WE MUST FINALLY UNDERSTAND THAT OF ALL THE VALUABLE CAPITAL IN THE WORLD PEOPLE, PERSONNEL ARE THE MOST VALUABLE AND THE MOST DECISIVE CAPITAL. WE MUST UNDERSTAND THAT IN OUR PRESENT SITUATION «PERSONNEL TURNS THE SCALE…» (put in capitals by the authors. A quotation from Stalin’s address to graduates of military academies made on May 4, 1934).
And it is truly so: «Personnel turns the scale». Those who disagree with this statement made by the outstanding Bolshevik manager, man of state thinking and economist, Joseph Stalin, can find consolation in a different formula, which is of a slave-owning nature in its essence:
«Assets[75] are resources owned by company «A». And though the EMPLOYEES of this COMPANY are probably its MOST VALUABLE RESOURCE (put in capitals by the authors) they nevertheless (are/ are not) a resource subject to accounting. Underline the correct answer» (Robert N. Antoni, professor at Harvard university Business school, “Essentials of Accounting”).[76]
Though various equipment and technologies are indeed important, in any sphere of maintenance of modern civilization it is not the money, equipment, technology and software, not the lifeless knowledge contained in books, not the infrastructures that do the work. It is the living people who control the whole thing and contribute their productive labor (whether manual or intellectual).
At the same time the overwhelming majority of products and services needed for an individual’s, a family’s, a nation’s life in modern civilization are of such a nature that they cannot be produced on one’s own by anyone. Manufacturing them in good quality requires the coordinated effort of dozens of enterprises and agencies:
They must work «as a single person» who is something like a multitude of personalities existing simultaneously. This «person» should perform the elements of the common work (the manufacturing process) in different places with proper professional skills and industry.
If this is not the case then any projects and ventures end up unrealizable (at the maximum) or at the least the quality of their products does not satisfy consumers and their participants themselves, depending on how far they were from this ideal. In some cases the project fails because one man out of the thousands of its participants has made a single mistake that passed unnoticed or if noticed uncorrected by other workers; or this one man could knowingly do his part of the common job carelessly.
Totally removing man from the system of production and turning to a fully automatic and robotic production will not solve this problem. On the contrary, it will aggravate it:
first, any software controlling automatic equipment is written by teams of humans. Both their strengths and weaknesses leave an imprint on this software;
second, one of the basic qualities of most automatic applications is that it is impossible for people to control accuracy of its operation and to correct its mistakes at the pace at which automatically controlled processes (especially fast ones) proceed[77].
Owing to the above-mentioned qualities of the modern society’s production basis in any period of time at any enterprise it is the relations between superiors and inferiors and between workers of similar status, which determine whether it will achieve success or fail.
Therefore when executives share such notorious prejudices in their relations with subordinates as «I’m the boss — you’re the fool», «personnel must do what they are told and mind their own business», etc. and use the clichés «you’re the boss — I’m the fool», «I shall do anything you say without any pangs of conscience» when addressing their superiors this is most detrimental to any team work.
If this psychological and ethic climate is maintained among staff members by the executives whose behavior is more befitting to a «pukhun» (leader in a criminal community») or «barin» (Russian landlord) and by other factors of social importance the enterprise is doomed to exist in abject misery. A hierarchy of real fools and «smart» rascals pretending to be fools is formed at the enterprise breeding incompetence and establishing a gap between the post and the qualities the holder of this post has. This happens on every level of controlling the manufacturing processes and controlling the collective. The same goes for the economy as a system formed by many enterprises managed on the principles described in the previous paragraph.[78]
Unfortunately, in the course of the post-1991 reforms in the countries of the former USSR top executives on the whole (with minor exceptions known to few people) treated the collectives they headed with permissiveness and carelessness. CEOs and top managers of most enterprises misused their authority, suppressed and dismissed those who opposed their aggressive parasitism and self-seekingly made money. Considering themselves and their relatives to be the society’s «cream of the cream» and the true proprietors of those enterprises — the first generation of capitalists, they redistributed Soviet NATIONAL property (according to the legislation in force) and COOPERATIVE property of the KOLKHOZES (collective farms) to their own benefit.
Virtually everywhere CEOs and top-managers treated employees as if they were working cattle without a single human right. In the collectives that could not withstand this outburst of «barstvo» (the high-brow way Russian land-owners treated serfs) and permissiveness displayed by the mafia of CEOs and top managers such attitude gave rise to many people’s unwillingness to work honestly and conscientiously.[79]
Actually in many collectives employees silently hate[80] or simply despise and ignore the entire management because they know them to be profoundly vicious people who have been systematically and impudently misusing their authority with impunity over many years.
This psychological and ethic atmosphere that reigns in many (perhaps in the majority of) collectives is the most prominent result of the post-Stalin «ottepel» (“democratic” thaw), «zastoi» (stagnation) and «democratic reforms» in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union.
It follows that establishing a psychological and ethic atmosphere that would motivate individuals and collectives at enterprises to work conscientiously is the chief problem one needs to solve at the majority of enterprises. Solving it will enable enterprises to work to the benefit of society and thereby enable Russia to get over the social and political crisis.
This problem needs to be solved because in the current psychological and ethic climate any personal professionalism no matter how high it is and what sphere it belongs to is rendered futile by the absence of voluntary conscientious support from one’s associates.
This holds true for anyone’s professionalism: ranging from a janitor’s or a dish-washer’s professionalism to professionalism of truly outstanding men of science, culture and of the state’s head.