Low pay, high pay it’s still about motivation

Inflation is increasing because low wages are starting to rise in China, economists are warning us. The dismal science truly does have a problem for every solution. A decade ago, low pay in China was a problem because it took jobs away from west without increasing aggregate demand in the low-wage economy.

But never mind, as usual, economists miss the bigger part of the story, so biased are they against notions such as employee motivation, skills, performance and anything that can’t be measured on an abacus or a spreadsheet. Just about everything that matters, in other words.

When a country is in the early stages of conversion from mostly peasant farming to an industrial-based economy, almost any urban job paying real wages offers the chance of a better future for a family. People are often escaping extreme penury. They are motivated. They work hard; very hard. Many have little or no concept of leisure time.

In the two-dimensional analysis of formal economics, these crucial dynamics are arbitrarily absent. In the real world, however, they are what make workplaces productive. All an economist sees is the wage that is lower than in richer countries, ergo they conclude it is the lowness of the wage that offers the competitive advantage. This is reinforced by the rhetoric of anti-corporate campaigners, who seek to ‘name and shame’ western companies that use low-wage suppliers, arguing that they gain an unfair and unethical advantage in this way. Entire outsourcing strategies are based on this superficial understanding, and as a consequence they often go wrong, as this recent feature by Simon Caulkin shows (£).

Is this equation of low wages and competitive advantage, however, a case of correlation, not cause-and-effect? Are the bigger factors the motivation and the work ethic? Would wage rises, handled in the right way, actually increase the competitive advantage? This is an exciting discovery we have made in research for New Normal Radical Shift, that higher wages and productivity in Bangladeshi clothing factories are leading to better quality and margins for Marks & Spencer.

A recent example of the institutional bias towards low wages was the report of China Labor Watch last year. Even the supposed campaigners for the low-paid repeat the myth that it’s good for business. But a press report at the time indicated a growing problem of high staff turnover – which in many cases represents a higher cost than a wage rise. Because the dismal science fails to measure or take into account such an important matter, it fails to be incorporated into analysis, decision-making, economic understanding or the dominant business model. Hashtag fail, as they say in Twitter.

What if low wages have never offered any competitive advantage at all, whatsoever? What if it has all been a terrible mistake?

Radical Shift: A mini-manifesto

The ‘old normal’ business model has been exposed as unfit for purpose. The recent crisis has exposed how the costs of opportunistic, unethical pursuit of short-term returns have been huge: mis-selling, fraud, Libor-rigging and so on have damaged and even destroyed entire businesses. The forthcoming book New Normal Radical Shift, by Neela Bettridge and Philip Whiteley, describes how these damaging practices were based on flawed theory. It describes a positive but practical alternative, showing how sustainable, enlightened management can be good for business, the environment and society, simultaneously. The principles of the ‘New Normal’ can be summarized in six major themes:

The 20^th Century business model was based on economic theory, not evidence on how businesses operate – Formal economics has used mechanistic metaphors for the economy and the organization, assuming ‘the firm’ or ‘labour’ to operate according to ‘laws’. We now know that this approach is inaccurate, and has led to a downplaying of the importance of personal leadership skills. Wages are described as the cost of labour in economics, but in the real world they form only a part of employment costs, and can be dwarfed by the costs of poor skills or low morale.

Accountancy can only measure money, it cannot measure the organization – The terms of reference of accountancy have been adopted for attempts to value organizations. This has led to the misnomer that the people who work for the company and their skills are ‘intangible’, whereas in fact they exist; and the misnomer that the assets owned by the legal entity of the firm are ‘tangible’, even though they consist of relative valuations expressed on a balance sheet.

The company is a network of teams, not a structure with resources – A business is based on relationships, not impersonal transactions. Business leadership means negotiating with, leading and challenging or inspiring people.

Sustainability is a business necessity, not an ethical extra – It is now clear that the cult of ‘maximizing shareholder value’  is an unsustainable business model, which does not even benefit shareholders, especially when measured over the longer term. Business sustainability has to be based on a recognition of the role of all stakeholders. Environmentally, the finite nature of natural resources, and volatility in commodities markets, mean that responsible and efficient stewardship of resources is now a business imperative as well as an ethical one.

