Download Dissertation MBA 2013

An Auto Ethnographic Analysis of Self as Manager
Leslie Christopher Burke
January 2013
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Acknowledgements:
Dr Joe Nason as Course Tutor and Dissertation Supervisor University of Lincoln and strong support.
"…No matter how carefully we plan in advance, research is designed in the course of its execution. The
finished monograph is the result of hundreds of decisions, large and small, made while the
research is underway" (Becker in Gill and Johnson (1991) p.145).
This sums up the guide to dissertations that Joe produced and which is the structural basis for this work.
I also acknowledge that it was a chance meeting with Joe in the village he lives in that planted the seed
that led to the Masters, causing me to understand that the only barrier to success is oneself. Joe was
recommended many years earlier as such a guide by Dr Fred Dobson whose 1998 course appears in the
text as another defining moment. Joe’s academic writings and lectures also proved to be a huge
resource of guidance and his direct support a reservoir of friendship.
Dr David Currie as Course Tutor. University of Lincoln, Guide and producer of academic literature David
was also a strong and forceful catalyst in challenging preconceived notions in groups each week and
particularly on the residential schools over the three years of the course.
Mr Edward McGuiness, Teacher (retired) St John Almond School, Garston, Liverpool. Mr McGuiness has
continued to encourage me for over 40 years to continually seek and understand knowledge and use it
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for the general good. To him I owe the knowledge that the most important things in life are often not on
the curriculum.
Mr Paul Taylor MBA. Paul was the first employer in over 40 years of working life who both saw and
enabled an academic dream I was hardly aware of. Without his support I would never have completed
the certificate course or grown to be an effective manager.
Cllr Mrs Sue Burke who constantly supported the dream that became a reality.
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Abstract
This work is an auto ethnographic study which is a new form of expression for me which I have found
challenging but immensely rewarding as a medium of expression. It surprised me to learn that there is a
great popularity for this approach and in my research of this field I encountered, leading this approach,
Carolyn Ellis.
The work has been carried out in about the last six months of 2012 using my own home office and
University of Lincoln facilities.
This work has been approached chronologically; looking at my origins and how this has influenced me
and then my working life and issues that have impacted within and outside that process. Throughout I
am reflecting the learning experience of three academic years with the MBA although in real time this
was a period of nearly six years and so included lots of self-learning and reflection outside the structured
course. I also experienced a period when the MBA course was being designed and participated in a year
of first lectures at the then new University of Lincolnshire and Humberside that later became the
University of Lincoln.
Crucially the past is being interpreted using the tools acquired during the MBA course and debates occur
about the scope and extent of the issues to be included. I look through both my lens and also I am
informed by the lens of thinkers I encounter on this journey, many are academics drawn from the
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reading lists of the past three years but others have occurred through conversations with tutors and
other fellow travellers on the course or in the other worlds that I live in. I am using myself as a manager
throughout in constructing the narrative. Emerging themes are ones of conflict against harmony and the
use of power in politics sometimes, in the case of my time in Northern Ireland via religion. Emerging
conclusions indicate that issues, positive and negative, I face as a manager and as a general community
leader can be traced back to past events and did not simply occur in their own right.
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Contents page
Contents
Acknowledgements:...................................................................................................................................... 2
Contents page ............................................................................................................................................... 6
List of Tables and Figures .............................................................................................................................. 7
Introduction: Setting the Scene and Aims .................................................................................................... 8
Methodology........................................................................................................................................... 12
Chronological Journey towards The MBA and Management Knowledge .................................................. 16
Chapter 1: Childhood and Family Background ........................................................................................... 16
Books as Education and Escape - a brake against dehumanisation........................................................ 17
The Historic Environment ....................................................................................................................... 21
Chapter 2: Early Education.......................................................................................................................... 27
Chapter 3: Fine Fare Stores First Job .......................................................................................................... 31
Figure 1: Sweeny’s Generic Strategies ................................................................................................ 34
The Royal Air Force ................................................................................................................................. 34
Chapter 4: RAF Initial Training and Background ........................................................................................ 34
Chapter 5: RAF Northern Ireland Three Month Tour.................................................................................. 39
Figure 2: Northern Ireland Census 2011 Religion ............................................................................... 40
Figure 3: Adapted Child to Church Adult ............................................................................................ 41
Chapter 6: RAF Northern Ireland Two Year Tour ........................................................................................ 45
Figure 4 Impact by Premiership of Irish Issues ................................................................................... 51
Figure 5: The Radical Weberian view of interests, conflict and power .............................................. 55
Chapter 7: RAF and the Middle East ........................................................................................................... 57
Chapter 8: RAF UK Period ........................................................................................................................... 61
Chapter 9: Stamford, Managing Politics and Engineering .......................................................................... 65
Figure 6: Team Learning in the context of a wider approach ............................................................. 69
Chapter 10 Lincoln: Managing a European Union Role .............................................................................. 70
Chapter 11: Lincoln: Managing Youth Services and Red Cross Services ..................................................... 76
Chapter 14: Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 80
Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................ 82
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List of Tables and Figures
Figure 1 Sweeny’s Generic Strategies
Page 34
Figure 2 N. Ireland Census
Page 40
Figure 3 Adapted Child to Church Adult diagram
Page 41
Figure 4 Impact by Premiership of Irish Issues
Page 51
Figure 5 The Radical Weberian view
Page 55
Figure 6 Team Learning
Page 69
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Introduction: Setting the Scene and Aims
My primary aims in writing this paper are:

To understand how my individual history has influenced my management style.

To reflect on the learning that has occurred via the MBA and its impact on my management
approach.

To learn lessons from the past to apply to the present.
This section is about how I decided the extent, scope and breadth of this paper – what aspects of the
last sixty years of life and the forty or so years of work it should properly encompass. I consider the
literary, academic underpinning that I have accessed and the range of writers involved even though
where there is not a direct quote but more a sense of an idea, as occurred with Peddler. “Waking The
Tiger” by Peter Levine is an example where I find inspiration and awareness through a consideration of
the healing nature of trauma. This occurs here and elsewhere.
In order to manage others it is necessary to understand self. For me this approach is a key one enabling
me to learn and develop by understanding how the impact of the MBA learning process has altered my
approach as a manager. What effect on me has occurred when I have encountered people like Peddler,
Saunders, Slack, along with Conners and Smith who talk about the Oz Principle. Manger, Morgan and
Schein, and of course Wickham, all of whom influenced for me MBA course issues and my working life.
This all leads however to more “outside the box” people like Freire, Berne and Levine with his Waking
the Tiger and Barnes with his Flaubert’s Parrot more of which later. Personal explorations then arose
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with Orwell, Buffett, Branson, Getty and Rockefeller. For indicative thinking via fiction and biography I
was assisted by reading Momo by Michael Ende and Stephen Fry’s Moab is my Washpot. At least ten
other major figures of this kind occurred throughout the MBA course and have had varying levels of
influence on my thinking.
I have often felt held back by some “force” and one of the many gains of the MBA has been to throw
some light on this phenomenon. A clue for me lies in the discussion of trauma in Waking the Tiger:
Healing Trauma - The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (Levine et al, 1997 p32),
“Unresolved trauma can keep us excessively cautious and inhibited, or lead us around in ever tightening
circles of dangerous re-enactment, victimization, and unwise exposure to danger.” One of the issues to
address is about the ways I have worked as a manager before and after the MBA. I feel the work by
Levine has an intrinsic message for me. I ask myself whether such broad influences implied here go
beyond the world of work. I wonder then about the influence of family upbringing and culture. Another
very serious influence on this work has been that of Carolyn Ellis and I have used her definition
described earlier of auto ethnography to guide me in the form and depth of what is both a story and
academic work, (Ellis, 2004, Pxvii Preface).
This leads me to the question: Should I confine this paper to my career? Would that imply that only
work and its influences and consequences have an impact on my approach to being a manager and not
background, family, upbringing and external beliefs? Both Berne and Fichte have something to say about
how wide the perspective of human interaction is. Berne (Berne, 1964, P14-15) argues that, “As the
complexities of compromise increase, each person becomes more and more individual in his quest for
recognition, and it is these differentia which lend variety to social intercourse and which determines the
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individual’s destiny”. This implies a considerable interplay over a lifetime of many different impacts and
relationships both in and out of the world of work, in and out of childhood and adulthood. Fichte
(Burrell et al, 1979, P280 -281) however wants the world understood in terms of the “projection of
individual consciousness”. Husserl, and then Sartre from a phenomenological perspective then see “the
individual as trapped within the mode of existence which he creates”.
Ontologically then our
consciousness is projected onto the external world by acts of “intentionality” so creating that world. I
am tempted however by Hegel where consciousness is “subservient to an external pattern of universal
reason which reflects the existence of a universal force or spirit above and beyond the individual. I am
tempted by such a philosophy because my culture growing up in a strongly Catholic community is
apposite to this expression of belief. Here then lies both the advantage of taking on board the whole
corpus of experience, bringing family, faith, community and other “outside of work” issues but also the
danger of elevating aspects of it such as faith out of proportion to the whole. In fact a better approach
might be the more neutral one expressed in a lifeboat shortly after the sinking ship has stranded the
crew with the chaplain in charge. “Reverend, should we row away from the rocks or pray?” said the
crew. “Pray” replied the chaplain “as if God existed but row as if he didn’t”.
Finally, the great danger here is to follow fascinating but irrelevant strands and lose the cohesion that
this paper needs to fulfil its purpose. The development of my home town prior to my birth is relevant to
my development but this is not an analysis of the Irish diaspora or the political and religious conflicts of
post WW1 Liverpool, the interwar years when Moseley’s Blackshirts fought local mainstream political
parties for control. I have had to confine myself to the effects of that environment as I encountered it.
This encounter was mainly through a rich family oral history and the differences between individuals
such as my mother, uncles and stepfather. Into this mix comes the views of teachers, priests and the
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books that I have read. Because faith and politics have played a huge part in my life along with an
awareness and fascination with history all of these subjects have informed my journey over the last fifty
odd years. Events before my time have impacted strongly like the First and Second World Wars. That
said I have tried to confine this paper to the most relevant phenomenon possible and tried to balance
views to enable a management perspective.
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Methodology
This section is about the tools I will use in the course of this paper. I indicate this when considering
Freire’s use of “dialogue” and “the word” in reflection and action. So I am using his approach to arrive at
a view that explains why I have failed to act for example as a manager, perhaps to better understand
when I should have taken a reflective approach. These tools and other academic sources of thought will
enable me to study interactions and relationships to gradually challenge my and other people's thinking
and actions both as a person and manager of people.
My approach has been to consider the influences that have occurred and affected me during the MBA
three years of action, study and work and relate this to my career and early influences. I use this
approach to define shortcomings, things that have I believe held back my development and ways that I
feel that I have progressed; for example, Freire expresses a primary issue that concerned sometimes my
inability to turn thought into action in an original way. He says that “As we attempt to analyse dialogue
as a human phenomenon, we discover something which is the essence of dialogue itself: ”the
word”(p68). He goes on to describe “the word” as two constituent parts “reflection and action”. I take
this to mean that we need to reflect before acting, increasing a qualitative process and making it more
effective. Prior to the MBA my approach as a manager or leader was sometimes action-based, without
reflection and sometimes reflective but without that transformation into action. Perhaps even more
importantly there was not the underpinning of management theory that is so important when managing
people, processes or systems. This emerged as a reflective thought during the early days of my
appointment as a service manager with the youth charity Rainer. In a conversation during one of my first
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one-to-one meetings with the Executive Manager he wondered how I arrived at “safe” decisions. He was
an MBA student himself at that time.
An array of influences of a fairly unreconstructed kind influenced my thinking. Most of my recent
management experience had been in the third sector which seemed to sit perfectly with the influences
of the powerful Roman Catholic Council known colloquially as Vatican II. The relevance of Vatican II at
this stage in my development is that it was one of several influences on my management style that
brought some important underpinnings of logic and historic development however this lacked any
academic rigor or learning that related to management. I read widely during my RAF career about
Church philosophy and that brought me into contact with pre Vatican II theological academics such as
Hillarie Belloc, GK Chesterton and Arnold Lune. This in any case was in conflict with the more
conservative influences of a traditional Irish Catholic upbringing and a twelve year career in the Royal air
Force followed by twelve years in an engineering industry environment. Alongside this process was an
interest in community development, for example, in that era I helped to create a citizens advice bureau.
