I was talking to an old man in a
bar the other day. He is a retired engineer from a major corporation in this
area. He spent his life in the this company and has many fond memories of that
life. He now is back in the company as a consultant and wonders what happened
to that company he loved so much, as he celebrates the fact that he is no
longer an employee there.
This started me wondering, as I
prepare to teach two graduate courses this week, both on the topic of how to
build effective organizations. What constitutes an effective organization?
The man with whom I spoke talked
of the days when the owners of this large company would routinely make the
rounds of work stations and talk to employees. The owners knew the names of
most of the people and called the folks by name. Many employees had worked for
the company all their lives. There seemed to be mutual respect. The company did
well.
The company was doing so well that it
was sold. The new corporation is managed by young, ambitious
business-school-graduates who came with new ideas, most revolving around
production metrics and formulated motivation tools. They made no effort to know
the people. The working people have jobs to do and are expected to their
jobs and continually increase production. Levels of mutual respect have
declined. Employees who could have retired. Turnover for the rest increased
dramatically.
But the company is doing well.
These two organizations (company before
sale/company after sale) point to two different ways of organizing to do business.
In the days of Frederick Taylor,
and the concepts of “labor” and “capital”, organizations were designed so as to
facilitate smooth running humans-as-replaceable-cogs-in-the-machine called the
organization, thus decreasing the “cost of labor” as much as possible.
W. Edwards Deming thought organizations should be designed so as to capitalize the best performance of human
beings, defined as thinking, talking-back, important partners in the execution of an
organization’s business, through the development and implementation of
effective processes.
In Taylor’s idea, individual people
were expendable. In Deming’s way of thinking, individual people were important
and, rather than being seen as costs,
should be seen as worthy investments.
I wonder that if people are replaceable and
appear on the “cost” side of the ledger, companies focus on creating jobs
within their organizations. If people are investments, I wonder if companies focus on
creating careers within their organizations.
In talking to working people as I
wander around the country, I wonder if we (companies and the U.S. in general)
have moved away from Deming’s idea and toward Taylor’s in defining what
effective work organizations should look like. I wonder what effect this might
have on the economic health and vitality of the country.
