Management tips from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens

June 9, 2009 in lessons learned
Tags: management, networking

The following are major management tips drawn from the writings of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, two of history’s favorite authors.

Kindness. How many times must we hear “it takes a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down” before we will actually believe it? Yet most American managers are content to manage, when they could instead lead by example. The example starts with showing kindness to those who work for you, thus building loyalty. Consider Dickens’ description of Mr. Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol:

Spirit of Christmas Past:

He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise.

Scrooge:

It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count them up: what then. The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.

And Jane Austen repeats this thinking in Pride & Prejudice, speaking of Mr. Darcy:

As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people’s happiness were in his guardianship! — how much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow! — how much of good or evil must be done by him!

Engagement. If we want to do business with people, we must reach out to them. Constantly. Here’s Jane Austen again:

Darcy:

I certainly have not the talent which some people possess, of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.

Elizabeth:

My fingers do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women’s do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault — because I would not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman’s of superior execution.

Darcy:

You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you, can think any thing wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.

Networking. We add people to our networks all the time, never certain where those relationships can lead. The strength of the network is in its nonlinear reach. Consider Jane Austen in Sense &ampl Sensibility, where Col. Brandon and Edward Ferrars, who have never met, are connected because both know and value Elinor Dashwood:

Col. Brandon:

I have seen Mr. Ferrars two or three times in Harley Street, and am much pleased with him. He is not a young man with whom one can be intimately acquainted in a short time, but I have seen enough of him to wish him well for his own sake, and as a friend of yours, I wish it still more. I understand that he intends to take orders. Will you be so good as to tell him that the living of Delaford, now just vacant, as I am informed by this day’s post, is his, if he think it worth his acceptance; but that, perhaps, so unfortunately circumstanced as he is now, it be nonsense to appear to doubt; I only wish it were more valuable.

Humor. Jane Austen, again in Pride & Prejudice, shows us that humor and a default tendency toward happiness can lighten the burden of our lives:

Mr. Bennet: