30 January 2010 | spiked review of books

Do we need a more venturesome economy?

In the world economy, R&D, laboratories and national competitiveness aren’t everything – but they count for more than Amar Bhidé suggests

23 January 2010 | special to Woudhuysen.com

Innovation: principles, not models!

Innovation cannot prosper without curiosity, serendipity, unpredictable outcomes, inspiring vision, and sheer hard work. These things are principles, not models

Innovation cannot prosper without curiosity, serendipity, unpredictable outcomes, inspiring vision, and sheer hard work. But these things are principles, not models of innovation. Market forces may limit innovation, but innovation is too big to be placed on a hockey stick of initial loss followed by profitability, or on a tapering S-curve of market saturation. Nor should the state insist that innovation fit into the straitjackets it lays down.

Nevertheless, in practice one model of innovation dominates today - that it’s wrong to focus on pioneering new technologies. [1] High-level science and engineering’, one savant in America writes, ‘are no more important than the ability to use them’.  [2] Britain’s National Endowment For Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), agrees with this. It tells us to emphasise ‘business innovation’, not the technological sort.  [3]

Oh no, innovation cannot, must not begin with laboratories and R&D!

The same old tilts at the old, linear model

To justify the new, research-lite dogma, everyone attacks the ‘linear model’ of innovation, which saw it starting from R&D and moving on in a straight line toward commercialisation. NESTA attacks the linear model, hoping that the recession will shift innovation toward ‘more open, networked approaches.’ [4] But what’s new? For Britain’s doyen of innovation studies, Chris Freeman, no doctrine on innovation has been ‘more frequently attacked and demolished than the so-called linear model’. And he wrote that… in 1996! [5]

Today’s innovation theorists are not very innovative. America’s John Kao says that firms should network together elements from four international models of innovation.  [6] In corporate strategy, too, Gary Hamel tells us to end ‘top-down, analytical’ methods and instead use models based on biological principles.  [7] But why should innovation, a human enterprise, follow models based on IT or biology? More fundamentally: any theoretical model is merely an artificial device, a metaphor, an analogy, or a rough, formalised or simplified account. So in innovation, any model can, at best, only capture but one way to go. Being a model, the linear account of innovation certainly suffered from all the narrowness of the Cold War epoch, and will not do for the 21st century’s more service-based, more global economy. But continued attacks on it now only function as a cipher for a dangerous diversion: underrating the risky, expensive business of R&D.

Models as substitutes for technological innovation

In place of R&D, the übermodel of innovation today consists of business models. Yet these different ways of reaping revenues from the market - pay as you go, monthly subscription, leasing, lease-purchase, profits through consumables, licensing, franchising and, in the case of Enron, profiting not from energy supply but from derivatives - have a lot to answer for. [8] It’s true that innovation cannot be reduced to technology. But to downplay technology in favour of business models is a great mistake.

It’s also wrong to talk up an orientation to ‘users’. The demand side of innovation is important, but is now widely presented as an alternative to ‘technology push’. [9] The latest innovation here is ‘design thinking’ - an approach, one advocate argues, that ‘uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible’.  [10]

Design thinking, design sensibility, design methods - they all sound good. But the UK design community, at least, is, market research suggests, ‘apathetic’ about boosting its skills.  [11] Anyway, matching people’s needs to feasible technologies is another cramped model of innovation. Google never started from people’s need to search for information. Technologically, its algorithms were feasible, but they were also new, and specially developed.

In fact, taking one’s lead from users exemplifies a wider trend. For much of the noughties, Harvard’s Henry Chesbrough has said that that firms should rely on others to innovate for them. Innovation must change from closed to open, basing itself on a ‘landscape of abundant knowledge’ lying not just with customers, but also with other companies, suppliers, universities, national laboratories, industrial consortia, and start-up firms.  [12]

Who, though, would today want to boast of running a closed innovation system? Openness sounds hip, but in outsourcing innovation, it abdicates each organisation’s responsibility to lead and perform innovation itself. Now that we have found out about Bernie Madoff, but still don’t know where the banks’ toxic assets are, it’s clear that we don’t live in a landscape of abundant knowledge. In assuming what cannot be assumed, open models of innovation are complacent, self-serving, and a cop-out.

