Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2035

Letter to Harvard Business Review re the article by Dr. O.A. Ohmann, “Skyhooks,” in their May-June 1955 number. Appended after this a piece by Heath, “The leadership Role of Management.”

 

 

 

 

To the Editor of

The Harvard Business Review

Harvard College

Cambridge, Mass.

Dear Sirs:

     I have been greatly interested in reading your “Sky Hooks” by Dr. 0. A. Ohmann in your May-June, 1955 issue, and the various commentaries thereon. I beg to add my bit.

     First, I want to state my deep appreciation of its spirit of earnest inquiry and sincere seeking. But I seem to find, running through it all, the naively implied thesis that there is something fundamentally wrong with the economic system of production and exchange that has conferred upon us such material prosperity as to be the envy of all the world. This imputation of essential wickedness is in no way substantiated but is subtly implied in such semantic tricks as, “There is nothing wrong with production, but … and, How can production be justified if it destroys personality and human values both in the process of its manufacture and by its end use?” This is not any proper question. It is an assertion, the stark absurdity of which is somewhat hidden in its touch of moral indignation and its interrogative appeal. Surely, we are not driven stupidly to suppose that either our production or our process of it must “destroy personality and human values.” May not the care­less acceptance of such as this betray us into treason against our abundant way of life? Is there nothing else on which to blame our perplexities, our tensions and our discontent? And must science, too, be suspect? Science is not anything but knowledge — the know­ing of things from themselves instead of from official authorities. Surely, knowledge is not a destroyer of personality and human values.

     Nor can the worker’s dignity and responsibility be destroyed by his enjoyment of a standard of living that includes, as it does, an increasing margin for savings and investment, and, thereby, the opportunity for dignity and security of proprietorship over his own production and increasing wealth wherewith to be responsible for his own actions or default. It is only when someone else undertakes to answer for him, for his deficiencies or needs, that “not only his dignity but also his security” is lost.

     And monopoly in any field is not any matter of size, but of others being shut out. Small business is extensively created and maintained by the patronage of the big, not destroyed by it.

     Nor need we bewail that “the individual must be adjusted to the group.” Every productive organization does just that. It is but another way of saying teamwork within the organization, each working with others as he would have others work with him, to the end of best serving the needs and desires of its patrons or what­ever group the organization is best qualified to serve.

     Just two facts admittedly stand out: (l) “Our standard of living is at an all-time peak.” (2) “Yet we are a tense, frustrated, and insecure people full of hostilities and anxieties.” If we must grant the second, we have yet no ground to assume that the second is because of the first; that good living is the cause of our frustration and anxiety, as some seem to think. It is quite the reverse. Evil does not spring out of good. We must look else­where.

     Ours is not a purely economic society. For we practice not only a social technology that is modern and creative, we practice also a political technology older than Egypt and Rome that, so far from being creative and paying its way, is a free-rider on Free Enterprise and becoming more and more burdensome day by day.

     Why must we denigrate as godless our essentially creative and thereby spiritual, our golden rule system of free contract and mutual service by consent and exchange — doing each unto others in the manner we would have them do unto us — yet breathe no word even of suspicion against our part in the world’s sad heritage of sub­jection to nationalistic coercive power? In our allegedly “neurotic and schizophrenic environment,” must we curse the hand that feeds us while fawning on the only power that slays? “Schizophrenic en­vironment” it is, indeed, the new and modern side of it blessing us with abundance and with length of days, while the old and more accustomed, the political, is a perpetual problem, a mighty burden and a menace to our very lives.

     Primitives and pioneers, men of action and devotion, are not given to neuroses in any environment. It is our self-styled intelligentsia, weak-hearted, white-collared and well-published, who are the most disturbing and disturbed. They are the readiest victims and most true to type in their spite against that which produces and sustains.

     Science has laid the powers of nature within the hands of men, the right and the left, without distinction. In the one hand they are spiritual. In their spiritual relationships through the golden rule of each serving others while others serve him, the objectification of love, they are creators. They employ the powers of nature to serve and build their dream of life abundant and ever-lengthening days. With the other hand they employ these powers, under the iron rule, to tax, enslave and to destroy their fellow man. The one is the way of life, the coming of the Kingdom. The other leads to darkness and to death. Small wonder mankind shrinks and trembles in fear caused not by their heavenly right but by their own left hand of worldly power which in fear they worship and from lack of vision must continually appease, as the half-man turns to darkness and makes sacrifice to his demon god. “The Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force.”

 

     Yet through it all, “underneath are the everlasting arms.” The system of free enterprise, the golden rule kingdom on earth, serves and grows. The one thing needful is to know the truth about this new kingdom so that the truth that serves life shall make us free.

     The divine progression is creation, the higher order super­vening always upon the lower, the more enduring upon the less en­during. The older and the cruder — the evil — is not to be destroyed, but is to be overcome only by good.

     Endless generations there were who knew none but the iron rule among men. Less than two thousand years ago, the Golden was pro­claimed. For more than a thousand years, its kingdom lay crushed beneath the iron heel of Rome, its spirit wafted and banished into realms of promised bliss beyond. For another half millennium it slumbered in the dark debris of fallen Rome, to waken in the sea­borne commerce that built the free-born coastal cities whence sprang the Renaissance. Then towards the golden sunset freedom took its way and nurtured into wealth and greatness the peoples of the Western world, whose governments now increasingly despoil them of their gains.

