Four Faces of Corporate Man

Life in corporations is one of the most under-reported subjects in American journalism. An energetic press serves the business community—and that’s the trouble: business writers and editors know their audience and serve it all too well. Thus those wonderful profiles of standout executives that appear in such places as Business Week: “Fogarty, 48, a former USC tailback, jogs four miles daily and demands lean-and-mean performance from his management team— and he gets it.” That sort of thing.

It is remarkable how little an outsider knows about the realities of corporate experience. The blame for this situation can’t all be laid on a sycophantic press. Business is a tougher beat for a writer than sports or entertainment or the arts— tougher in its way than politics. No Freedom of Information Act requires that executives share interoffice memoranda; no tradition of leaks from well-placed sources breeds intimacy between business and the press. Nor does corporate life encourage flamboyant self-promoters or ligures given to revealing flight of introspection; so many of the unwritten rules for businessmen add up to one word, and mum is the word. A symbol for the distance companies keep between themselves and the rest of the world used to be “the executive suite” up on “the fortieth floor,” but the contemporary symbol is the secluded corporate headquarters tucked into the hills of Greenwich or Palo Alto or Armonk. A recent visitor to this scene describes it: “To enter the corporate world, you travel to the outskirts of the city (sometimes to a building resembling a baronial manor of glass and concrete surrounded by woods and superhighways). In the waiting room, you are greeted by an aging uniformed security policeman and a pretty young receptionist. One of them tells you to write down your name, nationality, organization (no one ever comes without an organizational affiliation), and the person you are visiting. You are given a badge and you wait for your host or, more likely, his secretary to lead you through a maze of corridors (after a while you slop trying to remember the turns) to the proper office. Inside the shiny corridors, the well-scrubbed, totally clean smell is like nowhere else.”The Company Man. Diffident, polite, and tactful to a fault. Scorned by the craftsman as just “an office politician.” Hates conflict, and is very good at smoothing it over. He is the cowed figure that William H. Whyte described in The Organization Man. His central principle is that the good of the company and his own good are congruent. But he usually doesn’t expect to move beyond “middlemanagement”—and usually he’s right.

The writer is Michael Maccoby in his new book THE GAMESMAN (Simon and Schuster, $8.95). a study based on interviews with some 250 executives in what are commonly called “high-technology” companies: the Xeroxes, Fairchilds, and IBMs of our world. (The companies he studied, like his individual subjects, remain pseudonymous, though the reader can make intelligent guesses.) Maccoby had unusual access to his subjects, gained partly, as he acknowledges, through the influence of Harvard, with whose Program on Technology and Society he was associated. Maccoby is a psychoanalyst and was certified to pose questions of unusual intimacy. His baggage for the trip held Rorschach tests and questionnaires that asked into his subjects’ lower back pains and their difficulties with sex and bills, as well as their attitudes toward pollution and other social implications of technology, and toward the role of the individual in the corporation.

He came back with something considerably less weighty than the paraphernalia would suggest, a book that is a queasy blend of scholarship and journalism-not wholly satisfying as either, but redeemed by one solid observation about modern corporate character, and by a myriad of fragmentary data.

Maccoby found a “typology” of corporate personalities and it provides the book with much of its structure. His typical executives fall into four categories:

The Craftsman. A tinkerer and a perfectionist. He doesn’t care much about the bottom line, he just loves his computer. A pipe-smoking, head-underthe-hood sort of guy. Doesn’t like to take chances. A good father (better as a father than a husband). Sees beneficent oak trees on his Rorschachs. Not strong on “relating” to people. He’s essential to the technological company—but he’s not going far.

The Jungle Fighter. The reincarnation of the nineteenth-century robber baron, he knifes his way to success. Brusque and serious. Very good at firing people. Is often brought into a failing company for help in getting rid of the deadwood. Motivates by fear. Trusts no one, except possibly his wife. One such man, of a Rorschach blot that usually suggests two people working together, said, “It looks like a gang bang is about to occur.” The Jungle Fighter often climbs high on the corporate ladder but often falls to an early death.

If this doesn’t sound much like social science, it isn’t. The categories are jaunty and simplistic, and not exactly new.

