Those who make the big decisions in the world may have been short-sighted when they decided to marry management science and treat art as a mistress for the entertainment of their spare moments. Their marriage may not be – to use their now favourite word – ‘sustainable’. Management science is all about constant change, but the more innovation there is, the more uncertainty there is about the future, the more the young avoid placing faith in skills that may become obsolete, the more frequently they fall out of love with increasingly hectic, relentless and unforgiving work. Not that work was universally loved in the past; but people resigned themselves more frequently to the work to which they were limited by the accidents of birth. The more the specialisation of tasks and firms increases, the more do those who work together become strangers incomprehensible to one another. The more technology makes it possible to have longer hours of leisure, the more time becomes available for worry, not just about ‘What kind of work do I want?’ but ‘What kind of world do I want?’
Whether people say they are happy or dissatisfied with their work depends on how many minutes they are given to answer the question, and how deeply they dig into regrets they normally dismiss as pointless and unrealisable. A manager at Marks & Spencer could tell me how proud he was to work for such an excellent firm, and how honoured he felt when the big boss once asked him for his opinion, but after singing its praises for about two hours he suddenly blurted out, ‘I hate my boss’, and revealed how he was planning to turn his theatrical hobby, which was what he really cared about, into a full-time occupation. It is the doubts of the privileged in ‘advanced’ countries that are the most significant warning signs.
The hesitations of the French are particularly revealing, they being the people who in 1789 started a revolution when they were the most powerful and prosperous nation in Europe, but they still wanted something more than prosperity and power. It is not just destitution and oppression that produce revolution, but, quite as often, disappointment among those who succeed, and then have doubts, and ask what else there is to aim for. Today the French are still among the richest people on earth, and they work fewer hours than most others, but once again, they want something more. Of course, many love their job and are proud of their skills and there are many kinds of work that are exhilarating and a privilege to be involved in. However, to the question ‘What is the priority in your life?’ they have replied that family is by far their highest priority (63 per cent), with leisure (18 per cent), and work (12 per cent) trailing well behind. There is still work that is soul-destroying, and innumerable people are still forced by their work to sacrifice deep ambitions, or regret having spent too large a part of life working too hard and missing out on activities they discovered too late to pursue. Is it enough that work should provide status and a sense of purpose and social pleasures and mastery of a skill? Why does it so often degenerate into no more than a way of keeping body and soul together and earning enough money to pay taxes, or reimburse moneylenders, or shop for goods one may or may not need, or impress one’s neighbours so that they do not treat one as a stranger?
Could art play a different role, and not just be a distraction? Could it expand beyond its ancient focus on worship and its modern preoccupation with self-expression? Could it become a seedbed that grows another kind of courage, able to rescue ordinary working life from the torments that too often afflict it? Could it prevent professional rivalries and jealousies from turning colleagues into strangers? Do the pleasures of work have to be spoilt by having one’s inadequacies pointed out, making one a stranger to oneself? These questions may seem to ask too much of art. However, art has contributed much more to humanity’s achievements than is usually acknowledged; it has not been merely marginal decoration or distraction. Probably no religion and no ideology would have spread without the aid of art. Art has been enormously influential in destroying prejudice, in championing independent creativity, and in giving respectability to ‘whatever the human mind, fancy or whim may invent’. Its prestige has survived even when self-expression deteriorates into self-worship or is bruised by the frustration of discovering that others do not share one’s opinion of one’s own ‘genius’. But artists have not exhausted all the roles they could still play.
The biographies of artists are, in many cases, a litany of struggle and suffering, of drama and disappointment, because they have increasingly been engaged in a search for a form of existence different from that of the vast majority. That search is now of greater relevance than ever before. The more people are educated, the more they become interested in the artistic life, which is often explored, too late, in retirement. But there is more to aim for now than trying to revive the idealised world of the artisans who created objects with their own hands. How to make one’s life into a work of art is the new challenge.
The clue that art provides is that it seeks more than a predictable purpose, and more than competent craftsmanship. It expresses an individual vision that is discovered in the process of being constructed, so that the direction of the search, the perspective and the goal may change as new discoveries are made; it is an adventure into the unknown. No recipes or instruction manuals can do more than teach very preliminary skills. Each work of art is individual, but it is also an adventure in communication, stimulating ideas and emotions in others which it cannot control. It is therefore a training in courage and a small step towards the taming of fear.
Teaching children to be ‘creative’ by drawing and painting has had only limited results. It may give them self-confidence, but when they come out of school, they have no choice but to work for organisations which demand that they perform specific tasks, rather than freely exercise their imagination. Creativity is in any case not an adequate goal; it is possible for it to produce useless and harmful results. Procreation is more interesting, coupling two imaginations to generate something that is a surprise to both, and then continuing to experiment until a desirable result emerges.
