Great collaborations in the development of Requisite Organization: Wilfred Brown and Elliott Jaques

Speaker A Is what you've got there is the $5000 report, which costs.

Speaker B 10,000 word.

Speaker A You all know the joke. The 10,000 word report cost you 5000. Word cost you 10,000. I'm afraid this is the wordy version. I would love to vent longer on it. I've been practically finishing it, just but I just wanted to give you a flavor of how that collaboration worked. I think the usefulness may be that I suspect in the work we do certainly is true for the work I do. If you try and do serious consultancy work, you're always working through long term partnerships. If I look back over the last few years of my work, there's some client or champion within the client organisation who's become a friend. And we work away at a higher level on important stuff. So it seems to me that I'd like to have you share those stories. Ken wants me to pick up some of these stories. It's not the only great collaboration, but we all do this, I think, when it works really well. So that's my gathering task. And I thought what might be helpful whilst we gathered to think about ways of bringing our road to market. Because I've been increasingly worried about the discussions not worried, but puzzled about these discussions of bringing Ro to market. So you asked the question, what is Ro and how does it present itself as product? So I figured we could discuss that if you wish, at some point. And I'd like to share with you some of the ways I do it because it seems.

Speaker B For questions.

Speaker A If you could use this mic, we'll.

Speaker B Pick it up downstairs. So it'll be on the recording. Whose choice of music was that this morning? Chris and I.

Speaker A It was awesome. Just awesome. Is this working? Yeah. I don't really need it, but I guess recording purposes? Yeah. Okay. I shouldn't repeat myself, should I? That's the opening gamut one. I've been asked to do this by Ken. It's been added into the program. I'm delighted I've got a quorum at all. I thought nobody would roll up to this because it's backward looking. It's a historical interpretation. So that's what I'll do. I'll walk us through what you've got to give you a bit of collateral. And then I hope we can share some of these terms. Because you will all have experiences of that kind of collaboration on Betcher. I'd like to find out. And we can refer back, explicitly referred to in the brief as one of the great collaborations with Elliot. So I'd like to hear about that and then we might talk about ways of going to market, if you think that's helpful. So that's the brief. Are you content with that? Okay. Well, let's begin with a history lesson. It's such a primary task. I better give you the background of how I never worked with Edinburgh, so my relationship with him was oblique. However, I did work with Wilfred Brown quite intensively. In fact, we produced a little book together. This book is called Bismarck to Bullock. You all know who Bismarck is. You may not know who Alan Bullock is, but he was a distinguished historian. He wrote the famous book A Study in Tyranny about Hitler. But interestingly, he shared the great. This is, I think, still available from the Anglo German foundation. It's just a little fun book we did, which was based on a that's part of your reading. It was based on a late night drunken conversation between Wilfred Brown and a wonderful man called Wolfgang Hershwebach, who was then the professor of Political Science at Mannheim University. They got drunk one night and had this conversation about how extraordinary it was that the Germans began to get the hang of industrial democracy round about the middle of the 19th century. This was an outfall of the so called professionals parliament in Frankfort. You remember the revolutionary period, 1848 49, and the the Frankfurt Parliament, so called because it was pre unification that came out of this. They were all professional, academic, clever people, bit like this conference, seriously clever people gather together and they began to formulate a form of local district and regional works councils coming to a big body. So they had the idea of industrial democracy. They've cottoned onto the idea that once your firms begin to get as big as talents, then you need formal structures of representation. You need to distinguish between decision making and policy formation. Wilson Brown always said the workers and I can't do his Scottish accent, but I wish I could. He said, the workers are not interested in decision making. They know that's their boss's job and they should get on with it. They do have an interest in policy formation through representation, because that's the principle of our democracy. And the important thing for you to understand is that long before Elliot came on the scene, wilfred Brown was making glassier metal into a kind of working model of industrial democracy. He'd been at it for ten years. So in a way, Eldic was bent on building or and the theory sorry, Rod was bent on making industrial democracy work. So back to the history lesson. The Germans had the hang of this, at least the thinking level, by the middle of the 19th century. And the irony is they were reading mainly Scots writers thinking the English were doing this. Of course, the English weren't. And they haven't yet the English have not yet caught up forgive me repeating myself. Those of you that were here on legacy, my formation of this paper is on that chart up there, which I will I have another bit of reading for you over on the left here we have the world of authority, clarity, precision, all the things I'm sure we value. And over here we have the world of bullshit. And I'm using bullshit in a technical sense. Here with Professor Harry Franklin has anybody read his book on this? Professor Harry Franklin was professor of Philosophy at Princeton. He wrote this paper many years ago and it's called On Bullshit. And it's an extremely helpful discussion. What is the difference between hot air and out and out lying and bullshit? And it's important distinction because if you're telling a lie, you are deliberately deceiving. You know what you are saying is false and your intention is to deceive. If you're launched on a program of bullshit it may be true. Doesn't matter. The task is elsewhere. You get the General Griffith. This is what Professor Franklin was writing about very, very clearly in that wonderful my. Alistair? Yes. Could I just ask you for one slight modification to that chart? Sure.

Speaker C Could you distinguish between the north of England and the south.

Speaker A Point?

Speaker B So Newcastle is okay, well, Robert Owen.

Speaker A Was a great industrial socialist in the mills of England. I've always regarded Owen as an honorary Scott. Okay, look, let's call it the Charm Circle. All those kind of smoothies around London County. Okay, thank you for that. That's an important distinction. What I'm trying to say here is that I think it was very important in the collaboration that Elliot was a Canadian and Wilcott was a Scot. And these are both subordinate cultures. I mean, Canada is least economically and to some extent ideologically dominated by the USA. And certainly Scotland has been dominated in the same way by England. And we were talking about this cultural as possibly with you, Steve. What is it that causes a culture to move heavily into Bullshit? And often if it is a dominant culture, it wants to disguise the fact in some way. I mean, you need a cover story for what you're doing that it's really virtuous. You're simply screwing everybody else. Forgive me. You've got the general. I don't think that what happened in terms of the work they did together would have happened unless it was a union of a Canadian with a Scot. I think that's really important and I think one of the reasons why it's been so difficult to diffuse this important work is precisely that. I think somebody told us the story about Harvard bit back. I think it may have been Jack Fellow. But when Eldritt originally published in the HBR in the 1950s, within five or six years Lawrence and Lorsch and other luminaries from Harvard were coming up with contingency theory and the whole part of Ken Kravitz. It was Kevin. That's right. Thank you. So there was a kind of hitting back on the part of the Bullshit merchants but they are dominant and I think it's part of that difficulty anyway. But I wanted to show you that because I think the Canadian Scottish link is crucial to understand what went on.

