Modern Management

Several of my friends in the business world have told me that modern management is taught to keep its distance.

“You are supposed to live at least fifty miles away from the facility,” one told me. The idea is to not be influenced in decision making by any personal attachments to the people who work for you.

The friends in question are idiots and losers who have managed not to notice that Fordism is dead and gone. Successful managers today barf when they hear the expression “human resources” and don’t see their employees as conveyor belt workers.

The businesses that thrive today are the ones where the humanity of the employees is not only acknowledged but supported in its quirky, rich variety. I just spent the weekend with an employer who is helping her worker finish his dissertation on Canadian poetry while assisting another employee with running his personal blog (that has zero relationship with the business, obviously), etc. This is what real modern management looks like.

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22 responses to “Modern Management”

Vic Crain

April 23, 2015

That’s what an exceptional manager in a smaller company resembles. There are many who objectify their employees. I’ve even met some who despise their employees. I can usually tell how an employer feels when I drop by to present Aflac. Since Aflac requires no money and minimal effort to set up for employees, the employer who won’t listen really doesn’t care. Most don’t.

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Shakti

April 23, 2015

I just spent the weekend with an employer who is helping her worker finish his dissertation on Canadian poetry while assisting another employee with running his personal blog (that has zero relationship with the business, obviously), etc. This is what real modern management looks like.

But she runs a small outfit right? I mean, it’s difficult to run a truly small business and treat people like conveyor belt products. I knew a lot of friend type information about everyone without really trying, even if I wasn’t actually their friend. (The people I worked with tended not to have interesting sidelines outside of work, ymmv.) That quote in your post sounds like a guy in a manufacturing facility with hundreds of people with conveyor belts because commutes of 50 miles are not enjoyable.

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Clarissa

April 23, 2015

The manufacturing facility is dead. The future belongs to smaller companies that invest in talent and individuality. Of course, there is a negative side to the phenomenon. Namely, there is a growing chasm with those who manage to offer themselves up as talented individuals and those who are relegated to the global underclass. That underclass is not going to a manufacturing facility, though. That stage is in the past.

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1. Shakti
  
  April 23, 2015
  
  Oh I agree the manufacturing facility is never going to employ a lot of people again, and will continue to decease. Though if it’s not manufacturing or retail or on demand delivery task rabbit app employees, what will the workplace of the underclass look like?
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    April 23, 2015
    
    “hough if it’s not manufacturing or retail or on demand delivery task rabbit app employees, what will the workplace of the underclass look like?”
    
    There won’t be one, I’m afraid. 😦
    
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    1. Shakti
      
      April 24, 2015
      
      This only works if the great masses are at subsistence level. You cannot have such a high level of civilizational support for a few and then have overwhelming masses of unoccupied people struggling with Maslow’s 1st level.
      
      It’s a fact that people have chosen not to reduce everyone’s workweek like they hypothesized in the Jetsons, and the nation-states trending away from welfare of any kind even the kind where you do unpaid labor for a certain amount of labor for benefits (like food stamps). This slack will not be picked up by corporations of any size (the erosion of “benefits” is well underway if not complete).
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        April 24, 2015
        
        In Spain and in France today unemployment is at >25%. And it/s at >50% among the young. Obviously, all these people are neither starving nor going around naked. This is not a problem of starvation or of subsistence level. This is, rather, a problem of an enormous loss of human potential. All of these millions of young people in Spain have their gadgets, cell phones, social media profiles, etc. They have their basic needs covered. But their lives are thwarted because they are passing their formative years in this pointless, vague existence, unable to find a place for themselves. I just read an autobiographical book by one of them. It’s called I’m Precarious, and it’s extremely sad.
        
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    2. Jones
      
      April 24, 2015
      
      You are already logged into your new workplace
      
      This thought transgression has been noted by your employer and been made part of your permanent file
      
      Your statutory rights under The Employment Rights Act 1996 have not been affected
      
      This is a recorded announcement as we are all out on the golf course getting gobsmacked on premium label Scotch
      
      🙂
      
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2. Jones
  
  April 24, 2015
  
  The manufacturing facility as a speculative venture in producing lots of nearly identical widgets is certainly dead …
  
  … and yet, if you take a look at some of the mid-sized factories around places such as Shenzhen, it’s still quite alive.
  
  If I want ten thousand or more of said nearly identical widgets, especially if they’re electronics or something required bespoke plastics forming, there are a number of firms in Shenzhen alone who will shepherd me through the process.
  
