The authors that inspire my work

Some books one reads, and some books one works with for decades. Psychologie de la motivation belongs, for me, to the second kind. In it, Diel builds something rare: a theory of motivation that flatters no one. Neither the individual, never simply a victim of his context since nothing happens in him that is not first psychically motivated; nor the society, whose disorders of values he sees lucidly. Its keystone — vanity as primordial fault, unique cause of blindness, with a thousand fickle faces (exaltation, anger, despair, flattery, self-pity) — has a fecundity I have never ceased to test on ground Diel himself never trod: the enterprise.

For that is where I have made it work. The overestimation and underestimation of self and others, the four errors of evaluation he identifies, are encountered every day in teams — in the executive besotted with his strategic plan as in the collaborator walled up in denial or accusation. His distinction between vitally grounded values and false values, between right esteem and distorted esteem, has given me the framework of what I was looking for: to understand why technically impeccable organisations produce disengagement, and why no system of reward and punishment remedies it. Diel's answer: because behaviour proceeds from the subject's inner dynamic, of which the social is only the context — one does not “motivate” another; one creates or destroys the conditions of his motivation.

He will be reproached for his apparent harshness, his uncompromising refusal of sentimentality and self-pity. I see in it the opposite of harshness: a hand extended to whoever agrees to step out of his postures for a mature action. Seventy-five years on, this demanding book remains of a topicality that the fashion of commodified well-being makes almost cruel. It is one of the three pillars on which I have built my own work, and the one I recommend starting with.

There are two ways to approach Paul Diel. Through theory, with Psychologie de la motivation, which sets out his reading of vanity and false values. Or through the workshop, with this book here, which shows how one works. I would readily recommend the workshop: it is there, in practising it, that one understands what the instrument is worth.

The thesis is simple and dizzying. Symbolic language is not a poetic decor laid over ideas: it is the natural mode of expression of the mind, a language in its own right, shared by all — dreamers, poets, the sick, shamans and the authors of myths. Diel establishes its grammar with an artisan's patience. Each figure in the dream narrative is not a floating symbol to be interpreted according to one's mood, but an element of a coherent system in which father, monster, sea and hero occupy determined positions in the psychic economy. Reading is conducted on three distinct planes — the real, the linguistic, the symbolic — and it is their crossing that provides the proof.

This book has given me a method I have used for more than twenty years, far beyond dreams. I applied it to accounts of near-death experience: their structural permanence, across cultures and eras that nothing else connects, forbids treating them as clinical anecdotes and obliges us to read them as myth in Diel's sense — that is, as the statement of a truth of the life of the mind. But I use it just as much in meetings. For in an organisation, one rarely speaks literally: one says one thing for another, one assigns roles, one replays old scenes — and whoever hears only the first level understands nothing of what is at stake.

The reproach one will make of Diel is the one made of every interpretative method: that it finds what it seeks. He forestalled it, precisely by imposing the joint examination of the three planes, which forbids indulgent readings. Still, this book demands an active reader: one does not consume it, one exercises it. Which is, I believe, the definition of a master.

One last thing. Symbolic language is not a dead language, since it is the language of the mind — and our age's obstinate effort to listen only to the literal sense is not a victory of rigour: it is an impoverishment whose effects we measure every day.

Of all Mauss's texts, this one — written with Henri Hubert, too often forgotten — has most durably shaped my own reflection. Its thesis holds in few words and has not finished disturbing: magic is not the mistake of primitives ill-informed of the laws of physics; it is a social institution of real efficacy, whose condition is neither trickery nor credulity, but collective belief. The rite produces nothing if the group does not enter it; it truly produces as soon as the group believes in it enough to commit itself. And the magician is neither duped nor a charlatan: he knows his artifice and its efficacy together.

I have spent a part of my professional life in organisations, and I have seen nothing else there. A company is a magic circle: a proclaimed ambition, displayed values, distributed roles, rules, a measure of performance — a set that produces strictly nothing by itself, and produces everything as soon as the actors subscribe to it. The collective outcome does not come from machines or procedures: it emerges from the mobilisation of the psychic forces present. When rationalist minds are astonished that a technically perfect project fails, Hubert and Mauss have had the answer since 1903: they forgot to bring the participants into the circle. And when the moderns invoke without blushing the “invisible hand” of markets or the “miracles” of technology, they do exactly what they believe the sorcerers do.

