Deaf, blind and dumb: businesses, workers and State moving in different directions

Recently I had the fantastic chance to read a script of the BBC serie, “The gurus of management”, related to Charles Handy’s ideas.

What impressed me about Handy’s reflections was his critical analysis of management and his vision of some of its specific consequences impacting in society. It was more worth reading to me than any other approach about how to do things in this field or, perhaps, practical lists of steps to follow by managers.

From an ethical analysis, Handy developed a warning about “predatory capitalism” that puts profits before people. It seems to be reflections from the political left, but it’s not (or maybe not only). It is an ethical view of business and its responsibility with society. Something which is not given enough thought, and many times has been forgotten also with an ancient spirit of capitalism (surely based on a protestant vision). Handy, a son of a Protestant minister, recognize some philosophical underpinning on his ideas.

As well as Drucker mentioned many years ago, Handy talked about business as something more than a machine to make money. “It can’t be profits for the owners, with no thoughts for anyone else”, he said. Both Drucker and Handy were talking about a common idea: the social responsibility of business management.

Before to develop this interesting line of analysis, Handy explained the way he began to worry about a big problem: the fast changes of the world of work. He said: “Organizations were getting smaller in their numbers even while they seemed to be growing in size”.

We are living this now: companies plan to be twice as efficient in five years time and produce three times as much, but with just half people employed. How? So easy: subcontracting and outsourcing services that others can do better, leaving for a few employees inside just a bit of work in the chain of production. That little piece where you are the best. It needs more specialization.

It sounds good for companies, but, what about workers?

What was interesting to Handy, was not the reengineering of the companies and the procedures for doing so. But the impact of this evolution for people. Individual working lives which, in my opinion, are not prepared enough for these changes and even more, they are living in a social system not adapted and not structured for facilitating these new labour conditions.

What I can see in this scenario is: business, workers, and social structures of State, moving and evolving at different speeds, with different needs, and directions. Perhaps a delicate fracture of the world we have to live in. And business management shouldn’t ignore this.

But I would like to delve more deeply into Handy’s ideas from this BBC script. You should be wondering: ok, but if subcontracting and outsourcing is working out, it means that there are even more diversified new companies, even more specialized service businesses, and perhaps more small entrepreneurs. New competencies. Yes, a new adaptation. Handy said: “We have to develop what I called ‘portfolio’ lives, a mix of different bits and pieces of work”. And here, to me, the string breaks.

Perhaps workers are not very oriented on that direction. They are not educated or haven’t learned how to work out this way. We are talking about generations that grew up in a family, a school, a university and, in general, in a social context which is focused on a former model, where it is expected that you have to gain one degree, and even another one, introduce yourself into a “solid” and long lived big company which, it is supposed, will let you develop your capabilities (and specialize for your only one client: your company) until you get older and retire. For many people this is the only way they can work out. And of course, children are learning this model at school right now.

I think schools still believe that society works in that way, and of course, banks, and health care system and justice. Everybody. Except a new management, the new business which is laying off (or retiring) people every day in their mid-working lives, reducing their workforce and telling you: “sorry, we are going to keep just young and fresh-minded people, very keen in adapting to new ways of working (and also cheaper workforce)”.

Handy said it: “Half of the working population would not be full-time employees by year 2000.The problem was that we weren’t preparing people for this sort of independent existence. We had institutionalized them, letting them think that the organization would look after them until they retired and would then support them by a pension”.

So, what is the way out?

Let people prepare to adapt to this unstable and variable world of work.

“We need more why? and how? in our education, and less what?, because the knowledge component of life is changing all the time”, Handy said. Even more, knowledge isn’t substitute of other necessary skills in this changing world: taking responsibility for ones own life, for working for others, for problem-solving, for decisions making, for communicating, and risk taking. These are the very specialization of the new workers.

It doesn’t seem to be management, does it? But it has to do with it.