Management Versus Labor

Circa 1977

In 1977, I was Executive Director of the Alamance County Arts Council and it was my job to promote the "arts" in my location to the people, the schools, and to the local businesses...  The Arts Council was all-inclusive in that we promoted all aspects of the arts:  music, dance, drama, literature, photography, painting, weaving, pottery, sculpture, film, etc.

It was a local artist that drew the caricature above that I have kept with me for over 40 years...

It was during my tenure at the Arts Council that I attended Wake Forest University and received my MBA and began a new career in organizational development, training, consulting, and quality management.

At 67 years of age, I retired...  not because I had all the money I needed for a comfortable retirement but because I was simply tired of all the bullshit in the workplace.  While this may seem a tad egotistical, every single management team for which I worked was not just incompetent, but selfish and self-centered to the point that they could only think inside the box while wanting to hire people that thought outside the box.

If you think about that...  it just does not make much sense which underscores their incompetence.

For a brief period of time, I was in the category of being upper management and I am sure that the people who worked for me saw me in the same light...  and, what this tells me is that we have a problem with how we teach management to operate and manage companies.

There is and will always be an adversarial relationship between management and labor simply because management cannot be honest with labor for a variety of reasons and because management gets paid more money than labor to lie or to withhold information...

Until all the lies stop, nothing will change...  and, I cannot imagine the lies stopping anytime soon...