Elliott Jacques in the Glacier Project

Speaker A Now we're up to the point where Elliot's now coming into basket. And I have to say that there was some a rivalry about the Glacier work. It's felt that Elliot sort of pinched the glory. There were various other luminaries from the Tavistock who were working in Glacier as a thing. I don't fully understand the split in 52, but what became the central thing that Wilfred Brown taught Elliot is that if you're in a purposeive system, the kind of purposeive system that Russ Acoff talks about, then you do need a spine of authority. And that word of authority is the killer. Because where I come from in Australia, and certainly I think in the USA, authority is a tricky word for people. They don't like it much. It gets confused with authoritarianism and autocracy. The mere use of the word authority, which for me is simply a neutral description of a world relationship, that's the English language has become something else. When Elliot turned up at Glacier, he was 31 and Wilford was 40. So you have this additional element of the older man who is broad in his understanding of the world, and the younger man, who's very intense and focused, is quite narrow. It doesn't really understand an employment of bureaucracy. The reason why Elliot got so engaged with the notion of bureaucracy began to understand that there's some rules and if you break them, you get into a mess. You can do bullshit, but it's very hard to say. I've talked to a lot of people about this, trying to work out who taught who what, and I think it was truly symbiotic. It would be very difficult to say because the whole thing was hacked out in these brawling sessions they have, and they were just constantly having a good intellectual brawl about this or that or the other. It was like a golf match.

Speaker B But it also seems to me, and I keep on seeing echoes of this, in fact, throughout this whole conference, that you're actually bringing together two worlds of experience, very different worlds, which is why I alluded to the Snowy scheme. Before you had your foot in the Snowy scheme and you had your foot in Kansas, and you've got people with one reality and people with another reality. Wilfred Brown with the reality of producing engineered goods, and Elliot with the reality of the possibilities of human psych, and Klein and Freud with the cartoon.

Speaker A There was a classic in that sentence that I didn't mention that, and I didn't know this until recently, that terrible pressures Wilford was under still a young man running immensely complex system and doing all these things efficiently, making burdens for himself. Elliot persuaded him to enter psychoanalysis, and I think actually it was very important for Wilfred. I think he was an overachiever. He was overburdening himself. And according to Marjorie, his widow, she says that actually it was terribly, terribly good for him. His eldest son will tell you he was damaged by the fact that his father was a typical hopeless. His middle son will say it wasn't so bad for him. But by the time the third son came, wilfred had learned some parenting skills as a result of his analysis. I hadn't found out yet, but somebody said he thought that Wilfred had his analysis with Beal, and that would be interesting if it were true, but I haven't been able to confirm that yet. Elliot has his analysis with Klein. They're up the Rolls Royce, end of the shrinking tray, but I haven't been able to very that's something that Elliott brought to Wilfred, which I suspect is extremely important, because Wilfred have the if you think about the rice Acoff pairing. They're both very bright guys, but Herman Rice would not have been Russ Acoff's equal in terms of levels. But Wilford was very much Elliot's equal, as you say. It was complementary, bringing these different elements to bear. And the fact that Wilfred had an analysis, it's not commonly exceptionally interesting. Probably very important for him. Certainly his wife widow would say that. Now, I think you know the story from here on in, really, in a way. Wilfred continues to look after the Elliot's pulled out of the Tavistock, which has been his primary place of employment. He ends up in this new relationship with Glassier in which he does his clinical work. In the morning, he's shrinking people, in the mornings, he spends the afternoon at Glacier and he has this curious relationship with the work councillor. He's accountable to the Works Council, not to the chief executive. So they have this arm's length, et cetera. They argue the whole time about the theory and then things develop in the firm. Wilford is moving towards getting the thing solved because it's one of those situations. It was a rationalization and concentration going on it he got a very good deal. But by that time in the 1960s, wilfred had become where he retired from Glasser in 65 and having become Lord Brown of Macbrihanish in 64, because there was in a labor government and the only way to get him into government was to make him a life peer. You then sit in the upper house, the House of Lords, and so he became Lord Brown of Macrahanish.

Speaker C But even though he was a socialist.

Speaker A In a labor well, that's the way it's done. The Bicameral system, you have the two houses, the British upper houses. Peculiar in those days. It had a lot of hereditary there. He, of course, was a life bearer. Don't ask me, it was weird, but the Prime Minister wanted him in government, but they didn't have enough people, the socialists who really understood business.

Speaker C How old was Brown when he retired from managing Plaza?

Speaker A 65.

Speaker D He was.

Speaker A A young man. He wasn't all that old. He was born in eight, but he was 57. That'd be right.

Speaker C But he had sold it.

Speaker A You said sold the company on and.

Speaker C That'S why he retired.

Speaker A Hang on, I'll have to check the base. Okay, don't worry. Doesn't talk about at any rate, Brown member pro Chancellor of Brunel University. He helped to make it up from the Acton Technical College into the University of Brunel. And the fascinating thing that Brown did with this new university was to make it polysette that all the programs would be sandwich programs. That means that every undergraduate degree would be work theory. Work theory that we designed, that Brunel would become the sandwich programme at university again looking for that practicality in the university program. And then Wilfred got Elliot into Brunel. He opened up the first truly integrated, linked social sciences schooling in the country, bringing together psychology and sociology with the industry and economics. And there Elliot stayed until 70. Then he needed to move on. And that's when the American you went to the picture then take the story from there at that point. But the point I'm making is that Wilfred continues to sort of look after Elliot, find him his next job and clear the path for it. It has that slightly paternal feel even then. As to the ideas I was asking around about, I think the point I would make about what they were doing was that they created an incredibly fertile kind of ideas factory. And we're told that the actual ideas about time span came from one of the Glacier shop stewards in the pub. That one of the shop stewards actually.

Speaker B Said.

Speaker A I believe the story, it's quite likely. And one of the shop stewards actually said to Elliot, it's all to do with time. You want to believe that story because it's the most romantic version of it.

Speaker D The way I've heard it, I think from Elliott's writing is the phrase was something could it have something to do with time?

Speaker A Exactly you took out of the pub.

Speaker D And started thinking about it.

Speaker A I think it was three workers who stopped by and that's the way we had three shop stewards. That's the interesting sort of authority. It sounds as though John Isaacs was responsible for the levels thing. It was already I don't think it really matters. I mean, the telescope people were very protective. They're protective of turf in this situation. It was like Troy, it was a free flowing, highly creative moving very fast. Their ideas just bubbled to the surface. So attributing them is extremely pointless. I think the central point I think about that I want to make about the relationship between the two of them was that, as you say, Barry, that Elliot had this depth in the psychological realm and really Wilfred had the breadth an extraordinary sort of polymath in a way. Great technologist after the war he saw that Jack Fallow puts it glacier was a kind of technological slum sitting on the patterns. Nothing had happened in research and development, so he knew Governorly Function up and running he covered the entire field technology through to philosophy. He had this grand vision about industrial democracy which was based battlely on the notion of fairness and justice.