Tag: Robert Owen

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Arie de Geus: Living Company

James Dean or Kirk Douglas? Jimi Hendrix or Vera Lynn? Why do some people die young and other live long and productive lives? Arie de Geus, who himself is living a long and productive life, asked the same question of companies. And the answer he got was, like the long-lived companies,  unexciting, cautious, yet robust.

Arie de Geus
Arie de Geus

Short Biography

Arie de Geus was born in 1930, in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. While studying for his doctorate in Business Administration at the Nederlandse Economische Hoogeschool (now, Erasmus University) in Rotterdam, he started working at Royal Dutch Shell to support himself through his studies.

His career at Shell was long and successful. Over 38 years he took a number of regional and corporate roles. They culminated with leadership of Shell’s Group Planning Department, famous for its innovations in Scenario Planning. There, he focused his attention on Portfolio Analysis and Organisational Decision-making. He concluded that organisational learning was a key to successful decisions and corporate longevity.

He developed this theme in a Harvard Business Review article in 1988, ‘Planning as Learning’. When de Geus retired from Shell in 1989, he rapidly got involved with the newly founded Center for Organizational Learning, at MIT, joining Chris Argyris, and Edgar Schein among its advisors, and Peter Senge, as its first Director. In 1997, he wrote the book that has brought him most prominence: ‘The Living Company’.

The Living Company

In his research, de Geus found that the average life expectancy of European and Japanese companies is 12.5 years. For large multi-nationals, it is between 40 and 50 years. Why then, are some able to last hundreds of years? De Geus argues that all have a potential life of 200 to 300 years, and he set out to learn the secrets of those who have achieved it.

His principal conclusion is simple. The problem is profits. Or, more accurately, it is a short-term focus on building profits, at the cost of a longer-term focus on all aspects of the business. Chief among the long-term aspect, de Geus highlights the need to nurture people. How a long life, a business needs to prioritise human capital over financial capital.

The title of his book arises from two hypotheses de Geus sets out:

  1. A company is (in some ways) a living being
  2. The decisions made by the company are a result of a learning process

Therefore, for the living being to thrive, it must continually learn, and build on what it has, rather than constantly seek to throw out the old, and with it, the organism’s accumulated wisdom.

Other factors he found, which characterise the long-lived companies he studied, are:

  • sensitivity to their environment
  • cohesive, with a strong sense of identity
  • tolerant of experimentation
  • frugal financing decisions

He uses these to carry forward his metaphor of companies being like living organisms, in suggesting that these characteristics also represent successful survival strategies for real living creatures.

Context

Without a doubt, de Geus sets out a corporate, rather than entrepreneurial growth agenda. And his approach to human capital aligns him with other proponents of the human side of the enterprise, starting with people like Follett, Owen, Mayo, and McGregor.

His analysis is also more nuanced and less of a ready-recipe, than the book that followed it a few years later and also looked at long-lived companies: ‘Built To Last’ by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. Perhaps the biggest difference is that, while de Geus saw average companies as lasting up to fifty years, and targeted longevity on 200-300 years. Collins was interested, in Built to Last, on those that make it past the 50 year mark. Maybe de Geus would see these as merely promising adolescents.

 

 

 

 

 

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Robert Owen: Fair Management

Robert Owen is often referred to as a social reformer. So what is he doing in a blog about management?

In fact, in his espousal of management over pure command and control, we can see in Owen the first shining of the light of humanistic management, that was not to become the norm in his home country of the UK for nearly two centuries.

Robert Owen

Short Biography

Robert Owen was born in 1771, in Newtown, in Wales. After working in several drapery businesses around England, in 1790, he became the joint owner of a textile factory in Manchester. Because he had little experience of manufacturing, he started off wth a rigorous regime of intense observation of how his employees worked. Through this, he said, ‘I maintained order and regularity throughout the establishment’. Could this be an early variant on ‘Management by Walking About’: Management by Observation?

Along with other investors, Owen bought a Mill in New Lanark in 1799. The realities of what was then regarded as enlightened mill ownership were that he inherited a workforce where 5 and 6 year olds were expected to work up to 15 hours a day. His first act was to stop taking children from the local poorhouse, to raise the minimum age of children he employed to 10, and to ban the use of corporal punishment.

This was the start of a series of reforms that led to Owen being labelled variously as a social reformer, a socialist, an educational reformer, and a utopian (by Marx and Engels!) But at this time, certainly, Owen justified all of his changes on purely economic grounds. He used profits to fund social improvements for his workers and found that productivity subsequently increased. Eventually, the New Lanark Mill showed a 50% Return on Investment (ROI).

Eventually, his reforms were to include taking no children into the mill, creating the first night school in the world, for his workers,  starting what became the basis of the British Co-operative movement, and founding the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union in 1834 – sadly, it did not survive the year. He also tried in 1815 and failed to introduce new legislation to improve working conditions nationally.

It may shock us now that his aim of increasing the minimum working age to 10, reducing the maximum daily working hours to 10½, and requiring a minimum of half an hour a day of education for all children was seen as a serious risk to the wellbeing of business. Lesser legislation was passed in 1819 and we still hear the same arguments about potential legislation around worker’s rights today.

Consult other sources…

If you want to learn more about his social reforms, educational work, or attempts to create trades unions and co-operatives, there is plenty of good material. I would like to focus on the things Owen did in management, that were almost a century ahead of his time, to only really be formalised by the likes of Mary Parker Follett and George Eastman, and the later humanistic management leaders, like Elton Mayo and Douglas McGregor.

Five Visionary Approaches

Humanistic Management
Owen recognised that, in his rapidly mechanising industry, machines would never attain a greater importance than the people who worked them

Abandoning Command and Control
Owen preferred to manage his workers, rather than issue commands. And to help him, he started selecting his managers on merit and giving them training.

Empowerment
Okay, so he would never have used this modern buzzword, but he firmly believed in the value of giving his managers real autonomy.

Change Management
Not only did Owen understand the value of winning trust from his workers before trying to impose change; he actively sought out influential individuals among them to help build and disseminate his case: what we call ‘change champions’.

Performance Monitoring
Every day, supervisors would assess the work of their workers, and award a colour code (from poor, black to blue to yellow to white – best), which would be displayed on a wooden block (his ‘silent monitor’) for all to see. Peer pressure and pride are powerful motivators!

 

 

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