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Leading Professionals

the Natural Way

Lex A. van Gunsteren

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Parthenon Publishing House www.uitgeverijparthenon.nl

© 2012 Lex A. van Gunsteren / Parthenon Publishing House. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other-wise, without prior permission in writing from the proprietors. Citation is allowed on the condition that the source is credited. COVER: Löss graphic designers, Amsterdam KEYWORDS: management, leadership, HRM, industrial R&D, innovation, entrepreneurship, family business. ISBN/EAN: 978 90 79578 382 (Paperback) ISBN/EAN: 978 90 79578 399 (Epub)

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Contents

1. Introduction 7 2. How a herd is managed in nature 14

Wolves – Horses – Humans – Succession of the leader

3. What motivates professionals? 19 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – Frederick Herzberg’s

motivation-hygiene theory – The only real motivator:

self-actualisation

4. Natural and formal hierarchy 31 How to establish the natural hierarchy – Upward

delegation – Medical records – Wandering around –

Measuring output – Sharing judgement – Natural

versus formal hierarchy – The succession paradox

5. Time management 41 The secretary, time saver number one – Delegation –

Terminating meaningless work – Balance between the

urgent and the important

6. Leadership 50 7. Entrepreneurship 57 8. The essence 65 Rules of Nature 67

Appendices Horses Rescued from drowning 70 The Bielski partisans 77 The Innovation of a novice 81 About the Author 85 N0tes 86

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The best way to lead a group of professionals – engi-neers, physicians, accountants, lawyers, IT experts, etc. but also secretaries and craftsmen – is as if they were a herd in the wild working together to increase its chances of survival.

The effectiveness of the group will be best if the natu-ral ranking of its members is reflected in managerial decisions.

The formal hierarchy, as follows from the organisa-tion chart and the remuneration of the professionals, should not deviate too much from the natural one. Unrest, good people leaving, and lack of loyalty to the organisation will spread if the natural ranking is not reflected in the formal one.

The position of the Alpha, the leader, is of particular interest. If the official Alpha lacks the characteristics that are required in changed circumstances, a new leader must replace him.

In power struggles between departments, it is useful to think in terms of herds fighting for territory. Who belongs to which herd? Who are the Alphas of those herds? How strong are those Alphas?

In managerial decisions, the interest of the group should prevail. This includes firing a person, like a herd in the wild leaving behind a member that slows it down too much.

Leading professionals this way is natural, since it reflects mammals’ behaviour in nature.

Urbanisation, living in cities separated from our ecosys-tem, has alienated us from our natural environment. As a result, all kinds of unsound artificial practices in regard to managing groups of professionals could grow to become commonplace. To mention a few: directors of hospitals not

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2. How a herd is managed in nature Many species of mammals – apes, dolphins, whales, hor-ses, wolves and many more – live in groups to increase their chances of survival. Such a group is called a herd, a band, or a pack. Humans also organise themselves in groups, which we call organisations.

Below, the features are summarised of packs of wolves, which are related to dogs, and herds of horses since these species are most familiar to us as domesticated animals.

2.1 WOLVES Wolves live in packs consisting of four to forty wolves de-pending on territory size.3 The pack hierarchy is a strict social order. The Alpha male and female are the leaders of the pack. They pair for life. Breeding is usually confined to the Alpha pair only. They are the first to eat from a kill. Next come the Beta male and female, acting as the Alpha pair’s second in command. The Alpha and Beta wolves occasionally fight for their position in the pack and some-times change their position.

The lowest ranking wolf is known as the Omega and can be male or female. The Omega wolf serves an important purpose by absorbing the pack’s aggression, thereby main-taining balance within the pack. This submissive position is displayed by means of body language: Ears back, head down, tail between the legs, a raised leg to expose the stom-ach and genitalia. The Omega is the last wolf to feed from

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any caught meal. The pack feeds their pups and their aged family members by regurgitating food.

Wolves communicate in many ways: they establish dominance by growling; they use body language with their ears, nose teeth, and tail; they howl. Each wolf has its own howl; howling indicates the pack’s whereabouts to lost members and demarcates territories.

Wolves are hunting animals. The Alpha wolf leads the hunt like a general guiding his army in a battle of war.

2.2 HORSES Horses are prey animals with a well-developed fight-or-flight instinct.4 Their first response to a threat is to flee, although they are known to stand their ground and defend themselves or their offspring in cases where flight is unten-able, such as when a foal is threatened.

