What is the ideal way to develop leadership? Every society provides its own answer to this question, and each, in groping for answers, de­fines its deepest concerns about the purposes, distributions, and uses of power. Business has contributed its answer to the leadership ques­tion by evolving a new breed called the man­ager. Simultaneously, business has established a new power ethic that favors collective over individual leadership, the cult of the group over that of personality. While ensuring the competence, control, and the balance of power among groups with the potential for ri­valry, managerial leadership unfortunately does not necessarily ensure imagination, cre­ativity, or ethical behavior in guiding the des­tinies of corporate enterprises.

Leadership inevitably requires using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other people. Power in the hands of an individual entails human risks: first, the risk of equating power with the ability to get immediate re­sults; second, the risk of ignoring the many dif­ferent ways people can legitimately accumu­late power; and third, the risk of losing self-control in the desire for power. The need to hedge these risks accounts in part for the de­velopment of collective leadership and the managerial ethic. Consequently, an inherent conservatism dominates the culture of large organizations. In The Second American Revolu­tion, John D. Rockefeller III describes the con­servatism of organizations:

“An organization is a system, with a logic of its own, and all the weight of tradition and iner­tia. The deck is stacked in favor of the tried and proven way of doing things and against the tak­ing of risks and striking out in new directions.^”

Out of this conservatism and inertia, organi­zations provide succession to power through the development of managers rather than indi­vidual leaders. Ironically, this ethic fosters a bureaucratic culture in business, supposedly the last bastion protecting us from the- en­croachments and controls of bureaucracy in government and education.

Manager vs. Leader Personality

A managerial culture emphasizes rationality and control. Whether his or her energies are directed toward goals, resources, organization structures, or people, a manager is a problem solver. The manager asks: “What problems have to be solved, and what are the best ways to achieve results so that people will continue to contribute to this organization?” From this perspective, leadership is simply a practical ef­fort to direct affairs; and to fulfill his or her task, a manager requires that many people op­erate efficiently at different levels of status and responsibility. It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager, but rather persis­tence, tough-mindedness, hard work, intelli­gence, analytical ability, and perhaps most im­portant, tolerance and goodwill.

Another conception of leadership, however, attaches almost mystical beliefs to what a leader is and assumes that only great people are worthy of the drama of power and politics. Here leadership is a psychodrama in which a brilliant, lonely person must gain control of himself or herself as a precondition for control­ling others. Such an expectation of leadership contrasts sharply with the mundane, practical, and yet important conception that leadership is really managing work that other people do.

Two questions come to mind. Is this leader­ship mystique merely a holdover from our childhood—from a sense of dependency and a longing for good and heroic parents? Or is it , true that no matter how competent managers are, their leadership stagnates because of their limitations in visualizing purposes and gener­ating value in work? Driven by narrow pur­poses, without an imaginative capacity and the ability to communicate, do managers then per­petuate group conflicts instead of reforming them into broader desires and goals?

If indeed problems demand greatness, then judging by past performance, the selection and development of leaders leave a great deal to chance. There are no known ways to train “great” leaders. Further, beyond what we leave to chance, there is a deeper issue in the relationship between the need for competent managers and the longing for great leaders.

What it takes to ensure a supply of people who will assume practical responsibility may inhibit the development of great leaders. On the other hand, the presence of great leaders may undermine the development of managers who typically become very anxious in the rela­tive disorder that leaders seem to generate.

It is easy enough to dismiss the dilemma of training managers, though we may need new leaders or leaders at the expense of managers, by saying that the need is for people who can be both. But just as a managerial culture dif­fers from the entrepreneurial culture that de­velops when leaders appear in organizations, managers and leaders are very different kinds of people. They differ in motivation, personal history, and in how they think and act.

Attitudes Toward Goals

Managers tend to adopt impersonal, if not passive, attitudes toward goals. Managerial goals arise out of necessities rather than de­sires and, therefore, are deeply embedded in their organization’s history and culture.

Frederic G. Donner, chairman and chief ex­ecutive officer of General Motors from 1958 to 1967, expressed this kind of attitude toward goals in defining GM’s position on product de­velopment:

“To meet the challenge of the marketplace, we must recognize changes in customer needs and desires far enough ahead to have the right products in the right places at the right time and in the right quantity.

“We must balance trends in preference against the many compromises that are neces­sary to make a final product that is both reli­able and good looking, that performs well and that sells at a competitive price in the neces­sary volume. We must design not just the cars we would like to build but, more important, the cars that our customers want to buy.”

Nowhere in this statement is there a notion that consumer tastes and preferences arise in part as a result of what manufacturers do. In reality, through product design, advertising, and promotion, consumers learn to like what they then say they need. Few would argue that people who enjoy taking snapshots need a camera that also develops pictures. But in re­sponse to a need for novelty, convenience, and a shorter interval between acting (snapping the picture) and gaining pleasure (seeing the shot), the Polaroid camera succeeded in the marketplace. It is inconceivable that Edwin Land responded to impressions of consumer need. Instead, he translated a technology (po­larization of light) into a product, which prolif­erated and stimulated consumers’ desires.

Текст 9. Success story. Japan . P. Drucker

In general, the history of working and worker is not a particularly happy one.

