The Organization Man Page 19
Executives admit that they in turn impose exactly the same kind of pressure on their own subordinates. Some lean toward praising men pointedly for extra work, others prefer to set impossible goals or to use the eager beaver as a “rate-busting” example to others. “What it boils down to is this,” one executive puts it, “you promote the guy who takes his problem home with him.”
Why do they work so hard? No voice has been louder than the businessman’s in damning the income tax as encouraging slothfulness, and they have repeatedly complained that its worst effect has been to rob management of the incentive to hard work. With this plaint in mind, we asked each of the executives we interviewed this question: “Would you, personally, be working harder now if your taxes were less?” Well, said the executives, now don’t get them wrong, they don’t take back anything about taxes, but as far as their own particular case went—no, they wouldn’t be working harder now.
Unhappy as executives are about high taxes, to them the key aspect of salary is not its absolute but its relative size. And the relative size does depend on the income before taxes. The part of the pay stub that shows gross salary may be cause for hollow laughter, but it is still the part that is critical, and the man who gets $30,000 a year finds very little comfort in pondering the thought that his $37,000-a-year rival takes home only $892 more than he does. Even those with independent incomes are just as concerned in this relative figure as anybody else. With one exception, those executives we talked to who were independently wealthy worked just as hard as the others, and sometimes, under the baleful gaze of the steely-eyed old gentleman in the picture on the wall, a good bit harder.
When the executive talks of himself and why he works—a subject of quite compelling interest to him—he speaks about many things. He speaks often of service to others. It is a genuine feeling on his part, for he does not himself belabor the point. Convention rhetoric notwithstanding, he has so little self-doubt on the matter that he is rather bored with the kind of soul-searching questions (“Is management a profession?” “Is public relations at the crossroads?”) that worry the staff. He takes it for granted that management work is one of the most vital functions in the United States—sometimes he talks as if it were the only one.
Labor leaders talk like any other executive. Here, in excerpt, is a vice-president of a big CIO union on the subject of work load:
I’m working harder than I ever have in my life, and I once was a cushion builder. The incentive isn’t monetary gain. There is much more than that. There is never a dull moment in the labor movement. I feel I’m part of a crusade, making the world a better place in which to live. I like everything about my job.
My usual work week is seventy to eighty hours, I would say. I get to the office at 8:30 A.M. and usually am at my desk until 6:00 P.M. There’s usually a luncheon conference daily, and three nights a week I take home a brief case with reading material and reports. I spend about two hours those nights on the reports.
Two nights a week is about the average for attending local union meetings that require my attention. Every Saturday and Sunday there is a membership conference, an executives’ conference, a convention, or a union picnic.
Forty per cent of the time I’m on the road in top-level negotiations, trouble-shooting, speaking or attending a CIO board meeting. Here is an example of out-of-town work: Last week end a workshop conference was ending at Purdue University. I left Detroit at 3:05 P.M., flying to Indianapolis and taking a car from there to Lafayette, Indiana. I spoke at 7:30 P.M., finished at 9:30, and then was in a conference until 11:15 P.M. I drove back to Indianapolis, left at 1:10 by plane and got home at 3 A.M.
Do I work too hard? My doctor and my wife think so, but I don’t. If I am, it’s my own fault because I don’t delegate enough work.
Service is not the basic motivation. In talking about why he works, the executive does not speak first of service, or of pressures from the organization; very rarely does he mention his family as a reason. He speaks of himself—and the demon within him. He works because his ego demands it. “People are like springs,” explains one company president. “The energy you have within you has to come out one way or another. I would really get in bad shape if I didn’t work.” “It’s like baseball,” another president puts it. “A good player doesn’t think of the contract when he is up to bat. He drives for the fences.” Whatever the analogy—two presidents compare themselves to concert pianists—the theme is self-expression.
Work, then, is dominant. Everything else is subordinate and the executive is unable to compartmentalize his life. Whatever the segment of it—leisure, home, friends—he instinctively measures it in terms of how well it meshes with his work. Is it overwork? The executive’s ability to describe a crushing work load and in the next breath deny that it’s overwork is prodigious. Here, for example, is the way a utility company president answered the overwork question:
In the old days, I used to work eighteen and twenty hours a day, but when it was all finished, I didn’t give a damn until work rolled around again the next day. Now, hell, I go home thinking about decisions I have to make. I just don’t like to sit and think, so I pick up a detective story—something light—and sit there wondering what I’ll tell Mike Quill when he says such-and-such or what I’ll say at the next fare-increasing hearing.
In the middle of a rate or a wage fight, I lie awake nights wondering what the hell I’ll say next. Sometimes I get up from one wage-bargaining session, go home, lie awake thinking until it gets light, and then go back to the bargaining table with maybe only an hour’s sleep.
