Terence Conran’s Habitat: changing lifestyles in 1960s Britain

The current Terence Conran exhibition at the London Design Museum reminds us of the startling impact that Habitat had on the tastes and lifestyles of Britons in the 1960s.  As The Guardian’s video contribution to the current wave of Conran reportage says, ‘He transformed the high street!’ It’s true. Shopping for furniture and interior design in the UK was never the same again. But Conran changed more than the high street: by introducing the idea that everyday items could, and should, be both well-designed and affordable, he changed British people’s lives.

Suddenly, by means of a few, relatively inexpensive purchases: modern, streamlined furniture that was nothing like Edwardian bookshelves or Granny’s chintz-covered best sofa; some inexpensive but stylish kitchen accessories; a Japanese paper lampshade – we were modern! It was also, of course, obligatory to paint all of one’s walls white. Wallpaper of any kind quickly became a social embarrassment (woodchip or lining paper was marginally acceptable once it had been painted white, and was largely unavoidable since the plaster of most older British houses was in no condition to be exposed, and needed to be covered up with something more robust than paint; it was during the 1960s that Polyfilla became a household name, as the cellulose filler was used to fill the countless cracks and gaps in the typical British interior wall, once stripped of its forgiving covering of decorative wallpaper.)

A design revolution

In this way, with a few bits of typically British improvisation and ‘making do’, the UK seized on what Habitat offered and broke free from the 1950s, a decade that combined the elation of war’s end with the continuing realities of rationing (which was in force in the UK until 1954) and of national poverty, and emerged into the elegant and uncluttered modernism of the 1960s. In fact, most of us didn’t actually emerge into the bright white modernism of the 1960s until the rather more stylistically-confused 1970s, a decade that was already nostalgic for the magical ‘swinging’ sixties, but during which the majority of the UK began to catch up with the design revolution that Conran has started in 1964. As is the case with many decades which seem to define an era, ‘the sixties’ lasted for more than a decade.

What is fascinating, with hindsight, is the way in which consumers’ perceptions of ‘design’ changed so fundamentally between the previous and the current centuries: a change for which Conran can accept a great deal of the credit. Or, as some design purists would have it, the blame.

In the twenty-first century, ‘design’ is a good word. We expect things to be designed; we pay a hefty price premium for ‘designer’ goods; we restlessly seek out the most modern design. Having ‘designed’ stuff marks us out as being cutting edge and cool.

It wasn’t always like this.

Consumption engineering: ‘We must use up the goods we now merely use’

An unease with the idea of ‘design’ probably began when American marketers began to realise that they needed consumers to keep on consuming: that buying one car, or one kitchen range, or one fridge in a lifetime was not enough to keep the economy running at full speed. Consumers would have to be persuaded that their major purchases needed to be upgraded on a regular basis: that it did not matter if something was still functioning perfectly well, for example; what mattered was whether it was the right colour, or in the most modern styling.

An American adman called Earnest Calkins, co-founder in 1902 of what has been called the first modern advertising agency, Calkins and Holden, (‘modern’, because of its single-minded focus on graphic design), Calkins was a remarkably prescient marketing thinker. In the 1930s, he came to believe (as did the economist John Maynard Keynes) that America needed to consume its way out of the Depression and that, as an obvious corollary, it was the essential business of manufacturing and marketing industries to create more and more products that got ‘used up’ in the way that what we now call fast moving consumer goods (groceries, soft drinks, toiletries) get used up; that things which used to be ‘once in a lifetime’ purchases must now be replaced on a regular basis, not because they were no longer functional, but because they were no longer ‘cool’ (to use a modern term).

‘Consumption engineering must see to it that we use up the kind of goods we now merely use,’ wrote Calkin. ‘Consumption engineering does not stop until we can consume all that we can make.’[1] The terms that Calkins used to describe this process – ‘artificial obsolescence’; ‘consumption engineering’ – have become terms of abuse to which we all still pay unthinking lip service. ‘Artificial obsolescence’ is a terrible thing, we say to ourselves. Why design something that could last for fifty years (like a car) in such a way that it will only last ten years (or less)? What a terrible waste of limited resources!  Worse still, do people really design things with the sole purpose of tempting us to buy them? Surely design should be about functionality; about creating things that fulfil their function better?

Britain’s Council of Industrial Design

We still say (or think) this kind of thing, despite the demonstrable fact that we like to change our car every few years because the old one seems a bit dated, and that we rush out to buy the latest coffee-making machine, not because it makes better coffee , but  because it is absolutely the latest thing in coffee-making machine design, which impresses our friends and makes us happy. Welcome to the supposedly dubious world of consumption engineering.

Britain’s Design Council – a state-run body set up with the explicit aim of raising the status of good design in the national consciousness – got itself into a bit of a lather about this kind of ‘consumption engineering’ in the 1960s – perhaps not surprisingly so, since we all still seem to be a bit ambivalent about the concept.

