CORPOCRACY AND "THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION" -- OMEN FOR THE FUTURE?

CORPOCRACY AND “THE CULTURE OF CONFUSION” – OMEN FOR THE FUTURE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 2, 2010

REFERENCE:

A perceptive reader shared the following thoughts in his reaction to my missive, “THE WAY IT IS, THE WAY WE ARE!”

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A READER WRITES:


Hello Jim,

Fun stuff is too difficult to turn away from. I get a couple of this multi-colored graphic filled pieces of political commentary every week. As the individual members of Congress called out by first name are all Democrats, the source of the message is clear.

More indicative of the dissonance that exists in public discourse is the fourth element of the your "Culture of" group. That is the Culture of Confusion resulting from unconscious competence.

On one hand, when the Government institutes expand social programs, it is on a slippery slope leading to communism. On the other hand, when the Government fails to pad the social program that benefits me, it is evil and should be voted out of office. This is the unconscious part. The computers, software and the Internet combine to provide even the unconscious the competence to communicate their confused and confusing views of the world.

Your introduction of unions into the discussion is appropriate. When has anyone in America, when given the chance, voted for sustaining pay rates over increasing them? In hard times, unions have even voted in favor of decreasing their ranks rather than take pay cuts. Your argument emphasizes that the people we elect are no different, nor should they be, than the people that elected them.

We are, as a nation, filled with distrust as we see the institutions, which appeared as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, fades away. The discomfort of those disorienting events drive many to lash out at the obvious targets, Bush, Obama, Republicans, Democrats, neo-cons, liberals. Congress earns the extra $10K as a kind of abuse pay. Meanwhile, the shadow government of big business lobbyists probably gets ten times that for pushing laws that contribute to the net income of the conglomerates they represent.

None of these multi-colored graphic filled pieces of political commentary ever address that.

The unconscious competence of the Culture of Confusion flourishes.

Happy New Year!

Michael

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

Happy New Year to you, too!

What you say is true. We have indeed entered the Culture of Confusion in unconscious competence in many respects. What is not so apparent is that institutional society lags in the storyline in the New Age. It has failed to appreciate or take seriously society’s new construction.

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THE FAILURE OF CORPORATE SOCIETY

For the nearly the past forty years or since the Jimmy Carter Presidency, no fault of his, incidentally, Corporate Society has designed, constructed and institutionalized what Peter Drucker declared as “Corporate Society.” This society has failed again and again and again to realize it is anachronistic:

(1) Corporate Society has failed to realize a workforce of professionals educated in the sciences and technologies, languages and cognitions, philosophies and religions, economies and ecologies could not be treated as interchangeable pieces in a machine as workers in the past have been treated, and get away with it, or could it?

That is precisely how the professional workforce has been treated over the last forty years. Corporate Society has instituted a contrived system of meaningless performance appraisals and incentives, while confining workers to pigeonhole cubicles expecting them to dutifully react to inane directives of the leadership, a leadership nostalgic for compliant and obsequious workers of the past whom they could control by fear and intimidation.

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990) and SIX SILENT KILLERS (1998) addressed the consequences of this mindset. Workers have retreated into passive behaviors that have played havoc with productivity and have destroyed corporate infrastructures from within to the point that few corporations are surviving on much more than life support.

(2) Corporate Society has failed to realize that the moral authority of society is the foundation upon which the economic society is built. Religious and educational institutions have ignored the changing nature and complexity of society’s citizens in terms of expectations and demands along with the disappearing barriers between parents and children, teachers and students, managers and workers, and elected officials and citizens.

Instead of updating and promulgating linchpins to bridge the gaps inevitable when a society is in transition, Corporate Society has attempted to finesse its citizens by jerry-rigging a defunct system with workplace slogans (empowerment) and cosmetic change (open door policy), bogus academic curriculums (cultural studies) and new slants on grading (students evaluating teachers), fooling no one.

