It's Easy to be Right

You'll often hear disgruntled participants in any endeavor complain that they aren't being listened to or that they can't advance because of 'politics.'  This has always seemed to me like a lazy excuse. 'Politics' is just a word for how organizations work together to make decisions. Politics is the blend of formal decision making procedures, organizational hierarchy, and personalities that occur in the day by day business of getting things done.

I thought about this a recently as I read The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. It turns out that in order to really understand the political career of  Lyndon Johnson you need to know about his time in the senate. This was when he was at the peak of his powers. Johnson transformed the senate from an institution of long speeches, but zero action into an institution that could actually pass bills. In the process he changed the meaningless role of majority leader into one with immense power. And he did it with the most brilliant execution of pure, cynical politics. Lyndon Johnson came into the senate with an overriding ambition to have power, but no apparent goal in using it. His stance on any given issue is exactly what it needed to be to increase his power. There were no burning ideas for him, just opportunities.

Once LBJ was elected to the senate, he made the first step that any good book on transitions will tell you. He quickly identified the real power brokers in the senate and closely allied himself to them. The most powerful man in the Senate at the time was Richard Russell.  Russell was an ardent racist and segregationist. For normal day to day business at the senate, there was much to commend him. But when it came to civil rights, he and the southern caucus were rock solid in blocking every bill. This was the real era of the filibuster. Because of this, and because LBJ was a southerner, Johnson ardently fought AGAINST civil rights throughout his first years in the senate. Indeed his first speech was a strong defense of southern segregation.

But ultimately there was something real in his rise to power as well. The way he was able to cement his power was not through speeches or even back channel maneuvering, but rather by taking a job that nobody else really wanted and turning into a seat of power simply by being useful. That job was Senate majority leader.

The role of Senate majority leader has no intrinsic power. You can't punish people and you can't reward them. Even today you typically don't see the most powerful senators in the spot of majority leader. But Johnson used the role to became a project manager without peer and made the senate function again. He could count votes better than anyone, knew when any bill was coming up from a sub-committee and knew what every senator needed and what they had to offer. He became the best source of knowledge in the senate and could use that knowledge to schedule the floor efficiently. He could horse-trade votes and control the workflow better than anyone had even attempted to in the past.

The most interesting example of all of this is the 1957 civil rights act. After his 1956 humiliation at the Democratic convention, Johnson realized that he had to actually pass a civil rights bill if he had any chance of being president. The problem for LBJ was that his power base was still the southern caucus and they wouldn't pass anything meaningful. The northern liberals stood on principle and demanded that they not compromise on a substantive bill with far more far reaching implications. Johnson didn't care so much about the contents of the bill, but he needed something to pass.

He squeaked through a toothless bill by using some of the most stunning political maneuvering ever seen in the Senate. What I find most remarkable about this incident is how difficult the Northern liberals were. Here they were, with the opportunity to pass the first civil rights bill since reconstruction and they were fighting for stronger wording that surely would have doomed its passage. Perhaps they were the truly cynical politicians because they apparently cared more about the press back home than they did about getting something accomplished. In the end they may have preferred the role of saying the truth but not being listened to. There is much to commend this role. It gives you the luxury of saying "I told you so" without taking responsibility or assuming the burden of success or greater leadership.

This is the danger of the principled stand. You can publicly decry the state of affairs in your team, watch in glowering anger as nothing changes, and then complain about the lack of promotion or how you were shot down for political reasons. The hard truth is that it's easy to be right. It's vastly harder to actually produce change. The real kicker is that even if you recognize this basic fact and try a couple of techniques to create change, you still may fail. Rather than give up, this is the moment to embrace politics, identify the key opinion leaders and rather than fight them, engage them. Small concrete steps beat flowery speeches (or long blog posts) any day.

Right now some of you might be thinking of some people with more of a knack for politics than software who always seem to get ahead. They seem to be corporate ladder climbers without any particular vision to push or principled stands. But before you dismiss those kinds of people as exactly the kind of employee you don't want to be, remember that among presidents Lyndon Johnson is surpassed only by Abraham Lincoln in what he actually accomplished for civil rights.