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.