Speaker B Between that persists if you try to read the Harvard Business Review.

Speaker D Absolutely.

Speaker B It's bullshit.

Speaker A I'm glad we agreed on it'd. Be kind of awkward if we weren't but it is a these terms go round and round and circle. Anyway, back to the story. I should tell you that I played a lot of golf with Wilfred Brown. What I'm about to say will be absolutely meaningless to those of you that don't understand anything about golf. But Wilfred Brown was a scratch player in his youth, which means that to those of you uninitiated, he could have been a professional. By the time I was playing with, he was in his late sixty s and regularly playing his age. That means going around in 69 at the age of 69 off the tiger tees. I mean, he was scary and he was a pretty scary guy. Many words. He used to like me, making me bet more money than I could afford. He was a rich man, I was young and quite poor. He loved to put that little edge into the game. Of course I was younger and he was playing three times a week. He was retired then and I wasn't, but I was always coming out. We had epic struggles. It's a wonderful basis for a relationship and of course it was quite combative in a good way and that's what was going on with him and Elliot throughout this period. They used to brawl the whole time but it was always producing wonderfully fertile ideas. People talked about them being up in the office, just going at a hammer and tongues. It was that kind of relationship. All right, can I go on for just another few minutes to complete the story before there's my glasses. I'll just walk you through this, if I may. That's the background of my contact with him. I worked with him up until the time he died. Really. It was me and Elliot, I think were the only ones sitting at his bedside and he had the big stroke and he couldn't talk, you couldn't tell whether he was taking anything in but Elliot and I both had the idea you just went on talking, grab his hand and talk. And the depth of the friendship you saw at that, which was interesting because when they were working together at Glacier it was very formalized, detached relationship. The main work that Elliott did with Glacier, he was contracted to the Works Council, which meant he kept his distance socially from the Brown family. So all the other great luminaries from the telescope, people like Harold Bridger and I think Trist wasn't involved, isabel Mengus was involved. They all went to the tennis parties at the Brown's house. But as it never did so in the early days, it was actually quite this is the telestock model of consultancy. It's an action research relationship based on a professional role and so it was rather poignant in a way that the end of his life, this deep, deep friendship, became evident. It was always there, of course, but it was artificially constrained by the rules of the band as Edith saw it. Now, the reason why I want to get stories out of you about this the most impressive union of this kind I've ever seen was the one between Russ Acoff and Herman Rice edited, cursed, and lee. But another and I'll mention that briefly you may be aware of it but of course, the relationship between Russ Acoff and Eric Trist was another one of these great partnerships over many years. Trist, who came out of the coverstock like all these people and then went to America and he worked with Russ Acoff at Portland for 20 years. Another one of these terribly important unions. Usually two men. I mean, it's interesting. It's a kind of bloke thing, at least in this field. Isabel Mingus, who I worked closely with, Tavistop, was a wonderful tough glasswegian lady and she was a great Paarer, but always with men, never with another woman. I guess. I wasn't guess. Anyway, the Acof Rice collaboration was immortalized. Any of you read this paper? It's a wonderful paper Russ wrote way back. It's called black ghetto's. Researchers into the university. In a typically quirky way. Russ Acoff has he turned the whole thing upside down. The real task here is for the black ghetto in Manchester. Manchester, not Patrick. I've got it wrong here. The real purpose was for the black ghetto to do research in the University of Pennsylvania. It's a wonderful way of putting if you haven't read that paper, I'm giving you lots of readings. This is wonderful stuff. And of course, you'll get Professor Frankfurt's on Bullshit. You must have that in your army. Very, very important source document.

Speaker B Would you be willing before home soon to put together a bibliography of readings and post it and have.

Speaker D That'D be wonderful.

Speaker A These are all Odball things, but they have that in common. They're based on these partnerships and they turn things upside down. The beautiful thing about the ACO paperwork is that takes the whole notion of the university's, Daniel to do work on the poor ghetto. Just turns it upside down, which I love pressing on. Just come in whenever you're there, but I'm just going to run you through. Yes, I've mentioned this is part of the bullshit thing, but I quoted Harry Truman I think it was Harry Truman who said this. He said, A leader is a man. Notice the use of the word man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don't want to do and like it. I think that actually guts it. That was the notion about leadership coming out of the USA in the 1950s that it was really about persuasiveness. If you can get people to do things, then you're a leader now. I think by that time, Europe was very bruised. I mean, terrible things had happened. Most European countries had gritted their teeth and faced up to the reality. Russia, certainly you had to face up to reality. You couldn't believe the myths you used to have. And I think most European sensibility then understood that leadership is not just about the interpersonal relationship between leader and the lead, or the leader and the follower. It's about the thing in Egypt. It's an association with the valuable end product or the shared value, or whatever it may be quite a different way of thinking about it. I had the wonderful experience of working with Wilfred Bjorn, who, of course, came up with the notion of fight flight, distinguishing that from dependence. I mean, terribly important stuff. I can't tell you what extraordinary privilege it was to be working at the Table Stop throughout the 1970s, because these people were still around and they were absolutely impossible people. I mean, they were just dreadful. It wasn't so much a good place to work, it was a good place to have worked, but they all had brains the size of the city block. It was just wonderful to be there. But they fought like cat and dog the whole time of the territory. They were shockers, but they were brilliant shockers. If you were a young man, that's what you want. Shotters shockers. Absolute shockers.

Speaker C Alistair, you had worked before the Tanister Core, after it was on the Snowy, yes. So you worked in a.

Speaker A Construction culture.

Speaker C Where if you come across bright people.

