No more parades

I'd rather be flogged than go on a team building exercise

Mar 23, 2025

Some people did not like this ceremonial style. But after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite. (Winston Churchill on the elaborately formal declaration of war against Japan in 1941)

Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The RULES of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one. (G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy)

Only there will be no more parades. Sooner or later it has to come to that for us all. . . . (Ford Madox Ford, No More Parades)

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Many years ago I worked for a few weeks at a chain bookshop in a hellish out-of-town shopping centre. There were some likeable people but I hated it.

With Christmas approaching, the mood was serious and there were plans as if for a military campaign. Many bookshops only make a meaningful profit over the festive period. Situation: critical. Except the atmosphere was very unmilitary; management exuded some sort of weird authoritarian mateyness. Everything was informal; most people dressed like students; we were all pals together; but it was really more ruthless and hierarchical than anywhere I’ve worked.

It turned out that there were a lot of cartoonishly get-ahead managers in high street bookselling. I couldn’t understand why ambitious types would go into the trade, where the rewards were so small, but then again not all of them were conspicuously talented, and some seemed to have only discovered that they wanted to win in the game of life after they’d drifted into this. Still others were retail specialists and what units they sold was of no account to them.

One way of getting noticed and getting on was competing as to who could be the biggest shit to their staff. Expanding holiday opening hours and out-of-hours working time to wreck Christmas and New Year for employees for nugatory commercial advantage was a popular ploy. It might not really have benefited the bottom line but it showed the right spirit. There was a sort of superstitious belief that being a shit somehow conjured value. Or you might say it was a cargo cult: some successful people are ruthless, hence being ritualistically ruthless will make me successful, regardless of whether my actions benefit anything or anyone.1

A fellow new recruit and I used to wonder at the place we found ourselves. Who talks like that? Who behaves like this? Does anyone believe any of it? It was a bloody insult being ordered about by people looking like elderly students, wearing t-shirts.2

We wanted the managers and their sidekicks to wear elaborate uniforms with broadcloth, epaulettes, brocade and bicorn hats, holding ranks like Pay Marshal, Warden of the 3 for 2s, or Viscount Bestseller of the Celebrity Biographies, and to refer to us as You there, damn your eyes, as being more honest, as well as adding some colour to the functional drabness of every aspect of the job and our surroundings.

I was lucky and escaped before Christmas when a nearby university branch of the same chain offered me a job. The shop and its environment were altogether different and so was the manager.

B— was not only a great man in his own quiet way but also a notable admirer of Patrick O’Brian’s nautical fiction.3 His approach was unusual.

B— was reserved at work; deliberately, consideredly reserved. His manner was courteous, not unfriendly, but cool and dry,4 with moments of quiet humour that often passed unnoticed. He dressed with unobtrusive adult smartness. When I’d been working there for a while a new colleague asked me if I thought B— liked or hated him, as he had no idea after six weeks. B— didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve.

At work social functions he would drink precisely the right amount, enough to unstiffen but not enough to lose any self-control, and he would show precisely the right amount of generosity in buying drinks, enough to be appreciated but not so much as to curry popularity or embarrass us.

He never at any time told us, but I learned that he tried to protect us from stupid or unfair directives from Head Office, taking things he couldn’t ignore or avoid onto his own shoulders where possible. He tried to limit, not expand, holiday working hours. Once a customer put in a ludicrous complaint against me to HQ (there could have been better founded ones, I don’t have unlimited patience), and I overheard part of B—’s telephone conversation with whatever Customer Services or HR unit demanded an immediate explanation: he backed me up unreservedly and told them that he’d witnessed the incident—not strictly true but an indication of trust—and that he would have dealt with the situation in exactly the same way.

I thought of something Duke Leto Atreides says in Dune:5 the only coin you can buy loyalty with is loyalty, your own for another’s.

I also thought of another duke, Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington. I forget where, but I read that when he was asked about Napoleon’s habit of pinching the cheeks of his soldiers affectionately on parade, he said he wouldn’t do it because it’d be a damned impertinence to the men. This might seem strange to the modern way of thinking, but familiarity and even friendliness can be an insult, or at least a liberty, in relations with those beneath you in a hierarchy of some kind.

As a waiter I disliked it when some customers made a point of asking personal questions when we weren’t on anything more than basically civil terms, with them thinking they were being gracious and flattering by taking an interest in me.6 I took the same view as Samuel Johnson:

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen. It is assuming a superiority, and it is particularly wrong to question a man concerning himself. There may be parts of his former life which he may not wish to be made known to other persons, or even brought to his own recollection. (Boswell, Life of Johnson)7

Asking uninvited personal questions was once considered to be a gross breach of manners and in some circumstances could provoke a duel. In The Wine-Dark Sea, one of B—’s beloved Patrick O’Brian novels, one character observes to another that he appears to be asking him a question, with the accused then turning pale at the implications of what he has done.

