Moral Mazes

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book analyses corporate culture from a sociological perspective and how organizations act. It is an interesting aspect of the corporate culture and how it behaves. As a bonus, there is a shitton of funny anecdotes.

🎨 Impressions

It is precisely when a social order begins to fall apart that one can discern what has held it together. This is an interesting observation.

In business, money is the only moral pillar. The jokes are a way of enlightening hypocrisy.

✍️ My Top Quotes

Corporate leaders often tell their charges that hard work will lead to success. Indeed, this theory of reward being commensurate with effort has been an enduring belief and a moral imperative in our society, one central to our self-image as a people, where the main chance is available to anyone of ability who has the gumption and persistence to seize it.
Suggest in this book that managers’ rules for survival and success are at the heart of what might be called the bureaucratic ethic, a moral code that guides managers through all the dilemmas and vicissitudes that confront them in the big organization.
This book, then, examines business as a social and moral terrain. I offer no programs for reform, should one think that reform is necessary. Nor, I am afraid, do I offer tips on how to find one’s way onto the “fast track” to managerial success. This is, rather, an interpretive sociological account of how managers think the world works.
The term Protestant ethic refers to the set of beliefs and, more particularly, to the set of binding social rules that counseled “secular asceticism”—the methodical, rational subjection of human impulse and desire to God’s will through “restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling.”
Affluence and the emergence of the consumer society were responsible, however, for the demise of only some aspects of the old ethic—namely, the imperatives for saving and investment.
No major occupation or profession in our society has escaped the process of bureaucratization. They are all—from assembly-line workers to physicians—specialized, standardized, certified, arranged in a hierarchy, and coordinated by higher authorities.
Moreover, bureaucracy is never simply a technical system of organization. It is also always a system of power, privilege, and domination. The bureaucratization of the occupational structure therefore profoundly affects the whole class and status structure, the whole tone and tempo of our society. The changes in our social landscape brought about by this bureaucratization can hardly be exaggerated.
In its pure form, bureaucracy is characterized by a kind of legalistic objectivity, by close attention to details and to orders, by an adherence to standardized procedures, by thorough written documentation of daily business in well-maintained files, by impartial and fair treatment under law, by a consequent impersonality, and by a separation of offices from persons.
Patrimonial bureaucracy was the organizational form of the courts of kings and princes. There, personal loyalty was the norm, not loyalty to an office. In a patrimonial bureaucracy, one survives and flourishes by currying favor with powerful officials up the line who stand close to the ruler. It is a system marked by patronage and by intrigues and conspiracies among various factions to gain the favor of the ruler and the perquisites that accompany his good grace.
Essentially, managers try to gauge whether they feel “comfortable” with proposed resolutions to specific problems, a task that always involves an assessment of others’ organizational morality and a reckoning of the practical organizational and market exigencies at hand.
There is, for instance, a tremendous competition for ideas in the corporate world; authority provides a license to steal ideas, even in front of those who originated them. Chairmen routinely appropriate the useful suggestions made by members of their committees or task forces; research directors build their reputations for scientific wizardry on the bricks laid down by junior researchers and directors of departments.
As it happens, the CEO is devoted to sailboats and prefers that his aides call him “Skipper.”
As Karl Mannheim, among others, has pointed out, it is precisely when a social order begins to fall apart that one can discern what has held it together in the first place.
The first action of most new CEOs is some form of organizational change. On the one hand, this prevents the inheritance of blame for past mistakes; on the other, it projects an image of bare-knuckled aggressiveness much appreciated on Wall Street.
Perhaps most important, a shake-up rearranges the fealty structure of the corporation, placing in power those barons whose style and public image mesh closely with that of the new CEO and whose principal loyalties belong to him.
The saying is: “No one ever comes back from special assignment”);
Hundreds of people throughout the whole corporation lost their jobs in what became known as “Bloody Thursday,” the “October Revolution,” or in some circles, the “Octoberfest.” I shall refer back to this event as the “big purge.”
Fealty is the mortar of the corporate hierarchy, but the removal of one well-placed stone loosens the mortar throughout the pyramid.
Managers often note that one must stay at least three drinks behind one’s boss at social functions; this meant that Brown’s subordinates might never drink at all on such occasions.
Have I ever told you my definition of an auditor? An auditor is someone who situates himself up on a hill overlooking a battle, far from the noise of the guns and the smoke of the explosions. And he watches the battle from afar, and when it is over and the smoke is cleared, he goes down onto the battlefield and walks among the wounded. And he shoots them.
By the time the courts get to cases generated by contemporary practices, typically in fifteen years, those executives presently in charge will have moved on, leaving any problems their policies might create to others.
Footsteps behind them.” Bitter jokes circulated freely, like: “Opening Day at the chemical company; Brown comes in and throws out the first employee.”
“Every big organization is set up for the benefit of those who control it; the boss gets what he wants.”
The most damaging failure is, as one middle manager in Alchemy Inc. puts it, “When your boss or someone who has the power to determine your fate says: ‘You failed.’”
Many managers also note with irony that they work hardest, that is, put in the most hours, when economic times are bad, when even they see few practical results for their efforts. They do not do so because they actually expect their hours of work to produce an economic boom; rather, they know that, unless they are seen toiling with other managers, they might not be around when the good times start to roll.
A managerial commonplace says: “In the corporate world, 1,000 ‘Attaboys’ are wiped away with one ‘Oh, shit!’”
The total bill, including lawsuits and now federally mandated repairs to the battery, exceeded $100 million. I have heard figures as high as $150 million, but because of “creative accounting,” no one is sure of the exact amount.