Shareholders do not own a publicly listed company – Recent business orthodoxy has been geared towards maximizing returns for shareholders, who are assumed to be the ‘owners’ of the company. This is an arbitrarily narrow target, based on a misunderstanding of company law. Shareholders do not own the company; they own shares in the company, and benefit from limited liability. In many contexts the employees constitute a far more significant stakeholder. The duty of the directors, in law as well as in commercial good sense, is the long-term stewardship of the company for the benefit of all stakeholders.

Left-right politics is an anachronism: the interests of the workers are not always in opposition to the interests of owners and managers – Economic theories of left and right-wing politics agree that the interests of owners and workers are always inherently opposed. This can be found in the teachings of Karl Marx and Milton Friedman, which have been hugely influential. Decades of research on employee engagement now show this assumption to be inaccurate and extremely damaging to businesses and their employees.

Lazy journalism, institutional sectarianism

The failure to operate even basic checks on the accuracy of the Newsnight story on child abuse has led to a crisis at the BBC and a bill for libel damages that will cost us licence-payers dearly. The scandal exposes two common behavioural flaws among left-leaning journalists: institutional sectarianism and equating investigation with scandal.

It beggars belief that left-wing tweeters Sally Bercow and George Monbiot would have exuberantly named a Labour politician being accused of the most heinous crime imaginable; or that the professional Murdoch and Tory-baiter Tom Watson MP would have aired his apparently false allegations behind the protection of Parliamentary privilege had it concerned a member of Gordon Brown’s team. It is possible he was referring to another case, but as one commentator put it, he ‘set the hares running’. Too often, the thought process is: ‘Only the Murdoch empire and the Tories can be nasty. We can’t be nasty. Therefore everything we say and do is correct and everything they say or do must be wrong, somewhere.’

I first became aware of the capacity for institutional sectarianism and dishonesty by the left, justified because the propaganda was aimed at right-wing targets, in Nicaragua in the early 1990s. Throughout the previous decade the consistent line by Guardian opinion-writers, the Labour left and trendy vicars was that the Reagan and Bush administrations were not really trying to establish democracy by undermining the Sandinista military regime, and that the Contra fighters supported by the USA were hired foreign mercenaries.

When I was living and working in Nicaragua in 1991, I met several wounded Contra fighters who were neither foreign nor mercenary – they were local campesinos. The new anti-Sandinista coalition was fairly elected, and their defeated opponents were allowed freedom of organization and freedom of expression. To be fair to the Sandinistas, some of their women’s groups that I visited did fantastic work in the poorer communities.

But the lazy equation ‘investigative = scandalous’, combined with institutional sectarian thought patterns, distorted coverage in liberal Anglo-Saxon publications. The headline: ‘Reagan/Bush hire mercenaries to undermine progressive regime’ is just so much sexier than ‘Reagan/Bush use military force but also promote parliamentary democracy in complex multi-dimensional struggle where progressive and evil forces are evident on both sides.’

To balance my report, one has to remember that some Conservatives can be just as partisan and opportunistic – for example, earlier this year some actively encouraged a strike by oil tanker drivers as they thought it would create bad publicity for the Labour movement and make their government look good.

Left wing/right wing sectarianism serves little or no useful purpose. It is about as helpful as the hostility between Montagues and Capulets or those who open their boiled eggs at the narrow end or the fat end. We just have to end it.

More on this agenda in the forthcoming book: New Normal Radical Shift.

It’s the management, stupid

Employment lawyers, HR professionals and trade unionists have queued up to denounce the British Chancellor’s recent suggestion that employees in a start-up could trade their employment rights for a share in the business.

The storm of protest was entirely predictable. It was also based, as usual, on a fundamental misunderstanding of what employment rights can do and of the importance of the role of management. For decades now, both sides in this debate have been wrong. Rights don’t help the worker as much as their representatives imagine, but don’t impede the business as much as some conservative lobbyists suppose.

Let’s look at some common beliefs about management and employment law. They may be found across the political spectrum. Trade unions, employer groups and prominent politicians would broadly share these assumptions:

• Poor management, including carelessness, bullying and discriminatory practice, is inevitable. There is little we can do to prevent it.
• Ruthless cutting of wages maximises operating margins and boosts profits.
• Legislation and trade union militancy are the only counter-balancing forces that can prevent low pay and workplace misery.

