LEE, John
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18th June 1867 to 24th December 1928
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Biographical Text
A senior manager with the Post Office, Lee also wrote a number of works on management, and was well known in the late 1920s as a public speaker. He was one of the more prolific lecturers at the Rowntree conferences.
Lee was born in Liverpool on 18 June 1867. He left school at sixteen and joined the Post Office, where he took a job as a telegraph operator. His early career was unremarkable; by 1901, aged thirty-four, he had risen to the post of assistant superintendent. Thereafter, however, his promotion through the ranks of what was, for the time, a very high-tech industry, was rapid. In 1907 he was appointed assistant traffic manager for telephones in London, and during 1909-10 he worked in India, helping to reorganise the Indian railway telegraph system.
In 1916, Lee was appointed deputy chief inspector of telegraph and telephone traffic, and was also appointed to the government Committee on High-Speed Telegraphy. During 1917 Lee was in France where he organised the teams of women working as telephone and telegraph
operators behind the front lines. In 1918 he was appointed postmaster in Belfast, and in 1919 became controller of the Central Telegraph Office. In this capacity he attended a League of Nations conference on the restoration of communications in Europe in 1920, and led the British delegation to the International Telegraph Conference in Paris in 1925. In 1927 he became a member of the board of the Automatic Telephone Company.
Lee was a founder member of the Institute of Public Administration, and served as chairman of its council in 1925-6. He was awarded the CBE in 1923. He received the degrees of MA and an M.Comm.Sc. from the Queen’s University Belfast. Lee retired from the Post Office in 1927, intending to pursue his burgeoning career as a writer and speaker. As well as Britain, he and his ideas were now becoming well-known in the USA. Shortly after he gave his final Rowntree lecture in September 1928, Lee travelled to America to give a lecture tour there. While returning home he died suddenly on board the liner Laconia on 24 December 1928.
Lee was a prolific writer, especially during the last decade of his life when he wrote a number of books and contributed articles to The Economist and The Times. Most of his books are short treatments of various aspects of management, all published by Pitman, in which Lee lays out his thoughts on the duties and tasks of the manager. These books were highly successful in Europe and also in America, contributing to Lee’s burgeoning reputation there.
As well as providing practical advice to managers, increasingly Lee also began to dwell on the philosophical and spiritual dimensions of the profession. As Urwick notes, Lee was a devout Christian, and ‘the reconciliation of the demands of industrial efficiency with the principles of Christianity’ was of special concern to him (Urwick 1956: 118).
Lee’s most ambitious project, the two-volume Dictionary of Industrial Administration, was published in 1928. His aim was to provide reference work for the study of management, useful to both experts and students alike, covering subjects relating to the management businesses ranging from finance and accounting to health care and fatigue. There is considerable overlap between the subjects covered by the Dictionary and those discussed at the Rowntree conferences too, and there is also considerable overlap of authors: of the 98 contributors to the Dictionary, 20 – Sir Henry Bunbury, Cyril Burt, T.D. Buttercase, J.R. Clynes, Eric Farmer, A.P.M. Fleming, E.J. Fox, William Graham, T. Haworth, H.E. Jenkins, Harry Jones, G.H. Miles, Clarence H. Northcott, Tom Pear, Oliver Sheldon, William Sherwood, Lyndall Urwick, William Wallace, J.W. Wardropper and Lee himself – were also Rowntree lecturers.
In one respect, the Dictionary is even more progressive than the conferences. Only two women – Mary Parker Follett and Ethel Wood – spoke at Rowntree conferences, but Lee’s authors included eight women: Rose Squire and Constance Smith, both former inspectors of factories; Eleanor Kelly, chief welfare superintendent at Debenhams department store; Nora Wynne, vice-president of the Institute of Industrial Welfare Workers; Emelye Wilson, formerly superintendent of women workers at Metropolitan-Vickers; Ethel Newbold of the Medical Research Council; Winifred Culkis, first female professor of medicine at the University of London; and Audrey Wedgwood, company secretary of Josiah Wedgwood & Sons. Eight out of 98 may seem a small number by today’s standards; but for the 1920s, this is an exceptional recognition of the role played by women not only in the workplace but in thinking about management.