The Design Council had been brought into being in wartime Britain, in 1944, as The Council of Industrial Design. It had a clearly proclaimed aim, as pronounced by its house magazine, Design, which was launched in 1949: ‘To help industry in its task of raising standards in design.’[2] There was an unashamedly commercial aspect to this arguably high-minded vision: it was fervently hoped that, if Britain produced better-designed goods, it would be able to export more of them. This does not seem to be a foolish hope; the post-war economy of Germany flourished on the basis of enviable level of exports driven by great design and top-class engineering.

Nevertheless, along with our lingering concerns that ‘consumption engineering’ was a bad thing, so we continued (in the UK, at least) to fret that ‘design’ was being used to sell us things that we didn’t really need.  Good design, in the early days of the Council, was seen as something like good art:  something that it might be hard to define but that was, nevertheless, an objective quality; something that could be agreed upon by well-educated and cultured folk. The Design Council’s job was to try to improve the tastes of the general public, so that they would acquire an understanding of ‘good design’; manufacturers who made use of ‘good design’ would then be rewarded by the custom of these new consumers, with their improved sensitivities and newly-elevated levels of good taste. An article in the Oxford Art Journal, published in 1987, Good Design in the Market Place: The Rise of Habitat Man, said this, ‘For the Council of Industrial Design, the appearance of an object, its designed form, had to reflect the fundamental structure  of the object and thus be the product of the creative aesthetic power of the designer [...] As for the consumer, he/she [...] was to be educated and later to have his/her real needs served not merely pandered too. His/her taste was to be improved rather than his/her appetite merely sated.’[3]

As the author of the article notes, the Design Council was set up at a time when Britons were used to having their lives overseen and regulated by the state – there was, after all, a war on. The Council’s aims were paternalistic and didactic: the general public was to have its taste improved, which would encourage the production of ‘well-designed’ goods. It was a well-meaning, if slightly Big Brother-ish, government strategy.

A British version of Bauhaus

The problem faced by this rather Victorian world view was that neither manufacturers, designers or the general public were behaving quite in the way that they were supposed to. They weren’t really following the rules of Good Design. Manufacturers and designers were worrying about what might sell, and consumers were buying whatever caught their fancy – some of which happened to have been really well designed, which is why we bought it. It was all so confusing.

You will notice the reference in the description of the  Design Counicil’s aims  to ‘(good) design reflecting the fundamental structure of the object’ –the quintessentially modernist view of good design which we associate mainly with Germany’s state-sponsored Bauhaus academy, founded in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius. The most memorable founding principles of the developing school of modernism were to become

Ornament is a Crime

Form follows Function

Truth to Materials

The Council like most design bodies of the time, seemed to believe that these principles were rules: that design that did not follow these rules could not be good design.

Conran, naughty (and immensely successful) marketer that he was, offered us a range of ‘Bauhaus style’ furnishing – suitably stern and functional, true to its materials (typically steel, black leather, pale woods and modern surfacings) and without any criminally decadent ornamentation. But he also – unashamedly! – offered us simple but seductive elements of a continental lifestyle that was overwhelmingly appealing to a nation tired of the drab utilitarianism of wartime Britain.

The article on Sir Terence Conran at the website of London’s Design Museum (of which Conran was a founder and is still a trustee) highlights the way in which Conran mixed and matched the styles that he felt would appeal to the British public.

‘It was a very particular version of modernism, based on simple forms, natural materials, and a fresh colour palette. It was a humanised, British version of Bauhaus. [...] Habitat sold not only Conran’s own furniture designs, but products sourced from Europe and inspired by “triggers” of traditional domestic utility and continental sensuality: “the markets, the roadside cafes, the simple, unpretentious but abundant displays, the delicious food washed down with carafes of rough red wine”. By offering small, casual purchases alongside large furniture items Conran aimed at “that irresistible feeling of plenty you find on market stalls” and set in motion a revolution in home styling whose effects are still felt. By naming “essential” items and tools for the kitchen and home Conran celebrated the aesthetics of utility and connected the home to the exciting post-war tenor of industry and progress.’[4]

But it was not just the general public’s tendency to like items that were rather less austere and rather more sensual than the extreme vision of modernism would allow that was driving us away from the Council’s original vision of what ‘good design’ might be. It was that manufacturers were not following the strict and objective principles of ‘good design’ (putting to one side the fact that nobody has, to the best of my knowledge, succeeded in setting out exactly what those principles would be). In fact, it was even worse than that. Manufacturers were designing things that they thought people would want to buy!

The Persuading Image

As an article published in Design magazine in 1960, ‘The Persuading Image’, made clear, the pressure was now on to persuade consumers to consume: the principle that Earnest Calkin had set out so clearly thirty years earlier.  The author, Richard Hamilton, echoing Arthur Drexler, curator and director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York wrote this: ‘there is no ideal in design, no pre-determined consumer, only a market in a constant state of flux’.[5]

On this basis, good design is dictated by the vagaries of the market. We like what is good, and it is good because we like it.

