Organisers of charity book fairs reckon they could pack an entire table with second-hand copies of Fifty Shades of Grey, a book too many of us once bought but everyone is now eager to give away. Though Christian and Anastasia have nothing helpful to teach us, the Bennet family, Darcy and Mr Wickham in Pride and Prejudice certainly do. Life trumps lust. Fads fade; classics endure.
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Performance management often depends on stale tropes and props, things like textas and butchers paper, truisms and bonding, 360-degree assessments and self-criticisms. As an alternative, any manager trying to inspire improved performance should commission a compulsory reading of Pride and Prejudice.
A pedant might claim that Jane Austen lacks relevant qualifications and experience to offer instruction in management (LRQE, as that handicap was written in selection-panel jargon). Naysayers might captiously emphasise her strictly limited education, failure to hold down a job, ignorance of the wider world or the fact she was born 243 years ago. Surely these are not the hallmarks of an "outcomes-orientated", "results-orientated" individual?
If true believers still urged Austen's case, sceptics might direct attention to the justly famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice. Should that not disqualify any candidate, combining as it does dogmatic proclamation of a universal truth with passing commentary on received truth - on matrimony, hierarchy, capitalism and human nature. Here it is again, for those few readers who do not already have the sentence by heart. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
The point of the reading seminar would help to see through things as well as seeing them. Participants might work out how to be more acute and astute without being acerbic - at least not gratuitously so. To borrow one of her cherished words, Austen is concerned to "comprehend" - to decode and make sense of events, people, emotions and ambitions. Modern performance benchmarks would be met, since Austen relies on the most meticulously incisive "evidence-informed" judgments. Being playful, and learning how to play, those tricks are merely cover. Dancing, gossiping, dressing, conniving, marrying - those activities are windows to the soul.
On the other side of the table at a selection panel, the bosses' side, Austen's questions would be studiously courteous but focused, penetrating and deft. That technique would be founded on the interrogative style with which Austen endowed Elizabeth Bennet. Miss Bennet asks questions all the time, in her mind or from her mouth, in her queries at balls, in drawing rooms, on walks. If successive Elizabeth Bennet questions could make Mr Darcy reflect and repent, what chance would the rest of us have? Imagine Austen disposing of applicants who contended that their only weakness was at interview, that they worked twice as hard as anyone else, or that a conspiracy of nonentities had denied them their due. Austen would ensure that none of those phonies was "paid the compliment of being believed sincere".
Pride and Prejudice teaches us how to expose and condemn the vanity inherent in both pride and prejudice. "A sort of natural self-consequence" might be permissible, but "needless precipitance" should be deplored. Anyone who might "think with pleasure of his own importance" should be weeded out by a selection panel. In assessing applications, such a panel would need to guard against "a mixture of servility and self-importance ... which promises well".
Pomposity and pretension would be dissected, as they were by the Bennet family and as they should have been in David Cameron's toffy England. During the unhappy Cameron interlude, the cabinet too often resembled the risible, minor personages in an Austen novel. That was a novelty. A fair number of British postwar luminaries seemed drawn instead from the more dishevelled bit parts in Dickens' novels.
For Austen, self-importance connotes "nothingness", which in turn is constituted from vanity, ignorance and a reluctance to find oneself continually reading. Any whiff of "nothingness" should be taboo for performance managers. Detecting trace elements of "nothingness" could serve as a more sophisticated version of a pub test.
Similarly, those picking leaders might beware the appearance of humility, "often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast". As a corollary, discerning judges might praise "a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous". An interviewing panel might recognise straight away how neatly that last description fit Austen herself.
Those marking performance may learn that "composure of temper" is much to be admired. Even during feeding frenzies at Old Parliament House, we acknowledged that calm "composure of temper" was a virtue that could never be overestimated. Calm Austen took for granted - but she esteemed its connotations - poise, timing and wit. So should we.
Conversely, Austen advises that "whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable". Apparently, calculation and connivance are acceptable: they are, after all, prerequisites to marrying off a household full of daughters. Cunning, though, is a low act, especially for a woman possessed of many more worthy attributes.
Imagine finding something useful to say during a performance assessment of a candidate who had quietly resolved that "it was her business to be satisfied - and certainly her temper to be happy". Someone like that would have learned to "comprehend" the world and themselves; they would probably be reading a good book while waiting for the talk.
- Mark Thomas is a Canberra-based writer.