These beliefs are closely intertwined, and strongly supported by the dominant left-wing and right-wing economic theories. They are also almost completely wrong. The evidence base suggests the opposite: that fair, enlightened management practices help the business as well as the employee; that the direct costs of paying staff are usually outweighed by indirect factors such as skills, commitment and teamwork.

Many trade union leaders counter that they do make the case for the enlightened manager, pointing out that they have often sought to reassure businesses that they have nothing to fear from better conditions for staff. Many do make this case, but not consistently. They also use the ‘social dumping’ argument, which is the opposite: that workers’ rights must be strong and international to prevent firms gaining a sneaky competitive advantage by ‘dumping’ their operations in a low-wage environment. I once heard the then head of the British Trade Union Congress John Monks make both arguments in the course of the same speech. You cannot convincingly make the case for better business from enlightened management if your base your argument for more laws upon the exact opposite.

Let us consider the first of these cultural beliefs, that poor and discriminatory management is inevitable, and let’s go back 200 years and make a comparison with medicine. Before safe surgical practices, evidence-based treatment and long before antibiotics, many medical interventions were horrific: useless where there were not actually dangerous. ‘Blue mass’, which contained mercury, was still widely used in the 19^th Century.

Management now is like medicine a couple of hundred years ago: most practitioners are unqualified, most practice is poor, the evidence base is ignored.

So the question is: should the response to poor medicine be confined to pressing for more and more complaints procedures? Or should most effort be applied to improving practice?

We have to have complaints procedures – the shockingly discriminatory practices exposed in a recent local authority equal pay case demonstrate this – but it is by no means clear that always adding to the entitlements for workers automatically improves management: the really big changes come from reformed and enlightened practice. An over-regulated workplace can be an impediment to good management. Talk to anyone with a day job: the conduct of their boss is the single biggest factor that shapes their daily working experience. Given a choice between a good boss and a new route to the tribunal, all well-balanced people will choose the former.

This is of pressing concern to human resources managers and the trade unions, which have almost become branches of the employment law profession. At the moment, they probably spend 90 per cent of their time learning about or pressing for more laws, and 10 per cent of their time encouraging enlightened management practice. If this were reversed, the consequences would be revolutionary.

But we have to want to. The problem is that our left/right political duopoly tell us that bad management is really rather good.

Externalizing costs – an economic crime by the left

For decades now, anti-corporate pressure groups and trade unions have highlighted the unethical way in which many multinational companies have ‘externalized’ responsibilities and costs – keeping their profits but passing many of the costs of the way in which they do business to innocent third parties. Other agencies have to clear up the pollution they emit, or deal with the social problems caused by low pay.

So far, so clear-cut: principled campaigners from the left of politics put pressure on unprincipled corporations to clean up their act. Two recent developments have complicated the picture, and in some contexts the situation is almost the reverse.

Across the western world, in a bid to maintain free social and health care for their populations (an understandable objective), and maintain a short-term appearance of economic growth (far more questionable) centre-left governments have been borrowing, and borrowing big. They have a welter of euphemisms to justify the practice, by selectively quoting the economist John Maynard Keynes. This can reach extremes where some commentators claim that debt is not really debt and borrowing does not involve borrowing, as this interview with the ‘economist’ James Galbraith shows.

The harsh reality, however, is an externalization of costs to future generations to pay for benefits today. The people most negatively affected by these decisions have not been able to vote for them, because they are not old enough yet.

To take the UK, for example, in the period 2005-2008, the Chancellor and later Prime Minister Gordon Brown relaxed his definition of the ‘golden rule’ for borrowing by changing the definition of the ‘economic cycle’. For example, in 2005 it changed the start date by two years and, miraculously, it had suddenly met a target it was in danger of breaching. At the time, few people noticed; only when the banking crisis hit were the government’s stretched finances exposed. And on the crisis itself, the then government was partly to blame, as it had repeatedly ignored warnings about lax credit control, excessive personal debt and a housing bubble, as this transcript from the House of Commons shows in November 2003, where Mr Brown refused to acknowledge a clear warning from the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable.

The bigger point is this: the last Labour UK government, like others across the west, externalized the costs of their spending, for which they reaped short-term advantage, in a manner every bit as unprincipled as any corporation and on an even bigger scale. There was not a whisper of recognition, much less apology, for this financial crime at this week’s self-satisfied Labour conference.

