Bioss International

Bioss was founded in 1967 by Elliott Jaques. Jaques was a medical doctor and psychoanalyst born in Canada who moved to the UK during World War II to become a founding member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. Believing that in response to Freud's comment that 'the mature adult is the one who can love and work,' far less emphasis had been placed on work than on love, Jaques sought to redress the balance. Soon after the war he began a thirty-year working relationship with Wilfred Brown, the managing director of a British engineering company called Glacier Metal. Brown was Minister of State for the Board of Trade in the UK from 1965 to 1970. Jaques and Brown were members of a postwar generation that was looking again at the relationships between society, production and employees. They shared an interest in efficiency and fairness, their skills were complementary and their working relationship remarkable for its steadfastness and the ideas it produced.