I remember the first time I met Charles Koch. It was in the late 1980s. I was a graduate student at George Mason University. We were told that Mr. Koch, a Wichita businessman, had pioneered a philosophy of organizational management he called “Market Based Management.” MBM applied the principles of market coordination to decision-making inside the firm. For a group of young economists, the kind who committed long passages of Smith, Mises, and Hayek to memory, this was going to be fun.
Suffice it to say that in a room full of geeks, Charles out-geeked us all. And it wasn’t just his knowledge of economics that impressed us. He was equally conversant in the ideas of Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Michael Polanyi, and other philosophers of science.
Thirty years later, I was offered the opportunity to lead the Institute for Humane Studies, an organization that Charles had supported and helped to build since the early 1960s. I jumped at the chance.
I jumped because, in the intervening years, I had learned a lot from Charles Koch, the author. Not only was this the management philosophy that built Koch Industries, one of the largest and most successful privately held companies in the world, but I also liked the challenge of translating those principles to non-profit environments such as higher education. At some level I was still the same geeky grad student looking for locks that the magic key of economic thinking might open.
As valuable as I have found his other books, Science of Success and Good Profit, non-business readers could be forgiven if they didn’t quite see themselves and their work in them. Charles Koch’s latest book is different. Co-authored with Brian Hooks, CEO and president of the philanthropic community Stand Together, Believe in People is an explicit call to social entrepreneurs.
While consistent with the principles of MBM, it’s the lessons learned from collaborating with diverse visionaries that animate this book. Social entrepreneurs who drive positive change are those who recognize that progress happens from the bottom up. They are those who believe that people are the solution, not the problem. And in the spirit of Frederick Douglass, they are willing to “unite with anybody to do right and nobody to do wrong.”
The lesson that progress happens from the bottom up harkens back to the early influence those economists and social philosophers had on a young Charles Koch’s thinking. As he and Hooks write, “When people are empowered, they find solutions to the problems they are closest to, as they have the proximity and knowledge to do so.” This vision of human progress is counter to a paradigm of control in which people “at the top” assume that they know better and assert power over others, which brings us to the second lesson.
The very people who are customarily treated as “the problem” frequently hold the key to the solution. Want to find a scalable solution to drug and alcohol addiction? Start by listening to and empowering a former addict. Want to break down the barriers that keep people trapped in a cycle of violence and poverty? Tap the wisdom of those who were caught in that trap and broke free. “Effective solutions to society’s most pressing problems,” they observe, “frequently spring from what might seem the most unlikely of places and then spread as others see their effectiveness.”
But it’s the third lesson, abandon partisanship in favor of partnership, that represents the book’s most important challenge to any visionary committed to “doing right” in the world. As Charles candidly admits, he learned this lesson the hard way, with a journey down the path of partisan politics that proved counterproductive to his lifelong commitment to helping people remove barriers.
By reversing that course, by partnering with unlikely collaborators, the Stand Together community has secured significant wins in criminal justice reform with the First Step Act, veterans’ healthcare reform, and the Right to Try Act, which gives critically ill patients access to medications that have yet to receive FDA approval if all other available treatments have been exhausted.
It’s tempting to think that working with a broad coalition to do right is an obvious and easy thing to do. But it’s not. Understanding why is to understand something important about the particular challenge we face at this moment in American history.
First, not all partnerships are virtuous. Collaboration that perpetuates political privilege to well-connected elites is not a solution. It’s a significant part of the problem that is dividing the country.
Second, by their nature, partisans will resist any solution that gives the other side a win. Polarization amplifies this unattractive feature of political life and spreads it across civil society. Different from mere disagreement, polarization makes line drawing the default mindset. In a polarized world, we want to know first, before anything else, whose side you’re on. Are you on the side of truth, virtue, wisdom, and light? Or are you on the side of darkness and evildoers? The fact that there may be things on which we agree is invisible to us because even asking the question, “On what do we agree?” is taken as a sign that one is willing to “do business with the devil.”
My point is not to suggest that we shouldn’t be worried about evildoers. They’re out there, to be sure. But it’s unlikely that our neighbors and colleagues are among them. The point is that if we begin by asking, “Where do we agree?” rather than “Are you on the side of Light or Darkness?” — if we draw a circle of common ground as the first step, we are much more likely to find pathways for doing right and partners who can help us get there.
Whether it’s in politics, academic life, or civil society, finding common ground requires a deliberate shift in mindset. As expressed in Believe in People, “Instead of demanding all or nothing, partnership treats people with the respect they deserve and recognizes that, whatever our differences, we always have things in common.”
Emily Chamlee-Wright is the president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies.