Meanwhile, we discover that externalizing costs by corporations may not even make business sense, as this study shows. Corporations are smartening up their act, recognizing that responsible stewardship over the longer term encourages disciplines that help efficient operations and good customer service, helping profits.

It ought to trouble the left that it now has a worse record on ethical stewardship than the likes of Walmart, Coca-Cola and even some of the oil giants. But I don’t expect recognition of this any time soon.

Lost narratives

I have been utterly gripped by the archaeological dig this week at Leicester, just 70 or 80 miles from my office, and the discovery of a high-status grave below the choir of a friary that had been submerged by a modern car park. It is almost certainly that of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England and the last to die in battle, who lost his life at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

The most sensational finding was that his spine was slightly curved with a condition that would have made his right shoulder appear higher than his left. He was not a hunchback, as his opponents and William Shakespeare depicted him, but the indication of some spinal deformity is a thrilling illustration of how political propaganda tends to weave fact and fiction, rather than be pure invention. (Thought: as a skilled horseman, had he lived today Richard would probably have been in the Paralympic show-jumping team).

It is frustrating that there are so few surviving texts from the time, and that much of the history is inevitably the subject of interpretation and speculation. Richard has modern defenders of his reputation, the Richard III Society, who seek to counter the spin of the Tudors and the Bard.

It is even more odd, then, that we rarely revisit convulsive battles from our own times, which many of us can remember, to produce a more comprehensive version of events than the most popular. The industrial and political schisms of the 1970s and 1980s featured collapsing industries, strikes and protest marches and bitterly contested elections. They resurfaced also this week with the damning revelations of police harshness and misconduct at the tragedy of the Hillsborough football ground in 1989. Many observers pointed out that the South Yorkshire Police was the same force that took part in controlling and suppressing protests by striking miners just a few years earlier, and linked the incidents as examples of class war.

What is astonishing to me is that the dominant explanations of these events are almost as limited, narrow and sectarian as the debates over the Yorkist and Lancastrian claimants for the throne in the late Middle Ages.

Margaret Thatcher, who became Prime Minister in 1979 and oversaw the closure of much of the coal-mining industry, resisting a year-long strike by the miners, remains a hugely divisive figure. She is either celebrated as the one who saved the British economy from terminal decline, or demonised as the one who destroyed swathes of industry and entire communities.

An alternative version is that she did neither. These narratives serve the interests of left and right in covering up their own ignominious failures. Many British industries – car building, ship-building, iron, coal and steel – were already in steep decline by 1979. The obvious reasons – too obvious for left and right politicians to accept – were class-based, incompetent management and class-based incompetent trade unionism. There was failure to adapt to new technologies or match Japanese and German competitors on skills and teamwork. Unions preferred pointless militancy to meaningful engagement, and many featured Trotskyite entryists, fired up by the spirit of 1968, whose industrial vandalism was deliberate.

Losers and winners in politics will always argue over which narrative should dominate. But I wonder how many narratives get lost completely.

Olympic highlights

I got the London 2012 bug late, but I got it bad. I did neglect the garden, but tried to stay on top of my work. ‘My’ highlights are necessarily arbitrary as there were many events I missed. As you can see, I have sought to feature athletes from around the world.

Jessica Ennis

Yorkshire lass Jessica Ennis only had to finish her 800m to be sure of heptathlon Gold; she didn’t have to move from third to first place with a stunning sprint in the final straight to cross the line first in front of a home crowd. This is called panache, of the kind you only see in the really great sportspeople. It is the difference between being a very good athlete and one of the all-time greats; between being remembered and becoming immortal.

Jessica, who is from Sheffield, south Yorkshire, created a moment that will have prime place in British sporting folklore, eclipsing Geoff Hurst’s third goal at Wembley in 1966 because it was for the whole country, not just England.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/19131298

Chad le Clos

Michael Phelps is almost a freak of nature; with 6ft 7in arm span, long body and huge feet, he could probably beat a dolphin over 200m. It takes a super-special performance to beat El Phelps. This is what South African Chad le Clos managed in the 200m butterfly. Phelps’ head and body position was actually slightly ahead just before the finish, but le Clos got his fingertips home first. Timing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/18902357

Epke Zonderland

If you have never appreciated gymnastics before, take a look at this astonishing gold-medal performance on the high bar by Epke Zonderland of the Netherlands. If I remember my Dutch correctly, his name translates as ‘without-land’ and this is other-worldly:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/19171008

