1979 – Transitions
Why is it that our expectations are so often dashed? Do we hope for more than is realistic to expect, or is this another facet of a deeper problem? I was thinking about this recently, when I was talking to a friend about the challenges in recruiting staff. I am sure you know the process. You place an advertisement for a position, and several people reply. With the help of staff from the human resources area (if you have that luxury) and with a couple of colleagues, you sort out the applications. Several can be eliminated immediately: ‘wrong’ qualifications, lack of relevant experiences, or whatever other critical criteria are not being met. That part of the process is always a puzzle, as you thought the advertisement and accompanying job description made those key factors clear. On to a second review, and you draw up a list of promising candidates, suitable to interview. In the interview(s) it is clear there are one, two or three who seem ideal. You review the written references, speak to referees, and now you have a first choice. I don’t need to continue reminding you of the rest of the process in recruitment, the negotiation over timing, salary, etc.
You’ve made an appointment, and your new staff member arrives. After the first couple of weeks, you will start to find out what the person was really like! This is the moment of realisation, because however well you manage the selection process, it is only when he or she is working that this new staff member will reveal their workplace strengths and weaknesses. On many occasions you breathe a sigh of relief: the person is performing well, the odd quirks that have emerged are easily accepted, another exercise accomplished well. Sometimes the outcome is very different: it might take a few days, it might take a few months, but soon it becomes apparent you’ve made a mistake. Over the years I have found myself in just that situation. There have been times when I’ve been able to support a person in moving on, often to another organisation and a job that suits them better. Against that, even with a so-called ‘probationary period’, in a few cases it has been really difficult to end the relationship, especially if a union steps in to support the employee. I sometimes found the union representative was more active when the employee was least suited: I have even had a union rep telling me the person is the wrong person for the job, but still fought to keep them on!
I believe this is all part of a deeper issue. With adults, we know judging people on paper, in an interview, listening to what he or she thinks, all this is quite tangential to what you see in behaviour. If you have brought up or been close to children, there’s a similar situation. As a child grows from being a delightful bundle of something, their early years are generally very enjoyable. Then they seem to grow, physically, much faster, a sign adolescence is on the way. Who could have guessed that the lovely child will suddenly become moody, hard to read, riven by quicksilver emotions. As the teenage years progress, so the child is becoming an adult, living a life increasingly independent of the family. You need to give them ‘roots and wings’ I was told: roots, so they know they will always be part of the family, whatever they do; and wings so they can fly off to lead their own lives. Could you have anticipated that lovely boy was destined to become a doctor, a rather authoritarian orthopaedic surgeon, or that morose young girl was to end up a television comedienne?
I suppose it’s an example of one of those familiar and rather annoying nostrums: in this case, actions speak louder than words. The trouble is, they do. Your child tells you they will do something, but they choose another course of action: sometimes it is because they were distracted, but sometimes it is because they never really intended to do what they had ‘promised’. Back to recruiting, you only begin to know someone when you have seen their behaviour over a period of time. There is a clear corollary to this, of course. Witnessing a moment of transition, a new leader or a new approach offers very limited information as to what will happen in the longer term. Three globally important transitions took place in 1979, and in each case the longer term consequences only became apparent after months, even years.
At the beginning of 1979, the hot spot was Iran. For most westerners, Iran was known as Persia. For this, as in so many things, we can blame the ancient Greeks, who first used the name to refer to the empire of Cyrus the Great. It turns out that Persia was an exonym, an ‘outer’ name, and those living in Persia had always referred to their country as Iran (with various spellings and emphases over the centuries). Discovering this helped me with my recollection that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was usually referred to as the Shah of Persia in the UK. In Persia, names were even more of a muddle for a while. Back in 1935, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the previous Shah, had declared Persia would now be referred to as Iran overseas, only to have the name Persia resurrected during the Second World War to avoid confusing Iran and Iraq: but wasn’t that change confusing, too!
Back to Mohammad Rez Pahlavi the son, Shah of Iran. Born in 1919, the young Shah became ruler of Iran in 1941, after his father abdicated following the invasion of the country by a joint British and Russian military force. At this critical time, they were keen to ensure control over the country’s oil resources. The Shah wasn’t a modest fellow, and when he was crowned as king in 1967, he took on the title of Shahanshah, or ‘King of Kings’, as well as Aryamehr or ‘Light of the Aryans, Persia’s Commander in Chief, etc., while also laying claim to many of the monstrously bejewelled pieces in the country, including the 18th Century version of the fabled Peacock throne. However, his big moment came in 1971, a year claimed to mark 2,500 years of continuous Persian monarchy. The Shah saw this as a time for reform. Introducing a series of economic, political and social changes he claimed this as the opportunity to turn Iran into a global, modern power, including allowing women the right to vote, and spending billions on business development, education, health care and other initiatives. Considerable oil funds also went into military spending, with the result Iran’s armed forces were considered the fifth strongest in the world by 1977.
