It is, of course, easier to write or say than to do. Some exercises help, if you can organize yourself to do them and to use a partner or a friend to help you reflect upon them.
Exercise 1
Draw a line on a piece of paper to represent your life, from birth to death, and mark with a cross where you are now on that line. Think about it a bit, but not for too long; this is an impressionistic exercise not a precise one. Most people will draw a line something like the one below. Do yours before you read on.
In effect it is a line over time going up and down. What, however, do the ups and downs represent? The answer will tell you something about your real priorities in life. Where did you put the cross? The position will tell you something about the proportion of your life which you still feel is ahead of you, with time, probably, for a good Third Age. Does the line go upwards at the end or downwards? The answer will tell you something about your secret thoughts about the future. Most people feel good about it, in some modified way, and point their lines upwards.
Exercise 2
Write your own obituary to appear in your favourite paper or journal. Assume that it is written by a good friend who knows you well and understands the ‘you’ behind the facts. Don’t write more than 200 words.
People find this difficult to do but useful if they do it and then show it to a good friend. It is difficult because it requires you to envisage your own death as a real event. To be able to do this can be a big release because it allows you to think in more concrete terms about the long period between now and your death.
The exercise forces you to stand at the end of your life and to look backwards. It puts what you are doing now into a new perspective and forces you to work out what you would like to be remembered for. It is an exercise in very personal re-framing.
Exercise 3
Imagine yourself asking ten friends to list one quality each which they liked or admired in you. List those qualities, then against each list two activities where those qualities have been useful in the past and one type of different activity where they could conceivably be useful. Better still, ask ten friends to do it for you.
It is difficult to do this objectively by yourself, but worth trying. The point is to accentuate the positive in you and to conceive of other areas where your talents might be useful. It is, in a small way, a practice in liking yourself.
Exercise 4
Now, and only now, having done the others, list five things you would like to have achieved in three years’ time. Describe in a little detail how the achievement will be measured or observable and set down what practical things need to be done to start work on them.
This, of course, is putting the wheel of learning and of deliberate change into motion. It is surprising how easy it can be to do what we want to do when we know what it is that we want. Changing is exciting, fun and not too difficult if we see it as learning, learning in my sense, learning that we control and that we want.
I am more and more sure that those who are in love with learning are in love with life. For them change is never a problem, never a threat, just another exciting opportunity. It does, however, require what you might call a positive mental attitude.
Earlier this year we had to move out of our home for nine months while urgent repairs were made to the foundations. It was going to be a great nuisance and inconvenience. At first we were minded to minimize the inconvenience and camp out in makeshift accommodation next door. Then we decided to turn it into an opportunity, an opportunity to live in another part of town in a very different sort of home and community, to treat it like a foreign posting. It was more inconvenient, but now we call it exciting, fun, adventure and a bit of positive learning. Bad news became good news, change was learning.
Part Two: Working
Introduction
‘HE IS 55 AND he has just experienced his first month for 37 years without a paycheque. He is depressed, impossible to live with and I’m at my wits end.’ It was a middle-class wife speaking. They were not poor because with early retirement had come an early pension, they owned their home and their children were independent. It was not even that he had enjoyed his job. He had, in fact, despised it but, masochistically, had borne his dislike of his work like a man. Remove it and, paradoxically, he began to doubt his manhood.
Later that day I ring another friend, also 55. His voice on an answerphone replies ‘Anderson Associates – Paul Anderson speaking, I am contactable on 036484911.’ I know that the Associates are he and his wife and occasional friends in his or her multifarious little enterprises, some of which make money, many of which don’t. I know that the other telephone number is a fishing lodge belonging to some friends where he likes to spend long summer days. I know that his wife, a freelance journalist since the children grew up, makes more money than him, that their kitchen is their office. I know that for her and him, now, work and fun are inextricably intertwined, that he would never go back to working in a bank, that the telephone and the new opportunities for little service enterprises have transformed both their lives.
That evening my children, now in their early twenties, bring round some friends. The jobs they are doing did not exist in my youth – a production assistant in a small video company, a courier, a pop musician, a bond dealer in the city. There was also the perpetual traveller and the endless student, living rather precariously off odd-jobs, a grant and the occasional cheque from the welfare office. They none of them expected their job or their lifestyle to stay that way for long. The twenties were a time of exploration, for discovering the world and themselves. Careers were middle-aged concepts, things of the 1970s. Money mattered to them, but money was earnable if you wanted it enough and if you put your mind to it, and there were other parts of life which did not depend on money. They were both more carefree and more caring for others than I was at their age; they were less bound to their jobs than I was but often put more energy into the actual work. It was loyalty to the work, not to the employer which mattered most.
