How a Soviet miner from the 1930s helped create today’s intense corporate workplace culture
- Written by Bogdan Costea, Professor of Management and Society, Lancaster University
One summer night in August, 1935, a young Soviet miner named Alexei Stakhanov managed to extract 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift. This was nothing short of extraordinary (according to Soviet planning, the official average for a single shift was seven tonnes).
Stakhanov shattered this norm by a staggering 1,400%. But the sheer quantity...