EclecticLip

I’ll introduce a periodic kaizen suggestions category to the blog here, to capture, well, suggestions I send to companies and organizations when I see “low-hanging fruit” for improvement.  This somewhat plays to ideas found in book club selection The Toyota Way.

The first in the series is an email I sent in May 2010 to IKEA, relating to their particle-board furniture — which is not accepted at recycling depots in the Metro Vancouver area.

The email I sent IKEA is below the fold. 

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

In The Responsibility Virus (volume 20 of the book club reading list) Roger Martin discusses the tendency of Boards of Directors to become powerless yes-men, when faced with a domineering CEO.  This is in contrast to their intended role as wise greybeards, advisors or even coaches who keep the Chief Executive on the sraight and narrow.

This seems vaguely analogous to what happened to the Roman Senate as their Empire declined; instead of keeping the Emperor in check, they had to curry favour for fear of their personal safety (and probably family fortune, too: I imagine more than one Senator got his possessions confiscated).

It would be interesting to know whether the advisory influence of large corporations’ Boards of Directors tends to be weaker at firms where the CEO is paid more.  The Wall St. Journal recently carried an article reaffirming that power corrupts; in their context, as people gain power, they act more like jerks.  Transposing this lesson historically, maybe if Marc Antony had won, Caligula would’ve ended up as a very polite cobbler…

We read The Human Side of Enterprise recently, wherein Douglas McGregor (that’s McGregor, not MacArthur!) contained the wisdom nugget that:

“management gets the labour relations it deserves”.

I doubt McGregor coined the expression — it’s the kind of pithy phrase that floats around for years before being credited to a famous person — but it rings no less true. 

The general theme is a karmic one: if management mistreats labour, labour will eventually form a feisty union.  And contrarily, if management treats its employees well, union relations will tend to be amicable (if there even is a union).  Furthermore, while trust and respect grow slowly over time (like pearls!), bad memories have a way of lingering for a very. long. time.

In that context, I wonder if management in the West is still paying for the bad karma it earned during the Industrial Revolution.  If the explosion of industrial wealth was shared more equitably, or barons weren’t so slow to improve working conditions / recognize workers’ rights, perhaps labour unions wouldn’t've become so militantly anti-management.  Heck, maybe Marx and Engels wouldn’t've even been inspired to write their little pamphlet!

I’m perfectly unfamiliar with labour relations / extent of union militancy in other countries, but it would shock me if the Nordic economies (or Japan, with its fairly egalitarian corporate pay scales) have similarly confrontative labour relations.  After all, it’s difficult to have a class struggle if the different “classes” of employees (management, labour) enjoy reasonably equitable pay, and decent working conditions.  And I’d expect that economies with a heritage in the British Industrial Revolution tradition (US, UK, Canada, Australia) would have more confrontative unions.  After all, those union traditions would’ve been born in a desperate context of obscene wealth and even-more-obscene squalor.

So it would seem reasonable to consider militant unions a form of karma — a carryover from the bad ol’ days (correction: the very bad old days) of the Anglo economic tradition, when owners really should’ve cared more about their employees.  And given how long it can take for bad karma to dissipate, I imagine confrontational labour relations will be a feature of industry in these cultures, for a long time to come.