Totalitarianism vs. Authoritarianism

Some of my friends know that I spent a long time studying Russia and the Soviet Union from an academic viewpoint. They also know that I've lived there during the death throes of communism, during the transition to Russian democracy and during the actual height of Russian anarchic democracy.

That as the background, I've often been asked what I think of Vladimir Putin and the direction he's going. I know that Medvedev is the current President of Russia, but, I don't give his position and role much credence in either power or authority within Russia. More on that later because I think that there are situations where he can manipulate the appointment system within the bureaucracy in order to increase his leveraged power.

So, what do I think?

First, let me distinguish my understanding of totalitarianism and authoritarianism and highlight why I think they're different.

Authoritarianism is a system of government where one person or an oligarchy control the levers of power. And, they expect the people to obey those levers of power. Quite often there is a tacit bargain that as long as the people or the corporations don't interfere with the levers of political power and appear to support the political leadership, they won't interfere with the economic gain or personal lives of society.

Totalitarianism takes the concept of authoritarianism one step further where the political leaders don't accept that tacit bargain. They expect society to emotionally and economically bow to the will of the political system, organizing the economic system to track their political requirements and explicitly interfering in the personal lives of individuals to ensure that they not only appear to be supporting the political leadership, but, actually support the political leadership. At some level, to accomplish this in a large society, requires oppression and brainwashing.

This is an important difference to me because I believe that while Russia is reverting to authoritarianism with the Putin regime, I don't believe that there is a danger of descending into totalitarianism.

The ongoing Putin regime appears accept the tacit social contract that civil society toe the line and support them in appearance, not rock the boat, and they, in turn, can have economic and personal freedom (personal freedom that doesn't significantly impinge upon the political structure.)

Witness the arrest of Mikhail Khodorovski who ran Yukos. I'm not arguing that the charges were trumped up, he may very well have been breaking the law. But, he was not breaking it any more than anyone else in similar positions within the commercial sector. Once he started speaking out against the government, then his activities were used as a means of justifying removing a potential political opponent.

If you're interested in taking a look at other, like situations, check out The US Report on Human Rights Abuses.

With this as background, is Russia headed down an authoritarian path or down a soviet-style path?

Surrounded by Subject Matter Experts

I've walked into several companies with little or no expertise in the market that the company addresses. That being the case, I'm almost always faced with the question of how to become useful in a relatively quick amount of time. These people know more about their customers, know more about their business, and have the internal personal relationships in place that allow them to get things done within the organization. All of which, I don't have.

I tend to have a fallback position walking in as the new product manager. My first meetings in the company tend to focus around features and customer need perceptions around those needs. I build a feature prioritization weighting with the goal of adding methodological introspection around WHY the features are important and what impact they will have for the company and its customers.The next step (well, some might argue that it's really the first step), is to create a series of personae which model the end users as well as the channel users (if there are any).These two steps are important because in both cases, you are asking the SMEs within the company to think about their customers, and their customer's needs in a systematic way.

Why?

It's often the case, I've found, that companies, particularly small ones, are so involved in their customer development as they evangelize their products, that their assumptions about their users have become truisms that few tend to question. Often, we call this "drinking the Kool-Aid."It's not as if creating a spreadsheet of features and weights is hard, it's not, nor is creating a few personae with attributes. But, most companies, large and small, don't regularly evaluate their assumptions about their customers; certainly, not every six months (1/4 of a lifetime if you have a web business).

Coming up with key features, evaluating them against personae and business objectives and then discussing priorities with vested interests will do two things for you. First, it will make you immediately valuable because it's inevitable that people will have "aha" moments looking at your documents and think that you're really smart. And, second, it will be the first step in transferring their SME knowledge to you.

The next question, then, is how you keep yourself from drinking the Kool-Aid and getting lazy about your product and customer assumptions.

CAOS Theory

I often go by the451 Open Source forume (CAOS Theory). Noticed an interesting position about open source adoption impact in a down economy.

http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2008/10/08/the-other-value-of-open-source-in-this-economy/

Instead of retyping or copying my comment, check out the above link.

Well, one link wasn't enough. I also just had to throw in my 4.75 cents worth around an OS X based Netbook.

http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2008/10/02/apple-may-mix-up-netbooks-linux-still-looks-good/#comment-283712