Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers by Jackall Robert

Author:Jackall, Robert [Jackall, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1988-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

III

The kind of “flexibility” that is required to maintain such stances can be confusing even to those in inner management circles. For instance, a highly placed staff member whose work requires him to interact daily with the top figures of his company, says:

I get faked out all the time, and I’m part of the system. I come from a very different culture. Where I come from, if you give someone your word, no one ever questions it. It’s the old hard-work-will-lead-to-success ideology. Small community, Protestant, agrarian, small business, merchant-type values. I’m disadvantaged in a system like this.

He goes on to characterize the system more fully and what it takes to succeed within it:

It’s the ability to play this system that determines whether you will rise. … And part of the adeptness [required] is determined by how much it bothers people. One thing you have to be able to do is to play the game, but you can’t be disturbed by the game. What’s the game? It’s bringing troops home from Vietnam and declaring peace with honor. It’s saying one thing and meaning another.

It’s characterizing the reality of a situation with any description that is necessary to make that situation more palatable to some group that matters. It means that you have to come up with a culturally accepted verbalization to explain why you are not doing what you are doing…. [Or] you say that we had to do what we did because it was inevitable; or because the guys at the [regulatory] agencies were dumb; [you] say we won when we really lost; [you] say we saved money when we squandered it; [you] say something’s safe when it’s potentially or actually dangerous…. Everyone knows that it’s bullshit, but it’s accepted. This is the game.

He points out how a game can suddenly change:

Now what upsets the whole game is when some executive on high says: “Well, we just can’t accept such and such a loss,” or whatever. That throws the whole game into chaos at the middle levels because it disrupts and changes all the rules of the game. But if the guys on high do call a halt to some game, it’s not because they’re bothered by the game itself but only by the direction a particular game is taking which threatens some interest of their own.

In this view, top executives go home with the ball when they think they are going to lose. In addition, then, to the characteristics described earlier, it seems that a prerequisite for big success in the corporation is a certain adeptness at inconsistency.

I want to make a few general remarks about consistency and inconsistency in public life. Inconsistencies and outright contradictions between actions themselves, between actions and appearances, between actions and their explanations, between different explanations, or between explanations and other beliefs are, of course, commonplace human experiences. However, men and women whose occupational roles thrust them into the public forum are often expected to achieve or at least display a degree of consistency in their overall self-presentations, even as they are also expected to do what has to be done.

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