The divorce of work and art was consecrated by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), whose ideas on ‘scientific management’ captured the whole world’s imagination in the first half of the twentieth century, even more influentially than Henry Ford’s assembly line. What Taylor proposed was a ‘Mental Revolution’ which applied to all forms of work, even to education, even to gardening, and not just to manufacture as Ford’s did. Taylor believed that science could solve the problem of how humans should work. He started by analysing in minute detail how machines could be made more efficient, and often succeeded in trebling their productivity. He then studied every movement humans made in different kinds of work and showed that they too could vastly increase their productivity if they followed his instructions precisely, doing only what his stop-watch and slide rule calculated to be the optimum use of their energy, what a day’s labour could ideally achieve if pursued with total dedication. As a reward, he doubled or trebled wages, and the results were impressive: at one paper mill he increased output from twenty to thirty-six tons a day, reduced costs per ton from seventy-five to thirty-five dollars, and labour costs from thirty to eight dollars per ton. Everyone should have been made happier and richer, and Taylor claimed that the conflict of employers and employees would be ended because the surplus of wealth would become so enormous that there would be no need to quarrel about its distribution.
But his system involved all initiative being transferred from workers to expert managers. The workers protested that they were being humiliated, enslaved, turned into mere automata; more goods might be manufactured, but ‘as far as man is concerned it means destruction,’ said a union leader; what Taylor considered to be a wasted movement or gesture or an unnecessary pause ‘is frequently that moment when the divine spark of a new thought’ comes to the worker. But the worker was not supposed to think. That, said the union leader, was to ignore the precedent of James Watt, who used precisely such a momentary pause to watch a kettle boil, which inspired his revolutionary ideas about steam engines. Taylor persisted in p
ushing workers to extreme effort by offering ever-higher rewards and bonuses, but they responded by saying it left them so exhausted that their lives were ruined and their wives threatened to leave them. Those who were willing to do anything for money also worried Taylor because they became ‘extravagant and dissipated . . . Our experiment’, he wrote, ‘showed that for their own best interests it does not do for most to get rich too fast.’ At the same time he reminded all employees that the purpose of their work was to pay dividends to the owners; ‘They should never lose sight of this fact.’ Skilled mechanics were replaced by ‘drones’ who just minded machines; many were made redundant and told to become teachers or carers; a new class of white collar managers was created, quite separate from workers; foremen lost their traditional wide-ranging role and had their duties divided between several specialists to ensure that each gesture exactly obeyed the rules.
In 1910 efficiency became America’s new ideal, when a national dispute about railway companies demanding an increase in fares was opposed by a sensational demonstration of how, using Taylor’s scientific methods, they could easily make a hundred million dollars of efficiency savings so that no increase would be needed. Cutting the cost of living became a popular slogan, despite the price that had to be paid in harder work and redundancies. Europe and Japan quickly followed the American example. The leisurely pace of traditional work and individual pride in personal craftsmanship became inefficient and impossible to sustain.
Scientific management has learned many lessons since Taylor’s day and what is understood by it is now hugely different; his reminder that the purpose of work is to pay dividends to the owners is not spelled out in the same way; workers are no longer dismissed so arbitrarily for refusing to work harder, and when a few commit suicide because they find the strain of work unbearable, they attract international headlines. But it is worth thinking about how scientific management could change still further and how it could be inspired by art. A poet after all, in the original meaning of the word, was a maker and a builder.
[21]
What is more interesting than becoming a leader?
THERE IS ALMOST UNIVERSAL agreement that leadership is needed to solve the challenges of life. Leaders are our heroes, until they fail. So I propose to look at the side-effects of their achievements.
Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was one of the first to excavate below the surface of leadership. Thomas Jefferson called him one of ‘the three greatest men who ever lived’, and he was considered so exceptionally talented that it was claimed he was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Bacon reinvented scientific enquiry, transforming it from a contemplative pursuit to one of experimental research directed at practical inventions to ‘alleviate mankind’s misery’; he was a pioneer in the colonisation of America, and he had visions of religious freedom and legal reform. He was a leader in everything he touched, and eventually became Lord Chancellor of England, the equivalent of prime minister.
But his life was also a disaster. He was dismissed for corruption, pleading guilty to the charge, begging for mercy and confessing that he was ‘a broken reed’. His wife, thirty-one years younger than himself, turning out to be a spendthrift who complained he did not give her enough money to satisfy her extravagant tastes, was unfaithful to him and eventually left him. He was in debt for most of his life and died owing huge sums, at least three million pounds in today’s money. He was admired but also disliked and mistrusted, because he used hypocrisy and betrayal to achieve his eminence. After his downfall, he was lampooned as the ‘wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind’.
Bacon’s importance today is that he was able to distance himself from his misfortunes, and analyse the problems of ambition with a lucidity that has a universal relevance. He was not ashamed to admit that he had not been able to follow the principles of virtue and honesty that he preached. He had lived two separate lives, he said, and his ideals had been defeated by unforeseen temptations: ‘My soul hath been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage.’ The rewards of ambition had not been what he had expected. Only too late did he realise that he had unthinkingly been trapped by ‘the strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty, or to seek power over others and to lose power over . . . [one]self’. He could not explain it, nor why so many others suffered from that strange desire.