Somewhat surprisingly, there were only three American contributors to the Dictionary, one of whom was Ordway Tead, an internationally recognised expert in the field then known as personnel management. Lee makes no apology for this, and in his introduction to the Dictionary makes it clear that the work is intended for a British audience only. He pays respectful tribute to Frederick Winslow Taylor:
It would not be fair to overlook the specific influence of F.W. Taylor. Again and again in these pages there are references to his work. He set out to discover a methodology for industry. It is true that his plans have not been accepted exactly as they were given to the world, but it is also true that he gave a stimulus to the study which has affected industry throughout the world…
Respectful, but with a caveat: what Taylor intended and how his ideas have been interpreted are two different things. What is more, says Lee, there are significant differences between the USA and the UK in terms not only of business practice, but also regulation, law and economic environment. An American dictionary would necessarily have to cover subjects not included in Lee’s project, and vice versa. Reading between the lines, the message is clear: there is no one best way.
And Lee’s project also has, as already noted, a moral and spiritual dimension quite missing from much of Taylorism. Of all the contemporary American gurus, only Henry Dennison, Mary Parker Follett and Harrington Emerson go as far as Lee in asking not just ‘how’ questions about making management more efficient, but probing into the moral purpose of management as a profession. While the Dictionary is, or strives to be, ideologically neutral, Lee’s Rowntree lectures are sometimes highly personal. Comparing them to his written works, it seems almost as if Lee were using the Rowntree lectures as a kind of thought laboratory, working up his ideas and trying them out on his audience.
Lee’s first conference paper is perhaps the most straightforward of the six he gave. This is a survey of works councils similar organisations in the leading industrial countries: Britain, Germany, France and America. The context is the introduction of the Whitley councils, or joint industrial councils, an experiment introduced after the First World War which seemed to satisfy neither employers or the trades unions. The unions, says Lee, complain with some justification that while there is a lot of talk at the councils, nothing is ever acted upon; many employers still find it difficult to accept that workers have the right to interfere in the governance of companies at all.
Lee has little sympathy for these employers. ‘Management has found itself rather suddenly and surprisingly face to face with the indisputable truth that the human factor is the most important factor in industry’, he says, and he argues for a more progressive approach to labour management: ‘human labour [deserves] the specialist and far-sighted and in-sighted study and care which were given to plant and to the raw product and to the sale of the finished article.’
Are there lessons that Britain can learn from how things are done in other countries? Lee speaks approvingly of the situation in France, where many firms have a dedicated director of personnel whose sole task is to oversee labour relations. In America a wide range of structures can be found, ranging from the formal and highly participative works council at Filene Brothers to the very personal leadership of Henry Ford at Ford Motors, with no worker representation or labour management of any kind. Lee also notes that many American employers pay only lip service to the concept of labour relations, and that ‘the huge majority of employers… are, and always have been, opposed to labour organisation.’
In Germany the situation is quite different. Here, a state-ordained Federal Economic Council with 326 members discusses all manner of issues connected with work and wages, and has the power to make regulations. Lee thinks there are advantages to this, but is concerned that the council may have too much power; also, it does not represent the all-important interests of the consumer. This, Lee says, is a weakness in most systems of labour organisation. Somewhere between the heavily organised German system and light or non-existent forms of organisation on other countries, there is a middle ground which should be sought.
In his second paper at the same conference, ‘The ideals of industry’, we see Lee’s personal philosophy of management beginning to emerge. He sums up the key ideal of industry simply as ‘the mutuality of service’. The day has passed, he says, when competition is everything, when it is legitimate to pay the lowest possible wages, ‘and that the master or capitalist was not bound to consider the moral results at all.’ Passing too are the days of the dialectic between labour and capital. A third party is coming into play:
the manager, whose function it will be on the one side to represent fairly and frankly to the owners what he thinks they ought to do with regard to the workers, and who, on the other hand, will be called upon to represent to the workers what he thinks the right attitude on their part. That is a duality of function which is priceless in its immediate value…it may be that the future development of industrial structure will emphasise the mediatorial work of management…and the age-long conflict between Capital and Labour will find management as its neutral territory, where its daily Peace Conference is held.
‘I claim that the next stage in industrial progress will be focussed on the manager’, Lee says.
The day of the technician is nearly over. He has given us more than we can use in an infinitude of ways, in every possible aspect of the rich treasure of material things. But he has not taught us, and cannot teach us, how to make the best of human nature. It is a matter for the heart, for the deep subtle understanding that is born, not of skill, but of sympathy.
As for the role of the manager, Lee comes back to the notion of service. Inverting the traditional hierarchy, he argues that the task of the manager is to serve the people who follow him.
Sometimes, when at nightfall you look back on the work of the day, you are able to say: ‘I have not devised a perfect economic scheme. Perhaps I have sought to do my work efficiently, and to render those with me efficient, but I have often failed; yet I have at least done one thing – I have helped one soul to be nearer the pattern of the image in which he was made.’ It is then that you see just one little further approach to the Ideal of Industry.
