Well, I think that if those people who asked that question went to some hobby exhibitions and watched what happens there, they would find some of their answers. Now, this is part of what Danny Blanchflower, who I work with on occasion, calls the economics of walking about. You have to go out into the real world and open your eyes and see what’s happening to answer the questions which theoretical economics appears unable to address.
And in this case, the answer to the question appears glaringly obvious. If we look at what people do in their hobbies, they are being allowed to develop their own skills and put them to use in applications that they find interesting. That results in amazing work.
OK, left on their own, to pursue their own interests, folk do some pretty amazing stuff.
When they go to work, managers tell them to do the tasks that they think they want done. They do not require the employee’s input. They do not ask for their opinion. They do not invest in their skills. They do not seek to develop the person, and they set the standards for output that are required that are very often too low. The consequence is that the employee is not motivated to deliver for that employer who is giving them no incentive to cooperate with them. And as a result, we get low productivity.
This is the choice of the manager. It isn’t the choice of the employee. The employee – and I am talking about thousands and maybe millions of people who do hobbies to an exceptionally high level in this country – their choice is to work to the best of their ability when they’re given the opportunity to do so. So, it is the manager’s fault for not letting them do that in the workplace.
Good management would seek out the skills of the people who work for them, would mould their jobs to provide the opportunity for those skills to be put to best use, would provide the training to ensure that the person can improve on their innate abilities, and will encourage them to innovate so that best outcomes are achieved.
But that doesn’t happen. And that’s why we’re in trouble. If only we could put the skills that people actually have in this country to use in the way that I know they exist because I can see them being delivered in people’s spare time, then we could solve our productivity crisis. But we won’t, because we believe in having businesses that deliver just in time, to formulas, in accordance with preordained scripts, creating products that are frankly uninspired. And that’s why we have low productivity.
And that’s the miss. Because that first part is near straight Adam Smith. Even Hayek, Mises and so on. Leave folk alone to get on with things. And things get done and well. Therefore the answer is to shoot the politicians and bureaucrats who would demand folk do other things. Which isn’t the solution Spud comes up with at all, Desopite the fact that he’s got all of the evidence he needs right in front of him.
This is what the side hustle culture is. People have a hobby and they attempt to monetise it. Some people build fantastic businesses from the side hustle. In most cases it remains just a hobby.
The other side of this is that not all hobbies can really be monetised. If you look at the businesses that closed due to Brexit, a lot of them were small mom and pop type businesses where people built a business from a hobby and found that they could build a customer base across the EU. However, Brexit forced them to do actual exporting and their customers to do actual importing. Mot of them could not build a business big enough to survive Brexit and so their businesses went to the wall or where knocked back into the side hustle category. Note that I am not criticising Brexit, merely pointing out one the consequence of it.
Comrades, we need a new Whitehall ministry, let’s call it the Department of Initiative, to tell the managers exactly what to do.
Now, this is part of what Danny Blanchflower, who I work with on occasion, calls the economics of walking about.
Yeah. I can imagine he gets a lot of that with his his dog on a string & polystyrene cup.
their choice is to work to the best of their ability when they’re given the opportunity to do so
…. so many choose to stop working there and startup their own business, where they will find that rising minimum wages, increasing National Insurance tax and onerous regulations make it so hard to earn more than they did before starting out on their own, and the stress of business stops their “hobby” being fun.
Of course there’s considerable truth to it. Knowing in the earnings of a certain section of the workforce here is a pretty good window onto the contents of the back pocket of the average working Spanish male. And it’s telling a very different story from economists on the Spanish economy.*
But you have to do your walking around in the right places, don’t you? I doubt if that’s the Ely canal footpath.
*Growth of around 2½% I think they’ve been saying. That’s certainly not what the average working Dago’s experiencing. More like minus 2½% taking inflation into consideration. So, if it’s true, the results must be going into some selective pockets. So not a good indicator for future growth.
This part makes quite a bit of sense “Good management would seek out the skills of the people who work for them, would mould their jobs to provide the opportunity for those skills to be put to best use, would provide the training to ensure that the person can improve on their innate abilities, and will encourage them to innovate so that best outcomes are achieved.”
