WORK

Blood, sweat, and the Protestant work ethic Through the industrial revolution and the depression, onto the decline of heavy industry and the present day post dot.com era, the way we work has been in a continuous and ever-accelerating state of change. What can we learn from the way we used to work?

by Wilf Altman

ow did we ever comc to carry a briefcase, follow a drcss code and push H buttons on a keyboard? Why is work,

which has always been changing, now changing at a breakneck pace? How did the modern jot develop and how much more will it change? As Professor Warren Bennis, the distinguished business ‘guru’ asks in the foreword to an outstanding new book ‘Blood, sweat and tears’’$, will the bcst organisations of the future be small, ramshackle clusters of individuals or largc fcdcrations?

Richard Donkin, management columnist at the Financial Times, with an incisive grasp of the work sccnc, took a year’s unpaid leave to study the history of work from its carliest times, and the impact of the industrial revolution in the last 200 years. Thc post 1970s, whcn thc shakeout axe began to fall, have becn among thc most dramatic. Steel works closed, Grimsby trawlers were scrapped and great industries, textiles, steel, shipbuilding a i d coal mining, all began to crumble. But as Donkin asks: did the more rcccnt tcchno- logical advances which rcplaccd them-robots, cornputcrs, software and the silicone chip, creatc more leisure time?

Donkin grew up in Dcwsbury where his father worked as a welder. As a young journalist he noted the fall of the smokestack industries in the North. As a Financial Times columnist he had a close-up view of the impact of recent rcccssions, redundancy, downsizing,

‘“’Blood, sweat and tears-the evolution of work‘ by Richard Donkin and published by Texcrc.

re-engineering, recruitment and outplacement, and met many of thc key players, gurus and academics on both sides of the Atlantic.

He’s not contcnt simply to research the origins and development of work in the style of an academic text. There’s a passionate curiosity at work here, as he sets out on a journey of discovery. At the same time, he obviously wanted to test the lifestyle of the increasing number of sclf-employed. Could he set his own pace, survivc and enjoy the experience? Could he break the pattern?

H e not only wants to probe the cvolution of work. His wider aim seems to be to challenge the Protestant work ethic. There isn’t anything akin to slavery in the contemporary employ- ment contract, he concedes. On the contrary, the most enlightened employers now ‘undcr- stand thc need for freedom in the w o r k placc and are releasing their workforces from the tyranny of set hours, the strictures of managerial control.. .’

H e disapproves of the detnands of mass markets reducing once proud industries to the lowest common dcnominator where the real losers are those who take pride in their work. But surely no longer. Good craftsmcn arc in great demand, even if they have to be workaholics, like key cxccutives, to survive.

The industrial revolution Wc. may think of the industrial revolution in

thc 18th century as a turning point, but industry had been growing since the Elizabethan cra. The Quakers found plenty of opportunities in the new industries that had taken root in

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the one hundred years before the Civil War- in paper milling, gunpowder production (despite their Pacifist beliefs?), brass making, sugar refining, alum and coppcr smelting and the mining of zinc, ore and copper. Chemicals, confectionery and finance were other newcomers. The Lloyds family bank in Birmingham provided credit and so did the bank set up by David Barclay. Other prominent Quakers, thc Frys, Cadburys, Rowntrees and Huntley & Palmers were all in the vanguard.

Abraham Darby and the Darby dynasty in the Shropshire Valley embodied the spirit of the industrial revolution, the crnergcncc of the Iron Age. As Donkin notes, ‘the brick built forge in Ironbridge (what about the bridge itself?) is a fittingly humble shrine at which we may pause and contemplate the events that would change the lives of so many people, channel the Protestant energy and define the industrialised world. Darby was the father of the Iron Age, the creator of a new raw material for a new age of invention’.

Arkwright’s spinning framc followcd. By thc latter half of thc 18th ccntury, thc British textile industry was awash with inventions, including Samuel Crompton’s mule and William Cartwright’s power loom and shearing frame, later to be intercepted and destroyed by the West Riding Luddites.

In the US, Donkin writes, cotton production took a major lcap forward. In 1792, US cotton exports totalled 15138,328. By 1804 they were up to f38m and by 1820 closc on 15128m. The US lost no time either in exploiting Europe’s textile industry. Textiles became a trans-

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formational industry when Richard Arkwright and his colleagues mastered the mechanics and organisation of the factory system in yearn spinning. Steel had become a key industry when Frederick Wynslow Taylor tried his experiments in scientific management. Taylor (whose work will be known to many readers) was obsessed with timing jobs and individuals’ output to set piece rates. His message was spreading across the industrial world, creating new tiers of administrators who were needed to put it into practicc. Others like Frank and Lilian Gilbreth perfected the study of motion. They cvcn filmcd their childrcn washing dishes to assess how they could perform the task more speedily!

Super management Much later, W Edwards Deming, whilc

believing in scicntific managcmcnt, opposed performance-related pay schemes, which he called ‘fear schemes’, advocating co-operative problem-solving in teams. Then c a m Drucker, an economics professor and prolific writer on management and widely seen as a corporate visionary, who suggested that the workings of large corporations were becoming the orga- nisational model for the whole of society. In other words, how a business controlled itself, its governance, and how the individual behaved and operated within that business had become a standard against which the rest of society could measure itself.

Management began to Le sccn if not as a science, at least as a discipline. Super manage- ment, however defined, produced super profits.

