Volunteer Armies

I just found out that Adam Curtis’s 4 part documentary “The Century of the Self” is available to watch online (1, 2, 3, 4). Cool! It’s a little preachy, but it does tell quite an amazing story of how Freud’s psychological principles were first put to effective corporate use by his nephew Edward Bernays.

We take it for granted that emotional selling has been around for ever, attaching sexy women to big cars, and hunky builders to diet coke, but before Bernays there was none of this. Advertising was… well… just informational. If I wanted to sell you a pair of shoes I would tell you about their specification, and leave it at that.

When I look at how most large corporations communicate internally with their project teams, it’s like we are in a time warp, I see today what was common place in advertising 100 years ago, purely informational communication. We fully acknowledge that when dealing with consumers we have to ‘market’ to them, create brands, and excite them with images they can identify with, and aspire to.

… but talk about employees and just because we are paying them a wage we get lazy, and think that there is no need to engage or sell to them. They work for us, we just need to tell them what to do… don’t we?

NO!

Back at the dawn of the industrial revolution, things were different, you paid the peasants to come in and crank a handle, or pour the steel into the mould. It was easy to see whether someone was working or not, and there wasn’t a big difference between the best and worst of the handle crankers. I pay you, you do your job.

At the dawn of the Knowledge worker revolution, things changed, but many organizations have yet to catch up. Now a moments inspiration can create millions in revenue, and the output from an ‘engaged volunteer’ can blow away an experienced and knowledgeable ‘wage slave’. Open source software brought together hoards of volunteers to create the most complex software possible for zero pay!, and still… organizations are only just starting to realize that the traditional 40 hour week, live-for-the-weekend employee just doesn’t get the job done anymore.

When you are going up against Google (or your industry equivalent), your guys had better be really interested in what they are doing, and you had better be really good at selling your latest project to them!

…and so we’re back to Edward Bernays, he changed the way we communicate with consumers over a hundred years ago, he realized that purely informational communications didn’t cut it any more, and engaged and influenced people emotionally… huge change followed, and a whole new industry was born.

It’s time that his insight was brought back inside the organizational walls. Times have changed, and it’s not the co-ordination and control of work that is the key to success anymore, that’s become a commodity, everyone can do it. What we need is fully engaged employees – the guys that have ‘work ideas’ in the shower in the morning, the guys that bore their friends with excited talk about their latest project, the guys that would still do their job (or something like it) if they won the lottery tomorrow. That takes an understanding of Bernays' world

That’s what “Project Leadership” is about.

– Jason Bates

Tags:  bernays, project+leadership, engagement, project+management

Comments

[Philip Greenwood]

Fantastic! I think you nailed it. I've been playing with this idea too - my conclusion is:

If you want to influence people, use stories, positive associations, appeals to authority, repetition etc. - and facts.

If you want to make a decision, you should use cold, hard facts...and consider what stories, positive associations, appeals to authority etc. you will use to influence people to accept your decision.

Another project leadership paradox!

Philip Greenwood

[Limbic]

Great post J.