The Age Of Unreason

by Charles Handy

  Discontinuous change and the new professionalism have therefore combined to spell the end of the corporate career for all but a few. The new executive must look out for himself or herself, remembering that in this new world you are only as good as your current job – the future is not guaranteed. Education in those circumstances becomes an investment, wide experience an asset provided that it is wide and not shallow, and company loyalty something that has to be earned by the company from the individual not demanded of him or her.

  Careers will therefore become more variegated. In larger companies there will still be opportunity for variety and advancement, but as these companies get more federal more decisions will be left to the separate parts with the centre left with a brokerage and counselling role. It will increasingly be the individual’s responsibility to make sure that the opportunities on offer add up to a sensible career path.

  Some will want to interleave their careers with periods of study. We may see an increasing number of formal sabbatical opportunities within universities and business schools to take advantage of this new market. Others, particularly but not only women, will want to interleave the career with periods of raising a family although they might be well-advised to combine this with some form of part-time or distance learning. Some will want intense and early careers allowing them the possibility of a second kind of life before they get too old to do it well. Some will use the organization as a training ground and then, in their thirties, become more independent, perhaps as entrepreneur, perhaps as consultant or professional in the contractual fringe. Most will find that their careers in the organization will in any case begin to peter out in their early or mid fifties when there will still be twenty years at least of active life ahead.

  The new executives should be the fortunate ones in the new society. They should have the money and the skills to fill up the 50,000 hours of work beyond the job. They need, however, to prepare themselves for it, to realize that it is going to happen one day, and to them, to look change in the face and see it for what it is – an opportunity as well as a challenge.

  One organization has recently dedicated most of its corporate advertising to proclaiming how much time and money it now invests in the education of its executives. It cannot guarantee that it will get a direct return from those who profit from this investment, for some of them will leave for richer pastures and no contract can force them to stay unwillingly, but the quality of its recruits at all levels has increased dramatically. It is a far-sighted response to the new conditions and to the growth of the intelligent organization. It is a response that other organizations need to watch.

  The Culture Of Consent

  Intelligent people prefer to agree rather than to obey.

  In despair at the way its programmes were organized, the Business School in one university recruited as the Director of Programmes a successful businessman, who had made a modest fortune in his own business and wanted to move on to a new career. ‘I will soon put some order into this place,’ he thought, and said. He wrote memoranda to the academics laying down new procedures. No one read the memoranda. He called a meeting. No one came. In frustration, he asked for an explanation.

  ‘These are independent individuals,’ he was told, ‘you cannot command them to come to a meeting at your convenience; you have to negotiate a time and place convenient to all of them; you had better send round a list with possible alternatives.’ He did and they came, or most of them. He explained the new procedures which, he said, would be introduced next month. At that point one of the older faculty members said, gently,

  ‘Bill, in this kind of institution you cannot tell us to do anything, you can only ask us and try to persuade us to agree.’

  ‘Well then,’ Bill said, ‘let me ask you what you think we should do to put some sense into this place.’

  ‘No, Bill,’ the elder replied, ‘that’s what we hired you for, to come up with those sort of ideas. But they will only work if we agree with them. If we don’t, why then you will have to persuade us or come up with some better ideas. This is, you see, an organization of consent, not of command.’

  It is, however, not just because they are intelligent individuals that they cannot be commanded. There is often no one to command them. The new organization, as we have seen, will be a flat organization. Like universities they will often have no more than four layers of executives in any operation. People and groups will have large do’nuts with big areas of discretion. They will be judged increasingly by results not by the methods which they use. Everyone will have their own psychological territory or organizational space, territory which is theirs and which cannot be entered on without permission.

  A university lecturer is judged on performance. He or she is in charge of their classroom or seminar. Other colleagues enter only by permission. So it will be with the new organizations.

  Nor is it just the flatness of the structures. The new intelligent machines do not respect herarchical lines of command. They can pass information to whoever needs it, in real time. Intelligent organizations do not ripple their new information systems by pushing the stuff up the ladders and then down again; they encourage the information to go straight to where it is useful. Computers jump organizational barriers and put each group or individual in effective control of their own do’nut.

  Mrs Fields’ Cookies, in the USA, shows how it is done at its most obvious. Each of the 600 Mrs Fields cookie stores is equipped with a cheap IBM-compatible computer. Linked up with the big computers in the organization’s centre in Utah the machines:

  (a) plan production. Each shop bakes its own cookies according to a schedule worked out by the computer taking into account past statistics, the weather and how many cookies have been sold in the past hour.