Innovation is none of these things. It is not just a combination of what has gone before, as some maintain.  [13]

[1] An important exception to this rule is Clayton Christensen. See his The Innovators’ Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Harvard Business Press, 1997, and with Michael E Raynor, his The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, Harvard Business Press, 2003.

[2] Amar Bhidé, ‘Where innovation creates value’, The McKinsey Quarterly, February 2009. For more, see Bhidé, The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World, Princeton University Press, 2008.

[3] Charles Leadbeater and James Meadway, Attacking the Recession: How Innovation can Fight the Downturn, NESTA Discussion Paper, December 2008, p12. 

[4] Ibid, p11.

[5] Chris Freeman, ‘The greening of technology and models of innovation’, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, No 53, 1996, pp27-39.

[6] John Kao, ‘Tapping the world’s innovation hotspots’, Harvard Business Review, March 2009.

[7] Gary Hamel, ‘Moon shots for management’, Harvard Business Review, February 2009.

[8] For more on business models, see James Woudhuysen and Joe Kaplinsky, Energise! A Future for Energy Innovation, Beautiful Books, 2009, Chapter 7.

[9] Useful, but tending to this view are Donald Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things, Basic Books, 1988; John Seely Brown and others, Storytelling in Organizations: Why Storytelling Is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Management, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2004; Eric Von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation, MIT Press, 2005.

[10] Tim Brown, ‘Design thinking’, Harvard Business Reviewt, June 2008, p86. For more, see Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, HarperBusiness, 2009.

[11] Angus Montgomery, ‘Design community “slow to boost its skills”’, Design Week, 24 February 2009, on http://www.designweek.co.uk/news/design-community-’slow-to-boost-its-skills’/1141384.article (subscription required)

[12] Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: the New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, Harvard Business School Press, 2003, and Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape, Harvard Business School Press, 2006.

[13] See for example Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation, Harvard Business School Press, 2004; Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation, O’Reilly UK, 2007; Charles Leadbeater, ‘Shanghai: The Innovative City’, Speech to Mayor of Shanghai’s International Business Leaders Advisory Council, 5 November 2009, on http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/archive/shanghai-iblac-speech.aspx

11 January 2010 | Special to Woudhuysen.com – written in collaboration with Alan Patrick

Innovation: go beyond the post-war legacy

While earlier surges of innovation embraced a whole range of sectors, today’s advances don’t quite do that. It’s time for something better. The second of 14 Principles of Innovation, to be published as BIG POTATOES, the London Manifesto for Innovation

In 1965, in just four pages, the later co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, noted that the ‘complexity for minimum component costs’ of integrated circuits – that is, the number of transistors per chip that yielded the minimum cost per transistor – had roughly doubled each year from 1962 to 1965. Though he hardly needed to say so, that pattern is an exponential one. Still, Moore added that there was no reason to believe that it would not remain nearly constant for at least another 10 years. [1]

Moore’s extrapolation, however valid, is no unbending law of the future of the whole of electronics. To extend it beyond electronics is still less permissible. Innovation in pharmaceuticals, for example, is slowing. [2]

When boosters of IT rave about exponential growth, they should really say ‘accelerating, but only for the moment’. [3] While we wouldn’t rule out everyone owning five mobile phones, exponential growth tends toward infinity. And right now, the world’s technological growth is not tending toward infinity. Indeed since the West re-encountered economic crises in the early 1970s, the US in particular has had a kind of secret crisis of innovation, despite all the technological advances it has undeniably registered. [4]