What is that familiar warning? Pride leads to a fall. While some of his intentions may have been good, some changes admirable, he lost the support of the Shi’a mullahs. In part this was the result of corruption (and he certainly spent a lot of money on himself and his family), but along with his positive reforms he also suppressed dissent by violent means; he was accused of instituting widespread torture; and finally of making deals with the wealthy businessmen of the country for his own benefit as well as theirs. In 1978, the clergy were actively stirring up a populist revolution; in 1979 he was forced to flee the country. By the end of the year, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was leading the Republic of Iran. Iran went from living under a leader and privileged elite indulging in conspicuous consumption to a theocracy, and what proved to be the beginning of a oppressive, savage and misogynistic regime. Could we have foreseen that path of events in 1979? In the immediate aftermath of the revolution, much of the coverage focussed on the Shah in exile, and it took time before the true nature of the new regime became apparent. Since those heady revolutionary days, the world has had to adjust to an inflexible, hardline and dictatorial country, playing a major role in shaping the affairs of the Middle East.
Meanwhile, another revolution was taking place in Europe, in Britain. Did I say the world’s hot spot was Iran. Well, things had been warming up in the UK. Harold Wilson had retired as Prime Minister, and Jim Callaghan emerged from the bevy of contenders to become Prime Minister in 1976. In the next three years he suffered by-election defeats and defections from the party, hanging on through a deal with the Liberals. Increasing industrial relations disputes culminated in a ‘Winter of Discontent’ in late 1978, as widespread strikes were bringing the economy to a standstill, especially among militant coal miners. Up north, a referendum on devolution of government powers to Scotland failed. Inevitably, minor parties decided to ally with the Conservatives, and in the 1979 election ‘Sunny Jim’s’ party was defeated. The UK’s new Prime Minister was Margaret Thatcher.
I wonder how many realised what this ex-research chemist and barrister would do. Evidence that she was going to be tough had already surfaced in 1975, when she defeated the somewhat lacklustre Edward Heath to become leader of the Conservative Party as well as leader of the Opposition. Popular to begin with, she would eventually be remembered as the ‘Iron Lady’, (a nickname given by a Soviet journalist – they would know!). Iron Lady? She was uncompromising, and very clear that her task was to rid the economy of trade unions (seen as the perpetrators of the horrors of the Winter of Discontent), get the country out of a major economic recession, and deregulate the financial sector. She did an excellent job in portraying herself as a housewife (albeit a rather upper middle class example), with her cupboard of tinned food, iron rations at home if the country was in trouble! To begin with, there was a sense of comfort – a stern mother was in charge.
Clarity of purpose doesn’t always lead to effective outcomes, and in her first three years in office the recession continued and unemployment increased. As usual, serendipity played its part, and in April 1982, Argentina invaded two British territories, the Falkland Islands and South Georgia (both off the coast of Argentina in the South Atlantic). Three days later, the British sent a naval task force to engage with the Argentine Navy and Air Force. Once arrived (it took a few days to get there), the British force faced a complex task (assessed by many as ‘impossible’), but they managed to get back on the islands and pushed the invaders back into the sea. Argentina surrendered in June, and the islands reverted to British control. It was a strange victory, a collection of small islands a long way from Britain, of no obvious military or economic benefit, and with a long history as part of Argentina. However, it was proof of Thatcher’s will, made famous three years earlier at the 1980 party conference when she declared that “this lady’s not for turning”, battling opposition to beat the recession. With the Falkland’s victory, her declining support was given a massive boost (winning wars often has that effect), a triumph which appeared almost perfectly engineered to enhance her popular appeal in time for the 1983 British general election. She won a second term easily.
Perhaps obvious from the start, but the longer she remained Prime Minister, the more Thatcher’s uncompromising approach came to the fore. After years of trouble, a long strike by the National Union of Mineworkers was ended, among a number of union actions crushed by her government. Her own reputation was further enhanced by surviving an assassination attempt by the IRA, which bombed the hotel where the conservative hierarchy was staying for a party conference. She had tried to convey the image of a thrifty housewife, with those cans of food stored in pantry against ‘hard times’, but by the time she was about to face her third general election many had concluded any hard times were her creation! To add to her falling credibility, she came up with restoring a long-forgotten idea, a poll tax (it was labelled the ‘Community Charge’), which eventually she was forced to drop. At the same time, while her aggressive anti-Europe rhetoric was popular with many in the country, it wasn’t with her party colleagues. She eventually resigned in 1990.
Was this an example of a transition that proved to have major unexpected consequences? It was hard to discern in 1979, but Thatcher’s rise heralded the beginning of what was to become a global conservative economic agenda, antagonistic to government support for social welfare and education programs, combined with increasing privatisation of services and reliance on the market. In 1981, Ronald Reagan was elected US President, and he took on the same agenda. The ‘socialist’ governments of the post war years were being swept away, social welfare expenditure reduced, and economic rationalism, advocated by the so-called Chicago School of Economics, became ascendant. Forty years after this transition, we are still dealing with the aftermath of Reagan and Thatcher.
