Nicholas Ind
Meaning at Work
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© CAPPELEN DAMM AS, 2010 ISBN 978-82-02-31571-9 1. utgave, 1. opplag 2010 Materialet i denne publikasjonen er omfattet av åndsverklovens bestemmelser. Uten særskilt avtale med CAPPELEN DAMM AS er enhver eksemplarfremstilling og tilgjengeliggjøring bare tillatt i den utstrekning det er hjemlet i lov eller tillatt gjennom avtale med Kopinor, interesseorgan for rettighetshavere til åndsverk. Omslagsdesign: Graham Mansfield, Zoot AS Sats: Brødr. Fossum AS Trykk og innbinding: Livonia print SIA, Latvia www.cappelenakademisk.no e-post: cafinfo@cappelendamm.no
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For Vera.
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Preface
I saw work for the first time around 1970. I was eleven or twelve. Before then I understood that people had jobs and that my father dressed in a suit and tie every day and drove off to work. But all this was a bit abstract. I had never actually been to an office or a factory and seen what working people did and had no real idea of what a working day was like. Maybe that is not so unusual. When you are young, work is something vague that is defined by what you see in books and comics and on television. My son, who is seven, has variously said he would like to be a fighter pilot, Master Yoda (from Star Wars) and, interestingly, someone who talks to people. In my pre-teen years I veered between the idea of becoming a vet or a photographer (of course I became neither). The vet idea appealed because I liked animals, and maybe the idea of taking photographs felt creative or maybe it was because I knew something about it from my father, who ran a design company and photographic studio. At the time I had a basic Kodak camera the size of a small brick. It wasn’t very advanced and the picture quality wasn’t great. Mostly I took photos of friends and family, but then one day we visited a safari park and I photographed the elephants and the lions. Afterwards my father arranged for me to process the film and make prints in his studio in central London. Out of the blur of childhood days, this one seems quite clear. I dressed smartly with a trendy flowery tie and went with my
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father to work in the morning. I was introduced to the people in the studio and then one of the technicians showed me how to process the film in the darkroom and how to use the enlarger to blow up the prints. I remember they were in a large squarish format, black and white and quite grainy. They weren’t very sharp, but for me there was a certain pride in operating the machines and being allowed to use my own judgement in printing. Afterwards I was shown the different cameras – I even recall the brand names, such as Exakta, Praktika and Hasselblad – and how to compose shots. We went for lunch and had spaghetti and cassata in a small Sicilian restaurant just round the corner. In the afternoon we took some photos, including one slightly cheesy shot, which I still have, of me playing with a miniature roulette set. I was awed rather by the experience of being in this adult world, but I was also excited by it. For the first time I understood what people did at work. This trip into my past might seem indulgent, but I tell the story for a reason. In subsequent school holidays I had temporary jobs – as a clerk in personnel, washing up and cleaning tables in a café, as a junior insurance executive and as a salesman in a ski shop. I’m not sure I learned very much from any of them, except the negative that when you have very little freedom, work can easily become a drudge. But the day in the studio taught me something that I only appreciated much later: the act of making something oneself and of experiencing creativity is profoundly rewarding. It provides the opportunity of extending one’s known capabilities. It reminds us of the possibilities of life. As I reflect back it also brings to light a theme that will be important in this book, which is the need we have of others to help make fulfilment possible. Being in the studio, processing film and taking photographs happened because of the willingness of the people to give up their time for me. Although I never realised the dream of being a photographer, I think the experience of seeing work was cathartic. After that
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p r e fac e
day I knew I wanted to do something that would allow me to express myself. I chose writing because it gives the opportunity to create something uniquely my own and it connects me to the world. I get the chance to interview and question people, to discuss ideas and develop themes in conversation with friends and colleagues and perhaps to influence positively the lives of others – by helping them to see the possibility of realising their own potentiality. This thought has helped me to structure this book as a series of discursive chapters – with some suggestions as to how individuals can improve the meaning they find at work. And it made me realise after I thought I had finished writing, that the book needed the sections I have inserted between the chapters. These are interviews with people from different backgrounds and at different stages in their working lives who illuminate the chapter content through their ideas and recollections about their own lives. Intriguingly – to me at least – while I did the interviews after I had finished the main text, there are many connections that one can weave back into the central narrative. So I would like to thank those who gave up time to be interviewed and to provide input: Elodie Boyer, Lorna Tilbian, Oriol Iglesias, Isabelle Coche, Vibeke Tandberg, Jan Grønbech, Stefan Faldbakken, Runar Hodne, Kjetil Olaussen, Anne-Gro Gulla, Anne Cecilie Hugem, Joan Oliver i Fontanet and also my editors at Cappelen Akademisk Forlag, Katia Stieglitz and Hilde Kristoffersen. Nicholas Ind Oslo, June 2010
