Thief in the Night: Pied Pipers to Economic Oblivion?

Thieves in the Night:
Pied Pipers to Economic Oblivion?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 2005

In place of the traditional ethic of self-denial and sacrifice,
we now find an ethic that denies people nothing.

Daniel Yankelovich

A small fraction of people, the business elite and their legal
and political service, have reaped great gains while poverty has spread.

Michael Zweig



It would appear the mind of the times prefers pragmatic materialism to spiritual capitalism. This is evident as cunning takes precedence over character, progress over parity, means over ends, and forced order over the natural chaos of the day.

Success is the construct of real meaning and is always at the expense of someone else. It is a Darwinian drive of Pied Pipers of winners and losers who have become like thieves in the night. They preach optimism in the face of pessimistic reality, as they spin a synthetic economy toward economic oblivion. They do this with sincerity, but also with unconscious incompetence.

Just when I thought I had seen and heard it all, I find there is no bottom to our gullibility. A score of years ago, Yankelovich and Zweig noted the self-centeredness of Americans, giving special attention to the emerging educated workforce that had too much time on its hands, too many perks, and too little struggle, and were found retreating from concrete contribution to abstract complacency being preoccupied with their delicate psyches in a world driven by spin and political correctitude.

As the baby boomer generation was being born, Pacific Rim nations were emerging as world-class economic powers led by Japan, South Korea and Indonesia. This generation is in its mature years with India and China now in hot pursuit of economic dominance.

During this period, the American workforce has been undergoing a radicalization from essentially blue-collar to predominantly white-collar professional class educated workers. At the same time, the United States was transitioning from a manufacturing economy to a service and information technology.

Over the span of the past fifty years, great intelligence has been required to first acknowledge and understand the nature of this radicalization, and then to launch a systematic study and creative assessment of rigidly held myths that prevented effective engagement. That has not happened.

The nature of work has changed, what constitutes real contribution has changed, and what should be expected of a modern workforce has changed. Additionally, the whole concept of enterprise has erupted from its foundation of the Industrial Revolution. The pre-industrial guilds were first replaced by industrial sweatshops. These gradually metamorphosed through several iterations to the present day corporate structure where the few make decisions for the many, but not necessarily wisely or seldom well, as I propose to show now.

Thieves in the Night: Human Resources

While information technology has boomed in the past quarter century, and those creating it were atypical in their approach to work, at least on the surface, I am speaking of the Steven Jobs and Bill Gates of that world, the daily burden of organization life ultimately has fallen to technocrats in an eclectic discipline known as human resource management.

HR rose out of the hedonistic calculus of do-gooder sociology of human relations. Elton Mayo reported in his 1927 Hawthorne Works Study that if you paid attention to workers they worked harder in an effort to please. This was complemented and legitimized in 1938 when an executive, Chester Barnard, published The Functions of the Executive. He argued convincingly that you need only create the work climate and workers would do your bidding. Peter Drucker made his reputation on this rationale.

Remarkably, it worked. Serendipity may have had a hand in it, as there was no better time for it to be profiled than during World War II. Mobilization became the rallying cry and foundation of a management oriented society, and led naturally if not predictably to corpocracy, which is so eminent in our society today.

The booming economy that followed that war operated in a world decimated by destruction. It was hungry for American products. Management suddenly became a colossus built on Calvinistic ethics of prosperity and business utopia. Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie of the nineteenth century gave rise to Alfred Sloan, and his company men. These archetypes put business before everything and were identified as the men in the gray flannel suits.

The corporate surround is Sloan’s legacy. World War II was his validation expressed in these words: It took fourteen years to rid this country of prohibition. It is going to take a good while to rid the country of the New Deal, but sooner or later the ax falls and we get a change. That ax fell in the 1950s.

Thieves in the Night: White Knights with MBAs

Harvard School of Business and MIT deified Sloan’s men and modeled enterprise in an oligopoly of case studies. An army of white knights marched out of their doors with MBAs as authorization to spread the new religion of oligopoly. Schools across the country became MBA factories with a similar reading of enterprise and what it meant to do business in the United States of America.

These white knights became a law unto themselves reeking havoc in leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers throwing out management, sometimes sinking whole companies, demoralizing workforces from boardrooms to lunchrooms. It was a case of survival of the fittest and law of the business jungle.

“LBO” became part of the language personified by such names as T. Boone Pickens and “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap as its business celebrities.

A new lexicon was built on a litany of such words as building-down, compressing, consolidating, redirecting, reengineering, reorganizing, resizing, slimming, streamlining, contracting, declining, dehiring, demassing, dismantling, downshifting, functionalizing, leaning up, rationalizing, reallocating, reassigning, renewing, reshaping, reeducation-in-force, and rebuilding.

