ALL this week I followed the Democratic Convention in the United States and one common theme came through. Michelle Obama started the thread with her statement that “Success isn’t about
how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.”
Before the President’s speech, that thread was neatly tied up by Elizabeth Warren, senate hopeful and longtime public intellectual, who retorted to Obama’s opponent, “No, 
Governor Romney, corporations aren’t people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance.”
That was a direct response to one of Romney’s most telling gaffes earlier this year when he told one person at a public meeting, “Corporations are people too, my friend.” I’m not going to second guess Romney’s true meaning, but I can use his statement as a point of departure for what I want to explore in this week’s article – the impact of the human element, the ‘people factor’, in running a functional entity, whether it’s a country or a company, and how it impacts upon development.
In the case of a country, let’s list the core elements for sustainable and meaningful growth: there’s a healthy GDP as both an indicator of and prerequisite for development; there is the element of capacity, as can be gauged by the avenues for training and education; and then there is effective health care. All of these things, while having clear systemic bases and implications, are based upon one building block, the individual human being. If these systems were based on machines, robots, locked into one set programme, then everything would be perfect and I’d probably not have a column to write – the reality is that the human element is defined by its quirkiness and even in the best of situations, this means that a monkey wrench can appear out of nowhere and mess up the gears of the otherwise efficient machine.
Let me present the lower end of that scale in a hypothetical scenario – let’s imagine there is a small company that is producing, say, shoes. Materials are in abundant supply, the supply chain is reliable, distribution channels are obstacle-free and the market is far from saturation point, is indeed expanding. Let’s say that Mr. X, the longtime general manager of the company, the man who has sailed the ship smoothly from the inception, has retired and the ownership has to replace him.
| “The human element is a paradoxical one: it allows us to design and implement complex social and economic systems,while at the same time it is the human element which proves the key destructive force when those systems fall apart.” |
They advertise for a replacement and finally choose a person who has all the apparent qualifications for managing the company efficiently. A month into the job however, staff complaints increase drastically, all about the heavy-handed autocratic management style of the new GM. There is also evidence that the management recruit is brusque with suppliers and customers alike. The owners continue to have faith in his qualifications, despite the complaints, primarily because production surges for a while – over time however, those figures begin to drop to record lows due to a multiplicity of factors, from poor attendance at work, to low morale, to external inefficiencies both in supply and distribution.
Let’s now examine, the flip side of it. Same company, manager leaves, new manager, but this time very personable, open, communicative – despite this, the person goes to management with reports of a drop in efficiency and a concurrent rise in subordination. The results are basically the same: poor relations with suppliers, marketing agents and customers.
Whereas in the first case the overarching problem was autocracy, in the latter scenario it is insubordination – and in both cases, that core problem is ostensibly unwarranted, other than an issue of personality.
That is the human factor, and this is something I’ve written upon, granted not directly as in this case, in column after column, from my articles on territoriality, to those on public trust, to those on the need for fairness. The human element is a paradoxical one:it allows us to design and implement complex social and economic systems, while at the same time it is the human element which proves the key destructive force when those systems fall apart. On one end of the scale we have cooperation and cohesion at a refined, sometimes sublime level; and at the other end of the scale we have the disintegration of systems and relationships for oftentimes no other reason than a superficial shift in operations, one person, one cog, replacing another that has ceased to function, for whatever reason.
