COLD SHOWER NO. 3 -- WHAT IS CORPOCRACY?

COLD SHOWER™

WHAT IS CORPOCRACY?

No. 3

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 1, 2008
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This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial /organization psychologist and former corporate executive with Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe, Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is the author of nine books and more than 300 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk-taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits, and relationships to power – for a changing workforce in a changing workplace. He started as a laborer, worked his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinationals. These columns will answer questions troubling modern professional workers everywhere. His latest book captures the fixation of the times, A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007).
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QUESTION:

I’ve read several of your books, and am still confused about the meaning of a word you use repeatedly, and that word is “corpocracy.” What exactly is corpocracy?

DR. FISHER REPLIES:

I am sorry for your confusion. It is true that I often refer to “corpocracy” in my essays, and it appears as well in “Work Without Managers” (1990), “The Worker, Alone!” (1995), “Six Silent Killers” (1998) and “Corporate Sin (2000),” or four of my nine published books. These books are building blocks designed to create a narrative of what I see wrong with our corporate structure and why.

I THE AMERICAN DISEASE – CORPOCRACY!

Stated simply, I see “corpocracy” as manifesting the dysfunctional aspect of today’s corporate centralized authority. The corporate structure is the fatal flaw to organization that persists past its prime. Permit me to explain.

While I was an executive in Brussels, Belgium for Honeywell Europe Ltd., I came across an article in a German magazine, Wirtschaft Woche (Business Week, January 16, 1987), titled “Amerikas Krankheit” (The American Disease). I read it with interest and found it remarkable in identifying ten factors which it labeled “corpocracy”:

(1) Management is insensitive to its employees.
(2) Management is consumed with company politics at the expense of productivity.
(3) Secretiveness is the measure of company communication.
(4) The principle product of work is paperwork.
(5) Endless meetings are the “way,” when in doubt, call a meeting.
(6) An obsessive internal focus is maintained as potential markets are ignored.
(7) Short term planning and thinking are preferred to embracing challenges – plan, plan and plan some more!
(8) Individual initiative is not supported – you never know where it might lead!
(9) Management has isolated itself from employees by building mahogany towers between them.
(10) A “covert” hostility to innovation is maintained while overtly praised.

The article went on to say that the American corporation was running rampantly out of control. It observed that conduct formerly confined to government bureaucracies had become pervasive across American business, commerce, industry, education, and religious institutions.

II STUMBLING ON THE ESSENCE OF THE PROBLEM

It so happened that since 1984 I had been collecting my thoughts on the corporate organization in some forty engineering notebooks. This was a forced discipline on me that became surprisingly natural and spirited. How I came to engage in this activity centers around a keynote speech I gave for Honeywell’s Department of Defense customers in Clearwater, Florida in March 1984. I was an organization/industrial psychologist with Honeywell’s Avionics division at the time. The theme of the conference was “employee empowerment” celebrated through “participative management.”

The title of my speech was “Participative Management: An Adversarial Point of View.” In my daily observations, I found participative management a charade and empowerment a sham, and provided book, chapter and verse why it was so. I nearly got fired, but instead was instructed to keep these notebooks as part of my penance.

Reexamining these notebooks in 1987 after reading this German article I discovered my findings dovetailed with its conclusions. I knew I was on to something. It turned out that these notebooks would give birth to the breakthrough classic, WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A View from the Trenches (1990), and launch my career as a writer in this genre.

III THE GENESIS OF ORGANIZATION

“Corpocracy,” or society as bureaucratic organization had replaced the simple life and pastoral domesticity of the nuclear family and rural society by the end of World War II. A new day and a new military/industrial complex were taking hold that would be reflected in everything.

With that change, institutional society, as it was known, hit a historical snag. Corporate farms replaced ancestral farms, machines replaced farm hands, mom and pop small businesses were swallowed into corporations, and these in turn swallowed into larger corporations, the same in industry, education and the church. Worth was now measured in quantity, not quality. Communities and states bragged about how their populations were exploding. Automobiles got bigger; houses got bigger; indeed, people got bigger, as bigger was always better. The corporate pyramid grew taller with more and more levels of management.

