I wrote my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because of the necessity in business and life in general to defeat the administrative state.  One of the most significant objectives in business cultures is to decentralize their operations and break down the silos that various departments often isolate themselves with tall walls of bureaucracy.  Most of the world is suffering under some form of administrative state.  When governments want communism, for instance, they want an expansion of the administrative state.   When people say they want to be freer, they want to have less restriction in their lives of an administrative state.  So it was my goal in that book to teach people to break down their limitations without destroying their organization by learning how to deal with decentralized administration and value the input of individual effort.  It will remain for quite a long time; the most significant problem humans have is their desire to create administrative states. Yet, their personal needs to function without them is what all life strives for.  The defining problem of Lean Manufacturing is to decentralize business operations with de-siloed methods.  But it never works well in America because, in Asia, people need less of an administrative state due to the nature of the people to submit to an authority figure, since they have always been accustomed to worshiping a king or emporer throughout their societal development.  That is why communism might appear to work in China, whereas it would never work in America because people will not follow directions from a centralized planner.  They might pay lip service to such instructional flow down. Still, Americans will always sabotage their central planners where in Asia, they individually accept their place in the scheme of things and follow directions in a decentralized way.

Decentralization, therefore, is the goal and the trend of all future societies.  How successful can an organization be if the administrative state is small and without teeth of authority?  I explain in my book why embracing decentralization of authority, there are more opportunities for success than in the slow, terrestrial administrative state filled with mind-numbing bureaucrats.  For instance, I like to use football metaphors, and the best teams on the field are those most decentralized.  If players have to look to the sideline for instruction from their coaches after each play, then coordinating all that activity in the face of constantly changing circumstances moment to moment while confronting the variables of an opponent, the chances for error are much greater. Instead, what the coaches should do is prepare each player between games for every circumstance, then once on the field, they can adapt through their onfield leadership on how to deal with the challenges they are dealing with.  For instance, coaching becomes much easier when a team has a great quarterback because you have leadership representation in the huddle, and audibles can be made much faster depending on the kind of defense presented.  That is the same in all things in life; if we wait for a centralized planner to tell us what to do, the opportunities for success in life, whether for the individual or a social group, are minimized and perhaps lost altogether.  When innovation and productivity are significantly reduced, people tend to be much unhappier, including people who function as members of the administrative state. 

One of my most common sayings is that I’ll trade my Black Belt for a gunbelt all the time.  In Lean Manufacturing, which uses terminology from oriental martial arts, the American perception of gunfighting is much more effective.  Where the martial arts of Asia are mostly a defensive fighting mode, not usually displayed for an attack on an opponent, such as a centralized authority, the American gunfighter showed traits where they could function as agents of justice even when the legal system was decentralized from the backing of a big government.  The frontier sheriffs such as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp were able to bring a sense of justice to developing towns in the Wild West through gunfighting that was unique in the world.  Never before in modern history, modern being the city-state’s development, did a nation form under the blank slate of natural human autonomy.  This is why to this very day, the political left, communists, socialists, even major corporations tend to seek sympathy for the American Indian, as they were soundly defeated during Westward Expansion.  They like the tribal Indian with all their administrative state, adherence to the gods of nature, the village chief, and social hierarchy formed in communal life.  When really, what we learned during Westward Expansion was the alignment of individual goals to the task of necessity.  For instance, President Grant made it known that there was personal wealth to be obtained in the Black Hills, which inspired many hungry individuals to risk it all in pursuit of opportunity.  When a great leader can align the needs of a business, or a nation toward an objective without imposing an administrative state in the way to slow everything down, great things can happen and did.  The centralized administrative state, the Indians, could not fight the decentralized frontier settler.  One was motivated by preserving a centralized authority. The other was driven by individual gain.  This is precisely the problem of our modern times with centralized authority for all kinds of reasons trying to pin down a society with the fear porn of Covid.  Americans pay lip service to authority but do what they want.  Other cultures where Covid was designed are quick to adhere to centralized planning, which ultimately fails because the administrative state is too insulated from reality to make the proper decisions in crisis management. 

When people look at the events happening to them right now and fear a global takeover of the “elite” of the “Davos Crowd,” I tell them not to worry.  The fight is not about force or even intelligence.  The administrative state will always have the same problems; they will always be too slow to solve issues in real-time as problems arise.  Yet, due to their desire for the safety of group affiliation, most human society seeks to create an administrative state as their first primal instinct. We’ve built our entire education system, our political system, our businesses, just about everything we do around the maintenance of an administrative state.  America was formed by people trying to get away from the overregulation of an administrative state. At the same time, the rest of the world suffers under much less personal wealth because they have been slowed down too much by an administrative state and its massive, slow-moving bureaucracy.  When centralizing order, such as visiting the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, regulation gains are at the expense of freedom and innovation.  That is why we all hate going to the BMV.  They are slow and uncompetitive.  Yet to drive, we all have to go to them and wait in the long lines because the government does what government does to their time frame.  That is always why our public education system designed by people like John Dewey doesn’t work, and it will never work.  We are teaching people to be members of the administrative state when the trend of the world is to be more decentralized.  So what people most crave in the world, even if they aren’t consciously aware of it, is to function successfully in a decentralized state, whether in their places of business, their neighborhoods or even within their families.  And it is our modern task to teach them how to let go of the burdens of the administrative state and function more as individuals, making nations great, businesses profitable, and lives much, much better off.

Rich Hoffman