What we can still learn from Mao's Little Red Book

I am old enough to remember Mao’s Little Red Book. It was a collection of advice, analysis and sayings, and if you were a leftie in the Sixties there was no chance you hadn’t at least got a copy on your bookshelves. (No need to actually read it.)

I remember quite a few of the spectacularly unconvincing sloganeers that demonstrated more the chasm that separates Chinese from English ideas about language than anything specific about Maoism. My favourite was ‘Peoples of the world unite and defeat the US aggressors and all their running dogs’. I so wish I had said that.

So what has all this to do with management? At about the same time there was a story in the British media that seems to have been published primarily to ridicule Maoist revolutionism. It was about a lathe operator in a factory somewhere in China who had said that once he had read the Thoughts of Chairman Mao his lathe had turned three times as fast.

Of course everyone in the West laughed. What a fool. What a typical piece of irrational propaganda.

A little later another journalist found the man and took the trouble to ask him what he had meant. His answer was illuminating. Before he read the Little Red Book, he replied, he has simply come to work each day and followed orders. He had known all along that there were things wrong with his lathe that could easily be fixed but he did not think it was his job to do anything about t it. Just obey orders. But once he had read the Great Helmsman’s book he realised that it up to him to do something about it. So he did, and lo and behold, his lathe worked a lot better.

Not really very astonishing, of course. Yet I spend my life surrounded by staff and managers – often quite senior managers – many of whom would rather die than challenge the way things are done. And no wonder – after all what would happen if really they took the initiative and did something on their own authority?

Perhaps I can answer that slightly rhetorical question by my own recent experience. I recently attended a long offsite management meeting led by my immediate boss. He’s a good guy – I like him, and he once told me that he had chosen to work in this company precisely because he was tired of bullying corporate cultures.

So far so good. But in the course of this same meeting we happened to talk about whether the company's managers are empowered. Of course they are empowered, he insisted. I have told them they are. Of course they aren’t, I replied (over and over again – it was perhaps not the most constructive of discussions) – not until both the means and the authority are explicitly put into their hands. Which they had not been.

We came to a bit of an impasse, and started to talk about another subject. As he spoke my boss gave a little dig to one his other team members about a project that had overspent without his permission, and how the project manager had had a dressing down as a result. The amount the project manager had overspent was a small fraction of the total project costs, but this allegedly empowered project manager was in trouble. Most absurdly of all, my boss made it quite clear that, had the manager in question simply asked for permission to do what he did before he did it, he would have been authorised to do it anyway!

Apparently empowerment meant empowered to do things that work, but not things that don’t. Bearing in mind that empowerment is of significance only when you need to make a serious decision, this puts the project manager in an impossible position – damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

I think I would rather have been Mao’s lathe operator.