The re-animation of frozen corpses

The US inventor-forecaster Ray Kurzweil believes that disease-fighting micro-robots in the human body, artificial intelligence, and the reanimation of frozen corpses are technologies that will move in such an exponential style, they will transform life ‘irreversibly’ by 2045. [5] Yet technologies much less exotic than these always irreversibly transform life: the breakfast cereal, for example, cannot easily be dis-invented. Yes, the diffusion of the endlessly cited iPhone is faster than that of domestic appliances in the 1920s. But the development of the Internet-enabled mobile phone has taken decades – and in genetics, James Watson, Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin first published on the structure of DNA back in 1953. [6]

Perhaps people think that innovation is accelerating because they feel they have little control over their lives. Yet while earlier surges of innovation embraced a whole range of sectors, today’s advances don’t quite do that. It’s time for something better.

Agricultural, first and second industrial revolutions

In Britain the agricultural revolution embraced Jethro Tull’s mechanical seed drill (1701), Joseph Foljambe’s patented, lightweight, iron-fitted Rotherham Plough (1730, bought by George Washington and eventually factory-made), and Andrew Meikle’s grain threshing machine of the 1780s. It took in Flemish crop rotation, Flemish hydrology, and the selective breeding of animals. By raising productivity on the land, the agricultural revolution made cheap food and a surplus population of workers available for the first industrial revolution.

That began with the manufacture of wool (Kay’s fly-shuttle, 1733), and improved productivity in garment manufacture. Finished cloth was bleached with sulphuric acid and chlorine, and patterned with cylindrical printing.  Downtimes in mills fell as components and frames came to be made of iron, leather belts replaced pulley-ropes, and gearing and shafting were rationalised. Blast furnaces turned out iron at high levels of purity, and, unlike mills and windmills, steam engines worked year-round. They modernised coal mining; and, with the commercial application, after 1776, of James Watt’s improvement on Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine (1705), the science of thermodynamics took off. The design, precision and smooth operation of metalworking tools improved and, with that, the standardisation of bolts and screws. [7] Britain’s James Brindley pioneered canal building; America’s Benjamin Franklin hit upon the wood-burning stove and lightning conductor, and France’s Joseph Marie Jacquard devised, about 1800, punched cards to control the weaving of silk.

Spanning the decades around 1900, the second industrial revolution included electric power and motors, organic chemistry and synthetics, the internal combustion engine and automotive devices, precision manufacture and assembly-line production. [8] Steel, petrochemicals, printing and papermaking, lighting and vacuum tubes and cathode ray tubes, packaged goods, soaps and cleaners, cameras and film cameras, surgery and anaesthesia: all these advanced dramatically. So did the railways. There emerged mechanical typesetting, mechanical refrigeration, diesel locomotives, electric trolley cars, steel ships, modern submarines, chain-driven bicycles, gyrocompasses, safety razors, department stores, radio and the telephone. [9] Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine assisted in the first US Census (1890), laying the basis for IBM. [10] In December 1903 the Wright Brothers performed their first powered flights, and in 1912 the discovery of Bakelite was announced. To control the flow of goods brought about by steam-powered factories and locomotives, typewriters and telegraphs multiplied. [11]

What’s up, Doc?

Previous waves of innovation, then, were international, and prefigured some of what we now know as IT. Importantly, they coincided with major social, economic and political upheavals, and new hopes in the possibility and necessity of progress. In that context, the first and second ‘industrial’ revolutions were wide-ranging, more or less conscious attempts to save heaps of time in production processes.

After 1939 things were a little different. Many innovations came about that were all new: atomic bombs and nuclear reactors, transistors and integrated circuits, mass-produced homes, microwave ovens, manned space flight, lasers, xerography, the mouse, PCs, the graphical user interface, the World Wide Web, the Internet search, 3D TV. Significantly, though, many other innovations sprang from earlier developments: radar, cybernetics, television, mass aircraft carriers, ballistic missiles, synthetic rubber, plastics, mass-produced penicillin, and the Green Revolution with high-yield, disease-resistant wheat.

