Corporate Characters E-Book

Wulf Rehder

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 194

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

A corporation is a world all its own. Its inhabitants include the full deck of 52 Corporate Characters described in this book. Among them are not only human species such as the CEO and the Janitor, but also more abstract characters like Profit, Gossip, Corporate Humor, Corporate Romance and the Corporate Spirit. You will learn about the deeper meaning of the Water Cooler and of life in a Cubicle. Read about Rightsizing and Self-Evaluation. Especially important for the atmosphere of a corporation are colorful characters like the Has-Been, the Hands-On, the Empty Suit, the Wannabe, the Yes-Man, the Nitpicker, the Fussbudget, and more. Advanced corporations also feature the Trophy Wife, the Visionary, and the Godfather. The philosophy behind these wild and wily, tame and timid, high and mighty inmates of a contemporary business bestiary is described in an introductory essay, with references to American folklore, the Bible, and famous authors such as Thoreau and Shakespeare.

Leseprobe

Corporate Characters

Wulf Rehder

Corporate Characters

52 Shades of Business

Copyright © 2017Wulf Rehder

Verlag:tredition GmbH, Hamburg, Germany

ISBN Paperback:

978-3-7439-6281-1

ISBN Hardcover:

978-3-7439-6282-8

ISBN e-Book:

978-3-7439-6283-5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

For Carol

Kai and Toki

“This book should either be required readingin every American corporation, or it should beforbidden. It contains too much truth.”

Email message from a vice presidentof a US corporation, responding tothe first edition of this book, in 1989

Content

Introduction:

The A-B-C of Corporate Characters

I. Elementary Characters

1 The CEO

2 The Hands-On

3 The Fussbudget

4 The Nitpicker

5 The Empty Suit

6 The Fair-Haired Boy

7 The Godfather

8 The Curmudgeon

9 The Has-Been

10 The Corporate Gentleman

11 The Busybody

12 The Personnel Director

13 The Corporate Counsel

14 The Executive Secretary

15 The Janitor

16 The Know-It-All

17 The Staff Member

18 The Loquacious

19 The Yes Man

20 The Quality Manager

21 The Angel Investor

22 The Salesperson

23 The Wannabe

24 The Visionary

25 The Customer

26 The Pundit

27 The Survivor

28 The Trophy Wife

II. Advanced Characters

29 The Corporate Spirit

30 The Corporation as a Person

31 CorpSpeak

32 Profit

33 Corporate Humor

34 The Return On Investment

35 Gossip

36 Corporate Romance

37 The Business Trip

38 Business Casual

39 The Computer

40 Email

41 Rightsizing

42 Information

43 Marketing & Advertising

44 The Memo

45 The Org Chart

46 Powerpoint

47 The Staff Meeting

48 The Self-Evaluation

49 Wall Street and its Journal

50 The Stock Market

51 The Cubicle

52 The Water Cooler

About the author

The A-B-C of Corporate Characters

Some say that every man (and woman) belongs to one of two camps: the faculty of scientists or the fraternity of writers and artists. In the late 1800s, this dichotomy pitched Thomas Henry Huxley against Matthew Arnold, and in 1959, C.P. Snow coined the phrase of the “two cultures.” He described the rift as a breakdown of communication between the humanist tradition and the scientific worldview. The critic F. R. Leavis didn’t agree and called Snow’s thesis a “public relations” stunt for the sciences. The wealthy Templeton Foundation, in its ambition to mediate, has spent much grant money, including a lavishly endowed Templeton Prize, for interdisciplinary studies pacifying the two factions under the umbrella of Spirituality, in an attempt to reconcile the profits from the sciences with the promises of religion. Predictably, this ambitious effort has led to a motley crew of Prize winners, including Mother Teresa, Freeman Dyson, Billy Graham and Alvin Plantinga. In the groves of European academe, the French philosopher Hadot has tried to overcome Snow's chasm by depicting the two traditions, which he calls the Promethean and the Orphic, as autonomous but interdependent styles of reasoning about the world, a dual endeavor allegedly underway since Heraclitus. Over the years, several prominent intellectuals have offered their thoughts about a “third culture” bridging the divide identified by Snow. Examples of such diplomatic efforts can be found in publications by The Edge Foundation (see edge.org). But alas! These efforts have only resulted in awkward compromises with titles like humanist sciences and scientific humanism.

