Alper – who is now working in foreign sales and marketing with me – and I, often talk about the many things we don’t like about Turkey, Turkish culture, and Turkish people. I vent a lot of my frustration to him, and I return the favor by listening to his venting. We spend our lunch and during tea breaks complaining to each other. We are a bit better than say a five year old whining for a toy, but not too much some of the time. Last week, while I was complaining about the thick-headedness and narrow-mindedness of Turkish bosses, Alper told me a story that illustrated the essence of my complaining quite brilliantly.
One of Alper’s previous jobs was in the manufacturer of some small product. Let’s call it a thwap. Many workers worked individually to produce several thousand thwaps per day. When thwap production began, the workers worked eight hours a day and the volume they produced was enough.
As the months went buy, the number of thwaps produced each day declined with no change in the work force or the process. The decline was apparently for no reason. The boss of this company decided that if his workers could no longer produce enough thwaps in eight hours, they would just work ten hours a day. So he increased the length of the workday and sure enough, the number of thwaps produced per day increased back to where it had been. The boss was satisfied.
As the months went by, thwap production fell again for no apparent reason. The boss was no longer satisfied. He demanded answers.
One of the older workers at the plant came to the boss and proposed to him an idea. He pointed out to the boss that most of the workers were women from two income families. All these women had husbands and children at home. They did not want to work longer hours and they were not happy with the previous increase in the working hours. He suggested that the boss should say how many thwaps he wanted to be produced each day. Tell all the workers that if they hit the daily quota they could go home. This older worker thought that with this strategy, the women would be motivated to work hard, and work fast, and that they could produce the number of thwaps they had been producing in only six hours.
This is a good solution, isn’t it?
The boss did not like this idea. His response was they are my workers and I am the boss. They will work as long as tell them for as hard as I tell them. There will be no incentives like that. Instead he would increase the length of the workday until he was getting the right number of thwaps, and he would fire all of the workers if he had to. He would rule his company with an iron fist.
Unfortunately the story ends here because Alper quit that job. Alper found his boss to be a very stupid man and Alper did not like working for him. According to Alper, this is the mentality of the bosses in Turkey. They have grown up, and have made their money by working very hard, by being fighters. They view their workers as a commodity and have a very Machiavellian approach to management – “it is better to be feared than loved.†According to Alper, this is changing, but not fast enough.
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