American managers seem regularly to look to the short term rather than the long run. There are several reasons for this. First, in the last few decades, there has been an ascendancy of professional managers in the corporate world whose habit of mind, honed by MBA programs, scores of managerial seminars, and a voluminous and ever-growing literature, stresses the quick turnaround of ailing businesses, deal-making both to unload businesses slow to respond to such ministrations and to acquire “winners,” and, of course, the concomitant rapid prospering of one’s own career.
A second reason for managers’ short-term perspective is the structure and pace of managerial work itself. Managers’ days are punctuated by quick huddles and endless meetings; the reading and dictation of terse one-page memoranda, devoid of nuance; the scanning of fluctuating market reports; “brain-storming” sessions to surface bright ideas; listening to the presentations of line subordinates about output, productivity, or marketing, or those of staff about suggested guidelines for corporate policies; talking to lawyers about the impact of existing or projected regulation; evaluating the work of subordinates; buttonholing or being buttonholed by other managers for a word of advice or warning or simply to pass the time of day; and finally, constant phone calls.
The old saw, still heard frequently today, “I know what you did for me yesterday, but what have you done for me lately?” is more than a tired garment district salesman’s joke.
As one manager says: “Our horizon is today’s lunch.”
Decisions are made only when they are inevitable. To make a decision ahead of the time it has to be made risks political catastrophe. People can always interpret the decision as an unwise one even if it seems to be correct on other grounds.
Somewhere, there is a cartoon of President Richard Nixon saying: “I accept all of the responsibility, but none of the blame.”
As one executive says: “When things really go peanut butter, all the goddamn memos in the world are not going to help you.”
However, when real disaster strikes, the idea that paper protects anyone, at the middle levels in particular, is a vain and naive hope.
In fact, one way of looking at success patterns in the corporation is that the people who are in high positions have never been in one place long enough for their problems to catch up with them. They outrun their mistakes. That’s why to be successful in a business organization, you have to move quickly.
The ideal situation, of course, is to end up in a position where one can fire one’s successors for one’s own previous mistakes.
[Milking] works well if [a guy] gets out in time. If a guy keeps moving, he can say, “Look, I ran this plant better than my predecessors.”
These are usually stated briefly as a series of admonitions. (1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do what your job requires, and you keep your mouth shut.
Karl Mannheim points out that bureaucracy turns all political issues into matters of administration
Bureaucracy transforms all moral issues into immediately practical concerns. A moral judgment based on a professional ethic makes little sense in a world where the etiquette of authority relationships and the necessity for protecting and covering for one’s boss, one’s network, and oneself supercede all other considerations and where nonaccountability for action is the norm.
After all, as one executive says, “We lie all the time, but if everyone knows that we’re lying, is a lie really a lie?”
The old proverb “Tis an ill wind that blows nobody good,”
National Transportation Safety Board in the Federal Aviation Agency Accident Investigation Records names an airplane crash as a “controlled flight into terrain.”
Management consulting is also rooted in the application of social science to help managers establish control of the workplace. This process has included, to name only a few examples, the extensive and haphazard use of psychological tests to ascertain worker characteristics in both blue- and white-collar workplaces,
The rules seem to be: (1) suppress all irony, ambiguity, and complexity and assert only the most obvious and literal meanings of any phenomenon; (2) ignore all theoretical issues unless they can be encapsulated into a neat schematic form easily remembered, “operationalized,” and preferably diagrammed; (3) always stress the bright side of things, inflating, say, all efforts for change, whether major or minor, into “revolutionary” action; downplay the gloomy, troublesome, crass, or seamy aspects of big organizational life or, better, show managers how to exploit them to their own advantage; (4) provide a step-by-step program tied, of course, to one’s own path-breaking research, that promises to unlock the secrets of organizations; and (5) end with a vision of the future that makes one’s book, program, or consulting services indispensable.
They refer to consultants as “whores in pinstripe suits.”
Consumer activists, the far too many Ralph Naders of this world, want to save the universe but not give up their own creature comforts.
And members of the news media, who link together all of these groups clamoring for air time because of the media’s own vested interest in catastrophe, are cynical rabble-rousers propagating sensational antibusiness stories to sell papers or advertising time on shows like 60 Minutes, which lay in wait to edit for their own purposes clips of the “poor schnooks” stupid enough to submit to their inquisitions.
Another executive muses: “I often ask myself: ‘What is the going price for my soul today?’”
The Protestant ethic was a social construction of reality of a self-confident and independent propertied social class. It was an ideology that extolled the virtues of accumulating and reinvesting wealth in a society organized around property and that accepted the stewardship responsibilities entailed by property.
And outside consultants are men and women who borrow one’s watch and then charge for telling the time.
In short, bureaucracy creates for managers a Calvinist world without a Calvinist God, a world marked with the same profound anxiety that characterized the old Protestant ethic but one stripped of that ideology’s comforting illusions.
Managers often feel that, however genuine it may be, altruism is a motive that is always denied them by others.
The CEO at Weft Corporation, it is said, “doesn’t know a loom from a car.”
And the higher one goes, the more managers find that “the essence of managerial work is cronyism, covering your ass, [and] pyramiding to protect your buddies.”
Eventually, Enron became the middleman in trading one-quarter of the nation’s energy. This concentrated control enabled Enron to repeatedly game the markets in oil, gas, and electricity. The rolling electricity blackouts that created havoc for hundreds of thousands of Californians in 2000–2001 were due in part to Enron’s manipulation of energy prices.
All bureaucracies require varying degrees of self-rationalization of their members. Wise and ambitious men and women ruthlessly tailor their public faces—that is, their personal appearances, their vocabularies, and their expressed worldviews—to suit the fashions of the moment.