1960s WORK
0158 BTR Politics and No Hope
Looking back on my time at BTR, and with the benefit of my hindsight gained as a business academic, I can now see that I had no chance!
I was hired as the most senior non-board manager. I was even promised a seat on the board within a couple of years. Certainly, the Tavistock – the expert consultants who had advised on my appointment - had cleared me for general management. On the other hand, as I later found out, although they had been excellent in analysing my capabilities, they hadn't noticed that the actual specification was written on the back of an envelope. What was wanted, as was the case in many companies, was not a genuine general manager but someone who would do what they were told; and that certainly wasn't me.
Being the next in line to go onto the board, I was the target for every political opponent in the company -- though in my naivete I didn't realise it at the time. More ferociously, I was the target for a number of people at the Burton on Trent location. Not least, I was target for my two fellow business group managers. They had had longer than me settle down and well knew that you didn't win by being good but by destroying your competitors! Accordingly there was a constant competition from them. What was worse, of course, was that they only had products that would succeed where I also carried the products which were failing. Indeed these dominated my basket of offerings. It was inevitable that I was always the butt of criticism -- usually justifiably so.
But even within my own operations there were all the existing managers, who had every reason to want to see the back of me; and no doubt were telling stories to my director behind my back. That was how the company operated, and that's how the director loved to operate. Rather idiosyncratically, he (correctly) saw himself as a jumped up market stallholder. Indeed he was proud to describe himself as such, having had little or no education. He was, of course, bright but put his success down to being savvy -- to beating everyone else by underhand methods in whatever game was being played.
Then there were my direct competitors. The least obvious, at least to me, was the individual who was running our operations in the US. I didn't see him as a competitor, until he took over after I was fired. It was only then I realised that the disagreements we had experienced were politically motivated. And then, of course, there was the consultant who had been hired at the same time as myself. In fact, though, it turned out he was almost as badly placed as myself, and didn't get my job
Indeed, my most potent competitor was actually my predecessor. John Cahill still thought the world of him, and it was his image that I was tested against. He, like John, had been a barrow boy -- up to whatever trick was necessary. John was full of stories about how he had tricked people. Not least, was of course his trick of putting one million pairs of boots into the warehouse. John thought he'd done very well in this, and I had done badly by not being able to get rid of them! Of course his final glory was that he had the good sense to get out! Hence he departed in a cloud glory, and that was the success against which I was to be measured.
Then there were those people who had hired me and now were my superiors. John Cahill, the director who was my boss was -- I think -- initially a supporter; though he eventually couldn't cope with my more convoluted management style. In particular, he had hired me to launch a range of domestic rubber products (following the example of Rubbermaid in the US). He did not appreciate it when, after an in-depth investigation, I had reported back that we would make a significant loss if we even tried this. The company was then trying to build its image as a conglomerate, and such products in the consumer sector would have helped its share price. But, on the other hand, it didn't have any of the infrastructure necessary, and I simply didn't think that the factories would be able to produce products of the requisite quality. Whatever my reason, my refusal to do this undermined my position with John.
In BTR’s other divisions there were just as many enemies, as well as the people competing against John Cahill in the boardroom. But there were also those who didn't like the idea that I was in line for the next director position. In particular, though, my main enemy was - I suspect - the deputy managing director. He had not wanted to hire me anyway, and had his nose put out of joint when I opposed him hiring his favourite in our own recruitment drive.
It may seem that the whole world was lined up against me. Certainly most of the world within BTR was!
As if that opposition was not enough, there were the inherent problems of the production operation itself. I learned later, in case studies when I was at the OU, that there is a special type of job where someone is brought in from the outside to rescue operations - which was exactly what I was doing. As such, you had to be something of axe-man. Although I wasn't, in terms of redundancies (if you exclude the need for me to lay off 600 workers for six months). I still rode roughshod over the existing structure in order to make changes which were necessary. Unfortunately, the inevitable outcome of this process is that, when the job is finished and the problem sorted out, another sort of manager is needed to head the operation. It then demands a much more emollient manager, who will heal wounds that had been created by the axe-man. Hence, whatever my success, I was ultimately due to be shown the door.
Paradoxically, John Cahill later did exactly the same job when he moved to British Aerospace (BAe) as the axe-man brought in as MD to get rid of thousands of staff. He knew, better than me, what the role was -- maybe he'd seen what had happened to those he himself treated in this way, for he spent about the same length of time, two years, doing his work and then left. The difference was that he had arranged his departure in advance, and departed with what was then by far the biggest golden parachute that had ever been seen -- several million pounds.
The other big problem is that you never know what is coming your way. Everyone else in the organisation knows that you are due for the boot, but no one ever tells you. In fact one of the other business managers actually did tell me a month or so before -- but I didn't I believe him! The tragedy was that I had two offers of jobs then available. One I've mentioned elsewhere, which was the offer of a senior job with Philip Morris, where the head of the European operation was my previous boss -- who I loved working for. The second alternative was the option to take away a large chunk of the business, run for British Gas. It was time when North Sea gas was replacing coal produced gas in its pipelines. It was much drier and was drying out the previous seals. Accordingly British Gas was having to replace the seals on most of the town mains. To do this they dug a hole around the old seal and put a new clamp and seal over it. This was one of BTR's biggest businesses, which it had stumbled on by accident. They had quoted for the rubber part of the kit, which was probably the smallest part in the kit. In the event BTR found itself having to quote for assembling the whole kit, and this came to be a highly profitable operation. It mainly comprised steel rings and clamps, which were produced by an iron foundry which had nothing to do with BTR. BTR did produce the rubber sealing rings, but its main contact operation was assembling the various items into kits and putting these in cardboard boxes. It seems illogical that British Gas would pay for this operation -- but they had bigger things on their minds. Accordingly, the assembly process just took part in one of our unused working areas. It was a delight. Although we certainly had the stockholding and forecasting problems, we had no production problems.
This was in my personal gift, since I headed the group that undertook this work. I had continued, and built on, the relationship my predecessors had developed; and hence I was the main contact with the British Gas. Had I wanted, I could have taken the multi-million pound business away from BTR. Not only that, but my contact at Dunlop had told me that they were shutting down a factory in the Welsh valleys, hoping that BTR would take it off their hands. In this way I potentially had a factory, products, market, customer and a team of managers who were loyal to me. I could have walked off and become a multimillionaire. The reason I didn’t was partly that, in those days, I didn't know how you raised capital. But it was mainly because I was scared. I felt more secure in employment than as an entrepreneur -- despite the fact I had always wanted to be one -- and I stayed at BTR; only to fired a matter of weeks later!
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