Horses are highly social herd animals that prefer to live in a group. There is a hierarchy in any herd, which estab-lishes a ‘pecking order’ for the purpose of determining which herd member directs the behaviour of others and is allowed to drink and eat first.

This behavioural pattern also applies to their interrela-tionship with humans. A horse that respects the human as a ‘herd member’ who is higher in the social order will be-have in a more appropriate manner towards all humans than a horse that has been allowed to engage in dominant behaviour over humans.

Wild horse herds are usually made up of several sepa-rate small bands that share a given territory. A band usually consists of one adult male and a group of females. A mare that is dominant in the hierarchy, called the ‘dominant mare’ or the ‘lead mare’, leads each band of three to twelve animals. The band contains additional mares, their foals, and immature horses of both sexes. There is usually a sin-

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3. What motivates professionals?

The literature on the question of what motivates employees is so extensive that no practitioner can afford the time to study and digest it. Nevertheless, it can be useful to be aware of the following two theories, by now classics in the field, which offer guidance in regard to leading professionals:

Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs Frederick Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory

MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

6 is usually depicted as a pyra-mid, with the largest and most fundamental levels at the bottom, and the need for self-actualisation at the top.

Figure 3.1 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, represented as a pyramid

with the more basic needs at the bottom.

Love/belonging

Esteem

Self-actualisation

Safety

Physiological

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The most fundamental and basic four layers of the pyramid contain what Maslow called ‘deficiency needs’: esteem, friendship and love, security, and physical needs. Features related to self-actualisation are called ‘being needs’. Maslow introduced the term Metamotivation to describe the motiva-tion of people who go beyond the scope of the basic needs and strive for constant betterment. Metamotivated people are driven by Being needs, instead of Deficiency needs.

The relevance of Maslow’s theory for our subject of lead-ing professionals is that, as a manager of a group of profes-sionals, you have to focus on self-actualisation to achieve intrinsically motivated collaborators. The need for self-actualisation pertains to what a person’s full potential is and realising that potential. It is the desire to become every-thing one is capable of becoming. This is a broad definition of the need for self-actualisation, but when applied to indi-viduals the need is specific. For example, one individual may have the strong desire to become an ideal parent, an-other to become a top athlete, and a third to become an original artist. In order to clearly understand the need of self-actualisation, one must first not only achieve the previ-ous needs – physiological, safety, love and belonging, and esteem –, but also master these needs.

For me, the need of self-actualisation implied doing creative industrial R&D work and writing a PhD thesis about it. Max Lips recognised this instantly in our first con-versation and reacted promptly by offering to include a clause to that effect in my contract. In hindsight, I realise that this was decisive for my decision to accept the offer despite warnings that such a family owned company (Max Lips was 100% owner) might confront me in later years with some nasty consequences.

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FREDERICK HERZBERG’S MOTIVATION-HYGIENE THEORY The famous article ‘One more time: How do you motivate employees?’ by Frederick Herzberg

7, printed three times in the Harvard Business Review (1968, 1987, 2003), describes the important distinction between motivation and move-ment. Movement is a function of fear or punishment or failure to get extrinsic rewards. Motivation is a function of growth from getting intrinsic rewards out of interesting and challenging work.

While the immediate behavioural results from move-ment and motivation appear alike, their dynamics, which produce vastly different long-term consequences, are differ-ent. Movement requires constant reinforcement and stresses short-term results. To get a reaction, management must constantly enhance the extrinsic rewards for move-ment.

Motivation is based on growth needs. It is an internal engine, and its benefits show up over a long period of time. Because the ultimate in motivation is personal growth, people don’t need to be rewarded incrementally.

Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory suggests that en-vironmental (hygiene) factors can at best create no dissatis-faction on the job, and their absence creates dissatisfaction. What makes people happy on the job and motivates them are the job content (motivating) factors.

In essence, this means that there is only one motivator: self-actualisation made possible by interesting work, and all the rest – salary, fringe benefits, rewards, etc.– constitute hygiene factors, which are only relevant if not up to stan-dard but have little effect on motivation. Hygiene factors are like good table manners: only relevant if you don’t have them.

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Example: Salary issue As a consequence of holding a managerial position at an unusually young age, at least three of my subordinates were enjoying higher salaries than mine. This was cor-rected as follows.

