The Very Model of a Real Executive

...Marketing men may be either good guys or bad guys...

...He counsels The Organization Man to resist the pressure to conform—even if within the limits set by the realities of the modern economic structure and the need for self-preservation...

...Sociologists and humanitarians are the worst...

...Unless you accept responsibility for yourself, and work to develop yourself, you can't rightly begin to help anyone else...

...And if you don't agree at all with something in the company's political line, then I think you should abstain from political action in public that would embarrass the company...

...I know you've heard some supposedly wise people say this is what everyone should do, but that doesn't make it so, of course, and the way I understand things, all these high-sounding humanitarian goals are beside the point...

...also, you have to hand it to them, the way they can make a fast buck telling other people how to do their jobs...

...His is a voice of bureaucratic collectivism crying in the wilderness of decadent individualism...

...The young man must be loyal, his elder counsels...

...In a low-paying industry you would be loyal if you were willing to work overtime to get the work out...

...He need only add to his contorted dialectic of "integrity" the young manager's obligation to support the company's political line publicly irrespective of his own convictions...

...The Real Executives are The Men who exploit money and power for self-realization on a higher level...

...Real Executives breed other Real Executives...

...Isn't it possible that . . . what you actually object to is that others, outside and inside the company, may assume you are a company stooge if you do get into politics actively now...

...The golden rule is for the boys...

...Good line men con them into joining the team...

...At the same time, you shouldn't ever forget that your commitment to serve the company isn't your first commitment...

...In guessing that I meant your first obligation ought to be to help improve human welfare you were completely wrong...

...Real Executives never are retailers...

...Loyalty also extends to extracurricular activities...

...If the company was in an extremely competitive industry, for example, you might show loyalty by not selling out to any rival company that made the highest bid for your services...

...Stryker is that man—or impersonates him...

...Space limitations preclude listing more than the principal ones, to wit: Never mind the butler, it's the controller who bears watching...

...While Stryker grants that the managerial "individualist" experiences difficulties, he sees no threat to individuality itself in the modern corporation...

...Stryker finds fault only with thoughtless conformity to the mores of a corporation and with reverence for group opinions, but his book is an extended apologia for deliberate obeisance...

...The attainment of dedication and integrity, in balance, is an achievement of character that . . . represents the pinnacle of an executive's development...

...Mere managers are the boys: Their development has been arrested by an infantile fixation on money and power...

...Reviewed by Jonathan David Political and economic analyst The Organization Man has found a champion...

...On the surface, Stryker's book almost constitutes a do-it-yourself manual for boys eager to join the ranks of The Men...

...More than a champion, he has acquired an ideologist and, very likely, an embarrassment...

...Therein may lie the seeds of a small personal tragedy...

...Staff men are clever, brooding, introverted types...

...The younger man thinks he understands the hint and ventures to guess what his primary obligation may be, but, in so doing, he commits a faux pas...

...Inevitably, this strident paean to The Real Executive will be compared with William H. Whyte Jr.'s less admiring recitative, The Organization Man...

...Whyte raises the more fundamental issues posed by the mores themselves...

...At a subterranean level, its farcical exaggerations, its hyperbolical mystique of corporate leadership takes satiric vengeance upon The Men for all the indignities they have visited upon the boys...

...Both Stryker and Whyte see the very beneficence of the organization toward its managerial retainers, and not merely the ever present threat of its withdrawal, as a menace to their integrity...

...Stryker's book is cast in the form of eleven fictional situations "illustrating" outstanding characteristics of this ideal type...

...Production men are Aryan types, almost always good guys, not at all like controllers...

...What you put ahead of the company will depend on your own values, of course—maybe you would place your family, or your religion, or your country, ahead of [the company...

...rather, the difficulty lies in "the soft-minded denial that there is a conflict between the individual and society...

...If you do, most people would agree with you...

...I need scarcely say that a manager who publicly espoused political views his co-managers did not share would not be likely to get to the top echelons...

...His fundamental preoccupation is with an ideal type, in the sociologist's sense, with The Real Executive and with his cultivation...

...this is one of the Big Things about them...

...He can offer no reasonable basis for the company's condoning silence or abstention due to mere private scruples...

...they mean well, but while they have imagination, even more imagination than is good for them, they lack disciplined vision...

...Scarcely...

...There is a germ of truth in this pseudo-Nietzschean ethic which separates The Men from the boys: It distinguishes between those who are merely powerful and those who constitute a genuine elite...

...Both examine the interrelationships of power, competence and personality in the inner workings of the large corporation, but Stryker demonstrates little of Whyte's concern with the larger social and historical implications of the emergence of The Organization Man...

...Whyte's book is a plea for integrity, recognizing all the difficulties, addressed to The Organization Man...

...A Literary Note: In the emerging genre of the business novel or short story, certain conventions, we must record in passing, are taking hold...

...Real Executives attend seminars...

...It is clear," the retired executive writes to the young manager, "that you have already begun to challenge the company's right to ask you to participate in local politics: you think this is your private concern, and that the company is asking too much of you...

...Substitute "party" for "company" and you have a statement of "democratic centralism" upon which Lenin could not have improved much...

...Accountants have small minds, anal personalities, mean spirits and generally miserable dispositions...

...If you've really thought through your political convictions, then loyalty to the company could mean accepting the new policy and going out and supporting those convictions the company publicly supports...

...This balance is described through the imaginary correspondence of a "seasoned executive who has recently retired" with a young manager in his former company who aspires to be one of The Men...

...Stryker need only go one step further to close the small remaining gap between his own political ethic and that of Bolshevism...

...Consultants are good guys except when they are angling for jobs with client companies...

...What the "self" is when sundered from family, religion, country, human welfare— even from The Company—understandably is left undefined in this mountebank's version of a Super-executive...

...They're even worse than that, I think, because they allow people to evade the main point, which is that your first obligation is to your own, self...

...But I will tell you right now that I don't consider any of these your first obligation and I will add that until you discover what your first obligation is, you won't, in my opinion, ever know the most important meaning of dedication...

...He may tell the boss to go to hell, but he is going to have another boss, and, unlike the heroes of popular fiction, he cannot find surcease by leaving the arena to be a husbandman...

...Never before has Economic Man sunk to so low an estate...

...As I see it," says one of the characters with whom the author clearly identifies, "a young would-be executive has got to start out with a lot of personal ambition for money and power, but at some point he'll have to shift his center of interest from wanting things for himself to wanting to develop his own potentials...

...The typical chairman of the board is a man of imperious temperament, but he harbors no secret aspiration to be Big Brother...

...That won't sound selfish to you if you think it through...

...this is another of the Big Things about them...

...Both Stryker and Whyte deal with huge authoritarian systems embedded within a culture still essentially libertarian...

...As befits a Luceman, Perrin Stryker has written a pretentious avant garde manifesto in behalf of the corporate bureaucracy...

...The preferred murder weapon is a sharp pencil, but companies sometimes are smothered in statistical work sheets...

...Whyte, however, sees the emergence of a "social ethic" which legitimates social pressures exercised against the individual...

...In the accomplished executive," Stryker intones reverentially in the preface to his incredible concluding chapter, "there appears a fine balance of traits that set him apart...

...Stryker's authoritarian buffoonery may go unappreciated...

...only poor management can produce this unfortunate result...

...Stryker absolves organization, as such, of responsibility for deformation of the individual...

...Whyte, too, sees no fault in organization itself...