I’ve got an ulcer that acts up on me in times like that. It goes to sleep again when the bargaining is all over and I can start eating decent meals again. I turn in at the hospital every once in a long while just to get some time off to think quietly. Is it overwork? Well … I grew up in this business. I like it. There’s always something happening. I like it for itself and the fact that I’Ve got some share in helping millions of people get where they want to go. That gives me some feeling of accomplishment.
Most executives are not as sheepish. For some reason the question of whether they overwork touches a very sensitive nerve; equably as they discuss other aspects of their life, on this one they fairly jump. Ninety per cent of the executives we queried said they didn’t work too hard, and when they said it they answered with “Absolutely not!” “Of course not!” and similar expostulation. (The few executives who did say they worked too hard were described by colleagues as lazy.)
Why do they protest so much? Executives’ reactions to a follow-up question give a clue. Did other people—their wives, their doctors, their friends—think they worked too hard? A little sadly the executive would answer, Yes, others did think that he worked too hard. They just didn’t understand.
To the executive there is between work and the rest of his life a unity he can never fully explain, and least of all to his wife. One of the few secrets many an executive manages to keep from his wife is how much more deeply he is involved in his job than in anything else under the sun. Thus he can never really explain to his wife that what he is doing is not overwork, for the explanation would be tactless. “Overwork as I see it,” says one company president, “is simply work that you don’t like. But I dearly love this work. You love only one time and you might as well do something you like.” He was not talking about his wife.
Unlike the Catholic Church, the corporation cannot require celibacy, and because its members are subject to the diversions of family ties, the corporation does fall short of complete effectiveness. But not so very far short, and if it officially praises the hearth and family, it is because it can afford the mild hypocrisy. It is true that wives often try to have their men violate their contract, and it is also true that many men have a much stronger attachment to after-hours with their families than to their work, but such cases are the minority; the men on whom The Organization depends most are generally the ones able to resolve successfully any dual allegiance.<
br />
Executives try to be dutiful husbands and parents, and they are well aware that their absorption in work means less time with their family even when they are physically with them. Younger executives in particular accuse themselves. They are not, they say, the fathers they should be and they often mention some long-term project they plan to do with their boy, like building a boat with him in the garage. But, they add ruefully, they probably never will. “I sort of look forward to the day my kids are grown up,” one sales manager said. “Then I won’t have to have such a guilty conscience about neglecting them.”
What of leisure? When they talk about it, executives betray a curiously split feeling. They envy the worker his forty-hour week and they deplore the impulse that bedevils them into thinking about work after hours. Yet … “Instead of relaxing at night with a mystery story,” one executive said of himself, “I keep at it until eleven o’clock and finally I say to myself, The devil with it, I’m going to have a highball or two and go to bed. But I sit there stewing until 12:30 or 1:00. As a result, I am very uncompanionable at breakfast. My wife says I just sit there and dream and maybe she’s right. But I do get a kick out of being well informed in business.”
Even those who make a great point of not taking a brief case home with them confess that they cannot shut off the business Stream of consciousness. “I don’t carry a thing home with me,” a leading automobile executive said. “When I leave the office, except for the two or three nights when I attend meetings, I keep myself free for my wife and my family. After dinner, though, I take my dog for a walk. I guess you’d call them ‘meditation walks.’” The president of a New England firm confessed that it had gotten so bad with him he had to swear off working at home evenings. “I can’t read the shortest report,” he explained, “without my mind going into action to plan what to do next. I found this stimulated me so much I just couldn’t get to sleep at a reasonable hour.” He is still on the wagon but he’s not happy about it at all; what he really wishes, he says, is that there were more hours in the business day.
Civic work? Executives don’t particularly like it. Rightly or wrongly, most of them consider it a diffusion of energy, and only those who see a clear relationship between civic work and their careers perform it with any enthusiasm. Many businessmen plunge into civic work with gusto; but these are not organization men—usually they are the bankers and merchants and others for whom civic work is part of their regular job.
The organization man does some civic work, but it is largely out of a sense of obligation rather than from any personal impulse. Characteristically, he is involved in civic work at that state of his career when, as a branch manager to the national organization, he is ex officio a leader in the local community. Many years later when he has reached the elder-statesman state he is once again involved. But this involvement, as many privately concede, is more a case of entrapment than free choice. “I had looked forward to taking it easy,” says one sixty-five-year-old executive. “But the trouble is that just about the time you’ve trained the people under you to take over and you look forward to taking it easy the word gets around that you are available and then they put the finger on you.”
Culture? Executives do tend to have broader tastes in music, reading, and the like than their less successful contemporaries. But that, as executives themselves concede, isn’t saying very much. Most of those questioned were conscious that they didn’t read enough good books about something besides business, and some executives went out of their way to berate themselves on that score.
