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Speaker A I, of course had met him in the course that he had taught and then I did want some time with him while I was there. And so we made an appointment one day. He lived in downtown London at the time. He, of course was not with Glass here anymore. And so I made an appointment and I spent I think it was an entire afternoon in his apartment in downtown London. And I asked him all of the questions that I had always wanted to ask other people who didn't have the answers. And only he could have those answers because he was there when the thing started. And I was fascinated, still am today by the way, by the concept of works councils. And of course he pioneered that. And I've always viewed Wilford as a philosopher. I used to joke that Peter Drucker was the Wilford Brown of North America and some people didn't quite get that because of whatever but he was always a philosopher. And he started off at Glassier as a stratum two manager. And over the time he developed these concepts about how the organization should work and he was very keen on social justice, industrial democracy, fairness in the workplace, all the things later that we talked about in terms of quality of work, life and so forth, he was a literal pioneer in those sorts of things. And so as he developed those and he wrote his first book, the Exploration Management Series, he started to crystallize these but had already practiced them. So in the book he would talk about the theory behind what he had done and then talk about how it worked at Glass here and all the ins and outs. So there were always some questions that people ask me that I never had an answer to. So here was my chance to sit down for an afternoon with the man literally Lord Brown and get his take on things. And for example, at that time I had not yet been to a works council meeting. I did later, as it turns out but I had some questions about just the process and how the thing worked. And I said to him, I said, well, these things must be just absolute free for alls. You've got reps from all these strata coming together, meeting, making decisions that affect other people's managerial roles. I said it must be just chaos and conflict and what have you. And of course, in his very calm, in his very elegant way and politely explained that was not the case and it showed his again, the deeper roots of his philosophy of conflict management was what it showed. I learned so much from him about conflict management and he made a comment to me and I think it was in his book too, one of his books. And he said, you have to understand the only people who misuse power are those who don't have any. And at the time it probably escaped me, how subtle but important that concept was. But that's the whole concept of worst counsel. And his point was, if you give people the right of veto with no strings attached, which is the absolute power, the consequence is they will not misuse it. And he said people don't want to misuse it. It's ingrained in their nature that we would like to be fair of the people. And so he said, if I give you the power to tell me no, and I cannot reject that, he said, what will happen is, since you don't want to do it, I don't want to be rejected, we're going to work things out ahead of time. So he said all of the controversial, the conflict laden kind of issues, he said they're sorted out in the hallways, in the bathrooms before Works Council. And at that time, and I did not follow up for years later, so I don't know. But at that time, the veto had never yet been used at Works Council. And he said the reason was it didn't have to be because if you didn't like something, you knew you could drop your black marble or exercise your veto. And the rule was, if there's no consensus, nothing would happen. There was no change. Well, everybody realizes the need for change. They don't want the organization to be stagnant. And so if you have a concern with something, a proposal coming forth the worst council, you work it out with your colleagues ahead of time. So he said, in fact, and I did verify this, if you look at the minutes of the worst council meetings, they are quite boring, quite frankly. Not the excited shouting matches you might think. But again, that showed my naivety in terms of his model of conflict management. So there's things like that that I talked to him about, and he gave me some great examples of how this conflict resolution system worked. And one of them was, he said that one day well, it was the Stratum Two rep, the primary union rep, came to him and said, you had a real problem. And the real problem was that the National Union Council, whatever the name was at the time, had voted to have a one day national work stoppage in protest of Margaret Thatcher's policies. And of course, as people I think now know that a strike was not outlawed by the worst council constitution, but it was recognized that people didn't need to strike because if they didn't like something, they just exercised their veto. And so the right to strike was not necessary. So the Stratum Two rep came to Wilford and said, we have this problem and we have the one hand our loyalty to our national union, yet we also believe in the worst council. And so, true to form, they worked out what is called a compromise. And I remember Brown telling me that it was a shame that he said in Britain, he said compromise is viewed as winning and in North America, compromise is viewed as losing. And I think it underlies a lot of our conflict resolution techniques in North America. So he said we'd reached a compromise. And the compromise was and he said we agreed as the managing director that we would take I think he said 300 of our employees pay him a full day's wages to go downtown and carry pleckers and go through the march. And the union would call in the other 4800 employees to work that day. So he said, if you look at our labor relations record and by the way, a lot to me in the early days of the model was in labor. It was a labor relations model because it dealt with the labor issues and the rights to appeal and so forth. He said, if you look at our model, he said, some companies, they'll have a very, very stable kind of thing. And also they have the big blip, which, of course, is a strike. The worst one is a wildcat strike and so forth. He said, ours, he said, looks like this. We have these little bitty blips like the Margaret Thatcher thing. But he know the bottom line is people come to work every day and we get through these kinds of conflicts accordingly. So I learned so much from him on those kinds of examples that he gave me and reinforced first of my confidence in the works council concept employee participation, as he called it, but also how they worked them through and just how powerful they were. Unfortunately, I had great difficulty in North America teaching these things because for whatever reason and I'll attribute to my own personal teaching limitations, probably I could not get across the point to people that forming a body like a works council and empowering workers actually gave more power to the CEO. And whatever reason, again, in North America we still see that today as giving away the authority of the CEO to the workers, which is, in fact, not the case. So one of my kind of personal disappointments is that of all the recollective organization stuff that's gone on that part, which is, I think, probably ironically the most powerful and except for the cultural barriers, the easiest to implement has never been adopted widely in North America.