I think that today we are all fairly relaxed with this notion of deign: design, we now believe, is not absolute but relative. What seemed like good design last year seems dated this year. This flies in the face, of course of the notion that there were (or are) a set of principles that could define ‘good design’ but then – to stray into an area which we really don’t have time to explore in this blog – the idea that there was a definitive idea of what was ‘good (or great) art’ has relatively recently entered similarly difficult waters.

The Design Council, as I hinted at earlier, got into a particular lather about a product shown at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition of 1962. It was (you will be shocked to hear) a new Tricity electric cooker with a built-in radio to entertain the housewife as she cooked! What could be a more extreme example of unnecessary ornamentation and of ‘pandering’ to consumers’ wants? Design magazine made a series of laboured jokes on the subject to show how strongly it disapproved.  If you think that’s acceptable, they wrote, then what about these side-splitting examples of obviously pointless and unnecessary innovations? What about (writers collapse in fits of giggles) a ‘foculpoynte’: a TV screen built into an electric fire or a coal fireplace?  What about (snort!) a ’toast-a-phone’? A toaster that was also a telephone?? (No, stop it – you’re killing me!) What about (wait for it!) a ‘Rockmaster’: a baby’s cradle with a record player attached that plays music to the baby? (No really, it’s too much – wipes tears from eyes.)[6]

Good industrial design: good because we like it?

TVs and other entertainment systems are now seen as essential features of a kitchen, so the we can, indeed, be entertained while we cook. We tend to like to have ‘Foculpoyntes’ in our houses: many modern homes have a giant flatscreen TV on the wall above a fireplace. As for cots that play music to babies – well, that’s obvious nonsense, isn’t it? (I will admit that the toast-a-phone seems not to have caught on.)

We have, I would suggest, come not merely to accept that good industrial design is guided by what we want; I think we would now agree, almost without second thoughts, with the supposedly extreme version of the argument: that good industrial design is, by definition, what we want. It is good because we want to buy it.

[2] Design, January 1949, p.1

[3] John Hewitt, Good Design in the Market Place: The Rise of Habitat Man, Oxford Art Journal, Vol 10 no 2 The 60s (1987) pp 28-42. http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/content/10/2/28.full.pdf+html

[4] http://designmuseum.org/design/terence-conran

[5] John Hewitt, op cit., p 30

[6] John Hewitt, op.cit., p 31

February 12th, 1809: Abraham Lincoln is born

Abraham Lincoln, at a truly critical moment in American history, presented to a troubled and divided nation a clear and commanding vision: that the United States of America was ‘a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12^th 1809, in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky, in the new United States of America: a twelve-year-old nation state whose independence had been recognised by its former colonial master, Britain, in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, following the rebel territory’s military victory over British forces in America in 1781. The new nation state consisted of only thirteen states, all clustered on the Eastern seaboard of the sub-continent – and Abraham’s birthplace, Kentucky, wasn’t even one of them at the time. After the revolution, inhabitants of the territory known as ‘Kentucky County’ in the State of Virginia, east of the Appalachian Mountains, petitioned to become an independent state. America was beginning to expand westward from the coastal ‘Thirteen Colonies’, established by predominantly English settlers in the seventeenth century.

From backwoodsman to barrister

Kentucky’s independence was granted in 1792, making Kentucky the fifteenth state to join the new union (Vermont had become the fourteenth state – the first addition to the original Thirteen Colonies – in 1791.) Shawnee and Cherokee Indians attacked the settlers of Kentucky from the outset to protect their traditional hunting grounds; Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather was killed. His father scraped a living as a boy labourer, growing up to become a farmer and carpenter – respected in the local community of settlers, but still dirt poor. Lincoln was born in one-room log cabin. When the family moved to Indiana (adopted as the nineteenth state of the union in 1816) when Abraham was seven years old, their first home was a rudimentary three-sided shelter, protected by a permanently-lit fire on the open side. They lived off wild game until they were able to establish their farm. Lincoln’s mother died when he was nine. He attended school only haphazardly (and poorly-clothed) but educated himself from borrowed books, studying at the end of each day’s labours on the farm. He went on to teach himself law, and passed his bar examinations at the age of 27. In 1847 he was elected to the House of Representatives as a Whig. In 1856, he joined the new Republican Party, founded two years earlier on an anti-slavery platform. Abraham Lincoln was to become the first Republican president of the United States in 1860. The issue of slavery immediately threatened to split the United States in two: the American Civil War was about to begin.

The moral issue is the core issue

Abraham Lincoln started his presidency of the United States of America with an understandably conservative position: he was simply desperate to hold the United States together. The new nation’s radical experiment in republican government was in danger of fragmenting into a collection of loosely associated states; of ceasing to be a nation. Lincoln set out at first only to prevent the secession of the Southern States, and preferred not to address the issue of slavery in states where it was long-established. Deeply as he loathed the institution of slavery itself, he at first sought only to prevent the spread of slave ownership into new territories as America expanded to the west. As the American Civil War progressed, he realised that the moral issue was in fact the core issue; that the pragmatic solution of merely holding the states together was no solution. The vision that he offered was suddenly crystal clear in his own mind, as it would soon be to the nation as a whole: ‘a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’

Leadership visions for ordinary mortals: what are we trying to achieve?

