The Hungry Spirit: New Thinking for a New World Page 18
Denise Bredfeld remembers her first experience. She worked on the line building pumps, valves and cylinders. Jack asked her one day if she thought that she was making the company money.
‘Sure,’ she replied.
‘Prove it,’ said Jack.
‘Then he gave me a two-hour lecture on how to determine costs. I took two weeks and scrabbled around, digging up information. I didn’t know anything. I had to learn as I went along. Finally I proved that our section was making money, but not as much as I thought. Transmissions were making more. They say numbers don’t lie – and it was obvious from the numbers what we had to do. He armed us with the information we needed to make wise decisions.’
Some of the proof lies in the numbers. The share price rose from 10 cents to $18.60 in just ten years. The company now does over $100 million in sales, operates several different divisions, and employs nearly 800 people. Jack wrote his book about it all, and has now had more than 200 imitators. Treating people as responsible adults and citizens, trust and recognition, room to be yourself – it seems to work, for everyone.
The stories cited relate to relatively small organizations. At first sight it is hard to see how they might apply to the large supranationals discussed in the previous chapter. But, as ABB has proved, large organizations can be composed of flexible combinations of very small organizations, in each of which there can be a sense of partnership in a shared adventure, trust, recognition and a share in the rewards of success. The four Ps of Professionalism, Projects, Passion and Pride are not the exclusive property of new or creative businesses, but they seem to be the necessary elements of corporate citizenship. Given the mood of the times, and the hungry spirit which sits within each of us, there is no alternative but to give more space and more sense of partnership to the citizen core of any organization.
The practical implications are:
– a much greater emphasis on the selection of the citizens, to ensure that they are likely to be kindred spirits, as well as professionally competent;
– an explicit contract with each individual, laying down tenure limits and partnership rights, to demonstrate that the work is to the benefit of all, and to make the commitment of the organization clear;
– a formal constitution which sets out rights and duties, so that the boundaries of trust are known;
– a clear understanding, not necessarily in writing, of the imperatives of the organization, what it stands for and what it seeks to achieve, above and beyond the monetary goals, to elicit some of that passion;
– control by results more than by procedures, as a demonstration of trust and a source of pride.
Those who qualify for the citizen core of any organization will no longer be content to be regarded as the instruments of that organization, no matter how well rewarded, because they will, mostly, be able to turn mercenary if they need to. The citizen company will, therefore, gradually become a necessary way to organize, difficult though it will always be to manage and to lead.
In a recent book, Organizing Genius, Warren Bennis, philosopher of leadership and articulate observer of American organizations, has described the methods and the history of some of America’s most famous creative groups, including the Manhattan Project which made the first atomic bomb, the Disney animation studio and Bill Clinton’s campaign team for his first presidential election. As he analyzes these Great Groups, Bennis finds they had much in common despite their variety. They were all grouped around a specific and prestigious project and their members were all recognized as experts in their field. Those members had a consuming passion for their cause. They were careless of money or material comfort, often working in makeshift quarters for long hours with little pay, they were young (mostly under thirty), had great camaraderie and were given as much space in their work as they could handle. Their pride in their membership and, eventually, their achievements was obvious. He doesn’t call them citizens, but that is what, in effect, they were.
These great groups did not last for ever. Immortality seemed beyond their grasp, possibly because they were defined around projects with a beginning and an end, rather than a community made up of projects. Their members probably never had as intense an experience again, nor is it given to all of us to be part of such groups, but they will have provided their members with a taste of what it is to make magic, and the rest of us with lessons in how to herd the cats in the cause of something memorable.
TEN
A PROPER EDUCATION
THE PHILOSOPHY OF Proper Selfishness has to start early. We need an approach to education which fosters responsibility for oneself and others. How we learn then becomes as important as what we learn, as I was to discover in my own education.
I left school and university with my head packed full of knowledge; enough of it, anyway, to pass all the examinations that were put in my path. It was, naturally, a rather partial sort of knowledge, containing nothing at all of the natural sciences, or of languages other than Latin and Greek. In those days, it was thought that you could not reach the standards required of you in your chosen field and be, at the same time, conversant with all the other fields of study. I was, however, considered by my teachers and my parents to be a well-educated young man.
Unusually for that time, I went into industry. ‘You are the first member of our family to go into trade,’ my great-aunt said, with a disapproving sniff. But work was the stuff of life and ‘industry’, or the business of making and selling useful things or services, was an important part of that work, whatever my relatives might feel. As a well-educated young man I rather expected my work to be a piece of cake, something at which my intellect would allow me to excel without undue effort. School and schooling were behind me, thank God, and life could now begin, and life, I felt, was for living, with all the good things that that implied.