I worked at a large professional services firm, we had a few large competitors (name brands), a larger number of medium-sized or regional ones, and in some cases small firms would compete for niche projects. What he describes about moulding, training, providing the best possible opportunities – bingo, mate! We absolutely tried to do that. I attended numerous training sessions about how to relate to different people’s learning style, preference for being managed (some want very detailed step-by-step instructions, others want to be told what they need to accomplish in the broadest sense possible, then left alone as much as possible).
All that said, we also had to deliver what clients wanted & all this freedom & creativity had to work toward that objective. We were constantly trying to do this better than our major competitors. Attracting & keeping top talent was our North star, because that would lead to success.
Allowing businesses the freedom to organize and compete without regulation makes this approach more important (critical, actually). No idea how someone in favor of hyper-regulation could have written the bit above. The gov’t needs to force businesses to be more creative, srsly?
It’s the information problem, Esteban. It’s only going to work if the information/decision/action loop is close to what’s happening. That precludes central management. Central management precludes innovation. The two things are mutually incompatible.
“When they go to work, managers tell them to do the tasks that they think they want done. They do not require the employee’s input. They do not ask for their opinion.”
Where has The Potato ever worked, other than in accountancy and government?
I’ve worked for a few dickheads that completely ignore my input, but most managers listen. It’s a co-operative environment. I routinely save companies thousands of pounds with “why don’t you just use X instead”.
” They do not invest in their skills. They do not seek to develop the person,”
The person is not an asset, not an investment. You spend £5K training someone, they can give notice as soon as the course is finished. And you can’t make it conditional, like they have to repay it if they leave in 2 years as that’s classed as indentured service. So we ended up in a situation where university became the way to train programmers rather than hiring smart people from school and training them up. Or, you do some Udemy courses and start building.
“and they set the standards for output that are required that are very often too low.”
Oh good, the potato knows how good a designer’s work at Dyson should be.
Incidentally, close in information space doesn’t imply close in geographical space. Two things are different.
Our own modern day Thomas Paine comments from Ely, which by coincidence is not too far from Thetford
“Why Trump won, and why that requires that the rules be rewritten”
BIS,
“It’s the information problem, Esteban. It’s only going to work if the information/decision/action loop is close to what’s happening. That precludes central management. Central management precludes innovation. The two things are mutually incompatible.”
It’s why local government works better than central government. It’s still centralised to some extent, but the decision is made a lot closer to the ground than in central government.
You also get this in small vs large companies. Buying £50 software in a 5000 man company takes weeks. In a 5 man company you tell the boss, have a 10 minute meeting about it and he buys it. It’s one of the reasons why this churn exists, I believe. They might have scale, but small companies are more nimble, can take advantage of new opportunities faster.
The only large company I worked for that did this sort of thing really well was Honda. Because they were really good at delegating down, managing risk.
One place he refuses to go walkabout is within the State. From the inside. He must know it would shatter delusions.
To me it sounds like Murphy wants someone to pay him for playing with his train set.
Possibly he was refused a grant for same.
“Danny Blanchflower … calls the economics of walking about.”
How clever of him: maybe he’d heard the ancient phrase “management by walking about”?
Still, not bad for a defunct Spurs midfielder
To give another perspective, which happens to coincide with what the Great All Seeing Potato observes – a lot of managers are crap and don’t listen to their workers.
Part of this is that almost all of what comes out of the workers mouth is annoying crap, but the managers have their own biases and so just ignore 100% of what they are told.
If there was a decent collaborative environment (instead of what was written in the company handbook for regulatory/ESG purposes) that might change.
But the problem of crap management has been a problem of the British since before the 60s as could be observed when once world leading industries because a laughing stock instead.
Spud and his train set.
I wonder where he gets the kit? Does he buy any from my old boss Peter Waterman? He should talk to Waterman. He might learn something.
At the place I worked at, for over 30 years, we had pretty good two way communication between engineers and managers. I also learned a hell of a lot during my time there so personal development was also a thing. Maybe this was because it was a German owned company?
