‘Weirdo’ view of management

Press, 10 December 1981, Page 14

‘Weirdo’ view of management

By

KATHARINE WHITEHORN

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 weirdo — view, to complete a mixture in which he already had most of the orthodox views of the managers themselves.

I see his point; managers are all likely to make the same assumptions, or at least to talk the same language. And I think 1 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 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 realise that the larger car doesnt. 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 boys’ and gladden their wives with a new wall-to-wall.

They value the extra money mainly because (in the words of “Adam Smith” in . ‘‘The Money Game”) money is how you keep score.

It increases their feeling of mana, 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 lectureship in a prestigious department to an academic. An academic can afford to be scornful of big cars, or journalists of the pomp of mayors because they get their boosts in different wavs. ■.

Nobndf says. "There goes

Professor Spink in his Rolls,” they say “there goes the inventer of the Spink-Hamp-ton- radio- catheter”

Stick a gold chain round the neck of Chapman Pincher and he wouldn’t feel exalted — he’d expect people to be sufficiently impressed by his name alone.

Because to make more money or to “maximise profit” is their own ostensible reason for doing anything (they even sometimes make pious references to their shareholders) managers also take at. face value the roughly similar remarks of their main opponents, the unions

“The aspirations of my members,” say the union men, “oiir standard of living.” -

Money, is also how the union leaders keep score, in the sense that it is their ability to wring more out of management that gives them their clout with the workforce; but its a dangerous mistake to think that they in any sense represent Economic Man, the one who, in the business school textbooks, will act in his own best financial interest — or his members.

They are not accountants; they are generals. They are not gold diggers; they are tribal chiefs. The moment that really brought this home to me was the occasion a few years ago when the men at Vauxhall had just voted not to strike; and the TV cameras caught the head office union man before he had time to arrange his features in their usual starving-in-the-gutter mode.

“How can I negotiate if they won’t back me up?” he raged. “This is the first time' my men have ever refused to —follow me.” To follow me —

what about representing their wishes, then?

But this was not the talk of an elected representative; it was the talk of a defeated soldier. It’s a wonder he didn’t shriek: “A strike! A strike! My kingdom for a strike!”

Back in the boardroom, another general was doubtless congratulating himself on the success of his strategy. 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: security to some extent; a feeling of belonging; gratification in the feeling that a good job’s been done and recognised; a selfimage 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.

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, give up the company box at the opera or close a factory down.

And they might spot the signs in their own ranks, not only of the Captain Queeg going off his head with the long strain of war, but of a death-or-glory general who will think a victory well won, even if a thousand livelihoods have been sacrificed in the battle.