It came as something of a shock, therefore, to encounter the world outside for the first time, and to realize that I was woefully ill-equipped, not only for the necessary business of earning a living, but, more importantly, for coping with all the new decisions which came my way, in both life and work. My first employers put it rather well: ‘You have a well-trained but empty mind,’ they told me, ‘which we will now try to fill with something useful, but don’t imagine that you will be of any real value to us for the first ten years.’ I was fortunate to have lighted upon an employer prepared to invest so much time in what was, in effect, my real education, and I shall always feel guilty that I left them when the ten years were up.
A well-trained mind is not to be sneezed at, but I was soon to discover that my mind had been trained to deal with closed problems, whereas most of what I now had to deal with were open-ended problems. ‘What is the cost of sales?’ is a closed problem, one with a right or a wrong answer. ‘What should we do about it?’ is an open problem, one with any number of possible answers. Trained in analysis, I had no experience of taking decisions which might or might not turn out to be good. Knowing the right answer to a question, I came to realize, was not the same as making a difference to a situation, which was what I was supposed to be paid for. Worst of all, the real open-ended question – ‘What is all this in aid of?’ was beginning to nudge at my mind.
I had been educated in an individualist culture. My scores were mine. No one else came into it, except as competitors in some imagined race. I was on my own in the learning game at school and university. Not so in my work, I soon realized. Nothing happened there unless other people cooperated. How to win friends and influence people was not a course in my curriculum. Unfortunately, it was to prove essential in my new life. Being an individual star would not help me much if it was in a failing group. A group failure brought me down along with the group. Our destinies were linked, which meant that my classmates were now colleagues, not competitors. Teams were something I had encountered on the sports field, not in the classroom. They were in the box marked ‘fun’ in my mind, not the one marked ‘work’ or even ‘life’. My new challenge, I discovered,
was to merge these three boxes. I had discovered, rather later than most, the necessity of others. It was the start of my real education.
‘So you’re a university graduate are you?’ said my new Sales Manager. ‘In classics, is it? I don’t think that that is going to impress our Chinese salesmen! How do you propose to win their respect since you will be in charge of some of them very shortly?’ Another open-ended problem! I had never before been thrust among people very different from me, with different values and assumptions about the way the world worked, or should work. I had not even met anyone more than two years older, except for relatives and teachers. Cultural exploration was a process unknown to me, and I was not accustomed to being regarded as stupid and ignorant, which I undoubtedly was, in all the things that mattered in their world. It was my first realization that there is more than one way of being intelligent.
My education, I decided then, had been positively disabling. So much of the content of what I had learned was irrelevant, while the process of learning it had cultivated a set of attitudes and behaviours which were directly opposed to what seemed to be needed in real life. Although I had studied philosophy I hadn’t applied it to myself. I had assumed that the point of life was obvious: to get on, get rich, get a wife and get a family. It was beginning to be clear that life wasn’t as simple as that. What I believed in, what I thought was worth working for, and with whom, these things were becoming important. So was my worry about what I personally could contribute that might not only earn me money but also make a useful contribution somewhere.
It would be nice to think that this sort of experience could not happen now, that our schools, today, prepare people much better for life and for the work which is so crucial to a satisfactory life. But I doubt it. The subjects may appear to be a little more relevant, but we are still left to learn about work at work, and about life by living it. That will always be true, but we could, I believe, do more to make sure that the process of education had more in common with the processes of living and working as they are today, so that the shock of reality is less cruel. I would have more faith in a National Curriculum if it were to be more concerned with process than with content, and had as much to do with values and people as with knowledge and things.
The US National Centre for Clinical Infant Programmes recently listed the seven qualities which children need to do well at school, and probably in life, I would add. They are: confidence, curiosity, intentionality, self-control, relatedness and the capacity to communicate and cooperate. In addition, the capacity for deferred gratification turns out to be a better definition of success than IQ. Daniel Goleman bundles all these attributes into what he calls Emotional Intelligence. The success of his recent book of this title suggests that a lot of people agree. It is unfortunate that no curriculum lists these capacities as prerequisites. When I inquired of a Professor of English what his course did to inculcate these qualities at the higher levels of education, given that they were largely ignored at the earlier stages, he replied, ‘They come hear to read English, and that is exactly what they do. These other things they will have to pick up in the streets.’
