Folklorists always feel a frisson when they discover an artist working within a recognizable tradition. They’re as scarce as talent ever is, and especially rare in modern corporations. Indeed, I’ve only met one man who bridged his family’s tradition and his work environment. His life and work demonstrate that before there is art, there’s a habit of mind.
Doc Hopkins was a Harlan County, Kentucky, banjo player who moved to Chicago to work the National Barn Dance radio program in 1930. His son, Howard, was a computer programmer at Mark Controls in Evanston when I worked there in the late 1970s. He’s since died of cancer.
Howard betrayed no signs of a southern folk tradition. He was interested in classical music, especially opera and piano. When he talked about his family, he would attribute his and his daughter’s talents to their Welsh heritage. But he also talked about his Catholic education, like the time he joked about business ethics as taught by Jesuits.
He had a storytellers knack for setting up a situation, then leaving it to the listener to complete the tale. He once talked about the time he was at Kraft when they brought people together to announce layoffs. He happened to be holding the company payroll tape at the time. He said, he looked at the speaker, looked down, then looked back up, then looked down.
When he mentioned his father, who was named Doctor Howard because a seventh son was supposed to be gifted, it was so he could improvise the conversation that would occur between two doctors when the older man was in the hospital. He only mentioned the Barn Dance once, and then in a conversation that seemed to disparage country music. To a stranger, he was a cosmopolitan, almost Renaissance man.
In those years, before computer graphics were widespread, the typical computer folklore was a calendar or greeting card made by spacing X’s in a report line. The technique was reminiscent of cross stitch embroidery, and both shared their origins with the cards used to run mechanical looms that were one of the first applications for computer programs.
Howard discovered ways to use IBM’s job control language (JCL) to create dialogues for data entry clerks to enter run time parameters like dates into files read by batch programs. He then played with the macros to produce a primitive flip-book cartoon that was consciously derived from the house that Jack built tradition.
First the word CAT appeared in a single line and started to move across the screen, as he changed it's location in the display line for each display.
Then, the word DOG appeared and followed the word CAT at a few spaces as the word CAT changed it's display location.
Next, the word car appeared and ran into the word DOG as he decreased the spacing between the words as he changed the location, so it became CARDOG
Finally a TRUCK appeared with a hook to haul off the car as TRUCK ¬ CAR
He said, he would try to use the full screen editor next, but couldn’t decide if he wanted to do the sunset from Gone with the Wind or the Red Sea parting.
I’ve only known a few other programmers like Howard who could read a user manual and figure out how to use the commands for new purposes. Most of us can barely read a manual, and go no farther than getting an immediate answer. He certainly would have figured out how to recreate his cartoon within the limitations of HTML as it's constrained by this blog site.
I’ve known one other person who would go the next step, and experiment with the tools for artistic purposes, but he came after graphics were common and anything was imitation, not innovation. His efforts were labored and self-conscious, more concerned with proving what a cleaver fellow he was. Howard’s work always betrayed an enthusiasm for the objects themselves, and he was never the object to admire.
I’ve also knew one other person who could turn anecdotes into folk tales. He was a Texan, who never wasted his narrative talents on computer programs. But woe to his boss who went deer hunting with the boys and talked about what a great day they had holed up in a cabin in the rain reading girlie magazines. Jack had gone hunting with a guy who took to shooting rattlesnakes basking on the rocks. Jack was much tried.
Howard’s the only person I’ve known who like to play with the world of business, not to wax profoundly about bureaucracy, but to find the fanciful. He would say, everything made him hungry. Inventory turns became turnovers. General Ledger roll ups became jelly rolls.
I’m sure the thing that sparked the cartoon, that brought the disparate elements of his heritage together, was the existence of the alien ¬ key. It sat there taking up real estate on the keyboard, with no name. It had to have a purpose, and if he could find no logical one, then he would invent one.
Tradition and creativity are often juxtaposed, the one conservative, the other looking for the new and unexpected. In Howard, the two were combined, with the one structuring the form of the other. Unlike his father who made records, he left no permanent body of work. But then, before electronic media, that was the fate of most oral traditions, when only the structure and subject survived, but not the imaginative performance.
Howard shows folk tradition can exist in the modern world, use it for its context, but not be part of any surviving folk tradition. His creations never spread through the company, would never have been remembered. So far as I know, that company had no shared narrative traditions, no unique culture.
In his way, Howard was sui generis.
