Heaven Is A Place On Earth
It’s time to talk about something positive.
I’ve just reviewed all my newsletters and realised they are often looking at the darker side of work (or they’re bile-filled rants of unleavened cyncism, with a thick coating of sarcasm, if you prefer). Well, it’s important we keep in mind what good could look like. We should focus on our vision of the Jerusalem we are going to build and not spend all our time staring at the dark satanic mills.
It’s not like there aren’t examples of great organisations out there. They just don’t get much publicity. And although the same ones keep turning up in the books and articles about the future of work, so that those of us interested in it bemoan the fact, most people have still never heard of them.
And they’re not new, either. The ideas have a long history, and so have some of these pioneering organisations. Ricardo Semler published his book “Maverick”, about how he transformed his family’s engineering company in Brazil into a multinational conglomerate through unorthodox methods, in 1988 (in Brazil, English version in 1993). Patagonia was founded in 1973 and I remember a friend telling me about them in the early 80s. W.L.Gore has been around since 1958 (a good year!) with their lattice organization principle.
So we have some examples of different approaches that are more, well, humanistic. Less crappy than the norm, that’s for sure. Off the top of my head I would add
Morning Star - supplies c. 40% of the U.S. industrial tomato paste and diced tomato markets
Nucor - largest steel producer in the US
Barry-Wehmiller - global supplier of manufacturing technology and services, $2.4bn turnover
Handelsbanken - major Swedish bank operating in 6 other countries and internationally
Haier - Chinese multinational, No.1 brand worldwide for major appliances
Buurtzorg - Dutch community health care, 70% of home market and expanding internationally
These are all substantial organisations, all very successful and profitable, all desirable places to work.
So why isn’t everyone doing this stuff? Well, partly because each of these have a different approach, a different emphasis, they’ve worked it out for themselves over time.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot in common, they most certainly do. However, you have to work from first principles and forge your own path as an organisation. That’s hard work. You can’t just go and get McKinsey’s in do it for you - in fact, that’s the exact opposite of what’s required.
Change is gonna come
This could make us pessimistic. After all, if this stuff has been around for ages and STILL most organisations are crap, then it’s never going to happen, is it?
I, however, am an optimist. (yes, a miserable, curmudgeonly, cynical bastard of one, but an optimist all the same).
You see, these new ways of working, these progressive, human-focused ways of organising, bring great benefits. They are more profitable (by 200% according to some research), they are more agile and adaptive, they are more innovative and they are, consequently, more resilient. To put it another way, they are ‘future-fit’ (h/t Geoff Marlow).
Left to the market, these ways of working will prevail - eventually. Organisations that don’t change will just be outcompeted but we have to be realistic about how quickly that will happen. Those that are entrenched in their markets have inertia on their side, so we need them to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ and change of their own accord.
However, we don’t have to convert every organisation, we just have to convert enough to reach a tipping point. That could be 15%, 20% or 25%, but it’s probably not more than that (I hope it’s not, at least!). Once we reach that point, the competitive advantages will push the rest to move, or a significant number of them at least. One or two big hitters, supported with the right publicity, could accelerate the process.
It could already be happening. Look at the transformation at Microsoft under Satya Nadella and the waves that is making.
Look at the growth of the B-Corp movement. World-Blu. The growth of Social Enterprise.
Change happens hardly at all, then all at once. At least, it looks that way if we’re not paying attention.
Get Ur Freak On
This is the end of uniformity. The command-and-control hierarchy, the organisation-as-machine metaphor, the factory model that has dominated our thinking for so long is crumbling and being replaced by a thousand different ways of seeing the organisation and the world. The future is diverse, complex, interconnected. It’s possible that what we think of as ‘the organisation’ will dissolve completely, or at least be porous, malleable and indistinct.
Each of the examples I have given (you can find more in Reinventing Organisations or the Corporate-Rebels Bucket List) have gone about it differently but the common threads are giving autonomy to individuals, reducing bureaucracy and emphasising the human.
Already, of course, people are trying to standardise the approach, to copy one or other model. Haier’s 'RenDanHeyi' philosophy is being Bowdlerised into the new ‘Lean’, ready to be flogged to gullible CEOs across the US by the usual suspects. Each rollout will come with a guarantee of failure, built in!
I can see the appeal of the Haier model to corporates as one of its key organising principles is entrepreneurship but, like all of these pioneering organisations, its model has much deeper, philosophical and spiritual roots. The success is a consequence of their philosophy, their philosophy isn’t the pursuit of success. They make great profits because they are not about making great profits.
They are about making the world a better place for the humans within them, in their own unique way.
Proud Mary
This more humanistic, people and relationship-centred approach to work is not a new idea. Mary Parker Follett pioneered these ideas a century ago with her concept of ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over’ and her definition of management as “the art of getting things done through people”. This was in stark contrast to the mechanistic, hierarchical approach of scientific management conceived by Frederick Taylor around the same time as Follett, and which dominated as Follett’s ideas were largely forgotten, in the US at least, after her death. (If I’ve got this bit wrong, let me know what you think I should be saying!).
There has been a struggle between these two approaches since, as Follett’s ideas re-emerged in Japan in the 1960s, and in the UK and Europe after that. It seems to me that scientific management has run its course and we are moving back to a more humanistic approach, and I think it’s clear where my sentiments lie. We’ve all been processed and optimised to death (literally, in some cases) and the future is in realising the innate potential of human beings. After all, organisations are collections of people, not processes.
It might have taken a while for Mary’s ideas to come back into fashion but I think they are going to come out on top. And that’s something she would be proud of.