Meanwhile, jobs of workers got smaller. Everyone had a smaller piece of the action. Worker control of work disappeared. A workplace of 4,000 employees would have 400 or more managers-supervisors who made the big bucks and got the majority of the perks.

Routine became dogma. Workers did everything a certain way because it had always been done that way. In Brussels, the European headquarters for Honeywell Europe dutifully generated detailed sales reports and issued them every month to the affiliates. These reports were never read, despite the man-hours dedicated to them. Several other bureaucratic reports had a similar fate.

The pervasive routine noted in the German article I saw routinely established in Europe as well as the United States. I came to describe this routine as “non-thinking thinking to do non-doing doing of non-thing things”. Workers went along with the pointless drill because their heart, after all, wasn’t in their work. They were working for a paycheck not for the love of what they did.

An assignment dramatized this to me. I did an intervention where a small facility of some 320 workers and 80 managers were struggling to stay in business. The 80 managers worked 12 to 15 hours a day, seven days a week to find the solution to remaining viable, while the 320 workers worked their 40 hours, went home without a smidgeon of concern whether the operation made it or not.

Stated otherwise, 80 self-appointed saviors of the company operated without the support, input, or involvement of the other 320. Yes, 80 people were observed pushing the great stone of Sisyphus up the slope, while four times that number stood by and watched laughing through their teeth. “It’s not our problem” was the symphonic buzz, “management got its tit in the ringer. Let management get it out!” So glib. So righteous. So comfortable in their ignorance. These workers suffered from the “American Disease” of corpocracy, but were located in Switzerland.

You cannot charge these workers with being irresponsible when they were clearly nonresponsible. How many companies have folded across this land and other lands with such thinking?

IV ORGANIZED FOR ANOTHER TIME

We are not designed for survival.

When power and authority are centrally located, as they are today, should that center be flawed, the entire organization collapses in on itself no matter how much effort to the contrary. We have seen this in the subprime debacle, FEMA and Katrina, bribery in government, vice in the church, fraud in education, and corruption in virtually every institution of society without exception.

A strong central authority has come to represent the weakness of the corporate structure. If it is flawed, the weakness extends out in concentric rings to the peripheral aspects of that organization. That said the Secretary of the Treasurer of the Bush Administration wants to make the Federal Reserve stronger and more centralized in the panic of “Now!” The dollar is dropping, oil prices rising, jobs are disappearing, and once again, the thinking is predictable: more power and authority to be designated to manage the problem.

The last time such a policy was mounted was during the Great Depression, a very different time. It is difficult to get beyond the hard wiring in our brains when the best minds of our society are stuck, as this would suggest.

We are in a new age. The progression has reached the end of its tether and must rediscover its essence by a peculiar circular route:

(1) The Industrial Revolution saw America move away from a pastoral and agricultural society in which authority was decentralized and small communities were dotted across the landscape to a society of large centralized work centers in metropolitan areas.
(2) For the past fifty years, we have been in a post-industrial society in which the corporation completed the movement from decentralized to centralized power and authority.
(3) This functioned well before, during, and immediately after World War II.
(4) Centralized authority grew in concert with the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Viet Nam War.
(5) The United States military/industrial complex was not seriously challenged until the late 1970s.
(6) Throughout the 1980s in a panic mode corporate America grabbed hold of any idea that would right itself and reestablish its dominance.
(7) Corpocracy evolved as corporate society continued to do, believe, and behave essentially as it had always behaved.
(8) Then a revitalized Europe and an emerging Japan, Inc. and South East Asia cut into the competitive advantage of the United States.
(9) We are now in the post-post Industrial Revolution and Electronic Age.
(10) Cottage industries have been shooting up in the tens of thousands every month.
(11) On-line universities have more students than traditional universities.
(12) “Printing-On-Demand” (POD) publishers are publishing more books today than traditional publishers.
(13) More than 100,000 pay phones are being removed every month across Western society as few people use pay phones now that cell phones are so common.
(14) Workers don’t need supervisors to tell them how they are doing. They have electronic readouts that score their work.
(15) Workers can text message their standing; the same with students in school their grades.
(16) With the electronic connections that exist in every walk of life, there is little need for a strong central authority.
(17) Power and authority not only can be distributed throughout the system, but must be redistributed for appropriate action to be taken on a timely basis.
(18) We have reached the point in which everyone must become a leader of what they do or no one is.
(19) The Electronic Age is decentralizing activities while calling for interdependent responses to routine as well as crisis situations.
(20) Managers are atavistic and the hierarchical organization is anachronistic.
(21) The time for change, dramatic and radical, is now.
(22) There are no secrets anymore.

