what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Friday, May 17, 2019

Workforce Management – real dignity

You will not generally find me extolling books with titles which refer to “reinvention” – we all had our fingers burned in the 1980s and 1990s with names such as Hammer, Osborne and Gore overhyping that particular concept.
But Reinventing Organisations – a guide to creating organisations inspired by the next stage of human consciousness (2014) by Frederic Laloux is that rare thing - a highly readable and inspiring book. It starts with a strong attack on the alienating nature of so much work in large organisations - and a question about whether it needs to be so.

Highly-automated assembly lines began to appear at the end of the last Century but it is only recently that David Graeber and others have drawn attention to the scale of alienation (a staggering 80% of employees in the developed world find their work brings absolutely no satisfaction). Indeed a new term - the “bullshit job” came into circulation to describe the meaningless nature of most work these days.
Laloux suggests that organisations, until now, can be classified into four types to which he gives colours - Red, Amber, Orange and Green – with the guiding metaphors for these types (p 36 of the book) being
-               “wolf pack”,
-               “army”,
-               “machine” and
-               “family”.

This all reminds me of the four “Gods of management” a joint creation of both Charles Handy and the rather more neglected  Roger Harrison – whose fascinating “final reflections” (accessible by clicking the hyperlink) speak to a wider theme which has become central to the redrafting of my “Dispatches to a future generation”. But that’s for another post so let’s move on…..

The core of Laloux’s book consists of his portrayal of organisations which had broken out of the limits of this typology - and were giving both customers and staff satisfaction. Twelve organisations are identified and their history structure and processes detailed.
They are both profit and non-profit but have one basic feature in common – they are all managed by the workforce - with senior executives (such as are left in a streamlined structure) playing essentially a coaching role…..
The most famous of these is probably the Dutch nursing cooperative Buurtzorg

There’s a lot of thought-provoking material in the book which, after an initial splash 3 years ago, has not been much heard of – despite it being the first management book for a long time to focus on worker control (in a  totally non-ideological way).
Perhaps the thrust of the argument challenged too many people?
-               the theorists – for attributing so little to them. And
-               the ideologues who would have preferred some slogans…..

I referred yesterday to a much-hyped article – The New Practice of Public Problem Solving – which I hope to get around to discussing in the next post. But I felt that readers should first be aware of the history sketched out in these two posts….

main Laloux website
- You can read the book for yourself here – but you can get the gist in the summary given in the hyperlink in the title above; and some good slides here. And you can see Laloux in action here

Reviews of Laloux book

Other useful reading
-       Alternative Models of Ownership (UK Labour party 2017) - basically about coops, social enterprise and worker-controlled organisations,
-       Ahistorical article https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42488947.pdf


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