B— never quizzed us or otherwise threatened our private lives. He never pinched our cheeks. If we were clean, moderately tidy, punctual and competent, there his business ended. Some colleagues found his reserve and formality unsettling but it seemed like respect to me.

At my next, generally benign, workplace at a publisher one of the senior managers was well known for running her team something like a big sister or a prefect in a school dormitory, with a strong emotional undercurrent. She was smiling and caring and always took an interest in her team, and stabbed daggers into some of them every day with cheerful little remarks. She wept when confronted. That, as far as I was concerned, was where cheek pinching often got you.

At the same benign workplace company events had traditionally involved going to the horse racing, the cricket ground, the zoo, the cinema, or the pub, with generous, straight-up hospitality. After a change of MD it was all team building. Departmental team building, company-wide team building, team building on obstacle courses, team building on orienteering or mystery-puzzle walks, team building at an HR-approved ‘farm’, team building on rafts and in canoes.8

It might just have been an enthusiasm of the new MD’s, or the influence of the swelling HR department, but it’s not generally a good sign if you start talking about these things: “So it is that when a man’s body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health.”9

Teams grow more than they are built. And how do you grow something as mystical, fastidious and precious as a team?

There’s another cargo cult you sometimes find in business, where people think something like: the army has good teams, they do physical things and take on contrived challenges, if we do physical things and take on contrived challenges from time to time we’ll also have teams. Hence the amusing but useless spectacle of middled-aged professionals being sent out with maps and over obstacle courses.

Perhaps, though, the army do some other things to grow esprit de corps, starting from the moment recruits arrive and woven into the fabric of army life, including custom, ceremony, ritual, theatre—parades.

When US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara replaced some traditional military approaches with modern business practices during the Vietnam War it didn’t work. Morale collapsed.

The single-minded emphasis on rational analysis based on quantifiable data led to grave errors. The problem was, data that were hard to quantify tended to be overlooked, and there was no way to measure intangibles like motivation, hope, resentment, or courage. (Harvard Business Review)

I imagine that when B— as a young man became the manager of a bookshop, he asked himself, how ought I to do it, how can I do it, given my own temperament, talents and limitations, and the environment I’ll be working in, and he built a method and a professional persona around his answers. Somehow what he ended up with was just a bit like an idealised Napoleonic era man o’ war, within the constraints, the very powerful and in many ways inimical constraints, of contemporary society and a corporate chain bookseller.10

And because we trusted him, and we trusted our collective competence in a well-run, tight ship, and there was some sense of character and being part of a narrative in our ugly, flat, functional, blocklike shop, there was a team of sorts, or rather a crew, or a shop’s company if you can forgive a despicable play on words. This was part of our working life and we never thought to talk about it.

Epilogue

Despite all this my bookselling job was often boring and at times detestable, as well as being poorly paid, and I was glad to leave. I rarely think of it now but made some lifelong friends, including B— after we’d both left and found ourselves working for the same publisher doing the same job. He’d been made redundant by the geniuses at Head Office, who didn’t realise that he was on an old contract that gave him an enormous payout, meaning that no cost savings were made before the store closed a few years later. It worked out for him, however. He’s refused every opportunity to return to management and says that he’s glad to have set that burden aside forever. He enjoys his job and also, as it happens, the team building exercises.

As I came to the end of writing this I recalled that under the Old Regime at my benign publisher employer, which I liked a great deal, there was a famously excruciating one-on-one interview with the MD for all new recruits at every level, where he would ask us personal questions. Everyone accepted that this was horrible and intrusive but also quite amusing. I’d been warned, so I asked him some questions, which, being quite a vain as well as an admirable man, he spent the next 29 minutes answering, sparing my privacy. He didn’t pinch my cheek.

Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, March 2025)

I’ve seen something similar many times when there’s a new manager or someone senior needs to be seen to perform, but they have no ideas to improve performance, so they cut costs because that’s the easiest way to make the bottom line look better. It might actually be harmful for the business or organisation, but in the short term it could benefit that person.

I benefited here and elsewhere from habitually wearing a blazer (US: sports coat) and wasn’t bothered so much. I was also sometimes mistaken for the manager.

As am I now. At the time I was already an admirer of Captain Frederick Marryat, especially Peter Simple.

Like a pantry.

I loved Dune when I was perhaps ten years old and read it many times.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t only want a limited, drily contractual relationship with customers/employers, I like to enjoy or at least get satisfaction from work, it’s just that a relationship has to form voluntarily over time, not be forced. And I’d quite enjoy it if we started on formal terms, including not using first names. But then I also admired the traditional aloofness of British service staff, who had their own proper pride.

The whole caboodle

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