The Organization Man Read online

  How does the executive really feel about the organization? On almost every question that illumines the relationship between the individual and the system you will find a definite difference in attitude as you go up the scale from trainee to middle management to top management. Let us take first the matter of the group way. As I have mentioned before, younger executives see it as a positive boon, the grist of the professional manager’s job. Older executives are partly responsible for the younger men’s outlook, for when they make a progressive-type speech, or deliver one written by their public-relations man, they often sound as if the thing they love most is deferring to colleagues, delegating authority to subordinates, and in general submerging themselves in the team.

  They most certainly do not. “You’re always selling,” as one executive complains. “Even in my position, everything I do is subject to review by all sorts of people, so I have to spend as much time getting allies as I do on the project. You have to keep peace with people on all levels. Sometimes I get home worn to a frazzle over all this.” The complaint is characteristic. In one variation or another executives make the point that when one’s job is inextricably involved with others, the sense of individual creativity and the satisfaction of being able to deliver a tied-up package of achievement is hard to come by.

  One of the most mouthed shibboleths in business is that a good executive is a man who can so organize his job that he enjoys this satisfaction and can leave at 5:30 with no worries left dangling over. The efficient executive can make a good show of this—the clean desk top, the brisk memo, the impressive charts—but a lot of this appearance of control is sheer self-defense. How, they complain, can you really control a job when it’s others who are doing it?

  When the executive was a younger man on the way up he felt differently about the group. For a young man on the make there is no better vehicle than the conference way. Where fifty years before he might have had to labor unseen by all but his immediate superior, now via the conference he can expose himself to all sorts of superiors across the line of command. Given minimum committeemanship skills, by an adroit question here and a modest suggestion there, he can call attention to himself and still play the game.

  But as he succeeds in the struggle he comes into contact more and more with the frustrating nature of the process. He is, let it be noted, very, very good at team playing—he wouldn’t have risen if he wasn’t.* But more and more he begins to see the other side of the coin of “multiple management.” He still presents the equable façade—he listens as if he really liked to and suggests rather than orders—and he half persuades himself that he is just suggesting. But down underneath, that ego is hardening.

  The executive is very gregarious when he sees some practical utility to the gregariousness. But if he doesn’t see that utility, good fellowship bores him to death. One of the most recurring notes in executives’ complaints about their work loads is the uselessness of so much of the socializing they have to put up with—whether it is entertaining after hours or human relations during hours. One rather studious executive, who at the time was bucking for a vice-presidency, put it this way: “It is when you get where I am that you see the difference between the ‘contributory’ and the ‘noncontributory’ aspects of the job. You’ve got to endure a tremendous amount of noncontributory labor—this talking back and forth, and meetings, and so on. The emptiness and the frustration of it can be appalling. But you’ve got to put up with it, there’s no mistake about that, and you just hope that you can keep your eye on the contributory phases which put you on the glory road.”

  A majority of executives say about the same thing: the constant interruptions, the necessity to be fraternal, are the impedimenta of their lives—but impedimenta they cannot shed. “There’s only about 10 per cent of your job you can control,” one complains, “the rest is up to the others, so you’ve got to try to move people. Any program you’re pushing, you’ve got to lay the groundwork. It’s a drain on your time, but if the top people haven’t been educated the program will get axed. Worrying about this is the part of the job that gives you butterflies in the stomach.” “There’s too much of this group stuff, but you don’t want to be left out,” another puts it. “This sort of thing has a sort of velocity.”

  Executives have much the same feeling about entertaining. When they are in the junior-executive bracket, the high life afforded by the expense account is very welcome, but this soon loses its savor. If the executive sees something pertinent to his work, the steak tastes very good indeed, but entertaining for entertaining’s sake makes him fret. And more than anything else, he detests being entertained. To put it another way, if the entertaining is useful for work, it’s play—but if it is just play, then it is just work. “Actually, it’s hard to tell where the workday ends and the ‘pleasure’ begins,” one executive says. “If you count all the time required for cocktails, dinners, conferences, and conventions, there is no end to work. I think any responsible executive these days works practically all the hours he is awake. That’s the part that kills you off. You can stand the office hours, but you can’t stand the rest.”

  This involvement with others, as young men see it, is the heart of the manager’s job; not specific work itself, but the managing of other people’s work is to be the goal. These matters are indeed central to the executive job, and when he has reached the elder-statesman phase he will talk a great deal about such managerial satisfactions as having inspired others, brought out the best in the group, and so on. For all this, however, the executive is much more concerned with the concrete nature of his work than current literature suggests. He does not talk like a neutralist lubricator of other human beings, but rather as a person who identifies himself with quite a specific challenge. Ask him to describe what he does and he will not dwell long on abstract principles of management; he will talk about the terrific job they’re doing on nylon, the uphill fight the company has been having with the competition, the chaotic distribution of the industry, and what he’s doing to set it right. It is when the executive talks of these things that he generates a sense of excitement. Sometimes, when he dwells overlong on the romance of the industry—how this is increasing more jobs for more people, how it’s separating the men from the boys—he can also generate a good bit of hot air. But the excitement is there.

