By David S. Isenberg 
From America's Network, June 1, 1999
http://www.americasnetwork.com/issues/99issues/990601/990601edge.htm
In times of tension at AT&T, my colleagues and I would
joke that our jobs were 10% technical and 90% political. One day
it dawned on me that it wasn’t a joke.
So I launched an effort to understand why I felt like such a maladapted
fish in the invisible but omnipresent viscosity of corporate culture.
Dilbert helped some, as did the stories of Gulliver, Alice in
Wonderland and The Emperor’s New Clothes. But I suspected
that there was a more systematic treatment. After years of reading
fawning analyses and how-to management success stories that rimmed
but did not penetrate, I finally found Moral Mazes.
Moral Mazes, a 1988 book by social anthropologist Robert Jackall
(Oxford Press, New York), is written as if the observer had just
parachuted into a Fijian island or the Stone-Age Lacandon jungle.
But the bizarre, alien culture detailed here happens to be that
of the big, modern, unreconstructed American corporation.
An anthropologist needs informants — high priests and warriors
that can explain a culture’s ceremonies and shibboleths.
But corporate culture is opaque and unfriendly to the outsider.
Thirty-six corporations refused Jackall’s request to study
them. From these unsuccessful negotiations, Jackall learned enough
of an insider’s ways to gain admittance to three companies:
a textile company, a chemical company and a public relations firm.
He called them Weft, Alchemy and Images Inc.
Once inside, Jackall observes that formal corporate processes
are but a ritual veneer over intensely personal ones. Reflecting
this, managers typically identify their jobs by their boss. They
say, "I work for Bill Jones," or "I’m in Jill
Smith’s organization." To Jackall’s clinical eye,
this phenomenon "exactly reflects the way authority is structured,
exercised, and experienced."
Jackall calls corporate culture a "patrimonial bureaucracy."
He points out that such personalization makes it more like a royal
court than a classical rule-and-process-driven bureaucracy.
Jackall describes in detail how "management by objective"
ties the patrimonial bureaucracy together. The anthropologist
observes that "management by objective" is, in fact,
quite subjective. The data indicate that a boss’s primary
job is to make his or her organization look good to superiors.
Bosses use ambiguity to manipulate credit and blame, allocating
blame downward and pulling credit up. "Pushing details down
protects the privilege of authority to declare that a mistake
has been made," Jackall says. A boss can’t do this if
procedures are too explicit or well established. So bosses often
leave important details unspecified. This creates more ambiguity,
so personal relationships become even more important.
Personalization of authority extends from lowliest manager to
CEO. At every level, Jackall observes, "the most common topic
of conversation is… speculation about the CEO’s plans,
intentions, strategies, actions, style, public image and ideological
leanings of the moment," including who has the CEO’s
ear and who’s out of favor.
When there is good news, credit flows up — so the boss,
personifying the organization, looks good to superiors. Then credit
flows up again.
When there is bad news, it’s the boss’ prerogative to
push blame onto subordinates to keep it from escalating. Bad news
that can’t be contained can threaten a boss’s position;
if bad news rises up, blame will come down. This is why they shoot
messengers.
So it’s easier to ignore bad news. Thus, Jackall’s chemical
company studiously ignored a $6 million maintenance item until
it exploded (literally) into a $150 million disaster. "To
make a decision ahead of [its] time risks political catastrophe,"
said one manager, justifying the deferred maintenance. Then, once
the mess had been made, "The decision [to clean up] made
itself," said another relieved manager.
I first read Moral Mazes in 1996, when I was part of AT&T’s
Opportunity Discovery Department. At the time, we were discovering
that the ways that telcos create value were becoming obsolete;
bad news for AT&T, indeed. One night while reading, I had
a vivid dream that my department colleagues and I were hanging
on meat hooks in a cooler, like butchered cattle.
Moral Mazes is a difficult book for other reasons, too. It is
written in a convoluted, academic style. But it casts a steely,
objective, unapologetic eye on how corporate culture works, how
decisions get made, how power flows, what it takes to get ahead
and why Dilbert is so funny so often. The book is a decade old,
but it hasn’t lost its edge. It is a must-read for all of
us whose work gets bogged down in the labyrinthine politics of
big, seemingly bureaucratic companies.
Copyright 1999 Advanstar Communications.