A great vision for any organisation is both simple and bold, but it need not be as ‘grand’ as this. The question is simply, what is any leader leading their team or organisation for? There will be targets to be achieved (and directions to be set), but these are the essential running, the unavoidable management of any business. A vision is something else: an overriding sense of purpose, a raison d‘etre, a genuine corporate identity. ‘Boldness’ is, after all, a matter of degree – but a vision, by definition, is something that everybody in the organisation can grasp; a simple answer that can instantly be given to the question, ‘What are we trying to achieve?’

Abraham Lincoln is featured in Section 2 of History Lessons: ‘Boldness of Vision’.

February 11th, 1990. Nelson Mandela walks to freedom

One of the most difficult tasks that a leader may face is to change the engrained ‘mood’ of an organisation; its very culture. South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, who, after his release and his later election as president of a country that had voted for the first time on the basis of ‘one man one vote’, was expected by his white opponents to introduce a new regime that would be implacably hostile to whites. In fact, Mandela set out to create a racially mixed government of national unity, and set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to heal old wounds. His personal commitment to a process of forgiveness – visiting his old persecutor, ex-president Botha; having dinner with his ex-gaoler, the commander of the maximum security Robben Island prison – set a tone that the nation quickly followed. White citizens felt included in the new South Africa. A new mood had been created.

High treason

On February 11th, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked free from the low-security Victor Verster prison near Paarl in the Western Cape district of South Africa. He had been sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964 after being found guilty on a charge of high treason, after he had been linked to acts of sabotage against the apartheid regime. Mandela had served 18 of his total of 27 years of imprisonment enduring a ‘hard labour’ regime on Robben Island. When convicted of treason, Mandela was already serving a five year sentence for leaving the country illegally (black people were not allowed to have passports) and for instigating a strike in protest against the creation of the newly declared Republic of South Africa, which had broken away from the British Commonwealth after a referendum from which blacks, some seventy percent of the population, had been excluded.

During his treason trial, Mandela freely admitted to his membership of the African National Council (ANC) and to having founded the military wing of the ANC, which had begun a campaign of sabotage after the notorious Sharpeville Massacre in which at least sixty-nine black protesters were shot dead by South African police.

An ideal for which I am prepared to die

During his treason trial, Mandela said this.

‘Our complaint is not that we are poor by comparison with people in other countries, but that we are poor by comparison with white people in our own country, and that we are prevented by legislation from altering this imbalance’.

‘Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent. [. . .] It is not true that the enfranchisement of all will result in racial domination. [. . .] The ANC has spent half a century fighting against racialism. When it triumphs it will not change that policy . . .

‘During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.[1]’

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/23/nelsonmandela2

Nelson Mandela features in section 1 of History Lessons: ‘Changing the Mood’.

Be Decisive – Great Leadership Idea No. 62

Change involves risk, and there will never be enough information to guarantee that you have made the right decision. At some point, leaders must trust their accumulated experience and their gut instinct and seize the moment.

An effective decisions made at the right moment

Making decisions is the defining aspect of leadership. There has never been a leader who made only right decisions. An effective decision made at the right moment is far better than no decision at all.

The most forceful exponent of this school of thinking was probably George S. Patton, the US Army General who led the astonishing armoured dash across France towards Germany after Allied forces had established a beachhead in Normandy, in north-western France, in order to bring an end to the Second World War. Patton had started life as a cavalry officer at a time when men on horseback carrying swords were about to be replaced by men in armoured vehicles carrying firearms. His experiences in the First World War as a captain in the newly-created United States Tank Corps, during which he witnessed the futility of trench warfare, convinced him of the need to keep an attacking force constantly on the move. Patton was convinced that establishing a defensive line was what lost battles and got soldiers killed. “Attack rapidly, ruthlessly, viciously, without rest – however tired and hungry you may be, the enemy will be more tired; more hungry.”  This aggressive, take-the-fight-to-the-enemy approach led to one of Patton’s most famous quotations: “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

Even the right decision is wrong if its made too late

Lee Iacocca, President and CEO of the USA’s Chrysler in Corporation in the 1980s offered a modern, corporate version of this philosophy:

“If I had to sum up in one word the qualities that make a good manager, I’d say that it all comes down to decisiveness. You can use the fanciest computer in the world and you can gather all the charts and numbers, but in the end you have to bring all your information together, set up a timetable, and act. [. . .] Too many managers let themselves get weighed down in their decision-making [. . .] at some point you’ve got to take that leap of faith. First, because even the right decision is wrong if it’s made too late. Second, because in most cases there’s no such thing as certainty.”[1

Be Decisive is further explored in 100 Great Leadership Ideas

January 8th, 1976. The first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, Zhou Enlai, dies

Zhou Enlai was Premier of the People’s Republic of China from the moment the Chinese Communist Party achieved power in 1949, following their defeat of the Nationalist government, until his death in 1976. A dedicated and lifelong communist, Zhou Enlai’s political instincts were moderate and progressive. Famous for his punishing work routine, intelligence and subtlety, Zhou worked all of his life to improve the condition of the Chinese people and was to become famous for his diplomatic skills in opening a dialogue with the West after the political conflict created by China’s involvement in the Korean and Vietnamese wars.

