David Williamson has produced several disturbing plays about HR fascism and the psychopathology of many modern bosses. He has noticed the way the modern corporation has relinquished its ambition of the 1970s to go from the hierarchy of an army to the pluralism of an orchestra. The ranking would remain there but it would be devolved, honouring specialisation. The theory was that essential decisions should be centralised but all the rest handled at the coalface, among staff. Now we are back in the army. This is partly to do with the abolition of executive careers. No longer do you ‘come up’ through the Post Office, or David Jones, or the ABC, where girls and boys could once start delivering mail and end up running the joint. Nowadays executives are guns for hire and do not expect to stay more than five years in a company (running airports, national broadcasters or bean factories is taken to be much the same), and they become used to a five-stage assault on the status quo.
First year, paint the walls purple (I’ve arrived!) and sack a third of the staff; second year, train up your newly hired executive force and jemmy your new plan through the system; third year, sack some more, fix some intercorporate alliances; fourth year, cope with bad results, blame government and international conditions, foreshadow plan B; fifth year, produce figures and charts showing results have been staggeringly good but more austerity is required. Adopt plan B: accept golden parachute.
As managers become more itinerant, underlings become shiftless. Even in ABC-TV, where you would think jobs would be prized and not easily relinquished, there is a turnover that would shock even the English cricket team. My partner, Jonica Newby of Catalyst, finds that every time she returns from leave or a long recording trip half the staff are new. How do you build teams or loyalty in conditions like that?
Students prepare for all this when young. Gone are the days when (especially arts) students lounged on lawns dreaming of…well, whatever noble things we 1960s students did dream of: Utopias, world peace, remedial massage (more likely beer, more beer and Jenny Lustgrove). Now students have three part-time jobs, call in to campuses for what they need, then shoot through. University bars are almost deserted.
The managers also have new priorities: compliance. And compliance. I am usually grilled three times to justify a $240 trip to Melbourne. Why am I going? asks clerk No. 2 preparing to send my answers up several layers of determined executive scrutiny. ‘Why, to shag the choirboy I have secreted there,’ I want to reply. ‘Oddly enough, to record radio, as I’ve been doing for 35 years,’ I once answered. The clerk, who didn’t know me from Peter Foster, sent the form back.
Managers are seen at 1. fare-well parties, 2. strike negotiations, 3. airport club lounges. Some are never seen by staff at all and are said to be shy. This is the strange world David Williamson has written about in plays such as Operator and Charitable Intent. Psychopathic bosses are encouraged by a top-down, ruthlessly competitive system because they are manipulators par excellence and can combine charm with lots of cod jargon and pseudo MBA guff. Their path to power is made easier in a world of short-term goals and high turnover. It seems unlikely, but it’s true, and worrying. On one occasion, following a Catalyst report on psychopathic bosses, a startled Geraldine Doogue, who has wide contact with executive Australia, asked whether we were really referring to all the chaps from the Forbes 500 List as megalomaniacs, and we replied, ‘Not at all.’ The villain in the piece could just as well run a mail room or a shoe shop as run the company.
Dr John Clarke (no, not Fred Dagg, I’m being serious for a change) who has written about all this in Working With Monsters, estimates that 0.5 per cent of women and 2 per cent of men qualify as corporate psychopaths according to his definition-and they’ve never had a better time. Despite the current obsession with compliance, it is they who slide around systems by knowing their inner workings and by playing colleagues off against each other.
The answer? Well, Dr Clarke doesn’t recommend therapy for the offenders. They’d just learn new tricks. I am convinced that old-fashioned devolution is the way forward. It is surprising, but shouldn’t be, how much workers know about the breadth of their job and how both efficiency and creativity can be nurtured. It is also interesting to see how little the checks and rechecks fail to spot the fraudsters. In this age of bureaucracy sans frontières, companies still miss rorters hiring yachts on expenses for New Year’s parties and managers creaming hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions.
Compliance can also be counterproductive. An example from outside the workplace: fear of paedophiles has generated an obscene list of regulations in the UK covering clowns at kids’ parties, Santa Claus and Scouts. The result is that parents are no longer content to allow their children to walk or bike to school. Predatory men might be hiding behind pillar boxes. As a result, children are driven to and fro. Apart from the green implications of this extra chauffeuring and the children’s lack of exercise, and even an undue fear of strangers, it now turns out that, for every child saved from a predator, three hundred are killed in car crashes. The price of vigilance can be greater than the gain.
What of the future of work? Must it be a discontinuous patchwork of jobs, a gypsy-like lifetime of discontinuity? The answer is, yes, for the time being. And it is a terrible waste.
The management model I like, being fond of animals, is the goose-flight-in-formation theory of the workplace. The goose flying in front is not the leader who sets the course. They all take turns in front and they all know where they are going. Those honks coming from the back of the V shape are simply to assure the lead bird that the gang are still there. Keep going, they say.
After a while another goose takes over. Should one goose get exhausted and need to land, two other geese will accompany her, to oblige and protect.
The reason they fly in a V formation is that the slight overlap with the next bird’s flight path saves energy by cancelling some of the air turbulence. The ‘energetic advantage’ could be as much as 50 per cent. A corporate equivalent of this goose theory of management is long overdue. The future depends on it.
The values a society places on something like work are reflected in the wages it offers and how it treats the next generation of employees. The remuneration packages of Australian executives are now so obscene I wonder how those receiving all those millions can face the mirror. A seventh Toorak Tank, an eighth mansion, another vineyard-how do they keep track? How do some of them stay out of jail? Many don’t.
If, on the other hand, you work for ABC-TV as a very highly qualified reporter, you may find yourself hired on contracts that start in mid-January and end in November. This saves the organisation from having to pay for holidays or other add-ons. It also means it can give staff the shove when it’s finished with them. The reporter, meanwhile, earns less than our mega-executive’s third assistant trainee PA (about $75,000). (American CEOs in 2006 earned 320 times average earnings-or only 120 times if you use kinder figures. Their mean annual pay was $US8.5 million and the median $US4.1 million. Don’t fret about the calculations, just feel the rage.)
The skill and health implications are dire. Without security it is very hard to grow professionally and gain confidence. Health is also undermined in fascinating ways. Sir Michael Marmot has gained worldwide fame for his Whitehall study showing that the guys at the top fare best and that there is a direct relationship between power and wellbeing. The lowlier you are, the worse your health and longevity. This research has now been followed up by Dr Cary Cooper.