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The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
THE INTERNSHIP , a film about two middle-aged no-hopers who land work
experience at Google, is a dire offering even by the standards of Hollywood
summer comedies. But it does get one thing right: that it is rather absurd for
a technology firm to provide slides for staff to play on, and to let them wear
silly propeller-hats. Google is not alone in its juvenile tastes. Box, a
Silicon Valley company, has installed swings in its headquarters. Red Bull, an
energy-drinks firm, has a reception desk in the shape of a giant skateboard in
its London office. Businesses of all types have moved towards sitting workers
in groups in open-plan rooms, just like at nursery school. Time was when firms
modelled themselves on the armed forces, with officers (who thought about
strategy) and chains of command. Now many model themselves on
learning-through-play Montessori schools.
Montessori management has plenty of supporters in the higher reaches of
business. The bosses of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Amazon (Jeff
Bezos) and Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales) were all educated in Montessori schools. So
was Will Wright, a video-game pioneer. Messrs Page and Brin credit their
Montessori education with their enthusiasm for thinking differently. Mr Bezos
thanks it for his enthusiasm for experimentation for planting seeds and
going down blind alleys as he puts it. Mr Wright says SimCity comes right out
of Montessori .
The nostrums of some management gurus sound remarkably like those of the
progressive educationalists of the 1960s. For example Gary Hamel, of London
Business School, and Jeffrey Pfeffer, of Stanford Business School, praise
companies that dismantle hierarchies and encourage experimentation. It is not
just rich-world businesses that are buying into this philosophy: HCL
Technologies, an Indian software company, invites workers to write assessments
of their bosses and publishes them.
But it would be wrong to conclude that the success of Google and Amazon
vindicates Montessori management. Both companies have pragmatically mixed
progressive ideas with more traditional ones such as encouraging internal
competition and measuring performance. Mr Bezos is also an enthusiastic
employer of ex-military personnel. As in education, where traditionalists have
staged a counter-revolution against the progressives, some academics are now
questioning Montessori management s basic assumptions particularly its faith in
free-flowing creativity, endless collaboration and all things open-plan.
For example, Morten Hansen of the University of California, Berkeley studied
182 teams who were trying to win a contract on behalf of a
professional-services firm. He found that the more time they spent consulting
others, the less likely they were to win a deal. This shows, he says, that
collaboration has costs as well as benefits. These need to be weighed against
each other, instead of simply assuming that the more teamwork the better.
Mark de Rond, a Cambridge academic who once rowed for the university, argues
that the most successful teams are marked by internal competition and clashing
egos as well as Kum Bay Yah -style togetherness. A focus on interpersonal
harmony can actually hurt team performance, he suggests. Jake Breeden, a
management thinker at Duke Corporate Education, worries that too much reliance
on teamwork can create a culture of learned helplessness in which managers
are terrified to take decisions without yet another round of consultations.
Excessive collaboration can lead to the very opposite of creativity:
groupthink, conformity and mediocrity. It is especially damaging at the top of
an organisation. BlackBerry, a smartphone-maker, believed that having two CEOs
with complementary skills would produce the best of both worlds: Jim Balsillie
was a professional manager and Mike Lazaridis was a technician. The company
soon discovered the truth of Napoleon s dictum that one bad general is worth
two good ones .
According to one survey around 70% of all offices in America have gone
open-plan. Yet evidence is mounting that this is a bad idea. Over the past five
years Gensler, a design firm, has asked more than 90,000 people in 155
companies in ten industries what they think of this way of working. It has
found an astonishing amount of antipathy. Workers say that open-plan offices
make it more difficult to concentrate, because the hubbub of human and
electronic noise is so distracting. What they really value is the ability to
focus on their jobs with as few distractions as possible. Ironically, going
open-plan defeats another of Montessori management s main objectives: workers
say it prevents them from collaborating, because they cannot talk without
disturbing others or inviting an audience. Other studies show that people who
work in open-plan offices are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure,
stress and airborne infections such as flu.
Time for some discipline and separate offices
It was the unthinking and indiscriminate application of child-centred education
techniques, with little attention paid to outcomes, that eventually brought
about a backlash. The more thoughtful critics did not wish to turn the clock
back entirely and return to rote learning and tyrannical teachers; they simply
said that structure and order have their place too. The same seems to be
happening now in business. Mr Breeden argues, sensibly, that managers should
treat collaboration and creativity as techniques rather than dogmas. Diane
Hoskins of Gensler speculates that her company s findings about open-plan
offices are so striking that they may mark the beginning of a new era in
workplace organisation . When workers start being moved back into separate
booths, and the office slide is replaced with a noticeboard bearing a list of
staff instructions, you will know that the counter-revolution is well under
way.