From time to time, Max Lips used to have a chat with every young engineer in his company. The chats were never scheduled in advance: Following a call from his secretary, you had to come immediately to his office. These chats were always a joy for me because Max Lips understood very well the intricacies of marine propeller design and manufacture. In the early days, when he was fighting for the survival of his family firm, he used to manufacture in the morning, to sell in the afternoon, and to have lessons in propeller design from the director of the Netherlands Ship Model Basin in the evening. At the end of such a chat, Max Lips politely asked me if everything was all right at home. I did not answer straight away, so he asked: ‘Is something wrong?’ The conversation then evolved as follows.

LG: ‘Nothing serious, except that I find it difficult to ex-

plain to my wife why I stay with Lips although I can earn 30% to 50% more elsewhere.’

ML: ‘That is impossible, we pay our people appropri-ately.’

LG: ‘I received unsolicited offers from three different computer firms offering salaries in that range. If you wish, I can ask them to confirm in writing. I feel, however, that in that case I should take their offer into serious consideration. It is up to you: should I ask for confirmation in writing?’

ML: ‘That won’t be necessary. I’ll look into it.’ Thereupon, I got a salary raise of 28%.

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Example 3: Picasso A star performer, who was of great value to a company, was asked by his supervisor what could be done to make sure he would stay with the firm. The surprising answer was that he would like to have a real Picasso in his of-fice. The costs involved were only $600 a month as the painting could be hired from a museum.

When the question ‘What would you do?’ is put to a group of managers, an amazingly high number of them would refuse the request out of fear of creating a prece-dent. From a group of personnel managers about half would refuse and from a group of other managers about one third would do so. Apparently, the myth of ‘equal monks, equal caps’ is deeply ingrained in management practice. The answer to similar requests from less bril-liant colleagues would simply have to be negative, of course.

In reality, the star performer got the Picasso in his room.

Having a Picasso in the office represents a Beta privilege,

like the privilege of drinking and eating first granted to a highly ranked member of a herd in nature.

Example 4: Shaft lining specialist on trial trip Before commissioning a ship, usually two trial trips take place. The first is the technical trial trip, extending over several days, to sort out any technical problems that may arise. The second trial trip serves to prove to the owner that the ship performs according to the specifications of the contract.

As managing director of the yard IHC Gusto, I was warned shortly before the technical trial trip of a drill ship that our specialist on shaft lining could not attend

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4. Natural and formal hierarchy In the wild, there is only one hierarchy in the herd and that is the natural one. In human organisations there is a sec-ond one: the formal hierarchy as determined by the organi-sation chart and the remuneration of its members. When the two start to diverge, stresses within the group mount up and motivation and loyalty of members of the group dete-riorate. 4.1 HOW TO ESTABLISH THE NATURAL HIERARCHY As leader of a group of professionals, how can you establish the natural ranking of the members of the herd entrusted to you? To this end you have to pay in-depth attention to the work of your people. That requires, before anything else, a genuine effort, which many managers are not prepared to deliver. The result is that they make false judgements about the capabilities of their subordinates. These judgements are felt to be unfair by the individuals concerned. Nothing is more frustrating than a boss who becomes enthusiastic about the wrong things. Ultimately, this leads to low morale and lack of loyalty.

Personnel appraisals are of little value, as they usually reflect the diplomatic nature of the appraisal interview. The Alpha has to find his own ways to get an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of his Betas. In this chapter, a few methods are given that I have experienced to be useful.

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UPWARD DELEGATION Delegation means transferring work you are responsible for to subordinates. The opposite is upward delegation, subor-dinates delegating work to their boss. Upward delegation allows the boss to become aware of how difficult or easy the tasks are that his subordinates have to perform.

Example: Collective holiday. During two weeks in the summer, our factory used to be closed for the holiday. Only a very few people stayed to take care of urgent matters like a repair job or the re-placement of a broken propeller.

I always made sure I was one of them, for two rea-sons: (1) The computer was available to me for my scien-tific work and (2) I could take care of urgent matters myself, thereby becoming acquainted with the intrica-cies of the various jobs in the department.

The latter enabled me to identify inefficiencies in the work procedures that would be difficult to spot other-wise. It was also useful for the acceptance of leadership from one of the youngest of the department: they knew that I knew.

Upward delegation, passing the buck up the organi-sation, is generally undesirable, but it can be construc-tive provided it remains incidental.