Is mankind, though, moving in decisive style beyond this, the still formidable post-war legacy of innovation?

After the Holocaust and the gulags of the 20th century, the 21st sorely lacks a background culture of optimism about progress. There are few great quests to lighten the load of work: for instance, robots have spread in industry, but still do little in hospital or home. It is labour utilisation, not innovation, that has brought the principal boost to the world economy in recent years.

It’s true that there’s forward movement in the controlling of IT by voice, face and gesture, in nuclear fusion, cleaner coal, carbon capture and storage, the capture of CO2 from the air, bio-fuels, batteries and all-electric cars, wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, geothermal energy, hydrology, desalination, early warning systems for bad weather, synthetic biology, stem cell research, neurobiology and much else besides. But there is little to compare with the sweeping grandeur of earlier revolutions.

The emphasis is not on revolutionising production, but rather on finance, home insulation, consumer goods, and consumer services (though something like civilian supersonic transport is out). Innovation has come to mean not step-changes in the making of wealth, but something vaguely akin to the continuous improvement programmes developed in post-war Japanese car factories. There are few new miracle cures, wonder materials or truly rapid transformations of the energy scene. Above all, it is impossible to see even the silhouette of a range of mutually reinforcing innovations, creating new industries across a broad front.

That, though, was the pattern in previous industrial revolutions.

Right now, the second decade of the 21st century badly needs a wave of new industries. Where, for instance, are tomorrow’s radically new means of production? The principles around which mankind should go innovating have never been more vital.

[1] Gordon Moore, ‘Cramming more components onto integrated circuits’, Electronics, Vol 38, No 8, 19 April 1965. The interpretation of complexity and minimum cost is by Jon Stokes, ‘Classic.Ars: understanding Moore’s law’, ars technica, 27 September 2008, on http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/09/moore.ars

[2] Some see pharmaceutical companies as having ‘risen to the challenge’ of increased regulation and cost discipline: see Stephen Scypinski, ‘Editorial: Speed and Efficiency in Pharmaceutical Development’, Journal of Pharmaceutical Innovation, 18 August 2009, on http://www.springerlink.com/content/c572151612628732/fulltext.pdf. However for critics the drug firms focus more on ‘me-too’ innovations than on fundamental ones. In a paradox, just when Big Pharma is attacked for its excessive market power, it has ‘a professional sense of gloom’ about prospects. See Frank A Sloan and Chee-Ruey Hsieh, Pharmaceutical Innovation: Incentives, Competition, and Cost-benefit, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p10, and Richard A Epstein, Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation, Yale University Press, 2006, p7.

[3] Compound interest, like parts of biology and physics, works exponentially; but IT rarely moves as xt, where x is a constant number bigger than 1, and t, the exponent, represents time elapsed. While Moore’s ‘law’ shows few signs of reaching its limits, in the rest of IT growth tends to be sub-exponential or polynomial. Still more restrictively, Metcalfe’s law suggested in about 1980 only that the dollar value of a network proceeds as the square of the number of ‘compatibly communicating devices’. For a discussion, see Simeon Simeonov, ‘Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong?’, 26 July 2006, on http://blog.simeonov.com/2006/07/26/metcalfes-law-more-misunderstood-than-wrong/

[4] ‘Industrial innovation’, noted President Jimmy Carter in a major speech on the subject, ‘is an essential, but increasingly overlooked factor in a strong and growing American economy’. See Carter, ‘Industrial Innovation Initiatives Remarks Announcing a Program To Encourage Innovation’, White House press briefing, 31 October 1979, in John T Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project [online], Santa Barbara, on www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=31627. More than two years earlier, Carter had favoured new, unconventional sources of energy, but only as last of 10 principles: the ‘cornerstone’ of his response to the energy crisis of 1973-4 was energy conservation. See Carter, ‘The President’s Proposed Energy Policy’, televised speech, 18 April 1977, on www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_energy.html