The book in your hands is about a truly different third culture and its practitioners. I call them Corporate Characters. The intellectual noise and polemical dust created by the quibbling between scientific and literary men has obscured a simple fact: Just as every bar stool needs three legs in order to be stable, so have people since times immemorial relied on three pillars to stabilize their life: the above two, science and humanities, and a third one: business. While the modern-day protagonists for the sciences and humanities, professors, artists, writers, have been the subjects of much scholarship, the representative of business, the homme d'affaires, has so far been sorely neglected.

Uncovering this third basic style of thought and action is as important as Einstein's discovery of the warped universe as the third world system in addition to the “two Major Systems of the World” described by Galileo. Continuing this analogy, we might say that the Ptolemaic system corresponds to the traditional culture of the homme des lettres, while the Copernican revolution led to the enlightenment, which in turn hatched modern science. Several hundred years later, Einstein taught us his theory about curved spacetime, which is the cosmological equivalent of the known fact that in business there are many crooked roads and detours based on the theory that time is money.

It is obvious that after the ages of Ptolemy and Copernicus, we now live squarely in the third culture, the age of business and economics. The businessman has truly arrived. From the sciences he carves his high-technology tools, from the arts he plucks his entertainment. The quest for eternal Truth and the search for heavenly Beauty has been replaced with the Law of Supply and Demand. Within this new framework, “what's true” has been demoted to “what's useful”, and “what's beautiful” translates as “what's attractive.” The new kind of ever-changing business “Truth” reflects the ups and downs of the stock market, and the new market-driven “Beauty” is as fickle as fashion.

Though it exploits the sciences and the arts, our current business culture can no longer simply be defined in terms of the two older “two Major Systems of the World.” Business stands proudly by itself, and its practitioners must be portrayed and judged on their own merit.

Such a phenomenology of Corporate Characters has been attempted in the book you are about to read. It was inspired by Theophrastus' book Characters, written some twenty-three centuries ago, and by Elias Canetti’s whimsical psychological types portrayed in Earwitness: Fifty Characters (1979, originally published in German in 1974). Two of Theophrastus' characters, the Loquacious and the Busybody, freely translated and suitably adapted, are included in this collection of Corporate Characters. Through personal experience, wide ranging interviews, and bookish (though very enjoyable) research, I have found that all those wild and wily, tame and timid, high and mighty inmates of a contemporary business bestiary can be described within a systematic framework that derives it unique language and defining concepts from just three sources: Americana, Biblica, and Classica, the A-B-C of business culture. By Americana, I mean, for instance, the folk tales of John Henry, the Constitution, and the economic philosophy of Henry David Thoreau. Under Biblica, I count references to biblical stories and their heroes such as Moses and his field managers. Finally, Classica allude to the root of American business in Shakespeare's plays and, farther back still, to the Athenian water cooler, where greenhorns listened to Socrates holding forth.

This portfolio of business archetypes contains 52 snapshots of corporate characters, one for each week in the fiscal year, or one for each card in a full deck. Previous profiles of the businessman, from Mencken to Galbraith, associate him with the hangman and the scavenger and make him the uncultured brute that revels in private affluence and causes public squalor. True, he shares these properties with other socially accepted rogues: bandits, tort lawyers, and slumlords, all of whom argue for the sovereignty of private means over public ends. But while these rapscallions have been portrayed in books and even in blockbuster pictures, from The Firm to The Sopranos and Michael Moore’s movies, corporate characters have never been featured as representatives of a well-defined third culture.

