New Zealand and Australia – endorsed these values to a much greater degree than did managers from the Catholic countries of Western Europe and Asia. Like Americans, Australian managers are strongly committed to universalism, analysis, individualism, inner-directedness; but unlike Americans, Australians suffer certain doubts about the relative importance of achieved status. Americans are more likely than managers from other countries to believe that winning is what counts. But if winning is everything, nothing else matters. In Australia, however, other things do matter: how one copes with success matters.
I had the pleasure of working in Germany with Fons Trompenaars on a course for senior Western European managers. We asked them to nominate the dominant management model (or metaphor) for several countries. There was almost unanimous agreement that the dominant management models were: U.S. – the football team; England – the class system; Germany – the machine; Asia – the family; and Australia – the barbecue.
It is clear that studies of Australian management values over a period of nearly fifty years reveal a surprising consistency in their conclusions. Australian managers endorse a form of home-grown humanism which tries to harmonise work performance with quality of life generally. England’s study is important since it is the first to emphasise Australian managers’ commitment to an ideology of humanism. The study from Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars is important because it suggests that, while Australian managers are similar to Americans in their support for broadly-based Protestant values, their humanism acts as a brake on their commitment to performance.
The 1990s were not good years for the reputation of Australian managers. The OECD in its 1992 World Competitiveness Report rated Australian managers as ‘ineffectual’, ranking them nineteenth out of twenty-two member countries. The Leadership Report undertaken by Monash University found Australian managers to be egalitarian, responsive, forthright, but indecisive and risk averse. Then along came the Karpin Report, which was three years in the making and a waste of $6 million of taxpayers’ money. Formally known as the Industry Task Force on Leadership and Management Skills, it was established in 1992 and advertised as the most comprehensive study of Australian managers ever undertaken. That it was, but it was also dominated by management consultants, confused definitions, inadequate methodologies and management jargon. And it offered no new ideas.
In February 1995 the report of the Task Force appeared under the politically correct title of Enterprising Nation: Renewing Australia’s Managers to Meet the Challenges of the Asia-Pacific Century – and was predictably critical of Australian managers and management education. The main conclusion was that Australian managers are hard-working, flexible, technically sound, egalitarian, open, genuine, honest and ethical. But they are also poor at team work and empowerment, unable to cope with change and lacking in people skills. The egalitarian nature of Australian managers was considered a weakness because it had an adverse effect on decision-making and resulted in managers’ reluctance to confront subordinates with issues of poor performance. The authors concluded that while the best Australian managers are the equal of the best in the world, there are very few of them. Furthermore, Australian managers are perceived internationally as considerably inferior to Japanese, American, British and German managers. Even among their colleagues, Australian managers were judged to be well below acceptable international standards.
Releasing Enterprising Nation to the public in April 1995, David Karpin suggested that Australians need to revere their business leaders. He made the familiar pleas for more women in management, best-practice management – Australians should be more like American managers – and more and better training and education. But the bad news was that there were no ‘world-class management schools’ in Australia. We need management schools that employ around 110 academics and our little schools are well below that number. Therefore, we are not world-class schools.
Newspaper headlines were predictable: ‘Australians: No Brains for Business’ (Australian Financial Review); ‘Report Slams Managers’ (Courier Mail ); and ‘Schools Not up to World Standard’ (The Australian). With a few exceptions, Australian journalists delighted in reporting our faults to the world.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Gerard Henderson thought it appropriate that the Karpin Report was launched on the day after Anzac Day: another Aussie failure. He concluded that there was not much enterprise in the Karpin Report and pointed to its bland observations. He acknowledged that the authors asked important questions but their recommendations were pedestrian and bureaucratic. The Report abounds with clichés and tautologies:
‘All enterprises are experiencing change as we move towards the twenty-first century’. Well, fancy that. Finally, the authors’ indulgence in simplistic theory is embarrassing. For example, we are supposed to believe that we are moving from old to new ‘paradigms of management’. Once upon a time managers were consumed by ‘vicious circles’ but now they are blessed with ‘virtuous circles’. ‘The essential problem with Enterprising Nation is that it bagged Australian managers without defining precisely whom it had in mind…As a short, middle-aged Anglo-Celt, I keep my weighty volumes to stand on as required.8
Fred Emery thought that the Karpin Report was a ‘deeply disappointing blockbuster’. He criticised the authors for assuming that management is a newly emergent science. Management is not and never will be a science, yet the authors assumed that there is an emerging body of empirically-grounded knowledge that is worthy of the title ‘management sciences’ which are applicable to anything called management. More importantly, Emery wondered why the authors of the Report did not ask whether changes in the workforce towards self-managing groups eliminate the need for the supervisors who are included in the authors’ definition of ‘manager’. They assumed that supervisors can be retrained as leaders, mentors and coaches. This is assumed in the face of one fact, which they probably did not know, that in the 1950s the movement to retrain supervisors in human relations was a dismal failure; and in the face of another fact, which they certainly did know, that human resource people do not know how to train the much better-schooled managers to be leaders, mentors and coaches.
The analysis of the task-force reveals that Australian management is faced with more of the same old challenges; the recommendations add up to more of the same old solutions. Although the Report lists a depressingly long series of complaints about the state and insularity of Australian management education, it can do no more than recommend higher salaries for professors, forming one really big national school of management and capping the lot with a national body to certify management education and “continue the work of the task force”. Heaven forbid.9
If it is true that Australian managers are criticised for being insufficiently American, it does not follow that they should replace Australian humanism (which defines truth as correspondence with the facts) with American pragmatism (which defines truth as what works). If truth is what works for different groups, the dominant group’s ‘truth’ will quickly become the received wisdom until a stronger group replaces it with another version of what works.
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