Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield/Corporate Cultures:
Jackall, Robert
TALISMANS FOR MANAGEMENT IMPENETRABLE smoke. Terrible din. Continual confusion. Savage warfare. An impressionistic sketch of Lebanon or El Salvador? Core values. Heroes. Rites, rituals, and...
...a' 'question mark'' (they have to make up their minds), or a "dog" (they kill it...
...Experts do not help much to resolve it for managers...
...Indeed...
...Core values, where they exist, resonate throughout a company and give it coher-ence and strength...
...and try to determine whether a business area is a "star" (if it is, they pump money into it), a 'cash cow'' (they milk it...
...The main chance rests in going to Harvard Busi-ness School or at least in learning its lessons...
...Indeterminacy is thus the pervasive fact of corporate life...
...diversify their lines through "product proliferation...
...Taken in context, this remark captures the tone of the whole book and, I might add, of much business consultant writing...
...One year, Mary Kay Cosmetics had pink Cadillacs and Buicks float down from the ceiling to be awarded to out-standing salespeople...
...Rites, rituals, and ceremonies recog-nize accomplishments, celebrate virtues, and forge the social bonds that make bus-iness work...
...The authors keep completely straight faces in elaboratinag their thesis...
...This company also crowns as queens its supersaleswomen for the year, bedecks them with diamonds and minks, and surrounds them with a court of other similarly adorned women who also have hit very high sales numbers...
...The game is not to be creative, but shrewd...
...They argue rather that fierce competition between companies is the norm in our economy...
...only the intrepid plunge into the fray and only the adroit and lucky survive it...
...Cultural net-works...
...The roiling flux of marketplace competition and the endless scramble to catch each new market opportunity at the right mo-ment breeds a profound uncertainty in corporate managers...
...not inventive, but calculating...
...And yearly "cultural extravaganzas" are the climactic, no-costs-barred symbolic events in companies with "strong" cul-tures...
...The first set of images portrays the market conditions facing American business...
...Businessmen, while plagued with the uncertainty Solman and Fried-man describe, must nonetheless always seem to have inherently chaotic situa-tions under control...
...Most notably, they fail to probe adequately the internal conse-quences of market unpredictability and irrationality...
...4) provide a step-by-step program for readers to unlock the secrets of their organizations (in Corpo-rate Cultures this means providing a recipe for instant ethnography called "cultural diagnosis...
...The real financial outcomes - and the fortunes and careers made or broken by them - depend on "random walks" in surging market sectors, on chance, circum-stance, and luck...
...Neither are entre-preneurs the answer...
...All or-ganizations, corporations among them, have implicit and sometimes explicit core values...
...if there are only seamy or crass undersides, show the reader how to exploit them...
...The authors raise crucial issues in suggestive ways but do not pur-sue them...
...But their book lacks any perversity at all and becomes therefore not a tool for understanding corporate life, but just another consultant program that purports to provide a competitive edge to com-panies smart enough to heed their advice...
...However, the latter most often seems unintended - to the detriment of the book's consistency and substance...
...and so on...
...reposition" their goods...
...The authors of this lively and enter-taining book fluctuate between stances of awed naivete' and a perversity remarkable for a book about business...
...most often they are hard and insen-sitive...
...If, as Solman and Friedman suggest, Harvard Business School is an accurate metaphor for present-day America, and if our social economy's hope for the fu-ture actually rests with Hamburger Uni-versity and the Vatican, then we are in much deeper trouble than anyone has yet imagined.anyone has yet imagined...
...At that "Fortress on the Charles," one can master all the combat skills necessary to survive personally and to help one's company triumph in the corporate wars...
...The second is the latest consul-tant scheme to calm corporate uncer-tainty and gird managers for their next battle...
...Rites, rituals, and ceremonies...
...Terrence Deal and Allen Kennedy, a professor of organizational cultures and a management consultant respectively, do address the internal workings of corpora-tions...
...Invest-ment counselors or financial analysts, for instance, may proffer sage advice about where to put money, but they are best at collecting sizable commissions...