[5] Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Viking Adult, 2005, p7. For a pessimist vs an optimist on the rate of technological change, see Jonathan Huebner, “‘A possible declining trend for worldwide innovation’, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 72, 2005, on accelerating.org/articles/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.pdf, and John Smart, ‘Measuring Innovation in an Accelerating World’, Acceleration Studies , no date, on accelerating.org/articles/huebnerinnovation.html. Two critiques of the view that the speed of change is accelerating are Bob Seidensticker, Future Hype: the Myths of Technology Change, Berrett-Koehler, 2006; Steven Schnaars, Megamistakes: Forecasting and the Myth of Rapid Technological Change, The Free Press/Collier Macmillan, 1989.

[6] The classic papers from that year are on http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/archive.html.

[7] David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 1969, pp84-85, 87, 90-91, 95, 99, 101-2, 104-5.

[8] Ibid, p235.

[9] See, among others, Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: the Managerial Revolution in American Business, Harvard University Press, 1978. 

[10] Kevin Maney, The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr. and the Making of IBM, Wiley, 2003.

[11] James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Harvard University Press, 1986.

21 December 2009 | special to Woudhuysen.com

Think Big!

In innovation, as we look toward a new decade, it's a moment to broaden horizons and demand much more: herewith the first of 14 Principles of Innovation, to be published as BIG POTATOES, the London Manifesto for Innovation

The full entry of China and India into the world economy doesn’t just mean billions more consumers aspiring to Western lifestyles. It also means that the world can benefit from billions of innovating brains. It’s a moment to broaden horizons, demand much more, and expand every kind of ambition.

First, though, Britain and the West need to recover a sense of what innovation is and just how much it can do.

Defining innovation and its potential

Innovation cannot be reduced to technology: while it embraces improvements both in process and in product or service, these often accompany changes in organisation. [1] However today technological innovation is weak in private services, weaker still in public services, and takes second place to changes in business model—different ways of taking money from customers. In particular, business expenditure on research and development (R&D), taken as a fraction of GDP, has been stagnant in America and Europe for 15 years or more. [2] In that faltering context, where the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development talks up what it calls ‘the central importance of non technological innovation’, [3] it’s essential to uphold the powerful improvements, above all in productivity, that new techniques can bring.

When Adam Smith published The wealth of nations in 1776, he didn’t know that the title to his famous passage, ‘The division of labour in pin manufacturing (and the great increase in the quantity of work that results)’ would be on the back of every £20 note. Nor could he have realised how much bigger, with China and India, is the stock of ingenuity that mankind can now mobilise. Yet today all corners of the Earth can rightly hope to move on toward a global division of labour far in advance of what we can imagine. By itself, that won’t lead to more time for leisure or more equality. But with more than one billion people going hungry for the first time in 40 years, [4] the need for productivity step-changes just in agriculture, irrigation and food distribution has seldom been greater.

In innovation there can be no skipping over the need for professional expertise. Still, with the opening up of Asia, more people can now specialise more deeply in particular lines of work—something that will also allow multidisciplinary initiatives in innovation to be more successful. The Internet and machine translation make international collaboration easier. So, after all today’s ignorance about the whereabouts of toxic assets, the world now has a chance finally to move toward the much vaunted, prematurely announced ‘knowledge economy’.

Scale is beautiful

Of course, Britain will not make digital cameras any time soon. Conversely, China will not forever build coal-fired power stations unequipped with carbon capture and storage. But between the nations of the world there is now an opening to share profound insights, agree on vaulting objectives, and take wealth to a qualitatively higher level: to provide more growth, and a better kind of growth.

