Chapter 1
Old Norms, New Norms

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that continued economic growth over the course of the twentieth century would reduce the workweek to 15 hours.1 I54n 1959, the US Postmaster General predicted that today's mail would be sent by rockets (email turned out to be more cost-effective, faster, and, I think, more environmentally sustainable).2 In 1964, the RAND Corporation predicted that by 2020 we would be breeding intelligent apes to perform manual labor.3

We are not very good at forecasting the future of work. Perhaps it's no surprise that Keynes imagined a gradual disappearance of work, given what was happening in the decades prior to his prediction. Between 1870 and 1930, the average weekly hours of a nonagricultural worker in the United States fell by one quarter, from 59.5 hours to 44.5.

This downward trend continued, if more slowly, in the second half of the twentieth century. One study of time use in the United Kingdom found that between 1961 and 2000, average weekly leisure time increased by seven hours for men and five hours for women.4

Only one group of workers bucked this trend. Top quintile earners - for whom busyness became a symbol of status and success - saw their average weekly hours creep up, from 39.7 in 1973 to 42 in 2018. They now work the longest hours of all: the idle rich of bygone days has become the laboring class of today. Those at the bottom of the income hierarchy work the least hours, unable often to secure the stable full-time employment they need and want.

The importance we place on our jobs compared with other life factors has declined across successive generations. According to the World Values Survey, younger generations place a lower importance on work relative to leisure time compared with earlier generations who took the survey at the same age. The only outlier is Gen X - hit particularly hard in wealth and career prospects by the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

On average, as countries grow their per capita gross domestic product (GDP), workers gain greater economic freedom to spend time on other pursuits. This trend is not confined to the West: workers in China and India are also starting to place less importance on work relative to leisure.

Was Keynes simply too early with his prediction? Maybe not. As of 2017, only 28% of Americans said they would stop working altogether if they had enough money for the rest of their lives - down a little from 34% in 1995.5

The predictions keep coming. In late 2023, the much-quoted Elon Musk said of AI that "We will have something that is, for the first time, smarter than the smartest human. It's hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want one for personal satisfaction. But AI will do everything."6

So, there's that. If Musk is right and "that moment" is within planning distance, then this book, with its focus on humans at work, is far too narrowly defined. For now, I shall assume, while allowing for the possibility Musk means what he says, that we are a very long way from a human-free workforce.

The Professional Management System

In 1961 the General Motors Personnel Staff published The Secret of Getting Ahead.7 Here is the opening of the pamphlet, with its startlingly simple message for the men and women of GM:

• WOULD YOU LIKE TO GET AHEAD in this world? Then learn how to please your boss. It is the only way you can possibly succeed at anything. The sooner you recognize it, the faster your progress will be. Do you find this idea unpleasant? Millions of people do. Yet all their combined resentment cannot change the situation one iota. It's one of the facts of life. The people who do not adjust to it never get anywhere. The promotions and pay raises which might have been theirs go to someone else.
• I mentioned this fact recently to my nephew, Jim, who is just finishing college. If he wanted to get ahead, I pointed out, he would have to learn to please his boss. Jim bristled. It was as if I had suggested that he demean himself and lower his personal standards. Jim's reaction was perfectly normal. I can remember feeling the same way myself. Young people have a natural resentment of bosses; they do not like the idea of having to please any specific individual. They feel, somehow or other, that there ought to be certain standards of conduct or performance. If you reach or exceed those standards your success ought to be assured. It should not be a matter of anyone's opinion.
• But who is going to set these standards? And who is going to judge whether or not they have been fulfilled? No matter how you look at it, the first requirement of any job is that a man be helpful to his boss. That's why he was hired - to help his boss carry out the duties for which his boss is responsible. And who is in a better position to judge whether he has done this successfully than the boss himself?8

OK, Boomer. Try that in next month's Town Hall meeting. My point is neither to criticize nor make fun of General Motors. In fact, I would make a strong case that Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. - a leader at GM from 1916 when his company was acquired and later president and then CEO of the whole group - was the most impactful, most important businessperson of the twentieth century. He is the leader, more than any other, who shaped the norms of professional management, and I talk about him in more detail in Chapter 4.

The Birth of Professional Management

It is easy to forget why professional management took off. The previous era (in the United States) had been dominated by trusts - big, powerful, founder-led companies that were vertically and horizontally integrated to a degree that would make today's tech hyperscalers blush. The likes of Standard Oil, US Steel, and the American Tobacco Company all thrived, until a wave of antitrust regulation and rapid technological change left them vulnerable to a new breed of highly efficient competitor.

The professionalization of management enabled a new generation of companies to scale and sustain themselves beyond the vision of a charismatic founder. Smart managers, trained in the latest techniques, made data-driven choices about strategy (where to play and how to win). They built systems for continuous improvement and to enable better, fairer, and more consistent decision-making. They increased transparency and managed risk.

Standardization, routines, predictability - this is what professional management delivers. The benefits are evident: the cost advantages of scale, the easy spread of learning across the firm, and the eventual market power and influence.

Consider the shipping container.9 It standardized an industry and created a routine to dramatically lower the cost of ocean freight. The first standard shipping container was invented and patented by Malcolm McLean in 1956. He wasn't a shipper. In fact, he owned the largest trucking company in the United States at the time.

For years, as McLean was building his trucking company, sea-borne cargo was loaded and unloaded in odd-sized wooden cases. He watched dock workers unloading freight from trucks and transferring it to ships and was perplexed by the inefficiency. He knew that both trucking carriers and shipping companies would gain from a standardized process of cargo transfer. He slowly developed the idea to make intermodal transportation seamless and efficient.

To start the change, he acquired the Pan Atlantic Tanker Company, with all its shipping assets. He started experimenting to find better ways to load and unload his trucks.

Eventually, he developed what we now call a shipping container. It is strong, theft resistant, reliable, and easy to transfer. In April 1956, the first container shipped, departing from Port Newark, successfully plying its route to Houston.

Standard containers have changed international trade. Cargo now goes on its journey sealed and safe, which reduces pilfering and damage. Containers have reduced the labor required for loading and unloading and have changed the character of port cities worldwide. Cranes substituted for human labor; ports evolved to accommodate larger ships and loading facilities. McLean's innovation reduced the expense of international trade and increased its speed by shortening shipping time. This is a quintessential professional management-era achievement.

General Electric's famous leadership training center at Crotonville in New York state trained generations of leaders in playbooks for strategic planning, Six Sigma, lean manufacturing, just-in-time, and Net Promoter System, among other tools. The GE managers could disperse back to their jobs equipped with a common language and shared techniques for managing the diverse businesses. (The center was closed in 2022 as part of a broader set of changes at the, by then, much-diminished GE.)10

The professional management system has been written off many times but has endured the rise of the shareholder-value movement in the 1970s, deregulation in the 1980s, globalization in the 1990s, multiple technology boom-and-bust cycles, and a global financial crisis. It soldiered on through a worldwide epidemic and during that time showed some of its greatest strengths.

Alfred Sloan wrote...