Renaissance of
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| MORE THAN ACADEMIC: Elliott Jaques and his wife, Kathryn Cason, recently presented a seminar to senior managers in Toronto. Jaques has written 17 books about how his idea of corporate structure can be made to work effectively. |
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NEWFOUND ACCEPTANCE: Toronto born Elliott Jaques' theories about what makes companies tick have been more accepted in
China and Japan than in his homeland. That seems about to change.
"Ah, how hard it is to tell of that wood, savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my fear. So bitter is it that death is hardly more." Dante, The Divine Comedy, quoted by Elliott Jaques in Death And The Midlife Crisis. "The midlife crisis," as a phrase and a concept, was first articulated more than 40 years ago by Toronto-born organizational scientist Elliott Jaques. While his insight into the adult psyche has since gained wide currency, it's not his most important claim to fame. But then, most people have never heard of Jaques and don't know that he's regarded, in select circles, as a pioneer, a brilliant innovator, an intellectual giant on a par with Adam Smith (in economics) and Sigmund Freud (on the human psyche). When the late Alexander Ross, former editor of Canadian Business, died last year, he was deep into writing Twenty-First Century Management: Elliott Jaques And The Theory of Requisite Organization. Ross believed Jaques had identified, through scientific research, immutable natural laws governing human behavior in groups organized to get work done. As Jaques' wife and professional partner, Kathryn Cason, puts it, "Elliott didn't make this stuff up."
"Until recently, Jaques' work was regarded as an academic curiosity," wrote Ross, in the manuscript made available to the Toronto Star by his widow, Minette. "Now it's being applied, with dramatic results, in some of the world's largest companies... (It) has the potential to transform North American capitalism." Until recently, Jaques remained a prophet without honor in his own land, a fate he shared with Edwards Deming. Revered in Japan, where his management theories transformed Japanese automobile manufacturing, Deming was only recognized in America late in life. When he died two years ago at 93, he was eulogized in the American press as "one of the most influential pioneers in the modern industrial world" and "a cantankerous and self-assured critic of American management." Which sounds a lot like Jaques, who is, at 78, very much alive, fighting for a radical system of organizational development that is suddenly flourishing to Jaques' great delight, in a Jaquian renaissance centred in Toronto. Jaques' admirers include Bank of Montreal chairman Matthew Barrett; senior managers at Ontario Hydro, which is implementing Jaques' "Requisite Organization" system in some units; Jos Wintermans, who as president of Canadian Tire Acceptance Ltd. used Jaques' model to eliminate unnecessary management layers and increase productivity and profitability; and consultants such as John Bryan and Ken Shepard, activists in ACCORD (the Association for Creative Change in Organization Renewal and Development), which has been bringing Jaques to Toronto for seminars since 1991. Even Jaques' detractors admit the man is well-educated. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a science degree and a master's in psychology, Jaques did his medical degree at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore and a doctorate in social relations at Harvard. He served in the Canadian army during the Second World War, settled in London, studied psychoanalysis and was analysed by Melanie Klein, a pioneer in the analysis of small children. He was also a founding member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, where he contributed to the development of "t-groups" - training groups in which people learned about group dynamics. He helped create, in other words, the teambuilding approach that dominates organizational development, or OD, today. To earn his living, Jaques worked mornings as a psychoanalyst and afternoons at the Glacier Metal Co., where he gathered startling new data about organizational behavior.
Essentially a scientist, Jaques abandoned his theories when they didn't work in practice. While doing research, he discovered that improved group dynamics didn't solve organizational problems. Personality was not the issue; structure was. At the same time, he was going through a midlife crisis. He presented a paper about the process to colleagues at the British Psychoanalytical Institute. Such presentations were usually followed by lively discussion. Not the night Jaques spoke. He delivered original insights into adult development and the impact of facing one's own mortality. No one had ever said, in intellectual circles, what he said. His colleagues didn't know what to think, and so they responded with stunned silence. So it has been for decades, as Jaques burrowed more deeply into managerial structures, from Glacier Metal which was his major research laboratory for 25 years; to an Australian mining conglomerate; a major aluminum company in the United States; the Church of England; the U.S. Army, the Pentagon and "everything in between," he says. One hundred years ago, most people in the Western world worked on farms or in home-based cottage industries; nowadays, 95 per cent of the industrial world's work force is engaged in what Jaques calls "managerial hierarchies." And that, Ross wrote, amounts to "structural change without precedent in human history." But until Jaques came along, there was little scientific research about what makes organizations tick; despite the plethora of bestsellers, few real discoveries were made. As a result, a lot of well-meaning managers preside over dysfunctional enterprises; most companies collapse before hitting the 40 year mark. Ross believed that Jaques' "Requisite Organization" was the answer to most organizational problems. Jaques took his definition of requisite from the Oxford Dictionary: "as required by the nature of things." "Requisite Organization" which Jaques has trademarked and written 17 books about, means "as required by the nature of the work to be done." It's built on a primary concept: accountability within an employment organization.
