What is it that makes some countries rich, while others remain poor? If only we could identify the right elements, perhaps everyone could be rich. The United States became rich because of its managerial culture, which was built on a Puritan worldview, according to Kenneth and William Hopper in their book The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream Amidst Global Financial Chaos.
The authors say that traditional American society had four characteristics:
1. A conviction that the purpose of life, however vaguely conceived, was to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth;
2. An aptitude for the exercise of mechanical skills;
3. A moral outlook that subordinated the interests of the individual to the group; and
4. An ability to assemble, galvanise and marshal financial, material and human resources to a single purpose.
The authors say that management of major corporations in the United States reflected these virtues during the golden age of management which lasted until the early 1970s. The rate of economic growth in the US has deteriorated since the 1970s because of the advent of “professional management”, consisting of people who do not have technical engineering skills and who focus on financial manipulation rather than the core technical competence of an organisation.
The authors have still not forgiven the British for the American Revolutionary War. British management practices are universally condemned, the authors conveniently omitting to mention that Great Britain became wealthy long before the US did. Australian management practices are roundly condemned on the basis of the country’s British origins and the fact that Australian managers are wasting the country’s resources in a spendthrift way, because the authors once read in a book that Australia, with a land area just 19% smaller than that of the US, can only manage a sustainable population of 8 million people.
Notwithstanding these idiosyncrasies, this is a very useful and thought-provoking book. It provides a useful corrective to the prevalent but mistaken belief that economic growth is fuelled by a “greed is good” mentality. While I think that the book’s criticisms of modern management techniques are overstated, I think they do provide useful starting points for examining management techniques rather than just accepting them unequivocally.
A video review of this book is available at my new site BusinessLessons.org.