I also acted for several years as a volunteer trade union education officer arranging weekend courses
and became active in the Catholic Justice and Peace Movement and the Labour Party.
During this period I encountered Bishop John Jukes with whom I collaborated in a joint Church/Trade
Union Committee that sought to influence the then Thatcher Governments social policies. He
successfully held dialogue with the Prime Minister and members of her Cabinet including the then
Norman St John-Stevas putting Trade Union views that she might otherwise not have listened to. I later
deduced that this also enabled him to support the political interests of the Catholic Church in Britain.
Thinking through the motives behind apparently altruistic approaches by organizations or individuals is
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something that I would now tend to do but I was trusting of his approach as a result of a level of
hegemonic conditioning. We later clashed during one of the Eucharistic Conferences of the 1980’s
because I had begun to develop a view that the Church was in denial regarding issues like celibacy and
the ordination of women priests. Bishop Jukes contended that the capitalist system although flawed
was not in its own right immoral and nor should we be opposed to capital and wealth creation as a
system per se. He was later to argue this in the 1990’s as an eschatological reality, that the accumulation
of wealth is OK however he goes on to discuss that it is the use to which that wealth is put that becomes
the issue, (Jukes et al, 1993, P30). I have mentioned the hegemonic conditioning, as I see it, which
caused me to trust, not only Bishop Jukes but also a pre Vatican Catholic world which exerted a strong
control on me through most of the 1970’s. Even as I evolved into supporting the post Vatican II Church I
still feel that levels of control occurred. Nietzsche sums this up here:
“Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another,
and the concept ‘leaf’; is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences,
through forgetting the distinctions; What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and
embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to
a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which
are worn out …” (Femia, 1987, P46).
It was during four years working with the EU that I first encountered the then new University of
Lincolnshire (now University of Lincoln) for an initial management course with Dr Fred Dobson. This was
a pilot for the MBA. While I had started to understand the elements that can influence us as managers
the course gave some indication that I could become a more effective manager by understanding myself
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more and how this management of people and events really works. For example, I was also dealing with
the reality of working with the EU social model which essentially meant seeking to reduce inequalities in
Lincolnshire around issues like housing. The early course persuaded me of the need to analyse this
model and see if I was engaging all of the agencies that might help to make it work. While I did not
complete the course, five years later I did begin the MBA and successfully completed the certificate and
then Diploma stage which began to give me some of the tools that I needed as I progressed towards a
more senior management role. The significant turning point that convinced me to begin and complete
the MBA course was an encounter with Dr Jo Nason where we discussed how academia and reality must
become one to be effective. Learning had to be accompanied by action and universities must not simply
be “sausage machines” that produce automatons. It was at this point that I began to see the need to
gain some of the tools and academic underpinning that I needed to be a more effective manager. In fact
this process and learning/action experience enabled me to perform more effectively in a variety of ways
and to re-evaluate many aspects of my life. I use these changes in my approach as well to look at how I
have evolved not only over the years since meeting Dr Nason but also I looking back over the 40 years
that preceded this in the light of this experience to learn new lessons.
This methodological approach would only work however if I exercised considerable control in order to
minimize extraneous information that would be irrelevant to an effective academic paper. This has
proved a major challenge. Equally the format and auto ethnographic approach has caused me to
evaluate many half-forgotten aspects of my life which came as a surprise. I would join with Stephen
Fry’s choice of opening quote for his first biography: “To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To
write is to sit in judgment on oneself - Ibsen” (Fry, 1997, frontpiece).
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Chronological Journey towards The MBA and Management Knowledge
Chapter 1: Childhood and Family Background
I grew up in the post war period spanning the 1950’s and 60’s in a Catholic Irish tradition in a Liverpool
which had largely settled its sectarian differences. There is a considerably body of literature involving
the City’s conflicts in the 1920’s and 30’s between different political and religious traditions which later
informed my understanding of the community that I came from however my main purpose is not to
provide analysis here on that subject or write a history of my native City.
Although my father was an English Anglican who converted to Rome his early death before my birth
meant that I was brought up almost entirely in my mother’s more Irish tradition. Alongside my mother’s
grief over my father’s early death (he was 26) I grew up sensing a loss, an absence of something
everybody else seemed to have. I now see that throughout my life I have sought older company as part
of the need for surrogate fathers. My first surrogate father was my Grandfather who was born in
Ireland in 1882. He was a Victorian and was influenced strongly by that period of history. I was subject
to and invited to participate from an early age in discussions about the political nature of the City by my
Grandfather’s nephew, Jimmy Brind, along with exciting stories about conflict, for example between
the Black shirts and the other parties, often violent in their outcome from the recent past. He was
initially a strong Communist who supported the trade unions. I was also tutored in my Irish background
and believed I was Irish and called Murray (my Grandfather’s name) for some time until primary school.
An important issue that influenced my future development was a sense of rebellion in the people
around me. While my Grandfather was a small “c” conservative who believed that his countries
“rebellion” against the Crown was a mistake he accepted the traditional nationalist view in the end that
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Ireland, like America, had the right to be independent. He believed the change had to occur because
“England” had misgoverned there. There was conflict between those who supported Michael Collins, a
pragmatist who had negotiated with the British Government to obtain independence for the majority of
the country of Ireland and Éamon de Valera who insisted on having Ulster too and failed in that
objective. Years later I would be stationed in Northern Ireland and come into conflict with Uncle Jimmy
as a result, also I would see the consequences of “partition” as it came to be called. I think that this was
the first time I encountered people describing countries as if they were people. The general Liverpool
community from a more English point of view felt that Parliament and Westminster were remote and
often got it wrong where Liverpool was concerned. My mother was pro English, anti the local Catholic
establishment but wary of the Police and authority, she overcame this to become a nurse, the first
professional in her family.
Books as Education and Escape - a brake against dehumanisation
“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read”. So said Groucho
Marx US comedian with the Marx Brothers (1890 - 1977). A hugely important early development for me
was the discovery of books and reading at about the age of four. My mother was an avid reader and
despite a poor education had a large but sometimes unreliable knowledge gleaned from books. She was
determined that I should read as early as possible and this project was aided by the fact that we had a
library at the end of the road. It seemed almost an immediate process and I was at the age of 5 off in no
time consuming all of the children’s literature in the small library. By the age of eight I was using the
district library and was reading biographies written with young teenagers in mind. As I went from
primary to secondary school I began to read the adult books in my mother’s library. This was an
unconscious but effective way of retaining individuality and not being absorbed into a street culture that
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had no books. The new phenomenon of television was reflected in most homes by this point and to my
mother’s disappointment this was a world with fewer books in homes.
Books gave me a world where I could resist dehumanisation but then reality intruded. I failed the 11
plus having a poor grasp of math’s (I latter really welcomed the age of calculators) and I found this a
shock to the system. I also discovered that poor eyesight had also contributed to this huge failure and I
had to start wearing glasses. I believed that I had failed and could have done better with more
application. I was therefore challenged and dehumanised in Freire’s terms by this process of early
selection.
I then went to a Catholic Secondary school which I seriously enjoyed. It was a brilliant opportunity to
meet the teaching staff and some students who could converse on a range of exciting things that I
wanted to know about.
My first school time job was at Garston indoor market and a main “employer” was the second hand
books man. He was very interested in politics, as was I and he began to feed me books such as the Stars
Look Down by AJ Cronin. Now a young teenager I began to appreciate thanks to AJ Cronin that novels
could be as important as biographies and the history books I had now gravitated towards. The Stars Look
Down, I discovered, by its description of the appalling conditions in Britain’s Mines had led to the Mines
Act and the nationalization of the coal mines. He also wrote “The Citadel”. This book shook me by
describing doctors’ practices as business operations in Harley Street where wealthy and initially fit
clients where exploited and treated for bogus illnesses and unnecessary operations. My experience of
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doctors was that of my local surgery operated by a kindly couple of elderly doctors who had encouraged
my mother to become a nurse. The book was a contributory factor in the work that helped create the
NHS. This led me to read JB Priestley and a host of other authors whose fiction contained political or
moral messages. Now a whole world opened up but it was not confined to politics and religion. This was
not without its problems. A teacher at secondary school, Mr Edward McGuiness discovered in my desk a
book by the novelist Dennis Wheatley on black magic. When he asked me about having such a book at a
Catholic school I was able to respond by saying that Wheatley reflected Catholic teaching in opposing
black magic. To my surprise he accepted the argument subject to reading the book as research after I
had finished it.
Mr McGuiness was particularly influential in indicating that most people could go further academically if
they wanted to hard enough. He was one of a number of outstanding people operating in a system that
did not expect working class people to do too well outside of trade work if they had not passed the 11
plus exam. If the rule of life was dehumanisation as a norm then Edward McGuiness was the exception
to the rule and I think consciously so. He taught outside the curriculum areas like the twenty-four hour
clock and other ways of using the train service. Just as the eleven plus was a challenge which seemed a
disaster in reality the new environment was actually a gain.
Books then became my university, pleasure and source of friendship in tougher and lonelier times
ahead. My first serious essay set for me by English Teacher Tom Kelly was to seek a piece of work that
spoke of my most important discovery. I responded with an article on the joys of a second hand book
shop that I had discovered behind Lewis’s department store in Liverpool City Centre. It had been there
since before the War as had many of the books stocked. I was able to talk about this book shop as a font
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of knowledge that I could afford to access with staff who had the time to talk about their treasures. I no
longer have a copy of the essay but many years later came across something similar and considerably
more advanced in the book Eighty-Four Charing Cross Road which also became one of my favourite
films. This true account tells of a New York writer’s correspondence with a London Bookshop during and
after the War as she orders books and falls in love with them and their “curators”. She reminded me of a
conversation that I had regarding a critique that had fallen below par and the book shop did not want to
order it for me. “What kind of Pepy’s diary do you call this? This is not a Pepy’s diary, this is some
busybody editor’s miserable collection of excerpts from Pepy’s diary, may he rot. I could just spit”,
(Hanff, 1980, P27).
This passion for decent books became my passion and I found this joy among the staff of my book shop
too and with Tom Kelly himself a serious reader of serious books. He and my stepfather taught me that
although books could be great fun and a passport to strange and exotic new worlds they were also a
crucial access to knowledge. He never read fiction but only biographies, his favourite which has been
passed to me after his recent death was the story of Joshua Slocum. Reading it now I came across an
entry that summed up an important aspect of my stepfather, Leslie Curtis: “As for myself, the wonderful
sea charmed me from the first. At the age of eight I had already been afloat along with other boys on
the bay, with chances greatly in favour of being drowned.” My Uncle Les was swimming as soon as he
was allowed in to the local baths and there is a photograph of him as a tiny figure holding a huge
swimming cup surrounded by much taller and older young men. He taught me to swim and also to have
a deep respect and fear for the dangers of the sea. He would love to quote from Slocum: “The next step
toward the goal of happiness found me before the mast in a full-rigged ship bound on a foreign voyage.
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Thus I came "over the bows," and not in through the cabin windows, to the command of a ship”
(Slocum, 1900, P9).
Books are still a great friend although they can now be on a Kindle where I can carry large numbers in
my pocket.