Speaker A They'Re fairly well ordered. They were very well ordered in their own work. Incredibly disciplined. I mean, Wilfred Brown, when he wrote his book, he became a better writer than Elliott. He's a terrible writer. At the beginning, Elliott used to rewrite his stuff for the Works Council, but put it in mean in the end, Wilfred was a very human, very good writer. But the way he wrote his books was he had a writing room when all the walls in the ceiling were covered with clumps of stuff. It was time to start writing. An amazing way to write a book. Extraordinary man. So in terms of their individual trajectories, they're incredibly well organized people, but as a collective, they were messed. Big eggos, colleague duality. Wasn't thinking that have a kind of bear guard. Frankly, that's a reference to when I was a youngster, when I was 19 years of age. To tell you a bit more, I was at law school. I was meant to be a lawyer because my family are all lawyers and I got extremely bored because I have a low boredom threshold. So I went down to work on this. At the time, it was the biggest civil engineering project in the world, called the Snowy Mountain Scheme. It was just taking, you know what Australia is like. It's a big desert. It was extremely wet. Down the right hand side, there's a line of mountains and the weather comes in and comes in from New Zealand and hits the mountains, and it's very fertile on the coastal plains, but inboard, of course, it's pretty dry. The deal was they were going to dam up this water and just pipe it to the center. Pretty simple. It was huge. Absolutely huge. And in the meantime, if you're dropping at 5000 foot, you can make some electricity. So it was a wonderfully simple thing. But you're right. I was under the command of Bill Hudson, the first commissioner of that scheme. The scheme lasted 50 years. I went to the 50 year picnic. They had the world's biggest picnic to celebrate the 50 years of the scheme. It's in the Guinness Book of Record. I couldn't resist. And it was a very moving experience, by the by. It was full of beautiful young women who kept approaching me, which is always nice if you're an old fart. And these were the daughters of the so called new Australians, because if you had a craft or a skill, you went to the snowing. Colossal sponge for male workers with some skills. I lived in a village at nearly 6000 foot, which had 5000 men and two women. It was an interesting experience for a young man. And you got some money in your pocket. Well, that's where you got your money. Then you went back to civilization. By that time you've become an Australian. And the daughters of all these men, all their sons, were offered merchant banking. They didn't want to go to picnic. Never occurred to me to take my daughters. But all the daughters came because they understood this snowy thing that dad is always talking about, whatever it is. They knew it was important in his formation and they wanted to understand it. So they came down to the picnic and just obsessively asked questions about it. That was a wonderful experience. I mean, I think in terms of getting involved with Wilfred, all of these things, you'll have your own stories of this kind. You need to be involved in something like that, that connects you to a higher purpose or something changes the way you think. And I guess that was your I'm glad you mentioned that, because it's a precursor to the work with Wilfred. Let me finish the history, because that's my primary task. I've made the point that a word more about Wilfred Brown. The family had been pretty well off, but had become relatively impoverished by the end of the First World War when all the shipbuilding in Glasgow just went terrible. It was the Depression, and Wilfred was old enough to remember the slums of Glasgow and the terrible deprivation. He was a passionate believer that unemployment was just wrong and shouldn't be allowed to happen. So coming from a fairly conservative family, he became a lifelong socialist when they made him the Lord. In 1964, he became Lord Brown of Macrihanish, which is his favorite golf course. But he was a labor socialist life, Pierre, so he was passionate about unfairness and injustice right from the start. And I don't know the extent to which that influenced Elliot, I guess Elliot had had his own experience in the family. We don't know much about Elliot's family, but apparently tricky. Not happy. Lost his parents young. We all now know he changed his name before he went to med school. It wasn't straightforward like Wilfred Brown's. Brown was very, very soundly, grounded. You could tell there was confidence all the way through. Except that Brown had a twin brother who was even more brilliant and irritatingly brilliant. Also a scratch golfer. So Wilfred had to apply himself with it. The brother was ridiculous. And Wilfred was also a very great technologist. His dad ran this electrical repair supply shop thing. And everybody at Glasia will tell you, if Wilfred Brown had gone to university, which he didn't, he would have ended up as a distinguished scientist at some just an extraordinary brain. But he never went to university. That wasn't their money. So he joined Glassier at the age of 24 and he was very enterprising, a brilliant salesman. And it's not irrelevant that the chairman and his daughter were both golf nuts and they had this young man who was a scratch golfer. So the chairman's daughter and Wilfred played in the summer forsomes at the local golf course. And then he married the boss's daughter, which is a sensible thing to do. Why not? The story then develops that she became pregnant in 1934 and died in childhood. The marriage was over almost before it began. Within a year, both of her parents died, as it happens. So Wilfred Brown's sister in law became the major shareholder. One of the major shareholders and another major shareholder was the Skinner family, from where he got his second wife. So he married Marjorie in 1938, I think. And that had a wonderful union for 46 years. I went to talk with her at length before I came up. Check some of the details of the story. Okay. The war is approaching and Glacier is the largest manufacturer of plane bearings in Europe. So it's pretty important for the war effort to be embraced.

Speaker B Alistair, just so that I don't keep worrying about this, would it be fair to assume from those circumstances that Wilford was an opportunist as well?

Speaker A In a good way, yes. Oh, yeah. He was on the mic, but was all in a good cause. He was a top servant. He covered the whole territory. It's a wonderful thing. He was a technologist. He was a deep thinker about the philosophy, democracy and so on and on the mic.

Speaker B And that showed up in the way he played golf. He was aggressive, competitive.

Speaker A Okay. He loved a good brawl, but it was never personal. It was just fun to have a good brawl. I guess the context of those days.

Speaker C Alex, if I was to guess at it, would be much more.

Speaker A A dynasty.

Speaker C Building would be much more legitimate than we regarded today.