     Beauty was the achievement of Greece, and order that of Rome. But that order was imposed on man by man, a kind of order that God^’s law forbids and Christ’s Golden-Rule relationship transcends. This is the spiritual order in which men are co-creators with God even though they realize it not, though they count and deplore it as “materialistic” and seek salvation in extraneous mystical and supposedly spiritual far-off things.

     The animal man, unregenerate, is preoccupied with evil. He has to be, to stave off death; for he cannot create. The spiritual, the regenerate man’s preoccupation is with life. It leads him in­to the Golden way, the creative Kingdom of cooperation — which is mutual love and service — with his fellow men; into a love that is impersonal, thereby universal, hence truly Divine, and in which, as he becomes conscious of it, he is divinely inspired and finds spiritual joy. In this spiritual relationship of working creative­ly together, the spirit is wrought into not only useful but also into beautiful — soul satisfying — material arts and forms.

     Every elaboration of divine technology under the golden rule, every extension of free enterprise in the mutual service of mankind is a further execution, in His Kingdom, of the creative will of God.

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The Leadership Role of Management

     In the creative realm of the spirit, every inspiration “cometh from above.” And so it is within the organization. As Dr. Ohmann so truly observes, it is the “top man” who sets the tone. He will be self-dedicated to something he feels to be greater than himself and in devotion to which his self-anxieties and frustration fade away. His example will influence all those whom he leads. It will draw them into a joyous team-work of the spirit that banishes anxiety and fear in the self-fulfillment it brings. The common devotion will be far less spoken than felt; and in their united loyalty to what they conceive as of greater worth than themselves, they will develop with one another, even though it be unacknowledged, a sense of comradeship and love. Consciously or unconsciously, the top man must be self-fulfilled in his practical dedication to the public whom his organization serves, to the organization itself and to its personnel as the means and instrument of that service. This creative and spiritual solidarity leads to harmonious cooperation and efficient practical results. Perhaps not everyone will sense this spiritual solidarity. A few are likely to hold out against it and thus separate themselves from the comradeship and tend to fall away to connec­tions they think more congenial to their mind and mood.

     But this spiritual leadership, this esprit de corps, cannot be established or maintained unless it come down from the head of the organization to all levels of authority. For every good and perfect gift cometh from above, and, flowing out of this gift of the spirit, all things are added unto them. During World War I, a group of benevolent ladies who were appraising the conditions in various industrial organizations vouchsafed to the head of one of them the high compliment, “In all our visits, we have found in your place the happiest people.” The spirit of that organization was summed up in a sign bearing this motto: “Do we just build propellers? No. We build also men!”

     In the fellowship of common aim and purpose, there is creative power. It is emotional concord flowering into rational results. In every sphere of responsibility, there is no high action without decisive authority. But how high and fine that action, that is dependent on the rapport between chief and subordinate all down the line. All are united by the integument of contract the same as the organization is united with all its patrons and sources of supply. And for greatest satisfactions and success, one precept must govern all: the Golden Rule of doing unto all others not by force, however sanctioned or decreed, but in the same manner as one would be done by. Our free enterprise system, so far as it is free, is just that. It does not “destroy personality and human values,” for in it alone can men in and under authority exercise spiritual relationships to­wards material ends. Be his authority over many or few, the man at the head has rare opportunity under the Golden precept to bring alive all the knowledge and skills, enterprise and enthusiasms that lie latent in those under his command. This spiritual capital is always available to him and not to be neglected and lost. Yet we still have to adhere to the sound principle that the decision in each case as to action, to be effective, must be made by one man alone. He can delegate authority but he must not scatter it, and he can bring the creative powers of others into full cooperation with his own.

     The final fruit of free enterprise is the self- realization of the individual, for it enables men to answer the invitations of the spirit through all the active and the passive arts and recreations that an advancing economy and its culture, and none other, can afford. With this independence, springing from their mutual productivity,

 

Each, in his separate star

Shall paint the Thing as he sees it

For the God of Things as They Are![1]

     Free enterprise is not what “destroys personality and human values;” for it alone liberates the spirits no less than the bodies of men, and by its extension into wider fields can transform the rude powers of the world into servants of mankind. Dr. Ohmann makes no mention of these worldly powers, their taxation and their wars. Let it be so. Let us learn to value the true way of life that has come to bless us in our midst and how we may go further forward in it.

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     It is the province and privilege of man to breathe (as it were) into material things the forms and qualities that reflect his spirit and, so, minister to his life, his desires and dreams. These tangible, transformed things are created conjointly but unequally by men. Under “Heaven’s first law” (which is order), as they are unequally created so must they be unequally distributed — in an order that is rational (by ratio) among men. The market is the milieu in which these ratios are given effect. It deals only with limited and measurable things, tangible or intangible — measurements made by the market quoted and announced in value units; but its blessings and satisfactions are as immeasurable as the heart and mind of man. The uniqueness of human personality forbids any common standards or units wherewith to measure desires and satis­factions. And even if they could be measured it would not be done, for the “values” of the spirit are not diminished in their giving but multiplied to the giver in such measure as he gives. The value of tangible and measurable things is what they induce as re­turn. But spiritual values are self-creative, enhanced by but not dependent on any return. The works of the spirit are values of themselves — art for art’s sake, love for love’s sake. But its necessary foundation is in the mutual measured rationality of the Golden Rule as practiced in the Market, whence comes the abundance that exalts the life of man.