By Ron Strand
During the ten years or so that preceded his death, Howard Hughes managed a billion dollar business empire from a secluded hotel suite in Las Vegas. He allowed personal contact with only a few people and communicated primarily by passing notes with short, cryptic messages. Presumably professional managers carried out the day-to-day operations of companies like the oil field drilling company Hughes Tools, defense contractors Baker Hughes and Raytheon, Las Vegas hotels and casinos and Hollywood movie studios.
This eccentric management style was a continuation of a distant relationship Hughes had with many of his operations. He inherited Hughes Tools, a company founded by his father and based on an oil drilling device his father invented. During his 60 year tenure as owner of Hughes Tools, Howard Hughes Jr. apparently only visited the company five times. What the media reported as a bizarre life style, was perhaps to Hughes, the logical extension of a management style that had worked for decades.
Michael Moore in his film, The Big One, gives the impression that most American Chief Executive Officers are somewhat like Howard Hughes. They may not live in complete seclusion in Los Vegas hotels, but are portrayed as being in seclusion in their office towers, inaccessible to the common person, insensitive to the plight of the people who work for them, making decisions that strip people of their jobs and livelihood while making enormous profits for themselves and their companies' shareholders. Attempts to ask these executives for more information about lay offs at their plants were met, except for one executive, with stonewalling by security and public relations personnel. Except in the one incident with CEO Phil Knight at Nike, Michael Moore never makes it past the lobby.
The impression Moore makes is one of a changing America. The new America is a place where people don't matter and communities are destroyed for the benefit of nameless and faceless international corporations. His dramatic attempt to put a human face on what economists are calling the new economy or the new capitalism, is effective so far as drama is concerned, but perhaps tells only one side of a multifaceted story. There is little doubt, based on considerable literature, that the economies of what is typically called the developed or industrial world is changing. Along with those changes come changes in organizational structures, the way people communicate with each other and live together, in communities and societies. But whether or not these changes result solely in the bleak future portrayed by Moore is a matter of debate.
Drucker and others, foresaw a future in which workers are far more mobile and flexible than the industrial workers portrayed by Moore. The workers in the Moore film have jobs that are intrinsically linked to major capital investments, like factories. When the need for the factory declines, when it becomes inefficient or when other factors such as land taxes become onerous, a company may decide to change its product lines or its method of manufacturing or the location of the plant. When this happens, the need for the workers is lost along with the factory and massive lay offs occur. On the other hand, the knowledge worker is not constrained, at least not as much, by capital investment and geography and can work from a variety of locations in a variety of circumstances.
The flexibility described by Drucker has become the reality for many workers but it may be having a negative effect on organizations and community. In order to maintain employment and career advancement, people are subjected to the vagaries of the new economy by moving constantly, uprooting family and relocating in the suburbs of various cities, requiring a constant acculturation to new organizations and situations. Some have observed that this lifestyle, while providing more or less continued employment, also seems to prevent the formation of true communities, and leaves it participants lacking human support systems, friendship and a feeling of occupying a meaningful place in the social order.
But if our economies, and societies with them, are moving through radical and unalterable change, it makes sense that our paradigm of what constitutes organization should also change. Perhaps the methods of communicating and organizing that we are moving towards are more natural than what has been the norm in the past. Nature is a complex web of interconnected systems constantly seeking equilibrium by replacing what is used and lost through extraction. Natural ecosystems are not open-ended systems which use things up but rather closed systems that constantly replace what is used. The loose knit networks of people forming with social media may be more like a natural ecosystem.
Coming back Howard Hughes, he was an innovator in many ways. Perhaps his management style was not so eccentric as it was futuristic. CEOs who manage their business using Facebook, Twitter and their iPhone are becoming more commonplace. Imagine what Howard Hughes could have done if he had a smart phone.
This eccentric management style was a continuation of a distant relationship Hughes had with many of his operations. He inherited Hughes Tools, a company founded by his father and based on an oil drilling device his father invented. During his 60 year tenure as owner of Hughes Tools, Howard Hughes Jr. apparently only visited the company five times. What the media reported as a bizarre life style, was perhaps to Hughes, the logical extension of a management style that had worked for decades.
Michael Moore in his film, The Big One, gives the impression that most American Chief Executive Officers are somewhat like Howard Hughes. They may not live in complete seclusion in Los Vegas hotels, but are portrayed as being in seclusion in their office towers, inaccessible to the common person, insensitive to the plight of the people who work for them, making decisions that strip people of their jobs and livelihood while making enormous profits for themselves and their companies' shareholders. Attempts to ask these executives for more information about lay offs at their plants were met, except for one executive, with stonewalling by security and public relations personnel. Except in the one incident with CEO Phil Knight at Nike, Michael Moore never makes it past the lobby.
The impression Moore makes is one of a changing America. The new America is a place where people don't matter and communities are destroyed for the benefit of nameless and faceless international corporations. His dramatic attempt to put a human face on what economists are calling the new economy or the new capitalism, is effective so far as drama is concerned, but perhaps tells only one side of a multifaceted story. There is little doubt, based on considerable literature, that the economies of what is typically called the developed or industrial world is changing. Along with those changes come changes in organizational structures, the way people communicate with each other and live together, in communities and societies. But whether or not these changes result solely in the bleak future portrayed by Moore is a matter of debate.
Drucker and others, foresaw a future in which workers are far more mobile and flexible than the industrial workers portrayed by Moore. The workers in the Moore film have jobs that are intrinsically linked to major capital investments, like factories. When the need for the factory declines, when it becomes inefficient or when other factors such as land taxes become onerous, a company may decide to change its product lines or its method of manufacturing or the location of the plant. When this happens, the need for the workers is lost along with the factory and massive lay offs occur. On the other hand, the knowledge worker is not constrained, at least not as much, by capital investment and geography and can work from a variety of locations in a variety of circumstances.
The flexibility described by Drucker has become the reality for many workers but it may be having a negative effect on organizations and community. In order to maintain employment and career advancement, people are subjected to the vagaries of the new economy by moving constantly, uprooting family and relocating in the suburbs of various cities, requiring a constant acculturation to new organizations and situations. Some have observed that this lifestyle, while providing more or less continued employment, also seems to prevent the formation of true communities, and leaves it participants lacking human support systems, friendship and a feeling of occupying a meaningful place in the social order.
But if our economies, and societies with them, are moving through radical and unalterable change, it makes sense that our paradigm of what constitutes organization should also change. Perhaps the methods of communicating and organizing that we are moving towards are more natural than what has been the norm in the past. Nature is a complex web of interconnected systems constantly seeking equilibrium by replacing what is used and lost through extraction. Natural ecosystems are not open-ended systems which use things up but rather closed systems that constantly replace what is used. The loose knit networks of people forming with social media may be more like a natural ecosystem.
Coming back Howard Hughes, he was an innovator in many ways. Perhaps his management style was not so eccentric as it was futuristic. CEOs who manage their business using Facebook, Twitter and their iPhone are becoming more commonplace. Imagine what Howard Hughes could have done if he had a smart phone.
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