My Response to Matt's "Blog number 10: The Yarur Legacy"

What Matt said:

"This week I want to talk specifically about the Peter Winn book we are reading for prof. Stark's discussion questions. I have been doing my questions lately, and I am liking this book significantly more than the others this year so far, so I would like to talk about why that is for this week's blog. I am going to talk specifically about the 3 Yarur leaders that the book describes; Jorge, Juan, and Amador and their leadership. I personally found their systems and the shifts between them to be comical. The father Juan was the man who set up the company, and he did so during pretty bad times, with a lot of outside support. He set up a very loose system where he was seen as a father figure, walking among his men, and being friendly with not only the employees, but their families as well. He took advantage of his incredible skill in business as well as his charismatic character. The people liked him, and were happy to work for the successful company during hard times. But then he died, and his most successful son took over the reigns for the company. This shift to me was the funny one, as he took everything his father had put together, and threw it out the window. The Taylor system was implied in the factory, half the workers laid off, while production doubled. Jorge focused completely on productivity and efficiency of the factory, and the factory benefited in exchanged for unhappy workers. He created a gap between the workers and leaders of the factory, where his father had worked hard to prevent that very thing. This is one of those scenarios where one could imagine the father rolling in his grave with what his son was doing. But at the same time, he was a businessman, so perhaps not so much, it is just difficult to tell whether this was a move that would have been supported or not. It is also difficult to choose whether the boost in production was worth the decrease in worker happiness. I for one think so, but then again, ultimately the workers take over, so who knows. But then Amador takes over from his brother, and he tried to essentially return to his father's ways while retaining the productivity. He tried to return to the paternal image, but he lacks the charisma of his father, and the workers hated him. He kept the productivity high through further worsening the working conditions, to the point where a 3 minute bathroom break got the worker yelled at. The people increased their dislike for management, and eventually take the factory.

In a single generation, the Yarur leaders lost all the support of the workers, and completely revamped the system of the workers. It is just funny and strange to me that brothers had such different ideas from one anther and their father as well."

My response:

"I also thought that the shifts of leadership between Juan, Jorge, and Amador were interesting. I found Juan and Amador’s paternalism to be kind of creepy—who wants their boss to act like a father figure, when he is really just trying to manipulate you to keep you loyal? I was actually pretty surprised when Amador got control over the mill from Jorge; in these kinds of cases, I usually expect the “most capitalist” system to be the one that prevails. Jorge did manage to increase productivity and efficiency (but, like you said, in exchange for the workers hating him), and it was strange that Amador would want to reverse some of the changes that Jorge had made."

(http://mattsinclair17.blogspot.com/2014/03/blog-number-10-yarur-legacy.html?showComment=1395592270033#c5154593644147211520)