But here are significant exceptions. Again and again, we find either a period or a particular or­ganization in which working is achievement and fulfillment. The usual case is a great national emergency, in which the worker sees himself contributing to a cause. This hap­pened, for instance, in Great Britain in the months after Dunkirk. On a smaller scale it occurred in the United States during World War II. Jobs did not change. Bosses did not become more intelligent or more humane. But the basic satisfaction of working changed completely, if only for a limited period.

This can also be achieved, examples show, without great national emergency, indeed, without any outside spur. Robert Owen made his workers achieve in his Lanark textile mills in Scotland 150 years ago—and he did not do anything revolutionary.

There are similar exceptions to be found in modern industry. The most important—if only because of its success in worldwide economic competition—is Japan’s organization of working and worker.

At first sight, nothing looks more like the extreme of Theory X than a Japanese fac­tory or office. Japan is not a permissive country, but a very rigid one. Its way of managing working and worker is anything but flexible. But it differs significantly from any other way we know, whether rigid or flexible, autocratic, or democratic. At the same time its way is not hoary tradition. The most important features of the Japanese system were de­veloped in the twenties and thirties of this century and for use in modern large-scale or­ganization. The main impetus was the importation of Taylor’s scientific management, which began around 1920.

The industrial engineers in Japanese industry use the same methods, tools, and tech­niques as the Westerner to study and to analyze work. But the Japanese industrial engi­neer does not organize the worker’s job. When he has reached the point at which he un­derstands the work, he turns over the actual design of jobs to the work group itself. Actu­ally, the industrial engineer begins to work with the people who have to do the job long before he finishes his analysis. He will study the work the same way his Western counter­part does. But he will, in his study, constantly use the work force itself as his “resource.” When he has finished his analysis, the synthesis will essentially be done by the work group itself. The industrial engineer continues h activities, but he does so as “assistant” to the work group rather than as outside analyst.

The Japanese worker very largely also takes responsibility for improving his tools. Machines in modern industry are, of course, designed by the engineer, but when a new machine or a new process is being introduced, the workers are expected to take an active part in the final adjustment, the final arrangement, the specific application of machine and tools. In many businesses the work force actually participates in machine design and acts as a resource to machine or process designer.

Zen versus Confucius

The mechanism for making the worker take responsibility for job and tools is what the Japanese call “continuous training.” Every employee, often up to and including top man­agers, keeps on training as a regular part of his job until he retires. The weekly training session is a regular and scheduled part of a man’s work. It is not run, as a rule, by a trainer but by the men themselves and their supervisors. The technical people, e.g., the industrial engineers, may attend but do not lead; they are there to help, to inform, to advise—and to learn themselves.

The training session does not focus on any one skill. It is attended by all men on a given job level and focuses on all the jobs within the unit. The training session which the plant electrician attends will be attended also by the machine operator in the same; plant, by the man who sets up and maintains the machines, and by the sweeper who pushes a broom—and by all their supervisors. Its focus will be the working of the plant rather than the job of this or that man.

Similarly, the accountant is expected to be trained—or to familiarize himself in the training sessions of his office group, and through correspondence courses, seminars, or continuation schools—in every single one of the professional jobs needed in his company, such as personnel, training, and purchasing.

The president of a fairly large company once told me casually that he could not see me on a certain afternoon because he was attending his company’s training session in weld­ing—and as a student, rather than as an observer or teacher. This is unusual. But the com­pany president who takes a correspondence course in computer programming is fairly common. The young personnel man does so as a matter of course.

Underlying this is a very different concept of the purpose and nature of learning from that prevailing in the West—but also in the China of the Confucian tradition. The Confucian concept, which the West shares, assumes that the purpose of learning is to qualify oneself for a new, different, and bigger job. The nature of learning is expressed in a learn­ing curve. Within a certain period of time this student reaches a plateau of proficiency, where he then stays forever.

Continuous training gives every worker a knowledge of his own performance, of his own standards, and at the same time of the activity of his fellow workers on his level. It creates a habit of looking at “our work.” It creates a community of working and workers.

Japanese institutions are far more rigidly departmentalized and sectionalized than most Western institutions. Departments in Japan fight fiercely for their territorial integrity. They have utmost expertise in “empire building.” The individual member of a department is expected to be completely loyal to it, yet the individual employee tends to see beyond the boundaries of his own specialty and his own department. He knows what goes on, He knows the work of others, even though he himself has never performed it. He sees a genuine whole, and he is expected to be concerned with the performance of every single job in this genuine whole. He, therefore, can see his own place in, the structure and his own contribution.

Finally, continuous training creates receptivity for the new, the different, the innovative, the more productive. The focus in the training sessions is always on doing the job better, doing it differently, doing it in new ways.

The training sessions actually generate pressure on the industrial engineers. In the West, the industrial engineer starts out with the assumption of resistance to his approach by the employee, whether in manual or in clerical work. In Japan the industrial engineer tends to complain that the employees expect and demand too much from him.

The commitment to continuous training makes the entire work force in a Japanese institution receptive to change and innovation rather than resistant to it. At the same time, training mobilizes the experience and knowledge of the employee for constructive improvement.

One basic problem in studies of employee satisfaction in the West has always been that there are two kinds of dissatisfaction. There are negative and positive dissatisfaction. There is the complaint about frustration, arbitrariness, speed-up, poor pay, poor working conditions—the negative dissatisfactions. There is also impatience with poor working methods, desire to do a better job, demand for better, more intelligent, more systematic management. The Japanese continuous training mobilizes positive dissatisfaction and makes it productive.