Read alongside the Essai sur le don, this text sketches a complete mechanism: magic acts on things through the intermediary of the gods, the gift acts on men through the intermediary of things. Whoever wants to understand why human collectives hold together — or unravel — will find more here than in many treatises of management. It is from this small centenarian essay that I drew the concept around which my own work is organised.

This book gave me more than a method: it gave me, as a side-effect, the concept around which I have built all my work since. I must therefore begin with a debt.

Kervern and Boulenger propose here a science of danger — the cindyniques — whose key is a five-dimensional space: facts, models, rules, objectives and values. Danger, they say, does not arise from a technical failure but from the dissonances between these five planes: when what an organisation knows, what it believes, what it prescribes, what it aims for and what it holds to be good cease to be coherent. It is rigorous, it is operative, and it is of a rightness twenty years of practice have not belied.

Still, I remember the day I had to explain it. I was in the United States, before a room of American executives, and it appeared to me with sudden clarity that not one of them would listen for three minutes to a lecture on “the cindynic hyperspace of danger”. I said “magic circle”. They loved it, and set about taking notes. At the time, I thought I had merely translated for an audience. I later understood I had said something else — and something more exact.

For what cindynic formalisation cannot name is what makes the whole hold together: the magical share. The five dimensions do not produce coherence, they measure it; what produces it is the adherence of the actors to a pact that exists only because they believe in it — exactly like the magician's circle, which does nothing until the group enters it. I do not blame the authors: their quality as engineers, which makes the strength of the model, doubtless prevented them from even conceiving that share, let alone expressing it. An engineer cannot write that his object rests on a belief.

It is therefore to this book that I owe both my toolkit and the precise place where I had to go beyond it. One cannot ask more of a work of method.

There are foundational texts everyone cites, and foundational texts almost no one reads. “Saint Besse” belongs to the second kind, and it is an injustice each reader can redress in a few hours — the study is short, limpid, and of a modernity stunning for a text from 1913.

Robert Hertz, the most gifted of Mauss's students, does here what his master theorised: he climbs. At two thousand metres, in the Alps, a rock draws thousands of mountaineers every 10 August, coming from valleys that ignore one another all the rest of the year. Hertz observes everything: the procession and its quarrels of precedence, the communities that dispute the ownership of the saint, the fragments of stone detached and carried away as relics, and that admirable doubling — for the clergy, Besse is a soldier of the Theban legion; for the shepherds, he is one of their own, martyred on his mountain. Same rock, same saint, two readings — and each speaks the truth of those who carry it.

This short text demonstrates, half a century before the great syntheses, that a material object is never either pure thing or pure symbol, but both at once; that the same place is a stake of worship for some and of conflict between others, a few metres apart; and that social geography overturns physical geography — this mountain that maps give as the obstacle between the valleys is in reality their centre, the only point where they form society. Whoever observes a modern organisation — its venerated machines, its avoided places, its quarrels of precedence — will find everything, absolutely everything, in these pages. Hertz fell at the front in 1915, at thirty-three. Mauss piously edited his papers. Read “Saint Besse” for what it is: the brief masterpiece of a field sociology never surpassed on its object — and, for my part, the absolute reference for what I call, elsewhere, social geography.

Louis Dumont poses a question almost no one dares to formulate: what if the individual were not self-evident? Not the concrete human being — which has always existed — but the individual as supreme value, as the base unit from which one would legitimately think society. Dumont shows that this configuration is a historical exception, born in the West, long elaborated from early Christianity to the Enlightenment, and now so obvious to our eyes that we take it for human nature itself.

His method is comparative and his gesture consists in making us foreigners to ourselves. Against modern individualism he sets holism — those societies where the totality takes precedence over its parts, where a person is defined first by his place in a whole. It is not a matter of preferring one to the other: Dumont is no nostalgic for hierarchies. It is a matter of understanding that our ideology, precisely because it believes itself universal, is blind to relations — it sees individuals and contracts where there also operate belongings, debts, hierarchies of values that it refuses to name and that act no less for that.

It is here that this difficult book becomes redoubtably useful for whoever observes organisations. Autonomy, individual performance, the work contract between equal parties are celebrated — and one is then astonished that the collective unravels, that belongings take refuge in sub-groups, that what really holds teams together appears on no dashboard. Dumont gives the key: our instruments do not measure relations because our ideology does not see them. The reader of Mauss will find here his most rigorous heir — the one who understood that the Essai sur le don was not an ethnographic curiosity but a machine for dismantling our self-evidences.

The work is demanding, sometimes arid, and one may debate his reading of Christian history. But it does what few books do: it makes visible the water in which we swim.