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Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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1 The meaning of meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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2 What’s wrong with work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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3 Freedom, happiness and fulfilment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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4 Finding the right job: just do it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Profile: Isabelle Coche. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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5 Being open, staying open . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Profile: Vibeke Tandberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 6 Difference and repetition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Profile: Oriol Iglesias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 7 Having a say. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Profile: Lorna Tilbian. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 8 Making a world. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Profile: Runar Hodne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 9 Death. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
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Introduction
Most of us spend a lot of our lives working – or at least at work. For those addicted to it, work is all consuming. They think about it, talk about it and dream about it. Most of us see this as unbalanced. We call such people workaholics, which immediately suggests they are unable to control their urge to work and, like foreign legionnaires, might be trying to escape something murky in their past – or present. Another, larger group of people are rather less involved. For them work is a drudge; something to be endured. They might be physically at work (although high absenteeism in many countries suggests they might often be at the dog track or beach), but mentally they are elsewhere – rather like one of the characters in Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889) whose working life is described thus: “George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two.” Sadly there might be a lot of Georges in the world: a research study in the USA found that 69% of employees are not engaged and not psychologically committed. That means roughly 107 million people who work, don’t very much. The annual cost of this disengagement in terms of lower productivity is estimated at $370 billion. Lest we think this might be down to the prevalence of nickel and dime jobs in the US, in Germany only 12% of employees are engaged, equating to an annual cost in terms of lost productivity of €260 billion. Research studies by Gallup into the attitudes of employees (2003, 2005).
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The lack of engagement at work ought to matter to individuals. Some might find meaning in family relationships, performing in an amateur dramatic society or meeting with friends, but that still leaves, for most, eight hours a day to stare out of the window. For leaders of organisations, lack of engagement ought to matter, because more engaged employees are more productive, which results in greater profitability. And for those charged with the management of national economies, engagement ought to matter because it has the potential to improve the well-being of all citizens. So, from every perspective there would seem to be benefit in people getting more out of their working lives, but often, rather than different needs for meaning being compatible, they become conflictual. Instead of needs intertwining they pull in different directions. A new employee wants the opportunity to express her creativity, while a long-established one wants to get on with the job in hand. A team leader wants the task done on time and on budget, and a business unit manager is concerned with making himself look good in the eyes of his peers. None of this is surprising. We all have different needs and aspirations. A group of friends, a team, a community and an organisation are all riven by the competing needs of their individual members. The resulting tension can and should be valuable – driving creativity, involving people, enhancing performance and generating fulfilment. But the tension can be destructive – undermining confidence, excluding people and generating frustration. That it is more often the latter is suggested by the research. Assuming there is a choice, people join an organisation with the hope and anticipation of finding meaning, but in the cited Gallup study, only 17% planned to stay in their jobs for more than 12 months, which suggests they pretty quickly fall out of love (if they ever found it) with what they do and those they work with. This is where the blame game starts. Individuals argue that their hopes are never realised, that they are misunderstood and feel they can’t contribute, while managers argue