The Historic Environment
Politics and nationalism apart the Victorian heritage, although criticised during the 50’s and 60’s as a
grim architectural and stifling moral inheritance, was very much present and made, over my life, a
considerable contribution and influence to my way of thinking. Many local buildings in use were
Victorian and older local people around me like Mr Hughes who I ran messages for and befriended could
remember that era. Mr Hughes’ house, which his mother had decorated, was still a tribute to that first
age of photography and late Victorian decorating and furniture in a “new” house built in the 1930’s. This
caused me to be interested in the Victorians in a passing kind of way but when I began to discover how
much of our “modern” successes such as power generation and photography along with art we owed to
them I began to admire their achievements. An early and important activity for me as a young teenager
was to explore the Walker Art Gallery and having visited again recently I can see how its huge collection
of Victorian Art would re-enforce this environment. They appeared very strongly again when, after
service in the RAF, I became involved in engineering encountering the work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel
among others and realising that their inventions were very much still in use. I even discovered during
the 1980’s news of an engine in India still in use that had been built in the Stamford town factory I had
worked in the 1880’s. Later still they became a link back to those people, now gone, such as my
Grandfather and Mr Hughes and a time of apparent national greatness. This may explain the
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rehabilitation of the Victorians by my generation. Jeremy Paxman describes the feeling in his childhood
in a similar fashion adding “they shrouded the legs of pianos in case the turn of a piece of wood might
trigger lascivious thoughts” (Paxman, 2009, p6). Paxman goes on in his book to praise the Victorians and
express the view that their demise in popular respect in his childhood was due in his opinion to jealousy
that they had done a better job than the generation running things in the 1950’s and 60’s.
The whole period of my childhood and adolescence was pervaded by the aftermath of the Second World
War. The physical environment was one of bomb sites in many local streets where the Luftwaffe had
either deliberately bombed the civilian population or missed strategic targets like the Docks or Gas
Works hitting nearby houses instead. A bomb had fallen on the Gas Works but had failed to explode
giving the Bomb Disposal Unit led by Temporary Lieutenant Harold Newgass time to defuse it. This is still
widely
reported
today
locally.
(http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/liverpool-news/regional-
news/2010/12/01/garston-gas-works-bomb-hero-remembered-70-years-on-92534-27746841/ Liverpool
Daily Post accessed December 2012). Although my own mother and stepfather were evacuee’s my
father was a sailor and had been torpedoed. My Grandfather worked on the docks throughout the War
and most of the adults that I encountered had a story to tell from their war. Even more interestingly,
one of my contacts, an “old” man I befriended and ran messages for had been a sailor at the Battle of
Jutland during the First War, this was John Hughes mentioned earlier. My “Step Uncles” had served as
soldiers during the invasion of Germany and then as occupiers and my first camera was a Zeiss Icon with
a bellows design exchanged with a German Officer by my Uncle for cartons of cigarettes. A health
difference in that period was the lack of general awareness that cigarettes were dangerous. Later when
my mother became a nurse she warned against smoking but did not stop herself dying as a result of lung
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cancer at a comparatively young age. I can remember older doctors still smoking during a consultation
well into the 1970’s.
A significant issue that emerged again and again was the sense that the community had been for a long
period under real threat of invasion and such was the reluctant reverence for Winston Churchill as the
“saviour” of Britain that I have studied him over my lifetime in some depth. People’s admiration for
Churchill was reluctant because Liverpool tended to be Labour and Churchill’s Conservative past was not
appreciated always. While in the early 50’s and 60’s there was a sense of relief that Britain had survived
this was replaced by apprehension regarding the Soviet threat. I think that some sense of this insecurity
communicated itself to me and my generation.
There was a genuine and widespread belief also that we perhaps would not survive as a human race
given the proliferation of nuclear weapons in evidence. A significant piece of learning for me that
summed up this period was in the book “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. I was to read this when about thirteen,
so in 1965, and it had a profound effect on me. It later emerged again during the MBA Diploma stage as
material for one of my essays. Written in 1948 (Orwell simply reversed the last two digits of the year) it
described, as I saw in my mind, a world in which Soviet Russia had conquered the world and then split
into three opposing factions. Equally you could describe the three powers as corruptions of
contemporary (in 1948) Russia, America and China. At this stage in my life I would have rejected that
assertion seeing the US as the country that had saved my own during World War Two; I was conditioned
in my own way. Orwell perfectly describes a form of hegemonic conditioning that enables constantly
changing alliances while protecting the Stalin type leader, Big Brother, from all error. “Doublethink
means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both
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of them” (Orwell, 1949, P223). Big Brother really works when considering Stalin who was given the
equally chilling nick name of Uncle Joe. A further, I think deliberate, parallel can be found in the
application of doublethink when, as regularly occurred, the external enemy changed and at that stage
everybody forgot the old enemy and believed only in the new one, and that this new enemy had always
been the one we were at war with. In fact this actually happened during the Second World War. At the
start of the War in 1939 the British Communist Party decided on the instructions of the Soviet Union to
oppose the war using its influence in the trade union movement and local government to obstruct
wherever possible the war effort. According to the Communist Party Archive (an academic reference
site) an honourable exception to this was the Party Secretary at the outbreak of war Harry Pollitt. He
was later to become very well known to me because of another book which hugely influenced me
regarding a journalist working for the Daily Worker (The British Communist Party Newspaper) who
converted to Catholicism (Douglas Hyde). Harry Pollitt was his ultimate boss and widely, at times
reverently, referred to. In the archive it is stated “Though Pollitt took some time to establish his
authority, by the mid-1930s he functioned as de facto party 'leader' and a sort of tribune of the antifascist left. How telling it was that when his tenure was interrupted in 1939 on account of his resistance
to the Comintern's anti-war line, no other party figure attempted to combine these functions. Pollitt was
therefore able to resume his old responsibilities with the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941”.
(http://www.communistpartyarchive.org.uk/collection.php?cid=CP-IND-POLL&keywords=
accessed
December 2012).
Elsewhere in Kevin Morgan’s work on Pollitt he tells the story of Pollitt launching the Party against
Germany on the eve of Chamberlain’s declaration of war against Germany. Within a few weeks Moscow
instructs the Party to conform to its Soviet view and get rid of anyone who is opposed to it. This is
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confirmed by Morgan: “only Pollitt and Campbell finally voted against the anti-war policy” with Pollitt
and Campbell then “both relieved of their duties, as Party Secretary and Editor of the Daily Worker
respectively” (Morgan, 1994, P108). All of the rest of the then quite influential British Communist Party
decided to believe that the War was a capitalist plot against the Soviet Motherland. In June 1941 with
the German attack on the Soviet Union the same people, with hardly a pause for breath, believed, in an
Orwellian fashion that this was now a war against fascism. It is worth remembering that at this period
the Communist Party had 10,000 members and about 300 councillors with a handful of MPs. Today
starting with the Russian invasion of the then Czechoslovakia and following the fall of the Soviet Union
itself the party has virtually disappeared.
In seeking to understand how my Individual history has influenced my management style I have
acquired some insights:
The discovery for me in considering this period in my life is that I have absorbed the thinking of a much
earlier historic age. Learning to read at an early age and becoming a huge consumer of written material
created a desire for more learning and more knowledge. One of the weaknesses I had as a manager I
think comes from this period causing me to expect a similar level of background reading, not
appreciating that every journey is different. Strength though has been to appreciate that people can
have many different interests including art and music which can be a resource for the organisation as
well as a way of valuing people. The tendency to seek surrogate fathers has expressed itself in placing
undue trust in older people without first ascertaining if that trust is well placed.
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The learning around conditioning comes in here for me very strongly as something that I encountered
on the MBA course that relates to how I am influenced by my ethnic origins. A strong Irish background in
an environment sympathetic to rebellion and excited about the defeat of Germany brought about a very
local view of life that discounted to an extent national influence. Although outwardly compliant to this
influence I began to gain an interest in the external environment even where it conflicts with the local
one. Churchill starts to emerge for me as a force for good despite his poor local reputation. The effects
of external forces and the hegemonic thinking of another culture, Soviet Communism, become
apparent.
Learning lessons from the past features strongly in this chapter, in fact there is here an early lesson in
understanding people via their history. Without a good knowledge of the environment and its effect
locally on the people living in it I would fail to effectively manage in that environment. The other lesson
is that we are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past if we ignore history. “Those who do not learn
from history are doomed to repeat it” (George Santayana 1863-1952).
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Chapter 2: Early Education
Some of my school friends say that by today’s standards the education system I encountered in the
Liverpool of the 1950’s and 60’s was academically unambitious compared to now, but it did not lack
imagination or innovation from my point of view. It was a Catholic Education System at a time when
Catholics still allegedly operated a siege mentality. Others have since said that the Church was
triumphalist and that this was reflected in its education institutions. Just as this is not a history of
Liverpool nor is it a tool for exploring religion as such however in those times, it must be said, religion
had a strong influence on the City and on the world of education. In fact my head teacher, Mr McGarvey
was a hugely committed educationalist. He praised universities as an ideal but fully realized that most
parents felt that it was unaffordable even if an option at all. There was also the fact that the eleven plus
test convinced many who failed it that they lacked the ability to climb the academic ladder to success.
He did talk of a number of bank managers and other old boys who did well. To many of us however this
sounded quite unattainable and most of us expected to work where our fathers worked. Workplaces at
the time would be the Docks, Ford Motor Company, the Gas Works, The Bryant and May Match works
and the Merchant Navy. Interestingly, and well ahead of his time, our English teacher, Tom Kelly,
pointed out that we would have at least five careers in this new world where he saw production as
increasingly automated. As documented later my working life has consisted of the retail sector, the RAF,
engineering, the public sector, the third sector and variations on those themes. Five careers and many
more different jobs.
Most of the teaching staff were Catholics who had served in the Second World War and many were
determined that the war they had fought must this time mean something. This reflected a prevailing
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view that the First World War was a waste of life because its aftermath had created a Second World War
from which we had still not obtained a real peace. This was reflected in Martin Gilbert’s slim and mostly
illustrated biography of Churchill where he said Churchill: “called his final volume (of war memoirs)
Triumph and Tragedy” (Gilbert, 1979, P171). This was the triumph of victory over Hitler but the tragedy
of half of Europe occupied by a power he regarded as every bit as bad as Hitler’s regime had been. This
was accompanied however by a sense of optimism that a country that had defeated Hitler with all his
might would progress to be a better place and this was supported by both the beginning of the end of
post war austerity and a different approach to Europe and Germany itself than had prevailed in 1918.
Writing in the 1950’s some ten years before this period in my life Churchill had said that at the Potsdam
Conference “We all deeply feared a united Germany. Prussia had a great history of her own. It would be
possible to make a stern but honourable peace with her”. He went on to describe his hope for a
recreation of the pre First World War Austro-Hungarian Empire and then said, “Thus a United Europe
might be formed in which all the victors and vanquished might find a sure foundation for the life and
freedom of all their tormented millions” (Churchill, 1952, P359-360).
By 1961 as I went from primary to secondary school a peaceful and prosperous West Germany had been
created while the East of Germany and many buffer countries along the Soviet Russian border were kept
under the control of Stalin and his successors. Although something approaching Churchill’s vision did not
occur until the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 (BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/9/newsid_2515000/2515869.stm accessed
October 2012) his words represented a very different view from the reparations arguments of 1918.
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The World of Work and Management – 1960’s
Against this background I would receive adult accounts of the world of work. My stepfather began, for
the first time in his life, to earn considerable sums of money. He could afford flying lessons. He had
changed jobs from lorry driving to the delivery of cars which carried a performance bonus and the
means to “hitch hike” instead of using expenses money for trains. My mother’s profession as a nurse
began to receive recognition in the 1960’s and her salary began to rise also in line with that of industrial
workers but importantly also professionals. This was called after a while “Pay Drift” and was allegedly a
result of management incompetence in creating easily exceeded performance systems (Manpower
Services Report, 2006, P11). I would argue also however that what I was hearing about was also
motivated by the desire to make this new post war world “stick” and mean something at least in
material terms.
This experience represents the first understandings of how working environments operate via school or
my mother or stepfathers experiences. Structures begin to emerge and take shape however dimly.
There is a limiting process from my and other parents or grandparents, not one they have consciously
imposed but one we young people created from our perception of an accepted history.