MEDICAL RECORDS At a congress of R&D managers in the eighties, Irma Wright, Medical Doctor and head of the department of Health and Safety of the Volvo car company presented a remarkable paper. A constructive relationship had been established between her and the CEO, Pehr Gyllenhammar. Whenever she noticed an exceptionally high percentage of absence or stress-related health problems in a department,

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the records were inconsistent. My controller and I termi-nated their fruitless discussions by simply asking the fore-man: ‘How many tons of copper scrap do you estimate are piled up over there?’ He gave his estimate, which we de-clared to be from then on the only valid figure in our ad-ministration.

MEASURING OUTPUT Measuring output of knowledge workers, both qualitatively and quantitatively, is often possible and useful in assessing the natural ranking.

Example 1: Computer punch typists The input of our computers was taken care of by typists punching input cards. These punch typists were pre-dominantly farmer’s daughters accustomed to hard work. Their productivity, measured in terms of punched cards per unit of time, was almost twice the average in the country. Figure 4.1 Punch typists

9

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5. Time management To assess the value of employees for the whole organisa-tion, and thereby their natural ranking, requires time and effort. This means that time, the manager’s scarcest re-source, has to be managed.

A vast amount of literature is available on the question of how to spend your time effectively. Classics are ‘The Effective Executive’ by Peter Drucker (1966)12 and ‘The Time Trap’ by Alec Mackenzie (1972)13. Their lessons seem to be simple, but appear to be very difficult to apply in every-day practice. Everywhere we can see managers devot-ing their time to activities they like or are good at, instead of spending time on work that makes them effective.

How to avoid the time trap is a very personal matter. The measures you take to manage your time should fit with your character and comfort zone. Nevertheless, my per-sonal experiences regarding time management could bring others on ideas that are useful in their particular situation.

When an engineer is promoted to a managerial position, the way he spends his time changes drastically. Less time is available for engineering work; more time has to be devoted to communicating, in particular with subordinates. The big plus, however, is that he has also acquired the right to dele-gate work to others, in particular to his secretary.

5.1 THE SECRETARY, TIME SAVER NUMBER ONE A good secretary is your greatest time saver. The more you delegate, the more she will enjoy her work and, as a result,

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the easier it will be to recruit and retain a good secretary. My promotion from purely technical work to a managerial position brought along with it that a secretary could be as-signed to me. We had at the time our own training school for secretaries where girls, straight from high school, were educated in secretarial work. I asked the head of that school who, in his view, was the best. His advice proved to be in-valuable. In six years’ time, my secretary and I moved up together in the hierarchy till in the executive board. Let me give some examples of our modus operandi.

Example 1: The mail Somewhere I had heard of a director taken completely by surprise by a strike in his factory. He had always me-ticulously read and answered his mail, but never noticed any signal in it that a strike was imminent. I promised myself that such a thing would never happen to me. Even when I was a member of the executive board, my secretary and I devoted no more than one hour to deal-ing with the mail. That means both reading and answer-ing. My secretary used to order the mail into three cate-gories. On top of the pile she put letters she could not deal with herself. Then followed documents she ex-pected me to be interested in. The third category related to matters she could deal with without me. When the hour was over we stopped, no matter how many letters still remained. These letters were answered and signed by her, for which purpose she could sign with my signa-ture. Thus it could happen that someone thanked me for my kind answer to his letter, which I had not actually read nor answered myself.

The Alpha blindly trusts his Betas.

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Example 2: Travel preparation When a colleague saw me putting my airplane ticket and other travel documents in my pocket without even giving them a glance, he asked: ‘Don’t you check? If a mistake has been made, you’ll find out at the airport and that is too late to do anything about it.’ I replied that it was exactly for that reason I did not look at the papers. When the secretary knows you are in real trouble when she makes a mistake, she will check herself and not make any mistake. For the same reason I abolished con-trol punching in the computer department. If punch typists know that their output will be checked by control punching, i.e. another typist producing the same input and letting the computer check that both inputs are identical, they make mistakes in the order of 8%. With-out control punching, this remains below 2%. Input can be checked by other means, for instance by letting the programme check if the input variables are within real-istic boundaries. For the same reason, the procedure of having several signatures for the approval of expenses, as is policy in many organisations, is counterproductive. When five signatures are required, all five executives will trust that one of the other four has seriously checked the expense. So, actually nobody checks any-thing. The Alpha does not need to check if his Betas are properly protecting the herd. If they are not carrying out their tasks properly, disasters involving casualties will be the result. Also then

The Alpha will not directly interfere with the work

of the Betas, but simply change the hierarchy in the herd by demoting the Betas that fail.