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that people don’t demonstrate commitment and can’t really be trusted. One of the core themes of this book is to challenge the practice of blaming. Blaming others can be cathartic (even fun), but it tends not to change things. And the point here is to provide some recipes for change. I use the word “recipes” here to make a particular point. Alternative words such as “rules” or “laws” would imply a quasi-scientific belief in causality, but I don’t believe that is appropriate when dealing with the choices individuals make in a wide diversity of contexts. A recipe, for me at least, suggests a set of ingredients combined together by an individual, who may care to add more salt or spices depending on preference or context. Whereas a rule or law expresses a transcendent uniformity, a recipe requires the active participation of the cook and is variable. A recipe is based on the experience of what has worked in the past, but it always turns out slightly different. Just to continue this metaphor for a while longer, Meaning at Work argues that making the recipe is not the responsibility just of those who manage, but rather the concern of everyone. If people are to become more engaged and psychologically committed, then they have to take the opportunity to be active participants at work – as Peter Koestenbaum writes, “our institutions are transformed the moment we decide they are ours to create.” In other words rather than stressing the space between us and the organisations of which we are part or emphasising the separateness of the subject (individual) and object (organisation), we should understand our individual connectedness to the organisation. The organisation is both an “it” – something individuals can observe as distinct from themselves – and a “we” Koestenbaum, Peter and Peter Block. (2001) Freedom and Accountability at Work – Applying Philosophic Insight to the Real World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/ Pfeiffer.
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– something they are part of. Everyone should have the potential to help nurture and develop the culture of the organisation, to create an environment where meaning is more easily attained. This book however is not just about recipes for individuals, as individuals. Meaning at Work also indicates how managers can learn to trust and involve people in the organisation. Managers usually have more influence than others in helping to determine the sort of organisations we work in and relate to, which in turn means they have to be able to manage tension positively. While I would always stress the importance of individuals finding meaning at work, that meaning should not come at the expense of others. Lest this suggest creating a world of harmony, where dissension and argument is suppressed, it should be understood that in aligning the needs of different individuals and groups, we should expect – and welcome perhaps – disharmony. As Mary Douglas notes in her anthropological study Purity and Danger, purity “is the enemy of change, of ambiguity and compromise”. Purity means we must discard things that do not fit, reclassify ideas so that they integrate with our preconceptions and ignore inconvenient truths. Rather than falling prey to the “urge to make a unity of all their experience”, people should be willing to break patterns and experience ambiguity. It is Douglas’s contention that rather than avoiding dirt (matter out of place) we should embrace it, because it has the potential to fuel creativity and new ways of seeing things. In this spirit of getting dirty, Meaning at Work aims to help the reader, whether they are a student about to start work, an employee, a manager or a free agent, to alter their perceptions of what work can mean and to find new, more creative ways of using their active time. Rather than being a “morose wage earner”, individuals should recognise that Douglas, Mary. (2002) Purity and Danger. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.) London: Routledge Classics.
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that they “have within them the angel”. This positive view of the individual is based on the premise that people are essentially good and that when they are not, it is largely to do with the structures of which they are part. To help people become what they can be and to participate actively at work, the book’s structure moves from an analysis of meaning and work, to a critique of alternative perspectives, to, finally, suggested strategies and illustrative examples of getting more out of working life. Yet within this structure there will be some matter out of place. We will meander into stories and references, including some interviews with people about their feelings on finding fulfilment at work that are hopefully engaging and inspirational. To begin with, the first chapter is one I didn’t realise I needed to write. I was sitting eating with some friends, who asked me what are you writing these days? I said, it’s called Meaning at Work and they said what do you mean by Meaning? A long discussion then followed, which concluded with me saying, I’ll write it and then you can see what it’s about. So, for Mo and Irena in Bracciano, Italy, the book starts with “The Meaning of Meaning”.
