The Rise and Fall of the British Manager

147 Pages·1977·14.939 MB·English

by  Alistair Mant (auth.)

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BRITISH MANAGER
THE RISE AND FALL
OF THE BRITISH
MANAGER
Alistair Mant
Illustrations by the author
© Alistair Mont 1977
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1977
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1977 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in Delhi
Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos
Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo
Typeset in Great Britain by
COMPUT ACOMP (UK) LTD
Fort William
This book is sold subject
to the standard conditions
of the Net Book Agreement
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Mont, Alistair
The rise and fall of the British manager.
1. Executives -Great Britain 2. Management
History
/. Title
658.4'0041 HD30.5
ISBN 978-1-349-03067-5 ISBN 978-1-349-03065-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03065-1
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements vii
Introduction Management-What Does it Mean? 1
1 The Unguistics of Management 4
2 The Rise of the British Manager 14
3 A Culture of Dependence 35
so
4 The Post-War Managers
5 A Word for the Product 54
6 Management Development - A New Priesthood 70
7 The Informal World of Management Development 80
8 Management Education 100
9 The Case for a National Neurosis 109
10 Fighting the Good Fight 116
Conclusion 135
Select Bibliography 137
Index 141
PREFACE AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to be able to advise the reader how to approach this book but I
om not sure how to. The whole hongs together for me but it will not
necessarily do so for anyone else. The book has only got written because I
found myself unable to ftnish another book, of a more technical kind. In the
closing stages of that work, certain inappropriate ideas and phrases kept
obtruding onto the page, until it become clear that there was another book
in the system, demanding to be let out. More to the point, there was on
accumulation of experience in different places and roles that required some
kind of summary, however tentative, in order for me to be able to move
onto the new work.
Eerily, it was just then that I read Liom Hudson's marvellous dissection of
the world of research - The Cult of the Fact. In the opening chapter, he
describes the genesis of that book in exactly the some terms; the only
difference being, he managed to get the original book done. It is probably
more than coincidence that, at that time, my age was, within a year or so,
the some as Hudson's when his own foetal book unexpectedly popped out.
Therefore,·if this book is a kind of effusion of mid-life then the reader would
not expect it, to use Jaques' word, to be too carefully 'sculpted'. Indeed, I
would dearly love to rewrite about half of it, but there isn't time; its time has
come.
But what is it? Oddly, I didn't grasp this until, late in the day, I began to
write the blurb material for Macmillan. Then it become clear that the book
represents the confluence of four distinct streams of personal experience:
Hoving read history and never quite recovering from the force of the
experience.
A long association with some of the great ftgures out of the post-war
To vistock Institute and thus, on association with those tenuous links
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
between the human sub-conscious and the strange things people do at
work.
A 'career' in industry and the inevitable fund of anecdotes arising out of
this, from the surreal to the grisly.
A life-time's fascination with words and the uses and misuses to which
they are put.
I count myself an amateur in history, social science, management and
linguistics but the combination of all four provided, for me, a slant on the
topic of 'management' which I have missed elsewhere.
To a certain extent, I have aimed the analysis at Britain and British
industry but, it seems to me, that the message may really be for the other
English-speaking cultures (they have all inherited the word 'management')
and for those outside the world of business and industry whose
psychological projections into it help to make it what it is. Both Americans
and Australians resent the Englishness of some of their institutions, but that
doesn't make it go away and the historian in me suggests there is much to
learn in both countries from what has already happened in Britain.
I owe a substantial debt to many people who have contributed,
voluntarily or otherwise, to the ideas in this book. In chronological order, I
must begin with Dr W. R. Bion, whom I have never met, but whose writings
on the 'basic assumptions' of Fight and Dependence seem to me to be so
apposite for an understanding of modern Britain. Professor John Morris
introduced me to serious 'management education' and helped me,
amongst other things, to see how funny a lot of it was. The late Dr A. K. Rice,
with whom I count it a privilege to have worked, demonstrated how to keep
Fight alive in Dependent settings. Professor Reg Revans, in his far-seeing
educational designs for managers, simply operationalised commonsense
and got himself virtually ostracized for his pains. Like Rice, he knows
something about the relevance of Fight in a culture of Dependence. Finally,
Dr Eric Miller and Bruce Reed have helped me in recent research work in the
management field (funded, for the most part, by the Social Science Research
Council of Great Britain). In fact, many of the· better ideas in this book
emanated from discussions with Bruce Reed and it is here my debt is
greatest. It was Rice who said 'Fight is not a problem in itself; the problem is
to locate the Fights between the right people, about the right issues, at the
right time.' The group above spans a world of disciplines - psychoanalysis,
psychology, engineering, operations research, anthropology and theology.
They are all, however, fighters and that is the point.
Finally, I am grateful beyond words to Rita Friend for typing, retyping and
generally nurturing the manuscript through to completion.
INTRODUCTION
MANAGEMENT- WHAT DOES IT
MEAN?
The idea for this book came originally from two apparently quite different
experiences. One was connected with the experience of getting married
and having children. In those days I was styled a 'manager' and my wife, so
far as the tax people were concerned, was a 'housewife'. I can remember
well the blessed relief of leaving my house and its attendant chaos each
morning to go off to my oh-so-demanding 'management' job. In what
sense, I had to ask myself in the end, was my wife not 'managing' and in
what sense was my work more difficult or more essentially managerial than
hers? At work, I had another woman to make sure I managed properly. This
one was paid, indeed positively relied on, to nag me about detail in
precisely the way that my wife was (and is) not allowed to. This one wasn't
styled a 'manager' either, but the same essential question held good for her;
in what sense is the work of a secretary not managerial.
By this time, I was beginning to be worried about the meaning of