This world is a deliberately created one where the eleven plus system, which operated at that time
diverted young people of eleven years of age into a more labour related and apprentice orientated
system while those who passed the examination received a more academic learning process. This was
part of for me a dehumanising process that reduced my confidence in my academic abilities. That said
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my school as a secondary modern comprehensive did seek to provide a higher stream which I eventually
joined but for most of my time at secondary school I was in the middle stream. Friere describes this
process as one of manipulation, keeping social classes in their place. The possibility of climbing out of
this situation is intimated but rarely achieved (Friere, 1970 1996 edition, P128). So this early
environment for me is seen by Friere as a tool of oppression. Krishan Kumar however claims that this is a
natural process for human beings, a “division of labour” that has always occurred back to the earliest
times. He comments that the nineteenth Century industrialisation process of which I was a part, being
prepared for industry even while at school, was a matter of greater focus and complexity than in earlier
times but essentially it was the same process. The difference he highlighted, along with Spencer and
Durkheim, was that the “phenomenon achieved such dimension in scope and volume that it introduced
a new principle of order into society.” Durkham called this “organic solidarity” and contrasted this with
the “mechanical solidarity” found in more primiative cultures where “harsh punishments” held people
under control (Clark et al, 1994, 2004 edition, P14).
A crucial learning point for me here that would inform my future was that information was coming my
way from teachers and family sources that would still be valuable in the future. This could be esoteric,
like Mr McGuiness’s twenty four hour clock or Mr Kelly’s five career’s or it could be a sense that it was
here that I began to trust the Church or people who were Irish in a way that was naïve and would prove
a problem later. I would later be able to analyse these particular issues as ones of conditioning. My first
surrogate father was Catholic, Irish and decent. The false lesson then was that all Church people and all
Irish people could be trusted, that said I met many people in those categories who lived up to my high
expectations too.
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Chapter 3: Fine Fare Stores First Job
My first real job after leaving school occurred almost as part of a holiday. I had a hobby from about 15
years of age onwards of cycling all over England; one trip was to visit the main Cathedral cities of
England. I now think this was a process of attempting to escape from the home city environment. This
led me to spend some time in one town, long enough to see and apply for an interesting job which I
obtained working for a supermarket chain, Fine Fare Stores. This was my first opportunity to be part of
and observe a working environment. Although the job title said that I was an Assistant Manager
essentially the work could be anything. I started as part of the fruit and veg team and encountered my
first enthusiast, the man who managed that service. I thought that there was a thing called an apple, he
taught me that over 30 varieties existed in supermarkets all over the world but many thousands of apple
varieties existed in general. He would display stock based on his experience of what customers would
find attractive. Conversely I encountered staff who gave their main commitment to hobbies outside the
work environment while doing a reasonable or relatively poor job. In the Journey to the Emerald City the
author’s describe this well (Conners, et al, 1999, P37). A manager describes how her people as
“punching the clock and checking their brains at the door” and how this would frustrate her. She was
also frustrated that they gave huge commitment to their outside interests. Equally she would have
described my Fruit and Veg manager as someone with “High personal investment”. The store manager,
Mr Ireland, encouraged what we would now call a “Culture of Accountability”. The company had
appointed James Gulliver two years earlier to revive and modernize this 1950’s organization
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Fare accessed December 2012) evidence of which I saw in Mr
Irelands talks to staff. I was fascinated to learn that James Gulliver had been promoted from the ranks to
this high position by AB Foods. I used to read the Daily Telegraph in those days and my manager guided
me to read the companies share performance as part of AB Foods which controlled the company. My
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inexperience meant that I was not an ideal employee and I was missing home after three or four months
which did little for my performance. At this stage I felt quite dehumanised, I had failed to become a
manager or an effective assistant and because the management structure was not harsh I blamed
myself entirely. I had not learned to value that corpus of experience which enables a more balanced
view. I was however learning early valuable lessons about the cause and effect of systems and then later
personalities. It’s worth noting that James Gulliver, at the end of a hugely successful business career,
lost his final battle via a failed bid for Distillers which was undermined by an illegal share support
operation which led to the jailing of Ernest Saunders in 1990. Reference to Ernest Saunders’ case, via
James Gulliver’s obituary
(http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/17/world/james-gulliver-chairman-of-
food-group-dies-at-66.html?sec=&spon= accessed November 2012).
It didn’t take me until 1990 to learn this but one area of confidence that has never been undermined is
my very strong belief that an understanding of history and its lessons is crucial. This is as opposed to the
view that allegedly said “History is bunk”. In fact the view, ascribed to Henry T Ford, was incorrect, he
actually said: "History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the
present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today." (Chicago
Tribune, 1916 and http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/182100.html accessed October 2012).
So at this early stage I was learning that people had many skills that could be used in the workplace if
you troubled to understand them and their hobbies and interests.
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Later the MBA course would cause me to reflect that activities at a board room level profoundly impact
on the “shop floor”. James Gulliver’s work directly influenced managers like Mr Ireland. The success I
was seeing relates to Clark’s remarks balancing capitalism with a “new stage in human society where
previous explanations of social development no longer apply” (Clark et al, 1994, 2003 edition, P59).
Although I do not benefit from this new society to the extent that I might have opportunities did exist in
this new age with its different kinds of social development. If this where a history article it would be
worthwhile comparing this store with its Dickens emporium equivalent.
The lessons of history here looking back cause me to consider that although Fine Fair appeared to be
doing really well as a modern structure the period in which it existed would over the next decade
undergo those changes which would challenge its approach. By the end of the 1970’s, after James
Gulliver was gone, Fine Fair as an early supermarket with little competition thought it had no need to
innovate beyond what had already occurred. It had reached what Slack would later call the “Caretaker”
stage. “Operations managers are expected to make sure things do not go wrong, rather than provide
much in the way of innovation or creativity” (Slack, 1998 edition,P798). Under Sweeny’s generic
strategies illustrated in the table below, Fine Fair had other choices. It was sold off to Somerfield’s which
survives to this day.
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Figure 1: Sweeny’s Generic Strategies
The Royal Air Force
Chapter 4: RAF Initial Training and Background
I served for twelve years in a variety of roles and places and over thirty years later I still regard this as a
pivotal time in my life. I believe that there is no civilian equivalent and civilians find some of the
concepts and issues quite difficult to understand. There are now very few MPs and less Government
Ministers or influential civil servants who have served in the forces. This is important in the modern
context when so many ex-service personnel are homeless for a variety of reasons, many of them
connected to dependency on a formerly more secure way of life.
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All of my accepted concepts were challenged at some point during this period. The big change for me in
making the transition from civilian to military life was about accepting a level of control that I had not
encountered before. I am reminded in relating this experience of the recent debates between BernardHenri Levy and Michel Houellecq as chronicled in “Public Enemies “(Levy et al, 2011, P359-360). Here
Levy questions the absence of consciousness (P123 - 124) and debates the dangers of Creationist theory
recently revived in the United States. He says “We are a meeting place of multiple identities, broken,
contradictory, vying with each other, then at peace, then again at loggerheads”. He looks to Rousseau,
Cicero and Kant to describe this multiplicity of conflicting human concerns as against the monolithic
view of a common good, common mind promoted within the RAF. This view impacted upon me as an
organization with a mind of its own that all those involved in must obey. Explanations were given to
explain this, all was a preparation for war and there would then be no time for debate and discussion,
one’s very life might depend on conformity and obedience.
To be fair, The RAF did not condemn openly a latitude of thought, indeed I met and still meet, many
open and intellectually enquiring members of the RAF along with other branches of the British Armed
Forces, it’s just that the thoughts occurred within a context, within an environment that was the subject
of heavy conditioning.
(Burrell & Morgan,2004,P46) talk about this when discussing Durkheim’s
“predilection for ‘order’ as the predominant force in social affairs”.
In fact I found this ordered society far from unpleasant and even enjoyed its sense of security. This
experience did lead me to seek or attempt to recreate this comfort zone and sense of “order” in other
organizations later. In reflecting later however I was to discover that this issue of order, conformity and
conditioning is present in many other organizations; I was to encounter it in the trade union movement,
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the Labour Party, management organizations and eventually in the wider national and international
community.
I ask myself, was the effect of this requirement to be “ordered” to “dehumanize” me as a consequence?
Right at the beginning of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed” he discusses this issue. Importantly
for me he argues that the state may not be permanent like a person but a consciousness of the matter
of being “dehumanized” is required. So he describes the process as one where once awareness occurs
“humanization is a viable possibility”. “Both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a
person an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion” Freire (p25).
I and others talked at the time about and looked upon the RAF as very like a person rather than the
organization that it was, albeit imbued with many historical traditions. In Epistemological terms we also
trusted this entity with our very lives based on a false knowledge. This trust was based upon an
inaccuracy; it assumed that usually the RAF would not be wrong in where it sent you or in what it asked
you to do. There was an assumption the RAF had your best interests at heart. Jackson et al (p55) in their
chapter on epistemology point out that your trust in a police officer is based on the assumption that he
or she really is a police officer. Similarly it was not accurate to see the RAF as a force for the good of
those serving within it. The RAF defines itself at the present time this way “The Royal Air Force makes a
vital contribution as a force for good in the world by delivering flexible air power wherever it is needed.
The Cold War may be over, but it has left behind a world that is less predictable and, in many places, less
stable. Britain and her Allies are now faced with challenges of many different kinds. The RAF is ready to
meet these challenges.” (RAF Web Site http://www.raf.mod.uk/role/airpower.cfm accessed November
2012). In fact there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this statement and in 1970 when I joined the RAF
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there was no contrary statement, the RAF existed as an organization to defend British interests and
statements like the one above predominated. As a side product of this the service organization provided
a career for those involved and for good economic reasons did not unnecessarily endanger this costly
investment that service personnel represented.
So, how did this false premise arise that the RAF was there to “look after you”? What had occurred
during military service to create this inaccurate view or was it a pre-conceived notion that I imported
into my RAF service? Why did this create in me a lack of confidence in later life as a manager or did
something else do that?
It can be argued that the system adopted by the British armed forces to ensure loyalty can also stunt
overall confidence in other areas of development for some people. In fact when I reached the end of my
service I perceived myself to be very confident about the positive impact that I would have on my new
environment.
To understand how my individual history has influenced my management style here is clearer than in
earlier chapters. I did subconsciously adopt the RAF rank and authority system and that adoption was
significantly re-enforced. I remember a particular conversation with my former English teacher Tom
Kelly while on leave shortly after recruit training. I remarked that I could support the RAF recruit training
being fair because most of those joining had made the decision at seventeen plus which at that stage in
my life seemed a mature age (I would be about eighteen at that point). I had learned that RAF
Apprentice training started at sixteen which I regarded as wrong because at such an early age the recruit
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training process would be a form of mind control. Tom responded that the Church recruited priests at a
much younger age and also in terms of the sacraments (Communion for example) the age of reason was
taken to be as early as seven years old. I accepted this argument. When I subsequently supervised
people I was subconsciously operating a rank and obedience system little realising that such things do
not come naturally, we are conditioned to accept them or not.
The lesson to learn here was that I had to understand the dangers of conditioning which might be right
for a military situation but could undermine supervision in a civilian role.
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Chapter 5: RAF Northern Ireland Three Month Tour
Among the challenges I faced was to serve in Northern Ireland twice. My first tour was for a three
month emergency tour as a soldier and a year later in my trade for two years. As previously discussed I
had come from a city with a strong sectarian past, I was to find that Belfast and the surrounding areas
had a strong sectarian present and although I encountered it at a time of huge prejudice between the
communities it is still a city with a level of sectarianism. The comparatively “moderate” English-based
Catholic faith that I had received seemed completely at odds in terms of its Christian character with the
practices of the Republican and opposing Unionist Movement’s both of which promoted violence
against other Christians. This is not however an analysis of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland but more
about the environmental impact on me and how this effected my development in management terms.
Neither is this an analysis of the Catholic Church or Christian community as such but no story involving
Northern Ireland or indeed any story involving me can be told without reference to faith and the use or
abuse of religion. In the latest Census, mainland Britain states that it is about 58% Christian while
Northern Ireland reports 83% (http://www.nisra.gov.uk/Census/key_report_2011.pdf accessed
November 2012) even today as indicated below.