With the operational word in this litany, “downsizing,” an army of white knights created a booming profession of consultants justifying their existence and exorbitant fee structures on the basis of the number of employees they trimmed from the company payroll.

Thieves in the Night: Corporate Sins of CEOs

While all this was happening, the compensation of CEOs was climbing first a modest 10 to 20 percent during the 1960s, then 100 percent in the 1970s, to more than 400 percent in the 1980s, and then through the roof since the early 1990s to ultimately rise to 3,000 percent or more of the average worker’s pay on the line today.

If this were not enough, a small percentage of these chief executives, and their direct reports resorted to inside trading, acquiring unpaid loans, using company funds for private purposes, and outright fraud. Why? Because they could.

Some are now serving prison terms, and others are scheduled for long term prison sentences, while many others have escaped under the radar screen.

Thieves in the Night: Coddled Workers

This is the backdrop to the American workplace of today, which is out of control. When someone should step to the fore, admit we have a problem, point out that the world of work is in a chaotic mess, and do some of the heavy lifting to get enterprise back on track, I read of a human resource survey that claims that loafing on the job by workers is productive.1

Work has not only gotten a bad name. Work must now compete with recreation and goofing off on the job for its attention.

It is not uncommon for workers to leave their workstations for fifteen minutes every hour for a smoke, or to socialize for indeterminate periods with friends in the cafeteria or in their cubicles. Not to worry. HR claims this is no cause for concern even if they spend as much as a couple of hours each working day surfing the Internet, taking coffee breaks, taking care of personal business, or going on personal errands. It is important that these stressed out workers take care of their delicate psyches to remain creative and productive. Indeed, the survey claims, it is a blessing to the company that they be so engaged. Loafing gives them stress relief while providing a natural coping mechanism for them to handle the anxieties of their work.

This inattention to work costs U.S. business upwards of $750 billion a year. Human Resource management comes back with the bromide that this is creative waste of time, not leisure taking on the job, and may actually help the company’s bottom line.

According to the survey, the top time wasting activities are surfing the Internet (45 percent); socializing (23 percent); personal business (7 percent); spacing out (4 percent); and running errands (3 percent).

A British study takes exception to this, especially to the use of email on the job. TNS Research was commissioned by Hewlett Packard to make a study of the impact on workers distracted by frequent phone calls, emails, and text messages. It found that these interruptions actually negatively impacted their IQ’s, indeed, more than if they smoked marijuana on the job.2

The problem isn’t email itself. The problem is the constant interruptions in a worker’s day that reduces productivity and leaves the worker feeling tired, lethargic, and unable to focus. In 80 clinical trials, Dr. Glenn Wilson, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London, monitored the IQ of 1,100 British workers throughout the day. He discovered when people tried to juggle email, phone calls, and text messages along with their work, their IQ’s dropped by a full 10 points. That is the equivalent of missing an entire night’s sleep and more than the 4-point decline seen after workers smoked pot. Dr. Wilson concludes, “This is a very real and widespread phenomenon.” It is as if email has a drug-like grip on the worker, and speaks to a lack of discipline. More than 50 percent of workers in the study admitted to responding to emails within the hour of being received, and 90 percent admitted to answering emails during face-to-face meetings with others even though rude.

Thieves in the Night: Not our problem!

Should companies have a problem with this, the survey claims it isn’t employees fault, as they feel underpaid (23 percent) or don’t have enough to do (33 percent). Then there is the predictable old saw of being distracted by other employees, and the justification that they run errands, surf the net, or conduct personal business “because they have no time after work.”

When you consider less than a quarter of a week’s available time is spent on the job, this is a bit over the top. Should workers then complain that they work beyond forty hours to complete their tasks, it is academic. If they weren’t loafing so much, chances are they’d have plenty of time in the requisite forty-hour workweek.

Thieves in the Night: the Siren’s Call

This weak justification has a history, as the seeds of it were planted when human resource management abandoned its role as employee advocate to become management’s union. I witnessed this first hand in 1980 starting with a jarring report by Tom Brokaw on NBC television news.

The program was called “Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” It dealt with the emergence of Japanese car manufacturers and appliance makers into American dominated markets. The message was clear. Quality and teamwork were key to Japan’s rise. The surprise and embarrassment was that Japan was doing this with American technology, technology earlier rejected by American industry because it was thought to cost too much, and to call for infrastructural operational change. Besides, the old adage held sway, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Incipient catastrophe was not on management’s radar.