High office, to his surprise, had reduced him to the status of a ‘servant’ of the routines of administration. The process of achieving power was ‘sometimes base’; retaining it was ‘slippery’, and losing it ‘is a melancholy thing [because] when a man feels that he is no longer what he was, he loses all his interest in life’. Success comes at too high a price: ‘By indignities men rise to dignities.’ His hunger for power had indeed made him master of the art of licking the boots of the influential, of making promises and betraying those who were once friends but were no longer useful. He concluded that power had isolated him from other humans; he was the first to find fault with others but the last to recognise his own faults. Worst of all, ‘in the puzzle of business [the powerful] have no time to tend their health either of body or mind.’
Two and a half centuries later, Sir Robert Barlow (1891–1976), starting from a poor illiterate home in East London, became the founder and head of a multinational, the Metal Box Company, employing over 50,000 workers, a giant of the packaging industry, surpassed only by the titan American Can Company, but never surrendering in the battle against it.
He used a mixture of cunning, courage, ferocity, ruthlessness, generosity and kindness ‘with such charm that even those he injured would speak of him with affection’, while others called him ‘an evil man’. He was hailed as one of the most brilliant businessmen of his generation, but he said, ‘I get no happiness from it.’ He was constantly fighting rivals and colleagues challenging his power. ‘I don’t know why I go on with it . . . I’m sick of this life. They are all plotting against me . . . Never be ambitious. Only misery can come of it. Never hold a job like I hold. You’d better be dead.’ But he continued to resist all the efforts to oust him, fighting back with outbursts of rage against the ‘personal conflicts which loom so large in the minds of [his] executives’, ‘the exceedingly bad atmosphere’ in the company and ‘the clash of personalities’. Though he was a great success in his lifetime, no sooner was he dead than the worst blow came: his achievement was condemned (in 1976) as being an ‘undesirable manifestation of the consumer society, adding unnecessary frills and expense to the process of distribution, using scarce materials extravagantly, disfiguring the landscape with litter and contributing, especially in the food industry, to the debasement of taste with products cultivated and processed by unnatural means’. He could not have foreseen this change in society’s expectations.
Heroes and saints have a necessary place in the history of ambition, but so too do the far more numerous people who throughout the ages have regarded ambition as dangerous, because it contradicted the ethos of acceptance of one’s lot that most religions recommended. ‘An ambitious man is a sick man,’ wrote a doctor in 1841, when there were still very limited opportunities for ambition, with only 1 per cent of the jobs in industry being managerial, and only about 7 per cent in commerce. It is only recently that the ambition to be promoted to a higher rank has become an almost universal passion, and that ‘incentives’ have become the aphrodisiac of the workplace. In the twentieth century, Britain increased the number of managers sevenfold; and many of the world’s armies trebled or quadrupled the proportion of officers: one third of the Chinese Army are officers and one third NCOs. But now ambition is in crisis: there cannot be more supervisors than subordinates who have no-one to whom they can give orders. Rising expectations make the fulfilment of ambition ever more elusive, even if aristocracy is endlessly expanded into meritocracy. Thomas Hobbes’ brutal claim remains unanswered, that all distinctions imply superiority and inferiority and that there was no way for everyone to enjoy equal respect, for ‘if all men have it, no man hath it’. More importan
tly, never has there been such pitiless scrutiny of the weaknesses of the successful, the powerful and the rich. Never has there been so much questioning of whether they do more harm than good. Only in countries emerging from poverty do they inspire awe; once their numbers multiply, their spell is shattered.
In 2000 an MIT professor of economics simplified the criterion of success: ‘Wealth has increasingly become the only dimension by which personal worth is measured . . . It is the only game to play if you want to prove your mettle. It is the big leagues. If you do not play there, by definition you are second rate . . . Wealth gives one the power to do what one wants. The greater one’s wealth, the happier one becomes.’ But this may not be the last word. It has become evident that the big players cannot do everything they want. If they run big corporations or organisations, they find that power is often elusive. Their orders are constantly reformulated, reinterpreted and resisted. Their problems are frequently too difficult to solve. They are spending ever more time worrying about the risks that threaten them. They call themselves ‘leaders’ but they are now not even ‘servants’ in the way Bacon described: they are prisoners of the shareholders and analysts and pension-fund managers who are constantly pressing them to make bigger profits. Political leaders disappoint because they do not work miracles and seldom even carry out the programmes on which they won their election. All leaders now devote enormous amounts of time to nurturing their ‘image’, as though they dare not show their face without make-up. Some become characters of pure invention, triumphs of hypocrisy or self-delusion. However brilliantly they can talk about any subject, however much affability or humility they display, and whether they write poetry or watch birds to keep sane and show that they remain ordinary humans, they have never been so vulnerable to being suddenly destroyed by mistakes that are hard to avoid. Though they may enjoy their privileges, the excitement of being at the helm and a sense of achievement, few can avoid constant stress and broken private lives. The price to be paid for the fulfilment of ambition is rarely fixed in advance. Voltaire complained that ‘the only reward to be expected from the cultivation of literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds’. Education, though conceived to help everyone succeed, can throttle imagination as well as make it sing.
The Hidden Pleasures of Life Page 25