  (b) maintain stocks. The computer tells the manager when to re-order.

  (c) communicate with top managers. The computer monitors the progress of shop managers towards performance bonuses and runs an electronic mail service.

  (d) carry out employee training. The computer drills employees in the knowledge needed for promotion.

  (e) organize the accounting and consolidation. The computer keeps track of costs, profits and payroll and analyses them continuously for the local managers.

  As a result, with 600 stores, there are only 130 people in headquarters in Park City, Utah, few to command the store managers and not much to tell them that they do not already know.

  The Chief Executive of Norsk Data in Norway sums it up, ‘Like Japan, we use the consensus method, when the idea is to make the decisions at the appropriate level, which is not always at the top, nor at the bottom, but at the level where the most knowledge is available and where the people are most effective. It means that we must have managers who accept that they cannot force their opinions upon their subordinates. They have to fight like everybody else with their ideas and the best ideas will win, and not necessarily the ones which come from the top or the bottom.

  Tom Peters, who co-authored In Search of Excellence, described a visit to Johnsville Foods. A typical Johnsville work team, he says:

  (a) does its own recruiting, hiring, personnel evaluation and firing;

  (b) regularly acquires new skills and then conducts training for everyone;

  (c) formulates and tracks its own budgets;

  (d) makes capital-investment proposals as needed (with all the necessary staff-work);

  (e) is responsible for all quality control, inspection and subsequent trouble-shooting;

  (f) suggests and then develops prototypes of possible new products, processes and even business;

  (g) works on the improvement of everything, all the time;

  (h) develops its own detailed standards for productivity, quality and improvement and makes them tough standards. This does not, says Peters, leave much for management to do, but then there is not much management, or hierarchy, at Johnsonville.

  The point is that you cannot run this sort of organization or these sort of people b
y command. For one thing the people on the job often have more information than the would-be commander, for another their responsibility for the task is so complete that they are not going to take anyone else’s word for something, they need to be convinced. Intelligent organizations have to be run by persuasion and by consent. It is hard work, and frustrating, particularly when the persuasion does not work and the consent is not forthcoming. Bill gave up the Business School in despair and went off to look after a forest, with only the trees to organize.

  It is this type of organization which has given rise to what has been called the post-heroic leader. Whereas the heroic manager of the past knew all, could do all and could solve every problem, the post-heroic manager asks how every problem can be solved in a way that develops other people’s capacity to handle it. It is not virtuous to do it this way, it is essential. These organizations do not work if it is left to one person. Everyone has to be capable or nothing happens. The post-heroic leader lives vicariously, getting kicks out of other people’s successes – as old-fashioned teachers have always done.

  Let us make no mistake: the cultures of consent are not easy to run, or to work in. Authority in these organizations does not come automatically with the title; it has to be earned. But the authority you need is not based on being able to do the job better yourself but on your ability to help others do the job better, by developing their skills, by liaising with the rest of the organization, by organizing their work more efficiently, by helping them to make the most of their resources, by continual encouragement and example. The job of the leader is a mixture between those of a teacher, a consultant and a trouble-shooter. Technical, human and conceptual skills, the three faces of intelligence, are all required. Some might say it is not a job for normal mortals. It isn’t, unless they have grown up with it, have been trained and developed for it, then it can be a most exciting and challenging way to work. As one pulp mill worker said to Shoshana Zuboff, ‘If you don’t let people grow and develop and make more decisions it’s a waste of human life . . . Using the technology to its full potential means using the man to his full potential.’ That must be good, mustn’t it?

  Not everyone may think so. It is often easier to be told what to do than to decide for yourself. Choice means responsibility – for failure as well as success. Full potential means full commitment. Some have other things to do. And what, some say, if my full potential is less than is required; what then? The organization of consent puts a premium on competence. There is no place for the incompetent – there are few hiding places in these organizations. Do not look to the new intelligent organizations with their intelligent machines and their cultures of consent for days of gossipy coffee breaks or for boring but untaxing jobs. The culture of consent is not, as the British would say, going to be everyone’s cup of tea unless they are educated and prepared for it. There lies the challenge for our society.

  Part Three: Living

  Introduction

  ORGANIZATIONS WILL NEVER be the same again. That was the message of the first part of this book. It might even have been entitled ‘The withering of the corporation’ now that it looks as if less than one quarter of the population will have full-time jobs inside any organization.

