People sat in rooms, telling stories

I spent much of last week down at Dartington Hall on a School for Social Entrepreneurs residential, visiting various interesting social and educational projects in Devon and Cornwall. It was an incredibly inspiring time for me, and has also triggered some follow-up thoughts to my recent comments on business and organisations.

Being with a group of 80 people all intent on making the world better through business is quite a rarified atmosphere, and certainly very energising and inspiring. However, in the context of my recent discussions with Anthony, I'm always cautious about organisations created for "higher purposes" - lest people should be trampled on the way to paradise. I read a blog post recently (apologies, can't find the link currently) which said "social enterprises work best when the employees are the beneficiaries." So it's been very encouraging to spend time with social entrepreneurs and observe how effectively they manage live by the principles they espouse.

One place that really stood out for me was the wonderful, beautiful Schumacher College for sustainable living, certainly one of the most gently powerful environments I've ever been in. The college was inspired by the work of the economist EF Schumacher, of "Small is Beautiful" fame, in whose obituary I came across this marvellous quote from him about dealing with large corporations:

"I never deal with corporations; I only deal with people."

The college works on these same principles, centering the learning on the individuals and their experiences rather than an abstracted system of curriculums and knowledge transfer. When people leave the college, all their knowledge leaves with them, because the college is simply the sum of the people associated with it. And all this got me thinking: what else is there to a corporation apart from the people who comprise it?

As I write this, my girlfriend is mid-way through a deeply unhelpful phonecall to Vodaphone. "Why can't people treat each other like human beings instead of systems," she just asked me? This seems to be an increasingly prevelant symptom of the modern organisation: it takes on a life of its own that makes people act in unsociable, inhuman ways towards each other. The story of the organisation ends up being more powerful than the humanity of the people who create it.

As part of my travels last week, I was very fortunate to meet Tim Smit of the Eden Project, who shared a lot of his lessons-learned with us. He came out with some classic one-liners which are still rattling around in my brain now (including evangelising about the importance of being "curious as kittens"), but one idea particularly chimed so neatly with my own thoughts that I had to share it here:

"Say good morning to at least 20 people before you start work, because work is basically sociable and you'll learn far more from talking to the people around you than you will from whatever you think is your real work."

On the bus on the way to Eden, I realised a few things about our various social enterprises. A business is a story that inspires people to collaborate, by bringing their own personal objectives together under a shared aim. And the best way to make the story work is to acknowledge this: it's just a story, and the people in the organisation are its authors. By removing the emperor's clothes, stripping away the mythologies of our organisations, we make it much harder to do inhuman things - exploit our staff, neglect our customers, pollute our world - in their names.

This feels like the core issue in any business, social or otherwise: we need to put the humanity, the sociability, back into our businesses. A business, in modern convention, is just a tool for organising money and property, not people. There is no such thing as a "business" in any physical sense: it doesn't really exist.

Businesses are just groups of people, sitting in rooms, telling each other stories. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Getting tough

I've been thinking a lot about organisations and management lately, and the question that keeps coming up is how to get things done without upsetting people or wrecking interpersonal relationships.

There seem to be two opposing schools of management around at the moment. In the blue corner, we have the touchy-feely, "I'm here for you" approach, full of words like "empowerment", "development" and "mentoring" - creating positive spaces into which employees can reach their potential and feel valued. And in the red corner, there's Alan Sugar, swearing at fools, demanding 111% effort, results yesterday - humiliation as motivation.

Most management courses these days will not teach you the "do it or you're fired" approach. Instead, dozens of best-selling business books relate wonderful stories about how "we just let everyone do whatever they wanted, and suddenly our profits quadrupled," and the like. So it's interesting that in popular culture, business management is increasingly depicted as good ol' fashioned, ball-breaking rage. Maybe we're craving something here that touchy-feely management isn't giving us.

As an advocate of "sociablism", you'd probably expect me to be firmly in the blue corner, harnessing positive human social interactions rather than trampling people's needs in pursuit of money and standards. But much as I hate to admit it, I've always had a grudging respect for people who can "get things done". More than that, I remember a former boss of mine once saying to me, "now Andy, here's a development opportunity for you: read this document and tell me what it says." I remember wishing he'd just said "I can't be arsed to read this. I pay you, you do it." There's an insincerity about much of modern management that I find uncomfortable, just as I find Alan Sugar's approach uncomfortable too. Instead of harnessing people's personal desires to benefit our businesses, shouldn't it be the other way around?

My friend Charlie once told me that the free market is based on the rational pursuit of self-interest, but companies are based on the irrational suppression of self-interest to a made-up story. Management these days sometimes seems like a hypnotic process of convincing people that their best interests will be served by playing their part in the grand plan. It's particularly worrying in many social enterprises, where hard-working people can be ruthlessly exploited and burnt-out in pursuit of the "greater good". At least Alan Sugar is honest: he wants you to make him money, and if you do, he'll make you money too. (The rest is just showbiz.)

As someone who has worked with friends, and befriended work colleagues, for many years, my biggest challenge in business has always been how to get things done without destroying social and professional relationships. What do you do when your friend lets you down? When do you say "getting this done is more important than our friendship?" Can we be sociable and get things done at the same time?

Business traditionally tends to view itself as a special case, distinct from the social and familial interactions. It works to higher standards, in pursuit higher purposes, and follows its own rules. But in reality, business is no different to any other part of human life. Families have confrontations, and so do boards of directors. Friends argue about missed deadlines and stolen girlfriends. And just as there are times to be fierce in business, so too there are times to be fierce in other areas of your life. Take the ideology out of it, and it's all just human beings interacting, positively and negatively. We're all people, and we all deserve to be treated as such - even when we're being fired.

I think we can learn a lot from organisational theory about how we live our lives and work to make our worlds better. But work should not be the place where we learn about these things, and business goals should not be only ones we use these techniques for. I have been quietly focussing of late on cultivating fierceness in myself, finding healthy ways to get what I need from my society without recourse to bullying or manipulation. Fierceness, anger, disappointment are all essential parts of our social interaction. It's only when we dress them up in "greater good" narratives that they become dangerous.

We don't need to choose between being sociable and getting things done. Sometimes we must embrace the tougher aspects of "sociablism", to get what we need from each other.