The transforming technology was that of W. Edwards Deming’s statistical quality control, J. M. Juran’s process quality control, and Peter Drucker’s quality management. The essence of this technology was constructed around quality control circles (QCC). Workers focused on the work at hand, meeting regularly to discuss and solve work related problems regarding quality and quality control. QCC workers were schooled in data gathering, statistical methods, brainstorming techniques, cause and effect analysis, force field analysis, and problem solving.

American industry was bordering on panic when this NBC television program aired, as it couldn’t explain its eroding markets, and was looking for a panacea. This appeared to be it! Over night a whole new industry erupted in a coast-to-coast frenzy to get on board this new technology.

Quality control circles (QCC), total quality management (TQM), total employee involvement (TEI), and lifetime employment (LTE) exploded into prominence with a new alphabet of business acronyms, along with the fuzzy semantics of “employee empowerment” and “participative management.”

Suddenly, Human Resources assumed a key operational role to make this all happen. It had the total attention of senior management, which assumed this to be the magic bullet it needed to regain America’s competitive advantage. Senior management was comfortable managing things, and people as things to be managed. This called for motivating people. It willingly abdicated this role to HR, which was given carte blanche to make it happen!

Thieves in the Night: A Strategy Gone Completely Awry

A quarter century later, there is little evidence that such expectations were met. In fact in a macro sense, the balance of trade deficit, especially in manufacturing goods, has increased with many American manufacturing companies choosing to manufacturer abroad, including the loss of more than 3 million manufacturing jobs. In a micro sense, the workplace went from a culture of comfort to a culture of complacency, losing its way to its targeted culture of contribution.

Meanwhile, Japanese manufacturers found they could make their products profitably at no sacrifice in productivity by making them in the United States, and "their way" with American workers. Something was wrong with this picture.

In fairness, American manufacturers did benefit to some extent with quality circles and quality technology. No doubt it suffered because Japan operated as Japan, Inc., providing enormous concessions and unfailing support to Japanese companies. Then too, Japanese and American cultures differed widely. But the fact remains American corporations were unwilling to change, except cosmetically, and therein lay the problem.

Quality circles dealt only with cosmetic changes in operations (change in lighting, architecture of workstations, etc.). TQM often was reduced to a Malcolm Baldridge Awards Program, which didn’t necessarily translate into sustained quality operations. TEI became a scam almost from the beginning. It appealed to blue-collar workers consistent with Elton Mayo’s premise of motivation by paying attention, but blue-collar workers were now less than 20 percent of the workforce. It failed to make an impression on professionals from the beginning. They treated it with disdain bordering on cynicism, seeing it as patronizing, and pedagogic, dealing with them as if they were still obedient students in school, and not active participants in the actual decision-making process.

Then too, lifetime employment (LTE) was even a myth in Japan. During Japan’s economic boom of the 1970s and 1980s, only ten percent of the largest Japanese corporations had any such policy. This policy was drastically modified during Japan’s difficult 1990s.

In the US, “empowerment” and “participative management” were meaningless concepts practically from the beginning as there was no real sharing of power, and workers were never privy to the planning stages of business strategies or participants in business decisions.

Thieves in the Night: Not doing their homework and misreading the tea leaves

National cultures differ. None differs more than that of Japan with the United States. The composition of the Japanese workforce is primarily blue-collar characterized in a group-oriented culture. This clashes clearly with the American workforce, which is primarily white-collar in an individualistic culture.

Teamwork and conformity are natural characteristics of the Japanese culture, but they are necessarily mechanized and contrived strategies when imposed on American workers, especially with professionals. Compliance is the best that can be expected when it is cooperation that is sought. Compliance is begrudgingly realized while cooperation is voluntarily realized.

Corpocracy bought into the scheme of HR that promised the corporation could have its cake and eat it, too; that it could regain its competitive edge without radical structural change while making only cosmetic concessions. HR interventions became entitlement programs and semantic games that represented no threat and little disruption to the status quo.

The cosmetic changes included making pay concessions, creating group feelings (feel good supervision), discussion of fairness issues, the promotion of job security, the introduction of generous entitlement programs (company funded health insurance, liberal vacation and retirement policies), and the sponsoring of quality of work (QW), quality of work life (QWL) and quality of management (QM).

The workplace was redesigned into a combination social club, college-like campus and recreation center. Workers were exposed to constant spin on how good they had it, while given every imaginable concession but control of work, the freedom to do it their way, or the trust that it entailed.