Speaker A You mean within the family? It's largely a family company. Its origins of the big south of the USA. But it was a complicated international organization, in fact, that caused all the trouble after the war, because the Ministry of Defence, or whichever ministry it was, had suspended all patents and protections. But Darcy had a kind of charmed life throughout the war, but immediately after the war, of course, they were sued by everybody for infringing patents. It's one of the reasons that Dassier became financially weakened and had to be sold eventually. All of which Wilford did very sensibly. So you've got the water. Now, bear in mind, Wilford Brown has become chairman and chief executive at the age of 29. And this is really pretty major. There are six major production plants all over Britain, I forget, five, 6000 employees under a lot of pressure. Without doubt, then these troubles begin to hit. But right from start, I mean, within a year of becoming chief executive, he had instituted the Works Council in every single factory. This is going back to 1941. What you need to understand is that Brown was already on this pathway of seeing whether you could democratize an industrial organization. As we said, there's one very different assumption than those of because he was funded the union, he saw the unions as part of the deal. Now, what was interesting about Brown was he had this conception, and Geo taught me a lot, that when your firms begin to get really big, as I said, like town, then you need to replicate the institutions of the state, so you need a legislature with proper representation. Now that's, of course, the works council. Brown understood power extremely well. It's connected to the culture. He understood and was easy with power, but he knew that power had to be corralled. He taught himself history, and I absolutely, certainly taught Elliot history. I mean, Elliot had been deeply educated all these degrees, but it wasn't broad. And I think if everything knew about history, it was taught by Wilfred. And Wilfred talked incessantly about the 19th century in Britain, how at the beginning of the 19th century, the British right across Britain, were the most lawless, out of control, criminal societies in England. People were on the streets. People forget this. Eventually they became the sober, virtuous Victorians that we know and love. But at the beginning of the 19th century, it was out of control. They were burning down briscoe, the Duke of Wellington, was terrified by the mob. So it was the point that Wilfred made was that, well, within a century, they were transformed. But it wasn't the genetic change. They were still and hoax, but they'd been brought within the Constitution, successive reform acts. What had happened was that this power had been corralled in an appropriate way. That was his model and that was his model for labor relations, how the relationship with the union should be. You must have a legislature and that was the works council and you must have an executive as you do in the executive arm of government and that's the managers. He forced the managers to unionize themselves much interest to you because he could see that they were going to get squeezed on pay and of course managers always fantasize they're part of the ownership. They're actually just hired hands. So if the only got them to unionize themselves as a management union, they're always coming up with schemes like kind of fun as it went forward, I think. But the third arm, of course is the separate independent appeals procedure which is the judiciary. So he was quite specifically wanting to replicate the organs of the state in the firm. Now this was a very if you think about that, by now he's just in his 30s but he has this grand vision of industrial democracy and he's using Glacier Metal Company as his test bed. It's extraordinary thing for a 30 year old lake to be doing and all that's in train until 1948 when Elliot comes on the scene. Now, I'll give you a little bit of background about Tavistock. You may not all know this, but the Tavistock Institute actually grew out of a Tavistock Clinic of medical psychology which was formed after the First World War. And after the First World War nobody really understood shell shop, so people were being shot for malingering and they were just after a couple of years in the trenches. So that was a collection of doctors essentially working on the problem of what are these traumas that soldiers suffer? What were the problems of resettlement of veterans when they come back from the war traumatized? And that was the Tavistock clinic, which was essentially medical. It was called Tavistock. They sat down in Tavistock Square in London for it, and the Tavistock Clinic had been running all that time. Most of them were shrinks. Mainly they were psychiatrists who were also psychoanalysts. And that work continues, and that's the work.

Speaker B Public institution, government or private.

Speaker A It lived on government money, mainly through grants rather than a block thing. And then, of course, they did the important work during the war. That's the wonderful thing. I love living among the English. If you're an Australian, it's funny. I just laugh all the time. I have the feeling they're putting it on for my benefit. You meet chaps in clubs and they say, you think, no, you're from central casting. It's not possible. However, the important thing about the wartime period was they were absolutely hopeless. Choosing officers the way they chose officers, especially in the army, was worse than random. I mean, they were going for chaps. It doesn't work in wartime, but they were smart enough to see you need to do something clever. So they invented the wasby and that was invented by Wilfred Bjorn, the War Officer Selection Board, which is group methods of selection. Looking for the nap. You all know the stories. Finding out through observation what emerges naturally from the wit and. The application and seriousness of the person from then on. They were absolutely brilliant at choosing officers, and they were choosing officers from all classes and all types and sizes, but they were using group methods to find out who had this thing, and A.

Speaker B K. Rice was part of that group.

Speaker A Rice came later. That's another great pairing. I mean, Rice and Miller were another one of those extraordinary pairs. I worked very closely with Ken Rice. Eric Miller's only just died. A lot of these pairs of men were forming and reforming. But Ricekamp might say he came after the war. He wasn't even one of the founders of the Tabletop Institute. I'm coming to that in a minute. But all this work was going on in the war, which had to do with leadership and teamwork, and it was basic stuff, the work that beyond did on dependence, fight flight and pairing stuff. It's part of a language now. It's just basic stuff. Basic in the sense of ro is basic.

Speaker B Hasn't he renounced at all? Hasn't he renounced at all at the end of his life?

Speaker A Sorry, say that again.

Speaker B You're talking about Elliot. Hasn't he renounced biden's, light bearing independence?

Speaker A Well, he moved on a bit. He went back into the psychoanalytic world. That was his choice. He was edging into systems organizational stuff very seriously, but sort of reverted about the time that Elliot gave up group stuff and left the tallest, there were seismic shifts going on. What was the important work anyway? Back to the trace. So that work had gone on during the war by the clinic. After the war, government was very interested in these discoveries that had been made and wanted to encourage the creation of a new institution which became the Tavistock Institute. So the Tavistock Institute was set up in parallel with the Tavistock Clinic. They still operate separately, and the clinic was basically medical. I mean, the original members of the Tavistock Institute were all psychoanalytically trained. That was part of the deal. I think I was one of the very few people in telstock who'd never been an on the sand. I used to patiently explain to my colleagues that in order to understand the phenomenon of transference, it wasn't necessary to be. But they didn't believe it. It didn't matter, we got along fine. I was in some ways more combative than they were, so that was okay. But the institute comes on stream in 1948. It's actually funded by Rockefeller. All the seed corn money for the Tavistock Institute came from Rockefeller Foundation. That was 1946. It was chartered in 47 and opened its doors in 48. And almost the first project was Glacier. Why? Because Wilfred Brown said, we want this stuff, and that Wilfred Brown was just using everything get his hands on to run his experiment.

Speaker B When Elliot went to the UK during the war and got involved in officer.

Speaker A Candidates, he was also involved in that stuff.

Speaker E That's right.

Speaker B But was that through the no.

Speaker A Oh, yes. Excuse me. The work that was being done, that was the Tavistock Clinic. So he was associated that's where he.

Speaker B Was during the war?

Speaker A At the end of the war. I'm a bit vague on this part of the story, but he was certainly working with Be on.

Speaker E He worked for War Osprey selection during the war.

