2013-07-29 05:33:44
Once upon a time there were only workers and owners, but then the age of the
manager dawned, explains Lucy Kellaway.
There are five million managers in the UK today, 10 times as many as there were
100 years ago.
Even if you don't actually manage anyone, your title pretends you do. A
conductor is a train manager. An administrator is an office manager. A
technician is an IT manager.
We've all become obsessed with management. Any self-respecting executive will
now have an MBA, a shelf full of management books, and a vocabulary stuffed
with "key deliverables" and "scalable solutions".
And yet we were able to get through the industrial revolution without having
any "masters of business administration" at all. No-one thought of management
then - the very word manager wasn't widely applied to business until the 20th
Century.
"There's an earlier set of meanings of management, one is to do with managing
the household, from the French word menager," says Chris Grey, professor of
organisation studies at Royal Holloway University.
"But it also has a meaning, in popular early 19th Century culture, of
dishonesty. A manager was someone who will run off with your money. Someone
like a cowboy builder taking your business, getting control of it, and running
off. Manager meant something quite disreputable, quite unprofessional."
In The Wealth of Nations, author Adam Smith shares his suspicions.
"The directors of companies, being the managers rather of other people's money
than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it
with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private
co-partnery frequently watch over their own."
In the UK, we still distrust our managers, sometimes with good cause. The way
Fred Goodwin brought down the Royal Bank of Scotland wouldn't have surprised
Adam Smith at all. We are suspicious of them not just because we don't know
what they do - we fear they don't know either.
But at the end of the 19th Century an engineer from Philadelphia came along
with a very clear idea of what management was all about - efficiency.
Frederick Taylor was the world's first management consultant and his fad became
known as scientific management.
Fred Goodwin talking on the phone in a car Has Fred Goodwin fuelled the UK's
distrust of managers?
He believed that for any given process, there was one best way to do it. The
average worker, he thought, was pretty dim and hopeless and so the answer was a
rigid system with a manager in charge of making it happen.
"It is only through enforced standardisation of methods, enforced adoption of
the best implements and working conditions, and enforced co-operation that this
faster work can be assured," he said.
Continue reading the main story
How to run a bassoon factory (in 1934)
Supposing one winter's day it becomes so dark in your office that you can't see
the print of your paper.
Now your first instinct is probably to get up and switch on the light. But
pause a moment. Is that quite fair to the firm?
A good organiser would reason like this: "In the next office is my secretary.
The cost of her time to the firm is only one seventh of the cost of mine.
Clearly we shall save money if I ring for her and let her switch the light on."
You see? The good organiser sees at once how to get the job done as
economically as possible.
From Nigel Balchin's 1934 management guide How To Run A Bassoon Factory
"And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this
co-operation rests with management alone."
Taylor's beloved time-and-motion studies were initially used in factories, but
it wasn't long before they reached the office.
His disciple William Leffingwell began applying these methods to clerks in the
early 20th Century. He became obsessed with how they opened the mail and saw "a
lot of tiny, ineffectual motions" such as reaching twice for pins because the
pin tray had been moved a couple of inches.
He was a stickler for a tidy desk too.
"Desk system should be taught to all the clerks and close watch kept until they
have thoroughly learned it," he said.
Continue reading the main story
Start Quote
Suddenly ask for an eraser or a ruler, or some other item that is not in
constant use, and see how long it takes [the worker] to locate it
William Leffingwell
"To ascertain just how well they are proceeding, suddenly ask for an eraser or
a ruler, or some other item that is not in constant use, and see how long it
takes to locate it. If it cannot be located at once, without the slightest loss
of time, the lesson has not been learned."
Detail delighted him - he even got one of his underlings to make a time study
on how quickly ink evaporated and worked out that inkwells of the
non-evaporating variety would save $1 per inkwell per year.
This kind of pettiness is still to be found in most offices today. It explains
why free chocolate biscuits inevitably get replaced by plain ones. Some clever
accountant finds costs are saved twice over - plain biscuits are cheaper, and
are also nastier, so fewer get eaten.