  Does it matter if organizations change or wither? Only to those who work in them, we might think. But here we’d be wrong. When work moves outside the organization, as it is doing, it affects all of us who are on the outside, the great majority. ‘What do you do?’ no longer means ‘What is your job?’ but ‘How do you occupy your time?’ Work has changed its meaning and its pattern. That affects our sense of identity, our families and our roles within those families; our whole way of life is changed, sometimes upside-down.

  Will there then be one world and one set of rules for the intelligent and qualified people in the core of the organization and another for those on the edge or on the outside? Even those in the core will be outside for the last third of their lives. When society can no longer assume that we all have a paid job for most of our lives the old recipes for dealing with the small bits at the end (pensions) and the small bits missing (unemployment benefit) become irrelevant. The whole system of money to live on, who gets it and how they get it, needs re-thinking. Discontinuous change requires upside-down thinking by the state.

  When education becomes an essential investment, whether as a passport to a core job or as a route to acquiring a saleable skill on the outside, then to ration it is absurd. It is equally absurd to try to shove it all in at the beginning of life, or to think that it can all happen in classrooms, or to ration it later on to those who were cleverest at 18 years of age, or to think that brain skills are the only skills that matter, just because a precious minority need them. A new world of work requires upside-down thinking in education.

  Things need to change in the world around us if we are to make the most of the new possibilities, if we are not to keep on trying to use yesterday’s answers to deal with the quite different problems of tomorrow. But we also need to change ourselves. A longer life will mean a different life. Success and achievement will have other faces than the ones they wear now. We shall describe ourselves in different ways, live in different ways, have new values and priorities. If we do not, then our children and their children will. Changing has to become a part of our life. We know something about the process of changing, what helps it and what hinders it, how to make it a plus and not a minus, more like learning than losing.

  A World To Worry About

  If most jobs for the next generation are only going to occupy 50,000 hours (or the equivalent of 25 years) instead of 100,000 hours, there is going to be a lot of space for all of us, sometime, outside the formal jobs, especially since we are all going to live longer. This compression of the job is going to happen, is already happening, not because of some miraculous rationing system but because organizations everywhere are learning how to make do with smaller bits of our time. Organizations could once wallow in our time, waste it even, when it was cheap or when everyone around them wasted it as well. A more competitive world and more expensive people demands a more careful use of time. The new technology and new types of organization make it possible to be more careful. Half the people paid double, working twice as hard and producing three times as much, has to be good sense.

  Good sense, indeed, but the immediate results could be bizarre, if we are not thoughtful enough in time enough. Half the people working twice as hard while the other half have not enough to do is a worrying prospect. The new rich will not have the time or the energy to enjoy their riches; the leisured class will be those at the bottom of the heap rather than those at the top. An upside-down world.

  It is worrying from many points of view. It could be a society obsessed with wealth creation with too little regard to the way that wealth is either spent or distributed. In the end, all societies are remembered more for the way they spend their wealth, than for how they made it. The great civilizations of the past are remembered today for what they did with their wealth, for the monuments they left behind them, for their great buildings, major public works, great art or great conquests, for great education or great social reforms. The pursuit of efficiency and effectiveness in our organizations has got to be a means to something even greater, but if those with the wealth have no time or no thought for its proper spending then we could end up with a society preoccupied only with getting and never with giving or creating.

  It could also be a new servant society, with a whole class of people cooking, gardening, driving and maintaining for the busy rich. They might call themselves mini-businesses but their dependency on their new masters is no less because they are now called clients instead of masters. Indeed, because these new servants will be independent and not employees there will be no obligation on the part of the new masters to take any care for their future.

  It could become a very divided society; a privileged exclusive world inside the organization for some and a more perilous, exploited and lonely life outside
for most; a world in which, if it were dominated by the organization, the educated middle-class professional would have it good and the less-educated would be condemned to be forever the outsider.

  Instead of getting more flexible, organizations could react to the shortage of qualified people by becoming less flexible, locking in their chosen few with big salaries and bonuses and turning their backs on the freelance or the part-time mother. It would be expensive and, ultimately therefore, dangerous but it would be easier and so may, in the short-term, be more tempting. Such a strategy would only increase the differences between the insiders and the outsiders for a time. The organizations which adapt do best but not all organizations adapt.

  It could be a world in which to be old was to be useless because you were not needed by the organization, and old might come to mean over 50. Rich but useless is only marginally better than being poor and useless, particularly if the transition has been from 110 per cent involvement to zero over one weekend.

  The divided society could be a mutually envious society, one in which the poor but leisured resent the rich and busy, while the rich and busy resent the drain on their incomes needed to support the new leisured class who have the time they say that they would like to have but not the money.