  The difference is that these factories behave like shops that provide exceptionally good value for the investments required, which is not something typically offered by older monolithic manufacturing centres in the West.
  
  Again, the future is more of Prince and MRP2 and less of Fordism and Taylorism …
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    April 24, 2015
    
    With increased automatization and robotization, the likelihood that the number of blue-collar jobs in manufacturing will grow is really non-existent. I just don’t see any trend pointing to growth in this area.
    
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    1. Jones
      
      April 24, 2015
      
      This of course means it’s a commodity business, and as such the best advantage for survival is to present flexibility and options …
      
      Machinists for large-scale automation became CNC programmers and specialists for smaller-scale automation. The workforce that services the machines changed just as the machines themselves changed.
      
      You might be interested in the revolution known as “just-in-time manufacturing” …
      
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
      
      There’s even a hospital version of this system:
      
      http://www.voanews.com/content/us-hospital-turns-to-toyota-for-management-inspiration–121165799/163553.html
      
      Prince is a well-known process management system and MRP2 is its quasi-competitor for supply chains:
      
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_resource_planning
      
      Essentially, large computer systems, databases, and advances in algorithmics have made the 1950s style of mass producer of widgets obsolete.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        April 24, 2015
        
        “Essentially, large computer systems, databases, and advances in algorithmics have made the 1950s style of mass producer of widgets obsolete.”
        
        Exactly. And every person who is capable of bringing value in the new economy is worth their weight in gold.
        
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April 23, 2015

“What will the workplace of the underclass look like?”

It will look like the workplace of adjunct professors who hop from university to university like medieval mendicants while muttering about the Martyrdom of Saint Vojtko the Adjunct.

I just bought a copy of “The Age of Acquiescence” by Steve Fraser. I’ll let you know what I think after I finish it.

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Jones

April 24, 2015

“The friends in question are idiots and losers who have managed not to notice that Fordism is dead and gone. Successful managers today barf when they hear the expression ‘human resources’ and don’t see their employees as conveyor belt workers.”

Unfortunately Clarissa, this is instead a sort of pressed-down “disinterested investor” mindset, rather than a return to Fordism or Taylorism.

The idea is that a company that’s sufficiently large would be in business to produce “shareholder value”, and that in order to do that, you have to be somewhat of a tough bastard and “sack up” to sackings and that sort of thing.

In order not to be tied too closely to the workings of a particular facility that comes under your management, based on the presumption that one day you’ll have to sack everyone, it becomes desirable to the upper management that your middle managers don’t live near these facilities.

Otherwise they’ll do something entirely rational and predictable, which is that they’ll do what middle managers are supposed to do: they try to defend the people and resources under their management, and they’ll do their best to keep from closing facilities and sacking people.

The “disinterested investor” doesn’t care about these things, and instead cares about whatever maximises shareholder value, since that’s the metric by which the company is typically measured by through trading in markets and stock valuation.

This is essentially no different than what Joel Bakan argues in his books on how corporations behave, but of course he’s pointing this out as a dysfunctional way in which to behave.

A current case example of how “sacking up” to sackings proves to be rather gutless is what’s going on with Tesco: they’ve closed shops across the UK that weren’t producing enough profit, and those shops are sitting derelict. Tesco just took a £6.4 billion hit on its profits and losses sheet because of these closures.

Of course, the management simply reacted to shareholder pressure that they Must Do Something Quickly, and what they’ve done is that they’ve quickly produced a loss so enormous that perhaps they’ll shed this kind of shareholder entirely.

Some investors have already gone on record to say that this wasn’t very imaginative, that Tesco could have perhaps created a “Tesco Properties Plc” to manage the conversion of their larger properties into mixed-use developments, for instance, that simply shuttering the shops was itself a further sign of mis-management.

But if the management that’s responsible for the closing of the Tesco in Doncaster, for instance, doesn’t live anywhere near it, then of course they don’t really have a feeling for self-preservation.

It’s the survival instinct in business, the drive to self-preservation, to ensuring that the people who work with you are still with you the next day, that’s a sign of competent management.

I’d rather be a private investor in a company that’s held mostly privately and not primarily traded in public markets, but then again, that also requires competent investors instead of those who are only seeking “shareholder value” as a short-term speculative strategy.

Activist investors may be a part of solving the problem, but they are just as likely to be a horrible pressure on the business to do the wrong things for the wrong reasons. I could perhaps defend doing the wrong things for the right reasons, provided that the company didn’t shed core values along with core valuation.

