About J.B. Hardy
Upon graduating from university, John Berling Hardy apprenticed for his chartered accountancy designation with an international audit firm. Performing audits on Fortune 500 companies afforded John Berling Hardy the opportunity to observe a wide range of corporate environments. Also, it provided him with valuable insight into the internal dynamics of a large professional firm.
Specifically, it offered him a view into the stratified organizational structure typical of the Game. The partners, the principles of the firm, occupied the higher strata, with all the remaining levels of professional, from auditor through to the managers, were clustered together in the next rung. Finally, the support staff occupied the lowest strata. This caste system had a profound impact on the corporate culture of the firm creating an environment which was highly political and aggressively competitive.
After leaving the international firm John Hardy worked with the government of Ontario in the office of the Auditor General as a senior value for money auditor. While at the government he specialized in designing audits for individual organizational units within larger ministries. During that time John Hardy gained valuable insight into common misconceptions about the nature of efficiency. Our linear mindset promotes and rigid work hard, rather than flexible work smart attitude tends to produce suboptimal results. By narrowly defining an organization’s mandate and compartmentalizing it into small, controllable subroutines which are easy to replicate, we are squandering the potential of the employees’ ingenuity and creativity. Also, it does little to promote a warm congenial environment in the workplace. This then leads to absenteeism, poor performance and high turnover.
His experiences there led him to develop an alternative approach to value for money auditing, Bottoms Up! Auditing. Stressing flow over compliance, it was remarkably successful in eliciting the insights from the front line stuff who are directly involved in the delivery of the service. This ‘going into the trenches approach’ broke down the usual resistance encountered by the auditor, encouraging a more collegial, horizontal relationship between auditors and the client staff.
John Berling Hardy’s time at the Szeged Paprika and Meat Processing Plant in southern Hungary, as crisis manager, was a life defining experience. The company, one of the largest in the local region, was experiencing difficulty and John Hardy was sent in by the lead secured creditor, one of Hungary’s major banks, to do a work out. Ostensibly, this was because of problems related to the liberalization of the economy as it moved from a centrally controlled to a market based economy in the early nineteen nineties.
Even though these challenges were real enough, they concealed another, much darker, reality. This was that a fraud which enlisted the participation of the senior management of the plant, as well as the local bank’s management (John Berling Hardy’s employer), was the real driver of events behind the scenes.
John Berling Hardy’s experiences at the Szeged plant was the inspiration for this book and provide the underlying case study interlaced into the book. The happenings at the plant are a microcosm which serves to illustrate the essential elements of the Game.
Upon returning from Hungary, John Hardy returned to the family business, the construction and development of luxury homes in Toronto. Even though in a city the size of Toronto there are thousands of builders, architects, and real estate agents plying their trade; at the upper end of the market there is an extremely small selection from each of those categories who monopolize the market. This creates a kind of oligopoly, or club. Small enough for all the Players know one another. Completely self contained, almost hermetically sealed, it creates a kind of ecosystem. This is an extension of the Game from the scale of an individual company to a niche within a larger market.