The Organization Man Page 15
In the conflict of power the academic person has more advantages than laymen suspect. The businessman is awed by him. Considering the somewhat contemptuous way businessmen often describe academia, this sounds farfetched, but you’ll note that the contempt is expressed at a safe distance. In actual practice, the businessman is the biggest sucker in the world for the trappings of scholasticism; and while his own hired intellectuals may lose esteem through continued familiarity, he will take an almost childish delight in introducing as professor a simon-pure visitor from the campus. Even the rawest Ph.D. can command a deference in the business world never accorded him on the campus. In the latter he is just another “mister”; in the business world he becomes a “doctor,” and the executive is in a quandary as to what simulated rank he should be given. “We may not make much money,” one Ph.D. confessed to me, “but, by God, they can’t place us.” There is another, and more important, weapon. The businessman wants more than power; he wants it rationalized, and so long as the academic withholds the final blessing, he keeps a weapon of considerable power. Let him look to it zealously. To repeat the point of these paragraphs: the crux of the problem is not the pressure from business, but the posture of the academics.
There are issues, and vigorous debate of them is more vital than immediate “co-operation.” Communication, yes, but the active kind too—the kind, for example, in which educators do not accept grants for further vocationalism. For the burden of leadership is theirs; instead of looking forward to the upsurge of the humanities so regularly proclaimed every year, educators can serve all of us, businessmen especially, by boldly reasserting the integrity of their own institutions. Those who do will inspire hostility from some businessmen, but business is not monolithic in distrust of the humanities. Not yet.
* “Employment Trends in 1955,” “Employment Trends in 1956,” Frank S. Endicott, Director of Placement, Northwestern University, Journal of College Placement, March 1955 and 1956, respectively. These surveys also indicate that after five years with business the outstanding liberal arts men overtake the specialists in earning capacity. Students, unfortunately, don’t think much about this possibility.
* In one exception Frederick Allis, of Andover School, wrote for Fortune an account of his experiences at an elaborate convention the automotive industry had staged for secondary-school teachers. He didn’t think much of it. The teachers, he said, would really like to know more about business, but they heard only the commonplace (he would never be able to think of trucks any more, he said, except as “the workhorses of industry”) and similarly low-level fare. Outrage greeted the article—it was rotten of Allis to have said such things, many wrote. It did, however, stir some second thoughts by the automotive people, and in the end was possibly more salutary than the bushels of easily won praise solicited.
CHAPTER 9 The Pipe Line
Before we follow the senior into the corporation’s postgraduate training schools, we must pause a moment longer on the campus. For it is here, in one important respect, that these new schools are being shaped. They are a projection of what the senior wants, and more than corporations care to admit, what the senior wants these days has a lot to do with what he gets. Corporation people talk much about the intensive screening by which they have sifted out of the common ruck such a superlative group of recruits for their particular organization. The blunt fact, however, is that these days it is the college senior who does most of the screening. With more job vacancies than there are graduates, the attractive senior will usually have some eight or nine offers to choose from. He does not throw the advantage away.
What he wants, above all, is the guarantee of a training program. Almost every recruiter implies to him that he will find security, happiness, and perpetual advancement if he chooses Ajax, but he is apt to remain visibly unimpressed unless the recruiter can back up the promise with a training program—and a formal, highly organized one too. Seniors don’t leave it at that either. Having narrowed the choice to companies whose brochures promise training (”individual development program tailored to your particular needs” … “no dead-end jobs” … “no ceiling”), the senior starts applying other yardsticks. How long is the training program? Is it a real training program or just afterhours indoctrination about the company? Will he be exposed to many different operations of the company or will he be pigeonholed in a specialty? How will he be rated? Is the program geared to a fixed salary increase schedule?
What he wants is a continuation. He is used to formal training and he is wary of stepping out into the arena without a good deal more. This is one of the reasons he does not incline to the smaller firm; it may offer opportunity, but it offers it too soon. By contrast, big business’s reassuringly institutionalized schools—sometimes complete with classrooms, dormitories, and graduating classes—is an ideal next step. It will defer opportunity until he is ready for it. For the same reason, it offers him far more security; the more the company spends on him, goes a popular line of thought, the less likely is it to let its investment in him lapse. The training program, in short, promises to obviate the necessity of premature decision, and to those concerned because they don’t yet know what kind of subspecialty they want to follow, enrollment in the formal program is a sedative. “We tell them, in effect, ‘You don’t have to make up your mind, “says one executive. “‘Come with us and you will find out while you’re in training.’”
The companies which deliver best on this promise, as a consequence, are the ones that get the most applicants. Students are not easily fooled; by spring they are connoisseurs of placement interviewing, and their information network is quick to pass along the word about specific company situations. If the placement director is energetic he will have checked up with recent alumni as to how well the companies have done by them. If the company welched by taking on more trainees than it would promote, or otherwise exploited them, the placement director then warns his men away from it—though, as we will see later, there are exceptions to the rule.
