I came to my senses in the end, just in time. I have, however, seen too many marriages fail because one or other of the partners, or sometimes both, loses themselves in their work, putting what they do before who they are. Of course, in the world of 24/7 working and incessant travelling for some, it can be hard to find enough time to be out of the work zone and free to be your full self. We may like to think that we are the same person at work and at home but the reality may surprise us. One of our more successful friends took his daughter to the office on a Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Later I asked the young girl how it had gone. ‘It was strange,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t Daddy behind that big desk, but someone else I hadn’t seen before.’
Inevitably different aspects of who we are show up in the different spheres of our lives. It is crucial, therefore, that we make sure we carve out enough space for each side of us to be seen. If we are honest with ourselves, it might just be that we are not needed as much or as often at work as we think. Sometimes, too, if we are honest, the workspace is more fun and more exciting than the domestic one, and we think we do it better. When you reach the family stage of life I would urge you to remember all this. One of the books that influenced me at that stage was called Must Success Cost So Much? by Paul Evans and Fernando Bartolomé. The book described the results of a series of interviews with senior business executives on how they saw their lives. The title of the book says it all: every one of them regretted that they had spent so little time with their family when their children were growing up and when they were needed most.
The weekend is disappearing. The universal break from work is breaking down because of that technology. It is not just hospitals, prisons and airlines that now work 24/7. We all can and many do.
Yet there was a reason for that weekend, or at least for the Sunday, or the Friday or the Saturday, depending on the religion of the country. Even God, they said, rested on the seventh day and reflected on his week’s work, although he, unlike many of us, ‘saw that it was good’. God was right. All work and no play, goes the old saying, makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a dull girl. It is not only play that we need. Most learning, as I have said, is experience understood in tranquillity. We need time and space to reflect on what went right and what could have been done differently in our lives in the past week or month. Without that reflection we will never change, or improve, or be all that we could be.
We need a regular routine for rest and reflection. The problem is that we now have to organise it for ourselves. You cannot expect the organisation or anyone else to do it for you. That should be easy, thanks to the new technology aids. In the past most people worked for 5 days a week for 47 weeks a year, allowing for holidays. That adds up to 235 days a year, leaving 121 days free for that rest, play and reflection. We can take one day a week for rest and play leaving 70 or so for the reflection and learning. Or we can adjust the mix and take more for family time and play. Nor does the rest day have to be Sunday. We often find it the quietest day on which to do our work with fewer interruptions, making Friday our day for culture and friends. The important point is that it is not only our choice but also our need. Without society’s convention to guide us, we have to impose our own discipline on ourselves.
My own routine is to go on a forty-minute walk before breakfast, usually through the woods opposite my house. It helps to keep my body healthy but more importantly it keeps my mind ticking over. I think of it as ‘going nowhere’. Most of my day is spent going somewhere or doing something. Here I am just walking, or wandering as a friend calls it, with no destination in mind. Nature at its best is very consoling, non-judgemental and tolerant of mistakes, as you can notice wherever you look. It is a wonderful companion. I let my mind wander as I walk, contemplating the day ahead and reviewing the days just gone. I then try, in that ambience, to rise above the daily trivia and look at my priorities for life in the weeks ahead. It is, I find, too easy to let other people’s agendas define your days. I need to ensure that my instinct to be busy and to say ‘yes’ to all requests does not take over my life.
It is, you might say, a form of walking mindfulness, only I see it not as withdrawing from the world but taking back control by re-establishing my priorities. To do that I have to escape my regular workspace and go into another space which works to a different rhythm and where the sounds of keyboard clicks are replaced by birdsong and the rustle of leaves in the wind. A friend of mine, David Pearl, has created a novel social enterprise called Street Wisdom. He, or increasingly anyone, invites anyone who logs on to the website of that name to join a group that will meet at a specified time and place in a town or city. They will be invited to walk the nearby streets for a couple of hours, quietly observing what goes on, speaking to those they meet if they want to, reflecting on all the richness and variety of life that they encounter. They then return to discuss in the group the impact that the experience has had on them. It is all free and is now happening in towns and cities around the world. People, it seems, welcome the simple structure that it provides for a walk to nowhere.
LETTER 10
KEEP IT SMALL
In 1973 Ernst Schumacher, a British/Swiss economist, wrote a book called Small Is Beautiful. The title was the inspired suggestion of an editor, although the main thrust of the book was contained in its subtitle: ‘Economics as if People Mattered’. I was tempted to steal that subtitle for my own book three years later on organisations and call it ‘Management as if People Mattered’, because that was at the heart of what my message was going to be. I came to realise that if people truly mattered then it was better that they worked, if at all possible, in situations where everyone could know each other. For how can you trust or rely on someone whom you never meet? Humans need human-sized groups to be at their best. Small is better if not essential to get the job done properly.
