Those who perform love what they’re doing. I’m not saying they like everything they do. That’s something quite different. Everybody has to do a lot of the routine; there’s an enormous amount of the routine. Every great pianist has to do three hours of playing scales each day. And nobody will tell you they love it. You have to do it. It’s not fun, but you enjoy it because even after forty years you still feel the fingers improving. Pianists have a wonderful expression I heard many years ago: “I practice until I have my life in my fingers.” And, sure, it’s a dull routine, but you enjoy it.
The same is true of people I’ve seen in business who enjoy the work. Their routine is: It’s got to be done, and I enjoy it because I enjoy the work. And that is the difference, I believe, not between mediocrity and performing, but between what you call a “learning organization”—one where the whole organization grows and then the process changes—and an organization that maybe does very well but nobody misses it after five o’clock.
It is perhaps the biggest job of the modern corporation—to find a synthesis between justice and dignity, between equality of opportunities and social status and function.
The modern corporation as a child of laissez-faire economics and of the market society is based on a creed whose greatest weakness is the inability to see the need for status and function of the individual in society. In its refusal to concern itself with the unsuccessful majority, the market society was a true child of Calvinism with its refusal to concern itself with the great majority that is not elected to be saved. Following the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, this belief is now expressed usually in the language of Darwinian “survival of the fittest” rather than in theological terms. But this does not alter the fact that the philosophy of the market society only makes sense if the unsuccessful are seen as “rejected by the Lord” with whom to have pity would be as sinful as questioning the decision of the Lord. We can only deny social status and function to the economically unsuccessful if we are convinced that lack of economic success is (a) always a person’s own fault, and (b) a reliable indication of his or her worthlessness as a human personality and as a citizen.
Only the social sector can create what we now need, communities for citizens.
Civilizing the city will increasingly become top priority in all countries—and particularly in the developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. However, neither government nor business can provide the new communities that every major city in the world needs. That is the task of the nongovernmental, nonbusiness, nonprofit organizations. Only the social sector can create what we now need, communities for citizens—and especially for the highly educated knowledge workers who increasingly dominate developed societies. One reason for this is that only nonprofit organizations can provide the enormous diversity of communities we need—for churches to professional associations, form organizations taking care of the homeless to health clubs…
The nonprofit organizations are also the only ones that can satisfy the second need for effective community, the need for effective citizenship. The twentieth century saw an explosive growth of both government and business—especially in the developed countries. What the twenty-first century needs above all is equally explosive growth of the nonprofit social sector in building communities in the newly dominant social environment, the city.
Managements have tended to reject ideas for the self-governing plant community and for the responsible worker as an “encroachment” on their prerogatives.
Of all my work on management and “the anatomy of industrial order,” I consider my ideas for the self-governing plant community and for the responsible worker to be the most important and most original. A self-governing plant community is the assumption of managerial responsibility by the individual employee, the work team, and the employee group alike for the structure of the individual job, for the performance of major tasks, and for the management of such community affairs as shift schedules, vacation schedules, overtime assignments, industrial safety, and, above all, employee benefits.
But managements have tended to reject these ideas as an “encroachment” on their prerogatives. And labor unions have been outright hostile: they are convinced that they need a visible and identifiable “boss,” who can be fought as “the enemy.” Yet what was achieved in these areas in World War II went way beyond anything that is being trumpeted today as a breakthrough, such as the highly publicized attempt to replace the assembly line at some Swedish automobile companies. This actually goes much less far than the assembly lines that have been standard in American industry, not to mention the responsibility factory-floor work teams have assumed routinely at IBM, hardly a particularly “permissive” company.
“All my life as a musician, I have striven for perfection. It has always eluded me. I surely had an obligation to make one more try.”
I have never forgotten these words—they made an indelible impression on me. Verdi, when he was my age, that was eighteen, was of course already a seasoned musician. I had no idea what I would become, except that I knew by that time that I was unlikely to be a success exporting cotton textiles. At eighteen, I was as immature, as callow, as naive as an eighteen-year-old can be. It was not until fifteen years later, when I was in my early thirties, that I really knew what I am good at and where I belong. But I then resolved that, whatever my life’s work should be, Verdi’s words would be my lodestar. I then resolved that if I ever reached an advanced age, I would not give up, but would keep on. In the meantime, I would strive for perfection even though, as I well knew, it would surely always elude me.
Work, we know, is both a burden and a need, both a curse and a blessing. Unemployment we long ago learned creates severe psychological disturbances, not because of economic deprivation, but primarily because it undermines self-respect. Work is an extension of personality. It is achievement. It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself or herself, measures his worth, and his humanity.
It is management’s job to get the right regulation enacted.
To make elimination of a detrimental business impact into a business opportunity should always be attempted. But it cannot be done in many cases. More often eliminating an impact means increasing the costs. What was an “externality” for which the general public paid becomes business cost. It therefore becomes a competitive disadvantage unless everybody in the industry accepts the same rule. And this, in most cases, can be done only by regulation—that means by some form of public action.
Whenever an impact cannot be eliminated without an increase in cost, it becomes incumbent upon management to think ahead and work out the regulation that is most likely to solve the problem at the minimum cost and with the greatest benefit to public and business alike. And it is then management’s job to work at getting right regulation enacted. Management—and not only business management—has shunned this responsibility.
Inflation is the greatest threat to retired people on pensions.
Ever since the Great Depression, unemployment has been seen as both the endemic and the most dangerous disease of modern society and economy. Under pension-fund socialism, inflation can be expected to take over both roles instead. Inflation is the greatest threat to the retired people on pensions, and an equally great one to the workers over fifty with an increasing stake in the future purchasing power of their retirement benefits. Together, these two groups constitute a near-majority of the adult population. These two groups, as a result of pension-fund socialism, have a far greater interest in preventing inflation than ever existed before. A substantial constituency of this kind, sharing a common concern, is by definition a major “interest group” in the American political system and a potent political force. At the same time unemployment is far less of a threat, if a threat at all, for the “constituency” of the pension funds, that is, retired people and older workers.