Mo Farah and Alan Watkinson

Mohamed Farah, born in Somalia but a proud Brit and Londoner, thrilled the home crowd two Saturday evenings in a row to become the first GB athlete to win the double of 10,000m and 5,000m Olympic champion. Special mention must go to Alan Watkinson, his former PE teacher, who spotted his talent at a young age. Mo had wanted to be a footballer, but Watkinson could see that his ability lay in athletics. He came up with the idea of letting him play football for half an hour, in return for agreeing to do athletics training. Genius.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/18912148

Alexander Vinokourov

On the first day of the competition proper, the UK was hoping, almost expecting, its first gold in the cycling road race, with Mark Cavendish as a strong contender. In the end Alexander Vinokourov won a stunning Gold for Kazakhstan:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QaF10WyXHc

Women’s boxing, hmmm

One event I planned on avoiding was the women’s boxing, featured in the Olympics for the first time. I don’t know if I’m just old-fashioned, that it makes me squeamish. Probably most men my age are thinking: how would I feel if a daughter of mine were an Olympic boxer? Would I feel proud or horrified? A mixture of both, probably.

London 2012 did produce at least two quite sparky characters: Ireland’s Katie Taylor and a Team GB Gold medallist Nicola Adams, who is from Leeds in West Yorkshire. She declared she was taking the medal home to Leeds and was looking forward to some fast food. I still can’t bear to watch young women getting hit, but Adams and Taylor have star quality.

Ruta Leilutyte: Lithuanian sensation

Teenage swimming stars tend to cause a sensation; they can improve their personal bests quite rapidly – causing suspicions, in the case of Chinese gold medallist Ye Shewin, which the Games organizers and drugs testers strongly rejected. But perhaps the most impressive performance was by Ruta Leilutyte of Lithuania, totally unfazed by an error in the starting mechanism that led to a false start in the 100m breast-stroke, she beat the favourite to come home first.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/19054438

Jamaica Gold-Silver-Bronze

I cannot add any useful further observation about the amazing feat, and the amazing feet, of the fastest man in the world, and the fastest nation on earth, with Jamaica winning Gold-Silver-Bronze in the 200m. There is much comment on whether the 100m record will keep on being broken, but a different possibility is that Usain Bolt is a rarity and that 9.58s will prove stubborn. The high-jump world record was set by a similarly exceptional athlete Javier Sotomayor of Cuba. It has stood at 2.45m since 1993.

• Thought: do Jamaican men blub? I just find it hard to imagine Bolt and Blake welling up on the podium as they hear the Jamaican national anthem yet again. Views welcome.

Caribbean excellence and generosity

There must be a mention for other great performances from the Caribbean: Felix Sanchez won Gold at the age of 35 for the Dominican Republic in the 400m hurdles, and Grenada celebrated a first Gold, with Kirani James in the 400m. James may be remembered at least as much for his gesture in insisting upon swapping name badges with the runner in the semi-final who came last, Oscar Pistorius, the first athlete with disabilities to move from the Paralympics to the Olympics.

The Caribbean is a wonderful part of the world, with friendly people and an exuberant approach to sport. The generosity of spirit of Kirani James does not surprise me.

David Rudisha: World record in the 800m

David Rudisha shows you can be modest and unassuming, yet still charismatic and one of the all-time greats. The pace of the 800m men’s final was such that the competitor coming last, Andrew Osagie, ran in a time that would have secured him the gold medal in Sydney, Athens or Beijing. To finish it in style, Rudisha broke the world record, one of the ‘hardest’ in athletics. Special mention goes to Lord Sebastian Coe, organizer of the London games, who set a world record in 1981 of 1 min 41.73 seconds. David Rudisha’s time was only 0.82 seconds quicker. Nijel Amos of Botswana, still a teenager, took Silver and exactly equalled Seb Coe’s former world record time.

Let’s hear it for the more ‘unusual’ events

Before London 2012, I vaguely categorized Olympic events into four:

1. Running around sports
2. Splashing around sports
3. Sitting down sports
4. A bit Mickey Mouse, really.

But having actually seen much more of the events this time around, I can see the athleticism, excellence and skill of some of the less fashionable events. So I salute all competitors in BMX biking, synchronized swimming, dressage, shooting and fencing. Turns out, BMX biking is ferociously fast, and makes Formula 1 look a bit wimpy. And I really shouldn’t mock people with a gun or a sword.