Employees do not report to managers; instead, managers are accountable for their subordinates - a subtle shift in power relations that means it's in the boss's best interest to treat underlings well. The structure is established by defining the time span of individual roles, which reveals their complexity; the longer the time span required for task completion, the higher the level of the job. (A janitor's tasks are of daily or weekly duration compared with a chief executive officer, who works on l0-year goals.) But in the egalitarian North American culture, Jaques' hierarchical model has been avoided or criticized as too autocratic. Tom Peters, author of In Search Of Excellence, called Jaques authoritarian. ACCORD's John Bryan defends Jaques' system as "authoritative." "There's a difference," Bryan whispered as he prowled the back of a Toronto conference room during a recent three-day ACCORD seminar with Jaques. Ken Shepard had opened the event by describing two great intersecting streams: The first, the traditional OD line, is a behavioral approach stressing group dynamics and the "soft" arts of learning and team-building. ("Elliott likes teams," Shepard said, "as long as there's a manager accountable for them.") The second stream is Jaques' structural analysis, which offers a total management system, an ideal state that induces trust and maximum effectiveness. The man himself, wearing a yellow cardigan, grey trousers and Birkenstock sandals, exuded youthful humor and sarcastic wit; he peered over his glasses and demonstrated to the crowd of OD experts that they couldn't define a single concept in their field, which is, he said, "intellectually bankrupt." (One quickly senses why OD types tend to resist Jaques.)
On an overhead projector he placed charts and graphs of Requisite Organization structure; he defined specific layers required for specific managerial hierarchies, with a maximum of seven strata, and outlined which functions should be performed at each level and which managers should be accountable for which employees. He pored over graphs illustrating his technique for analysing the talent pool, enabling managers to fit people with appropriate levels of capability into roles within the structure, one stratum at a time; and for creating career-development plans for all employees, "not just crown princes," says Cason. The manager-once-removed (up the ladder) is responsible for mentoring subordinates-once-removed (down the ladder). Jaques' model holds that effective managerial leadership depends not on charisma, but on selecting people with the necessary ability to handle complexity, and giving them the authority to manage. What he does differently he argues, is to combine "the managerial stuff with compensation, structure and talent-pool development in one comprehensive system." "I think, therefore I am," he said, quoting Rene Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher. Descartes didn't get it quite right, in Jaques' view; his revision is "I work, therefore I am." Chart No. 1 in "Requisite Organization Key Charts" states Jaques' first basic assumption: "Everyone needs to work, and to be able to exercise their full competence, initiative and creativity in that work." Full employment "has to be a major political goal" he insists. "It's absolutely fundamental to a decent society" In Human Capability, he and co-author Kathryn Cason wrote: "The widespread and continued existence of high levels of chronic unemployment is among the most inhuman and cancerous of all social conditions." Good managerial leadership creates trust, Jaques says. "Trust is the main ingredient of the social glue that holds society together." But the rules of the game have to be clear. "When dysfunctional behavior occurs in the workplace, individuals are often blamed," says Chris Harcourt Vernon, a senior manager at the Bank of Montreal, "but it's usually the fault of structural problems. We have to clarify roles and accountabilities." Harcourt Vernon, who specializes in executive succession and development, is actively exploring the application of Jaques' ideas under the leadership of Bank of Montreal senior vice president Harriet Stairs. She's in charge of human resources, and introduced Jaques to bank chairman Barrett. "People don't understand that Jaques is holding out scientific hypotheses which he is constantly testing," says Harcourt Vernon. "His work continues to evolve, based on his research."
Jaques' major research breakthrough - the concept of time span - flowed from an insight that was not his own. Glacier Metal's chairman, Wilfred Brown (later a cabinet minister in Harold Wilson's Labor government), brought Jaques into the factory in 1949, to improve the acrimonious labour-management relationship and make the company more efficient and profitable. (He eventually succeeded.) One night, over pints of warm ale in a pub, a group of employees working with Jaques wrangled about issues of pay, responsibility and structure. One said, "I wonder if time has anything to do with it?" The next morning, three of them came into Jaques' office. They were excited about their insight that the level of job was related to the length of time it took to accomplish the job. Ross wrote: "From this snippet of shrewd observation, Jaques found the core of his life's labor. From this one central notion of time span, the pieces of the organizational puzzle slowly began to fall into place." Listening to Jaques in full flight at the ACCORD seminar, Debora Bloom, a Boston human resource consultant, was thrilled, she said, "to actually have a chance to see Jaques in action. I've been waiting for this for years." |
This copy is provided by courtesy of The Toronto Star
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