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The Alpha determines his own priorities, nobody else.

5.4 BALANCE BETWEEN THE URGENT AND THE IMPORTANT Short-term problems constitute the urgent, because ignoring them results in direct punishment. Long-term problems, and opportunities both short-term and long-term, make up the important. Ignoring long-term problems only brings along punishment in the future and ignoring opportunities has no other consequence than missing the rewards they generate. Figure 5.1 The double dichotomy short-term versus long-term,

and problems versus opportunities.

Managers tend to devote most of their time to the urgent. They are constantly fire fighting leaving little time for any-thing else. Their balance between the urgent and the impor-

tant is, say, 99% versus 1%. Would it make any difference for coping with the urgent if that 99% would be reduced to 80%? Of course not, but it would leave 20 times more time to spend on the important.

Effective time management implies that the balance be-tween the urgent and the important is determined by the manager himself, and not by pressing circumstances.

It is the Alpha’s exclusive prerogative

to decide on his priorities.

OpportunitiesProblems

Short term

Long term IMPORTANT

URGENT

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cially become ‘assistant’ of one of the directors, which enti-tled me to address myself to whoever I wished.

When a Beta is pushed down in the hierarchy by jealous competing Betas of the herd,

he has to fight to regain the position he deserves.

Leadership is closely related to protecting the weak, the Omegas of the herd. It was not accidental that Tuvia Biel-ski’s clash with the lieutenant he ultimately had to kill was about the protection of the weaker members of the partisan group: the non-combatant men, the women and the chil-dren. Both in nature and in business,

Protection of the defenceless constitutes

an important aspect of the Alpha’s leadership.

Example 1: Widow of killed labourer On a freezing day in January, an accident occurred kill-ing one of the labourers of the yard. Three men had been lifted in a basket by a crane to bring them from the quayside of the ship to the side at the waterfront. When lowering the basket at the waterside, it had been hooked in the scaffolding causing the (unsecured) crane hook to disconnect. The basket with the three men in it fell into the water. One of them, belonging to our group of Span-ish guest labourers, could not swim and drowned in the icy water. I felt deeply sorry for his widow but could not do anything directly for her because of the accountability issues that then would arise. I therefore took an indirect route. I invited the managing director of our scaffolding subcontractor to my office and asked him if he was in-terested in having his contract renewed for the next year. Of course, he was. What you have to do for it, I told

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him, is to ensure that the widow gets Dfl. 50,000 (nowadays about the same amount in dollars) to enable her to start a small shop in her village in Spain. He pro-tested strongly, pointing out that his scaffolding had not caused the accident, although the hook had discon-nected after the basket had hit the scaffolding. I agreed: The accident was partly the fault of the three men them-selves who should have secured the crane hook, partly of the crane operator who violated the rule that his load must be always in sight when he moves his crane. Nev-ertheless, I told him, you know by now what you have to do to remain our preferred supplier. Not surprisingly, I soon got word that the widow had received the money.

Protecting Omegas from outside attacks in the wild means, translated to business, that

The Alpha has to take a stand for his people

when they cannot do so themselves.

Example 2: Press conference The name giving ceremony of the ‘Maersk Explorer’, at that time the largest drilling platform in the world, was a hot news item, not in the least because of its history. Its construction had begun in the United States. When IHC’s shipbuilding operations in the US were wrapped up, the hull had been towed over the Atlantic Ocean to be finished by our yard. The complexity of this operation had caused a delay of almost a year with the conse-quence that our client, A.P. Muller, had missed an en-tire good weather window. The press conference on the occasion of the forthcoming delivery of the platform could easily bring along some very nasty negative pub-licity for our whole shipbuilding corporation. My mental preparation included the following consideration. Jour-

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nalists love to write about extremes, either positive things like winning gold medals in the Olympics or very negative events like tsunamis and earthquakes. Articles about extremes sell, reports on every day platitudes don’t. The dilemma for the journalists is: What is it go-ing to be, a success story or a disaster? To resolve that dilemma, one seasoned journalist opens the session with some very difficult questions. The answers on those questions are determinant for the atmosphere of the whole further conference. Figure 6.1 The Maersk Explorer

After my introductory speech, the first nasty question fired at me was: ‘What you tell us is fine, but how does Mr. Muller feel about it?’ That question was not at all

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7. Entrepreneurship Leadership includes both entrepreneurship and manage-ment. The entrepreneur starts and assumes the risk of a business. The manager organizes and controls the business by getting things done through people. Obviously, Max Lips excelled in both, as is illustrated by the following examples.