In the third paper, ‘The ethics of industry’, it is almost possible to see Lee’s mind in motion as he tries to create what Oliver Sheldon would later call a ‘philosophy of management’. This is a very dense and in places somewhat rambling paper; in terms of ideas, it is very definitely a work in progress. The question Lee is asking, and attempting to answer, is: what is the purpose of management? What is its meaning? Is it simply a matter of controlling other people’s efforts for our own benefit? Lee refuses to accept this. ‘Industry emphasises the interdependence of all men and assumes the steady development of man’, he says. ‘Industry is that which provides for the extensive and the intensive development of mankind in its relation to the use of the products of nature.’ Industry makes us better people; it lifts our standard of living, it makes us more wealthy, it produces good things that benefit society, and both the act of work and the act of consumption make us better people. ‘What seems to me to be certain is that there has been an expansion of human character’, he says, ‘a growth in kindliness of outlook, a desire for justice in reward, and that in the amenities of life for all classes as a whole there has been an advance.’
So, if industry is a force for good, it stands to reason that management should seek likewise to be a positive force and to assist that almost sacred mission of the ‘development of mankind’. That indeed is what is expected of managers, Lee says: ‘the next generation will look back and wonder how it could come about that we, who think ourselves so enlightened, could possibly be so timid in respect of the welfare of those who work with us to produce goods for the betterment of man.’ We are too much focused on the material gains that have been achieved through production, he says, and not enough on the spiritual and moral gains that should follow:
Our glittering shop-windows are eloquent of the fact. There is a sort of hedonistic paradox which affects us, for just as those who follow the search for happiness too closely fail to get it, so do those who follow industry with too slavish a regard for the goods, the economic laws, the organisation, fail to realise that, after all, the true aim to be directly followed is the betterment of man.
Lee goes on to speak of introducing what he calls ‘moral warmth’ in to management and industry. This moral warmth, he says, must not be confused with sentimentalism: ‘We must be strict in our scientific processes of thought, always illumined by spiritual values. Softness and mere immediate kindliness and capricious manifestations of unguided feeling are a peril.’ Instead, borrowing a phrase from the poet Robert Browning, he speaks of ‘passing on’, of looking beyond ourselves at the wider world and how we can make it a better place. That sense of stepping outside ourselves and understanding the bonds that bring worker and employer and manager together, ‘speaks to us of a conception of welfare, progressive and free and based upon spiritual values, which will add to the life of industry the crown of a purpose for the betterment of mankind, both in its ultimate aim and in its immediate process.’
Lee was tasked with providing the concluding remarks at the April 1926 conference, and it is here that he develops on his theme of diversity in management. There is, he says, ‘an objective science of administration which is well worth pursuing’, but that does not mean that the same system and the same methods will work in every case. ‘We have seen in recent years that the votaries of this or that method have urged their pet theory as being universally applicable without having studied objectively the facts of the case.’ He cites profit-sharing and co-partnerships as examples: they are excellent ideas in and of themselves, but they will not work in every industry, or for every country.
And, although Lee speaks approvingly of ‘the new knowledge which is coming to us from over the Atlantic’, it is clear that he feels the same about scientific management. Taylorism clearly works in the USA, but the USA and Britain are not the same. The former has a large population, no customs barriers and steadily increasing consumption; it also has ‘the general attitude to money as a desirability, and included in that desirability the conception of social status and worth’, and ‘the fact that, as a result of emigration, there is a less definite tendency to safeguard the weak within the industry’. In other words, socially as well as economically, Britain and America are different and each must develop its own way forward. There is no one best way.
As a further example, Lee discusses the relative position of trades unions, which are clearly stronger in Britain than in the USA. He has mixed feelings about unions: ‘We have allowed trade unionism to grow up as the protector of the workers, and largely because of the foolishness of the employers a few generations ago. We have allowed it to become political, with the concomitant danger of dividing the body corporate with a horizontal line.’ However, it is clear that unions are here to stay, and there is no doubt in his mind that they have also provided valuable protection for workers’ rights and freedoms.
The problem is not the existence of organised labour, but that ‘horizontal line’ which separates workers from management: ‘We have allowed industry to become so clear a dichotomy that either side shrinks from making the first advance… Fear has reacted upon fear to such an extent that there is no hope from national and certainly none from legislative attempts.’ Lee argues that management needs to take the first step to breaking the deadlock. It will not be easy, and as no two industries are alike, each will have to find different solutions to the problem. The secret, he believes, is leadership: ‘enlightened and receptive and adventurous leadership, and that...leadership must be by consent, and that consent must be active and eager, not passive and sullen.’ In other words, it is time we started pulling together, rather than pulling apart.
