| Some months ago a man at a business college was rash enough to ask my views on management. | ||
| It was not, as he was quick to explain, that he thought I was an insider in such matters; it was | ||
| because he wanted an outside - he didn't quite say eccentric - view, to complete a mixture in | ||
| which he already had most of the orthodox views of the managers themselves. I see his point; | ||
| 5 | managers are all likely to make the same assumptions, or at least to talk the same language. And I | |
| think I know to which of their sacred cows I'd take a humane killer if I could. | ||
| From where I sit, the things which are right with managers are very easy to see. Their energy, | ||
| their commitment, the infectious enjoyment they have in what they do - even, of course, when | ||
| they are ostensibly groaning under their enormous workload or howling at the unreasonableness | ||
| 10 | of head office or at their low pay compared to their Swiss counterparts. | |
| But too many of them suffer from this quaint conviction that people work for money. They | ||
| think, for a start, that they work for money themselves. With a little more self-knowledge, they | ||
| would realize that the larger car doesn't make them happy because they can knock ten minutes off | ||
| a journey, nor the larger salary because they can now pay for their girls' education as well as their | ||
| 15 | boys' and gladden their wives with a new wall-to-wall carpet. They value the extra money mainly | |
| because money is how you keep score. Increases their feeling of personal worth; it shows they | ||
| have the approval of the company or their superiors; money, to a business man, is what rank is to | ||
| a soldier, billing* to an actress or a position at a prestigious university college to an academic. | ||
| Academies can afford to be scornful of big cars, because they get their boosts in a different way. | ||
| 20 | If men worked mainly for money, it would not be the highest-paid workers (such as those in the | |
| motor industry) who were most often on strike; you would not get nurses working for half what | ||
| they could get as secretaries ; and it would be possible for any executive, any time, to be wooed | ||
| away to the highest bidder. | ||
| Good management surely consists in thinking out all the other things that people care about; | ||
| 25 | security to some extent; a feeling of belonging; gratification in the feeling that a good job's been | |
| done and recognised; a self-image that makes a man feel he is the sort of person he set out to be; | ||
| for these are the real motivators. Once the managers could get their minds thoroughly round that, | ||
| they would have a far better chance of getting what they want out of the people who work for | ||
| them - as, of course, the good ones do. | ||
| 30 | If they could once admit that the balance books do not really rule their lives, they might, in my | |
| view, become more humane. They couldn't run their companies at a loss, naturally - but they | ||
| might not, merely because it would make the sums come out at 10 per cent profit and not 8 per | ||
| cent, see the need to cancel an order for sculpture, axe a department, or close a factory down. | ||
| And they might spot the signs in their own ranks of a death-or-glory general who will think a | ||
| 35 | victory well won, even if a thousand livelihoods have been sacrificed in the battle. | |
| The Observer, November 1, 1981 |