[ The Opportunist ] by Niger Lim

Monday January 21, 2008

[Managing Mindset by MORTEN LUNDAL]

DiGi.Com CEO shares his thoughts on the necktie. According to him, it suggests formalism and hierachy which is not good for the business or the individual. 

I THINK the day will come when a boy will see a picture from our days and point to the tie and ask his daddy (or mommy), “What is that?”  

The parent will answer something like this: “It’s a clothing habit that was prevalent for 200 years or so, especially for men in politics and business.  

Morten Lundal thinks that the necktie symbolises an artificial distance between individuals

It disappeared as organisations and leaders started to question all basic fundamentals of their own framework, including their dress code.”  

We might not see this happen in our lifetime - some changes take time - but I do predict that most of those living after us will not use the tie. 

It’s interesting to take an “outside looking in” view on a typical business meeting. Mostly middle-aged men are sitting around a table, armed with mobile phones, papers and cups of coffee. Under each chin hangs this piece of textile - a two-ft-long narrow piece of cloth, woven or knitted. A bit strange, isn’t it? 

The first few thousand years, human beings did pretty well without using a tie. I guess people thought about “purpose” when they chose to dress in the morning.  

A textile under the chin does not provide warmth, nor does it hide some very essential body part. 

While the history of ties can be traced back to the first emperor of China, the tie as we now know it appeared along with the industrial revolution in the late 1800s.  

By the 1920s, the tie in various derivatives spread across the western world and beyond, to a large extent driven by British gentlemen who used the tie as one way of visually distinguishing themselves from ? well, from non-gentlemen, so to speak.  

And at some point, the tie became defined as “normal” for certain social settings and situations, and here we are, most of us taking it for granted without question. 

In the last 50 years, the tie has gone through many turbulent changes. The salaried corporate man is actually a rather new invention and the uniform chosen for the white-collar worker was just that, white shirt and the mentioned tie.  

In the 50s, most men in “real jobs” wore ties, even at home for dinner and during weekends. 

Then the Sergeant Pepper generation challenged everything, including the tie. And throughout the 80s and 90s, the tie went through both strong following and equally strong anti-sentiment, symbolising a great debate regarding conformity, expectation and self-expression. 

The IT generation raised the novel idea that what you thought was important, not how you looked. Since that view often was followed by a booming share price, it was seen as a plausible alternative thesis. 

Businesses then invented the weird concept of “casual Friday.” Casual Fridays became just as uniformed as the other four days of the week, but now the uniform was “casual.”  

Normally, casual clothing should mean whatever you feel comfortable in, but the human need to not differentiate from peer group norms struck again and the definition of what was “casual” became as tight as the suit.  

People look to their leaders for signals and direction. Words are powerful, but examples speak more strongly. I never wear a tie in the office, and that does say something to everyone in our company of who we want to be. Always wearing a tie says something; never wearing a tie says something else.  

“Why spend time on the role of the tie?” you might now understandably ask. Well, to me a tie symbolises two things. First, it symbolises an artificial distance we create between individuals and also between people’s home and work-lives.  

We take on a certain persona when we leave for work. Not only do we dress differently for rather hard-to-understand reasons, but we also talk differently, behave differently, and think differently than we do as “private people.”  

A tie suggests formalism and a reliance on hierarchy that I don’t think is good for either the business or for the individual.  

It also symbolises a thoughtlessness - a failure to challenge the most basic current assumptions. We simply take on (literally around our necks, in this case) something previously defined as “normal”, never taking the time to re-think its relevance to us (or to our customers, our employees, our societies?) today. 

Is that so important? Well, not in itself, but it is interesting that we human beings living today take so for granted a thing that is so temporary.  

There are a number of elements in life that we take for granted which are not so obvious when you actually think about them.  

Look around. What do you and other people take for granted, and which of these assumptions could you change that will lead to at least a slight improvement in quality of life.  

If you find some of those, like the tie (it is rather uncomfortable, isn’t it?), maybe they are worthwhile studying further. Life’s bigger inventions and also businesses’ smaller innovations come from challenging existing beliefs. What do you want to challenge today? 

As always, I would look for your comments, questions and views at my email, mindset@digi.com.my.