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every time she's in her cubicle the computer becomes a

Mirror
by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

meet your management guru: Elton Mayo

Elton Mayo
Apr 24th 2009

From Economist.com

One of the few Australians to have appeared on anybody’s list of famous management gurus, Elton Mayo (1880-1949) was born in Adelaide on Boxing Day 1880 and studied psychology at the city’s university. He followed an academic career and became professor of philosophy at the then new University of Queensland. After the first world war he was involved in research into shell shock, which he later likened to the condition of certain industrial workers.

At the age of 43 he won a scholarship to do research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Three years later, in 1926, he moved to Harvard Business School to become a professor of industrial research. Between 1929 and 1937 Mayo’s wife lived in the UK, where their two daughters were at school, while Mayo himself stayed at Harvard. The family got together almost only during the summer holidays. For the rest of the year Mayo corresponded with his wife almost daily, creating a remarkable series of letters that exists to this day.
While at Pennsylvania he became involved in the research for which he subsequently became world famous. One department of a spinning mill in Philadelphia had a labour turnover rate of 250%—that is, nobody stayed in a job for more than five months—while the average for other parts of the company was 6%. After introducing rest breaks and other improvements in working conditions, Mayo and his colleagues found that within a year the labour turnover rate fell to the average elsewhere in the company. Mayo concluded that social factors were a more powerful motivator in the workplace than financial rewards.

After this he was invited to take part in a series of experiments (see article) being carried out at Western Electric’s Hawthorne factory outside Chicago which produced telephone equipment. Here the working conditions had been altered, as at the spinning mill in Philadelphia. But there was one important difference. When, for instance, the level of lighting in the workplace was increased, productivity rose, as was expected. But then when the lighting was dimmed, productivity again increased. And that had not been expected.

“Human collaboration in work … has always depended for its perpetuation upon the evolution of a non-logical social code which regulates the relations between persons and their attitudes to one another. Insistence upon a merely economic logic of production interferes with the development of such a code, and consequently gives rise in the group to a sense of human defeat.”

Mayo concluded that the key factor was the workers’ feeling that they were being involved in the changes to their working conditions. They were being asked what they thought about them, both before and after they happened. Mayo believed that conflict between managers and workers was inevitable as long as workers were ruled by “the logic of sentiment” and managers by the “logic of cost and efficiency”. Only when each party appreciated the position of the other (through discussion and compromise) could conflict be avoided.

This sounds much like common sense today, but following Frederick Winslow Taylor (see article) and his time-and-motion studies, it was almost revolutionary. Indeed, it has defined the major schism in management thinking ever since—between the humanistic school (represented by such people as Mayo and Douglas McGregor—see article) and the more “scientific” school (of people such as Taylor and Michael Hammer—see article).

Despite his close association with the Hawthorne experiments, it was not Mayo himself who conducted them but two of his assistants, Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson. Roethlisberger went on to say that although neither the data nor the results were Mayo’s, the interpretations and conclusions were. Without those interpretations, the data could still be gathering dust in some archive to this day.

Mayo spent the last two years of his life working in Britain, which he had visited as a student. He died in Guildford, Surrey. A brother, Sir Herbert Mayo, became president of the Law Council of Australia.

Notable publications
“The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilisation”, Macmillan, London, 1933; 2nd edn, Harvard University Press, 1946“The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation”, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949; later edn with appendix, 1975

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