Foucault and the Power Inside an Agile Business.

 Foucault can teach us a few things 
about power and agile.

When you work as a professional person, objectively, your life is better than many others.  You work in environmentally controlled conditions, you get paid more than most workers, and you have the social cache of being an office worker.  In reality, being an office worker has plenty of risks.   Professional people do not unionize, so they are fired “at will.”  White-collar workers deal with high levels of stress and deadline pressure.  Finally, many of your colleagues are damaged, neurotic, or plain mean.  The reality of this situation should not be happening, but it often does. I was thinking about it more seriously this week and decided to write about it. 

As a professional person, I spend most of my time on LinkedIn learning about industry trends, keeping tabs on my colleagues, and finding informative bits of information.  Ville Pellinen posted an interesting nugget this week when he shared the satisfaction survey results from the banking and investment firm Goldman Sachs.  The news was a damning inditement of the company culture.  See for yourself.  

Employees were working on average 96 hours a week, and they were suffering physical and mental health problems because of the pressures to perform.  Managers were not respecting mandated time off over the weekend, and associates were expected to make last-minute changes to presentations and reports up to 20 minutes before discussions with clients.  As one associate said, “ What is not ok to me is 110 to 120 hours over the course of a week!  The math is simple. That leaves 4 hours a day for eating, sleeping, showering, bathroom, and general transition time.  This is beyond the level of ‘hard-working,’ this is inhumane / abuse. “

Compare this information with the company mission of Goldman Sachs, which proclaims, “our people are our greatest asset…” and you can see a severe disconnect between what the company says and what it does.  It occurred to me that a few factors are forcing these employees into these abusive situations.  The first is the notion of workism. Derek Thompson from the Atlantic magazine says working long hours becomes an “arms race” between talented and hard-working people who want to advance their careers.  The next is Karl Marx’s theory of labor exploitation.  Business people know that they can force people to work longer hours for less money because their competitors do it, so they are forced to squeeze harder on their workforces.  The most intriguing notion came from one of the other coaches on the thread who shared a quotation from Michel Foucault.  

He said,

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

In other words, there is no difference between the prisoners and the guards in prison; they have to live by the same awful rules of surveillance when they are together.  I then joked about if M.B.A’s are being taught Foucault in business school.  It appears that business schools in Europe are sharing Foucault and his unusual philosophy with the future masters of the universe in their business programs.  What do business people have to gain from a radical French philosopher with a colorful history?  

Foucault and all of his writing were concerned with two principal issues.  The first was power, not the power to control but rather the ability to influence.  Peer pressure, new forms of learning, standard means of coercion, and social factors all mix together to create power structures that influence how people think and behave.  This kind of power is what executives and human resources people label as corporate “culture.”  The other thing that Foucault is interested in is how people’s knowledge and perceptions change over time.  In his books, “The Birth of the Clinic” and “Discipline and Punish,” he shows our perceptions of hospitals and prisons have changed over the last 300 years. 

As agile professionals, we can learn plenty of wisdom from Foucault.  We have to see how power flows through an organization, including the less formal means of control like peer pressure.  Next, we need to know how those systems of power affect the people doing the work.

As Foucault says in “Discipline and Punish,”

"In a disciplinary regime, on the other hand, individualization is ‘descending: as power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized; it is exercised by surveillance rather than ceremonies, by observation rather than commemorative account, by the comparative measure that have the ‘norm’ as reference rather than genealogies giving ancestors as points of reference by ‘gaps’ rather than by deeds."

We improve individual performance, but to do so, we need to exercise more surveillance, and the nature of the administration should be more anonymous than personal.  Employees are worried about letting their fellow team members down than upsetting the boss.  

Finally, we need to understand that the business practices that exploit people are just as destructive to the business because exploitation will extend to clients and shareholders.  People working 110 hours a week are no good to anyone and for a CEO to tolerate something like that is short-sided.  

So pushing people to exhaustion is not intelligent, and it is not agile.  Why people work long hours and tolerate abuse, and poor conditions need examination.  Finally, leaders need to look more clearly at their business and what it does to the people who work there.  The clock is ticking for Goldman Sachs.  

Until next time.