Teach Leveraging in Middle and High School To Promote Democracy

It's all about leverage. You hear this from a lot of people. Thomas Friedman said it years ago in one of his Sunday New York Times columns on foreign policy. He was referring to international relations. In particular, he was talking about bargaining leverage, namely the kind of leverage that is needed to motivate an ally or an opponent to change their course of action, whether it concerns trade, military build-up, or political alignments.

People in business, especially sophisticated big business, talk about leverage all the time. Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad wrote a chapter in their famous book, Competing for the Future, that was all about leverage, although the concept of leverage they were talking about was resource leverage, not bargaining leverage.

In fact, resource leverage captured the essence of the age-old concept of leverage first identified by the ancient Greek mathematician and scientist Archimedes, who said that if he had a pole that was long enough, a place to stand, and a fulcrum of some kind, then he could move the earth.

Hamel and Prahalad were focused on resource leverage in business when engineers and managers leveraged a product or a service in such a way that it created massive positive results. Uniting the tape recorder and the headphone, for example, led to the Walkman. They discuss many kinds of resource leverage and especially companies that are great at leveraging scarce resources.

Resource leverage and bargaining leverage both involve the broad concept of using a force, an input, to create a much larger force, the output. They are different, but they both fit under the concept of leverage. The same holds for financial leverage, which involves borrowing funds to make an investment (e.g., a house) that will, in time, yield large results.

I wrote a paper for the Brookings Institution in 2010, called "The Age of Leverage," which later became a book. The immodest thesis of this article was that our entire Age (a 25-50 year time period) revolved around the age-old concept of leverage. The idea was that leveraging was as old as Western Civilization—and probably Eastern Civilization, too. But it had grown in its use and influence as a result of the IT revolution, the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of the nuclear family, and the deregulation of the financial services industry.

In short, new inventions like the internet, as well as changes in the structure of authority, unleashed massive leveraging opportunities—even necessities in order to survive.

We should be teaching the concept of leveraging in middle school and high school. Students need to learn about this fundamental method—or tool—to achieve results. Leveraging would help students with career readiness, family life, and political and civic knowledge and action, which would strengthen our democracy.

Leveraging would help in career readiness because students need to learn how to network in order to get interviews and get jobs. Leveraging would also help in jobs because employees need to learn how to leverage relationships to produce better products and services. Leveraging would help in political and civic activities because young people need to learn how to work with others to promote social causes, regardless of their political commitments. Leveraging would help with family life because middle school and high school students need to learn good negotiating and good investment strategies. Learning how to network, work with others, get interviews, and collaborate with others to advance social causes, negotiate, and invest are obviously good things to know how to do. Leveraging provides an excellent umbrella to group together these tasks.

Leveraging, like technology, is morally neutral. Yet its capacity to promote democratic values is limitless. Good citizens need to be well-informed, fair, kind, respectful of each other's privacy, engaged in civic and political affairs, and they need to be skilled in resource, bargaining, and financial leverage. If my thesis that we live in the Age of Leverage is even half right, then the time is right to start using leveraging as the umbrella concept it is designed to be.

Dave Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework," has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.