Speaker A Right.

Speaker B But I'm just trying to understand, was it in the clinic?

Speaker A Right. Okay.

Speaker B So it wasn't in the military. It was for the military. In the clinic?

Speaker A In the clinic. He was an officer. Yeah.

Speaker B I never knew this.

Speaker A Wilfred Bion was a brigadier. Wilfred Bjorn was really your upright, posh English officer class.

Speaker E And it fit his psychological background. It all fit together.

Speaker A Oh, Melanie Klein was later well, she'd been around all that time, but up the shrinking end of the stairs.

Speaker B Sorry.

Speaker A And we all know Elliot had his had his analysis with Bellamy time.

Speaker B After the war. After he came back from Harvard.

Speaker A After he came back, yeah, that's what he told me. I think that's great. Okay, totally. This gets boring. The development of events is so interesting in how this runs. So in 48, we now have the Telescop Institute, and the founding members are people like Harold Bridger and is billing us. It's just a powerhouse. You had Tristan Bamforth, you see, doing the extraordinary work up in the whole sociotechnical systems thing. It branched out pretty quick. The whole group relations People, which was partly Miller and Rise and that Gang and also Bridger. Then you had the operations research arm, which is a man called Friend, and you had the socio technical systems people, which was Tristan Bamforth, who were working in the coal mines in the north of England. Very fertile. You have these different threads of work which are all really based on the notion that there is an underlying psychology to organizational life, and it'll bite you in the ankle unless you're conscious of it and organize for it. For example, I think one of the brilliant pieces of work done in that period was done by Isabel Mingus, who wrote a paper, and gee, this is worth it. I'll put this in my bibliograph. She wrote a paper in 1961 called the Operation of a Social System as a Defense Against Anxiety. And it's the most extraordinary analysis of why the organization and training of nurses is invariably dysfunctional for patients. One of those unintended consequences studies and classic piece of telescope work because it was digging into the underlying psychology of the system. Her reading of it was that there's nothing you can do about a nurse's work. A nurse's work is anxiety provoked, it's unavoidable. Her argument was, unless you acknowledge that and consciously and deliberately organize around the anxiety, then the system will find its own way of handling the anxiety, and that will be dysfunctional for the patient. So you can't just leave it to the system the problems were that nurses are not given any authority whatsoever. They treated like children, triple checked on everything. The kind of continuity of care that's important to the patient is just chopped up to protect the nurse from what comes with continuity of care, which is attachment. I mean, all these very in a way, simple psychological insights came to bear in this paper. And it's a very psychoanalytical kind of paper, but to read as a bit of analysis of an operating system just extraordinary. I think that's a tabletop paper, isn't it? Was originally a tabletop paper. There's a double volume of tabletop paper being published. I haven't seen that yet. We've got a copy of that.

Speaker C You can get it through the web, publish.

Speaker A I mean, it's a very psychoanalytic writing, but under the skin you can see this marvelous clarity on the system itself. Now we're up to the point where Elliot's now coming into Grassia, and I have to say that there was some rivalry about the Glacier work. It's felt that Elliot sort of pinched the glory. There were various other luminaries from the Tavestock who were working in Glacier as a team. I don't fully understand the split in 52, but what became the central thing that Wilfred Brown taught Elliot is that if you're in a purposeive system, the kind of purposeive system that Russ Acoff talks about, then you do need a spine of authority. And that word of authority is the killer. Because where I come from in Australia, and certainly, I think in the USA, authority is a tricky word for people. They don't like it much. It gets confused with authoritarianism and autocracy. The mere use of the word authority, which for me is simply a neutral description of a world relationship. He was 31 and Wilfred was 40. So you had this additional element of the older man who is broad in his understanding of the world, and the younger man, who's very intense and focused, is quite narrow. It doesn't really understand an employment of bureaucracy. The reason why Elliot got so engaged with the notion of bureaucracy began to understand that there's some rules, and if you break them, you get into a mess, you get into bullshit. But it's very hard to say. I've talked to a lot of people about this, trying to work out who taught who what, and I think it was truly symbiotic. It'd be very difficult to say because the whole thing was hacked out in these brawling sessions they had, and they were just constantly having a good intellectual brawl about this or that or the other. It was like a golf match.

Speaker C But it also seems to me, and I keep on seeing echoes of this, in fact, throughout this whole conference, that you're actually bringing together two worlds of experience, very different worlds, which is why I alluded to the Snowy scheme. Before you had your foot in the Snowy scheme, and then you had your foot in hamstring and you've got people with one reality and people with another reality. Wilfred Brown with the reality of producing.

Speaker A And Elliot with the reality of Klein and Freud. There's a classic in that sentence that I didn't mention that, and I didn't know this until recently, that terrible pressures Wilfred was under still a young man running immensely complex system and doing all these things, additionally making burdens. Elliot persuaded him to enter psychoanalysis, and I think actually it was very important for Wolf. I think he was an overachiever. He was overburdened himself. And according to Marjorie, his widow, she says that actually it was terribly, terribly his eldest son will tell you he was damaged by the fact that his father was a typical hopeless second year. His middle son will say it wasn't so bad for him. But by the time the third son came, wilfred had learned some parenting skills as a result of his analysis. I hadn't found out yet, but somebody said he thought that Wilfred had his analysis with beel, and that would be interesting if it were true, but I haven't been able to confirm that yet. Elliot has his analysis with climb. They're up the Rolls Royce end of the shrinking tray, but I haven't been able to me, it's very that's something that Elliott brought to the which I suspect if you think about the Rice Acoff pairing, they're both very bright guys, but Herman Rice would not have been Rasaikos equal in terms of levels. But Wilfred was very much Elliot's equal, as you say. It was complementary, bringing these different elements to bear. And the fact that Wilfred had an analysis, it's not commonly exceptionally interesting. Probably very important for him. Certainly his wife, his widow would say that. Now, I'm going to get on the story from here on in. Really, in a way. Wilfred continues to look after Elliot's pulled out of the Tavistock, which has been his primary place of employment, he ends up in this new relationship with Glacier in which he does his clinical work. In the morning, he's shrinking people, in the mornings, he spends the afternoon at Glacier, and he has this curious relationship with the works councillor. He's accountable to the works council, not to the chief executive. So they have this arm's length, except that they argue the whole time about the theory, and then things develop in the firm. Wilfred is moving towards getting the thing sold because it's one of those situations. It was a rationalization and concentration going on. He got a very good deal. But by that time in the 1960s, wilfred had become where he retired from Glasser in 65, and having become Lord Brown of Macbrehannish in 64, because there was in a labor government, and the only way to get him into government was to make him a life. Peer you then sit in the upper house, the House of Lords, and so he became Lord Brown, lord brown of Macrahanish.

