Working the Crowd
Solving problems and providing motivation has been a changing art over the years. There was a time when people owned donkeys and mules, and some said that the only way to get those beasts of burden’s attention was to hit them right between the eyes with a two-by-four. Not the prettiest of concepts but effective. The method was transfered to employee-employer relationships and for many years this was the way things got done.
Perhaps the next step was early marketing. The idea was that you would sell your product by fully explaining everything about it in lengthy, text heavy advertisements which appeared in magazines such as Collier’s.
This stage was the ’super-sell’ period a refinement of the days of drummers of wares of all kinds and in person demonstrations for food choppers, gadgets and even popular music which was sold during the noon hour in downtown music stores.
A lot of this was the ‘hard sell’ as it became known and was the way we convinced behavior well into the late 20th Century. Along the way another group picked up on the flipside of selling and coined the term ‘the soft sell.’
The ’soft sell’ survives today.
Management by Objectives
Giving people ownership of the decisions that drive business and create sales has been the focus of business gurus for years. (MBO) is a process of agreeing upon objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they are in the organization. The term “management by objectives” was first popularized by Peter Drucker in his 1954 book ‘The Practice of Management’.
Nothing much really changed under this technique but managers and the ‘managed’ felt better about themselves after reviewing the problem with charts and maps hung on the walls of the meeting room. Everyone walked out of the room with a common vision, albeit the plan the managers had conceived prior to presenting it to the ‘managed’ during the meeting.
The Team Approach
With apology to Ken Blanchard, the activities of team management are not new, but some of the tools used by team managers are.
Teams are developed through team building activities – which can also be used to build relationships where team members lack cohesion due to organizational structure or physical distance. Project managers may approach team management with a focus on structure, communications and standardized practices.
Tools combine planning and collaboration with features that provide a structure for team relationships and behaviors. In addition, there are tools that facilitate the forming of highly productive teams through analysis of personality and skills profiles.
The emphasis on ‘ownership’ is greatly enhanced in the development of the operation of the team. No longer is the group focused on carrying out the plans that managers have developed but rather team members take responsibility of planning, decisions and outcomes and the reporting process is highly diverse.
‘the crowd’
It was the nineteenth century French economist Bastiat who came up with this interesting little parable. The story is best paraphrased by Hazlitt: “A young hoodlum, say, heaves a brick through the window of a baker’s shop. The shopkeeper runs out furious, but the boy is gone. A crowd gathers, and begins to stare with quiet satisfaction at the gaping hole in the window and the shattered glass over the bread and pies. After a while the crowd feels the need for philosophic reflection. And several of its members are almost certain to remind each other or the baker that, after all, the misfortune has its bright side. It will make business for some glazier. As they begin to think of this they elaborate upon it. How much does a new plate glass window cost? Two hundred and fifty dollars? That will be quite a sun. After all, if windows were never broken, what would happen to the glass business? Then, of course, the thing is endless. The glazier will have $250 more to spend with other merchants, and these in turn will have $250 more to spend with still other merchants, and so ad infinitum. The smashed window will go on providing money and employment in ever-widening circles. The logical conclusion from all this would be, if the crowd drew it, that the little hoodlum who threw the brick, far from being a public menace, was a public benefactor.
Bastiat knew that the fallacy came about because the crowd only reason upon what they can see, not on what is unseen. ” That the shopkeeper would have otherwise visited the tailor to buy a new suite. The glazier’s gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor’s loss of business. No new “employment” has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene.”
The fallacy of the broken window is so well known that it is amazing that anybody still commits this error. Yet this is exactly what is happening with the claim that subsidies will create new “green” jobs, because the money that is used to create them can no longer be invested in real jobs. This must be so because society has a fixed amount of labour, land and capital that it can draw upon to meet production. Any form of subsidy is a claim on these inputs, and hence is effectively to “break windows and replace them.”
That is why the Spanish lost more real jobs than “green” ones, and the same will happen in every other country that attempts to direct production in this manner.