Norman: I can’t imagine Spud talking to Pete Waterman. The green-eyed monster will be strong there I expect.
Judging from the reports from my friend in the Probation Service, the management there knock the private sector into a cocked hat in the ‘Being completely useless c*nts who fail to listen to the people they are supposed to be managing’ stakes…….
In fairness Tim you transcribed near the entire post!
I think people have beaten me to the punch but my guess is most private companies wouldn’t allow someone like Murphy anywhere near reception let alone to examine how their systems of work operate in practice. I bet he hasn’t tried to investigate ‘Climate Change co-ordinators’ or the Equality and Human a rights Commission in his ‘economics of walking about’ as neither job actually needs to exist so their productivity is by definition zero. As Esteban points out he clearly is completely unable to connect cause and effect.
I have been a manager in the past and I would not have lasted six months in the job if I managed my workforce in the fashion he outlines.
For some jobs, those with a large element of creativity, people can develop their skills and produce great work without detailed management. But not all jobs are like that. That style of working will not produce your burger and chips from a takeaway chain. Which is fine if you think we can all afford Michelin starred dining experiences every day, but not in the real world where careful control of costs may involve aspects not knowable to those doing the final steps of work.
>When they go to work, managers tell them to do the tasks that they think they want done. They do not require the employee’s input. They do not ask for their opinion. They do not invest in their skills. They do not seek to develop the person, and they set the standards for output that are required that are very often too low. The consequence is that the employee is not motivated to deliver for that employer who is giving them no incentive to cooperate with them. And as a result, we get low productivity.
The first sentence of this is true – and the rest is either untrue or irrelevant.
There’s a task to be done, often that task is already well-studied and the procedure to do it well-developed – with consideration for how much the employer is willing to provide in terms of capital (tools/machinery) to do the task.
But from my own experience, employees who are willing to bring their own capital – to make the work easier on them – are rarely interfered even if they’re not ‘following procedure’ as long as basic safety is maintained and productivity is increased.
My last job was a seasonal labor job – literally ‘stand by and do the random task that someone needs done’ where you’re given a task, access to some tools, and then left to it. Half the people were of the ‘I’m going to spend as much of the shift as I can standing here keeping this shovel upright’ but the other half spent time and effort figuring out how to best utilize what we had (even bringing our own gear) to do the job easily and better and we were rewarded for it. Granted, the reward was mostly ‘we’re not laying you off this week’ but still;)
And as for ‘invest in their skills – that’s not what I hired you to do. I hired you to do a task. *YOU* invest in your skills, I’m not going to because as soon as you get good enough to make more money elsewhere you’ll be off like a shot, no loyalty. And I prefer it that way. Management is hard enough without ‘developing subordinates’ – the private sector is not the military where you want your subs to be able to do your job because you might be dead at any moment.
He’s also confusing hobbies – things people do for fun – with work – the things people do *for money*.
If we could make the same money doing our hobbies, well, that would be our work. But we do work on things we’re often just not that interested in. There’s been vanishingly few jobs I’ve had that I would have continued to do if someone dropped 10 million dollars into my bank account. As such, many people don’t have a strong interest in their work performance beyond ‘I don’t get fired’ – modern western society no longer has a ‘take pride in your performance’ culture.
“Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to.”
“When they go to work, managers tell them to do the tasks that they think they want done. They do not require the employee’s input. They do not ask for their opinion. They do not invest in their skills. They do not seek to develop the person, and they set the standards for output that are required that are very often too low. The consequence is that the employee is not motivated to deliver for that employer who is giving them no incentive to cooperate with them. And as a result, we get low productivity.” Perfectly describes large parts of the civil service. Combined with managers who are totally ignorant of what the job entails you’ve got a remedy for disaster.
As Charles says most managers, as opposed to supervisors, are usually juggling with the cost v time, v quality trilemma.
I always associated Management by Walking Around (MBWA) with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard – although they may not have invented it, theirs became the first major corporation where it was considered a key management function.