The placement director is in a sellers’ market, and half the fun of the game for him is to get a most-favored-college position with the companies that do best by trainees. He schools his men in the way to deport themselves with particular recruiters, the weighting of the personality profile each is looking for, the right answers to the curved-ball questions. In some colleges, regular courses have been set up for the task, and seniors can’t enter the placement competition until they’ve taken them. The Carnation Company’s Wallace Jamie, one of the leaders in the field of corporate recruiting, tells of an experience at Indiana University: “I began to notice that every applicant wore a dark-blue suit and a conservative tie and had ready and right answers for most of my questions.” As he had suspected, it turned out that the students had trained for the interview in a special class. Like other recruiters, who have similar experiences, he rather admires their sophistication. The eager beaver of today, he points out, knows the value of not being too eager, and only the company with the first-rate training program can command his attention.*
But corporations have not been setting up training schools simply because seniors want them to. Corporations started experimenting with such programs many years ago, and while the predilections of the young men have been a powerful prod, in time many corporations would have made the shift anyway. For the training schools are not simply a sugar-coating, a more attractively packaged indoctrination; they are a manifestation of a deep change in the organization’s own view of what kind of man it wishes to achieve.
There are two divergent conceptions, and the question of which is to become dominant is still at issue. On the surface the trainee programs of most big corporations would seem very much alike. Beneath such new standardized trappings as testing, automatic rating, rotation, and the like, however, is a fundamental difference in policy.
One type of program sticks to what has been more or less the historic approach. The young man is hired to do a specific job; his orientation is usually brief in
duration, and for many years what subsequent after hours training he will get will be directed at his particular job. If he proves himself executive material he may be enrolled in a management development course, but this is not likely to happen until he is in his mid-thirties.
The newer type of program is more than an intensification of the old. The company hires the young man as a potential manager and from the start he is given to thinking of himself as such. He and the other candidates are put together in a central pool, and they are not farmed out to regular jobs until they have been exposed, through a series of dry-run tasks, to the managerial view. The schooling may last as long as two years and occasionally as long as four or five.
At the risk of oversimplification, the difference can be described as that between the Protestant Ethic and the Social Ethic. In one type of program we will see that the primary emphasis is on work and on competition; in the other, on managing others’ work and on co-operation. Needless to say, there are few pure examples of either approach; whichever way they incline, the majority of training programs have elements of both approaches, and some companies try to straddle directly over the fence. But an inclination there is, and the new training program may prove the best of introductions to the “professional manager” of the future.
To sharpen the fundamental differences, I am going to contrast two outstanding trainee programs. For an example of the first type, I am going to take the training program of the Vick Chemical Company as it was in the late thirties. There are several reasons for the choice. First, it has been one of the best-known programs in the whole personnel field. Second, though it has often been cited as a pioneer example of modern practice, it was in its fundamentals the essence of the Protestant Ethic and so undefiled by change that there was nothing in it which Henry Clews would take exception to. Third, I happen to have gone through it myself. If I grow unduly garrulous in these next pages, I bespeak the reader’s indulgence; I have often pondered this odd experience, and since it furnishes so apt an illustration of certain principles of indoctrination, I would like to dwell on it at some length.
It was a school—the Vick School of Applied Merchandising, they called it. The idea, as it was presented to job-hunting seniors at the time, was that those who were chosen were not going off to a job, but to a postgraduate training institution set up by a farsighted management. In September, some thirty graduates would gather from different colleges to start a year’s study in modern merchandising. There would be a spell of classroom work in New York, a continuing course in advertising, and, most important, eleven months of field study under the supervision of veteran students of merchandising and distribution. Theoretically, we should be charged a tuition, for though we understood we would do some work in connection with our studies, the company explained that its expenses far outweighed what incidental services we would perform. This notwithstanding, it was going to give us a salary of $75 a month and all traveling expenses. It would also, for reasons I was later to learn were substantial, give us an extra $25 a month to be held in escrow until the end of the course.
Let me now point out the first distinction between the Vick program and the more current type. It was not executive training or even junior-executive training. Vick’s did argue that the program would help produce the leaders of tomorrow, and prominent on the walls of the office was a framed picture of a captain at the wheel, with a statement by the president that the greatest duty of management was to bring along younger men. This notwithstanding, the question of whether or not any of us would one day be executives was considered a matter that could very easily be deferred. The training was directed almost entirely to the immediate job. The only exception was an International Correspondence Schools course in advertising, one of the main virtues of which, I always felt, was to keep us so occupied during the week ends that we wouldn’t have time to think about our situation.