Speaker B But even though he was a socialist.

Speaker A In a labor well, that's the way it's done. The Bicameral system, you have the two houses, the British upper houses, the truly were in those days, he had a lot of hereditary there. He, of course, was a light bearer. The Prime Minister wanted him in government, but they didn't have enough people. The socialists really understood business.

Speaker B How old was Brown when he retired from managing?

Speaker A 65. He wasn't all that old. He was born in 87. That'd be right.

Speaker B But he had sold it, you said sold the company on and that's why he retired.

Speaker A Hang on, I'll have to check the date. Okay, don't worry. That didn't feel quite brown then. Pro chancellor of Brunell University. He helped to make it up from the Acton Technical College into the University of Brunel. And the fascinating thing that Brown did with this new university was to make it polysette that all the programs would be sandwich programs. That means that every undergraduate degree would be work theory. Work theory. They were designed that Brunel would become the Sandwich Programme University. Again, looking for that practicality in the university program. And then Wilfred got Elliot into Brunel. He opened up the first truly integrated, linked social sciences at schooling in the country into bringing together psychology to sociology. And there Elliot stayed until 70 and he needed to move on. And that's when the American you went to the picture, then take the story from there at that point. But the point I'm making is that Wilfred continues to sort of look after Elliot, find him his next job and clear the path for it. It has that slightly paternal feel even then. As to the ideas I was asking around about, I think the point I would make about what they were doing was that they'd created an incredibly fertile kind of ideas factory. And we're told that the actual ideas about time span came from one of the glacier shop stewards in the pub, that one of the shop stewards actually said, I believe this story, it's quite likely. And one of the shop stewards actually said to Elliot, it's all to do with time. And you want to believe that story because it's the most romantic version of it.

Speaker D The way I've heard it, I think, from Elliot's writings, is the phrase was something could it have something to do with time? You took out of the pub and started thinking about it.

Speaker A I think three walkers were stopped by and that's the way three shop stewards I suppose that's the interesting sort of authority. It sounds as though John Isaacs was responsible for the levels thing. It was already I don't think it really matters. I mean, the telescopic were very protective. They're protective of turf. In this situation. It was like Troy. It was a free flowing, highly creative moving very fast. The ideas just doubled the surface. So attributing them is extremely pointless. I think the central point I think about that I want to make about the relationship between the two of them was that, as you say, Barry, that Elliot had this depth in the psychological realm and really Wilfred had the breadth. An extraordinary sort of polymath, in a way. Great technologist. After the war, he saw that Jack Fallow puts it glacier was a kind of technological slum. They've been sitting on the patents, nothing had happened in research and development, so he muted, got an R and D function up and running. So he covered the entire field technology through to philosophy. He had this grand vision about industrial democracy, which was based utterly on the notion of fairness and justice, that somehow society had to find a way of bringing these things together in the world of affairs. The other thing I haven't told you was that during the war, wilford had been attracted to the Commonwealth Party. There's a new political party in common and I must remind myself what its platform was. But I'll tell you, this was under the aegis of a man called Sir Richard Akman, who was a very religious man, and the Commonwealth Party, it was equality of wealth, distribution of wealth, world government, United Nations kind of thing, active democracy, looking for ways to it was a very idealistic party. And in 1940, I think, Stafford Crips, who was one of the Sir Stafford was one of the architects of post war reconstruction, actually sat down with Wilfred and said, please don't go into politics. We need people like you running businesses. It's a better place for you if you're a socialist. But Wilfred was then flirted over the Commonwealth Party, which is in opposition to labor, but with some sympathy. So Wilfred actually stood for Parliament, for public parliament at the end of the war, in the 45 election for Westminster. If he'd got in, that would have changed history again. Who was he opposing in Westminster? Pardon?

Speaker C Who would he have been opposing on the Conservative side?

Speaker A Somebody very well entrenched. No. Churchill. Somewhere else. I don't know. Good question. Like to find out. But would have been a fairly hopeless thing to contest. Although it was a funny election, as you know, everybody thought Churchill would get in because well, he was tossed in for very good reason. I mean, Gaga for three years, it was a good idea.

Speaker E But it's fascinating because I just wrote a note to myself. Authority, command, role, clarity. What organization has greater clarity, greater command in a closed social system? So it makes sense why Elliot would come over to the army to look at accountability, because it's very clear accountability. And then having piecing that together with Rod saying he discovered Elliot from the business side, because Rod is more like a Wilbur, very broad, true businessman, very expansive in terms of that. And remember, prior to that, the layers didn't exist in the business unit that Rod created. At GE Original Business units. GE didn have layers. They were organized around the market and business segmentation of the market. It wasn't until after the other came on the scene that Rod put layers together into the level five business unit. But that begins the piece shows you the history of why he would come in and made sense in a series of working hypotheses. And he started off because the first thing he did was study the command channels and the roles and what was the role of the staff versus the line? How clear were they? And he was working at that time with General Gormers, working on the Joint Chief of Staff. Later he got into the assessment stuff, cognitive stuff, but the first part was clear. Role clarity, authority, accountability.

Speaker A Canadian will have more affinity for that than an American.

Speaker D Well, generally, how do we begin with here? How was the connection made to the military?

Speaker E He got a research grant from Army Research Institute, which is a social science arm to study roles and clarity based upon his previous work at Tabstock. Remember now, the army was not into this group, just like he broke Tabstock because of the group stuff. The army has never been into the group. Soft stuff.

Speaker D They have a little bit. I was on NTL in the there was guys learning some touchy beauty stuff, leave your role at the door, that sort of thing.

Speaker E I know I spent three years doing.

Speaker D All that crap.

Speaker A Clarity, but that's I find you a very sensitive color.

Speaker E That was all because the Soviets were doing that. And so we were.

Speaker D Carol Rogers and the boys were traipsing over to Moscow.

Speaker A That's a different story.