The first principle of a new, innovatory global division of labour for the 21st century is that scale is beautiful, not smallness. In mobile telephony and electronics, miniaturisation has its place; but to lower the cost of handsets enough for world’s poor to be able to afford them, still larger, more automated production lines are needed. To make the most of sources of renewable energy, which are very diffuse, demands scale undertakings, not David Cameron’s kind of roof-mounted home windmill. Even without attacking the world’s deteriorated and substandard housing, UN estimates suggest, the world must build no fewer than 4000 houses an hour—if its increasing population is to be housed and its slums replaced. [5] More than a third of a century after Ernst Schumacher’s Small is beautiful (1973), it’s time to wave goodbye to humility, parochialism, and the dogma of ‘act local’.

Innovation must set its sights high, and can never do things by halves.

Innovation is, at its best, Big Potatoes.

[1] In the classic account of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, ‘long-term improvements in output and cheapness’ came from new technologies and methods of production or transport, but also from new consumer goods, new markets, new sources of supply and new forms of organisation. See Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), Unwin Paperbacks, 1987.

[2] See Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Main Science and Technology Indicators (MSTI): 2009-1, 13 July 2009, on http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/9/44/41850733.pdf

[3] OECD, Policy Responses to the Economic Crisis:  Investing in Innovation for Long-Term Growth, June 2009, p16, on http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/59/45/42983414.pdf

[4] United Nations, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2009, October 2009, on ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/012/i0876e/i0876e.pdf

[5] Figure derived from United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Financing Urban Shelter – Global Report on Human Settlements 2005, 2005, Tables 1.2 and 1.3, p5, on http://www.unhabitat.org/pmss/getElectronicVersion.asp?nr=1818&alt=1

December 2009 | special to Woudhuysen.com

11 November 2009 | spiked

Still no clear policy on nuclear energy

New Labour’s commitment to nuclear is half-hearted at best, and goes hand in hand with more policing of our energy use

4 November 2009 | Special to Woudhuysen.com

3 November 2009 | Design Week, 3 November 1989

31 October 2009 | spiked review of books

State intervention is no substitute for innovation

Should governments in Britain intervene in the economy to ensure that the nation’s industrial base is preserved?

16 September 2009 | Eastern Cape Socio-Economic Consultative Council

19 August 2009 | spiked

New Labour’s power vacuum

The UK government’s obsession with energy self-sufficiency and renewables looks set to lead to blackouts in the next few years

21 July 2009 | spiked

Who’s afraid of electric vehicles?

The fact that Greens oppose even eco-friendly electric cars shows that what they really dislike is travel itself

7 July 2009 | spiked

The green man’s burden

Why is Greenpeace calling on the UK to set an example to nations like China, when the Chinese are cleaning up faster than us?

2 July 2009 | Facilities Management World

What movies tell us about the workplace

The history of the cinema reveals much about how people have interpreted the world of work

The news is that Michael Douglas is once again to star for Oliver Stone as Gordon ‘greed is good’ Gekko in a second, credit-crunch version of Wall Street , first released in 1987. That’s impetus enough for me to consider how movies have treated the world of work over the past 85 years. Looking back at the office of Michael Douglas, one realises how much has changed: by today’s standards, there’s an enormous surfeit of paper, Rolodexes and red pencils - each complete, it being Wall Street, with an eraser.

There’s similar nostalgia to be had in Colin Higgins’ Nine to Five (1980), which took a cool $100m in the US and is back on Broadway - with Dolly Parton - as a musical today. Apart from more Rolodexes, lumpy calculators, IBM typewriters with plastic covers, people smoking, and extensive drawers of files, there’s the ritual clocking in, and a great scene when a photocopier sorting machine runs amok, spewing sheets everywhere.

Yet it isn’t the physical side of the workplace that arrests in movies gone by, so much as what they say about the meaning of work. The technology of the workplace has run through some familiar changes; but what has changed more, and often more imperceptibly, is the substance of social relations at work. Start from those things, rather from lists of services or tasks, and there’s room for real insights.

