Two Strikes Against Diplomacy

It's been Diplomacy in the batter's box and Community on the pitcher's mound. The count is two strikes against Diplomacy.

First up pitching for Community was WikiLeaks, throwing curve balls. Diplomacy hit them all foul. Then Tahrir Square took to the mound, throwing fast balls, straight over the plate. Diplomacy never even saw them: by the time it realized one had gone by, the next was on its way.

Diplomacy is used to winning, probably because it normally plays against itself, or else with Dictators, to whom it lobs balls that they have been able to hit out of the park, collecting billions each time they passed home plate. Now along comes Community, a real competitor.

Where did Community come from? Out of obscurity, to be sure, but not out of thin air. It came off the ground, the last place Diplomacy would look. Its players got hungry, for food and freedom, and so they challenged Diplomacy.

The Community team has no sponsoring oligarchs, hardly even any leaders, at least in the conventional sense (look at WikiLeaks), or else all kinds of leaders (look in Tahrir Square). And it plays by a different set of rules. It is spontaneous and adaptable, which to Diplomacy looks unpredictable. Is that fair?

Worse still, Community is honest and transparent. That's certainly unfair: Diplomacy never saw anything like that before. For example, it expected the batter's box to be closed and wooden, not just a few lines on the ground that exposed its nudity for all to see. And boy, did a lot of fans come to see this.

-Article by Professor Henry Mintzberg

Read full article: The Huffington Post, February 17, 2011