Wilfred Brown

People are always surprised that Wilfred Brown — Elliott Jaques’s collaborator, and the guy who hired him in the first place — ended his life in favor of unions and workplace democratic principles. Jaques, who could be so exacting in other areas, left ensuring that voices down the chain be heard to the goodness of the managers’ hearts. Brown understood power, as Alistair Mant says, and this showed in his understanding of representation in issues values, what he called “policy”.

In 1978 and 1979, Brown has a series of discussions with Wolfgang Hirsch-Weber, Professor of Political Science at the University of Mannheim (Germany). These were facilitated and recorded by Alistair Mant, the management writer. I’ll cover more on Mant later, partly in a shameless exercise of attempting to suck up and thereby convince him to write a biography of Brown but mostly because he’s wickedly interesting. (See for example his 2003 screed, “Muddying the waters between guardians and traders” or his interview on ABC [Aus] where he says “you need to be really bright for these very, very complex jobs, [to] know what not to be thinking about.”)

Mant thinks extremely highly of Brown, by the way.

Brown and Hirsch-Weber’s conversation was later published by the Anglo-German Foundation (1983) under the ungainly title Bismarck to Bullock: Conversations about institutions in politics and industry in Britain and Germany between Wilfred Brown and Wolfgang Hirsch-Weber, whence this excerpt comes. “WB” is Wilfred Brown and “WH-W” is Wolfgang Hirsch-Weber.

Here’s how Brown described the only strike that Glacier Metals had during his 25 year tenure as Director:

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