One of the problems with management – and economics and politics, for that matter – is the common idea that beliefs and ideology don’t matter. We can just be pragmatic people, getting the best deal, it is lazily assumed. This is misleading, because it’s based on the assumption that practical people don’t have values and beliefs. In practice, you cannot divorce belief from action, because beliefs determine how you view a subject, what your priorities are, and what you perceive to be achievable.
In particular, the following observation, from the political columnist Mary Riddell, writing in the Daily Telegraph on 9 July, cannot pass without comment. She asserts:
Ideology pays no bills, minds no children, trains no teachers and offers no succour to the sick, the elderly and the dying. Mr Miliband’s huge gamble in moving his party to the Left can work only if he can prove that Labour will offer fair wages to those in penury, jobs and training for the young and care for the old.
This is not true. A better ideology is precisely what is needed to improve wages. For over 100 years, cynical ideologies (of the left and the right, as it happens) have kept pay very much lower than it could and should have been, especially for skilled workers in effective teams. It is a shared left-right ideological belief that minimizing the wage bill maximizes profits. This is reflected in the astonishing fact that more than half of FTSE100 chief executives have a finance background, according to the Chartered Management Institute and that many companies still prioritize reducing the cost of hire (often relatively unimportant) rather than the operating cost of weak skills or low engagement (often much higher) as this recent blog by Philip demonstrates.
The dominant ideologies have kept pay low, and disguised the importance of management. We need a better ideology. One that is neither left nor right but based on good leadership.