But where, the executive asks, can he find time? Much as he might like to read more history or take in more plays, he looks on this as too marginal, too little relevant to his career to warrant making the time. His judgment is debatable on this point, but that is another story. The fact is that he doesn’t see much relationship, and thus, as with the long-deferred project to build a boat with the boys, he will keep on planning that reading he hopes to get around to. One of these days.
Hobbies? Even here, the executive applies the yardstick of business relevance. While some executives are genuinely absorbed in a hobby for the sheer creative bang of it, for a larger number the pursuit carries strong therapeutic overtones. For them the hobby is not a joy in itself but simply a means of restoring themselves between rounds. To this end some executives go through an almost compulsive ritual—like watering the flowers at a regular week-end time whether or not it has just rained. To borrow an old phrase, they are never less at leisure than when they are at leisure.
We have, in sum, a man who is so completely involved in his work that he cannot distinguish between work and the rest of his life—and is happy that he cannot. Surrounded as he is by a society ever more preoccupied with leisure, he remains an anomaly. Not only does he work harder, his life is in a few respects more ascetic than the businessman of half a century ago. His existence is hardly uncomfortable, yet, save for the Cadillac, the better address, the quarter acre more of lawn, his style of living is not signally different from that of the men in middle management. And the fact doesn’t concern him overmuch; the aspects of luxury that he talks about most frequently concern things that are organic to his work—good steak dinners, comfortable hotels, good planes, and the like. No dreams of Gothic castles or liveried footmen seize his imagination. His house will never be a monument, an end in itself. It is purely functional, a place to salve the wounds and store up energy for what’s ahead. And that, he knows full well, is battle.
* While it is difficult to classify or distinguish the executive from the nonexecutive, we had to make an effort so that we could distinguish between denominators which applied to all organization men—which to executives, which to the older, which to the younger, which to large companies, which to small, etc. For the “executive” category we interviewed: (1) fifty-two company presidents (average age, fifty-five); (2) twenty-three vice-presidents (average age, fifty-three); (3) fifty-three middle-management men who have marked themselves or been marked by the company as comers (average age, thirty-seven). In the “nonexecutive” category were studied: (4) thirty-three men working their way up from lower to middle management (average age, thirty); (5) sixty college graduates in their first two years as corporation trainees.
CHAPTER 12 The Executive Ego
In this absorption in work, many people believe, lies the seat of the executive neurosis. From Dodsworth on, the figure of the businessman self-alienated from the wider life has been held up to Americans as a somewhat tragic figure. Why, when the purpose of our vast productive apparatus is the release of man from toil, do the people in charge of it so willfully deny themselves the fruits of it? Even the executive, as he curses the demon within him, tends to feel a little guilty about it.
But this is not the nub of his problem. His long absorption in work to the exclusion of everything else may hit him very hard when he retires and finds himself illiterate in the other kinds of life. But if work is a tyranny, it is a self-imposed tyranny. He sees the disparity between work and leisure only as a minor conflict. It is something he feels he should worry about. And he hasn’t the time.
The real conflict, I am going to argue in these chapters, is the conflict within work. Of all the organization men the true executive is the one who remains most suspicious of The Organization. If there is one thing that characterizes him, it is a fierce desire to control his own destiny and, deep down, he resents yielding that control to The Organization, no matter how velvety its grip. He does not want to be done right by; he wants to dominate, not be dominated.
But he can’t act that way. He must not only accept control, he must accept it as if he liked it. He must smile when he is transferred to a place or a job that isn’t the job or place he happens to want. He must appear to enjoy listening sympathetically to points of view not his own. He must be less “goal-centered,” more “employee-centered.” It is not enough now that he work hard; he must be a damn good fellow to boot.
And that is the rub. Executives ha
ve always had to play a role, but the difference between role and reality is becoming increasingly difficult to resolve. Even executives who would hate to be accused of philosophical thought sense that they are poised midway in a rather perplexing shift of values. They applaud better human relations, permissive management, and the like, yet for them personally these same advances ask them to act out something of a denial of the kind of people they really are. The organization ideology can help people endure the pressures, and the mere playing of the role of the well-adjusted team player can help quiet the inner worries. As Pascal pointed out, if one acts long enough as if one believes, the grace of faith will eventually be given.
But not to the executive. Many people from the great reaches of middle management can become true believers in The Organization —and, in this sense, I think laments over the plight of the white-collar man can miss a very important point. Of all the people in organization life, they are best able to reconcile their own modest aspirations with the demands of organization. But the most able are not vouchsafed this solace.
Here lies the executive neurosis. Some of the executive’s tensions and frustrations are due to psychoses—his own and others’—and these are amenable to individual treatment. To a very large degree, however, the tensions of organization life are not personal aberrations to be eliminated by adjustment; they are the inevitable consequence of the collision between the old ethic and the new.