Dave

Taking pride in your work has become a luxury, something available to the incurably naive but definitely not the pragmatic, successful business person.

There’s a very easy, convenient story which tells us that machines have pushed out craftsmanship. Richard Sennett traces the much deeper relationships between physical touch, tools, how we work together and how we relate to the things we create.

Understanding craftsmanship is particularly important for the marketing industry which is inherently craft based. One challenge for the profession is that as a society we have lost the underlying understanding of what it means to be a craftsman. Marketing professionals cannot help but bring into their work assumptions of more mechanistic management, of command and competition.

We have allowed what Sennett convincingly portrays as a deeper human need to be bartered away as we have adapted to industrialised production. In place of mutual respect for skills, our teamwork is more often driven by command structures and competition. These management approaches suit mechanistic production but undermine the workshop culture necessary for developing craft skills. 

Its easy to make the link with obviously craft based businesses, but this thinking may have far broader relevance. Crowd-sourced development which is being applied in so many industries is a crafts based management approach. 

As global supply changes, putting more emphasis on local production, suppliers will be less able to rely on lower cost production to create differentiation and will need to relearn a crafts based approach.

There is a lot up for grabs as we come out of the credit crunch. Much of the commentary is about how quickly banks are returning to ‘business as usual’. There’s a lot of reason to believe that craft skills will remain to be seen by capitalists as something difficult to scale and monetise, and therefore of little value. On the other hand, there’s good reason to believe that despite this, the tide is inexorable.

It could be that the major industrial and social shift of the coming period is towards a renewed understanding of craftsmanship. There is no sense of judgement from the author who offers no simple answers. Craftsmanship itself is thoroughly described and we are left to decide whether this is a quaint part of history, or something vital for our future.