Badiou, Alain. (2009) Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy. Trans. David Macey (Editions La Fabrique, 2008). London: Verso.
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The meaning of meaning
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“We cannot bear to live our lives without some sort of content that we can see as constituting a meaning… a society that functions well promotes man’s ability to find meaning in the world.” Lars Svendsen
There is a sort of duality in the title of this book. The first reading is perhaps obvious. It suggests the idea that an individual can find meaning in their life in a working environment. The seeking out of meaning is something people can take an active role in – using their experience and the recipes put forward in this text. Yet there is another way to read the title, which requires a slight shift in perspective. If we pause after the word “meaning” and then read “at work”, it suggests the idea that meaning itself is active; that the organisation is a repository of evolving meaning. In this reading, what the organisation does and how it is constructed are determined by a collective understanding of a specific interpretation of meaning – one that grows and develops as the organisation itself shifts and changes. The implication of this is that an effective organisation creates the opportunity for individuals to find meaning. Some organisations are clearly better at this than others, but should we happen to work in one that is poor in creating the opportunity, we should seek to change it. As observed in the introduction, people should remember that the organisation has a status that is independent of themselves. It is an “it”. But also, it is something that they are part of. It is also a “we”. As Karl Popper reminds us in The Open Society and Its Enemies, institutions cannot improve themselves – that is the responsibility of people. In writing the above paragraph, I am conscious that some might object that it is probably far easier for managers to effect organisational change than for others. There may be some truth Svendsen, Lars. (2005) A Philosophy of Boredom. (Kjedsomhetens filosofi, 1999. Universitetsforlaget, Oslo.) Trans. John Irons. London: Reaktion Books, p. 30.
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in this, but flat and dynamic organisations that I have researched, and written about elsewhere, such as Patagonia, Virgin and Adobe, demonstrate the potential for individuals at all levels to find meaning and to change what the organisation does and how it does it. As a further illustration of this, Slawomir Magala in his book, The Management of Meaning in Organizations, relates an example of a woman with Afghan roots, employed by a facilities management contractor to clean the offices at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The job specification allowed the cleaner less than one minute to clean each office. Not surprisingly, the woman felt this unreasonable, because it meant that she could not do the job properly. She contacted someone she knew at Erasmus, who also had an Afghan background, and together they persuaded the university to increase the contractor’s payment in return for more time to clean each office. As Magala observes, “what they were fighting for was recognition as responsible, concerned and rational employees, rather than merely existing as anonymous cogs in a service machine.” I am also reminded here of the experience of working for a company in London many years ago. The company of about 130 people was highly successful and led by an effective and inspirational CEO. I used to sit in an office across the corridor from him, so I got to eavesdrop a bit on conversations, especially if voices were raised. One of the more frequent visitors to his office was Maria, a young, junior assistant in her first job. She would regularly march into his office and give him an expletive-filled earful on everything, from what was wrong with the photocopiers to how reporting systems could be improved. We were always amused by these confrontations, but he always listened to her – and helped her implement the better of her suggestions. I think he liked her forthrightness and passion. It was an interesting Magala, Slawomir. (2009) The Management of Meaning in Organizations. Basingstoke: Palgrave, p. 73.