This strategy was not new. Workers gave up control of work, and voice in the decision-making process when the union movement came into prominence in the early years of the twentieth century. Union leaders led by men such as Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers bargained for pay and benefit increases at the expense of power and control concessions. HR was simply building on a precedence already established in a predominantly passive and reactive workforce.

The irony if not paradox are that this well educated workforce of the 1980s and beyond has failed to escape this harness. Throughout man’s history those who controlled the knowledge controlled the game. That is not the case today. Position power still rules. Yet, real power has shifted to knowledge power. Professionals, in the main, possess this power. They control knowledge, which is the primary bargaining chip of power and control. Then, how is it that professionals remain essentially outside the decision-making process? That is the great conundrum of our times. I offer my explanation.

Thieves in the Night: Pragmatic Materialism – feed them cake!

Pragmatic materialism has appealed to the child in the worker. This immature worker cannot envision thinking beyond fulfilling the basic needs materialized in the paycheck.

The spiritual aspect of work is completely bypassed. This is where pride, respect, loyalty, love, joy, consideration, and passion reside. It relates to moral character of the worker, where the adult lives and flourishes, where man does not live by bread alone.

When work slips completely from the spiritual to the material aspect, motivation is neutralized and replaced by incentive, or what you can get, for what you give. Behavior is directed exclusively by external prodding. This results, at best, in compliance, but never cooperation. Cooperation is always voluntary; compliance is always coercive.

A person works at a job because he has to, not because he wants to. Work is not love made visible, but a job to keep the wolf away from the door. It is the mindset of bringing the body to work and leaving the spirit at home. The worker does what he is told, and little more, careful not to do more than others of the same pay grade. This monster wasn’t born. This monster was created.

Thieves in the Night: Workers suspended in terminal adolescence

The emotionally immature worker responds to benign and permissive paternalism forming a management dependent bond with his pragmatic boss. This worker reacts to external demands, direction, stated expectations, fear, flattery, and rewards and punishment. Satisfaction is found outside of work rather than in the job at hand. Likewise, this worker seeks approval from others to register self-approval, and displays the persona of the “please other” mentality, or the obedient twelve-year-old-child in a 20 to 60-year-old worker body.

In an attempt to solve this riddle, work has been acclimated to this mindset and personality, giving productive work a bad name. Work has become incidental to having a good time at work. When there is no pain, struggle, discomfort, or sacrifice, the needy child surfaces as the dominant characteristic of the worker.

The hedonistic calculus of do-gooder sociology has materialized in company sponsored employee surveys measuring job satisfaction and happiness on the job. These questionnaires are so phrased that, predictably, negative satisfaction and happiness are registered. In response to this attention gathering device, we have seen a shift in organizational life from the “please other” management dependent emotionally immature worker in arrested development to now an organizationally counter dependent worker looking for the company to be responsible for that worker’s total well being.

Workers, in this climate, act out the role of pleasers suspended in terminal adolescence in the contrived atmosphere of peace and harmony devoid of conflict and confrontation. It is a sterile environment heavy on perfection but light on performance.
The problem is that serenity does not spur contribution. Confrontation and managed conflict do. Managed conflict is the glue that holds an organization to its goal and confrontation to its tasks in pursuit of that goal. Chaos, not order, is the fuel of creativity. A clash of wills generates concepts and promotes ideas. These are fed by contradictions, disagreements, and debates, not by peace and harmony.

Fitting in and being safe hires are not requisites for a dynamic change organization. Instead, they are the safe haven for foot draggers, not hard chargers. There is no place for productivity in a pain free, fail-safe, and stress free environment.

Where security is emphasized, cover your ass (CYA) and show your ass (SYA) games thrive; where the focus is on having a good time, priorities are confused; where change is cosmetic, appearing busy becomes the dominant behavior; where a task is measured in time spent doing, the process is the focus at the expense of the results.

Thieves in the Night: The Antidote – Mature Adult Workers

Mature adult workers are patient, take problems and surprises in stride, and search for chronic causes instead of being addicted to quick fixes in the problem solving. They display the emotional maturity of a “please self” confrontational personality. This means they excel in challenging work, focusing on what is wrong, not who is wrong, demanding the right to an opinion and the right to be wrong, as they take ownership of what they do.

Mature adult workers are students and critics of their work, treating work as play as much as work, making no attempt to escape from it. Recreation, creation and justification are all rolled into one. Work is passion on display but it is not flaunted. Achievement energizes work, but it is not used to punish others with it.

Mature adult workers thrive in a climate of managed conflict where it is not necessary to be politically correct but authentic and engaged. They represent the behavior sought with the HR interventions of the 1980s and beyond. These failed because they were promised without corporate risk or diminution of corporate power, and without employee sacrifice, hardship, inconvenience, or motivation. There was no place in the equation for changed management or mature adult workers.