Chairman Mao: famines and purges

Throughout all of his time as Premier, Zhou reported to Mao Zedong (often written as Mao Tse-tung), Chairman of the Communist Party of China. Mao had begun his rule of China with a series of vicious purges of opponents. In the late nineteen-fifties, Mao proposed a disastrous programme of agricultural collectivisation and ideologically-driven peasant initiatives, such as a plan to produce steel in makeshift furnaces in villages across China (or for peasants to construct canals without interference from ‘bourgeois’ engineers). Unfortunately, it is only possible to make steel under controlled conditions at consistently high temperatures – something that, ironically, the ancient Chinese had fully understood. Woods were cut down, labour was diverted from agriculture, and the end result was a great deal of nearly worthless pig iron. Local communes over-reported the amount of food that they were producing in an attempt to be seen to be meeting their targets, and were then required to hand a percentage of this inflated amount to the state to feed the cities. The so-called ‘Great Leap Forward’ resulted in a famine that is estimated to have caused the death of between 20 and 43 million people. Mao’s various purges of political opponents, ‘middle-roaders’, intellectuals and recidivists killed millions more.

Mao’s last great initiative, the Cultural Revolution, threatened to plunge China into a state of total chaos.

The Cultural Revolution – ‘Out with the four olds!

Mao decided that the country was in danger of losing its revolutionary zeal. The Party, and the country, must be purged by a brief spell of violent anarchic change, driven by the people. Students, peasants, workers and soldiers were called upon to abolish the ‘Four Olds’: Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas. The Red Guards—a term used for all young people embarking on Mao’s new mission—were offered free travel to anywhere in the country. Exhilarated by their new powers and fired up with revolutionary fervour, they began to take China down the road of mere anarchy.

Tribunals were set up to ‘try’ capitalist-roaders and anti-revolutionaries. Teachers, academics, writers, journalists were attacked; museums, temples and shrines were ransacked; ancient books and works of art were destroyed. There were many suicides and murders. Party members were sent to detention camps, where many died. Future Premier Den Xiaoping was sent for ‘re-education’, ending up as a worker in an engine factory (he was later rescued by Zhou and brought back into politics). Throughout these terrifying times, Zhou trod a difficult path, rescuing those whom he could, but not stepping so far out of line that he became an easy target for the Red Guards, though there were virulent campaigns against him. Zhou closed museums to protect their contents and drew up lists of temples and shrines that were to be preserved as national treasures. To save politicians, his favourite ploy became the despatch of those at serious risk to ‘Hospital No. 301’ – a hospital reserved for high-ranking party members – citing some supposed illness of theirs. They were to emerge, years later, miraculously cured.

The Gang of Four

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s last wife, Jiang Qing, had become a power in her own right at the head of the infamous Gang of Four. At the height of the chaos, Red Guards were given the political sanction to seize weapons from the army – the ultimate symbol, after all, of hierarchical authority. They began to overthrow local governments and to take control of factories. Rival Red Guard factions began to shoot each other with liberated weapons. The Gang of Four were ecstatic: here was true people’s power, unmediated by any Party, government or military involvement.

Zhou presented the figures on the economy to Mao. Production was collapsing; the Chinese economy was facing ruin. Mao called on the People’s Liberation Army to end the Cultural Revolution. A whole generation of dangerous Red Guards were sent off to work in the country in the charmingly named ‘Down to the Countryside Movement.’

Beloved Premier

With Mao’s health declining (though he was to outlive Zhou by eight months) the Gang of Four remained in effective power, and the Cultural Revolution is deemed to have continued up until Zhou’s death in 1976. After his death, the traditional annual day of mourning became the occasion for a massive national show of respect for Zhou. The Gang of Four cleared Tiananmen Square, where huge crowds had gathered, and arrested Zhou’s old political ally, Deng Xiaoping. But the Gang’s power was broken by this demonstration of national feeling. Deng was to rise to power in 1978; the Gang of Four were arrested, tried and imprisoned. All served their sentences and were released, though Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, committed suicide in 1991. A year after Mao’s death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping became the effective leader of China. He denounced the Cultural Revolution, launched the liberalising ‘Beijing Spring’ and opened China to foreign investment and international markets. Zhou Enlai became increasingly revered as the ‘Beloved Premier’ who had worked to mitigate the previous regime’s worst excesses and had doggedly persisted with his own agenda of laying the foundations for future modernisation.