When the German article came out, it highlighted the obvious. Corporate America was off its track, running harder and harder but making little progress because it had left its steel rails. That is when “corpocracy” set in. Unfortunately, it is not only an American Disease, but also a Western Society Disease.

V A CASE IN POINT

Corpocracy has conditioned us to be passive and nonresponsive, silent and safe hires, going along to get along, doing what we are told even when we know it is wrong, keeping our nose clean and out of trouble, not being a whistle blower when we discover corruption, not reporting somebody seen misusing or stealing company property, or somebody withholding important information to a project.

Corpocracy has led to worker cynicism with workers bringing their bodies to work but leaving their minds at home.

It is counterintuitive to suggest that the corporate design is anachronistic; that corporate society has overstayed its functional life; that this has led to corpocracy.

To illustrate, I once told the director of a department of sixty people that he didn’t need his ten manager-supervisors. He looked at me aghast, “How would we operate?”

I answered, “Better than you’re operating now.”

A nice man, he was literally dumbfounded by such a suggestion. He could not see getting anything done without all these overseers of work.

Well, he was wrong. These were professionals. In one section of his operation, there were seven Ph.D.’s. They were all treated as if children suspended in terminal adolescence waiting for instructions from above, which incidentally, were by people who had little knowledge of their discipline. It resulted in chaos.

These ten manager-supervisors, whom I describe here, took in $750,000 in salaries and benefits. It was the 1980s and they were essentially paper pushers and meeting holders, both now essentially replaced by electronic records and conferences.

VI WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM OUR ENEMIES

Another writer registered concern that Islam and its jihad could one day take over our way of life. I don’t think so, not if we learn important lessons from how this movement operates.

The Western belief is that if we could only take out Osama bin Laden the international jihad would collapse, and peace would be restored throughout the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What the terrorist movement should teach us is the wisdom of decentralization. There couldn’t be a looser confederation than this jihad. Yet, it has confounded the single super power of the world.

Consider this:

(1) There is no strong central authority with this jihad, although we like to identify certain members of the jihad as occupying this authority.
(2) We have erroneously looked at Islam as a group and failed to recognize these renegades are only a small splinter of the total Islam population.
(3) The best equipped, most technological advanced and electronically sophisticated military the world has ever known has failed to subdue this poorly trained, poorly led, poorly equipped, and relatively small insurgency movement.
(4) The reason is obvious.
(5) The jihad has mastered the wisdom of decentralization where the passion of individuals is the highest possible, along with the willingness to sacrifice their lives for the cause.
(6) The jihad’s only advantage is the knowledge that it can move swiftly and stealthily without the encumbrances of a lethargic, complex and complicated multilevel sophisticated organization of apparatchiks carrying out decisions made half a world away.
(7) The Roman Army made similar mistakes when the Visigoths and Germanic tribes sacked Rome.
(8) Rome refused to demand sacrifices of its Roman citizens, and instead entertained them in the coliseum.
(9) The Roman Army failed to adjust its military to deal effectively with these barbarians from the north and paid dearly for it.
(10) Rome fell.
(11) The Dark Middle Ages followed.

This elaboration on “corpocracy” is meant to show that a reluctance to learn from our enemies is not new, but has tracked man throughout history. Time will only tell if we will become unstuck and learn from our enemies.

Check out other essays by Dr. Fisher on his website: www.fisherofideas.com, where all his books are also available for purchase.