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James Autry on reintegrating the business/life split
James Autry calls us to the realization that business is first and foremost a human thing. Setting aside for a moment the regression analyses, organization charts, and 10K reports, business is about "fear, jealousy, anger, guilt, pain, joy, celebration, and a lot of love." "How many of us," he asked, "have best friends at work that we care about so much that we can't imagine not sharing news about what's happening at home?" Autry speaks calmly and languidly, at times a little like a Sunday school teacher. But he has sat in the hot seat as a publishing executive. "I am not St. James the Perfect," he insists. He has hired, fired, and charged into economic battle with the best of them. "I have made every mistake I am telling you not to make." A poet of some note, he is to business what Wendell Berry is to agriculture, a player who calls us to the real rules of the game, and who clings to ideas so old-fashioned that they seem radical: humanity, decency, and the challenge to get through the business day without sending our souls through the shredding machine. He called for an end to the idea of the businessperson as tough guy. We are not drill sergeants who lay it on hard in the field and save the soft stuff for when we get home to our families. "I am asked to speak about finding a balance between life and work. I think that's the wrong question. What we should be looking to find is a balance within, not between, life and work," he said. The two ideas are falsely separated, he said, part of the error of dualism. In the days of the First Wave, people's work and life was inseparable — farming. Autry said it was uncommon to hear a farm wife say to her husband, "Honey, we need to talk. Your work is interfering with our relationship." The splitting of business from life is one of the things wrong with our lives, he said. It legitimizes uncivilized behavior at the office so long as one is civilized at home. (Here imagine the theme music to The Godfather.) It is important that we find ways to reintegrate our parts into a single whole.
Management, he said, is the art of paying attention. But too often we pay attention to only half the job. Business is not just a way of reaping financial rewards; it is also a way to achieve psychological and spiritual goals. It enables us to meet and work with others; to create products and services that are useful to others; and to help others achieve their goals of survival and fulfillment. One of our modern sorrows is the disintegration of an old covenant: "Jim, come give us your loyalty and hard work, and we will return the favor with our loyalty and long-term employment." He quoted a CEO who came to him and asked him whatever became of good old employee loyalty. Autry had to bite his tongue to keep from replying that maybe the loyal employees had all been laid off. Autry doesn't rail against the rationales for rightsizing. He appreciates that it is usually done to help struggling companies survive, and to bolster a company's stock price. "But what have we lost when we set loyalty aside?" he asked. Not loyalty to persons, to bosses and managers, but loyalty to purpose, the idea that the success of an enterprise is shared by all. That sharing drove American businesses and workers together to thrilling heights of success earlier in this century. How high will we soar without that sharing covenant?
Too often, instead of doing ourselves and Jim the favor of talking to him on the level, and even of letting him go and make a new start somewhere he can succeed, we move him to a new job off to the side, where he can either do nothing important and eat up corporate resources or continue to do important things, but badly, in ways that damage the company's prospects for success. There is too much secrecy in organizations, Autry said — a holdover from the days when information was viewed as power to be hoarded. "I have a logical country boy question for people who hold onto secrets: If you've got the secret, and you've got the power, how does everyone know you've got the power?" In the real world, he said, there are no real secrets. The CIA gleans more information from reading the daily paper than from sending out undercover spies. Likewise, we can learn pretty much anything we want to know about an organization just by asking its receptionist.
Yet trust is the air successful teams and organizations must breathe together. Without the confidence that your colleagues are not out to get you, you can't advance. The reason empowerment efforts often fail is that managers don't believe workers want to do a good job. Without trust there is no empowerment, and workers can tell. They see the policies and procedures a company institutes to keep workers in line, and they get the message loud and clear. A company that trusts its own people has better things to do than police them. "If you're looking ahead," Autry said, "there's no time to check your backside." He recalled a remark by Motorola's Robert Galvin: "My father imposed upon me the greatest discipline: he trusted me."
"When I flew jet fighters in the Air Force, if I ever wanted anything, if it was a little out of the ordinary, my lieutenant would say to me, 'If we do that for you, we'll have to do it for everyone.' "I wanted to say, 'No sir, you can just do it for me.' " We're not the Air Force. So what prevents us from attending to individual needs, be it child care, job sharing, piggybacking, elder care, telecommuting? We all have different dreams and different requirements. Won't an organization that seeks everyone's individual happiness be an organization where people return the favor with loyalty, commitment, and best effort? The Hawthorne Plant experiments of the 1930s at Western Electric proved that you can spur continuous productivity spikes from workers simply by paying attention to the conditions they work in. Autry's favorite dictum about business comes from Peter Drucker: "Management's abiding challenge is to make people's strengths effective while making their weaknesses irrelevant." And you can't get there with one-size-fits-all management.
Death by torture cries out to have some ultimate meaning. In a less dramatic way, but just as seriously, out careers cry out to be about something. We need to believe that we are not engaged in a mindless, absurd rat race, that life is not a bitch and then we die. He cited a Zen parable about a monk who is chased by a tiger off a cliff. The monk clings to a vine and is chagrined to see another ravenous tiger below. But there alongside the vine he sees a luscious wild strawberry, which he plucks and enjoys. "Now that's nowness," Autry said. "We are all hanging between the tiger of the past and the tiger of the future, clinging to our perception of reality. But even in these dire straits we have the opportunity to find meaning, a red berry, that is there for us to grasp." The trick to balancing work and life, he said, is not to avoid biting off more than we can chew; it is to avoid biting off more than we can savor.
On Trying to Write a Note To an Employee Whose Baby Died of SIDS
I have written a million little notes, by hand on these personal pads, about new jobs and promotions and raises, about babies born, about triumphs of all kinds from college degrees to bowling trophies. And I have written, of course, about deaths in the family. But there are times when I know that anything I say will fall short, when any word I choose will be wrong.
I think now of my little boy so few years ago in his crib and how I would check him in the night, fearful as ever that good things live always in peril, cupping my hand around his head, watching for the breaths which it seemed to me could so easily stop, and I think of how it would have felt to wait for a breath that did not come again.
Words will never do, and even my tears on this blank sheet have no meaning for her. |
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