  Another index of the difference between executive and trainee lies in the matter of conformity. In an inverse way, how much a man thinks himself a conformist tells a lot about how much spiritual fealty he feels for The Organization, and as subjective as this attitude may be, there is a discernible difference between older and younger men. The younger men are sanguine. They are well aware that organization work demands a measure of conformity—as a matter of fact, half their energies are devoted to finding out the right pattern to conform to. But the younger executive likes to explain that conforming is a kind of phase, a purgatory that he must suffer before he emerges into the area where he can do as he damn well pleases. “You take this business of entertaining,” an ambitious assistant plant manager told me. “You have to go through all that stuff for ten years or so, but then you can chuck it. It’s like running for the President of the United States; during the campaign you have to do a lot of things you might not like, but when you get to be President that’s all over with.”

  Older executives learned better long ago. At a reunion dinner for business-school graduates a vice-president of a large steel company brought up the matter of conformity and, eying his table companions, asked if they felt as he did: he was, he said, becoming more of a conformist. There was almost an explosion of table thumping and head noddings. In the mass confessional that followed, everyone present tried to top the others in describing the extent of his conformity.

  “A help-wanted ad we ran recently,” one executive said, “asked for engineers who would ‘conform to our work patterns.’ Someone slipped up on that one. He actually came out and said what’s really wanted in our organization.” And it gets worse rathe
r than better, others agreed, as one goes up the ladder. “The further up you go,” as one executive put it, “the less you can afford to stick out in any one place.” More and more, the executive must act according to the role that he is cast for—the calm eye that never strays from the other’s gaze, the easy, controlled laughter, the whole demeanor that tells onlookers that here certainly is a man without neurosis and inner rumblings. Yet again the drive, the fierce desire to control one’s own destiny, cannot help but produce the inner conflicts that the demeanor would deny. “The ideal,” one company president recently advised a group of young men, “is to be an individualist privately and a conformist publicly.”

  Presidents appear considerably less disturbed by the pressure to conformity than those just beneath them. Yet the latter entertain few illusions that, even if there were not one rung higher—a board chairman, perhaps a not-too-friendly board of directors—things will ever get much easier. For now they must conform downward, just as much as upward. Less than before can they afford the luxury of an inadvertent frown, for their position now means that it will be transmitted all down the line, and eventually come back and smite them. An executive cannot have it said about him that he is an authoritarian; he must, above all, be permissive. Or, as is more customary, make a good show of it. Democracy, as many executives learn, is a lot more fun when you’re going up than when you get there.

  Some could interpret this attitude on conformity as proof that top executives are conformists. I interpret it otherwise. To be aware of one’s conformity is to be aware that there is some antithesis between oneself and the demands of the system. This does not itself stimulate independence, but it is a necessary condition of it; and contrasted with the wishful vision of total harmony now being touted, it demonstrates a pretty tough-minded grasp of reality.

  * Let me add a personal testimonial on this score. Comparatively speaking, of all the kinds of people I have come in contact with, corporation men have seemed to me the least given to backbiting and personal animadversions. Most of the popular novels, movies, and plays on the subject give a quite contrary impression, but I think this is due to failure to distinguish between the entrepreneur and the organization man. The businessmen who draw popular attention are apt to be entrepreneurs who, like Robert Young, exist on strife and are never so happy as when they are publicly reviling their enemies. The corporation man is a different breed; he has obeyed the precept to team play so long it has become part of his personality. One result is often a rather automatic, and icy, bonhomie, but another is a remarkable capacity to disagree with colleagues professionally without having to dislike them personally. By contrast, the academic and literary worlds often seem like a jungle.

  CHAPTER 13 Checkers

  Now, finally, the matter of ambition—for here is where we see most clearly the collision between the Social Ethic and the needs of the organization man. So far I have been arguing that the older executive is far more suspicious of organization than the professional manager who is the model of the next generation of management. I have further argued that this is not simply a difference in age but a portent of a long-range shift to the professional manager of men. I would now like to buttress my charge that the harmony it promises is a delusion.

  The young men speak of “the plateau.” If they were to find this haven they would prove that the Social Ethic is personally fulfilling. For the goal of the plateau is in complete consonance with it; one’s ambition is not a personal thing that craves achievement for achievement’s sake or an ego that demands self-expression. It is an ambition directed outward, to the satisfactions of making others happy. Competitive struggle loses its meaning; in the harmonious organization one has most of the material rewards necessary for the good life, and none of the gnawing pains of the old kind of striving.