Enough for 1979? Do you want any more? It is time to move over to the US, and to Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. There, near Harrisburg, is the location for the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station. It was there that one of the reactors went into a partial meltdown in March 1979. The accident began with failures in the non-nuclear second system in the generating plant. This led to a relief valve in the nuclear system becoming stuck-open. Like a cascade of events, this allowed large amounts of the reactor shell coolant to escape. In an unfamiliar situation, mechanical failures were compounded by the actions of the plant operating staff. Poorly trained, they failed to understand what was happening, their confusion exacerbated by a complex computer messages and automatic control systems. On top of all these challenges, it was later discovered a hidden indicator light failed to warn an operator against manually overriding the automatic emergency cooling system of the reactor (the operator mistakenly believed there was too much coolant water present in the reactor) causing excessive the steam pressure which released the coolant into the environment.
The partial meltdown proved an object lesson in potential system failures, inadequate operator training and confusing monitoring information. Were the lessons sufficient to prevent such an accident recurring? Perhaps, but seven years later a safety test at the Chernobyl Reactor in the Ukraine led to a horrific accident, and then in 2011 a tsunami and earthquake led to another disaster in Fukushima, Japan. In 1979, Three Mile crystallised activists opposed to nuclear power, and the disaster led to increased nuclear safety concerns in the general public. The US imposed new nuclear industry regulations, but the genie was out of the bottle. Three Mile may have contributed to the gradual slowdown in the use of nuclear power generation, but that had already begun in the 1970s.
Unlike my first two transitions, a great deal was known about the risks in shifting from traditional power generation to nuclear power. What Three Mile showed was that the consequences were often the result of more trivial issues that a lack of understanding of nuclear fission and how to control it. A key part was to realise that human factors, and operating system failures can be just as important as the better understood technical factors in such operations. We still rely on ‘imperfect’ people and monitoring devices: history shows these kind of failures never go away.
Many years see similar events with unintended consequences, even if those in 1979 were especially graphic. However, the year also saw some closure, too. Wars never go away, but for the US, withdrawal of its forces from Vietnam in 1975 signalled the end of that particular engagement. Slowly, more became known about events that had taken place in nearly two decades of hostilities. In 1979, Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now was released. Loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (itself a stunning story), this extraordinary and compelling film looked back to the consequences of the US entering into the war against the Vietcong. I watched it again just recently. There are so many important aspects to the film, it would take a blog to cover just a few. However, in thinking about transitions, it offers testimony to two.
The first was the role of the US in the war, and the confrontation between ‘known’ military strategy and guerrilla fighting. While this had been apparent in many other wars in countries like Burma ad Cambodia, the US had joined a war against an almost invisible enemy. Any man could be Vietcong, any woman could be Vietcong, any child could be Vietcong. The scene where Rober Duvall, as Lieutenant Colonel ‘Bill’ Kilgore, leads a strafing and bombing raid on a Vietnamese village, doing so accompanied by a helicopter broadcast of an excerpt from Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, makes horribly clear how war can make anyone an enemy, and how otherwise decent people can commit appalling acts. The visceral power of the guns, the helicopter blades, the music, all combine to help you understand that this is what war means, with its personal and unrelenting aggression.
If that were all the film achieved, it did so outstandingly. However, in looking at the consequences of the US going in the war, it also illuminated another outcome. This was how ordinary young men, not women then, find themselves in uniform, armed, expected and ready to kill, and also terrified. Coppola is remarkably dry-eyed. We see soldiers on drugs, soldiers scared, soldiers firing at anything that moves (even their own colleagues), distraught at the thought of killing young women and children, and yet doing so. Among many other achievements, it is one of the great anti-war films, and a powerful example of the lesson of unforeseen consequences. It followed The Deer Hunter, the 1978 film centred around three veterans, another searing reflection on war, especially with Robert De Niro’s outstanding performance as a damaged Senior Sargent. Way back in 1955, few realised how dehumanising that war was to prove, and how many mentally as well as physically damaged veterans would return, finding themselves in a confused and misunderstanding country. The legacy of that war lingers on.
At a trivial level, I made a change with unanticipated consequences in 1979, too. Mine was far from important, going from the academic world into the private sector. My reasoning at the time was quite simple. I had been teaching courses and seminars in management, but I had never been a manager. Surely it would be good to learn and gain experience in the field, instead of teaching on the basis of theoretical insights alone. In its own small way, the results of my transition proved as unexpected as those in Persia, England and the USA! Within a few weeks I confronted two surprises, both quite obvious, but hardly understood from the perspective of a teacher.
The first was that commercial organisations in the private sector were just as political as academic departments in the university sector. There was just as much back-stabbing, manoeuvring, surreptitious attention seeking and credit grabbing, as well as plain old lying. What was it Kissinger had said? ‘The intensity of academic politics and the bitterness of it is in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject.’ Wow. Just as true in business! The second, and please don’t laugh at me or groan when I say this, but the private sector really is driven by financial performance. I had several performance objectives agreed with my manager for the year, but only one mattered: the bottom line. Unexpected consequences? I should have known better.
