Diffusion of the Work-Levels Approach

Speaker A I think there are several answers. Firstly, it's happening, but in ways which we don't know, or it's difficult to discover because of both Unilever and Tesco and other companies are training their own I'm training their people. So their people are now going out and working in their own companies. But what's happened in the past few years is that their internal people, some of them have left. They've used this material, of course, copyright material, but they don't care. Let's ignore this vexed issue for the moment. They've gone out and implemented it elsewhere. So one of the largest companies in the world, which is Tata Industries in India, has in fact adopted work levels and has kindly recognized that they were my ideas. And it appears in public. So there at least is one company that's implemented it on a huge scale, because the chief executive of Tata was in fact a senior member of staff in Unilever, in Hindustan Lever, which is what it's called in India, then moved to Tata and of course took the ideas with him and then employed people to implement it. So that's happening at one level, the more worrying one. So, in a sense, that's the easy answer of the question. I'm not worried about that. It's getting out. And I've trained people in Unilever over many years who are now acting as consultants. So fine. The more difficult question which bothers me, development of this taking place and what's happening there. So I do have on my agenda, once this project is completed, which should be by the end of the year, a book which draws together the experiences of the three companies, because this way we cover hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. And it would be a global sort of statement, but I have the strength to carry on to do that one. Other than that, there are I think one of your earlier questions was about my own students. There are several of my students who are now senior people in other universities. They have cottoned onto and have become excited not so much by the work levels aspect, but by the theory practice and what Rafe calls a social analytic approach. So that's a sort of approach which I think we often overlook in our discussions of Wilfred and Elliot's works. That's quite an attractive mean. Many academics are there, flounding around and they're trying to cross that theory practice boundary, and they've got some good material there. So that's alive in the academic world. The levels of work staff isn't, I'm afraid, and won't be unless I guess somebody, either me or somebody else, get something out that will be academically recognized. And that's been a failure of, if you like, this community in the past. So I haven't seen any academic articles on this.