A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

WE’RE ALL ACCOUNTABLE ■ 139
They did not in any way consider themselves accountable for worker performance
or productivity.
According to Peter, unions had become accustomed to demanding more
benefits every time a new labor contract was negotiated. The union membership
expected this. In fact, the norm was to make demands that everyone
knew would not be met, but then the final terms would be better yet
than the previous contract. The problem was clearly that while the unions
were gaining more compensation and more favorable working conditions
for their membership, they were not accountable for worker productivity
or manufacturing costs, and therefore any negative impact on the corporation
was simply viewed as management’s responsibility. The unions’ view,
of course, was that since management was pulling down salaries that
weren’t commensurate <strong>with</strong> their contribution, why should workers do
otherwise? This view reflected back on what <strong>Drucker</strong> saw as management’s
accountability and responsibilities and how they were related.
As <strong>Drucker</strong> saw it, labor had to be held accountable just as did management.
Adding benefits <strong>with</strong>out increasing productivity just meant that
workers were increasingly less productive and that the company was
increasingly less competitive in the world marketplace. For a start, <strong>Drucker</strong>
thought that boards of directors should include union representatives who
were full and voting members. This wasn’t the practice in those days.
What Peter was stressing was that in an internationally competitive
environment, the time was long past when management and unions in a
company should consider themselves as adversaries on the opposite side
of the fence. Company managers and workers were not in competition;
they were both on the same side.
After this lecture, one of my doctoral classmates, the vice president of
a division of a major corporation, showed me a book that had been given
to all senior divisional managers in his corporation. The title was something
to the effect of “Keeping the Union Out and Minimizing Its Effect.”
Certainly this was clear evidence that at least this major corporation considered
the relationship adversarial.
Former astronaut Frank Borman later served as CEO of Eastern
Airlines. I had known Frank since the time I was a cadet at West Point.
When he was a young Air Force captain, Frank had been my professor of
Thermodynamics. Frank was a book author as well. In his book
Countdown: An Autobiography (Silver Arrow Books, 1988), he speaks of
flying <strong>with</strong> Eastern Airlines pilots for the first time after he became CEO.