But in the UK scientific management was never taken up with much enthusiasm,
which was mainly because, at least until the second half of the 20th Century,
British managers were pretty much amateurs.
John Barron demonstrating a withering look while in the role of CJ in The Fall
and Rise of Reginald Perrin John Barron as domineering boss CJ in The Fall and
Rise of Reginald Perrin
After World War II, all our proudest companies were run not by people who had
the first clue about business but by generals. There was one apiece at British
Railways, British Airways, at Vickers, and even at the BBC. They believed in
one thing only - hierarchy.
These managers didn't think they had anything to learn, which was partly why
the first proper business school in the UK didn't open until 1965, more than a
century behind the US and Europe.
When the British heard of the new management science being developed in the US,
their response was to laugh. They had their own methods of reinforcing the
office pecking order.
The super swanky manager's office from Barings Bank in the late 1890s is now on
display at the Museum of London.
The elaborate desk has a fine green leather covering and the floor is covered
in a bright red Axminster carpet. There are paintings on the wall and a top hat
on the coat hanger.
Something that I particularly like is that it leaves you in no doubt who is the
most important person in the room - the manager has a leather swivel chair,
while the visitor has a little chair.
"If the chief clerk came in, he probably had to stand," says Alex Werner, head
of collections at the museum.
"The chair is for visitors from other banks."
But with the growth of corporations in the first half of the 20th Century, the
march of management wasn't to be stopped. And with so many more managers, some
of them need to be managed themselves - hence the middle manager.
Being effective in this new role required a whole new set of skills.
President John F Kennedy sitting in a big rocking chair while three Russian
officials sit lower on a couch Office layout and seating can be psychological
tools to indicate power
According to the American sociologist C Wright Mills, a successful manager had
to "speak like the quiet competent man of affairs and never personally say no.
Hire the No-man as well as the Yes-man. Be the tolerant Maybe-man and they will
cluster around you filled with hopefulness. And never let your brains show."
Excellent advice all round. The Maybe-man still fares pretty well in offices
some 60 years later - though brains have possibly staged something of a come
back.
But back then there was no talk of diversity, let alone authenticity. It was
all about conformity and hard work.
According to the sociologist William Whyte, managers required a range of
qualities.
Continue reading the main story
Start Quote
Hire the No-man as well as the Yes-man. Be the tolerant Maybe-man and they will
cluster around you filled with hopefulness
C Wright Mills on successful managers
"Today the executive must appear to enjoy listening sympathetically to
subordinates and team playing around the conference table," he said.
"It is not enough that he work hard now, he has to be a damn good fellow to
boot."
As for work-life balance, there wasn't any. One sales manager confided in
Whyte: "I sort of look forward to the day my kids are grown up. Then I won't
have to have such a guilty conscience about neglecting them."
With the expansion of management came an equal expansion in job titles, which
were both a way of labelling people and cheap way of making status-conscious
men happy.
Office Magazine summed it up in October 1955:
"It may well be that the duties of Mr Bloggs - an employee of many years'
standing - are, strictly speaking, those of a senior clerk, but it will do his
firm no harm, to confer an 'Inspectorship' upon him. And it will probably do Mr
Bloggs' morale a power of good to sign his name above with such a title, not to
mention enabling his wife to hold her own in conversation with that odious Mrs
Jones whose husband, as she never allows one to forget, is Manager of Makepeace
and Farraday's Export Branch."
The cult of management with its unwritten laws and petty titles was changing
the way outsiders saw offices. The fictional hero was no longer the skeletal
scribe but a middle manager working in a world that could have been invented by
Kafka. CS Lewis describes it in the Screwtape Letters:
"I live in the Managerial Age in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now
done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done
even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result.
"But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in
clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white
collars and cut fingernails and smooth shaven cheeks who do not need to raise
their voices."