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Area
All
Usual
Catholic
Residents
Presbyterian
Church of
Methodist
Other
Other
no
% of usual
Church in Ireland
Ireland
Church
Christian
religions
religion
residents
in
Ireland
who
did
not state
religion
Northern
1,810,863
40.76%
19.06%
13.74%
3%
5.76%
0.82%
10.11%
Ireland
Figure 2: Northern Ireland Census 2011 Religion
In the two years that I spent in the Province I encountered many discussions and events about the
political and allegedly religious conflict from people I deemed to be of good will and seeking to avoid
violence. However in that initial three month tour a particular effect on me was to see the situation in
terms of my own culture and faith. I did not manage this very well, lacking the tools to do so. Following
an initial three month tour in the Province I formed a view that Christianity could not be grounded in
reality and truth because so many of its adherents in Ulster and over the border in the Republic were
breaching its most basis cannons. This led me, over a period of time, to doubt the existence of God. I
now think that I was attempting to relieve an unacceptable feeling of betrayal by seeking, in the regime
of the RAF, a better comfort zone. The Church which had educated me, formed a crucial part of my
social life, friendships and family had apparently abandoned one of its most important tenants revolving
around the sanctity of life. I was also reaching out for a way of understanding the structure and
communities in relation to the Church (I mean all Christian Churches there) that existed around me. In
Eric Berne’s terms I was engaging in a form of transactional analysis and becoming an adapted child but
rather than relating to a real adult I was relating to a perceived Christian Church and withdrawing and
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6.75%
hiding from it or “whining” as Berne puts it (Berne, P 26, 1964).
The diagram below describes the
relationship.
Figure 3: Adapted Child to Church Adult
This experience represented an “epiphany" which I remember as a moment which altered the direction
of my life. (Bochner & Ellis, P165-172, 1992). The majority of my peer group had ceased practice of any
religion by this period of my life, out a class of 30 pupils, at this stage I knew of five still interested. Had
someone asked me at this point where my spiritual life was going I feel sure that I would have indicated
a zero response. Statistically it seemed that I would become at least inactive and join the majority of my
cohort. This epiphany did not represent in the end a rejection of spirituality so things did not go in that
direction after my return to England. There was however a profound change in my approach and beliefs.
As I am following a chronological approach I will return to that journey later but the seeds of this change
lay in Northern Ireland. The philosopher George Simmel would have found the conflicts I was
experiencing interesting but not unexpected. He believed that harmony was to a large extent impossible
(Coser, 1965, P12), which was something I would have challenged in that period. After nearly 6o years of
conflict rather than harmony, observed or experienced I am beginning to agree with him that this is a
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natural condition of human beings although hopefully not to the extent of the Northern Ireland conflict
of that era. Simmel believed that both harmony and conflict had to occur in all relationships, otherwise
they would not develop. This can lead also to a realization that conflict need not in its self be negative.
My environment then in Northern Ireland at that point was that of a soldier, protecting installations and
married quarters, accompanying vehicles as an armed guard to and from Belfast and patrolling in
vehicles around the immediate area. I mainly encountered other service personnel, civilians working on
the RAF Station or people from the local village. This caused a transition to occur; I began to see
Northern Ireland through the lens of a particular group of people. Previously I had seen Northern Ireland
as the lost province of the republic which Éamon de Valera, according to family teaching, had contrived
to lose during negotiations with Winston Churchill leaving this part of Ireland British. In fact this was a
considerable simplification and when I began to discuss these views with colleagues who were born in
Ulster I found that a different folklore existed for them where brave Ulstermen fought and obtained the
right to remain British. As my interest in Northern Ireland and the Republic grew I was to discover that
neither story was quite true. This was an early lesson in understanding that when we use other people’s
lens to see something then it is someone else’s perception that we are sharing. I did not see my own
presence as part of an occupation but more a policing effort to keep the two sides apart and this was yet
another lens, that of the picture being presented to the British public and service personal.
Following this period I returned to England and entered the world of photography and the uses it could
be put to deployed in satellites and high flying aircraft even balloons. Although my work was interesting
my mind was still angrily wrestling with the issues I felt my Northern Ireland experience had raised. This
led me into many discussions and much reading over a period of a year or so. The RAF and Liverpool
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became worlds where I explored people’s views on spirituality and the use of power on the threshold of
an age that will probably be described as a humanist one, in fashion at least. As a result of my
discussions I came into conflict with a strong childhood and adult mentor (my Grandfather’s nephew
Uncle Jimmy) who felt that my time in Northern Ireland was as part of an occupying force and that
British troops had been used to undermine Irish independence. We debated this hotly and briefly fell
out. Eventually we agreed an understanding that although the British Army had responded to the
conflict in a well-meaning way deadly force had been used by all three sides. As considered earlier, I had
seen my role and that of the forces as part of a policing action. Here was the proposal that our forces
had become by 1972 another tribe with its own interests to promote. This was the first time I began to
see my own organization and actions as part of another tribe in Northern Ireland.
This view of conflict was to be much more common later in the Iraq War (also called the Second Gulf
War). There is a perfectly legitimate view that I began to hold that if you subject a peace keeping force
to enough violence if it is military in nature then it will begin to respond militarily and protect itself. The
mission may then change. We now know that the Army deployed undercover agents, used entrapment
techniques and targeted hard core republican leaders as well as hard core UDA leaders. I began to
realize that what I had taken for a religious conflict, a hangover from the Reformation or the “plantings”
of the 18th Century to create a “British” Georgian Ireland was no such thing. This was the interplay of
politics, power and the acquisition of territory on both sides of the Irish Sea and both sides of the Irish
border. I began to doubt my move away from the beliefs that I had held but found it difficult to
reconstruct a trust in the Church. It was at this point I learned that I was being posted back to Northern
Ireland in my trade for a standard tour of duty (usually three years).
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It was from this experience that I began to appreciate in later life as a manager that I needed to
understand why people behaved in the way that they did and understand the history that led to
personality and work patterns.
The learning the MBA would later give me puts into perspective the huge influences that the Church and
family and now the RAF had while I sought to understand an apparently familiar environment which was
in fact alien.
The lessons for the future here was to always analyse the apparently familiar and be prepared to
discount past assumptions and look afresh at the situation. This was a country where history was used
to explain and justify anything. My love of history was an Achilles heel in this context and this was when
I began to learn the importance of an intelligent interpretation of history judged against the background
of the times under consideration.
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Chapter 6: RAF Northern Ireland Two Year Tour
The new tour in Northern Ireland proved very different for a number of reasons. In the year I was awre
of a number of false dawns in the peace process had come and gone but there was a sense in
Government that if the participants promoting peace remained independent of the Republicans and the
Unionists then change was possible. Within the military there was a level of cynicism although some
relief that attention was shifting after a number of incidents where innocent civilians, a number included
very young people, had been injured by Army fire. For me this had an unexpected consequence.
After some soul searching I had attended the nearby Catholic Church a few Sundays and this had
brought me news of the Peace Movement as an ecumenical organization mainly of Christians from both
sides but also Jewish and non-believers as well. This seemed to me to challenge my existing perception
that Northern Ireland could only be sectarian. While I wanted to explore this, although not on direct
military duties, I was still a soldier and did not want to compromise my colleagues or breach security. I
asked the question of my NCO who sent me for a chat with an officer who talked to the chaplain.
Interestingly the RAF saw it as a religious freedom versus security issue rather than simply a security
issue per se. They also saw it as policy to support the peace movement that was coming from the
churches. As a consequence I attended an ecumenical conference where people of many difference
faiths came together to promote a solution to the conflict. The learning experience for me was that
people could entertain the idea of new systems to solve an (as they saw it) ancient problem. This
despite the fact that the very people working up the solutions were themselves the product of the
conflicting tribes that had created the problem. I was also dealing with a need to redefine my own
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spirituality which had changed over this year from a passive Catholic one to an active Christian belief. I
had yet to decide if I could, in all conscience, remain part of the Catholic Church.
To return to the issues of Ireland however I was fascinated and at first puzzled until the common driver
of change began to emerge. The thing that had caused the current troubles had been a decision by the
Catholic community to seek full civil rights. The lack of rights rested on a range of problems. Edward
Heath whom I feel sought to govern Northern Ireland by implementing social reform as Prime Minister
remarked, “Those who have never visited the Province cannot appreciate the bitter tribal loathing
between the hard-line elements in the two communities springing from an atavism which most of
Europe discarded long ago” (Heath, P421, 1998). Ted Heath went on to argue that for fifty years the
Unionists had discriminated against the Catholic community until in 1969 the Civil Rights Movement was
defensively formed as a consequence by the Catholics. The clue was in the name. In my discussions in
the 1970’s with the Peace Movement people I discovered that the Civil Rights Movement had sprung up
to mirror the work of Dr Martin Luther King in the United States. Another interesting discovery was that
many of the activists for peace that I met were Protestant although the majority were Catholics. At that
time in 1969 the Minister of Defence was Dennis (now Lord) Healy. He wrote later “Although violence
had been increasing in Northern Ireland since the previous October, the Government still hoped that
political reforms would restore tranquillity. In mid-August rioting caused the army chiefs to see me
about the threat to law and order, which was increased by the grossly anti-Catholic bias of the BSpecials, the Protestant auxiliary police” (Healy, P342, 1990 edition). Healy went on to abolish the BSpecials and won support among Catholic’s as a result. Like Heath later he commented on the “atavistic
sectarianism of the two communities”. He also highlighted something I noticed too, both sides could
recognize each other even down to the Catholic or Protestant part of the City people came from. By
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accent and phrases they could identify the “religion” or tribe. This realization that Northern Ireland and
its troubles was about a political conflict, a play for power by an oppressed people was to moderate my
line about the failure of religion. Religion had not failed, people in authority had failed to respect each
other and they had held positions of sectarianism in order to have better jobs than their fellow citizens.
Most of those ordinary people who held a sectarian line did so however as a consequence of
conditioning rather than for reasons of personal gain.
As my position moved towards one more sympathetic to the Catholic community I sought advice from
my former English Teacher, Tom Kelly. Tom was one of the few members of staff in my secondary school
who openly admitted to being a Conservative supporter. All of my time in Northern Ireland was during
the premiership of Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath whom I regarded as a reasonable person.
The policy he pursued of social reform was not greatly different from that of Harold Wilson his
predecessor. As Leader of the Opposition Ted had supported Harold Wilson’s decision to deploy troops
to Northern Ireland. Although policy did not therefore seem predicated on party politics I thought it
would be reasonable to ask an English Catholic Conservative for a balanced view. Tom Kelly had another
advantage over others also in that he was several generations English and not strongly influenced (as
was I) by an immediately Irish past. What was the Unionist case for persecuting the Catholics I asked?
Interestingly he raised the question of patriotism and trust. Ulster was part of the British state or Great
Britain as he put it which was entitled to ask for loyalty and support for the nation from its citizens.
Ulster Catholics had never supported the province and therefore could not be trusted. I found this a
harsh view but it held some logic and perhaps explained why Westminster had not intervened until late
in the day to reform this place.
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Northern Ireland had a huge impact on my life and the formation of experience because I lived and
worked there however it is often disregarded when the troubles are absent as a minor and anachronistic
vestige of an earlier age. In fact its impact was present throughout my lifetime and much earlier. To test
this view I looked at milestones in the premierships during my RAF service until the Peace Agreement
under Tony Blair and the growing Unionist rebellion occurring now as illustrated in the table below. This
is roughly based on a model found at http://www.fergys.co.uk/Blogs/BritPMs.php accessed December
2012 which I have added to. I have highlighted the Northern Ireland impact below. I also looked at the
72 premierships that there have been and found eight milestones in all before 1964. In contrast major
events occurred in all of the premierships that followed and as a partial result of the murder of Airey
Neave DSO OBE MC MP a major policy change occurred under Thatcher.