But then there was the young man I had heard being interviewed on the radio that morning. He had left school at 16 and was now 23. No educational credits, no qualifications, no sense of personal talents. He had never had a job but felt let down, cheated, by a society that had seemed to promise him the right to work and to a wage. By now he was without ambition, had a child by a girl whom he had not married, was drifting with no plan for the future. When asked if he had thought of enrolling on one of the many training courses or schemes which are now available, he replied that he was no good at that sort of thing and that anyway they were only a politician’s scheme for cutting down the number of unemployed.
The stories are familiar. They are happening all over Europe and in the USA. Some are those of happiness and good fortune. Some are of depression and even of hopelessness. They are the stories of discontinuous change at work, of those that adapt, even rejoice in the opportunity, and of those who lose their way and their will. Sometimes it seems that whole slices of generations have been allotted to pay the price for the mammoth change in the places of work which has taken place over the past twenty years and will continue for at least another ten. The Numbers (Chapter 2) have made clear how mammoth is that change; the next three chapters in Part Two describe and explain what it looks like.
4 The Shamrock Organization
THE WORLD OF work is changing because the organizations of work are changing their ways. At the same time, however, the organizations are having to adapt to a changing world of work. It’s a chicken and egg situation. One thing, at least, is clear – organizations in both private and public sectors face a tougher world – one in which they are judged more harshly than before on their effectiveness and in which there are fewer protective hedges behind which to shelter. It applies to hospitals and schools and employment offices as much as it does to businesses of all sorts.
It has been made increasingly clear, in Britain at least, that it is the organization’s job to deliver; it is not its job to be everyone’s alter
native community, providing meaning and work for all for life; nor is its job to be another arm of the state, collecting its taxes, paying the pensions, employing the handicapped and the disadvantaged, administering an implicit incomes policy or collaborating with an exchange rate policy. They have been very convenient, these employment organizations, as the delivery instruments of government policy but now that they employ, full-time, an ever-decreasing percentage of society’s adults they have become less useful. The alternative community idea has also got in the way, some people believe, of the organizations’ proper job which is to deliver quality goods and services to their customers. ‘My social objectives add five per cent to my costs,’ one chief executive said to me recently, complainingly.
It all begs a huge question, of course. If the organizations are no longer expected to look after people, then who is? It is a question which was raised in the first chapter of this book; it will come up again. My concern in this part, however, is to examine how organizations have begun to respond to this increased pressure for results, and how their ways and their requirements of their people are now hugely different – discontinuous change has begun to happen, for good as well as for ill.
It is not just that results matter more and that there is more scope for radical change in the way they are delivered; the organizations of today are more and more places for brains not muscles. As we saw, brain skills will be required in 70 per cent of all jobs, according to one very believable forecast, and perhaps half of those brain skill jobs will require professional qualifications or education up to university degree level. These are increasingly organizations of clever people doing clever things, and clever people have to be managed rather more sensitively than in the days when factories were manned by ‘hands’.
One sign of the new sorts of organization is a perceptible change in the language we use to talk about them. Organizations used to be perceived as gigantic pieces of engineering, with largely interchangeable human parts. We talked of their structures and their systems, of inputs and outputs, of control devices and of managing them, as if the whole was one large factory. Today the language is not that of engineering but of politics, with talk of cultures and networks, of teams and coalitions, of influence or power rather than control, of leadership not management. It is as if we had suddenly woken up to the fact that organizations were made up of people, after all, not just ‘hands’ or ‘role occupants’. It is, thinking about it, a startling discontinuity even if it has crept up on most of us unnoticed.
The new thinking on organizations shows itself in several ways, in the shamrock organization, the new alliance of different types of work and worker (discussed in this chapter), in the federal organization, the new form of the organization with its interesting counterpart, the do’nut concept of management (discussed in Chapter 5), in the smart organization and the shake-up that is happening as a consequence to the careers and lives of managers (discussed in Chapter 6). Discontinuities at work do, in the end, affect what we do on Monday morning.
The Idea Of The Shamrock
The shamrock is the Irish national emblem, a small clover-like plant with three leaves to each stem. It was used by St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, to symbolize the three aspects of God, the Trinity. I use it, also symbolically, to make the point that the organization of today is made up of three very different groups of people, groups with different expectations, managed differently, paid differently, organized differently. The key differences were outlined earlier in the book but they need now to be described in more detail with all their implications, not least because each one of us must decide which leaf of the shamrock is for us.
The first leaf of the shamrock represents the core workers, what I prefer to call the professional core because it is increasingly made up of qualified professionals, technicians and managers. These are the people who are essential to the organization. Between them they own the organizational knowledge which distinguishes that organization from its counterparts. Lose them and you lose some of yourself. They are, therefore, precious or should be, and hard to replace. Organizations increasingly bind them to themselves with hoops of gold, with high salaries, fringe benefits and German cars. In return the organization demands of them hard work and long hours, commitment and flexibility. Not for these people are there still 40-hour weeks and 45-week years – few take all their holiday entitlements, few see their houses or their families in daylight. They are expected to go there, do this, be that, as the organization requires. In return they are increasingly well-paid.
