The Spirit of an Organization

Two sayings sum up the «spirit of an organization». One is the inscription on Andrew Carnegie’s tombstone:

Here lies a man

Who knew how to enlist

In his service

Better men than himself.

The other is the slogan of the drive to find jobs for the physically handicapped: «It’s the abilities, not the disabilities, that count».

Management (здесь: руководство) tells a manager what he ought to do. The proper organization of his job enables him to do it, but it is the spirit of the organization that determines whether he will do it or not. It is the spirit that motivates, that calls upon a man’s reserves of dedication and effort, that decides whether he will give his best or do just enough to get by (отделаться).

It is the purpose of an organization to «make common men do uncommon things» – said Lord Beveridge. No organization can depend on genius; their supply is always scarce and unpredictable. But it is the test of an organization that it makes ordinary human beings perform better than they are capable of, that it brings out whatever strength there is in their members and uses it to make all other members perform better. It is the test of an organization that it neutralizes the weaknesses of its members.

Altogether the test of a good spirit is not that “people get along together (ладят друг с другом); it is performance but not conformance. «Good human relations» not grounded in the satisfaction of good performance and the harmony of proper working relations are actually poor human relations and result in poor spirit. They do not make people grow; they make them conform and contract. I shall never forget the University president who once said to me, «It is my job to make it possible for the first-rate teacher to teach. Whether he gets along with his colleagues or with me – and very few really good teachers do either – is irrelevant. We certainly have a collection of problem children here – but, boy, they do teach».

When his successor substituted this for a policy of «peace and harmony», both the performance and the spirit of the faculty rapidly went to pieces.

There are five requirements to ensure the right spirit throughout management organization.

1. There must be high performance requirements; no condoning of poor or mediocre performance; and rewards must be based on performance.

2. Each management job must be a rewarding job in itself rather than just a step in the promotion ladder.

3. There must be a rational and just promotion system.

4. Management needs a «charter» spelling out clearly who has the power to make life-and-death decisions affecting a manager; and there should be some way for a manager to appeal to a higher court.

5. In its appointments management must demonstrate that it realizes that integrity is the absolute requirement of a manager, the quality that he has to bring with him and cannot be expected to acquire later on.

A man should never be appointed to a managerial position if his vision focuses on people’s weaknesses than on strengths. He should be a realist. A man should never be appointed if he is more interested in the question: «Who is right?» than in the question: «What is right?» Management should never appoint a man who considers intelligence more important than integrity.

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The New Music

The new music was built out of materials already in existence: blues, rock’n’roll, folk music. But although the forms remained, something wholly new and original was made out of these older elements – more original, perhaps even the new musicians themselves yet realize. The transformation took place in 1966–1967. Up to that time, the blues had been an essentially black medium. Rock’n’roll, a blues derivative, was rhythmic, raunchy, teenage dance music. Folk music, old and modern, was popular among college students. The three forms remained musically and culturally distinct, and even as late as 1965, none of them were expressing any radically new states of consciousness. Blues expressed black soul; rock, as made famous by Elvis Presley, was the beat of youthful sensuality; and folk music, with such singers as Joan Baez, expressed anti-war sentiments as well as the universal themes of love and disillusionment.

In 1966–1967 there was a spontaneous transformation. In the United States it originated with youthful rock groups playing in San Francisco. In England it was led by the Beatles, who were already established as an extremely fine and highly individual rock group. First, the separate musical traditions were brought together. Bob Dylan and the Gefferson Airplane played folk rock, folk ideas with a rock beat. White rock groups began experimenting with the blues. Of course, white musicians had always played the blues, but essentially as imitators of the Negro style; now it began to be the white band’s own music. And all of the groups moved towards a border eclectism and synthesis. They freely took over elements from Indian ragas, from jazz, from American country music, and as the time went on from even more diverse sources (one group seems recently to have been trying out Gregorian Chants). What developed was a protean music, capable of an almost limitless range of expression.

The second thing that happened was that all the musical groups began using the full range of electric instruments and the technology of electronic amplifiers. The new electronic effects were altogether different – so different that a new listener in 1967 might well feel that there had never been any sounds like that in the world before. The high, piercing, unearthly sounds of the guitar seemed to come from other realms. Electronics did, in fact, make possible sounds that no instrument up to that time could produce. And in studio recordings, multiple tracking, feedback and other devices made possible effects that not even an electronic band could produce live. Electronic amplification also made possible a fantastic increase in volume, the music becoming as loud and penetrating as the human ear could stand, and thereby achieving a «total» effect, so that instead of an audience of passive listeners, there were now audiences of total participants, feeling the music in all of their senses and all of their bone.

Third, the music becomes a multi-media experience; a part of total environment. In the Bay Area Ballrooms, the Tillmore, the Avalon, or Pauley Ballroom at the University of California, the walls were covered with fantastic changing patterns of light, the beginning of the new art of the light show. And the audience did not sit, it danced. With records at home, listeners imitated these lighting effects as best as they could. Often music was played out of doors, where nature – the sea or the tall redwood – provided the environment.

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