Zhou Enlai is featured in Section 6 of History Lessons: Making Things Happen

Apple strikes deal with Microsoft – forging strategic partnerships

After their death, people’s reputations begin to eclipse the real facts of their lives. ‘Steve Jobs fired as Apple chairman’ and ‘Steve Jobs strikes pragmatic deal with Microsoft’ are not the sort of sub-heads you find in most of the obituaries.

Apple versus Microsoft

Steve Jobs was the genius who founded Apple Inc, the quirky, creative corporation that was (in the popular imagination) the corporate antithesis of everything that Microsoft stood for. Jobs, in this version of reality, started Apple in a garage in Silicon Valley with his friend Steve Wozniac (that much is true, and worthy of legend) and built it into the multi-billion dollar success story that it is today. Driven, uncompromising and motivational, Jobs inspired his organisation to ever greater heights of creativity, driven by his own remarkable vision of how things might be, rather than how things currently were.

I wouldn’t want to argue with much of that analysis, but I wonder how many people now remember that Jobs was effectively fired from the company that he had created (partly because of sliding sales but mainly for having become the chairman from hell, and a serial corporate plotter) and that when he achieved the astonishing feat of becoming the CEO of Apple for a second time, he set out to do the unthinkable – to make a partnership with Microsoft. Apple staffers booed Jobs when he made the announcement at the Macworld Conference in Boston in 1997. The fact that Apple was nearly bankrupt and that the deal was a lifesaver didn’t fit with their world view, in which Apple were the good guys and Microsoft was the evil empire.

A keyboard and a screen!

Steve Jobs founded the consumer electronics corporation, Apple Inc, with Steve Wozniac in 1976 and launched the Apple I Personal Computer Kit: an assembled circuit board. The next product, Apple II, represented a huge leap forward. It was the world’s first commercially successful personal computer, incorporating such radical features as a keyboard, a screen, a case and twin floppy disc memory drives. The new company went public in 1980, generating more capital than any stock market launch since the Ford Motor Company in 1956, and creating about 300 new millionaires overnight. In 1985 Steve Jobs was removed from managerial duties in a boardroom power struggle with John Sculley, whom Jobs himself had appointed as Apple’s CEO, and resigned from the company that he had created.

Eleven years later, in 1996, when Job’s subsequent venture, neXT Computer, was bought by Apple, Jobs re-emerged as Apple’s CEO. (Along the way, Jobs happened to have bought a little company called The Graphics Group, which he turned into Pixar – but that’s a different story).

With Apple struggling and near bankruptcy, one of Jobs’s first actions was to arrange a strategic partnership with the software giant Microsoft, with whom Apple had been engaged in a drawn-out and costly series of legal wrangling over patent rights. In 1997, at the Boston Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs took to the stage to deliver one of his famous keynote speeches. He stunned his audience—for whom the world had become defined by the struggle between the underdog Apple and the increasingly all-powerful Microsoft Corporation—with the following announcement.

A meaningful partnership

‘Now, I’d like to talk about meaningful partnerships’, said Jobs.

‘Apple lives in an eco-system and it needs help from other partners; it needs to help other partners. And relationships that are destructive don’t help anybody in this industry as it is today. So during the last several weeks we have looked at some of the relationships, and one has stood out as a relationship that hasn’t been going so well, but that has the potential, I think, to be great for both companies. And I’d like to announce one of our first partnerships today, a very very meaningful one. And that is one with Microsoft.’

As he began to summarise his announcement, Jobs said:

‘We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose . . . the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy and [. . .] about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the computer industry, to be healthy and prosper again.’

The deal set up a number of arrangements for the cross-licensing of patents. It guaranteed that Microsoft would continue to release Microsoft Office products for the Mac platform. Apple undertook to make Microsoft’s Internet Explorer the default browser on all new Mac products. Microsoft also bought $150m of non-voting Apple shares at market prices and undertook not to sell them for three years. Microsoft now had a vested interest in seeing Apple’s share price increase, rather than collapse. When the market heard about the deal, Apple’s stock rose by 35%.

Steve Jobs was a dreadful manager – visionaries generally are. But he was certainly a great leader.  Forging strategic relationships – with major competitors if necessary – is one of the hallmarks of great leadership.

These ideas are explored further in chapter 98 , ‘Look for Partnerships’, in  100 Great Leadership Ideas .

Cameron’s EU stance shows decisive leadership

Whatever you may think about the politics of David Cameron’s decision to play the ‘no’ card at the European Union summit by vetoing moves to use the current European treaty to endorse greater fiscal unity of the eurozone nations, that decisive moment has had one undeniable effect: Cameron’s leadership credentials have suddenly received a massive boost.

It is far from clear whether the decision was even politically wise: he has delighted the Eurosceptic wing of his party, but put further strain on the relationship with his coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, and handed the Labour opposition a golden opportunity to blame just about anything that goes wrong in Britain’s relationship with Europe for the next several years on Mr Cameron. His coalition government may fall, in time, as a result of this decision. The anti-Euro wing of the party, scenting European blood, may run amok and wreak political havoc, creating who knows what seismic shifts in the UK’s political landscape.