This collection is not intended as the businessman’s apotheosis. Neither will you read an apology for his deeds, nor an outright condemnation of his attitudes. As Arthur Miller said about Willy Loman, “He's not the finest character that ever lived.” That is true; but he is also not the worst. Navigating his ambivalent morality has prevented him from ever being really evil or truly good, outrageously funny or shockingly silly. The world of business is largely an irony-free zone. Countering this sorry state of corporate humor, I have, in describing this world, used many literary tropes, such as analogy, simile, metaphor, parody, caricature and even slapstick, all meant to paint an intrinsically gray terrain in brighter colors.

“It seems,” wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer, “that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning real names.” Therefore, no businessman will be mentioned by name, unless it was necessary for the plot or the joke I wanted to make.

I

Elementary Characters

The Chief Executive Officer, or CEO

The CEO shares with the Pope the gift of infallibility, and with Moses the certainty that his corporate objectives, a.k.a. commandments, are of a divine origin. He commands a posse of cardinals and bishops, his vice presidents. They make up his cabinet, they have a portefeuille, a post and responsibilities, and they believe in the motto that the Marquis de Lafayette lived by: “Think little, but firmly!”

The CEO, however, must think much, and he must think big.

Money is the first item within the categories of “much” and “big.” There is a sign on the CEO’s desk that says, “The Buck Stops Here.” This defiant instruction may seem like a sly reference to the dog named Buck in Jack London’s Call of the Wild, who, as everyone remembers, becomes (at the end of the book) the pack’s alpha wolf. More likely, though, it hints at the CEO’s pay: Hardly a dollar shall pass beyond this desk without a part of it being pocketed by him. Indeed, the salary of a CEO is usually given in six figures or more, while his philosophy can be expressed in only six words. They were written in a letter by the Roman philosopher Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD) to his friend Lucilius:

Cum ad summum perveneris, paria sunt.

When you are at the summit, everybody else looks equal.

Or in the CEO’s own vernacular:

To the top dog everybody else is just a dog.

Alpha comes before Beta and Gamma. Looking from his corner office down upon the masses of Beta directors and managers and Gamma employees toiling in cubicles, he can see that some of them are more unequal than others. How many lives of unequals depend on him? He roughly knows, but doesn’t care. In this, he follows the poet Ovid (43 BC – 18 AD), who wrote that numbers are only for the pauper:

Pauperis est numerare pecus.

Only the poor man counts his cattle.

The pay for the employed cattle, properly called their pecuniary reward (from pecus – cattle), is only a skinny fraction of the CEO’s, by a factor of 10 or 50. That’s because they are remunerated for their work only, and as “at will” employees they can be severed from the company for cause or without rhyme or reason. By comparison, the CEO, who doesn’t labor but lead, has a fat severance package, which is, in legal terms, his prenup with the company as his bride.

In his free time he plays golf (a double-digit handicap, in spite of multiple Mulligans), and on Saturday nights he sometimes accompanies his wife to the symphonic orchestra, for which they have season tickets. He is, in his own words, “very open to good music.” His favorites include Mozart's “Night Serenade” and Johann Strauss Jr.'s “Emperor's Waltz.” From his days of courtship he also remembers Maurice Ravel's “Bolero,” but he is not sure anymore in which context those pulsing rhythms once seemed relevant. Of American music he cherishes most Aaron Copeland's Rodeo, “Buckeroo Holiday” being his absolute favorite, because they always play it at his Equestrian Club. During the day he sometimes taps his fingers to Muzak's elevator music. That, for him, is a successful distillation of tonal happiness wrapped in non-threatening arrangements. Once he read in the Wall Street Journal that Muzak (together with Andy Warhol's cans of Campbell soup) is our postindustrial life's most authentic art form, because it is endlessly repeatable and non-offensive. Whatever the pundits say, it calms him down.

Buying two outrageously expensive glasses of champagne during intermission shows the CEO’s cultural commitment to the arts, and a plaque in the lobby of the Symphony Hall is proof of his responsibilities as a corporate sponsor and benefactor of cultural causes. He generously admits that he is not a specialist in music or art. No, he has no critical opinion about Wyeth's “Helga” pictures, for instance. But, personally, he likes her blond and naive nakedness. Yes, he certainly knows what he likes.