The formal schooling we got was of the briefest character. During our four weeks in New York, we learned of Richardson’s discovery of VapoRub, spent a day watching the VapoRub being mixed, and went through a battery of tests the company was fooling around with to find the Vick’s type. Most of the time we spent in memorizing list prices, sales spiels, counters to objections, and the prices and techniques of Plough, Inc., whose Penetro line was one of Vick’s most troublesome competitors. There was no talk about the social responsibilities of business or the broad view that I can remember, and I’m quite sure the phrase human relations never came up at all.
What management philosophy we did get was brief and to the point. Shortly before we were to set out from New York, the president, Mr. H. S. Richardson, took us up to the Cloud Club atop the Chrysler Building. The symbolism did not escape us. As we looked from this executive eyrie down on the skyscraper spires below, Golconda stretched out before us. One day, we gathered, some of us would be coming back up again—and not as temporary guests either. Some would not. The race would be to the swiftest.
Over coffee Mr. Richardson drove home to us the kind of philosophy that would get us back up. He posed a hypothetical problem. Suppose, he said, that you are a manufacturer and for years a small firm has been making paper cartons for your product. He has specialized so much to service you, as a matter of fact, that that’s all he does make. He is utterly dependent on your business. For years the relationship has continued to be eminently satisfactory to both parties. But then one day another man walks in and says he will make the boxes for you cheaper. What do you do?
He bade each one of us in turn to answer.
But how much cheaper? we asked. How much time could we give the old supplier to match the new bid? Mr. Richardson became impatient. There was only one decision. Either you were a businessman or you were not a businessman. The new man, obviously, should get the contract. Mr. Richardson, who had strong views on the necessity of holding to the old American virtues, advised us emphatically against letting sentimentality obscure fundamentals. Business was survival of the fittest, he indicated, and we would soon learn the fact.
He was as good as his word. The Vick curriculum was just that —survival of the fittest. In the newer type of programs, companies will indeed fire incompetents, but a man joins with the idea that the company intends to keep him, and this is the company’s wish also. The Vick School, however, was frankly based on the principle of elimination. It wouldn’t make any difference how wonderful all of us might turn out to be; of the thirty-eight who sat there in the Cloud Club, the rules of the game dictated that only six or seven of us would be asked to stay with Vick. The rest would graduate to make way for the next batch of students.
Another difference between vick’s approach and that now more characteristic became very evident as soon as we arrived in the field. While the work, as the company said, was educational, it was in no sense make-work. Within a few days of our session at the Cloud Club, we were dispatched to the hinterland—in my case, the hill country of eastern Kentucky. Each of us was given a panel delivery truck, a full supply of signs, a ladder, a stock of samples, and an order pad. After several days under the eye of a senior salesman, we were each assigned a string of counties and left to shift for ourselves.
The merchandising was nothing if not applied. To take a typical day of any one of us, we would rise at 6:00 or 6:30 in some bleak boarding house or run-down hotel and after a greasy breakfast set off to squeeze in some advertising practice before the first call. This consisted of bostitching a quota of large fiber signs on barns and clamping smaller metal ones to telephone poles and trees by hog rings. By eight, we would have arrived at a general store for our exercise in merchandising. Our assignment was to persuade the dealer to take a year’s supply all at once, or, preferably, more than a year’s supply, so that he would have no money or shelf space left for other brands. After the sale, or no-sale, we would turn to market research and note down the amount sold him by “chiseling” competitors (i.e., competitors; there was no acknowledgment on our report blanks of any other kind).
/> Next we did some sampling work: “Tilt your head back, Mr. Jones,” we would suddenly say to the dealer. For a brief second he would obey and we would quickly shoot a whopping dropperful of Vatronol up his nose. His eyes smarting from the sting, the dealer would smile with simple pleasure. Turning to the loungers by the stove, he would tell them to let the drummer fella give them some of that stuff. After the messy job was done, we plastered the place with cardboard signs, and left. Then, some more signposting in barnyards, and ten or twelve miles of mud road to the next call. So, on through the day, the routine was repeated until at length, long after dark, we would get back to our lodgings in time for dinner—and two hours’ work on our report forms.
The acquisition of a proper frame of mind toward all this was a slow process. The faded yellow second sheets of our daily report book tell the story. At first, utter demoralization. Day after day, the number of calls would be a skimpy eight or nine, and the number of sales sometimes zero. But it was never our fault. In the large space left for explanations, we would affect a cheerful humor—the gay adventurer in the provinces—but this pathetic bravado could not mask a recurrent note of despair.*
To all these bids for sympathy, the home office was adamantine. The weekly letter written to each trainee would start with some perfunctory remarks that it was too bad about the clutch breaking down, the cut knee, and so on. But this spurious sympathy did not conceal a strong preoccupation with results, and lest we miss the point we were told of comrades who would no longer be with us. We too are sorry about those absent dealers, the office would say. Perhaps if you got up earlier in the morning?