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Lack of it and increasing recognition of the lack of it led to the mushrooming of business schools, first in America where the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania dated back to 1881, later in the UK. A succession of managcment gums besides Drucker feverish I y wrote tcxtbooks, notably Mary Parker Follett, Fredrick Herzberg and Michael Hammer of re- engineering fame followed later by Charles Handy and Tom Peters.

Donkin shows how academic institutions were already venturing into corporations. The work undertaken by university researchers at Wcstcrn Electric had demonstrated the possi- bilities and limitations of academic research inside companies. The idea of inviting a lone operator like Peter Drucker instead of a team of researchers who might cause too many waves appealed to Alfred Sloan, then General Motors Chairman. H e may also have seen Druckcr, a man with n o previous business experience, as

less thrcatcning than a McKinsey consultant (McKinscy had established his own consult- ancy in 1925)’.

Thc founder of Marshall Field, the great Chicago dcpartment store, had learned to his cost ‘the consequences of falling too dccply under the consultant’s spell. In 1934, thc board had invited James McKinsey, thc highest paid consultant in the US at $500 per day, to study the company’s problems. A year later he was chairman. Two years after that, succumbing to illness brought on by the pressure of work, the company’s declining fortunes and the threat of forced resignation, he died. According to American Business magazine, “he died, as so many businessmen havc died, as a sacrifice to a job that made impossible demands”.’

McKinscy had found that the work ethic of his Puritan forebears demanded every waking moment, including Saturdays at the office and work at home on Sundays. How to deal with top heavy structures, influenced by Michael Hammer’s ‘Re-engineering the Corporation’, later bccamc the great management mantra which led to removing whole layers of

management and contracting out of work,

don’t if line-

n happy!

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were lionised by their peers for cutting jobs, as Donkin suggests. Many must have found it extremely distasteful. Many were themselves at risk. Truc, thcrc was Jack Welch, or ‘Neutron’ Jack, hailcd for shedding some 100000 jobs within five years of his appointment as chief executive of General Electric in 1981, but he was also a corporate builder on a tnassivc scale.

By contrast, Donkin takes a closc look at thc UK’s John Lewis Partnership and its founder John Spedan Lcwis, to whom downsizing or cutting out laycrs of management or store assistants would have been anathema. H e laid down that ‘The Partnership’s supreme purpose is to secure the fairest possible sharing by all its members of the advantagcs of owncrship- gain, knowledge and power’. It took years to achieve, but despite hiccups, such as the call for selling out so that partners could cash in on the windfall from a vastly increased inarket capitalisation, the original concept has flourished. The question today must be whcthcr other major retailers with a policy of profit-sharing and facilitating sharc purchasc, come close to the Partnership paradigm or offer a realistic alternative.

Donkin takes the view that ‘the employee share-owned companies appear to have become thc proving ground for Drucker’s theories on sclf-managed groups. The most successful of them are harnessing the creativeness of their employees, using quality circles, project teams and suggestion schemes’. H e quotes a study as long ago as 1987, which found that ESOP companies that increased worker involvement in decision-making grew more rapidly than they would have donc othcrwisc.

Work hard or get fired Has Ricardo Semler achievcd thc idcal in

Brazil? Donkin relates the management- worker relationship established by Semlei; chief executive of Semco, the Brazilian white goods manufacturer. When Sernler inherited the busincss from his father, his first action was to purgc thc top rnanagcincnt of all those who were not prepared to align their views with his. His second step was to recruit a solid finance head and an aggressive head of sales. ‘Work hard or get fired’ became the new ethic.

Having secured its survival with a sound financial base, a hcalthy ordcr book and a collection of busincsscs that had promising prospects of growth and people who had been pushed forward, lie tried to create a ‘self- propelled’ workforce’ and a type of partici-

pativc managcmcnt. Shades of Druckcr’s 50-ycar-old plca for self-managed plants! Semler claimed that ‘it’s only when the bosses give up decision making and let their employees govern themselves that the possibility exists for a business jointly managed by workers and executives.’ He seems to make it work. It would have been intcrcsting to learn more about just how hc docs it.

Whether Donkin is correct in assuming that by the late 1990’s real innovation was happen- ing in the small start-up companies that had begun to attract increasing interest from venture capitalists and get-rich-quick investors must be opcn to doubt. H c is clearly not writing about the 400 000-500 000 gcnuinely small start-ups every year in the last few years, that have found very little encouragement or help and have suffered a huge dropout rate. If he is thinking of Internet stocks, the bubble has surely burst, never mind a steep decline; even survivors’ shares are worth only a minute fraction of their original price.

A new ethic Donkin’s conclusions after a year of

prodigious research and wide travel, coupled with his experience as a seasoned commentator on the job scene, is that ‘we have come a long way since our ancestors found some merit in fashioning tools to improve their lives. Man has become restless and accepts that work is inescapable. Society will always reward the industrious, but-and this perhaps is the key point of Donkin’s case- hard work alone is not going to deliver either employcc or employer satisfaction. ‘We cannot divorce work and life’. Why can’t we reach fulfilment?

Donkin’s experience prompted his concern: somcthing was happcning to the job, but what? It wasn’t simply an abandonment of the ‘job for life’ concept for those who had cruised through the corporate monolith or the civil service. To balance our lives, he argues, we need nothing less than a new ethic-an ethic that leans far less on its religious antecedents but concentrates on the needs of society, not the needs of the job.

His soul searching may not have reached a satisfactory conclusion, but his book offers a captivating historical journey and a highly rcadablc account of thc cvolution of work, but also asks qucstions which call for urgent debate.

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0 IEE: 2001

Wilf Altman can be contacted 011 +44 (0)1442 876712

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