Schools are charged by society with multiple functions, which is one of their problems, but they are the only safe practice grounds for life that we have. They are, for that reason, precious and protected places, but they need to be clear about the implications. The economic historian R.H. Tawney, returning to Britain after the catastrophic experience of the Great War and what he called a world of graves, asked for an education that was ‘generous, inspiring and humane’ to replace an existing system which was ‘neither venerable, like a college, nor popular, like a public house, but merely indispensable, like a pillar-box’. He decried an approach that was narrowly utilitarian because of its ‘spiritual crassness’ and declared that ‘only those institutions are loved which touch the imagination’. We have still to create those places in most of our societies.
A school for life and work should, I suggest, subscribe to the following propositions, if it is to help its students begin to take responsibility for their lives, for their beliefs about the world, and for the others with whom they work or live or meet, as well as touch their imaginations and inspire their souls.
1. The discovery of oneself is more important than the discovery of the world.
Both are important, of course, but the world will always be there. We need to build up a belief in our competence to deal with it. Too many people experience school as a failure experience, leaving with their self-esteem in tatters, believing that they are stupid, inadequate and incapable. This is the worst possible starting point from which to begin looking for work or coping with life on one’s own, particularly when so much of that work will, in future, have to be created by ourselves. By the turn of the century, it is now clear, less than half of the British workforce will be in full-time long-term jobs. We can no longer rely on our work institutions to fill our empty minds with their skills.
‘Look for customers, not jobs,’ I told my own children when they left college – because only if you can make or do something that other people will pay you money for will you ultimately be employable. But that requires self-confidence, a saleable skill or competence and social skills of quite a high order. It is not easy to sell one’s own goods or services. It should be a guarantee to all children, as of right, that they will have these three components of survival by the time they leave school, for they are the building blocks of self-esteem, the start on the road to a full identity. If the children leave without them, it is the school that has failed.
Nelson Mandela is widely quoted as saying in his Inaugural Address: ‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. We are born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone.’ He never, in fact, said these words, which come from Marianne Williamson in her book ‘A Return to Love’ but perhaps it is because they ring so true that so many have attributed them to him.
Whoever said it first, or did not say it, the sentiment, whether put in a religious context or not, should be one of the articles of belief of a school for life and work. We can do many things to bring it about. We can, for instance, look for ways to give every young person a success experience of some sort every year. That will be easier if the second proposition is adopted.
2. Everyone is good at something.
Howard Gardner, a Professor of Education at Harvard University, once produced a list of seven different intelligences. The idea that intelligence is so multi-dimensional was a revelation to educationalists, although on reflection it is obvious. To his list we can now add Daniel Goleman’s concept of emotional intelligence. But even without these academic aids we can all make our own list, from our own experience. As time goes by, my own list grows longer as I encounter new examples of intelligence or talent. This is my current list, with the important proviso that the different intelligences need not, indeed usually do not, correlate. Fortunate are they who have more than three. All of them, however, can be developed, but those that are naturally there will develop faster.
Factual Intelligence – the know-it-all facility of the encyclopaedia.
Analytic Intelligence – the ability to reason and to conceptualize.
Numerate Intelligence – being at ease with numbers of all sorts.
A combination of these first three intelligences will get you through most tests and examinations and entitle you to be called clever. But there is more to intelligence than these.
Linguistic Intelligence – a facility with language and languages, even if one talks nonsense in all of them, which can happen if this intelligence is not aligned with the others.
Spatial Intelligence – an ability to see patterns in things. Artists, entrepreneurs and system analysts have this ability, but often do poorly in te
sts of the first three intelligences. They therefore fail at school but can prosper in later life if their self-esteem is not too dented.
Athletic Intelligence – although some might prefer to call it talent, the skill of athletes is a recognizable form of intelligence, still too easily dismissed as leisure activity. We mock some American universities for offering athletic scholarships, but perhaps they are only extending the concept of education and intelligence as they, and we, should.
Intuitive Intelligence – an aptitude for sensing and seeing what is not immediately obvious. Often opposed to analytic intelligence, making it difficult for the two to communicate. ‘You have won the argument, but I’m right,’ says my wife on occasion, and she usually is, because her intuitive intelligence gets it right more often than my analytic approach.
Emotional Intelligence – self-awareness and self-control, persistence, zeal and self-motivation are often more important in life than any other faculty. Goleman quotes Aristotle: ‘Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, for the right purpose, at the right time, and in the right way – this is not easy.’
Practical Intelligence – Often called common sense, the ability to recognize what needs to be done and what can be done. The person who gets on with it, while everyone else is debating what should be done.