Speaker E But it begins to make sense how Elliot was looking at the roles and the clarity around the roles. And he even tightened them up more than they were, because you'd think the army had pretty clear on those, but they weren't as tight as they are now in terms of role play.

Speaker A There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Elliot observing a managing director of that kind was absolutely central to everything. Finding that this stuff takes you so far in understanding until you have to turn it into a purpose of system. And then he just simply saw as Wilfred did, doesn't work, somebody has to bark an order at something. And it was just wonderful to have Elliot stopping Wilfred being a Martinet, because his natural instinct was to overwhelm people and he was so damn bright.

Speaker E The other thing that's interesting you mentioned earlier is that very strong unionism in England, very strong in Australia, not very strong in the US. So not really the industrial democracy is not the big issue in the US. Because the economy is not driven other certain segments by the and it's been waning for years. And so that portion of his interest wouldn't have been satisfied. Of course, there's no union in the.

Speaker A Military, but you see, the kinds of ideas Wilfred had about industrial remotes were anathema to the union because it was a genuine sharing of power. If you think about I talk about it in terms of my little book about this binary and turnary. I borrowed the word turnary from Gregory Bates. He loved that word. And a binary relationship is basically an unstable power relationship. A turnary way is the third corner, which is the guiding principle of common purpose, or whatever it may be. And the thing about the unions in Britain after the war, they were dominated by a bunch of really big, powerful unions which were simply misusing power and they had no interest in authority at all. Wilfred's view of industrial democracy is a proper elaboration of the organs of the state in the firm. But unions want that at all. It would eat into their raw power.

Speaker D They don't understand the diatic relationship of conflict.

Speaker B Alistair I guess what I'm realizing that I hadn't understood, I had thought from Elliot, not because he said so, that Wilford was merely reflecting the industrial democratic movement of the UK at the time he was actually creating. And so he did a 180 as a result of their discoveries in trying to share authority with the unions. Right. Wilford actually ended up doing a 180. From what I mean, he was trying to create a situation where the unions.

Speaker F Had genuine authority, where the people in.

Speaker C The business had genuine.

Speaker A What I said before, Wilfred understood power and he understood that power is out there and unless you corral it, it'll distort everything. It has to be brought within the constitution.

Speaker B But he was trying to use a democratic structure to harness the power.

Speaker A He believed democracy is the least worst way of managing affairs. The irony, as I said, was that Wolfgang Kashweba has gone into this looking at the kind of presumptions made by Germans in the middle 19th century. They all believe that Britain was racing it ahead in the application of looking at Wilfred Owen. People like that, assuming that what Owen was up to was kind of the norm. It never was. The Brits haven't got the hang of it yet, and the Scots do. I mean, what we're talking about now is not rocket science. It's certainly not rocket science to the scot, but those guys in the charm circle around the clubs in London will be genuinely baffled by this conversation. The English don't get it. I'm generalizing a lot, obviously, but we're.

Speaker B Talking about Brown, the Scott, and it seems to me he made a dramatic change in his thinking.

Speaker A I'm not so sure. He was very well read. Even before he took up his role as chief executive at the age of 29, he was already very well read in the matter of democratic institution. Why they matter? There wasn't a sort of broadcast for him in his own thinking. He certainly was bringing something to Glacier, which he hadn't had before. But I think there's a great continuity in Brown's thinking about this.

Speaker B There's no question there's an evolution, because what he tried to do wouldn't work. What he ended up doing, saying that authority is not delegated democratically, but it's delegated from each manager to each subordinate. They're expected to exercise that authority, but then they're held accountable for it. I mean, that's a very different model from what he's set out to do.

Speaker A I don't see it that way. It seems to me that there is. I mean, that's the whole point about the executive. Wilfred's point was that if you're a manager, you have to manage, and unless you separate out the policy formation process, which is your works council, working at that level from your exec, then your managers won't be able to manage. He was very keen on managers being able to say, it sounds like the military. In the military, it's rather important, you have to earn your authority. But of course it's important when the boss says, okay, we do this, you just do it. Wilford's conception was, that doesn't happen unless you sort out the other matters. The appeals proceed. So his motion always was that power is a reality. And that's the important thing to understand about Wilfredbaum. He had a feel for he was a powerful man. He knew he was dangerous when he was out of control. If you've ever met him on a golf course, you'd know that he was easy with power. He understood power and he believed passionately that power will distort your world unless you corral it in the correct way. And he figured that's what democracy is, it's the least worst way of doing that. I think that was a consistent idea of his, and that's absolutely consistent with the manager being able to manage.

Speaker D Alistair, what happened with works councils? And where do unions fit in? And I don't hear any talk about works councils when we talk about record.

Speaker A Well, for Wilfred, the unions were a necessary part of the deal.

Speaker D So this may have been a transition you had to accept unionism.

Speaker A No, I don't think he had any problem with it.

Speaker C The works council was actually driven by Wilfred Brown. That's argued very well, but unions wouldn't come at that unless there was some powerful thing in for them. They were invited into those works mean in Australia. Now, the unions know always been less powerful than they were, but they've never sought that kind of representation, nor have they here. No.

Speaker A Yes, it does.

Speaker C It changes their authority once you've got a works council.

Speaker D So was Wilfred able to do both Glensier Works Council and union?

Speaker A We had no choice.

Speaker D So he did.

Speaker A He did. He was trying to force the managers to unionize themselves as a power block. The system, he says, has power blocks. That's the reality. And the managerial group was a power block, so they needed to be brought within the constitution.

Speaker D Did they do that?

Speaker A They did in the end, yes. They unionized themselves. They call themselves the management unit.

Speaker D Has that happened anywhere else? Because certainly to my mind managers still think that they're part of the ownership.

Speaker C But if you look at it from an enterprise point of view you managers in this enterprise go and organize yourself. That's one statement.

Speaker A But if you look at it from.

Speaker C A national union point of view unions truckers in the states.

Speaker A They'Re industrially organized.

Speaker C It'S a very different thing. Very different thing because then you impose industry wide issues and that's not what Brown was about. It was about representation in the institution.

Speaker A He was concerned with.

Speaker F There are actual examples of that. As I understand it, the management of the United Steel Workers is unionized.

Speaker B Part of the management of.

Speaker F Management of banks.

