

To fight for your influence on the system in which you live is what it means to be human. We are but bees in a colony, each of us playing our part to keep each other alive, safe, and well. Our purpose as humans is intrinsically tied to our ability to impact the systems we inhabit. There is a continuous struggle and responsibility of influencing our environments, for better or worse, that defines much of the human experience. We are not isolated actors but rather parts of a larger collective. Each of us contributes uniquely, working in concert with others to maintain a healthy, functioning community. Our individual actions ripple out, impacting others in ways both visible and invisible, immediate and long-lasting.

So, what happens when we all feel as powerless as we do today?

Meaningful, positive change rarely arrives in the form of sweeping declarations or overnight revolutions; rather, it emerges gradually, driven by sustained efforts from within the system, patiently guiding, influencing, and sometimes gently disrupting entrenched norms. Small acts of empowerment accumulate over time, driving significant shifts in organisational cultures and practices.

My work inside large organisations isn’t a compromise of my values or a betrayal of my ideals. Instead, it is the very embodiment of them: to continually strive toward a better, fairer, more equitable world, one decision, one empowered individual, and one act of hopeful defiance at a time. It is a long, often challenging journey, but one I embrace, hopeful that this is how real, lasting change occurs.