His PR department realizes how important it is that the CEO will be seen during the correct fund raising events. The Science Center and the Opera House are great photo opportunities, United Way campaigns and Retirement Home openings are OK. Pro Choice events, Aids Awareness rallies, and Gay Pride parades are definite no-no's. He prefers to read about these controversial gatherings in the safe, square, and self-confident prose of the Wall Street Journal.

Since graduating from Business School he has been a conservative, staunch in the defense of tax breaks, but less dogmatic with regards to environmental policy loopholes. He owns a gun (but has never used it) – for him it’s a matter of principle in support of the Second Amendment. Justices and judges, he says, should be umpires and never pitch or bat. He has voted Republican since his second year in college, but Trump makes him uncomfortable. He has said he would never employ Ted Cruz, because he would give our customers the creeps.

The Hands-On

The Hands-On has narrow vision, which he calls focus. Just like his idol, the legendary steel-driver John Henry, he comes down heavily on things with his hammer and prefers to touch his objects with his own hands rather than use fancy technology, or think about anything in abstract terms. When in a reflective mood, the Hands-On calls himself a hard-core realist. He looks down on coworkers who make plans before they act. He calls them “fuzzy thinkers”. He laughs at those who write wussy specifications before they compose software.

He lives what he preaches. He owns a sturdy four-wheel drive, which he repairs himself (even when it isn't broken). His wife's hair is short and straight (the way he likes it), and she doesn't wear make-up. He insists, however, on a dab of aftershave for himself before taking her to their bowling night on Friday.

Back at work he strives to be known as a “doer.” When somebody talks about the weather, that it is too warm for a bike-ride, or too cold to go fishing, or too rainy for anything, then he's the one who'll say “let's do something about it.” And he does. He taps on the barometer, shakes the thermometer, and looks threateningly towards the sky. This can-do attitude is an indication that for a Hands-On nothing is considered impossible, some things, as he likes to say, “ just take a little longer,” and most things don't make sense anyway.

For the Hands-On, finishing a project is more exciting than starting it, or working on it. For him, the way is not the reward, and when he tinkers (which he always does), his pectorals are more involved than his frontal lobe, and his sweat glands more than his pineal gland. If he were educated and had read Pascal (which he wouldn't because Pascal was a mystic and a fuzzy thinker), he would have heard about the esprit de géométrie and the esprit de finesse. Being matter-of-fact he'll identify with the straightforward, rectangular, ungirlish geometrical spirit and look at the sense of finesse as if it were a whimsical piece of lingerie.

The Hands-On is a crude personification of Benjamin Franklin's definition of man as a toolmaker, who for Marx represented the very characteristics of “Yankeedom,” that is, of the modern age and thus of corporate life. Yet the Hands-On is also Emerson's true American Scholar. “I ask not for the great,” the Hands-on reads in that famous essay (with which he agrees), “the remote, the romantic. (…) I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; (…) there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.”

The Fussbudget

Limited in size and valid only for a fixed period of time, a budget records the size of the critical resources targeted for a particular purpose. Adding “fuss” turns a budget into a Fussbudget. The Fussbudget, however, has resources that are unlimited and available to him at any time, useful for no purpose other than fuss, fuss, fuss.

Different from the Nitpicker, who focuses his criticism on selected, if extraneous, details, the Fussbudget spreads his fastidious attention over several miscellaneous issues large and small about which he worries especially at times when everything is going well, complains about when everybody is happy, and protests against when everything has already been decided. The Nitpicker picks locally, at his favorite locations only, and one nit at a time. The Fussbudget fusses globally, wherever his general discomforts and specific displeasures pique him, and all at the same time.

These activities create a level of irrational heat sufficient to warm a four-person household. Defying such utilitarian thoughts, however, the Fussbudget prefers to provide hot air only to increase the entropy of the entire system surrounding him. With this carefree application of thermodynamic laws, he can successfully diffuse his energies and add to the general disorder until a state of chaos has been safely reached. Then, finally, the Fussbudget feels comfortable.

