Ideas from a Matchmaker

By Marshall Loeb

Executive View

He is so well known back home in Sweden that headline writers identify him by his initials alone: P.G. He has a small circle of close friends: professors, psychiatrists and other intellectuals; he relishes their barbs at business because they challenge him to "see the other side." He is married to a social worker, who looks like a Bergman beauty. He has written three books about society, industry, the future. He is a world-class sailor and plays a folk guitar. At 34, he became president of Sweden's largest insurance company. At 36, he rose to president of Scandinavia's biggest industrial combine, Volvo. Now, at 44, age is beginning to show, but he still is boyishly trim in his blue blazers or weekend jeans. In sum, Pehr Gyllenhammar has it all.

P.G. could spend the next 20 years just keeping his $5 billion multinational growing in the tighteningly competitive auto market. He is busy now negotiating a deal with Renault to swap Swedish shares for French capital and front-wheel technology. But Gyllenhammar has a cause beyond cars. He is going through the world and warning that the industrial nations have a growing problem: "the mismatch between people and jobs."

"Fewer and fewer people are related to jobs that they can identify with," says he. "They see no connection between what they do on the job and what comes out at the end." They spend their lives isolated behind typewriters and computer consoles. Gyllenhammar worries that company chiefs expect the industrial Indians to be machinelike. "If they die little by little every year, nobody cares very much." But millions of workers are becoming fed up, he believes, and the frustrations are rising equally in Europe, Japan and North America.

One group trying to figure out remedies is the Public Agenda Foundation, started a few years ago by Cyrus Vance and Opinion Analyst Daniel Yankelovich. It is a business-academic think tank that uses Yankelovich's survey methods in six countries, and Gyllenhammar is its European chief. The early studies lead him to suspect that one American in four is distressed about his or her lack of a job or conditions of work. The young among them are increasingly disruptive; the older ones feel discarded, particularly if they have been laid off with some frequency.

Gyllenhammar marvels that almost 11 million Americans have found jobs in the past three expansive years, but he worries that large legions are easily laid off when business turns down. It would be wiser, he argues, for companies not to hire so many people in good times and not to fire so many in bad times. Instead of dismissing them, perhaps the company could train them for other jobs, which they would get when business turned up again. Says he: "People take the punishment for your lack of planning. One wonders how these people react when they are hired and laid off so often. What do they tell their children? To whom are they loyal? Certainly not to the company."

The way out of the modern mismatch is to design jobs for people, he says. "It sounds oversimplified, but interest in people does solve problems." Gyllenhammar pleads for chief executives to get the message out that every supervisor has to take a serious personal interest in his own people. The foreman on the production line should have the power to say, "John, you don't seem happy in your job. Perhaps I can speak with the foreman at the next station and get you a transfer."

Volvo has much of this flexibility all down the line. Parts of Gyllenhammar's company even have flexible hours. People can work eight hours or six hours or four hours a day. Nighttime or daytime. Or two people can share a job. Husbands and wives work at the same time, but only six hours each; their combined wage is high, their leisure time is long. Shorter hours make it easier for housewives to take jobs. In one Volvo plant over several years, women have risen from 5% to 35% of the force.

Says Gyllenhammar: "The big problem today is not just to pay people, but also to help them feel they can identify with something in society." That may sound like an excess of Scandinavian idealism, but consider Gyllenhammar's results. Volvo's automobile productivity from 1976 through 1978 jumped 20%. The rise for U.S. private business productivity in that period: 2.4%.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.