Looking for a positive purpose

I’m always on the lookout for books which challenge how we look at the world.  A few years back I read a really original book - The Puritan Gift (2003) – which told a powerful story of how and why American business had changed its values in the second half of the 20th Century. No less a figure than Russell Ackoff wrote a foreword calling it simply

“one of the best books I have ever read in my long life – a social history of the American nation which also doubles up as a commentary on managerial culture”

I blogged about it at the time but the book’s theme and message does deserve broadcasting….

It was written by two brothers (then in their 80s) who had migrated from Scotland in their youth and it argues that the mid-20th century strength of American business, and the prosperity and cultural confidence it created, was due to key characteristics inherited from the country's founding fathers, the Puritan dissenters. The authors list these characteristics as:

- a sense of moral purpose in life;

- a liking and aptitude for mechanical skills;

- collegiality, giving the group priority over individual interests; and organizational ability.

“The Puritan Gift is a rare ability to create organizations that serve a useful purpose, and to manage them well.”

Sadly but all too typically, the book seems to have been ignored by the management scribblers – although it is still in print. About the only person to review it seems to have been Diane Coyle to whose excellent blog I’m indebted for the following summary –

The book starts with a history of the early days and heyday of US corporations, using an Armory in Springfield, Massachussetts as a case study which illustrated the importance not only of technical know-how and innovation – but of good employer standards and collegiality – sharing know-how and best practice with other gun-makers.

One fascinating chapter describes the transplantation of this American approach to Japanese business through the actions of three communications engineers employed in the MacArthur occupation. The Japanese communications and electronics industry was remade in the image of the best of America, and the Hoppers attribute the success of the consumer electronics industry to the adoption of these management practices. A war-destroyed, impoverished country became the world's second biggest economy in the space of three decades.

Decay set in early, however, and the Hoppers' first villain is Frederick W Taylor. He started the process of turning efficient organisational structures into social hierarchies, with top managers increasingly less likely to be engineers or technicians working their way up from the shop floor.

Business schools continued this evisceration of the actual process of business, creating a professional cadre of managers, superior in status in pay, and with purely financial and abstract knowledge in place of the tacit skills and experience previously displayed by management cohorts. The downfall was completed by the steadily increasing celebration of greed, sucking the moral heart out of American capitalism.

Coyle completes her review by saying –

It's hard to disagree with the outlines of this argument, harder to know what to do about it. The final part of the book is a brief attempt to suggest some ideas, with a list of 25 principles of Puritan management. Most of these seem very sensible without setting the heart racing.

The key aspect of the Puritan Gift seems to be the sense of purpose. As John Kay has argued (in The Foundations of Corporate Success), a good business is one with a clear sense of purpose. The profits are a by-product, but without the core purpose there is no hope of sustained profitability.

Discussion about the purpose of companies ebbs and flows…..The notion of “stakeholders” was much discussed in the 1990s as a more useful concept than the much-criticised one of “shareholder value” which had emerged from the greedy 1980s. Such discussions do not these days attract much interest - but a much more interesting one hopefully got underway recently – partly sparked by talk of the “platform economy” and books such as Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations to which I dedicated a post a few months back.    

If I have one point to draw from my (relatively) long life, it is that we need to return to this fundamental question of purpose. And to take more seriously the question of the nature of the “good society”, the “good organisation”, the “good city”.

I know we get embarrassed by such phrases – so by all means let’s talk instead of the “healthy society”….. the “healthy organisation”……”healthy cities”…….(as did Robin Skynner and John Cleese in their 1990 book "Life - and How to Survive it!")

Update; apparently the British Academy started a new programme in 2017 on “the future of the corporation” I learned this from Paul Collier’s new book "The Future of Capitalism – facing the new anxieties” (2018) which, so far in my reading, I’m finding a very exciting read – imbued with a moral passion economists don’t normally like to display. Its opening pages use Jonathan Haidt’s analysis in “The Righteous Mind” to give one of the most incisive treatments of our present social malaise I have read in the past few decades.