RUSKIN 200: into the future JOHN RUSKIN advised people to cut the word “utopian” out of their dictionary altogether. “Things are either possible or impossible,” he wrote. “If the thing is impossible, you need not trouble yourselves about it; if possible, try for it”.
2019 was a momentous year for the Guild. Andrew Hill, management editor of the Financial Times, wonders what happens next.
The Guild of St George remains full of possibility. It still cleaves to the noble aim of making the world a happier place. “Happiness” is not a word that is heard much in the orthodox management literature, yet it was a touchstone for Ruskin. He said his efforts to teach artisans how to draw at the Working Men’s College in the 1850s were directed “not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making him happier as a carpenter”. After the bicentenary, this is surely a strong foundation on which to build. Of course, Ruskin’s wide-ranging ideas point to a variety of other possible paths: improving people’s ability to see clearly; encouraging thoughtful urban planning and building; or campaigning for a more fruitful and useful co-existence between humans and our environment.
In the field of business, leaders are still a long way from meeting what I once laid out as five Ruskinian lessons for chief executives, who wish to be “honest merchants”: “Provide for the nation”, which leads naturally to Ruskin’s assertion that “it is no more [the merchant’s] function to get profit for himself out of that provision than it is a clergyman’s function to get his stipend” - a message to corporate leaders as they set their own and others’ pay. Be honest, not only in the sense of behaving morally, but in striving to produce goods and services of “perfectness and purity. Lead, with a view to becoming that “rich” man who has “the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others”. Collaborate and co-operate, rather than pursuing competition - “a law of death”, in Ruskin’s eyes - at all costs. Create wealth, in the way intended when Ruskin pronounced that there was “no wealth but life” and conceived the concept of wealth’s toxic opposite illth. It is, however, in the workplace not the boardroom that I think the Guild could focus its utopian ambitions. It could act as an important lever for change and ANDREW HILL has been a Companion since 2009. He is the author of ‘Ruskinland: How John Ruskin Shapes Our World’, Pallas Athene 2019, and management editor and associate editor of the Financial Times. 64
economic justice in the 21st century, drawing strength from the fact that others are already recognising the importance of worker well-being and autonomy. They range from multinationals such as Michelin, which is trying to give its frontline workers more power to decide how they work, to Unto This Last, the East End furniture workshop founded by the Guild companion Olivier Geoffroy. Geoffroy is on a quest to find new ways to use all the assets available to his team – including machine technology Ruskin generally loathed – to become more productive, while making jobs more interesting. Not everyone can take for granted they have work, let alone that it is fulfilling. At the Working Men’s College, now in Camden and restyled as the WMC, 75 per cent of the learners are now women. Much of the effort of educators there is lifting people onto the first rung of the working ladder, through teaching them English as a second language or basic, essential maths skills. Ruskin, were he alive today, would be worried about the excesses and exploitation in those parts of the economy where these bottom-of-the-rung jobs are found. In that spirit, the Guild could act on Ruskin’s triad of pre-conditions for happiness at work. For workers to be happy, he wrote, “these three things are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it; and they must have a sense of success in it”. These could become three lamps lighting the way for the Guild as it advances. First, fitness. These days, this means more than just physical fitness, but proper education, training, and valuable apprenticeships that lead to mastery. Second, Ruskin wrote, happy workers must not do too much of it. I take this as a prescription for better regulation of work, more humane management and smarter oversight of the growing “gig economy”. Third, the sense of success. This is Ruskin’s excellent description for the small victories that, properly acknowledged and rewarded, give impetus and meaning to day-to-day work. I can see a role for the Guild in recognising and rewarding people that achieve mastery— how about a Guild Master Craftsperson of the Year?— and for promoting good practice in the workplace. The Guild could set a benchmark not just for the best place to work, but the happiest place to work, the sort of place that, on John Ruskin’s own terms, ought, as a by-product of the workers’ own happiness and sense of fulfilment, to produce the best work.