Thirteenth Variation
The contemporary organization propagates and builds wealth by using resources permeated by impalpable, immaterial essences. In terms of human resource policy, this means the definitive passage from managing “bodies” to developing “minds”, carriers of multiple identities, yearning for memorable experiences.

In the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which opens the most legendary of his books, Ficciones (1956), Borges tells of an encyclopaedia intended to describe the geography and culture of an imaginary planet: Tlön. At a certain point, reality gives way and artefacts of Tlön are found in various countries, copies of the encyclopaedia of Tlön proliferate, and the sciences and history are amended accordingly. How can one not surrender to Tlön, to the vast and detailed evidence of an ordered planet? It is pointless to reply that reality is also ordered. Perhaps it might be ordered, but according to divine laws – translation: inhuman – that we will never finish discovering. Tlön might be a labyrinth, but a labyrinth woven by men, destined to be deciphered by men. If an Orbis Tertius project existed today, the computer networks would be its means of realization. Is the Internet a Tlönian encyclopaedia? Without doubt, we find ourselves faced with the first artificial environment shared by millions of people. Reality, as Baudrillard writes, is about to dissolve into an ultra realty? No, this is an exaggeration. Nevertheless, if it is true that the organization propagates and builds wealth by using resources, the added value of the resources appears today in an intangible form: the material manifestation does not count, the impalpable immaterial essence does. This common immateriality is the interpretation that unites every reflection that concerns resources. The physical place where one works doesn’t matter, because there is the Net that connects. The walls of the Research & Development Centre do not matter, what matters is what one does there. Similarly, we could add: people do not count, but their knowledge does.

Continuing with this reasoning: with the future in mind, Management that knows how to manage peoples’ bodies counts increasingly less. What counts instead is Management that knows how to manage, incentivate and stimulate their minds – mental production. And knows how to conserve the “product” of the minds, putting it to interest. In short, we are moving towards Management that knows how to develop the production and reproduction of knowledge.

The personnel manager must thus become the dean of a faculty of knowledge students and specialists, a faculty to extend, naturally, to the last worker who, equally naturally, will be a specialist endowed with knowledge, loquacity and initiative. If this is not so, the personnel manager should also be immediately replaced by a machine, with an electronic brain, with a tableau de bord, with a control room, with a video terminal and a databank, as Philip K. Dick had already imagined in the novel Martian Time-Slip (1964).

The change then forces the Personnel Department to acquire a new role and new skills. On one hand, it must develop the capacity to be a strategic partner for top management with an integrated awareness of the multivariety of the corporate objectives to be achieved and, on the other, to manage people through strategies that can appear oxymoron: unitas multiplex and integrated diversity.

Beyond the formulas, there is the discovery that oneness constitutes a change of perspective in everyday practices. Undifferentiated management cannot develop the potential existing within organizations: the office worker, worker, manager, professional and specialist categories are words that have reached the limit of insignificance. At the same time, the rediscovery of oneness shows how this condition is essentially relational: the single individual lives his/her oneness passing through the experience of multiple identities, opening himself/herself to comparison with the others in a reciprocal relationship, capable of making up for their respective shortcomings. The new human condition in the organization is a relationship between multiple onenesses: a political, as well as ontological, prospect and, as such, capable of triggering a management challenge.
On the instrument front, before building or discovering new ones, the management of multiple onenesses is obliged to set up truer methods for using those already in existence. For example, it appears essential to re-establish practices for assessing performance and potential, which, on the whole, have remained at the level of a declaration and/or bureaucratic formalism, rarely resulting in a systematic and florid relation through which the superior and the collaborator can confront and recognize themselves on a plane of reality.

With regard to the new “knowledge” needed by those who work in the personnel department (assuming that there is a sense to continue to talk of “department” in traditional terms), a strong self-confident integrity is fundamental, intended as the ability of remaining in situations of uncertainty for a long time. Extreme care must be added, more for the “divergent” signals than the “weak” ones, or rather the tendency to catch a not already prefigured truth: an indispensable requisite for development of the necessary skills for managing communities of practice, aimed at the sharing of knowledge, which are increasingly taking root in corporations, changing their structure and processes. Finally, in a world in which the individual wants to experiment with numerous and diversified experiences, the Personnel Department must set the example, offering memorable experiences to those who contact it. This can be quite a problem when dealing with union issues. The only solution on this front is to call upon them to be increasingly a place of training and communication. From office to newsroom, from wage packets (nowadays in outsourcing) to architectural firms for set designing in the offices, for choosing lighting and locating the business TV plasma screens in the open spaces. From recruitment interview to casting.

The objective is to create an experiential, pleasant and accommodating atmosphere. Obligatory paths for all Personnel Managers: training courses on script writing techniques and on TV communication. Perhaps this is the only way to avoid a destiny similar to that of the King of Babylon, who, in another tale by Borges, did not lose himself within the walls of a bronze maze. He met his death in a place where there were no stairs to climb, nor doors to force, nor tiring corridors to walk down, nor walls that blocked his passage: the desert. As today’s corporations are also a labyrinth of electronic sand made of pixels and bits, illusions and mirrors, a multidimensional and infinite labyrinth like the World Wide Web and satellite-TV channels.

Go to Intro