JESUS STORY CONTINUES

And God Created the Organization

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 17, 2015

And God created the Organization and gave it domination over man.

Genesis 1, 30A, Subparagraph VIII

Robert Townsend (1920-1998), CEO of Avis Car Rental

CHRISTIANITY AND ORGANIZATION

More than a half century ago, a spunky, glib and brash executive named Robert Townsend went against the prevailing grain of expected executive behavior, challenged the behemoth, Hertz Car Rental Company with an essentially start-up company, Avis that proved a towering success with the clip rejoinder, “We try harder!” 

Moreover, he used his natural Protestant work ethic to harness his energy and channel his individualistic spirit to an improbable success. 

Townsend captured this successful formula (justice, fun, excellence) in a tongue-in-cheek popular book, “Up the Organization” (1970) that reads like the Epistle’s of St. Paul but without all the sorrow as he examines the complex organization.   Ahead of the text, he makes biblical with,

And God created the Organization and gave it dominion over man.  If this was not blasphemous enough he add, Genesis 1, 30A, Subparagraph VIII

Elsewhere such derision shows through to reveal his persistent frustration:

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with our country except that the leaders of all our major organization are operating on the wrong assumptions.

We’re in this mess because for the last two hundred yeas we’ve been using the Catholic Church and Caesar’s legions as our patterns for creating organizations.  And until the last forty or fifty years it made sense.  

The average churchgoer, soldier, and factory worker was uneducated and dependent on order from above.  And authority carried considerable weight because disobedience brought the death penalty or its equivalent (Dismissal and blacklisting brought starvation to an industrial worker; excommunication brought the spiritual equivalent of death to a churchgoer (Townsend 1970).

Forty-five years later, as this is being written (2015), everything is pretty much as it was the prior forty or fifty years, as he puts it, including post WWI and post WWII, when everything changed and yet nothing actually changed at all. 

Companies have grown larger, institutions, too, across the board from education, religion, government to the military with gleaming glass towers called office buildings, but industrial plants, churches, schools and shopping malls looking like windowless fortresses or prisons housing those that find their way through the portals of these buildings to work, worship or shop.  They gleam with touching slogans, colorful décor, cutting edge technology and air conditioning, but they cannot escape the aroma of sweatshops of yesteryear.  

Students of our schools are bright often randy exploding with energy but made to sit and be polite, obedient, punctual, submissive, accommodating, and passive.  For if they are not, they are likely to be put on a regiment of pills to cool their jets and dull their wits as what they consider nonsense is poured into their unreceptive minds.

Most workers today are college trained and often superior in temperament, vision, perception and problem solving skills than those who would be called their managers.  These workers are expected to be loyal and obedient to executive authority, and to do what told to do even if it is wrong. 

When the company goes under, these managers bail out of the fracas with their golden parachutes while the workers are out of their jobs and livelihood.  It was likely this in the 1930s and nearly one hundred years later it is like this in the 21st century. 

Meanwhile, the working middle class has all but evaporated, while the executive class has expanded to the point of obscenity.  The rich have always gotten richer on the backs of the poor, but the poor before did not have the acumen or wherewithal to make a difference due to their lack of education and skills. 

But now, the working class is professional and is trained as well if not better than the managing class that dictates what professionals will and won’t do, as if nothing has changed.  Yet, the managing class is essentially a product of post WWII, which has glutted the corporation, making CEOs and other senior executives comparable to mythological gods with perks and benefits, salaries and bonuses, stock options and hidden concessions of divinity status.

It is apparent that author Townsend thought this was a short term problem, but clearly it is not.  What he is saying, then, is that the old incentives and inducements are not working; that the old saw of company compliance and dependence is no longer relevant, which is true.

Harvard professor Harry Levinson calls this “The Great Jackass Fallacy” (1973), that is, the false unconscious managerial assumption that that management knows best, that management knows what motivates workers, and that it is clearly different than what motivates managers.  

This was absurd in 1973, and equally absurd in 2015, yet as atavistic as this assumption may be many at the top of the pyramid practice as if they believe it is still plausible. 

We have been carried through a very brief outline of how Christianity came into being against considerable odds, not only from the outside but the insider as well.  We have also gone through the Six Ages of the Church to show it is a very human organization.   

The reason for endeavoring to write this Jesus Story from a layman’s point of view is that I recognize how important religion has been in my life, and how important the mythic and historic images of Jesus has captured that essence of my being and propelled me to both the life that I have had and to this stage in that long life. 

There is nothing that is written in this Jesus Story that has not been written tens of thousands of times before by thousands of people who do nothing else but look at or dispute the flimsy evidence of what this man left on earth during his brief stay. 

Born into an Irish Roman Catholic household, schooled in the parochial schools through eighth grade, and devout to the point of excess into my thirties, with all the important lessons of life that Catholicism taught me, it failed in the end to the real parents of my soul.

As I go forward in the balance of this short book, use will be made of an expertise with which I am more familiar as I find I have empathy for the rational-legal system of Max Weber, and with rare exception, a similar appreciation of organization and what it means and doesn’t mean. 

Weber, as you will see, was an acute observer from the outside whereas I by circumstance, inclination and you might even say destiny have been something of an acute observer from the inside, while ironically remaining an outsider, thus giving me the perspective with which I can identify with Weber, but as doer, not an academic.  This is by way of saying, for critics, I am neither fish nor fowl, but so be it.

This is still the Jesus Story, still a continuation of my Search for the Real Parents of My Soul, but now with deeper respect for my Christian training while, at the same time, having a greater appreciation of the Protestant Reformation and why that saved Christianity then, some five hundred years ago, nearly to the day, and continues to save it to this new century.

Most of my adult life has been in hi-tech companies surrounded by brilliant people, many of whom once were religious, but no longer believe, not only in religion, but in God or anything, some of them are atheists, others agnostics, and some have abandoned Christianity for money, fame, or simply because of boredom, expecting to be given something without giving anything.  

If religion doesn’t have the answer in the culture to which one is born, chances are it will not be found in another religion, as all religions, whatever their belief system, are fragile in character, often paranoid, and can be hostile environments as we have already seen in this narrative.

Albert Einstein, a non-practicing Jew, was a religious man with a deeply spiritual conscience.  As often is the case with him, he can say a lot in a few words, such as

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

This odyssey is an attempt to get past this cultural blindness.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY: AND GOD CREATED THE ORGANIZATION

Robert Townsend, Up the Organization: How to stop the Corporation from Stiffling People and Strangling Profits, A Fawcett Crest Book, 1970

Ibid, p. 139.

Harry Levinson, The Great Jackass Fallacy, Harvard Business, 1973

Jerry Mayer & John P. Holms, Bite-Size Einstein, St. Martin’s Press, 1996, p. 56.