The first half of Chapter 3 Service in the book "Kinds of Power" by James Hillman

From the book "Kinds of power : a guide to its intelligent uses" by James Hillman.  Copyright © 1995 by James Hillman.  Published by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

PART 1:  The Changing Heroics of Power
Introduction
Efficiency
Growth
Service
Maintenance

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Chapter 3  Service

By proposing that we alter our perspective on efficiency and growth, I am aiming to take down the old heroics of business as battle, conquest, victory and reward, and their shadows, passivity, imprisonment, defeat and loss.  I am seeking to adapt to the actualities of a coming century in which another sort of courage, another style of enterprise will have to obtain: a style that is also heroic but cast in another mold.  To be bold and brave, to set forth into unknown country, to rescue the endangered city, may mean taking the risk of letting go of the old ideas of heroics, such as going it alone, keeping others in line, stone-walling and wielding a ruthless ax.  If the GNP of the United States has shifted from the heroics of production to a primarily service economy which provides, it is said 100 percent of all new jobs, then we have to do some serious reevaluation of service.  Yet the very idea of service stands in the way of optimizing service itself.

Service offends deep strata of human dignity.  We may all want service, but who wants to give it?  For service still means 'menial' service (not banking, brokering, telephoning, teaching, installing, diagnosing or writing).  The first trouble lies in the word, which invites in its cousins---serf, servile, servant, servitude, servility, all descendants from the common Latin ancestor, 'servus,' slave.  Service, as it is defined in our culture, is hardly empowering, or empowering only to those persons who can command service and the system for which we slave.  Political promises to get the country moving again cannot be delivered unless the service sector delivers good service.  But what is good service?  How can we think about a service economy if the idea echoes back to a slave economy?

From what we have just seen in regard to efficiency, we cannot improve service merely by making it more efficient---that is, fast, frictionless and fault-free.  If that was all there was to improving service, then reliable digital equipment, optic fiber, satellites, robots, software---in other words, more productive impersonal systems (gas chambers and cremation ovens?)---would take care of the problem.  In fact, the personal factor would be more and more eliminated---but then what about "jobs"?

Moreover, can improved systems of service delivery, better hardware and software, alone improve the quality of service?  When a restaurant owner puts in a second door side by side with the sole existing one between dining room and kitchen, thereby facilitating single-direction traffic through each door, he is probably making faster, and less subject to friction and fault, the delivery of food to table and bussing dishes to washer.  But does this necessarily improve the quality of relations between diner and waiter?  In Stangl's concentration camp there were great technological refinements; using the goals of fast, frictionless and fault-free, Treblinka provided superb service.  Ingenuity, technical efficiency, impersonal objectivity may implement delivery, but do they complete the picture of good service?  Are there benchmarks?  Models?

Good service as measured by the standards of the well-heeled elite moves away from impersonal delivery toward a more personal and individualized touch.  A concierge on each hotel floor, private hospital room with private nurse, more attendants per passenger in first-class air travel, chauffeured car or valet parking, a flow of personal hands-on attention:  decorators, hair-stylists, tailors, masseurs, financial planners.  Good service by this standard simply wants "someone to talk with who can do well, and respectfully, what I ask for."  Notice the five components in this definition:  a human person, with language skills and sensitivity, adequate to the task, as judged by the recipient or customer.  This is a far cry from automatic electronic devices.  So which way do we go in thinking about service:  more systematized or more personalized?

According to the Swedish thinker Evert Gummesson, the main mistake in all thinking about service is that we are hardly thinking about it at all.  The first research centers focusing on the subject in business and public affairs were started only in the mid eighties (Karlstad, Sweden, and Arizona State, Tempe), so that 'most ideas of service have been imported from ideas of production,' as if good service could be defined by criteria of productivity. [Evert Gummesson, "Service Productivity: A Blasphemous Approach," Dept. of Business Administration, University of Stockholm, 1992; and "Can Implementation Be Taught?" ibid., 1991.]

I am contesting this approach with all the vigor I can muster by drawing an exaggerated opposition between productivity and service.  They need to be kept clearly distinct because they grow out of fundamentally different psychological attitudes, even archetypally different styles of existence.  Our habitual ideas insist that to serve is closer to surrender; to produce, more like conquering.  Production masters material; service submits to it.  In the language of myth, our ideas of productive employment indicate the influence of Prometheus, the Greek Titan, upon the do-it-yourself ego, or of Hephaistos, the Olympian craftsman and arms maker, because production constructs: whereas service employment, because it protects, conserves and furthers, more likely indicates Hestia, the Goddess of the hearth.  She is almost invisible in her service, although instrumental in maintaining the daily round.  Or our idea of service could also be more Hermetic, after Hermes, the God and master of media and mediation, because service deals, exchanges and communicates messages impersonally without involvement in the message itself.

Gummesson's main complaint is that to think adequately about service, we must free it from the productivity paradigm.  Moreover, we must first recognize how entrenched we are in the paradigms that have worked so well so far, even when these paradigms force services on the recipient who feels these innovations as impositions.

Here I am referring to service that anticipates needs for a product, even invents needs, entrapping the consumer into wanting what he does not need.  Good service becomes defined as delivery of product that links, or chains, the consumer to the production facilities and their over-capacity.  Production, rather than scaled to meet the needs of the market and harnessed by these actual needs, sets the pace, requiring the market to serve the needs of production.  Good service can hardly be defined by delivery of product without the consuming population being thrown into an Orwellian nightmare of forced consumption trying to satisfy the increase of invented needs.  ("You can never get enough of what you don't really want," said Eric Hoffer.)  In short, the production model of thinking about service serves consumption (as a last stage of the production process), but not the consumer.