...On this last point, Deal and Kennedy see a major structural revolution on the horizon precipitated by the new information technologies...
...Robert Jackall what they are doing...
...Managers interested in the gains that come with establishing strong corporate cultures will be quick to seize or create opportunities to manufacture heroes - for example, employees of the month or salesmen of the week - to exploit the symbolic significance of their achievements for the company's benefit...
...What are the harbingers and models for this turn of events...
...Therefore no events even coffee breaks, lunches, and meetings - are too insignificant to be manipulated by "symbolic managers...
...but most are "situational," made by circum-stances or by adroit image manipulation...
...CORPORATE CULTURES THE RITES AND RITUALS OF CORPORATE LIFE Terrence E. Deal and Allen A. Kennedy Addison-Wesley, $14.95, 232 pp...
...They are much ex-tolled but usually ignored and sometimes thwarted...
...Not only the executive, who was returning from lunch at the time, but, one may assume, the rest of the company got some symbolic mes-sage...
...3) always look on the bright side of things...
...and (5) end with a vision of the future that makes one's book indispensable...
...In big corporations striving to nail down elisive market shares, entre-preneurial creativity and concomitant egocentricity get in the way of rational planning which becomes valued for its own sake regardless of its results...
...2) ignore all theoretical is-sues unless they can be encapsuled in a neat schematic form...
...They search for "product niches...
...they sym-bolize their companies to the world...
...In short, marketing becomes the product and selling the only realistic measure of value and certainty...
...As it happens, the struggles between corporations are almost tame compared to the jungle warfare for status, power, and survival within them...
...These are often contained in slogans made familiar to the public through advertising like: "It Takes Two to Tandem" (Tandem Corporation...
...Heroes embody val-ues...
...To cope with this uncertainty, managers endlessly devise strategies and elaborate plans, geared both to catch their competitors off guard and to assure themselves that they know LIFE AND DCATE OR THE CORPORATE BATTLEFIELD Paul Solman and Thomas Friedman Simon & Schuster, $14.50, 288 pp...
...for exam-ple, Deal and Kennedy talk about the hidden hierarchy in corporations - spies, storytellers, gossips, priests, whisperers, and cabals - in a chapter entitled "Communications: Working the Cultural Network...
...The cardinal lesson is to recognize that everyone is as self-interested as Harvard business students and to act accordingly...
...they thus seize upon any reasonably well-packaged, pragmat-ic program which might give them, or seem to give them, a handle on events...
...Business heroes who rise to leadership are not generally charismatic or even lik-able...
...they make success human and at-tainable...
...Solman and Friedman, both journalists, eschew any notion that corporations are in cahoots with one another...
...Deal and Kennedy cite approv-ingly the case of NCR's John Patterson who, for some unnamed offense, had the office furniture of one of his executives drenched with kerosene and torched in the company parking lot...
...alternate hawk and dove tactics...
...Some of the key rules for the business consultant genre of writing are: (1) sup-press all irony, complexity, and am-biguity, and assert only the most obvious meanings...
...Deal and Kennedy say: "At the end of this extravaganza, everyone understands that the challenge of the company is in sales...
...Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield is a short course on modern marketing dilemmas, embellished throughout with the overblown metaphors and imagery of war...
...No, heroic because men like Patterson put the needs of their or-ganization over personal niceties...
...Make It Hap-pen" (Procter and Gamble...
...Progress is Our Most Important Prod-uct" (General Electric...
...None other than McDonald's and the Roman Catholic church...
...Big ceremonies - like one company's habit of awarding Attaboy plaques for outstanding performance (five Attaboys get one a Gotcha) - build on little rituals...
...not to take risks, but to minimize them...
...This revolution will break down old hierarchi-cal structures and result in highly atomized, and often dispersed, organiza-tions that place a premium on small, au-tonomous work units knit together by a strong centralized culture...
...Some heroes, like legendary founders of major companies, are "born...
...Bastardly...
...they provide role models and standards of performance...
...A glimpse into an an-thropologist's field notes on a primitive tribe...
Vol. 109 • December 1982 • No. 22