That most terrifying of leadership decisions – a brave one
Cameron’s lone decision has without doubt removed Britain from ‘the heart’ of Europe (if she was ever anywhere near this vital organ, which is doubtful: Britain has never been a fully signed-up member of the Franco-German vision of Europe). It has raised the spectre of the dreaded ‘two-speed’ Europe, with Britain stuck, as you will have guessed, in the slow lane; outside the debating chamber; left on the sidelines – select your own favourite metaphor.

From a leadership perspective, none of this matters. Cameron has taken his first steps towards a place in history as a leader of note. His decision was that most terrifying of all leadership decisions: a brave one.
There are some very imaginable scenarios in which Cameron’s decision is seen as having been so disastrous that Britain is forced to go back to Europe, cap in hand, say sorry, and ask if we might be allowed to carry President Sarkozy’s and Angela Merkel’s bags for a decade or so until they decide to be even a little bit nice to us again – in which case Cameron will be obliged (or forced) to step down and let somebody else do the grovelling. I’m not suggesting that this is likely scenario, but it is one possible outcome of decisions as brave as this one.

Even the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, thought that Cameron’s threat to use Britain’s veto was a bluff: as he says, “few – including, I ought to say, me – believed that he’d actually do it”.

Up yours, Delors!
This is the point. Cameron, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, has demonstrated that he has the bottle to be decisive, and the guts to be unpopular. In fact, ‘unpopular’ is too weak a word to describe what Cameron and the country he leads now are in most of Europe: ‘Does the UK still have a place in Europe?’ asks Le Figaro, one assumes rhetorically. ‘Auf Wiedersehen, England!’ says Spiegel Online, with a discernible smirk. President Sarkozy insultingly ignores Cameron’s tentatively extended hand of greeting on the morning after the fateful veto.

Well, ‘Up yours Delors!’ as The Sun newspaper’s famous headline said in 1990 of another ‘Froggie Common Market chief’ (their words, I assure you). If there’s one thing most Brits can unite behind, it’s having our leaders snubbed by foreign leaders who don’t understand exactly how special and important we are – an experience that is likely to become increasingly familiar, especially in the wake of Mr Cameron’s brave decision.

Nevertheless, what is it that we actually want from leaders? Decisiveness; knowing where they stand.

Do we want them to be popular? Not necessarily; in fact, we rather like being able to grumble about a leader’s tough decisions while admitting, grudgingly, that they might be right after all. And of course their decisiveness means that we can blame every thing on them if it all goes wrong.

Does history remember the uncontroversial leaders; the jolly nice ones; the well-meaning compromisers? It does not.

European leaders may now choose to despise David Cameron, but they cannot ignore him. Some countries, facing the drastic measures required to be part of the increasingly regulated and centralised European may even chose to join Britain in its new semi-detached (or just plain detached) relationship with Europe as the champion of a more lightly regulated, ‘Anglo-Saxon’, free-market approach.

Mr Cameron has taken a bold step towards becoming a leader of note. Commentators will argue about the political wisdom of what he done for the next decade or so. This is exactly my point: since his decisive moment, Cameron, come what may, has become a leader to be reckoned with.

Options and consensus – Great Leadership Idea No. 35

Change is implemented more quickly and successfully when alternative options have been discussed in advance, and when the team as a whole has reached a consensus decision on the right way forward. Consensus also helps ensure that the people who are closest to the likely results of a decision get to make their voices heard.

The idea

Sir John Harvey-Jones, chairman of ICI from 1982-1987, worked closely with Japanese organizations and saw the benefits of their more consensual approach to decision-taking. ‘Those of us who have worked with the Japanese and who admire their business achievements, as I do, know how long it takes the Japanese to reach a decision. One is lulled into a totally false sense of security by the apparently endless debate and the thoroughness of the involvement of people at every level of the organisation in the decision, because when the action stage comes, they move like greased lightning.’

John Mackey, CEO of American natural and organic product retailer, Whole Food Market, advocates consensus decision making. ‘I almost never make a command-and-control decision’, says Mackey. ‘I make a ton of decisions where I consult with people I trust, with the people involved.’ Mackey’s National Leadership Team of 24 people often vote on decisions. Employees at every store meet monthly in search of general agreement. Even hiring decisions are made by consensus: new employees join a team for a trial period and the team votes as to whether they are employed; a two-thirds vote in favour means they get to stay. Since teams’ bonuses depend on their productivity, team members have good reason to choose their colleagues carefully.[1]

The principle of consensus-seeking is featured in The Toyota Way: a set of principles set out by the Toyota Motor Corporation in 2001 to describe the system of values that should underpin every aspect of corporate behaviour. Principle 13 talks about consensus:

Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options; implement decisions rapidly (nemawashi). Do not pick a single direction and go down that one path until you have thoroughly considered alternatives. When you have picked, move quickly and continuously down the path. Nemawashi is the process of discussing problems and potential solutions with all of those affected, to collect their ideas and get agreement on a path forward. This consensus process, though time-consuming, helps broaden the search for solutions, and once a decision is made, the stage is set for rapid implementation.