Speaker C In Australia, Commonwealth Aluminum under Mark Kaminsky they had a whole bunch of representative representations.

Speaker F I think Barry's comments were useful as the distinction between a group deciding to organize as a group for the reasons of social power or authority in the business or being part of the broader political union organizational movement because they are actually quite different agendas.

Speaker B I guess my question is I have never heard Elliot talk about works consoles or aggregating management into some kind of power block other than historically back at Glassford. That's not part of his model.

Speaker A That's what I'm trying to get recently.

Speaker C That'S been a secret.

Speaker A Go talk to Mark. They did it quite deliberately, wasn't done in the rest of CRA but I'm.

Speaker B Having trouble understanding the role that would.

Speaker A Serve a policy setting.

Speaker C Plan conditions.

Speaker A The things that are negotiated.

Speaker D Those things are negotiated for the Stratum One people.

Speaker A Well that's right.

Speaker C They're negotiated on an industry wide basis. Now at Stratton One union level, traditional union, as much we know it, you have a triangular relationship which disrupts the delivery of the managerial barrier authorities. And that's the problem in Hammersley. What you saw on that chart on the screen the other day, you saw it wasn't clear enough. But the histogram of lost time suddenly comes to an end about 1995 because Terry Palmer, the managing director, took Ro right down to the front line, which is when he realized that he was taking vary authorities down to the front line. And the national unions battled for that ground. The authority of the manager. So he had a vote and he came up with this idea that we should have civil law contracts for everybody. Everybody belong beyond staff conditions if they so wish. They can feel free to join a union if they so wish and invited them to do that. They had a vote and think it was a company, 5000 people at the time, one union member remained but in effect that company deunionized.

Speaker A But in a very proper way. Absolutely through channels, properly.

Speaker B When Judge was reading a lecture, I remember it, he said the union was the result. Of the dysfunction within the organization and once you've redesigned organization requisite, then the need for union disappears.

Speaker C Well, maybe it doesn't, but what you're focusing on as a manager is my.

Speaker A Relationship with the employee. I'm not going to destroy the union's.

Speaker C Relationship, that's somebody else's business.

Speaker A No, you just would simply say strengthen my relationship with the employee, which is.

Speaker F You'Ve created the conditions for that relationship to be the primary one if you're good enough to make it that. So therefore the third party becomes obsolete if that relationship is strong enough.

Speaker A So you could say that Rod Carnegie.

Speaker C Set out to be the manager of choice.

Speaker B But I don't understand where the works Council fits into this.

Speaker A It doesn't, because CRA didn't got that no no anywhere. When you have a look at people.

Speaker C Systems, things like performance assessments, safety, fair treatment, using the mor and so on, career development, deal processes, all of those systems, if you like them, they're very heavy on policy, it's a prime opportunity for participation.

Speaker B For them to make recommendations, have input into absolutely.

Speaker A True representative. Yes, it's the parliamentary model.

Speaker B Well, no, it's not parliamentary because in parliamentary you're voting and you're legislating.

Speaker A Well, hang on, theoretically anyway, doesn't matter what process basically they were very keen on the idea whoever the representatives were representing the power blocks were the right people. There was adequate participation in process by which they were chosen by the workers.

Speaker F Jerry's also exploring the issue of what's the authority, what's the actual authority foundry of the Council?

Speaker A Is it recommendatory, can you implement or.

Speaker F Can you just recommend?

Speaker C Brown was very clear on the process, very detailed about the process.

Speaker F It's normally consulted.

Speaker B I'm not trying to say it's right or wrong, it's just I've never heard Elliot include this mechanism in any of his most current but it was the way work was done in the UK at that time. I mean, every company had a work. Yeah, I'm not saying it's just not every company.

Speaker A To close that time's coming in. Let me say one more thing just to close off the story because it relates to my point of our bullshit and where we're at in trying to take tharo forward and get an audience and have an impact. You could look at Brown's career in the end as a magnificent failure for a couple of reasons. One is that he believed that the institutions they had embedded in Glacier would outlive that they would be resilient enough to outlive the sale of the company to associated engineering. And on the whole they didn't. They needed Wilfred there equipping them on really. So to that extent, his belief that they were so obviously right and they would have that resilience not true. The thing over the years fell apart. Although I mentioned the other day that a number of the people, I mean I learned that the Sony Corporation when they were setting up New South Wales, for example, were looking for an HR boss for their big factory in Bridger. And the chief executive of Sony Corporation instructed them to go looking for somebody from Glacier. And they got one of the HR bosses from Glacier went across to so the Japanese understood this was this was important, as they tend to one other thing. After Wilfred's period at the Board of Trade, he was there from 64 to 70. So he was working in government. He had this wonderfully naive view that once he retired from government, that the offers to sit in various boards would flow in. Now, that's the point. By that time, they'd got the measure of him. They knew how uncompromising, how clear he wasn't. I mean, the English just hate that. So this is a story he told against himself. The authors never came, so he was beyond the pale. He was a pariah precisely because of the clarity of the authority. No bullshit. No bullshit. It's a kind of a sad but fitting end to the tale, but there you have it. So that underpins our difficulty. And then I made a little list of things. I'll close on this. What's the value proposition? And I think that we share the same problem as Wilfred. There's nobody in this conference who is extremely bright. And frankly, I don't think we'd be here unless we've been decently parented. I think there's a combination of intelligence and easiness generosity which goes with this work. It's in the nature of the best. People out there don't share this. So I think that people who are selling this product now, leadership, our people, will follow us to the ends of the earth. That's a very attractive proposition. People who are selling quality, the market will beat a path to our door. That's an attractive proposition. BPR business process re engineering. Our system will run smoothly as a machine. Irresistible, seductive systems thinking we can all be really smart. What's the Ro value proposition? For me, it's something like nobody will have any wriggle room. It'll be like Luftha Brown saying, it's like this, and it's this uncompromising excather. It's not attractive to people. Most the thinking I've been doing in the course of these last two or three days is thinking about what are the ways you can come to market obliquely and get in and have build up those partnerships? But I suspect we all need to do it. I'll bet each of you who's doing good work will be in some kind of partnership of a long term character like that.

Speaker B Thank you for pulling all this together. I'm going to read and reread and reread this paper.

Speaker A Thank you. I'm delighted to have an audience. I should mention that's sam. Sam.