Thieves in the Night: The New Reality

Self-management work teams are successful when issues are confronted and not buried, where no one is more equal than anyone else, where authority and responsibility have equal weight, and where there are no guarantees, but abundant opportunities.

The days of bonuses to senior management when the company is floundering are over. The days of treating chief executive officers as above reproach are as well. Likewise, the days of guaranteed income for workers in any job at any level are passé.

Performance appraisal, if it is to have meaning, is done by workers of managers as well as of managers of workers with complementary weight. What is learned from this is tied to improved readiness to perform, not to hiccup salary increases.

It is a myth that an individual or set of individuals is key to a company’s success. More answers are on the line than ever occur in mahogany row. It is the congruence and communication between the helm and the line that keeps the company on course.

Critical to the health of the company is the health of the staff and the health of the line. They are inseparable.

It is a myth that companies fail because they fail to imitate competitive leaders in a timely fashion. Companies fail because they fail to listen to their own people and nurture that climate. Xerox gave away the personal computer to Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, having failed to listen to and fund Xerox engineers who first developed it.

Company health is never limited to its tangible P&L statements, but is more concretely manifested in intangible company spirit and will to prevail that emanate from the line. Every company has the people it needs to be successful. The quality of workers is never the problem. The problem is the quality of listening to workers, and the dedication in creating a climate where honesty and trust matter. This reflects the health of the company.

Internal stress can be of such a magnitude that it compromises a company’s ability to respond adequately to unanticipated or accelerating external demands. This contributes to company failure. It lacks the strength and energy reserve demanded. Workers know what is working and what is not. When management talks out of both sides of its mouth while expecting workers to act as if it isn’t, passivity waits for calamity.

Thieves in the Night: The Baby Boomer Generation

The essence of the HR survey corroborates the fact that the United States has yet to create a mature workforce of thinking and behaving adult workers. That is the problem.

This is personified in the baby boomer generation. It has taken charge and found it unnecessary to grow up. Meanwhile, China and the Far East are bent on replacing the US and the West from its perch of economic dominance.

The United States, in particular, has gone through several iterations in the past century. It yielded to government intervention on a wholesale basis during the Great Depression and the Roosevelt Administration with social and welfare policies and big government. This tide was stemmed for a time as the private sector came into its own after WWII with the Eisenhower Administration and the rise of corporate power. Ownership of production, however, shifted from owners as individuals to stockholders, who in turn delegated it to the control of managers as the management class was established. This led to managers as pyramid climbers and “empire builders,” where the number of direct reports to a manager determined clout and income.

Managerial glut followed, and predictably with it a number of poorly performing companies. Hostile takeovers of these companies evolved to correct the situation. This gave rise to renewed power consolidation, first evident in manufacturing companies as they merged, followed by giant retailers, and later the technology of communication. These ganglia eventually made social connection with everything in every day life. Thus, corporate society was born.

To give a sense of this shift, consider a letter through the post is a link to government, while a message by email is a link to a corporation. One link is shrinking, the other expanding.

Now, we are faced with yet another paradox: on the one hand, democracy appears to be catching up to capitalism with individual Internet accessibility; on the other hand, there is the notable subversion of individual liberty by companies spying on employees with a click on the Internet, the recording of voice mail, or the text logs of cell phones.

The thieves in the night have many faces. These are but a few of them. I have featured the face of human resource management, well intentioned as it is, but still ill advised. It doesn’t appear to get it. Nor do the army of white knights with their MBAs who think in terms of the bottom line exclusively, and little if at all of workers as they become collateral damage when companies downsize or leave the country.

Thieves in the night are also workers who have little appreciation of the privilege of making more in a day than over half the people of the world make in a year, and still want to be mollycoddled.

Thieves in the night are corporations that think nothing of filing for bankruptcy, terminating pension plans, or keeping two sets of books, while pleading complete ignorance when once caught feeling they have done nothing wrong.

A world without consequences is a world headed for economic oblivion. In the words of Joseph Butler (1692 – 1752), Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?

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About the author: James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. is an O/I psychologist. He was director of the largest Quality Control Circle Program in the United States at Honeywell Avionics (1980 – 1986), and then director of human resources planning & development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. Prior to that he was an executive with Nalco Chemical Company operating in the US, South America, Europe, and South Africa. Dr. Fisher is author of several books and articles in the genre. His next book to be published in 2006 is Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man? Email address: TheDeltaGrpFL@cs.com and website: www.peripateticphilsopher.com