Craftsmen at Work

What can modern businesses learn from the art of the craftsmen? That was the subject of an excellent episode of In Business on BBC Radio 4 that I heard yesterday.

It again brought to the fore an ongoing discussion on several discussion boards recently – the central role of business in society and what drives successful businesses. Sociologist Richard Sennett put forward his thesis that people who practice a craft know better than “business people” how organizations ought to be run.

Businesses are set up to meet genuine customer needs and they are typically driven by the passion of entrepreneurs who love making and delivering a product or service to their customers. Then the businesses grow. And they get “professionalized”. "Performance optimization” becomes the holy grail and very insidiously, the focus starts shifting – from the product or service to the company’s revenues and stock price.

Soon almost everybody forgets that goal is not making more money but celebrating the craft which gave birth to the business in the first place. Of course lip service is paid every now and then to the core of what the organization is about, but key strategic calls are made with an eye on the Street.

Also a dubious theory gets propounded that craftsmen are so involved with their craft that they don’t know how to run a business. Dubious because there is nothing to suggest that a person adept at a craft will not be able to collaborate with teams, will not be able to develop meaningful relationships with customers and employees and will be unable to command a fair price for his / her product or service. Most of the iconic brands and businesses we talk about reverentially today were created by such craftsmen, people who cared about the businesses rather than care about the money - whether it was a McDonald’s or Starbucks or Apple or Google or whatever. The bigger challenge for businesses in fact is to continue keeping their core craft at the centre of their business – note the classic memo written by Howard Schultz to his employees earlier this year. Even if it is not real, the memo became famous because it so truly seemed to reflect the passion of a founder-entrepreneur for a craft undermined at the altar of efficiency.

Finally going back to the BBC radio programme, the proposition of craftsmen as better businessmen was best articulated by Richard Taylor of the WETA workshop which produced the stunning special effects for movies such as Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Asked how they run such a stupendously successful creative business without any formal business training whatsoever, he said they did it by turning the accepted business model on its head and driving it from the heart of creativity. Instead of pursuing the last dollar, the bottom line, they looked at producing the most beautiful work creatively and in turn, good business will follow. Now how many businesses can say that hand on heart?