To continue on the theme of reciprocity in management and leadership training:

A colleague, Michael Bertenshaw, recently sent me a very scary photo on my phone of him with dyed hair and the worst glasses in the world. He was on a film set playing Ralph Miliband – as in real life his two sons vied for the Labour leadership.

The programme “Miliband of Brothers” went out on 24th September. I, for one, was watching, for two reasons.

1. To find out if Ralph Miliband really did look like that and if so why didn’t a kindly person say something.

2. To find out more about this Marxist theorist who put his finger on the button at the heart of matter when it comes to the subject of motivation in management and leadership training.

This is what he said:

Human labour cannot be dispensed with, and this also counts for the growth within advanced capitalism of a vast ‘industrial relations’ enterprise, whose purpose is to elicit from wage-earners the ‘positive’ attitudes, the ‘loyalty’ and co-operative spirit which the collective, ’socialised’ process of production requires, but which the dynamic of capitalism serves to undermine. Read more