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1965 Rhodesia declared unilateral independence under Ian Smith
1966 Pound Sterling devalued
1969 Capital punishment abolished
1969 Minimum voting age reduced to 16
James Harold
66 1964 1970
1969 Founded the Open University
Wilson
1969 Maiden flight of Concorde
1969 Troops sent into Northern Ireland
1969 Date, place of birth and maiden names added to Death Certificates
Laws on gay persons and obscene publications liberalised
1971 Decimalisation coinage
1972 Bloody Sunday British Army Fire on Crowd
1972 Stormont Parliament abolished for Direct Rule
67 1970 1974 Edward Heath
1973 Abolition of restrictive voting rules against Catholics
1973 Miners' strike and the "3 day working week"
1973 Britain joined the EC
James Harold
68 1974 1976
1983 Became Baron Wilson of Rievaulx
Wilson
Presided over a monetary crisis which needed a rescue by the IMF with a
strict incomes policy
Leonard James Allowed no go areas and the building of walls between communities in
69 1976 1979
Callaghan
Northern Ireland
1978 The "Winter of Discontent" widespread strikes mainly in public
services
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1979 Shadow Northern Ireland Minister Airey Neave MP murdered by
IRA
1979 Lord Mountbatten and two children murdered by IRA
Britain's first woman Prime Minister
1979 Resolved the Rhodesian crisis leading to the foundation of Zimbabwe
Highest Unemployment since 1930’s
1982 Falklands War
1984 Brighton Bombing
Margaret
70 1979 1990
1990 Introduced the unpopular "Poll Tax" in England and Wales (Scotland
Thatcher
in 1989)
Reversed the policy of state ownership and presided over a period of
denationalisation, deregulation, reform of Trade Unions, tax cuts and the
move towards a market economy in the public sector
1994 became Baroness Thatcher
1991 Abolished "The Poll Tax"
1991 Devised the Citizens Charter
1991 Invasion of Iraq following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait
71 1990 1997 John Major
1992 Sterling crisis led to leaving the ERM
1993 Established the Northern Ireland Peace Process
1994 Created the National Lottery with the proceeds going to charity
1994 Channel Tunnel opened
Anthony
1997 Bank of England made independent of Government
72 1997 2007
Charles Lynton 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland
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Blair
1999 NATO attacks on Kosovo and Serbia
2001 Terrorists attack the New York Trade Centre
2001 Afghanistan War
2002 Euro introduced (but not in the UK)
2003 Invasion of Iraq
2005 Suicide bombers attack London
2005 Civil Partnerships recognised
2007 Stormont, the Northern Ireland Parliament, restored
2007 Signed the Brussels Reform Treaty extending EU powers
2007 Signed the Lisbon Treaty
2008 Collapse of Banking System
2008 Withdrawal of active British troops from Iraq
73 2007 2010 Gordon Brown 2008 MP's expenses scandal, leading to the enforced resignation of the
Speaker
2009 Lisbon European Union Treaty approved by all member states
2010 Restoration of policing governance to Northern Ireland
Joint administration with the Liberal Democrats
74 2010
David Cameron State Collusion in murder in NI “shocking” says PM
2012 Unionist Rioting in Belfast over reduced hoisting of Union Flag
Figure 4 Impact by Premiership of Irish Issues
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Airey Neave was not one of the usual run of the mill Tory MP’s but a war hero who had used his ability
to plan effective strategy’s to escape from the German’s and help others do the same (Airy Neave Trust
http://www.aireyneavetrust.org.uk/about-us accessed December 2012) . He had enabled Margaret
Thatcher to capture the leadership of the Conservative Party which would have profound consequences
for the post war consensus between Government and people. During my time in Northern Ireland
however this was yet to occur.
I continued to attend Church events around the peace movement and meet and talk to local people. An
unintended consequence of this posting was to enable for me a dual view. While I felt that eventually
Northern Ireland should become part of the rest of Ireland I had gained by experiential learning a view
that in reality the IRA was as great a threat to that unity as the Unionists. Many Republicans among the
people I met did not want the IRA and their violence and believed that if the North became linked to the
Republic the next IRA target would be Dublin.
By the time I left Northern Ireland my spiritual and cultural beliefs had undergone a transformation.
Retelling this story in an ethnographic form has raised some internal feelings for me and memories of
inner conflict. It has reminded me that I felt and feel strong emotions in relation to the violence of those
times and the role played by the Republican and Unionist Paramilitarys. It seems OK for example to
describe the death of an IRA or UDA victim as a murder rather than a political assassination. There was a
point where I wondered if expressing these emotions was acceptable in an academic work. Carolyn Ellis
had something to say about this: “I think you have to be emotional to do good ethnography, since
fieldwork almost always is an emotional experience” (Ellis, P110, 2004). Although emotions remain I
have over the last nearly 40 years rationalized a level of my emotions regarding Northern Ireland and as
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a result my spiritual approach and also changed through further experiences of Northern Ireland as a
civilian later on. As Levine remarks “When a young tree is injured it grows around that injury. As the
tree continues to develop, the wound becomes relatively small in proportion to the size of the tree”
(Levine, P33, 1997).
During this period the debate occurred on membership of what was to become known as the European
Union. I followed the heated political discussions on television and in the newspapers as we all prepared
to vote on whether we should stay in the EU. This was the first time I had seen the structures of the
political parties disappear for a brief period. Tony Benn, then emerging on the left, shared platforms
with Enoch Powel universally recognised as a quite right wing politician. The arguments occurred around
sovereignty which I found puzzling then. All of my experience so far with the RAF had shown Britain to
be closely bound to NATO and culturally allied to the United States. As I discuss in the next Chapter the
Suez Crisis had proven that Britain had only limited power when confronted by a super power, even an
ally, like the United States. Economically with the decline of Britain’s power in the Commonwealth and
elsewhere in the world I could not see a future for Britain outside of alliances with other countries.
There was also the sense that we needed to provide a political and economic aspect to NATO which the
EU could provide. I cannot recall anyone suggesting that this was not a political debate. Interestingly I
did not take account of any local statements in Northern Ireland. I voted for membership with fairly
little hesitation.
I experimented during this period by joining a folk group called the Copper Kettle. This was a new
opportunity to relate with people from Northern Ireland who had joined the RAF but had been allowed
to tour as a band in their off duty periods. I was to visit Catholic and Unionist areas of rural Ulster and
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found this to be a way of relaxing but also understanding through its music the story of Ireland. Ireland
was the last haunt of the story teller and although both the music and storytelling are incidental to the
main narrative it’s worth noting that I found both sources powerfully moving. I think, just as books had
earlier helped to humanise me in a difficult situation so learning to sing and participate in the melodies
of this Ireland of two cultures and two histories was a similar process and learning as well as comforting
thing.
This period of my history influenced my later management style by introducing some fairly frightening
levels of reality. Political decisions, however well meaning, could lead to death or serious injury on the
ground. Later in management team meetings I would relate potential changes that might make an easier
life for managers but could undermine vulnerable young people on the ground. An example of this was a
proposal that we reduce management involvement in a call out process. Let staff make more decisions
during off duty hours. I believed that this could impact on the quality of decision making at night but
also cause managers to become distanced during the day by being less informed about the whole
culture of the organisation and the real people who lived within it.
The MBA learning speaks to this subject via Berne. His analogy to crime is applicable here, “There seem
to be two distinctive types of habitual criminals: those who are in crime for profit and those who are in it
primarily for the game (Berne P117 1964). Elements of the paramilitaries at this stage literally did
perform bank robberies and make profits but that’s not my point or Berne’s. I now think that whatever
their sincerity the paramilitaries were in a game that had become justification in its own right. Those
wanting a profit were more ideologically driven. To use Berne’s phrases again, the Peace Movement
would be “rescuers”, rather like reformed alcoholics who would point out the error of their ways to the
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other sides. On the impact of preparing to vote on EU membership the MBA learning leads me to think
about the way power occurs. A Weberian view is expressed in the following table from Burrell.
Interests
Places emphasis upon the dichotomous nature and
mutual opposition of interests in terms of broad socioeconomic divisions of the ‘class’ type within social
formations as a whole, which are also reflected in
organisations in the middle range of analysis.
Conflict
Regards conflict as a ubiquitous and disruptive motor
force propelling changes in society in general and
organisations in particular. It is recognised that
conflict may be a suppressed feature of a social
system, not always evident at the level of empirical
reality.
Power
Regards power as an integral, unequally distributed
zero-sum phenomenon, associated with a general
process of social control. Society in general and
organisations in particular are seen as being under the
control of ruling interest groups which exercise their
power
through
various
forms
of
ideological
manipulation, as well as more visible forms of
authority relations.
Figure 5: The Radical Weberian view of interests, conflict and power
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So the Weberian view might reflect the way the debate on the EU has occurred in terms of reasons why
people feel opposed to continued membership. Nonetheless the EU is an organisation with interests and
conflict although I would argue now that power is exercised through the Council of Ministers and the
Parliament and is more diluted than opponents appear to realise. As Burrell puts it, “All three lines of
development will seek to build upon the core concepts of totality, structure, contradiction, power and
crisis” (Burell et al, P388 – 389, 1979, 2005 edition).
The lessons drawn from this period for me today are:

Seek to understand that I need to regularly look “outside the box”.

Go back to source when making decisions.

Consider a forward analysis about how decisions taken now by me as a manager can impact in
terms of interest groups and the development of groups.
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Chapter 7: RAF and the Middle East
My next posting was for nine months to a radar station off the coast of Muscat and Oman on an island
called Masirah. This was followed by time in Salalah and Cyprus. While I was experiencing this very
different world the one I had left behind in Northern Ireland had begun to slip deeper in to violence with
savage behaviour in all the tribes to each other. My knowledge became filtered via the BBC World
Service or occasionally Voice of America along with out of date copies of the Daily Telegraph. I don’t
think that I ever encountered a Guardian newspaper during my whole sojourn in the Middle East. There
were no international TV services at that time and no internet to provide another view.
The experience of discovering that my childhood faith had been childishly easy to lose caused me to
want to know the truth about my religion and its background. In Northern Ireland I had discovered that I
was a Christian, but although in an ethnographic work that is important as part of the story and impacts
emotionally on how I saw things it is the impact on my eventual development as a manager that is
critical. So, I wanted to know how Christian my inherited church was and how much a part of my
makeup as a person this represented. I no longer wanted to be the result of the social engineering I had
seen in Northern Ireland or the tribal conditioning of my home environment. I wrote to Tom Kelly with
this in mind. Once again because he was an English Catholic rather than part of my Irish background as I
saw it. I was very interested now in exploring Christianity and in seeing where that would take me. He
posted out English authors who supported Catholicism usually from a more academic rather than
emotional or pious perspective. Chief among them was Arnold Lunn along with GK Chesterton and
Hilaire Belloc. Around this time I obtained a copy of the Koran and read this along with my grandfather’s
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bible which usefully had “guidance notes” to tell me the “correct” interpretation of scripture according
to the Church during his time.
Although the Island of Masirah had no female service personnel two women lay preachers were
stationed there and this enabled me to explore a perspective different again from the one I was
experiencing. They were not sectarian but they were puzzled by the Catholic Church and struggled to
see it as Christian. I also became aware of the politics of the region. The island had a school and I met
several of the teachers along with the spiritual leader, they were all Muslims. The teachers were
Egyptians and proudly boasted that President Anwar Sadat and Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser who he had
succeeded him some years earlier had sent them out to educate the Arab world. Nasser was familiar to
me as the leader who, with US support, had humiliated Britain, France and Israel, forcing a retreat from
the Suez Canal that had been captured. Nasser had nationalized the Canal. Sadat has stayed in my mind
as the architect of peace with Israel, signing the Camp David accords in 1977 for which he was later
murdered. (Journal: History Today http://www.historytoday.com/historical-dictionary/s/sadat-anwar-al
accessed November 2012).
However, fresh in my mind at the time was President Sadat’s daring attack on Israel known today as the
Yom Kippur War a few months earlier. He was so completely defeated that he changed track and began
the journey he is now so famous for towards peace. The RAF had gone on quite a high level of alert as
we wondered if the US and Soviet Union would militarily clash defending their respective Middle East
clients; Israel for the Americans and Egypt for the Russians. I now see Nasser and Sadat’s decision to
send teachers out to the rest of the Middle East (except Israel) as a form of cultural action. “Cultural
action either serves domination (consciously or unconsciously) or it serves the liberation of men and
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women” (Freire P 160 1970). Freire talks here about cultural synthesis which operates on social
structures, in this case pupils and their parents to bring about change. Nasser had been a teacher at the
Egyptian version of Sandhurst where I think the idea of using teachers was born. Although intelligent I
found the teachers that I met had little concept of objectivity and quite happily used their vocation as
one that promoted Egypt above the countries that they taught in. I learned from these observations
and discussions that power could be exercised by providing an innocuous service that then gives access
to clients or others that you would want to influence.
