Tall-Poppy phenomenon is alive and well in Australia in the twenty-first century. For her book Local Heroes, Ann-Maree Moodie interviewed thirty-seven influential men and women – entrepreneurs, politicians, scientists, artists, architects, writers, business executives, journalists and athletes. All but three agreed that the Tall-Poppy Syndrome exists in Australia.
No one has captured the Australian character better than Les Murray.9 Combining a reference to the vast open spaces and the local laconic style, Murray sees sprawl as the quality of the farmer who cut down his Rolls-Royce into a truck, and sprawl is what the company lacked when it tried to retrieve the car to repair its image. Sprawl cannot be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn with mink and a nose ring. That’s Society or Style. Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen. Sprawl is an image of Australia and would that it were more so. Reprimanded and dismissed, it listens with a grin and a boot up on the rail of possibility. It may have to leave the earth. But it scratches the other cheek and thinks it unlikely.
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Laconic: Management style that makes inarticulateness a virtue.
Readers may well object that this romantic indulgence in literature is anachronistic and irrelevant to the current concerns of Australians, especially those in the business of management. After all, these philosophical speculations were products of the romantic fantasies of urban intellectuals, not a few of whom were overly addicted to alcohol. Most Australians know little of the bush and care not a wink about its existential implications. They are suburbanites who rarely venture more than a hundred kilometres from the security of home base, except for tropical holidays. Is it not therefore fanciful and misleading to burden Australians with tensions and agonies that simply do not apply to most of them? A suburban existence dominated by the cretinising effects of the mass and social media protects individuals from existential angst to such an extent that Australians can happily claim that ‘we are all individuals’. Of course, it is possible, and some think likely, that the characteristic behaviour of Australians is a smokescreen for their inability to make the dynamic adjustments of which Americans are proud. The laconic Australian way is, on this view, little more than a pathetic attempt to ward off the presence of those who have developed consummate social skills which threaten artless folk. To go further, to suggest that Australians disvalue performance might suggest that they have yet to find themselves. Their hollowness, so often commented upon by Asian and European visitors, may be a sad fact. Is their disdain for politicians, bureaucrats and managers a well-rehearsed cynical romanticism? Or is it mere adolescent rebellion?
Distrusting managers, Australians nonetheless demand much of them and grudgingly respect those who demonstrate such personal qualities as tough-minded realism, initiative, courage or sardonic humour. Since there are few opportunities to demonstrate these qualities in their jobs, managers are ridiculed rather than respected. The only people who believe that managers are leaders are managers, and some of them are not sure.
Australian managers have never enjoyed a good reputation, even within their own ranks. Only at two activities are Australians incurably mediocre – government and business. So wrote Hugh Stretton, echoing Donald Horne, who lamented the fact that it is Australians’ misfortune that their affairs are controlled by second-rate men – ‘racketeers of the mediocre who have risen to authority in a non-competitive community where they are protected in their adaptations of other people’s ideas’.1 Yet there are, according to Stretton, grounds for hope in our ‘profound and lovable virtues’: a friendly, not-toocompetitive society that is still the world’s most egalitarian in manners, if not in fact.2 The problem for Australians is how to combine our profound and lovable virtues with the pragmatic demands of management.
Australian managers complain bitterly about excessive government control of their business lives. Yet, when companies run into trouble they want the government to solve their problems for them. Sadly, many government bureaucrats have been only too willing to comply, thus supporting capitalism for workers and socialism for over-paid managers. Obscene levels of executive remuneration, even for rank incompetents, have led to increasing cynicism about the quality and worth of managers, even within their own ranks.
Australian managers have been widely portrayed as artless, unsophisticated and transparent. Not for them the ruthless confrontation supported by devious strategies to achieve personal goals. Rather, they are an engaging mix of humanity, consideration and conformity. Whereas Americans are performance-orientated, Australian managers suffer certain doubts. If performance is everything, one has to applaud and reward outstanding performers irrespective of their behaviour. And this Australians will not do. If it is true that the English expect to lose at sport with dignity and Americans to win without it, then Australians aim for performance with caveats. Since Australian managers are determined quietly to defend their quality of life, they have been sceptical about imported management ideas and practices, and those that appear to threaten quality of life are allowed quietly to wither on the vine. Direct confrontation with overseas experts and gurus is not the Australian way. Rather, the gurus’ seminars are well attended, their jargon briefly adopted, lucrative commissions concluded, but the ‘new’ management models are rarely applied.
One difficulty in trying to understand Australian managers is that, given local values, they are regarded as mediocre by definition. Of course it is possible that Australian managers are mediocre in fact and deserve their reputation as ‘racketeers of the mediocre’. Reading between the lines of government reports and academic articles, it appears that their reputation for mediocrity is based on international comparisons with American managers. Are Australian managers regarded as mediocre because they oppose the profound and lovable virtues of American pragmatism?
Australian managers face a daunting task if they are regarded as mediocre by definition. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine what it would take for Australian managers to be widely respected and even revered. They are faced, therefore, with an apparently insoluble problem: trying to promote local values, they manage not to manage. Realising that ‘getting on with colleagues’ is important to their survival, they have danced around American-style confrontation, preferring a unique form of humanism which emphasises performance and personality, management and psychology. For many years, Australian managers have danced with psychologists. And Australia has produced several eminent dancing partners.
Julie Marshall and Richard Trahair published Industrial Psychology in Australia to 1950. 332 of the 1551 articles in the book are devoted to incentive schemes and profit-sharing. By comparison, there were only 169 articles on personnel management, industrial psychology (including counselling and mental health) and 88 articles on management training, education, management traits and attitudes.
In 1911, 13 articles appeared in The Argus and Australasian Manufacturer about profit-sharing and schemes which allow employees to become shareholders of companies. This interest culminated in a request in 1914 by the Liberal Workers’ Institute to ask the Minister for Home Affairs to provide statistics with a view to introducing such schemes in Australia. Profit-sharing, industrial co-partnership, industrial fatigue and the Taylor system of scientific management were the dominant subjects during the war. By 1917 the NSW Railway Commissioner was attacked publicly for criticising scientific management. After the war, discussion of interviewing, selecting and vocational training marked a shift towards the personnel function.
Bernard Muscio delivered a series of influential lectures at the University of Sydney on occupational selection, scientific management and work fatigue. In 1920 he published Lectures in Industrial Administration, in which he argued that industrial psychology should concentrate on the study of ‘mental’ factors and the selection of workers to achieve the best results from work. In 1924 there was light relief when an American ‘characterologist’ lectured on his method of employee selection, claiming