Anyway, movies are powerful. Showing a few of the classics at your workplace would be an innovation and, for young people in particular, a revealing one. What’s more, Frank Gilbreth, the collaborator of FW Taylor, the early 20th century pioneer of ‘motion study’ in the workplace, made movies of workers’ movements in his search for higher productivity. How many experts in work do that any more?

Nine to Five is about sexual harassment and women who get neither job satisfaction nor promotion - despite their great ideas for generating wealth. The meaning of that American workplace is, naturally, quite different from that evoked by Russia’s Sergei Eisenstein, in his short, sharp but epic Strike (1924). There the story is about how workers need to take action with all the ruthlessness deployed by the employers.

One might find that message as archaic as the Tsarist factory conditions that the movie highlights.  Yet at least Eisenstein’s unions are not today’s boring old compulsory workers’ insurance companies, with functionaries who moan about the UK’s ‘long hours culture’. At least nobody asked for therapy or a lawyer when confronted with that modern scourge, ‘bullying’. Instead, when the workers are eventually defeated, Strike ends with a Leninist plea for organisation.

Whichever side of today’s class struggles (what class struggles?) you choose, it’s hard to argue with the Strike ethic of discipline and determination - unfashionable though these qualities have now become.

After Strike, the industrialisation of the West and Stalin’s version in the East altered perceptions of the workplace. Work was less a reactionary regime to be overthrown, more the grinding product of an impersonal high-tech system. Today, people who should know better still prattle on about artificial intelligence; but movies such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) rightly hinted that it’s easier to turn a man into a robot than a robot into a man. The workers were less conscious agents, more cogs in a machine.

That was fatalistic; but it wasn’t long before subtle Rooseveltians, rather than the vulgar Marxism of Chaplin, offered a more fetching alternative. In Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and His Girl Friday (1940), the great Howard Hawks made teamwork, professionalism and biting wit his themes with, respectively, the airline and newspaper businesses.  Each of Hawks’s heroines (Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell) were one of the boys and, in mid-level, middle-distance group shots, the director conveyed the idea that a democratic division of labour (Wings) plus unswerving dedication to justice (Friday) could, in the later manner of America in the Second World War, conquer all.

Here teamwork had, thankfully, little to do with the sporting metaphors and mawkish egalitarianism touted by hip, modern theorists of the office. The task, not psychobabble, was what united people.

Preston Sturges’s chain-gang movie Sullivan’s Travels (1941) was a hilarious reminder that humour is a better antidote to bad times at work than all that caring, sharing stuff about culture. From the Cold War left, John Farrow’s noir mystery, The Big Clock (1948), had the US newspaper business as cellular, hierarchical and murderous; oddly, from the Cold War right, Sam Fuller’s Underworld USA (1961) had American capitalism itself as just a larger version of The Mob at work.

It’s from this time, perhaps, that visions of work begin to offer what has become today’s specially backward kind of fatalism. From Martin Ritt’s bleak The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) through to John Irving’s TV series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), it’s not machines that encage, but rather human nature. Battered heroes, bare courtrooms and decrepit offices convey a pervasive atmosphere of mistrust at work - the service sector included (not for nothing are Britain’s spies referred to as the Service).

The idea is repeated right up to David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Here and in other movies, everyone, but everyone, is on the make. Employers are bastards not because of capitalism, but because all people are bastards. This is a fatalism with strongly misanthropic overtones.

What past movies about work really show today is the need to follow the unsentimental but creative hard graft of their directors - and the need to be hostile to anti-human visions of the future. Not everything at work is pre-ordained by layout and IT, and not everyone is a greedy banker or MP. With resolve, leadership, clear goals, examples set and a bit more grown-up trust in our colleagues, work can be tough, but rewarding.

Even in the newspaper office, work need not be murder.

29 June 2009 | spiked

Let’s go back to the Moon – and beyond

As the 40th anniversary of the first manned moon landing approaches, backward attitudes here on Earth have tainted our view of lunar exploration