Example 1: Selling price versus cost price A few weeks after I had started in my job at Lips, the chief propeller designer and I went to the Rotterdam harbour for a repair job for a Greek ship owner. After some years of operation, hull fouling had increased the ship’s resistance causing the RPM of the engine to drop. The consequences of this are twofold: 1) the engine can no longer run at full power, which reduces the vessel’s speed, and 2) fouling of the cylinders of the engine. De-creasing the pitch of the propeller can cure this. To this end, the propeller has to be taken off the ship and trans-ported to our works, where the pitch would be reduced by warming up the blade roots while pressing the blades in the desired direction with hydraulic presses. The cost price of the whole operation would be no more than Dfl. 7,000 (nowadays about the same amount in dollars), I estimated. To my surprise, the price we could agree with the ship owner was close to Dfl. 28 ,000. How could the selling price be four times the cost price? Hadn’t Greek owners the reputation of never paying more than they have to? On the way home, we stopped at a restaurant to

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the matter itself. ‘Excuse me, Mr. Lips. I am probably not authorised to say what I want to say, for it concerns company confidential knowledge, but I feel I have to say it nevertheless to get us further.’ Immediately, Max Lips made a body gesture conveying the message what a hopeless naïve technical hobbyist I was, having no feel-ing at all for knowing when to shut up.

Figure 7.1 Body gesture: ‘You hopeless naïve technical hobbyist’.14

Our customer straightened his back to listen attentively to what I was going to say. I then gave an exposé of our efforts to solve his problem, and this time he believed me. We had regained the trust of our customer.

Example 5: The ASEA copper press A very advanced copper press had been purchased from the Swedish company ASEA. The press, originally de-veloped for working on diamonds, could work with pressures of over 200 Bar. This was made possible by wrapping the press in what we called ‘piano strings’. The machine could press small diameter tubes out of a

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Figure 7.2 Body gesture: ‘My hands are tied’.15

Example 6: The notebook Max Lips always had a small notebook with him to con-vey brief hand written messages, signed with ‘ML’, to his people. When he returned from a business trip, he used to drop the notes he’d made on the desk of his sec-retary, who subsequently would make sure that each of them was acted upon. One such note referred to my lack of diplomacy. I wrote back that in the case of the ASEA press my dealings had resulted in both a valuable up-grading of the specifications and a successful commis-sioning. Max Lips promptly responded with a hand writ-ten one liner: Is purchasing = easy; selling = difficult. A les-son I would never forget. Example 7: Diversification It is interesting to see how Lips diversified over time by going through the following stages: Small family business: a foundry producing church bells and small ship propellers.

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Rules of Nature

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The Alpha will not directly interfere with the work of the Betas, but simply change the hierarchy in the herd by demoting the Betas that fail. A good Beta prevents the Alpha from doing stupid things. The Alpha only fights himself if no Betas are available to do so. The Alpha has to make clear to attackers of his herd that his Betas enjoy his full support. Whenever possible, the Alpha accommodates the wishes of his Betas. The Alpha determines his own priorities, nobody else. It is the Alpha's exclusive prerogative to decide on his priorities. Body language can be sufficient to maintain the hierarchy. When a Beta is pushed down in the hierarchy by jealous competing Betas of the herd, he has to fight to regain the position he deserves. Protection of the defenceless constitutes an important aspect of the Alpha’s leadership. The Alpha has to take a stand for his people when they cannot do so themselves. Whenever required the Alpha defends his herd against outside attackers. The Alpha should take the initiative when he sees an opportunity to provide comfort to the herd.

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ditches in the landscape were now under water, so there was a very real danger of some of the horses tripping.

A LOT OF COURAGE TO SAVE THESE HORSES By 2 p.m., finally, everything was ready and the rescue could get underway. With the sight of the stranded horses directly in their sights, Micky, Hinke, Christina and Antje rode into the cold water without hesitation. The four cau-tiously made their way to the knoll. Minutes later, when they were about 30 m. of the frightened animals, the herd began to stir. It was as though they somehow sensed these women might be their ticket to freedom, after three days of cold and deprivation.