Fordism and Taylorism are more suited toward speculative production anyway, rather than the “just-in-time” strategies of today, such as Prince and MRP2 …

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Clarissa

April 24, 2015

My sister was interviewing a candidate last week. He had a huge likelihood of getting hired until he said he was looking either at my sister’s company or at Facebook. After which she lost all interest in him and moved on. The reason is that there are two very different kinds of people: those who want to work for large corporations and those who are done with fordism and want something different. Of course, even huge corporations are realizing that the previous model is dead. Hence Google’s clumsy song and dance around the employees.

What bothers me, though, is that we keep conflating the world of business with McDonald’s and Ford, as if the millions of small companies that are doing super exciting things and changing the world of employment did not exist. And I’m trying to change that way of talking about business by pointing out how much there is outside of these unwieldy monstrous Walmarts and Tescos. Yes, they exist and yes, they are horrible. But there is a lot beyond them, and that is where the future is.

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1. Shakti
  
  April 24, 2015
  
  What bothers me, though, is that we keep conflating the world of business with McDonald’s and Ford, as if the millions of small companies that are doing super exciting things and changing the world of employment did not exist.
  These business publications don’t write about McDonald’s and Ford and the like which employ lots of people for low wages; they write about startups which have a high valuation but employ relatively few people (like Facebook and Google.) I have trouble seeing a very personal relationship between workers and the management as a trend rather than something encouraged by the size and type of company. If I start hearing of that management as some kind of Business Insider trend, I immediately conjure up the friend type of activities I had to do that exhausted me in my last office job, which were not mentor like in any way at all. Of course, these people did not share any interests with me at all, let alone intellectual ones.
  
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  1. Jones
    
    April 24, 2015
    
    “Of course, these people did not share any interests with me at all, let alone intellectual ones.”
    
    Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
    
    By which I mean that since you already live a different life from the people you work with, you must continue the process of completing the shift to something even more different …
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      April 24, 2015
      
      “By which I mean that since you already live a different life from the people you work with, you must continue the process of completing the shift to something even more different …”
      
      My sister takes months to hire a new person. Endless interviews, many people, an enormous database, but it’s still hard to find somebody who will click. And this is at a company where no hard skills or specific qualifications are even needed.
      
      It is like the dating process, in more ways than one. 🙂
      
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  2. Clarissa
    
    April 24, 2015
    
    “These business publications don’t write about McDonald’s and Ford and the like which employ lots of people for low wages; they write about startups which have a high valuation but employ relatively few people (like Facebook and Google.) ”
    
    I see no real difference between Google and Walmart. It’s the same humongous structure that encourages extreme conformity among the employees, punishing anybody who stands up in any way. I’m not very interested in them because, as I said, it takes a very special kind of person to want to work for Google and it’s not the kind of person I’m interested in.
    
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    1. Jones
      
      April 24, 2015
      
      Essentially, I think sometimes people really do simply crave fast food. 🙂
      
      What I have to ask of someone is this: why is it that you crave it all the time?
      
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2. Jones
  
  April 24, 2015
  
  I shoulder-surfed someone’s book on the Tube last week that described a four-part model of people in business, where they’re “employees”, “self-employed people”, “business owners”, or “investors” …
  
  I think the narrative of big business and big manufacturing sells well when you’re dealing with “employee” types, and since many people respond well to narratives regarding “employee” types, there’s a degree to which goals are conflated.
  
  It’s not too different from Whyte’s “The Organisation Man”, in which he indicated that it was generally seen as good that the employee’s values converged with that of the large organisation …
  
  These organisations aren’t interesting to me generally because I behave like an “investor” first and “self-employed people” second, mostly because I’m my own employee and I don’t buy people’s business wholesale. But I do understand the necessity of commodity businesses, although I don’t understand why B-schools teach their people to match prevailing social and political narratives.
  
  If anything, they should teach their people to be highly suspicious of people who would do such things …
  
  Back during the heyday of the Organisation Man, my people made millions by investing in the likes of IBM, because that’s where the growth was.
  
  After all, if there are “employees” and “business owners” to exploit …
  
  [sinister smirk] 🙂
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    April 24, 2015
    
    “But I do understand the necessity of commodity businesses, although I don’t understand why B-schools teach their people to match prevailing social and political narratives.”
    
    Business schools have not yet found a way to be even remotely useful. 🙂
    
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