'management' and 'manager'-if they meant anything at all. There was, of
course, a largish industry, to which I belonged, in management literature,
management education, management development and all the rest of it,
but, what was it all about? Could all those people - the pundits - the
professors-the managers themselves be on about nothing or, more likely,
could they be on about so many things that it made no sense at all to lump
them together under the banner 'management'.
The other experience led me in exactly the same direction. I found myself
asked by a senior sales manager of a big multinational firm to examine a
department that was, in his estimation, not 'professional' enough in its
performance. My ears pricked up at the mention of the word 'professional'
because it happens to be another of those words that often seems to mean
nothing at all, or so much that one word won't do. So far as he was
concerned, this department, a 'marketing support' department had
objectives handed down from above that were not being achieved and so,
1
2 The Rise and Fall of the British Manager
he assumed, the logical thing to do was to attempt to narrow the gap
between aspiration and performance.
The first, and fundamental, discovery about this 'unprofessional' group of
men was that no one, save the manager, had been there longer than two
years and, what's more, such had always been the case. Without continuity,
there was no way, in my view, that 'professional' levels of performance
could be achieved when the task was to supply quite complex information
to the field about products, prices, specifications and sa on. Before we tried
to change the performance level, it seemed to make sense to ask why a
biggish sub-system of a major firm could so delude itself about its situation
for sa long. The answer, in hindsight, was fairly simple; salesmen get tired -
they have a lousy job, largely devoid of legitimacy in the eyes of society and
they live on their nerves. Rejection of the product by the customer feels like
personal rejection because the salesman, to a large extent, uses himself to
sell it. Much as he would like to, he can't linger too long with his favourite
clients - not if he want<; to make any money that week.
No wonder then that salesmen will frequently do anything to get into
'management'-into work which society deems clean rather than dirty and
where you can actually compel people to do things for a change. Most of
the salesmen I know tend to be in debt up to their eyeballs, but they still
seem to be prepared to accept a substantial drop in earnings in order to
enter the magic brotherhood of 'management'. If only you could promote
all the salesmen into management everything would be fine - until you
went broke, of course.
Which brings us back to 'marketing support' and its true function in life,
namely, casualty clearing station for shell-shocked salesmen-a place to go
for a couple of years under the guise of 'broadening' or some other
euphemism, but with no commitment to promotion. Why not just call it a
casualty clearing station?-that would mean facing up to what the sales life
does to people and, for that matter, to their marriages and most
commercial firms haven't arrived at that point yet.
The story has two morals. One, it is apparently worth making a lot of
sacrifices· to retreat from the field into a tiny office or cubicle with 'manager'
on the door. Two, there is a paradox in the manager-salesman relationship;
the salesman's job is shot through with technical skill, leadership and
trusteeship - he goes into the environment and, sa to speak, takes the skin
of the organization with him when he goes; - he is the organization so far
as his prospects and clients experience it. His implicit authority is almost
boundless; all he is really accountable for is to bring home the bacon. How
he does it is up to him.
His 'manager', on the other hand, occupies the archetypal 'Mickey
Mouse' job. He has to control the salesmens' creative energies so that the
market place is made to adapt to last month's production schedules, rather
Introduction 3
than vice versa. He has to tot up the figures and pass them on for higher
order collation like any postboy; and, he is supposed to 'motivate' the
salesmen - that is, to try to cause grown men to become excited over some
bauble put up as the monthly sales contest prize. If a salesman has
something important on his mind, he will probably go at least two up the
line to talk about it, leap-frogging the interposing 'Mickey Mouse', in search
of a mature dependency figure.
Of course, it depends how you define management but, to all intents and
purposes, it seemed to me that the salesmen, for all their frailties, did a deal
of 'managing' and the first-line manager hardly any at all. Taken together,
these anecdotes seem to me to have some pungency. In a country patently
unable to compete successfully in international trade and rapidly
approaching collective poverty, the jobs of salesman and housewife seem
to take on a special importance. The one, because it creates wealth directly
and the other because it provides the glue to hold together communities in
danger of falling apart and does so cheaper and more humanely than the
local social services manager.
Yet, for many people, the burden for putting things right seems to rest
primarily on the shoulders of the 'managers' - that is, those people who
have managed to put details behind them in order to concentrate on the
'broad picture'. I don't have anything against the broad picture, but I know
that the only really successful managers I have met manage to do both -to
keep an eye on the big things that count while paying meticulous attention
to the little things that count as well. There is not a lot of point in
understanding child psychology backwards if you don't attend to (say) dirty
nappies, or cut knees, at precisely the time the fates decree that you must.
Any production manager worth his salt understands this - i.e. that the
operation of a factory calls for the same, almost feminine, capacity to sense
that something horrible is about to happen, just before it does. It is not a
sense, or instinct, that is kept alive by that total absorption in the broad
picture that many managers seem to think represents their role in life. This
provides us with a further irony of the scene - the low status of production,
vis-a-vis other specialisms, in a country desperately in need of products that
halfway sell themselves on quality alone.
The puzzle, then, is to understand why we downgrade so many of the
jobs that really matter whilst building around the idea of 'management' a
plethora of myths, shibboleths and incantations which our most successful
competitors seem to be able to do without. When I sat down to write this, I
had in mind the thousands of young men and (more so, now) women who
will be taking on the role of 'manager' in the future. What on earth will they
make of it and how can they be helped to understand that, if
'management' doesn't mean running things properly (no excuses) then it
doesn't really mean anything at all.