“Uh-oh. I’m lost and I’ve wandered into the grimy habitat of an underling.
“I feel the cold desperation of your drab and meaningless life.
“I need to roll in money to get the smell off me. Where’s the nearest pile?”
Is it my imagination or is Dilbert
getting darker? Anyway, I think
Linked-In has taken a wrong turn by offering a link that helps you reconnect
with your old boss. Who wants to
reconnect with a tyrant, a petty dictator, a micromanager, a clueless ditherer
(as in Dilbert)…the bad bosses are 80% of all bosses, and the types of bad boss
are as numerous as the sands of the beach.
Bosses drawn and quartered
Most people would like to
re-connect with their bosses only if they can watch them being drawn and
quartered. Down through the decades and
centuries of the Industrial Age, as steam is replaced by silicon and robots,
one thing has remained constant: most bosses practice the
military/authoritative kind of managing that was supposed to have gone out of
style, with so many schools of management and armies of consultants spreading
the gospel of “treat people like human beings.”
But no. Basic as it is, they don’t get it – because
they don’t have to. The military system
works, sort of: whatever the top people want is what the peons carry out. If senior execs are lucky and the economy and
marketplace are right, their strategy succeeds and they’re geniuses. If not, they take a golden parachute and
start somewhere else.
Managing is independent of
content, said Harold Geneen, and he proceeded to prove it by amassing many
different companies under one corporate banner, ITT. I don’t think it really worked out that well,
though many execs change industry, with varying degrees of success.
Absolute power
The boss. Imagine one individual with the power to cut
off your livelihood at whim, and this individual is a control freak or a
humiliator…or any of the countless bad-boss types. No wonder inability to get along with one’s
manager is one of the leading causes of workplace dissatisfaction and
stress. You’re in a very clean, quiet
and pleasant…concentration camp.
You are at the mercy of the
guards. As in the camps, you can be targeted because of your race (white) or
gender (male). At one company where I
worked, diversity was a managerial metric, just like profit and loss,
headcount, and other things that really matter.
And my boss took it seriously, packing the department with women -- black
and Hispanic ones where possible.
Face time: no give
Not only do they maintain totalitarian boss-cracy…THEY WILL NOT BACK DOWN ON FACE TIME. You’d better not be seen coming in too late or leaving too early, no matter how well or thoroughly your work is done. Today, in 2012, when so much work can be done anywhere, Robert C. Pozen of Harvard Business school describes this very scenario and adds: “You don’t want to come off as a slacker.”
The article that reports this
scenario (Keene NH Sentinel, 10/10/12) laments the “cost of long work days,” the relentless toll on
body, mind and spirit. Europeans are just
as productive and they have at least six weeks of vacation a year. The article sugfgests, again, that if workweeks were shorter, more people could work.
Happy voters
Apparently the election is to
be decided in Ohio
Ohioans are an extremely important group to win over. As I watch all the happy voters in Ohio cheering the man who saved their jobs with billions of taxpayer dollars (have they paid it back?), I cannot but point out that the root issue in the auto industry’s woes…is management (quality expert W. Edwards Deming said that quality is 85% management’s responsibility): boss-ocracy and face time, especially a cruelly repressive workplace environment (until quite recently) were the ultimate cause of GM’s distress and failures.
The company bought the union’s compliance with lavish contracts and benefits but continued to practice the Shit Theory of Management: “I was treated like shit, so that’s how I’ll treat everybody who works for me.”
The Japanese, on the other
hand, practiced a more participatory approach.
They built quality cars on American soil, with American workers! Authority was still strong and hierarchical,
but at least workers could take responsibility for quality instead of “shut up
and get it out the door,” which was Detroit
Other scenarios
Auto industry jobs mean votes
in crucial states, so there was no thought given to alternatives to bailing out
the auto companies. They could have
broken up GM, as was suggested when GM was too successful for some people.
Surely there would be buyers for the Cadillac and Chevrolet brands, for the components divisions, investors who could pare down these operations and make them successful as standalone companies (which they once were), instead of making the taxpayers foot the bill. The industry could have sold off excess assets and given generous buyouts to anyone who wanted one.
I worked in the food industry, where acquisition, divestiture, and portfolio adjustments were ongoing. We can’t make money in this (margarine, ice cream, etc.) business, but maybe somebody else can, so we’ll divest.
Kraft Foods was independent for decades, then merged with General Foods, renamed Kraft, and spun off a decade after it was acquired by Philip Morris (renamed Altria).
So there were other
possibilities for GM – just not nearly so politically attractive. But the company went bankrupt fundamentally
because for too long they allowed cronyism, loyalty, tenure, and union
contracts to replace competence.
Reconnect with my boss? I wonder how many takers they’ll get.
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