The contribution here to my management style has been to underline the need for reflection, to take
time out to understand and engage differing philosophies or issues. I discovered, for example, that great
chunks of the Koran had been lifted straight out of the Christian/Jewish Bible. I had time in Masirah to
read, reflect and discuss.
The MBA learning here is that objectivity is a fluid concept. I expected teachers to be objective because I
felt their calling was to fill pupils with a joy of learning. Some would say that that is not the role of
education, that it is a sausage machine knocking out a sameness of people to do a routine job without
thinking too much beyond what they are told. Arguably the Egyptian teachers were an instrument of
conditioning for a new Arab world. I found the ego state scenario applied to organisations useful here.
The point is made that organisations can have “patterns of belief, etiquette and rules that correspond to
the Parent ego state, in this case the teachers are managers obtaining a negative adapted child egostate that is compliant because their real employers have so arranged this (Stewart et al, 1987, P280).
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The lessons for me today are to always reflect on the authenticity of the message I am receiving even
though it comes from a source I might be conditioned to trust. Those entrusted with teaching may well
have a career agenda, a political position or themselves be conditioned, as the Egyptian teachers were
to promote a particular state or organisation. As we discuss elsewhere this is not peculiar to the Middle
East, The Communist party of Great Britain similarly operated via a level of conditioning during the
Second World War.
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Chapter 8: RAF UK Period
After this period in the Middle East I was posted to 16 MU RAF Stafford a supply depot and then my final
station at RAF North Luffenham, another Radar Station near Stamford in Lincolnshire.
At RAF Stafford I experimented with working in my spare time as a forces broadcaster. I created a
program format that allowed classical music, film music and some folk music. The first two later became
the format for Classic FM radio.
While at Stafford I encountered Father William Russell, at the time he was the oldest military chaplain in
the British Armed Forces. He spoke very knowledgably about the impact of the modern world on the
people of Uganda where he had been a missionary before the Second World War. Uganda was very
much under discussion that year following a recent rescue mission where Israeli Special Forces had
rescued Israeli hostages held in Uganda at Entebbe Airport. Father Russell spoke of the breakdown in
economic activity following Idi Amin’s military coup which had cost the country its economic viability as
it switched to defence spending rather than maintaining, for example, cotton production and tourism. I
showed an interest in the emerging world of computers as a tool and the RAF therefore posted me after
a relatively short time to RAF North Luffenham near Stamford in Lincolnshire and gave me an admin role
working with the early data input and retrieval machines. At that time small units in the field would
access huge data storage devices that filled several large hangers at RAF Hendon. The processing power
and level of those early computers is now contained in a modern PC such as the machine that I am using
to create this paper.
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Now that I was back in communication with the media of television and daily newspapers and not
reliant on the BBC World Service my interest in Northern Ireland returned and I followed events there
with considerable interest. I was later as a civilian to play a role again in Northern Ireland affairs.
I developed an interest in youth and organized a youth club, many years later I was to become a youth
support worker and manager in that youth field, this was my first experience in working with teenagers
as an adult.
Through a new friend I was beginning to cast a critical eye on the RAF rank system and beginning to
chaff at my perceived lack of freedom. My friend, Tony Hilditch, was to produce a dissertation on the
exercise of authority within the RAF and he contributed to an increasingly heated debate on this subject.
The Dutch armed forces had increased service personal’s civil rights while the British view was that such
changes would impede service efficiency and in any case the Secretary of State for Defence acted as the
soldier’s representative it was said. While I have earlier recalled a feeling of dehumanisation in relation
to what I saw as “RAF conditioning” Tony’s dissertation subject and the fact he could write it made me
feel quite liberated. I began to engage in some education again, taking subjects like maths where I felt
that I had failed in this subject at the eleven plus point. I also took basic exams in history with
government studies to try and underpin the things I had learned with some educational basis. I felt that I
was finding an ability to become “humanised” and more in control of my life.
As the 1980’s approached the Conservative’s in opposition returned to an earlier model and removed
Ted Heath who had provided a strong level of reform during my time in Northern Ireland. During that
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period he had also succeeded in bringing the UK into what was to become the European Union. They
now turned to Margaret Thatcher and this caused me some concern. She was known to take her
economic policies from Sir Keith Joseph, a strong proponent of abandoning the post war consensus and
the Keynesian economics which in my perception had prevented the crisis Western economies had
faced in the 1930s. There were equally compelling arguments that laid economic mismanagement and
poor control at the door of Keynes and the trade unions. My concern however was for my family at
home in Liverpool should Mrs Thatcher ever come to power and this concern proved to be well founded
in the event.
This period in my life laid the foundations for an interest in economic affairs. Britain was passing through
a period of economic uncertainty that I had partially missed while being abroad but was now apparent
in this time of rising unemployment.
I think that this period informs my management style by giving me more coherent, information-based
approaches and also the sense that we can try new things and entertain challenging ideas.
Thinking forward to the MBA I think the learning here is to be prepared to rethink management
structures and see if they are still fit for their current purpose. On reflection I think that the RAF had its
management structure about right for the job it was doing. The point of Tony Hilditch’s dissertation that
the British military needed a democratic basis is still the subject of debate today. Changes have occurred
in reducing discrimination based on homophobia or gender discrimination for example but the level of
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workers’ rights Tony and others wanted have not occurred. It is arguable that positive changes have
been the result of a litigation culture.
The lessons from this period seem to me to be about the fact that we need to be ready for change and
that it really is that great constant in the universe. The destruction of Ted Heath’s policies and approach
might now seem a distant irrelevance, evidence of Enoch Powell’s intimation that all political careers
end in failure (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Enoch_Powell accessed December 2012) but it was what
we now call change management on a grand scale. I think recognising that change can be positive if
handled well and the workforce or team are engaged as agents of change is important. The change in
Northern Ireland and economically in the depressed areas of the UK brought about high levels of
dislocation and unemployment. My lesson to learn and apply now then would be about preparation and
intelligent forecasting.
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Chapter 9: Stamford, Managing Politics and Engineering
In 1982 I had completed my twelve years of RAF service and took up a post at Mirrlees Blackstone Ltd, a
diesel engineering company founded in Stamford during the Victorian period in 1889. I became a
supervisor of a group of workers in a chemical cleaning bay for about five years and during this time was
involved in my first and only strike. Although I would regard strike action now as a last recall, at that
time, given the low wages it seemed the right thing to do. In fact it took several years to recoup the loss
in wages. I had my first experience as a press officer for the union during the strike and gave my first
radio interviews and also became a negotiator helping to build the bridges that would help to take us
back to work. Still with Mirrlees Blackstone I then became an assistant metallurgist working for Dr Chris
Holt the Chief Metallurgist. Chris strongly drew on his academic background and was a strong proponent
of colleges and universities being a vital part of the world of engineering. I took an NVQ in metallurgy
successfully and found the subject interesting enough to occupy me for the next five years. This was not
enough however to fill something of a void and I became involved with local politics, the trade union
and a campaign to establish a citizens advice bureau.
Personal issues had an impact in this period; I became married but sadly like many young married
couples we lost our first child. I mention this because some events truly do impact on the way you
develop through life. Positively, eight years later we had a son now aged twenty-two.
As part of the local community I began to build a large range of contacts and during this period twice
stood for Parliament in the local area. I was also elected to the Town Council and had my first taste of
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being accountable to the public and how to give speeches in public. I mention this part of my life
because it led eventually to my work with the European parliament and also enabled me to receive
training in areas like how to manage meetings, how to appear and speak on TV and the radio and how to
interact with the general public. I put this training into practise. All of these skills would help me to
emerge from feelings of dehumanisation and gain confidence. The enthusiasm this generated in me did
cause conflicts in the local political party who were not used to being in the public eye so much and I
learned many lessons then about handling conflict which stood me in good stead later on. As this story is
primarily about a learning and developing process within the context of my story this has some
relevance mainly that all of these things prepared me so that I began to think I could one day have a
role in middle or senior management.
Towards the end of my Stamford period the new leader of Lincolnshire County Council asked me as a
local community leader to begin promoting the idea of a university for the County which I did. This
involved visiting neighbouring towns like Market Deeping and Spalding raising expectations and
challenging the concept that only quite rich people go to university. The institution I was promoting is
today the University of Lincoln.
My manager strongly encouraged me to look upon metallurgy as a potential career. Apart from
photography my skills-set from the RAF did not translate very well into civilian life and experience had
not yet taught me the simple lesson that everybody needs a trade or profession. This was not just a
simple issue of paying the rent but more about obtaining self-worth. I had existed in a hugely structured
organization for many years. It began to dawn on me though that in civilian life, and probably in the RAF
too the structures could be very different from my perceived reality. The role people could have could
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also be misleading. One part of the company, Engine Construction for example, could have more
influence than the Cleaning Bay. This might be because one was perceived to be more central to the
profit and strategic aspect of the firm or it could be based on the personality of the manager. So the
ontology of Mirrlees Blackstone’s organizational structure was important to me because I had come
from this world of perceived absolutes to a less obviously absolute one. My belief in structure as an
absolute was wavering. As Norman Jackson and Pippa Carter point out. “we are constantly making
decisions on the basis of what we consider, or believe, to be real, even if we are not conscious of doing
so” (Jackson et al, 2000, P37).
This was my first opportunity to exercise supervision in the workplace and I found this more difficult and
complex than I had imagined it would be. The production line system set the pace and it had not
changed for many years. Work colleagues were resistant to change and often when management
proposed changes the local supervision circumvented the process and so little change occurred. That
said the lines produced were sufficiently profitable until about 1994 when overseas aspects the
company, now bought out by BTR, took over production transferring the factory process nearer to
where sales occurred in India.
I learned many lessons here about how not to manage. Change management was often neglected for
crisis management and I had to learn that what the RAF called management did not work in civilian life. I
learned to adopt natural leaders within the workforce and work with them to keep production flowing
and build in incentives. The incentive in this case was crude and involved extending overtime. The
company was happy to balance low wages compared to its rivals with a promise of secure employment.
This largely worked coupled with some weekend working. Often however, despite good quality
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products, order times would not be met. Of course I was only seeing one aspect of the company, my
own corner but many different cultures had evolved in the different departments. Using Hardy’s gods’
concept, the assembly work including my own was primarily “flow and copy patterns (which) tend to
require Apollo cultures” (Have et al, 2003, P92). Apollo is evidently the god of steady-state and in
Hardy’s world workplaces need a diversity of gods and management must reconcile them. Development
was Athena and sales, which I interpret as Asterix situations, was Zeus and Dionysus. Hardy’s conclusion
unfortunately proved correct when he surmised that corporate mergers undermined the motivation of
people working in such an environment which is what occurred.
The learning under the MBA course here applied to this world to understand the importance of training.
Managers and supervisors often learned “on the job” without reference to much formal training. Even
“Team Learning” would have improved the situation and perhaps brought the company a more long
term competitive edge with orders being met more frequently. Team Learning as part of a wider
management model would have enhanced also I believe a sense of purpose and a greater inclination to
work together on the solution of problems through a shared vision as in Have et al’s “Shared visions
emerge from personal visions, deriving energy and fostering commitment as they evolve” (Have et al,
2003, P78 – 79).
The diagram below reflects the Team Learning approach as part of a wider organisational concept.
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Figure 6: Team Learning in the context of a wider approach
(Have et al, 2003, P 79)
The key lessons to learn for today would be about building effective workforce cohesion and ensuring
that the different cultures within the organisation were unified by a common corporate philosophy that
actually meant something people could feel some loyalty towards.
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Chapter 10 Lincoln: Managing a European Union Role
With the closure of Mirrlees Blackstone Ltd I was free to look at a new career. I had helped Veronica
Hardstaff to become a Member of the European Parliament on a voluntary basis as her election agent
and was subsequently offered the role of organising her local operation as her UK Agent along with Joan
Guy, a colleague I had worked with politically who would work with the voluntary sector but we had
many overlapping roles. Joan also had a role working with the commercial sector including the National
union of Farmers in the Constituency. Full time secretarial and admin support was proved by Patience
Gibb and Sue Burke with support from a number of volunteers. Kerry Haig began as a cleaner and
became an admin assistant and is now a solicitor. She was a good example of how our work helped
many people move on to better things because we believed in staff development.