I was largely influenced by my own experience. I spent the first seven years of my working life in a subsidiary of the big Shell Company, first in Singapore and then Malaysia. In those days it was, by Shell standards, a small company. Indeed, company was the right word, because it felt like a group of companions. It was a work family. We were well looked after; we all knew each other, almost too well sometimes, like a real family. I then returned to London, to a job in the headquarters of the Shell Group. I shared an office with Gerry, with a nice view of the Thames below. Gerry was the only person that I got to know at all well. Everyone else was an official of the business. When you think of someone as an official it means that you only come across them in their official role. You don’t know, and usually don’t care, what makes them tick as a human being. All that personal stuff is hidden behind their official title and duties. Public officials such as police officers will often wear uniforms to make it clear that they are there in their official capacity not as private individuals.
We didn’t wear uniforms in Shell, although there was an unspoken dress code of grey suits and ties, suitably anonymous. We also concealed our private selves behind our job titles. The door of our office had a big brass plate on the outside with the official name of our little department: ‘MKR/35’. Under it there were two slots for two bits of card with our names printed on them. The message was clear to me. What mattered was the department; the names were replaceable. When we wrote memos or letters to other departments they had to be from MKR/35, not from Gerry or Charles. Gerry did not seem to mind this. I did. I was not me, but a ‘temporary role occupant’, an impersonal word typical of a bureaucracy where the job mattered more than the individual. I was no longer in a family of companions but in a complicated network of boxes called an organisation, a machine for organising work. I did not enjoy being part of a machine.
I did understand that the task of organising the production and delivery of a wide range of oil products around the world was complicated; it needed to be done in a systematic way, with rules and procedures, but I did not have to like it. I was given a so-called ‘role description’ for my job as one small part of that system.
It was three pages long, describing in detail what I was to do. At the end was a line ‘Authority: Authority to incur expenditure on own account up to a maximum of ten pounds.’ That was to be the limit of my creativity or initiative. To me it showed how much they trusted me. Not much, I could see. I wrote a book some years later that I called The Empty Raincoat after a sculpture that I had seen in a sculpture garden in Minneapolis. It symbolised, I felt, the way large organisations saw their people. They were humans on the outside but nobody inside, pawns on the corporate chessboard, to be moved around as the game progressed.
The good news today is that many of those jobs no longer exist. The new technology does it all. In theory humans aren’t needed. Nobody should regret that. You would never have enjoyed the job that I had any more than I did. Nevertheless, large organisations will still continue to exist in some form and that poses a challenge. Humans should only be used to do what humans do best: combining together to get things done as sensibly and creatively and effectively as possible. The technology should not try to do what humans do better, and vice versa. We combine best in families, even when we disagree, and in villages of families. Great cities are collections of villages that in turn are collections of families. Edmund Burke, the great Whig politician/philosopher, talked of the ‘small platoons’ that make up society. He was right.
Why are villages and platoons better than mass organisations? Because they are human scale: they allow you to be a person, not a cog. Professor Robin Dunbar has studied a wide range of human groups down the ages, from early society to the modern day. He has come up with the Dunbar number: 150. This, he says, is the largest ‘number of people we [can] know personally, whom we can trust, whom we feel some emotional affinity for … It has been 150 for as long as we have been a species.’ As I said in another letter, humans don’t change.
In my experience 150 is pushing it. I like the other bit of Dunbar’s research, where he says that our levels of intimacy go up in multiples of three. We may have just five people whom we know intimately and trust implicitly: our best friends. At the next levels there are 15 good friends or mates whom we are always delighted to be with, 45 whom we see occasionally, perhaps work with, and 135 that make up our Christmas card or Facebook list of friends whom we want to keep in touch with. I have found that, for me, forty-five works best as the maximum size of a work group. And when a manager tells me that the organisation has grown to one hundred people, I say, ‘Be careful, you will now start to introduce specialisations and departments, you will become more bureaucratic, a machine.’
We need large organisations. Now more than ever as the world increasingly becomes one big marketplace. Oil companies such as Shell, car manufacturers, pharmaceutical businesses, steelworks and many others like them have to employ a lot of people to get the work done. The new giants such as Facebook only work if everyone signs up to them, so they swallow up competitors as soon as they appear. The winner takes all. China and Iran may try to protect their economies from foreign global giants but technology breaks through in the end. Big, I’m afraid, is here to stay.
Can these city-like organisations restructure themselves into collections of villages that are linked together by the new information technology? My guess is that the organisations will have to start doing just that if they want to attract the best and brightest of the new generation. Already young people are turning away from the traditional pyramid organisations in which you clamber your way up the hierarchy over the years. The world of work is increasingly going to realise that small is better.