Stat of the Games

Triathlon gold medallist Alistair Brownlee, who is from Bramhope, West Yorkshire, directly after swimming 1.5km and cycling 43km, ran 10km on uneven terrain in less than 30 minutes – only 97 seconds slower than Mo Farah on the track. He would not have come last in the 10,000m!

Olympic Fever and the art of competition

I am neglecting the garden. I am going for a run every day. I’m nearly getting knocked over running home to watch the next race. I’m making a start on my Bradley Wiggins sideburns. I have a moderate-to-severe case of Olympic Fever. Certainly, I’ve seen more of the events than any since Munich in 1972 or Montreal in 1976, in which cases I was on school holiday, waiting for the Test Match to begin.

What is remarkable is that for me, and for thousands of other Brits, this Fever has taken us by surprise. Before the events began, I was uneasy. Would there be logistical foul-ups? Have the Games gotten too big and too commercial? Is it a load of hype?

But somewhere between the opening ceremony and the first gold for Team GB, an electrical charge went through the country, a bolt as fast as Usain Bolt. People who wouldn’t normally follow sport were talking about ‘our’ chances in an event they were scarcely aware of a week earlier. I asked a friend who had previously declared a lack of interest in sport if she had managed to find a quiet corner to read a book and she replied: ‘Oh no, I’m really into it – watching every race and cheering on Team GB!’

I have never known such a positive spirit in the country – ever. It is new territory and I hope there is a lasting legacy. There also seems to be a great spirit among the athletes – I’ve never seen such smiles from the runners-up and hugs between participants.

For Britain, some of the most positive aspects have been to celebrate both diversity and achievement – concepts that, in our warped and sectarian political system, are often pitted against each other. On Saturday – the greatest night in British sporting history – the Gold winners were a mixed-race woman, a Muslim man born in Africa and a ginger-haired lad (bullying red-haired folk is a type of racist abuse still widely tolerated).

Many commentators have observed that Jessica, Mo and Greg are much finer role models than the reality-TV mini-celebrities that have had too much of the oxygen of publicity in recent years.

How inspirational is this, given that only one in a million of us is born with the talent necessary for the highest sporting achievement? I think the lessons we ought to learn concern the relationship between competition and fairness. In left-right politics, they are pitched as being each other’s opposites. The right has gone for an aggressive ‘win at all costs/greed is good’ ethos, which culminated in fraud and mismanagement in financial services where there were too few rules. Too often, the left has gone for an ‘everyone gets a prize’ mentality in school that undermines achievement.

Competition is inevitable, and perfectly healthy. The only Olympic contestants to be disqualified so far got the red card for trying not to win – and quite right, too. Competition is a part of life. It is, however, not the whole of it. It is an art form as well as a means to an end: trying to outwit an opponent; striving to write a better book; preparing for a competitive job interview.

It is no fun at all if your opponents aren’t trying. It is only destructive if you cheat. This is why the concept of ‘fair play’ comes in, and the importance of accepting defeat graciously. The inevitability of competition means that sometimes we lose – even Usain Bolt does not have a 100% record. For Oscar Pistorius, simply getting to the Games required a gold medal effort.

For the first time in my life, I totally ‘get’ the Olympic Spirit: Strive to be the best you can be. Competition and fairness are not opposites, they are two sides of the same coin.

It really is the taking part, not the winning or the petty rivalries that matter (though can I point out that Yorkshire is currently ahead of Australia in the medals table?)

• Just spotted a great blog on a similar theme by @Rachel_J_Lewis.

Better than a new equality law

Book Review – Jennifer Garrett’s Rocking your Role is aimed at the high-achieving woman; but as so many of us are now in dual-income households, her guidance is valuable for many men, also. Where her book marks itself out as being particularly timely and helpful is in showing how real life is lived in relationships. The concept of entitlement, and the idea of quotas, can only at best play supporting roles in the quest for a more even balance between men and women in the economy and in society. Bigger changes come from transformed attitudes, aspirations and practical domestic arrangements.