The Constituency approximately covered traditional Lincolnshire, so Grimsby and Cleethorpes were
included but not Stamford. An office was established in Lincoln on my recommendation. Incidentally
this meant that we left Stamford the year before I was due to be the Mayor of that town. I mention this
because, as we prepared to leave, I had many conversations with people who saw being Mayor as the
pinnacle of their councillor career or would imagine it to be so if they had been councillors. They could
not conceive of a career which placed another non-council job with little glory above that. There is a
lesson here about the incentives that inspire people to engage in community affairs. While I recognise
this is as good an incentive as any I also found that the community could lose good representatives after
they had had this “reward”. After being mayor there was nowhere else to go. Some of the ways local
government worked led to the reorganisation of the council structure which would impact on
Lincolnshire and other places later but the mayoral system was left alone.
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What has changed is the perception that councillors are managers and so should be subject to the
setting of personal development plans, one-to-one interviews with their leader and the acquisition of
personal performance indicators. This process began, during this period with the decision by Labour in
opposition to abolish the committee system and bring in cabinet government. The system came from
Total Quality Management (TQM) approaches strongly favoured by Tony Blair’s administration. Not all
the aspects of TQM as discussed by Slack are yet present in cabinet government but many are,
incentives include the possibility of being a portfolio holder (head of department) or a Chair of an
important subject area, these roles usually carry a fiscal gain now but are certainly prestigious (Slack,
1998, P787).
This work in the European Office was very new to me and also involved liaising with Veronica’s European
Parliament staff member Rachel Jones and to share the taking of groups to Strasbourg across the
Western European continent, stopping at important points that illustrated the need for the
development of the European story. I was also involved in working with local authorities to generate EU
and other funding into Lincolnshire. This was a serious opportunity to shape the operation of a small but
crucial part of the Lincolnshire infrastructure. This was also, as we approached 1995, the beginning of
the age of the office PC, email and web sites.
One of the most important organisations in the constituency was the Lincolnshire County Council which
had a spending power of a million pound a day. For the first time in its history it had passed out of
Conservative control and become a coalition council led by Labour with Liberal Democrat support. Many
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of the leading figures on the County Council who had never been in power before held discussions with
Veronica and I about ways the County could interrelate with European Union bodies. I also had similar
discussions with District Councils during this period of different political colours and none.
I learned at this stage that I was in a management rather than a party political role. We had discussions
with Members of parliament in the constituency too and I tried to forge a common agenda with these
disparate groups. It was interesting to note that conflicts emerged between local authorities and
between Members of Parliament of the same political party to the same extent as could be said for
those with different backgrounds.
While our office developed on Lincoln High Street a building was emerging up the road on Brayford Pool
which one day we were invited to go and see. I was away but Veronica went and met the Queen as she
opened the University of Lincolnshire.
One of the issues I wanted to tackle was how we could measure the operation of the office against
public expectations or a performance indicator of some kind. We set various standards, letters to be
answered in a certain time, interviews when requested to be offered speedily but these things were not
dynamic.
Drawing on Slack we would today be looking at a process that set expectations and goals and then
measured our ability to meet those expectations. Slack identifies the crucial element here as finding the
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quality gap and connecting or bridging that gap (Slack, 1998, P639). A consultant known to the office
came in and carried out a mapping exercise which identified us as an effective office delivering on the
things that we should.
The main key performance indicator was Veronica who set a high standard for herself and trusted her
team to deliver which largely they did.
Veronica decided that some management education would be useful and I was asked to attend the early
equivalent of today’s MBA certificate course as a taster and guinea pig. Dr Fred Dobson led the course
and gave me my first inklings about an academic view of management as a science that could have a
level of analysis and definition. The primary area of work was based on transactional analysis and talked
about ego states, stroking and discounting. All are definitions of human development and behaviour and
I found the session’s quite fascinating (Slack, 1998 P4 - 5). Unfortunately the timing was wrong because
after a month or so we began to face a crisis that would undermine the whole operation.
By now Tony Blair’s New Labour Government had come to power and set about its election pledges.
Substantial change and a major engineering of policy delivery were in hand in virtually every area of
Government including relations with the European Union and Labour Members of the European
Parliament.
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While many areas of important public service received much needed funding and modernisation a major
issue for this Government which it shared with all its predecessors back to Ted Heath was how to relate
to the European Union. While the Government was dealing with this it encountered another problem.
The Labour MEP’s (Members of the European Parliament) were largely not of Tony Blair’s New Labour
project.
It was decided after various conferences and discussions that the Labour MEP’s would demonstrate the
effectiveness of proportional representation. I participated in the planning and reported to the Veronica
and the party centre that we would lose 40% of our MEP’s under the form of PR being evolved. The
short list and allocation process was centrally controlled and although Labour actually lost 50% of its
MEP’s during its most popular period those lost were mainly “old” Labour, among the casualties was
Veronica. Such was the need to control deeply based in the administration there was very little
mourning for those who had served well and honestly but failed to be in fashion.
This period was the first where I received some academic underpinning to my early knowledge of
management and so contributed to my later management style in that way. I also learned from the way
that the Government controlled both the Labour MEP’s, Westminster and during the death of Princess
Diana the monarchy too that there were other management tools that were process-based and
effective. The MBA relationship, unbeknown to me had actually started and I was developing a taste for
this exploration of academia.
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The lessons of this period were to understand that old organisations can be renewed and be changed.
This was endemic to the period and largely positive. The other lesson for me from this past experience
was to be more questioning about the very nature of organisations. Burrell argues that organisations as
such do not really exist and are just, “the subjective construction of individual human beings” (Burrell et
al, 2005, 260). This means that an organisation can change dramatically depending on who populates it.
The Labour Government was radically different from its Wilson/Callaghan predecessor.
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Chapter 11: Lincoln: Managing Youth Services and Red Cross Services
After the closure of the European Office I was free to become a councillor again and was asked to stand
for election for the County Council which I successfully did and served for eight years entirely in
opposition and under a New Labour Government. A year or so after the election I applied to become a
support worker with a youth charity called Rainer. After nearly thirty years working in either the RAF or
industry or the EU I had wanted to do work on the ground with young people who had real issues.
During my time with Veronica I had encountered many third sector organisations doing serious work
among many different groups and I felt that I had a role to play. On the County Council I was specialising
in youth and community cohesion.
After a year working on the ground and learning to work with transitional youth from 16 to 25 I
managed to bring to the service support from a variety of the contacts I had built up which culminated
in the opening of the first youth advice centre with funding. I and my manager, Liz Holditch (now Liz
Straddling) had argued that opening a specialist advice centre for youth would enable early intervention
among vulnerable young people and this proved to be the case saving many hundreds of thousands of
pounds. More importantly this system saved hundreds of young lives in the County. With Liz I also
achieved the prestigious Matrix Award for the Youth Advice Service in Lincoln.
After eighteen months I was promoted to the senior management team with responsibility for the Youth
Advice Service. I then began bringing together my various contacts to talk to them about the role of my
new organisation. An important contact was Government Minister John Prescott whose department
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was responsible for “Supporting People” funding. This funded a range of services including the youth
services I helped to manage. I briefed Mr Prescott having known him when working for Veronica and he
asked me to meet him with my boss to put “meat on the bones”. My new manager, Paul Taylor, was the
Chief Executive of Rainer Lincolnshire and had, like me, a background in politics as well as management.
He had created the organisation and subsequently persuaded Rainer to bring it into its own charity.
Another Minister in another year was Yvette Cooper who was Housing Minister from 2005 to 2008.
Yvette, who became interested in our operations after Paul produced a booklet to which I made a
contribution, contributed a quote. The booklet detailed Rainer’s work in Lincolnshire and elsewhere and
she agreed to launch it at Labour Conference.
Paul and I evolved a partnership relationship which came out of his evolving management abilities and
political achievement’s. Without relinquishing managerial control Paul none the less empowered me as
a manager to achieve significant successes for the service. He also had a good relationship with the Area
Manager who supported our work completely. Paul had led a department as a County Councillor in the
Labour led administration and so had become used to exercising power and decision making at a
political level. He had learned through politics how much could be achieved by networking and
persuasion providing it could be backed up and it subsequently rewarded our backers with results. He
had also completed the Certificate and Diploma levels of the MBA course at the new University of
Lincoln which influenced his approach to the work environment.
In this period I learned about team development, staff appraisals, training and how to operate within
the charity.
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I began at last to feel that I had become “humanised” and was realising my potential as a manager and
in many other ways.
I also worked with other members of the senior management team on a number of projects and was
allowed to use my media knowledge to promote the local operation. Paul and I also branched out and
supported the Racial Equality Council and placed managers on a number of other strategic bodies.
Our success rate measured in young people not re-offending was about 70% and our work was deemed
to be a success.
Paul then felt that we needed to further build our reputation and recalling our previous success
obtaining Matrix for the Lincoln Youth Advice Service he asked me to obtain the award for the whole
Lincolnshire service. Awards are useful things, I recalled when with Blackstones we had obtained quality
awards for our work. Slack talks about ISO 9000 but the same remarks apply to the Matrix award, “they
are intended to assure purchasers of products and services that they have been produced in such a way
which meets customer requirements” (Slack, 1998, P787). I was pleased to find that the process raised
standards across the organisation especially around reportage. We had a good workforce generally but
they tended to place “paperwork” second to client care. This process helped people see that by good
reportage we could justify and evidence the service and keep it funded.
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Paul was surprised to learn that I had no degree and sent me onto both the Certificate and diploma
stages of the MBA.
The service flourished for some seven years until Rainer absorbed a few other charities and became
Catch 22. Paul left for new challenges and almost immediately the service began to experience funding
shortages and began to implement redundancies of which I was one. This coincided with the start of the
current economic crisis under Gordon Brown’s administration. Most of the management team which
had run this operation left and Catch22 eventually lost the contract to Framework. I was just beginning
my Diploma stage of the MBA and so funded this myself along with the Masters. Ironically my main
thesis produced was on the origins of the economic crisis the blame for which, along with most
economists, I attributed to the Hedge Fund Banks collapse triggered by the Lehman Brothers scandal.
Around the same period I lost my seat on the County Council due to the unpopularity of politics in
general during the parliamentary expenses scandal. A year later I was elected to the City Council and
became the Children and Young Persons Advocate and Chair the internal Equality and Diversity Group
with the Leader, Chief Executive and councillors.
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Chapter 14: Conclusions
As I began so I start this conclusion with a quote from Carolyn Ellis whose writings have guided much of
my approach to ethnography as a medium for and in this paper, “I use my ethnographic eye to gather
information“, “I think like an ethnographer and write like a novelist” (Ellis, 2004, P348).
This has created a new but enabling style for me. It has helped me to see the effects on my thinking of
the MBA course and the knowledge acquired. I have been able to apply to my life the thinking I have
encountered in both a textual way but also experientially.
My aims have been to:

To understand how my individual history has influenced my management style.
I have encountered significant cause and effect situations: I had not realised the effects of having
surrogate fathers or other long term effects emanating from the death of my own father. Some
aspect of the ripple effect of this event I believe caused me to feel dehumanised along with external
intrusions like the eleven plus made me feel challenged and unsuccessful. This clearly changed as I
developed patterns of success

To reflect on the learning that has occurred via the MBA and its impact on my management
approach.
Taking a chronological approach has enabled me to understand the things that have influenced my
management style and approach, influences from the RAF for example, seeing both sides,
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management and shop floor in industry and experiencing the job as a youth support worker and as a
manager.

To learn lessons from the past to apply to the present.
This has caused me to initiate an analysis of my working life with the aid of the tools contained
within the MBA learning process and the academic underpinning that is part of the wider reading
that I have carried out.
The process has been cathartic and sometimes painful but it has enabled me to better understand
the process that has been the MBA and the need for managers to better understand the tools that
they can access. There has also been an unexpected gain, the opportunity to understand the lessons
of life that are there to be seen when we journey back to look.
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