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Jack helps bosses gei along with unions

Genius in bt!

By ALAN DANIELS

At first sight, Jack Gibb seems an unlike- ly figure to command attention (let alone a $500-a-day fee) in the corporate boardrooms of some of North America’s biggest com- panies.

He is balding, diminutive, middle-aged, soft-spoken (a socialist, for heaven’s sake) with embroidery on his jeans and his stock- inged feet resting on the kitchen table, among the lunchtime salami and kaiser buns.

_ Jack Gibb is a psychologist, aspecialist

ional behavior. The main thrust of his work, he says, 1s trying to humanize ig business.

“T don’t go in and lecture to manage- ment. I don’t try to escalate the conflict, but together we look at the system and see how we can make it more humanistic.,

“The important thing is to look at the fears. Let’s look at what people are afraid of. And let’s look at the defences that stand in the way of these fellows getting their work done.”

Gibb says absenteeism, property de- struction, petty theft, and so on are defen- Sive reactions — employees punishing the company. The answer is to jze man-

need for this kind of frustrated reaction.

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“Ty fg 7 agem ent is to

learn how_to manage in a way that in- greases flexibil

“Supervision,” he says. at we have found is that people are over-managed. There is more featherbed- ding in management than in the unions. Creative management is dissatisfied with the status quo, but poor management responds to public criticism by tightening controls, imposing more supervision, more rules, more secrecy and greater imperson- ality.

Jack Gibb has been hired as a consultant by companies such as Bell Telephone, Gen- eral Motors, Dow Chemicals, and Wey- erhauser (“I don’t try to sell my program to anyone, they come to me’’): Companies, he says, who have an image of a better world.

jt is noor management that has produced werful unions — and, privately, that is ant They wil tell you.

“T consult with management, but my ide- ology is more in line with socialism,” he adds. ‘“‘I am not anti-union, far from it. Unions are preferable to oppressive man- agement, but if companies managed the way I am suggesting, the need for unions would disappear,

“My system is economic, too, because

you reduce the number of supervisgs,”’

Gibb and his wife Lorraine, wh live in

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rnia, are developers of what they call the TORI theory — a way of living, manag- ing, parenting, teaching, counselling and Yearning.

ym — Trust, Openness, endence — and the i conducting week-long oup of people get to be more trust- ted a five-day éampus of Van-

couver Communit)

“We d es. We don’t use leadership, We dor role playing and we don’t impose goals,’ Gibb explains. “Bae workshop is managed the way we ihink a good instilition shouldbe managed. It's essentially avery free-floating experi- ence that is created by the people them-

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Gibb says his workshops examine the na- ture of fear and the many forms it takes, and the development of trust — the antithe- sis of fear

“The amore we fear, the more we close up our avenues of communication and cover up our feelings and cover up our liv :s,"”’ he adds. “‘As we become more trusting, we dramatically open up to people and let them in and show ourselves to them.”