  As rationalization for the man who isn’t going anywhere and doesn’t much care, this goal has some utility. For others, however, the plateau has a fatal flaw. During the initial years the vision is proof against the facts of organization life. When he is on the lower rungs of The Organization the young man feels himself wafted upward so pleasantly that he does not think high-pressure competition really necessary, and even the comparatively ambitious tend to cherish the idea of settling in some comfortable little Eden somewhere short of the summit. As the potential executive starts going ahead of his contemporaries, however, the possibility of a top position becomes increasingly provocative. After all, he got this far by being a little quicker on the uptake. Perhaps … maybe … and why not? The apple has fallen into the garden.

  He will never be the same. No longer can he console himself with the thought that hard work never hurt anybody and that neuroses don’t come from anything but worry. He knows that he has committed himself to a long and perhaps bitter battle. Psychologically he can never go back or stand still, and he senses well that the climb from here on is going to involve him in increasing tensions.

  Just when a man becomes an executive is impossible to determine, and some men never know just when the moment of self-realization comes. But there seems to be a time in a man’s life—sometimes 30, sometimes as late as 45—when he feels that he has made the irrevocable self-commitment. At this point he is going to feel a loneliness he never felt before. If he has had the toughness of mind to get this far he knows very well that there are going to be constant clashes between himself and his environment, and he knows that he must often face these clashes alone. His home life will be shorter and his wife less and less interested in the struggle. In the midst of the crowd at the office he will be isolated—no longer intimate with the people he has passed but not yet accepted by the elders he has joined.

  In talking to men who have been selected by their companies to attend advanced management courses at graduate business schools, I have been struck by how mixed are the feelings of many a man so honored. Up until the moment the sword touched his shoulders his life has been fairly equable. He had done well in the company but not so obviously as to leave his contemporaries behind. If he had been on the special bonus list it was still too early for the implications to do much unfolding, and when he gathered with the rest of the gang around the barbecue pit on Saturday night it was with the easy camaraderie of equals.

  But it will never be the same again. Sometimes the man cherishes the idea he’s going to have it both ways, but if he does he is in for some poignant experiences. Let him pick up where he left off as if nothing at all had happened (they had to send somebody; just a fluke it was me), and he will soon be reminded by others that he and his wife are now different. He begins to notice the little edge in the joking remarks of his friends (What did that crack mean about the car? So it’s a ranch wagon. So what?). For his wife, unless she is exceptionally shrewd, the disillusionment is even more cutting. More than her husband she has bucked the idea that getting ahead in the company will mean any sacrifice of the modulated life and, unlike her husband, she must suffer the ambiguities of her new status unshielded by the rules of the game and the trappings of rank that set up a buffer zone in the office.

  Repeatedly, I keep running into management wives who bitterly resent (one to the extent of physically shaking me) a study I did on the subject four years ago. What they seem to resent most is the point made about the social demands of success. They actually believe in the plateau—or, rather, they desperately want to. Indignantly, they deny that becoming a boss’s wife will mean any shedding of old associations. In other companies maybe, but not in this one. And why should we ever want to leave Crestmere Heights? Not the snappiest section of town perhaps, but they’re real people here and none of us cares a hang about that rank stuff. Furthermore, that crowd out in the Brinton Hills is not our dish of tea. You were exaggerating terribly. Weren’t you, really?*

  Husbands who have come to the fork in the road may also ponder the idea of finding the plateau, but unlike their wives they don’t really believe it. The few who still try to convince themselves that the earlier dream is possible
will now find scant comfort from their colleagues, who while not cynical have become too sophisticated to keep a straight face on the matter. “The trouble with you men,” I heard one young executive exclaim to two friends, “is that you’re still small-town Baptists at heart.”

  The figures of speech younger executives use to describe the situation they now find themselves in are illuminating. The kind of words they use are “treadmill,” “merry-go-round,” “rat race”—words that convey an absence of tangible goals but plenty of activity to get there. The absence of fixed goals, as we remarked before, may make them seem less ambitious, less competitive than their forebears, but in the more seemingly co-operative climate of today lies a prod just as effective. They are competing; all but the fools know this—but for what, and against whom? They don’t know, and there is the trap. To keep even, they must push ahead, and though they might like to do it only slightly, who is to say what slightly is. Their contemporaries are in precisely the same doubt, and thus they all end up competing against one another as rapaciously as if their hearts were set on the presidency itself.

  This co-operative competition can be observed rather clearly in the postgraduate business schools. At one school an up-and-coming plant manager told me that he was puzzled at the apparent lack of ambition in the others. Since they represented a good chunk of the cream of their age group in U.S. corporation life, he couldn’t understand why so few of them had no specific goal in mind. (He wanted to be president of his corporation’s major subsidiary.) “But the funny thing is,” he told me, “that they work just as hard as I do. Frankly, I’m knocking myself out to get top grades because that will mean a lot to the people back in New York. The only thing the others here are working for is just to get an okay grade. But the grades here depend on how everybody else does, so how can you tell what a good grade is? They can’t take any chances so they do just as much night work, give up just as many week ends as I do.”