In practice

Leaders tend to believe that their role is to consider the options, take the advice of colleagues and experts, and then personally to make a decision. In a consultative process that involves the wider team, issues are debated by large sections of the organization. Likely problems, consequences and wider issues are explored in depth. Once the organization has reached a consensus decision, the thorough understanding of the process by the team as a whole, and the prediction and avoidance of likely difficulties, greatly speeds up the process of implementation.

Options and consensus is further explored in 100 Great Leadership Ideas

Give people autonomy – Great Leadership Idea No 31

Successful leaders offer substantial autonomy to members of the team and to parts of the business. Individuals are empowered, and respond to this; decision-making is de-centralised, bringing more opinion and directly relevant experience into the process and, ideally, bringing decision-making closer to the customer. Whole units can be allowed to take control of their own destiny while remaining ‘part of the family.’

The idea

Azim Premji is still chairman of the global information technology services company, Wipro, based in Bangalore, India. He took over the company in 1966 at the age of 21, following the death of his father, at a time when the company’s product range was based largely on the cooking oils and fats on which his father had founded the business. In the 1980s, Premji diversified the company into toiletries and lighting products and then into computer manufacture and software services. Wipro is now a global IT services provider.

In an interview with Ravi Aron, Professor at Wharton University of Pennsylvania, Premji says this:

“The most important thing you must appreciate is that, with the reorganization, we tried to bring Wipro’s leadership closer to the customer. In the process, we tried to de-layer the organization and empower our business leaders with a much higher degree of P&L and growth responsibility. That is why we removed an entire layer which was there previously. Our executives are seasoned enough in their jobs and they have performed long enough in their roles to be confident that they can deliver results through the new structure.”

Premji created a new ‘vertical’ structure that organised the company into units such as Telecom Service Providers and Enterprise Solutions.

“Each vertical is like a self-contained business . . .  Though they work under a common structure, with resources such as Finance, HR, Quality and Marketing, each vertical has people who represent these functions. So, in effect, each vertical is like a separate company . . . It all goes back to leadership. It speeds things up and gets decisions made faster. It empowers people more, and it allows them to further empower those who report to them, because their jobs have suddenly become much more responsible . . . I hope the reorganization will make Wipro more agile, because it’s one thing to design a new organizational structure, and quite another to execute well. We believe that the new structure will help us execute our strategy well.”

In practice

Trust colleagues, and give them as much scope for independent action as possible. Consider giving a high degree of autonomy to devolved operations: give them overall objectives and allow them to deliver results within these parameters. Decentralize decision-making so that many opinions and wide experience influence the organization’s decisions—which also reduces risk. Move decision-making closer to the consumer, making the organisation more responsive and more agile.

Encourage real debate is further explored in 100 Great Leadership Ideas

Zero tolerance and the staff kitchen – Great Leadership Idea No 60

If the tap in the staff kitchen is broken and nobody mends it, colleagues quite quickly begin to draw a number of very negative conclusions—in particular, that management isn’t particularly bothered about the welfare or comfort of the staff and that, since management don’t fix things that are broken in the staff’s day-to-day environment,  it is not reasonable to expect staff to worry about things that are broken elsewhere in the organisation: like computer systems, or production lines.

The idea

In a famous paper called ‘Broken Windows’, the academics and political scientists, James Q. Wilson & George L. Kellling set out the idea that a failure to mend small things in communal area sends out a signal that nobody cares. Even normally well-behaved and law-abiding members of the community may join in destructive behaviour as things begin to degenerate. “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all of the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighbourhoods as in run-down ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no-one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing . . . Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder, and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding.”

When Richard Baker took up his role as CEO of the Boots Group in 2003, he started work at 7 am each day in his first weeks by visiting three Boots stores in quick succession; later he spent two whole days on the shop floor at a branch in Loughborough.  At every opportunity, he asked staff for their opinions as to what was working and what was not. The exercise gave him twenty-one significant ideas with which to begin his stewardship. Some ideas, like a member of staff’s insight that some Boot’s prices were so high that staff bought them from other outlets despite their staff discount persuaded him to review pricing policies. But he also learned at Loughborough that the tap in the staff canteen had stopped working years before and never been fixed. Mending a broken tap was an important symbol of a wider problem. ‘For years,’ says Baker, ‘Boots invested any profits in other parts of the group but not in the stores. Everything looked neglected. We reversed this and invested in the stores. Our colleagues saw we were doing the right things and the mood in the company quickly improved.’

The practice

Small things matter—to a surprsing extent. Colleagues may even be unwilling to embrace major new strategies or initiatives simply because some minor but significant aspect of their working life convinces them that they are not valued. Fixing the small things has a disproportionate effect. A small amount of effort and expenditure convinces people that the leadership does, in fact, care.

Encourage real debate is further explored in 100 Great Leadership Ideas