What it Means to be Human. Robert Rowland Smith
Belonging is secured by the collateral of performance; and explicitly or implicitly, performance is continuously monitored. Take the performance away, and the belonging falls apart too.
Of course, there are those individuals in certain businesses who become so much part of the furniture that, long after they have ceased to hold their own commercially, they’re kept on like pets. But that is an indulgence. The only legitimate exception to the rule of belonging-conditional-upon-performance would be if the business were one that you founded. As the originating spirit, you are central. And you will be largely exempt from the scrutiny applied to the performance of those who come after. You created the enterprise, which makes you its ‘father’ or ‘mother’ in a more than metaphorical way. You gave it life. Where there had been nothing, you made something.
As acts of creation, these inaugurating gestures of the founding father share a life instinct with the making of a family. Which is why, in those rare cases when a company does turn on its founder and relieve him of his duties, everybody feels its moral portent. There is an unspoken question as to how natural it can be, like watching an eclipse. Nobody is totally sure that it’s a legitimate move, even if the business reasons for the removal are sound. Taking such a dramatic step leaves a mark on the conscience of those who unseated the founder, as if they had committed parricide. (In the later chapter about organisations called ‘Office Politics’, I will say more about this uncanny power of the founder.)
No wonder the concept of a family business holds so much tension. Most of the time that tension remains obligingly latent, but when, as in the case of Rowland Smith & Son Ltd., market forces enjoin on the company the taking of drastic action, it appears like an unspeakable black animal on stage. It has to be addressed. Do you get rid of Colin or David? Between family and business, which comes first?
We know which way my grandfather, Rowland, called it. He chose in that moment to see my father less as his son than as an employee to be judged on a level playing field with his rival. No more was Colin an alternative but sympathetic expression of the same genetic wave, a variant of Rowland’s own subjectivity. Rather, Colin had become an objective human asset to be evaluated against other human assets. To say that Rowland ‘disowned’ Colin would be a clear distortion, despite the feelings of abandonment that Colin must have suffered. Nevertheless, Rowland shook the family tree with sufficient vigour to make Colin fear that, like a rotten fruit, he would fall.
The diagram above describes the situation in graphic form. ‘Colin 1’ and ‘David 1’ refer to the starting positions, the point at which David was brought into the business. ‘Colin 2’ and ‘David 2’ refer to the later point at which Rowland, my grandfather, chose between them. This choice was made against two criteria: performance and belonging. In position one, David’s performance was seen as strong, but as someone with the surname Cooke rather than Smith, his belonging could only be weak. In contrast, what was perceived as weak about Colin was his performance.
The fundamental problem was that even at the start Colin’s belonging was less secure than it could have been. We know that Rowland’s ‘ownership’ of his son had always been circumscribed. He was barely involved in Colin’s childhood, and not for purely psychological reasons. For six of the eight years before Colin was sent to boarding school, 1939–1945, Rowland was at war, stationed in India and Burma. Not long after his return, he divorced, remarried and began his new family. In other words, Colin’s belonging never was assured. It wasn’t as if he had a full tank that got emptied: the tank peaked at around 70 per cent. Colin’s aggregate score, even in position one, fell short.
What’s most striking, however, is that despite his different blood, David actually increases his level of belonging. This is, first, because he replaces Colin: doing so makes David a stand-in son, a family member. The second reason is that David doesn’t carry the same baggage as Colin did from Rowland’s previous marriage. That makes David a less problematic proposition when it comes to slotting him in. These two reasons facilitated the miracle that Rowland performed of turning water into blood.
That miracle doesn’t have to happen under such special circumstances. There is a perfectly ordinary example of it. In the early 1930s, Rowland and Beatrice are a couple, and Colin is not even a glimmer in the eye. In order to marry, they must by law come from separate families. Marriage represents what anthropologists call ‘exogamy’. Exogamy means that matrimony occurs with a spouse chosen from outside the family. Nothing unusual about that. And yet on the day of the wedding, husband and wife become each other’s family. When Rowland and Beatrice tie the knot, they transmogrify into each other’s next of kin. That happens despite and because of the absence of blood ties. It is an act of social alchemy. In marriage, water not only becomes blood: it can become blood only if it is water. To extend the metaphor, one could say that Colin’s issue was that his blood and water were mixed. The result was a dilute mid-liquid that embarrassed all concerned.
The irony is that Rowland’s own belonging might have been the tiniest bit in doubt too. I say this because stories about my grandfather suggest he was never quite the man that legendary Uncle Bob – Robert, his brother – had been. Bob always seemed the more able. There is a suspicion, then, of what Freud called ‘projection’. This is the idea that we transfer onto other people those aspects of ourselves we find least congenial, thereby restoring a sense of our own flawlessness. In couples psychotherapy, for example, a wife might say of her husband, ‘I don’t trust him.’ But unconsciously what she is indicating is, ‘I am not to be trusted.’ So if, as second fiddle to Robert, Rowland felt inadequate, it’s possible that he saw in the pairing of David and Colin an echo, psychologically speaking, of his own situation. Thus David was the superior and Colin the inferior partner. Expelling Colin represented the purging of an inferiority that was Rowland’s own.
If that hypothesis is credible, then berating my father for his ‘uselessness’ was for Rowland an unconscious way of railing at a deficiency of his own, relative to his brother. It was a personal deficiency that he dealt with by contaminating his son with it. He then cited his son’s deficiency as a justification for banishing that son like a leper. Unluckily, however, you do not get rid of a disease by passing it on to someone else. It sticks. In any case, Colin had already been invaded by a disease of his own that would derange him more completely.
The madness of decision
On the other hand, we could say that Rowland took the tough decision. From this perspective, he was acting like a true leader. After all, when decisions require little discretion, we are not really deciding at all. We are pushing at an open door. Say I’m checking into the Grand Hotel in Brighton and am offered a choice between two rooms at the same tariff. One is at the front with a sea view; the other is at the back, overlooking the car park. It is obvious which one I should take.
But when I quiz the receptionist further, I discover that the sea-view room is poky. Between it and the sea runs a noisy road. The back room, by contrast, is spacious and quiet. Now I have a genuine dilemma, which calls for a true decision. Choosing between family and business is a genuine dilemma too, because the arguments on both sides can never be exhausted. The decision can always be deferred. What’s more, families and businesses are not two hotel rooms but apples and oranges. We are not comparing like with like, so how on earth are we to weigh them up?
So tricky are such genuine dilemmas that reason can take us only so far towards resolving them. That is why the Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida, for example, writes about the ‘madness of decision’.fn2 Whatever the logical steps involved in the run-up to it, the decision itself marks a leap into the dark. That leap is the point at which reason can no longer help, because now it’s a matter of acting. You close your eyes and jump.
That’s what Rowland did. He acted with the unavoidable madness of all action. By not ducking the decision, he was, for good or for ill, accepting accountability. Was this something that he had learned in wartime? He had won an OBE for his actions. If Colin was the poorer performer, keeping him on might have put the business at risk. That would have impacted everyone. We can choose to see Rowland’s