Corporate Society is broken and its pillars are crumbling along with its walls. The storyline is that draconian measures no longer work as they did one hundred years ago. Society has been turned inside out and upside down with students now the teachers and professionals now the face of the future and not well-heeled executives. Corporate Society has suffered a backlash, as surely we should have expected.

(3) Corporate Society has failed to realize how important spirituality is to the most sophisticated to the least sophisticated. Everyone needs spiritual sustenance as much as bread to live, breath and function as human beings. When religious and educational institutions bought into the Corporate Society model, the die was cast. We are now plagued with its consequences.

A spate of books claims God is not only dead but is irrelevant; that all the violence and chaos in the world can be placed at the door of religious institutions. These books have a point. The Christian, Judaic and Islam religions, in many cases, have been contaminated with secular corpocracy. Clerics and followers in such cases no longer practice the sacred that is preached. They have instead been tainted with fanaticism and gotten caught up in the politics of the moment. Love is at the center of all major religions, but that love is crippled when poisoned with the fatal flaw of secular corpocracy.

(4) Corporate Leadership has failed because it is the architect of a failed system. Even as I write these words, there are people who think President Obama runs the country, that he is the most powerful leader in the world, that Pope Benedict XVI is the spiritual guide of more than one billion Roman Catholics, and his word is law through encyclicals. None of this is true. Such leaders have a bully pulpit, to be sure, but depending on their respective charisma and persuasive seduction, they fail or succeed at the discretion of the people.

Leadership since the beginning of time has been local, regional and specific to clans, tribes and now gangs. Afghanistan and Pakistan are not mirages.

Peter the Great knew this. That is why he roamed among his subjects in disguise to see how they thought and what they thought of him. How many leaders today would take such a chance? How many, if they did, would use what they learned and have the courage to lead more appropriately?

Peter the Great wanted to bring his backward Russian society of mainly illiterate serfs into the modern world, and knew he couldn’t do it with a pitchfork, but could do it by the sage wisdom of his moral authority.

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Ask yourself, how many leaders you know would attend a conference much less wander incognito amongst their people where they could not display their credentials or mention the authority of their position? This is not a rhetorical question. When I was a Honeywell OD psychologist, I asked executives to attend such a conference, and they all refused.

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READ THE TEALEAVES!

We have seen 100-year-old institutions such as Montgomery Wards disappear.

We have seen the “Big Blue,” IBM, stumble and retrogress into the postmodern age, as it failed to see the significance of the personal computer age.

We have seen Xerox engineers develop the personal computer only to have it stolen from them by two college dropouts, Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, who were working out of Jobs’ garage, when Xerox management refused to fund their engineers’ research.

We have seen Bill Gates literally steal the software and write a contract with IBM that would turn him one day into the richest man in the world.

We have seen Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University college students, create www.google.com in their spare time. Google was first incorporated as a private company on September 4, 1998, and first offered as an initial public offering (IPC) on August 19, 2004, which raised $1.67 billion, making them instant billionaires.

We have seen, on the other hand, the failure of Homeland Security and the US Government to react quickly and effectively to Hurricane Katrina, making a mockery of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda play havoc with American Troops in Afghanistan and Pakistan with Al-Qaeda managing the same devastation in Somalia, Indonesia and other parts of the world. Corporate Society is flummoxed in the climate of turbulent change where terrorists with no national origin or allegiance control the game.

Rome, once again, has fallen, and we cannot rebuild it to its former majesty, not now, not tomorrow, not ever.

What have we learned fighting corporate wars against bands of renegades? Have we learned nothing? Can we not see that our failure is institutional as well as strategic? Do we have to be hit with a sledgehammer to realize this?

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HOW LATE WISE!

Apple, Inc. has learned the hard way that it is hard to resist the urge to adopt the Corporate Society model.

Steven Jobs thought that Apple needed a true corporate executive to run the company. He hired John Sculley of Pepsi Cola fame to run Apple and Sculley nearly ran it into oblivion.