Here is a book that calmly ruins the oldest lie in the world: “it's human nature”. Scott dismantles here, archaeological sources in hand, the heroic narrative of the “Neolithic revolution” — that fable of progress in which humanity, tired of wandering, would have invented agriculture, the city and the State in one same civilising impulse. The reality he restores is quite otherwise: the first city-States were machines to capture, retain and make produce a human livestock, so harsh for the greater number that they were fled as soon as one could. They did not win because they were loved; they won because around them, millennium after millennium, the space to live otherwise was closing in. And the choice of the crops themselves — wheat rather than everything that hides, disperses or ripens at unpredictable dates — obeyed the requirements of the tax collector: predictable, measurable, storable, taxable. One thinks one is reading archaeology; one is reading a genealogy of management.

For it is truly there that this book seized me. Whoever has frequented modern organisations will recognise everything: the capture and retention of “talents”, the enclosures made as much to retain as to protect, the production dictated by what is measured rather than by what nourishes. The entrepreneur who says “to produce wheat” is literally right, even if he does not know why. But the decisive lesson lies elsewhere: if this model has a beginning — a consolidation barely five thousand years old, a tidal wave in the 19th and 20th centuries —, then it has a composition, and what is composed can be recomposed. What society has made, society can unmake.

One reservation, which is also a tribute: Scott's sociology, admirable in its diagnosis, remains silent on the deep cause and on the remedy — not all systems are by essence perverse dominations; they become so through the loss of the meaning of their own values, and this is played out also in each conscience. Another companion of the road is needed for that. But to free the gaze from false fatality, I know no better book — it is the third pillar on which I have built my own work.

It takes a certain nerve to entitle “age of abundance” the study of the societies the West has most stubbornly described as miserable. Sahlins's nerve rests, however, on a simple operation: counting. How many hours a day do hunter-gatherers actually devote to their subsistence? The data he assembles are dizzying — three to five hours, often less, with entire days without productive activity, and an unconcern for tomorrow that scandalised the European observers far more than it worried the persons concerned. The rest of the time was theirs.

Sahlins draws from this a definition that turns ours inside out: abundance is not the quantity of goods accumulated, it is the ratio between desires and the means of satisfying them. One can therefore reach it by two opposed paths — produce much, or desire little. Our economy has chosen the first and set it up as a natural self-evidence; the so-called primitive societies had chosen the second, and lived in an abundance our statistics are structurally incapable of measuring, since they count only what is produced and never what is lived. It is here that this ethnological book becomes a book about us. Whoever questions well-being at work eventually stumbles on the question Sahlins asks obliquely: what is the point of improving the conditions of an activity that absorbs the essential of our days, if we never question the place that activity occupies in a life? Nietzsche had put it brutally — he who has not two-thirds of his day to himself is a slave. Sahlins demonstrates it patiently, figures in hand, and without ever giving in to nostalgia for a lost paradise: it is not a matter of returning to the Kalahari, but of ceasing to believe that our relation to work goes without saying.

He has been reproached for overstating his case, and debates on his data remain open. It matters little: even corrected, his demonstration has definitively cracked a self-evidence. That is what one asks of a great book.

Here is a book that does what no one was doing anymore: looking. Fourquet and Cassely have crisscrossed the country, noted down the signs of commercial zones, counted gyms and nail salons, observed what becomes of former factories, listened to the names given to new housing developments. From this patient collection emerges a France that no televised debate describes: neither that of electoral maps nor that of slogans, but the one that has built itself before our eyes over forty years, precisely because we were not looking at it.

What seized me is that this book is an exercise in social geography in the strongest sense. Every object it describes — a roundabout, a wasteland, a logistics warehouse, a padel court — is never merely a material reality: it is also a sign, valued or devalued, and one understands nothing of the landscape if one refuses to read both together. Today's French landscape reads as a palimpsest: the strata of industry, commerce, tourism, logistics superimpose upon it, and each era has left there what it honoured as well as what it let die. Fourquet and Cassely further show what I find again in all organisations: the progressive saturation of space by activities dictated from above, in spite of the populations who live there — and the retreat of these populations onto sub-groups of proximity that consolidate themselves through their mutual oppositions much more than through a common project.

One may reproach the work its profusion, sometimes dizzying, and a certain reluctance to conclude. I believe that is its virtue: the authors prefer to give us back our gaze rather than provide us with a thesis to recite. What we do with that gaze afterwards belongs to us. For my part, I no longer cross a business park the same way — nor, for that matter, an open-plan office.