This was underlined in what was, for me, the most startling fact to emerge from the book. On page 38 she notes, almost in passing, that nearly all the women she interviewed saw being a main earner as a temporary state of affairs. Given that her interviewees included high-achieving executives, I found this extraordinary. Nothing better illustrates the extent to which issues around equality are deep-seated and psychodynamic in character, with discrimination but one facet. Jenny follows up her observation with the excellent question:

‘How is thinking of being a main earner as temporary helping?’

There are plenty of practical exercises, including one on attitudes to money – precious advice for all dual-income households! There is a strong emphasis on keeping a diary/journal, not so much as a historic record but as an expression of feeling and spur to action.

Her book is empowering in the fullest sense of the word: encouraging women to acknowledge the status and power that earning well affords; not feel guilty about it, and not shirk from the responsibility that comes with it. Above all, she reminds her readers to make decisions with confidence. She quotes the wonderful Marianne Williamson poem about our deepest fear being not that we are inadequate but that we are powerful beyond measure, including my favourite line: ‘There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.’

In the context of the career women who take pride in her work achievements, this means shining her light for her husband/partner; children and friends and other relatives. I have written before about the limitations of discussing work-life balance as though all work were slavery and something to be minimized. Work can offer achievement and satisfaction as well as duty and routine. Children want quality time with their parents; but they want to feel proud of their parents and their career achievements. There is thus much sound practical advice for career men with families also.

Jenny’s insightful work is clearly founded on a deep understanding of the dynamics of relationships and careers, and on the ways in which people develop and learn, as well as on her interviews with women specifically for this book. I wish Rocking your Role well; a book like this, should it become a top seller, will do more to transform the lives of women, and those of their partners and families, than any number of Government commissions.

You can buy the book on Amazon, click here.

Jenny’s website is here.

Sectarian or Useless – the voter’s choice

The two main political parties in the UK each receive an increasing proportion of their financial backing from a narrow strip of society: the Conservatives from City-based institutions and Labour from the public sector trade unions. Given that the two parties have alternated power for decades, it is hardly surprising that these two parts of the economy have benefited from favourable legislation and financial support, compared with other sectors.

A generation ago, the unions behaved in an appalling, quasi-criminal manner, culminating in the Winter of Discontent (1978/79). Waves of strikes and aggressive picketing affected both the public and the private sector, leading to the downfall of the Callaghan Government.

Trotskyite infiltrators in the unions damaged UK industry in the 1970s, quite deliberately. Ultra-left activists – often middle-class students fired up by the 1968 revolutions – were sent to the coal, steel or car manufacturing industries to stir up trouble and pave the way for a workers’ takeover. This is not a Daily Mail conspiracy theory; I met some Workers Revolutionary Party veterans in the 1980s who described the process.

After 1979, the Thatcher Government imposed new rules on unions. Paradoxically this had a beneficial effect – requiring votes for general secretaries and for strike action reduced militancy, and gave unions more legitimacy.

Now it is the City institutions that are behaving appallingly. There is increasing evidence that criminal fraud is rife in the financial markets, as the Serious Fraud Office begins an inquiry into Libor rate fixing. As was the case back then with the unions, not all in the sector are crooks; but the crimes committed have been serious. In a mirror image, the next Labour Government is likely to produce new rules curbing such behaviour. As with the union reforms, this could have a beneficial effect on the sector.

With both the Thatcher reforms and the expected Labour reforms of the City, however, there are missing elements. They leave their own sides unreformed, and they neglect the importance of industrial leadership. Union militancy was only part of the reason for industrial decline: incompetent, class-based industrial leadership was the other. The Trotskyists would never have stood a chance of entryism if organizations had been run intelligently, on the basis of participative structures, strong teamwork and leadership. This approach also produces better productivity, service and profits, as Neela Bettridge and I describe in the blog and forthcoming book, New Normal, Radical Shift.

Almost certainly, Labour will introduce numerous new laws, both for the City and more widely in the economy to protect workers’ rights. And almost as certainly, they will neglect the importance of management education and industrial development. It is very unlikely that they will acknowledge their own role in the crisis: the hubris, mismanagement, excessive borrowing and wasteful spending by Gordon Brown, who bent the definition of the ‘Golden Rule‘ – a deception with an even bigger impact than Libor-fixing.

As for the Liberals then and the Liberal Democrats now, they appear to have little to say about economic and business issues. Sectarian or useless: this is the voter’s choice.