Via the Boston Globe’s Monday business blog round-up, Elizabeth Rosabeth Moss Kanter at Harvard’s Business School says, during a recession, everyone in a company should think of themselves as working in the marketing department. She means that with revenues dropping and the bottom line dwindling, in order to keep the concern going, everybody has to drum up business, and in everything they do to think in terms of getting new customers and keeping them happy. But the Globe’s very brief summary suggests that Kanter could be read as suggesting something more literal.
It’s not a stupid idea. It ensures that everyone in the organization is on the same page. It gets everyone in the organization speaking the same language—which helps everyone avoid misunderstandings and makes any mistakes that do occur easy to correct. In effect, it makes the customer the CEO, so everybody knows who’s the boss and what that boss wants.
Moreover, it orients the organization in the direction that’s supposed to be best for the modern economy. A business textbook will tell you that the correct vision of the firm is the “marketing model.” A firm exists to facilitate a relationship between people with goods or services and people who need goods and services, and Marketing is the department (or profession) that most concerns itself with establishing and maintaining that relationship. In accordance with this model, employees who have the interests of the firm in mind will think, not in terms of shareholder value and stock price, but in terms of the multifarious needs of customers.
In practice, though, I think it would be a distraction. People are already pressed for time. Most employees are not trained to think like marketers. They would have to take time away from other tasks to learn how to think of their jobs in terms more appropriate to somebody else’s job. They would have to take time away from thinking about their jobs in the terms they were actually trained in. The topics of discussion that are “traditional” in their professions or trades could easily be edged out in favor of something they don’t fully understand.
I think the problem is ultimately a kind of discomfort with Adam Smith’s idea of the division of labor. (Karl Marx did not envision the division of labor coming to an end, only a shorter working day and a more flexible approach to both avocation and vocation.) So it seems unfair to people and almost immoral to ask them to work towards a goal that’s subordinate to “the main goal” of the organization. There’s an understandable wish that everybody might understand the big picture all the time.
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