Yet the exhausted horses held back. To encourage them, fire fighters surrounded the little island by boat, shouting as loudly as they could. It helped. The thunder of hooves and the spray of water began to pick up as the horses surged forward. It made for an awesome spectacle.

Micky was concentrating with all her might. She turned her horse, as the other riders did, and set a course for shore. Looking over her shoulder, she watched as a whole line of horses set out to make the 600 m. crossing.

The rescue of the Marrum horses, Friesland, November 2006.

The look in the eyes of the weary horses and foals, putting their trust in the riders, was unforgettable and deeply mov-ing, as witnessed by millions of television viewers around

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Appendix 2

THE BIELSKI PARTISANS The Bielski partisans were an organisation of Jewish parti-sans who rescued Jews from extermination and fought against the Nazi German occupiers and their collaborators in the vicinity of Nowogrodek and Lida in occupied Poland (now western Belarus). They are named after the Bielskis, a family of Polish Jews who led the organisation.

Under their protection, 1236 Jews survived the war. The group spent more than two years in the forest.

The Bielski family were millers and grocers in Stankiewicze near Novogrudek, an area that at the begin-ning of the Second World War belonged to the Second Pol-ish Republic and was seized by the Soviet Union in Sep-tember 1939 in accordance with the Molotov-Von Ribben-

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trop non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and Sta-linist Soviet Union.

The Bielski family took part as low-level administrators in the new government set up by the Soviets, which strained their relations with the local Poles, to whom the Soviet Union was an occupier. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, that began on June 22, 1941, Nowogrodek became a Jewish ghetto.

Four Bielski brothers, Tuvia Bielski, Alexander Bielski (also known as Zus), Asael Bielski and Aron Bielski man-aged to flee to the nearby forest after their parents and other family members were killed in the ghetto in Decem-ber 1941. Together with 13 neighbours from the ghetto, they formed the nucleus of their partisan combat group in the spring of 1942.

The group’s commander was the oldest brother, Tuvia, who had served in the Polish Army from 1927 to 1929, rising to the rank of corporal. He had been interested in the Zionist youth movement. Tuvia ‘would rather save one old Jewish woman than kill ten German soldiers’. He sent em-issaries to infiltrate the ghettos in the area, recruiting new members to join the group in the Naliboki forest. Hun-dreds of men, women, and children eventually found their way to the Bielski camp. At its peak, 1236 people belonged to the group, and 70% were women, children, and the eld-erly. No one was turned away. About 150 engaged in armed operations.

The partisans lived in underground dugouts or bunkers. Several utility structures were built: a kitchen, a mill, a bak-ery, a bath house, a medical clinic for the sick and wound-ed, and a quarantine hut for those who suffered from infec-tious diseases such as typhus. Hers of cows supplied milk. Artisans made goods and carried out repairs, providing the combatants with logistical support that later served the So-

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Lex van Gunsteren

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About the Author Lex A. van Gunsteren (1938) is a business consultant, lec-turer and innovator in marine propulsion. He graduated as a naval architect and received his PhD from Delft Univer-sity of Technology, where in 1981 he was also appointed as Professor in Management of Technological Innovation. He was one of the pioneers of the Rotterdam School of Man-agement where he taught management of innovation and crisis management.

After his military service as an officer in the ship design unit of the Royal Netherlands Navy, Lips Propeller Works employed him, initially as an industrial scientist and later in various managerial positions. In the shipbuilding group IHC Holland, he was managing director of their shipyard Gusto, specialised in off shore equipment. In the Royal Boskalis Westminster Group, he served as director of cor-porate planning and R&D. In the late eighties, he founded the innovation company Van Gunsteren & Gelling Marine Propulsion Development for the further development of his invention of the slotted nozzle (duct with a slot at the front), which ultimately led to the successful application of the wing nozzle (duct with a slot at the rear). He served on various boards for monitoring R&D subsidies, among oth-ers as vice chairman of the board of the Dutch Foundation for Technical Sciences ‘STW’. Since 1997, he lectures in computer aided decision support in architecture and urban planning at the Faculty of Architecture of Delft University of Technology. His publications include six patents and nine books.