Such organisations already exist. Small start-ups keep things small, until they become successful. But large organisations are also trying. Haier, in China, employs over 70,000 people. It is large. It makes things, physical things like refrigerators, ovens, domestic equipment, things that might seem ripe for industrial-style mass organisation. But Haier is largely made up of 2,000 autonomous groups. These groups of seven to ten people organise their own work and if they can make improvements or boost their sales, they can keep some of the savings or profit. I am a great believer in the federal principle as the best way for all organisations, business as well as political, to grow big while keeping its bits small. The British are fierce opponents of federalism, which is strange since it is the form adopted by all their departing colonies, from America through to Australia, and its defeated enemies such as Germany where federalism works all too well.
Federalism, despite British fears, does not mean centralisation but the reverse. Its dominating principle is subsidiarity, an ugly term which effectively means reverse delegation in that power is considered to lie in the small parts of the organisation, who then delegate to the centre only the things that the centre can do better for them all. It is the only way that a city of small villages can work. The Federalist Papers, a collection of essays put together by the founding fathers who drew up the American constitution, is well worth reading if you ever get interested in politics. After all, you would have to admit that America has done quite well by following those ideas.
My family lives in a large Victorian house on the edge of London. When it was first built, in 1890, it was built for a family who all lived there with their servants. Between them they occupied the whole house, with the servants at the top and in the basement or the coach house next door. It was what is called a total organisation; everyone concerned with the family lived together, with a hierarchy of responsibility, starting with the head of the household. Today the property is divided into eight apartments whose occupants all live separate independent lives. I have calculated that the same number of people live there now as in 1890. That house, I suggest, is just like the organisations of the future; it still looks the same on the outside, one big house, but inside it is made up of independent groups who use some common facilities but are essentially independent, small but linked together.
Young people today often start off their working lives in an organisation, be it in business, government or the charity sector. That is sensible, for a time. I see such organisations as the graduate schools for work. They introduce young people to the necessary disciplines of work, the routines and systems, the need to sell as well as produce, the numbers that matter and the people who can be relied upon. If you go this way you will, I predict, soon yearn for the intimacy of the small group and the space to use your initiative to make a difference. If the organisation does not provide this you should move on, having finished your graduate apprenticeship. Humans are not meant to be machines.
LETTER 11
YOU ARE NOT A HUMAN RESOURCE
Organisations can be tough places. I have even suggested that they are on occasion prisons for the human soul. A bit harsh, perhaps? But I wonder. I do remember that when I was offered a job by Shell after leaving university, I sent a telegram to my parents in Ireland saying ‘Life is Solved.’ I really thought it was, because Shell had assumed that I would spend all my working life with them; they would see to it that I got paid, did useful work and would continue to be paid after I retired. There was nothing left to worry about.
That was until I married. When they wanted to post me to Liberia in West Africa, I saw it as one more step in the ladder of promotion. My wife saw it differently. She said, ‘I did not realise that I was marrying a man who would go wherever he was told to go, would do whatever they wanted, whoever “they” were, and would judge his whole life by his rank in their organisation. Did you know you were that sort of man?’ That was the first time I realised I had made what I was later to call a pact with the devil. In exchange for the promise of financial security and guaranteed work, I had sold my time to complete strangers with my permission for them to use that time for their own purposes; those purposes being partly, or even mainly in some cases, to enrich their investors. I had thought they were giving ME something, ignoring that I had in effect given away my birthright, or my right to do what I wanted with my own life.
Of course, most organisations do not see it that way. They see it as a c
onsensual arrangement from which both sides gain. Some lean over backwards to make their place of work more user-friendly, with fringe benefits ranging from free food, health- and childcare to meditation classes, sports facilities, community volunteer opportunities – all a well-intentioned attempt to provide a whole-of-life environment. Yet a comfortable, even luxurious prison is still a prison; you will still have given the organisation the right to use your time as they see fit. The effective use of that time is what is then called ‘management’. The problem is that managing your time inevitably involves managing you and my guess is that neither you nor anyone else likes to be managed and controlled by others, particularly if you don’t know some of them.
Think about this: any organisation whose key assets are talented or skilled people – universities, theatres, law firms, churches – don’t use the word ‘manager’ to describe the people in charge. They call them deans, senior partners, bishops, directors or team leaders. The title of manager is only used of those who are in charge of things, not people, that is the physical or inanimate parts of the organisation: the transport, the information systems, the building. Instinctively these organisations recognise that people don’t like to be ‘managed’ and avoid the word wherever possible. The word implies that you are a resource, something that is controlled by others, a ‘thing’ to be used and deployed as others see fit. The unfortunate term ‘human resources’ only encourages this way of thinking. As individuals we like to think that we have choices, that we are not slaves who have sold their time to others. In signing away our right to our time we have ceded power over the most active part of our lives to others in the conviction that it is in our interest to do so. That is why I call it the devil’s contract.
21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges Page 6