Charging around the web in pursuit of Richard Sennett’s ideas about the changing nature of work, consumption and politics I stumbled across, “The problem with performance-managing professionals” by Stefan Stern – a piece he wrote for the FT nearly a year ago. The bit I particularly warmed to was in the final few paragraphs. It was a surprise because I would never have expected to find any wisdom embedded in “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”:
“I have wandered a little from this column’s usual territory. How unprofessional. But that is my point. The early 21st-century version of professionalism risks becoming narrow and impoverished. The under-40s coming up through the ranks seek variety and autonomy in their work, as well as financial rewards. They do not want their true professionalism to be performance-managed out of them.
My daughter may struggle, like the 19th-century schoolboy Tom Brown, in trying to earn a living while ‘doing some real good, feeling that I am not only at play in the world’.
She might benefit from listening, if not to her father, to Tom Brown’s schoolmaster, who offers this advice: ‘You talk of ‘working to get your living’ and ‘doing some real good in the world’ in the same breath. Now you may be getting a good living in a profession, and yet not doing any good at all in the world . . . keep the latter before you as a holy object, and you will be right, whether you make a living or not; but if you dwell on the other, you’ll very likely drop into mere money-making.'”