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contrast to his senior managers, who were more wary. I once asked one of them what the directors meetings were like. He told me that the CEO would first tell them what to think and then they would all agree with him. It’s interesting to reflect now, that the two people who moulded the organisation the most, were the CEO and the junior assistant. The point about her, compared to the senior managers, was that she dared. And they didn’t. I never asked whether the junior assistant found meaning in her working life, but I am not sure whether she would have understood the question. She did things because she felt they were important both for her and for the company. She didn’t actively seek out meaning. If she did find meaning, it came to her. This suggests the first attribute of the idea of meaning. We may seek to do things that we think will make us happy, give us satisfaction and provide fulfilment, but we never know what the result will be. Generally we don’t tend to think in advance what will create meaning, but rather we use our experience to make judgements about what we think will be valuable for us. The sense of something having meaning comes afterwards. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “I make my reality and find myself only in the act… It is through my relation to ‘things’ that I know myself; inner perception follows afterwards.” This suggests that meaning is always singular and difficult to generalise. Indeed we find it difficult enough to know what is right for us, as individuals, let alone others. Whereas I might uncover meaning for myself in writing this book (I don’t know yet), someone else might find it more in running a company or training a football team. In Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927), we see that the need for meaning drives the characters in different direc Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (2005) Phenomenology of Perception. (Phénomenologie de la perception, Éditions Gallimard, 1945). Trans. Colin Smith. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, p. 445.
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tions. The novel takes place in two phases with a ten year gap between them (1910 and 1920) on the Isle of Skye in the summer home of a family called Ramsay. In 1910, Mr Ramsay, an academic philosopher, is concerned with his intellectual progression from one abstract point to another – he charts this in the form of an alphabet of development from A to Z, but he is stuck at Q. His goal is to reach R, but this quest, as with all his diverse imaginings becomes a dramatisation of a lost cause. His wife, Mrs Ramsay, counterpoints her husband’s cold masculinity, as the character who helps the development of her children, brings people together and creates a social world. One of the visitors to the house is a painter called Lily Briscoe, who is plagued by selfdoubt but seeks fulfilment through her painting of Mrs Ramsay and her son. When the house is revisited ten years later in 1920, Mrs Ramsay has died, and Mr Ramsay is troubled by his own self-worth and whether he can leave behind him the legacy he feels is so important. Lily Briscoe, who had never finished the painting of Mrs Ramsay, completes it in a sudden burst of enlightenment (“with a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second”) and in so doing realises it has been the process of selfdiscovery that has been important. In the narrative the different individual needs rub against another, creating friction, as epitomised in the iconic, but much delayed trip to the lighthouse which is planned in the first section of the book, but only completed in the second. The story also shows that our ideas about meaning change over time through action and learning as projects and goals are taken up and discarded. The characters in the novel are all concerned with their potentiality, but we should question how well they understand what that potentiality is. We might say that individuals never know what they are capable of, which suggests that Mr Ramsay might one day reach R. We might also wonder whether Ramsay is also mistaken, in that the achievement of R might generate little meaning. Perhaps he would then
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need to aim at S or recognise that the intuitive, family life that his wife represents would provide more reward. Ramsay should of course understand that reaching an objective can never be conclusive, because the uncertain, aporetic nature of life still remains. He is surrounded by a halo of virtualities, the true meaning of which he cannot foretell and only some of which can be actualised, but on reflection, he might find that it was not the attainment of the goal that was meaningful but the journey itself. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed in The Confessions (1782), self-discovery is not concerned with finding something that was hidden from the individual, but is a matter of making the self in the course of searching. It is not so important what the output is, but how it is done: “we just are what we make of ourselves in the course of our quest for self-definition. The important thing is the creative act itself, not objective self-assessment or accurate representation.” Whether any such self-assessment could be objective or how representation might be judged accurate are problematic, but the emphasis on the journey seems appropriate. The second attribute of meaning relates to the idea of perceived importance. The act of waiting on the street to meet someone seems to have little meaning, whereas if I am waiting while acting in a Beckett play, it becomes suffused with meaning. Similarly, the act of filling out a form seems inconsequential, but the writing and implementation of a company’s strategic plan seems to have more significance. For something to have meaning it needs to move beyond the everyday, unconscious things that we do. For example, most jobs entail a degree of repetition – there are orders to be met, customers to be greeted, systems to be administered. We may tend to operate on automatic when undertaking these tasks. Precedent and organisational culture determine the way these things should be done. But, sometimes there is something out of the ordinary that does not fit into established routines. This may generate discussion
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