I sometimes pause, momentarily, on a walk down to the water, at a small Chinese grocery store. There is always a myriad of strange and wonderful things displayed in boxes at the shop front. I have often pondered a big box and yams. “Hmmm, I wonder what they are good for?”
It is easy to try and categorize things as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but wondering about ‘the Good’ in something is something very different. ‘The Good’ isn’t a phrase we tend to use every day; and it’s entirely understandable that we’ve become a bit nervous around it. But ‘the Good’ makes perfect intuitive sense: it’s the satisfaction of the highest needs of humankind. It’s all the things that are felt to be in accordance with an ideal of human flourishing and the better self – what the Greek Philosophers called ‘eudaimonia’. It includes, though isn’t limited to, nursing, protecting, delighting, sheltering, teaching and enabling others. Though capitalism tends to describe humans as primarily financially-driven, self-maximizing creatures, there is an important extent to which we are in fact driven to serve other people and perhaps even a broader Good – and gain our greatest satisfaction from doing so.Obviously, people disagree about what exactly constitutes the best way to serve others. But the search isn’t for a single thing that could motivate everyone in the world. What the modern corporate mindset needs to find is an account of authentic serving that they can believe in and which they want to get employees to share. The more the worker feels they are contributing to the Good, the less there is a problem of motivation. They see their work as being something important; they want to do it right. They believe deeply that it needs to be done and they feel proud of their role (however modest) in making it happen.
Money is a vital active ingredient here. But it’s the worth of the undertaking that moves people. And if an organisation can convincingly present itself as serving the Good, there’s less need to use the instrument of money as the primary source of motivation - either through punishment or reward. So, for organisations, there’s a central challenge around articulating their mission so as to tap into the deeper roots of human motivation. Can they lay claim to our stronger motives – by orienting themselves towards serving an aspect of the Good and explaining this internally and to the world? For some organisations, this is going to be a very testing exercise: because it will show up just how far they currently are from having any purpose that could truly motivate people: how far they are from doing something properly worthwhile. A scan of the television any night of the week, which I choose not to allocate any of my time and attention these days, is chock full of advertising from banks, insurers, retailers and other large corporate organisations trying to implore their ‘Good’. Unfortunately, the reality of what they do is more at the opposite end of the spectrum of behavior in our community.
There are plenty of organisations that serve the Good directly – even if they don’t entirely live up to this task – like schools and hospitals. But what about a company that manufactures and supplies paper clips? Are they connected to the Good? The explicit service they provide is very modest: preventing sheaves of loose paper getting muddled. But the human territory in which it operates is large: the longing to bring and maintain purposeful order. It is the same end that is served, with greater public recognition, by libraries, museums, maps, statistics and logic. The makers of paperclips make a small but significant contribution to the noble cause of Order in human life. Society is often rather snobbish in this regard. It will bestow glamour on brain surgeons but neglect the humbler work of the nurse. It will be impressed by fighter pilots, but not so much by traffic wardens. And yet the so-called ‘lesser’ activities are always connected up with the higher ones. It merely takes a more generous, imaginative, even artistic eye to spot the link.
Vermeer’s Little Street, shows people involved in activities which then, as now, were generally regarded as pretty humble. Sweeping the yard, darning a sock, scrubbing the tiles – perhaps even cooking a yam. And we can imagine people often not being terribly motivated. Vermeer must have overheard all the familiar complaints: ‘What’s the point. I’m only going to have to do it all again tomorrow. No one notices much. It’s so tedious.’ But his aim, remarkable and very necessary in all eras, is to return true glamour to these little tasks: in themselves they may be minor. But they enact something major. They are the details out of which a deeply impressive and attractive civic life is created. Vermeer is showing how you reconnect members of the workforce with the higher Good that they are in fact serving. He shows them (and us) the beauty of what they are doing in keeping a house tidy. He reminds them of the wonderful whole of which they are parts. The picture is an ideal motivator, because it makes the worker see the dignity and value of what they do. It’s reminding them why they want to be part of this.
And so, the role of money in motivation takes a slightly back seat. The artist Vermeer is defining a central task of management, which is to ensure that the part of the Good in which the company is operating becomes as visible as possible. In the military and other top performing organisations, the Good is visible without too much work needing to be done. One can just tell that brain surgery and civil defence are important. Also, in many, daily ways the ultimate point of the organisation is restated and reaffirmed. So, in the army there are, unabashedly, songs and flags, rituals, medals and ceremonies which are designed to keep at the front of every individual’s mind just exactly what this organisation is for. The relevance (and therefore the worth) of every task can be explained. If someone asks why they have to polish their shoes so much there’s an answer: it’s an exercise in discipline. Or if they ask why do they have to go for long runs on hot days: so as to prepare for conditions in conflict zones. The point of using the military as a model here isn’t particularly to single them out for praise in terms of what they are for. It’s to point up the organisational advantages of an institution seeing itself as having a clear and important relationship to the Good.
In the ideal economy, all enterprises would be focused on addressing our true needs. So, they would all have a very good case to make: they would all in fact be serving the Good in some more or less direct fashion. And therefore, every job would be worth doing, and the person doing it would enjoy a full measure of public and self-respect. And the owners of the enterprises would equally be entitled to such regard. We aren’t there yet. Many, like the sellers of trash TV shows; the builders of substandard houses, banks, large retailers sell us below average goods and services and do not advance human welfare in any distinct way. These are the firms where money is everything and where we feel in our bones that working there will only be a means to survive rather than to flourish. But already we can see the shape of the future of capitalism: a world where we get better at learning to make money from the Good – and where we learn how to make the Good more visible to employees and the world; so that one is working for money, but, as importantly, one can see that one is working to make a slightly better world, one elegant paper clip at a time.
And, as for that yam…. hmmmm, maybe next time I come down by here, I might pick one up….
