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| Joy at Work |
Dennis W. Bakke's passion is to make work exciting, rewarding,
stimulating, and enjoyable. While most business books focus on top
executives, Joy at Work is aimed primarily at the working life of the
other 90 to 95 percent of people in large organizations. According to
Bakke, co-founder and CEO emeritus of the AES Corporation, a worldwide
energy company with 40,000 employees and $8.6 billion in revenue by
2002, a better measure of an organization's success than the bottom line
is the quality of work life.
In Bakke's view, successful business people should be guided by
principles and purposes meant to be ends in and of themselves, not
techniques to create value for shareholders or to reach financial goals.
He is disturbed that society's preoccupation with economics often leads
people to calculate their worth as individuals based on their salaries
or wealth and to judge their leaders more on financial results than on
values.
Bakke views winning, especially winning financially, as, at best, a
second-order goal. Yet, most business books do not go beyond this
objective and thus fail to define the ultimate purpose of an enterprise.
Bakke challenges us to broaden our definition of organizational
performance and success beyond dollar value. The timeless values and
principles he advocated during his tenure at AES, he says, stand on
their own merits, whatever a company's share price.
Bakke and AES
partner Roger Sant redefined the basic operating structure for
organizations and created an unconventional global success story. At
AES, said senior executive Tom Tribone, "We try it out in practice and
then see if it works in theory."
CHAPTER 1: MY INTRODUCTION TO WORK
After earning his M.B.A. at Harvard Business School, Bakke worked six
years for the federal government in Washington, D.C. He had grown up
enjoying work on his family farm in Washington State, but now he saw how
central staff operations tend to exert ad estructive tyranny over
organizations.
He knew that purpose makes work meaningful and believed
that fun and work weren't at all incompatible. So, when he and business
strategist Roger Sant brainstormed forming a private-sector company to
generate electricity, the two already had a different kind of
organization in mind. "Let's make it fun," Sant said. The two launched
AES in January 1982, with a $60,000 personal bank loan and $1 million
from investors, including family members.
As one of the new company's first steps, therefore, AES held a
two-day retreat where 20 employees hammered out its "shared values"
integrity, social responsibility, fairness, and fun. All AES personnel
were encouraged to develop a collegial, values-driven atmosphere at work
and to live these values off the job, too. AES leaders stressed these
values from the start to let people know where the company stood and to
give prospective employees the choice of whether they wanted to be a
part of AES or not.
"Fun" was the most difficult value to define. To Bakke, fun was not
the Friday afternoon beer blast or the annual holiday party. Rather, fun
meant a joy-filled, rewarding, creative work environment, free of
autocratic supervisors and staff offices, where each and every employee
could fully utilize his or her talents for success.
Bakke believes that values are the organizational infrastructure that
guides management and gives a company its distinctive character. An
organization?s values cannot change with the ups and downs of the stock
price or be regarded as some management tool or system that runs
parallel to the operation. Yet, CEOs rarely talk about values in
investor meetings and rarely consider them in judging the performance of
managers or employees, or in making business investment decisions.
When, in 1991, AES management, employees, and investors decided to take
the company public, they submitted a draft public-offering document to
the Securities and Exchange Commission for review. SEC staffers advised
moving the paragraph on "Adherence to AES's Values" out of the "Business
of the Company" section and into the "Special Risk Factors" section.
Bakke was amused that SEC officials thought AES's values posed a
business hazard and that the U.S. Government thought it was very risky
to try to operate a business with integrity, fairness, social
responsibility, and a sense of fun.
CHAPTER 2: A MISERABLE WORKPLACE
Today's management structures and attitudes toward workers are rooted
in the Industrial Revolution. As capitalists created factories and
hired laborers, they defined two classes of people: management and
labor. Workers moved from independence and generally high self-esteem in
the agrarian model to dependence and low self-regard in the factory
model. In the contemporary business world, managers can get education,
take responsibility, oversee budgets, and make decisions. But workers
are considered lazy and irresponsible; capable only of work for hourly
wages; in need of constant training and supervision; and not to be
trusted to make sound decisions.
In today's economic formula (labor + material + capital =
production), people (labor) are treated as a quantity like financial and
fuel resources, to buy and sell, depreciate, and, when used up, dump.
Business leaders are far more concerned with the tasks these
interchangeable, expendable "human resources" can perform than with who
they are as humans.
Current approaches to leadership are often hierarchical and
paternalistic, with decision making, compensation, and control all
centralized. But decentralizing makes more sense, since lower-ranking
people are most often closer to the problems and better positioned to
come up with solutions, especially if they seek advice from a broad
range of colleagues. In the AES experience, staff technicians were more
engaged and reacted more quickly to problems when no bosses were looking
over their shoulders.
They felt they played an important role in their
company, knowing that the company trusted their judgment. Yet making
such changes ignites resistance. Executives are loath to delegate much
of their power and control to others in the organization and to share
their knowledge and expertise with all who work in the organization.
We need to design organizations that encourage people to look beyond
job security. Most executives have no idea how to create such an
environment because they may never have experienced a joyful workplace
themselves. But the love of work and accomplishment, the passion to
serve, and the readiness to honor individual traits, gifts, and failings
still exist in the human spirit. These qualities transcend
industrialism and must be welcomed where we spend most of our waking
hours, the workplace
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