As a consequence they are expensive, and as a further consequence there are fewer of them. Every successful organization will tell you that they have at least quadrupled their turnover in the last ten years but have halved their professional core. In three years, from 1982 to 1985, General Electric in the USA reduced its total workforce of 400,000 by 100,000 and its turnover rose. The people who left were mostly staffers, not factory-floor workers and were, apparently, just not necessary; they were expensive luxuries, desirable no doubt but dispensable.
They call it downsizing in the USA, or de-scaling or just re-structuring. The results are the same whatever the language. A Conference Board study in 1987 concluded that since 1979 more than a million managers and staff professionals in the USA had lost their jobs, over half of them since 1983. Many of them were, as one CEO observed, people hired just to read reports which others of them had been hired to write.
If the core is smaller, who then does the work? Increasingly, it is contracted out. It is not sensible, after all, to pay premium rates and give premium conditions to people whose work is not crucial to the organization. The old philosophy of a single-status company in which the cleaners were in principle treated to the same conditions as the directors meant that either you had rather expensive cleaners or rather cheap directors. That had to change as the directors were treated better, or the organization would go bankrupt. All non-essential work, work which could be done by someone else, is therefore sensibly contracted out to people who make a speciality of it and who should, in theory, be able to do it better for less cost. Manufacturing firms are now almost totally assembly firms, while many service organizations are, in effect, brokers, connecting the customer with a supplier with some intervening advice.
Calculations by some organizations revealed that if they broke down all the elements of their product or service, 80 per cent of the value was actually carried out by people not inside their organization. These 20/80 organizations do not always realize how large the contractual fringe has grown because it has become a way of their life. It is only recently that more individual professionals, more small businesses, more hived-off management buy-outs have shone a spotlight on a way of organizing which has, in fact, always existed. It can get exotic: smart Londoners can now get their typing done more cheaply and as quickly in Taiwan as in London using the new communications technology, while the New York Insurance Company has located its New Jersey claims office in Castleisland in Co. Kerry, Ireland, where the people are clever but also cheaper than in New Jersey.
Japan’s export organizations have long depended for their efficiency on a large contractual fringe. Just-In-Time delivery means that the subcontractor carries the cost of any stocks. Subcontracts mean that the contractor carries the burden of any slowdown. It is a way of exporting uncertainty. Hence it is that only some 20 per cent of Japanese workers have the security of lifetime employment for they form the central cores of the large organizations. They are crucial, they are special, they are preferentially treated.
The third leaf of the shamrock is the flexible labour force, all those part-time workers and temporary workers who are the fastest growing part of the employment scene. That growth is partly a function of the switch to services, for the service industry cannot stockpile its products as a factory does. Some try to do it by putting their customers into a queue, but the more efficient and effective will always try to expand and contract their service to match the requirements o
f their customers. That means longer opening hours in the retail trade, it means peaks and troughs in demand. Shops now stay open for up to 70 hours a week. Airlines and airports are busier in the summer. Garden centres thrive at weekends. Of course, the full-time core staff could be asked to work the extra hours, or enough people could be employed full-time to cope with any peak and left underemployed the rest of the time. In years gone by both methods were used for they made it more convenient, easier to manage; but, today, the costs would be horrendous, given the increasingly privileged pay and conditions paid to the full-time core. It is cheaper by far, although more trouble, to bring in occasional extra labour part-time, to cope with extra hours, or temporary, to cope with peak periods. Convenience for the management has been weighed against economy and economy has won.
The Discontinuity
The three-leaved workforce has always existed in embryo. What is different today is the scale. Each of the leaves is now significant. It happened because it had to. The bad years of the late 1970s and early 1980s forced organizations to make significant reductions in their man-power, most of whom were still full-time employees. The threat of economic disaster forced them, in other words, to cut back their cores. When times improved managers were not going to be caught the same way twice; they did not expand the core but went instead to the other two leaves.
It makes good economic sense, but it also makes life more difficult for those who have to run the organization. Instead of one workforce there are now three, each with a different kind of commitment to the organization, a different contractual arrangement, a different set of expectations. They each have to be managed in different ways.
The core
Increasingly, the core will be composed of well-qualified people, professionals or technicians or managers. They get most of their identity and purpose from their work. They are the organization and are likely to be both committed to it and dependent on it. They will work long and hard, but in return they want not only proper rewards in the present but some guarantee of their future. They think in terms of careers, of advancement and of investing in the future. These, then, are not people to be ordered around. These are the new professionals who want their names to be as well-known as their roles, who want to be asked not told to do something, who see themselves in some sense as partners in the enterprise and want to be recognized as colleagues not subordinates.
The Age Of Unreason Page 7