Because we have had more than a hundred and fifty years of rapid, innovative, technological solutions that improve service delivery, we continue to imagine along the same paths, sometimes deaf to suggestions that service can improve by 'non'- technological means.  The old cliche holds:  new wars are fought with the last war's weapons and by the last war's generals.  Past ideas that once worked determine approaches to new problems.

As service machines replace physical labor---washing clothes, washing cars, washing floors---and as computer chips and software replace mental labor, our ideas of service remain tied to labor-saving devices.  At the same time, surplus and inadequately paid labor have become the major concerns of futurists as well as the major parasite sucking the vitality of Western capitalism.

In the 1950s the Western idea of an efficient steel mill employed the fewest people per ton of product:  in China the most efficient steel plant gave the most employment and had the highest ratio of persons per ton.  Today we may tilting toward that Chinese thinking as employment becomes as important as productivity for the well-being of the nation.  And it is in the service sector where the new jobs are found even as the imagination of that sector remains fastened to the old paradigms of productivity.

Because the imagination of business and industry remains under the spell of the productivity paradigm, a paradigm that favors high tech/low touch employment, we continue to devalue the obverse side of the coin so necessary for service:  high touch/low tech.  And so our society continues to foment an under-rewarded, disrespected, resentful and recalcitrant workforce, waiting for the lottery to lift them from the degradation inherent in the very idea of their jobs.  So long as good service means "eliminating what does not need to be done" (the "form follows function" theory of modernist architecture applied to human services), we will have barren no-frills service stripped of fantasy, restricting the imaginative power in those who serve.  Good service "takes the extra step," "goes out of its way," shows imaginative variations, finds precise ways of pleasing.  It calls on imagination and delights the imagination as well as the senses.  It is more Baroque (Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel; Caravaggio and Rubens) than Bauhaus (functionalism and simplicity).

To move our ideas of service, we will have to clear away the usual discourse obsessively focused on delivery, implementation, rationalization and performance, with models drawn from McDonald's quick-serve systems and Federal Express's quick telephone response rule.  The reduction to simplistics of the human delight in serving---caring, mending, nursing, teaching, cleaning, answering, helping, fixing, greeting, conserving, easing, feeding, leading---can only vitiate (spoil or impair) all our attempts at quality improvement on which the economy depends.

What after all is "quality" but the approximation to an ideal---that is, the idea of quality closes the gap between an actual material event and an idealized perfect form.  By aiming at perfection, quality reminds the soul of ideal beauty.  "Perfect service," we say.  A quality chemical has not been degraded by substitutes, attempting to be 100 percent pure.  A quality machine tool tolerates only micro-dimensional imperfections.  A quality service brings otherworldly expressions of praise:  superb, graceful, beautiful, divine, marvelous, wonderful.  As an 'aesthetic' gesture, good service pleases both giver and recipient by the beauty of the performance, thereby enhancing life and adding value to an event that would otherwise be only a transaction.

This aesthetic (artistic, beautiful) idea of quality offers a different base for the acknowledged superiority of Japanese quality.  I believe we have wrongly attributed that superiority to a set of economic and psychological factors only:  the conformity of their workforce and the homogeneity of their population; their intense school pressure assuring habits of concentration and long attention span; their management-labor teamwork; their disciplined competitiveness from top to bottom; their traditions of obedience to rules (specifications), even to their "shame culture," in which errors become psychologically intolerable.

To these factors supposedly accounting for Japanese quality, I would add their aesthetic sensibility that is essential both to the decorum of Japanese daily life and to the complexities of their imagistic language.  From the beginning, the Japanese mind is set in a culture that pays devout attention to sensate details.  Their hobbies in the refined arts---flower arrangement, tea ceremony, calligraphy, martial arts and weapons, miniaturization, painstaking handcrafts, garden appreciation, food preparation, traditional dance---as well as the subtle infinitesimal (extremely small) variety of gestures in the Noh (traditional Japanese masked drama with dance and song) performances bespeak a "precision consciousness" of sensate aesthetic qualities in an attempt at the ideal.  Precision consciousness is what we call "quality control."

Of course, this objective, aesthetic impersonality can lead to empty formalism and the stultifying stiff mannerism that Americans see all too often in Japanese procedures.  Any mode casts its shadow.  I am not suggesting that we imitate the Japanese mode of service because it is better.  I am rather suggesting that we notice that Japanese delivery of quality results from a precision consciousness based in an aesthetic tradition.

Quality service, then, enhances life by keeping one eye always on the ideal, striving for the purity of perfection.  Of course the ideal cannot be achieved, for that is the nature of "ideal," which explains why an ideal is not simply a benchmark standard.  "Ideal" implies qualities that are beyond any preset description.  They are only pointers to how things should be and, perhaps, how they desire to be, as if something in each moment of life wants to transcend itself.  Perhaps improvement is not only a human desire.  Perhaps progress toward perfection, toward the realization of the ideal, is inherent in the very nature of things, which service recognizes by doing what it can to support this desire for enhancement, bringing out of each thing its best possible performance.  This is the spiritual impulse that is the true root of service.  Our service in life and our service to life attempt to return whatever we do to a utopic vision, the ideal of heaven, which each of us feels in the heart as an aesthetic joy whenever something is done really right.

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