One thing Maccoby seems to have learned from his research is a lesson in the immodest art of packaging. His jungle fighters, craftsmen, and company men are essentially decorative items for the one idea this book has to offer. Maccoby’s concept of the new corporate man, the person he calls The Gamesman. Although this notion too comes with unnecessary vinyl panels, at its center there is some inventive and functional thought.

The Gamesman, in Maccoby’s view, is the rampant figure on the corporate shield. Although he is not without historical antecedents—cowboys and riverboat gamblers among them—he represents a break with business as it has been conducted in the recent past. He is in many ways an appealing figure—gregarious, unpretentious, unstodgy, a risktaker. Money matters to him, of course, but he isn’t greedy; he thinks of his salary as points on the scoreboard. Sports imagery is crucial to his thought. His skill is not in building empires but in putting together winning “teams”—often shortlived groups that compete intensely with others within and outside the corporation. He isn’t primarily interested in finding himself an impregnable spot in the hierarchy—but the scope of this fellow’s power can be impressive. (“Fred Gordon is thirty-six years old and manages four thousand people. . . .”) Like a football player, he is a master at turning his emotions (and his violence) on and off: hits hard but stops at the whistle. His trick is to turn work into play. “He sees a developing project, human relations, and his own career in terms of options and possibilities, as if they were a game. His character is a collection of near paradoxes. . . . He is cooperative but competitive; detached and playful but compulsively driven to succeed; a team player but a would-be superstar; a team leader but often a rebel against bureaucratic hierarchy; fair and unprejudiced but contemptuous of weakness; tough and dominating but not destructive. . . . His main goal is to be known as a winner, and his deepest fear is to be labeled a loser.” Maccoby’s research provides abundant documentation for his theory, as well as information which, if not neatly placeable, has its own interest. His subjects speak constantly of winning and losing; in their Rorschachs they see figures whirling in intricate rivalrous dances. A gamesman remarks seriously that the three historical figures he most respects are “Vince Lombardi, Jesus Christ, and Harry Truman,” because (respectively) of their competitiveness, ability to motivate others, and courage. An unsuccessful gamesman looks at inkblots and sees “poodles and detached testicles.” In the dream of another, a CIA-like organization chases him, even though he knows himself to be a member of it. Another dreams he is a top, which will fall over if it ceases to spin. One of the few women in the study repeatedly dreams she is buried alive in a coffin, and wishes above all for a telephone. One way to see the character that Maccoby describes is as a sane adaption to aberrant circumstance. The primary fact of the manager’s life is abstraction, a necessary distance between himself and others, between himself and what he does. Maccoby has relatively little to say about the products his managers makein part to protect their anonymity, in part because products are the least important part of their jobs. The product may be unlovable in various ways—trivial, or complex beyond comprehension, socially harmful, but in any case the manager measures his ascent in terms of the distance he puts between the product and himself. A manager’s true product is management. Ever increasing abstraction has its tempting pleasures: it’s possible to become high on “control”—control not just of subordinates hut of subordinate parts of oneself. “By controlling himself so successfully and maintaining control over the organization, he begins to enjoy control for its own sake. The brain becomes the overwhelmingly dominant organ of potency. Others are judged also on their powers of control. Can they laugh at the hierarchical put-down without taking it personally? Can they take defeat as well as victory without losing their cool? Can they play the game, take the pressure, even when the results are unclear for long periods?” If you can do all that, my son, then you can become a gamesman.

A bleak psychic landscape. The Gamesman develops his analytical and psychological acuity at the expense of morality and feeling. He exploits others and covertly enjoys it, but discovers at some moment that he has mined his own inner resources and done nothing to replenish them. His capacities for empathy, honesty, and honor atrophy. The cost is “dampened passion, emotional castration, and depression.”

Maccoby takes pains not to be judgmental about his subjects; indeed, he clearly warmed to them during his research. He chides his academic colleagues for their reflexive hauteur toward businessmen. “I would say that although academics consider themselves more ‘humane’ than businessmen, the engineers and managers we interviewed are no more competitive and a lot more cooperative with one another than most professors.”But there is nevertheless something unique about the corporate world—the monolithic intensity it demands, its power to shape character to its own ends.