Lee’s fifth paper, in September 1926, will be of more interest to historians of labour, or indeed political historians, rather than scholars of management. The title is slightly misleading, in that what Lee compares is not methods of management, or ‘administration’, but systems of industrial organisation. He concludes that Germany, France and Italy have all taken greater strides towards industrial organisation, ensuring better cooperation not only between firms but also between industry and labour.
Despite the current industrial turmoil, he is cautiously optimistic about the Italian system of government intervention in both business and unions, but although this system might work for Italy, he is adamant that it is not the right solution for Britain; once again, each culture and each country must find its own solution. The answer for Britain, he thinks, is to develop more scientifically rigorous methods of management, based on analysis and fact, to achieve greater efficiency.
Lee’s final paper, ‘The pros and cons of functionalisation’, is arguably his best. This was the view of Lyndall Urwick, who later reprinted the paper in the collection he edited with Luther Gulick, Papers on the Science of Administration, in 1937. This paper is much more sure of itself, and there is less sense of speculation and groping after ideas than in the 1922 and 1926 papers. Lee produces a very well-reasoned and articulate discussion of ‘functionalisation’, the Taylorist inspired notion of dividing workplaces not into silo-type departments, but according to the nature of the task being carried out.
Lee is cautiously in favour of functional divisions, and quotes Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management with approval. He notes that examples of the division of labour can be found as far back as the Old Testament. What worries him is the extremes to which some of Taylor’s disciples want to carry the concept, so that the functional division becomes the only division in the workplace. Functionalism, he warns, also has its risks:
A full-fledged functional system, vigorously introduced, is full of peril. In the first place, it tends to dethrone the discipline of industry on the human mind. It operates in this direction by its tendency to rob the industrial worker and his of a sense of the completed product resulting from their work.
This ‘de-skilling’, as Harry Braverman later described it, will have a deleterious effect on quality. More practically, no functional system, no matter how well designed, is ever perfect; there will always be gaps between functions, and those gaps will breed inefficiency. There must, he says, be a balance between functional direction and general direction, the overall coordination of general management, and by now it will come as no surprise that Lee feels that balance will differ between industries and firms, depending on their circumstances.
There is also an innate conflict between functionalism and individualism:
Men and women who are conscious of their ability, who have the sense of responsible leadership, are bound to feel that the functional system robs them of scope. They have been accustomed to looking at the industry as a whole, at its processes as a whole, at its production as a whole. They find themselves not only focussed in their attention but actually robbed of other points of view… Instinctively, they regard themselves as sacrificed, under a functional system, to the success of that system.
For a solution, Lee turns to Plato, who had identified the division of labour as one of the components of a civilised state. True, functionalism is necessary, says Lee, but it should not be the main guiding principle. Plato was writing about communities and how to make them work, and it is clear from his words (we can think specifically of The Republic) that functionalism is the servant of the community, not its master.
To manage, we must always remember that we are managing communities (which is what organisations are), and remember too what Lee calls ‘the sacredness of man’. Harking back to his earlier lecture on ethics, he argues that functionalisation can work, but only if it takes human needs into account. He closes his lecture as follows:
But with an appropriate sense of balance, with a recognition of the sense of organization in which [functionalisation] can take its place, we can boldly adopt this and that experiment, provided that the sacredness of man is kept steadily before us, and that his culture and his development are definitely regarded as part of industrial culture and industrial development. Where functionalisation unites the two it is a helpful ally; where it separates them it is an evil.
Major works
Pitman’s Economics of Telegraphs and Telephones, 1913.
Telegraph Practice: A Study of Comparative Methods, 1917.
Management: A Study of Industrial Organization, 1921.
Plain Economics: An Examination of Essential Issues, 1921.
Industrial Organization: Developments and Prospects, 1923.
The Principles of Industrial Welfare, 1924.
An Introduction to Industrial Administration, 1925.
(ed.) The Dictionary of Industrial Administration, 1928.
‘The Pros and Cons of Functionalization’, in L.H. Gulick and L. Urwick (eds), Papers on the Science of Administration, New York: Institute of Public Administration, pp. 171-9.
Bibliography
Urwick, L.F., The Golden Book of Management, London: Newman Neame, 1956.
Urwick, L.F. and Gulick, L. Papers on the Science of Administration, New York: Institute for Public Administration, 1937.
Witzel, M. ‘Lee, John’, in M. Witzel (ed.) Biographical Dictionary of Management, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001.