John Sculley was born, bread, trained, and programmed in corpocracy, and knew nothing else. He came from the management school of ITT Harold Geneen, who claimed a good manager could manage anything irrespective of the technology or industry. Geneen had no respect for culture. Incidentally, neither did the celebrated management guru Peter Drucker.

Geneen and Drucker saw culture as an aberrancy, something dreamt up by softheaded shrinks. Sculley attempted to impose Pepsi’s cultural corpocracy on Apple employees, who were of a different mindset, experience, spirit and inclination. It should come as no surprise it proved disastrous.

Bill Gates has essentially departed from Microsoft management but Paul Allen, a co-founder of the company is still actively involved. The culture is still nostalgic of its origins, but what happens in the future if the mind of that time is not leading the way? It is something to ponder.

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BACK TO THE FUTURE

In the nineteenth century, most industry and commerce was conducted in guilds. There was no boss, per se, but co-workers complementing each other in tasks to get the work done. They were skilled craftsmen, and took pride in their work. Most education was on-the-job training, and not in trade schools or academic institutions.

When students were able to attend school, it was rigorous and comprehensive. The high school curriculum (see IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, AuthorHouse, 2003) in 1900 for a Clinton High School student in Clinton, Iowa rivaled and perhaps surpassed what a four-year college graduate today would likely experience in terms of range and depth of learning. Only 5 – 10 percent of Clintonians then graduated from high school in 1900, whereas today 90 percent or more do. But are they educated for life, for a job, or for anything?

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Early in the twentieth century, tool and die makers worked as independent contractors. Henry Ford was a bicycle mechanic. He didn’t invent the automobile. He bought into the industrial engineering schemes of Frederick Winslow Taylor of assembly line production, and the rest was history.

Small manufacturers and tool and die makers combined to form General Motors. In doing so, they gave up their independence, falling in line to new rules and regulations, policies and procedures, and further surrendering their control of what they did for better pay and benefits as the union rushed in to establish parity.

In the early days, there was resistance to control. Like in all times of transition, independent guilds and private contractors were reluctant to cave in to Corporate Society.

(1) Guild workers didn’t have any organization, but were skilled and took pride in their work.

(2) They knew and respected each other, and valued their connection in terms of competence.

(3) When times got tough, they stuck with each other. They didn’t have a corporate umbrella upon which to rely or hide. Nor did they look to the government to bail them out of their distress.

If this seems radical, the “Skunk Works” of the Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Program is reminiscent of the guilds. It is famous for its aircraft designs of business, engineering and technical teams with a high degree of autonomy unhampered by bureaucracy of the wider organization.

These autonomous groups are several times more productive than conventional operations, and have brought designs in under budget and ahead of schedule. They are synergistic, electric and alive with camaraderie. Why not more in evidence? Corporate Society is still locked into the past.

Tracy Kidder won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Soul of a Machine” (1981), which tracked a “skunk work” like team in the creation of a mega computer, only to dispense with the team once the job was done.

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Organized people in a corporate complex are wide open for exploitation because they think they are too big to fail and too secure to be exploited. Therefore, they fail to pay proper attention to the nuances of change. They don’t misread the tealeaves; they disregard them.

Employees of corporations who are of a passive, reactive and vengeful nature look around them and see how easy it is to manipulate the system to their unsavory ends.

The corporation, too busy counting its loot, disregards the behavior of these social termites until it is too late for damage control. What is the point of lecturing an employee after he has been late for work 167 times but no notice taken before? This was the case of one supervisor who came to me for advice. I asked him, “What was so special this last time?“ He scratched his head, and answered, “Nothing, really.”

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Thomas Jefferson has been out of fashion for a number of years because he was so strongly for states rights, individual authority, decentralized federal government, and a more pastoral agrarian society. The Information Age may not look as Jefferson envisioned the future, but “cultural capital” and intellectual and spiritual innovation thrive in his kind of world while they collapse in Corporate Society.

Steven Jobs, Stephen Wozniak, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Marc Andreessen, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and many more like them are bringing us back to the future.

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