Most comfortable for a Fussbudget is a life in the city of Pidneres. You do not know Pidneres? But you certainly know the famous oriental habitat of Serendip, where one finds valuable or agreeable things not sought for – serendipities. Pidneres is its sister city in the occidental hemisphere, where every citizen indulges in the habit of seeking invaluable and disagreeable things, and he finds them! Once found, he pays very close attention to them, turning them over and over in his hands and in his mind as if they were the most precious bugaboos, uncovering new facets to agitate about and new angles to excite him – all of which reinforces his utter fascination with things gone wrong.

Thus the Fussbudget has brought us a creative and disturbing reworking of Murphy's Law. He is disappointed when something that can go wrong doesn't go wrong. He has warped the Peter Principle into a new corporate wisdom, to wit: In a hierarchy every Fussbudget tends to rise to a level where his fussiness proves his incompetence. The Fussbudget has even upset Parkinson's Law: His work expands into fuss so that there is never enough time available to complete it.

A Shakespearean quote explains why the Fussbudget likes to surround himself lovingly with the clang and clatter of persnickety trivialities: It is the empty vessel, Shakespeare writes, that makes the loudest sound.

The Nitpicker

When it is small it interests him, when it is insignificant he seriously objects to it, and everything that is minuscule excites him beyond reason.

Making the small and insignificant nit a matter of great importance is his whole concern, and succeeding once again in the megalomania of the mini quibble gives him superior job satisfaction. Happiness for him comes from the challenges that lie in the hitherto undisputed detail - if indeed happiness it is. For happiness is rather a large sentiment for his myopic yet quarrelsome mind. He prefers his microscopic rewards in a sequence of tiny victories, strung together like the beads on the rosary of his childhood.

Since his cradle days he has always insisted on his right to complain, from the composition of the baby milk formula to his quantum of spinach at lunch as a schoolboy. As as a young man he counted the leaves on trees (and said he was missing some) when everybody else was rhapsodizing about the beauty of the forest. Now, as a grown-up, he is an expert on the rules of limitations and exceptions, insisting on the unalienable right to contradict a majority opinion, or dispute that the law of averages works: that a particular outcome or event is inevitable because, on average, it has happened in the past. But not to me, he says. He looks for flaws in perfection, and if he cannot find them he creates them by insisting stubbornly that flaws do exist and he has seen them before.

Eventually he becomes the Master Of The Marginal, chief of the feared order of Fanatics for Criticism of Minutiae. Their members are in charge of the pedantic police-work of watching over the crossing of t's and dotting of i's.

In discussions the Nitpicker plays his cherished role of tetrapyloctomist, the artist of splitting hair four different ways. When his department plans for budgets and next year's strategies, he is tired and inclined to gloss over the big picture, only to come alive ferociously to fight for, or attack, the allotment for the purchase of thumbtacks.

His most fastidious ways show in his own office. His pencils are sharpened, although never used. Every evening, exactly at five o'clock, he cleans each key of his keyboard with a q-tip, five keys per q-tip, using twenty of them every day.

The Empty Suit

Years ago, in an act of comic iconoclasm, Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, began to represent certain well-known public figures as icons. The first icon was a “point o’ lite” for George H.W. “Poppy” Bush. Drawn as an empty space, the point o’ lite was an eloquent oxymoron: a visible void, a distinctive nil, a full-fledged nothing. Even wrapped in the business outfit of an heir to oil wells, or clad in the baseball uniform of a Yalie, such a Void Persona is, in TexSpeak, “All hat and no cattle,” or, in CorpSpeak, an Empty Suit.

The Empty Suit is the complement to the Emperor wearing his New Clothes: the latter was a man without clothes, the former is clothes without a man. Instead of a child saying, “But Mommy, he's naked!” corporate employees whisper, “That suit is Smith from Marketing. He acts like hot stuff, but he's empty.” Or, “That’s Carly over there by the Lear Jet. Boy, is she an empty suit!” Others, including Hewlett-Packard employees who’ve read Catcher in the Rye, use another synonym for an Empty Suit: “She’s a phony.”

Our American culture has given us many fine examples for the old Latin saying vestis virum facit