Showing posts with label Corporate Folklore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Corporate Folklore. Show all posts
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Conspiracy - Part 2 - Blackmail
Corporate culture takes many forms, but genuine narrative traditions are rare. At Shatterproof Glass and my last employer, folk tales formed in irrational environments where management occasionally acted in ways that benefited employees. The paternalistic company produced a trickster tradition to explain the old man who ran the company, while the caste bound company fomented a conspiratorial belief that any incompetent who survived did so only because he, or she, had the goods on someone.
At the second company, the most egregious example was the manager caught with pornography on his computer who not only was not fired, but went to work for our customer. It was no mere rumor. I know people who were forced to see it, when the investigators who found it needed witnesses. I know the woman who was curious when everyone denied it existed and hacked into the computer to discover the pictures were girls the age of the man’s teenage daughters. What other explanation could they find for someone who broke every rule, violated every taboo, and was protected?
No one was particularly curious about what someone knew or how someone survived. "He must know someone" simply became the explanation for the inexplicable. When there’s no interest, there can be no tale. But that doesn’t mean a shared culture doesn’t exist signaled by a proverb without form, a moral without a story. Wisdom without explanation was distilled into a motif, the nub of the narrative tradition.
The ubiquity of the superstitious explanation for survival became apparent when peopled acted on the belief that blackmail and extortion were the ways to survive. The man, who reported the flawed bookkeeping at the end of the previous fiscal year, believed he could save his position because he knew what had been going on, and contacted higher up managers to remind them. The deputy general manager ignored him, and publicly gave his support to the transgressing CFO.
A few months later, the whistle blower began to say, his friends would take care of him. And, in the end, that’s what happened: one of the customers who was aware of the fiscal year-end shenanigans found him a job. Within a month of his transfer, our CFO laid off everyone he dared who knew what had happened. He later let people know he waited until the customer’s protégé was safe, that is, until there was no one left for the laid off to know.
A supplier demanded payment the same day his invoice was offered, even though the contract stipulated 30 days. When the purchasing and payables departments refused to do his bidding, he threatened to go higher. The message came down: pay the invoice the day it is received. When the manager who had responsibility for overseeing that supplier’s contract tried to exercise some authority, the message came down. Oversight was transferred to the deputy general manager, and the CFO was given notice. In this case, acting on the belief in veiled power worked; the supplier always hinted he had connections.
The underlying culture in this company may have arisen from doing construction for the government: each world is rife with rumors of power and kickbacks. More likely, it arose from its caste structure. In a normal bureaucracy, The Peter Principal tells us, people are promoted until they no longer are promotable. Caste societies have layers of permissible movement that tend to hinder promotions to levels of incompetence. When the normal bureaucratic dynamic appears in the caste world and someone rises who is incompetent, an explanation must be found.
Our local caste system also had very limited channels of communication between its layers. When I first worked for the company, the finance manager was a retired supply sargent who cultivated moles to keep him informed. In my department they happened to be members of the CEO’s church. The church provided an alternative, self-selective social group that crossed corporate castes, and provided an acceptable venue for identifying go-betweens.
The computer operations supervisor was seen as a timeserver who protected his position by consistently giving each of his employees a bad review. Those reviews allowed his manager to allocate the budget for raises to others. The good workers with the bad reviews told me, the supervisor must know something and he made his intercaste contacts through his lodge.
The source for tattletales varied with individual managers; but the perception that that was a means for favor continued. The most recent CEO and CFO each hired consultants to talk to employees. While some had initially been willing to talk to the new owners, the consultants were distrusted before they appeared. The fact that each round of consultants resulted in a round of demotions or layoffs reinforced the distrust between castes, and again the need to explain why less competent people were kept at the expense of the more competent.
The narrative tradition disintegrated when everything harmful that could possibly be known about someone was public, and men still kept their jobs. The CFO lied to the customer and his superiors about the financial health of the contract and kept his job. Men at the customers were accused by the media of severe derelictions of duty, and only a few tokens were punished. Alcoholics and womanizers were retained. Faith in blackmail cannot exist when there’s nothing to reveal.
Narrative traditions, no matter how truncated, are comforting, for they provide explanations. When they are lost, they leave people defenseless; when the myth is gone, rituals cannot function.
As the situation at my last employer disintegrated, people stopped testing their belief in the value of extortion as a way to survive and turned to conspiracy’s handmaiden, paranoia. People began to exchange information on slights and strange comments that could foretell the next victim. The sudden willingness to talk, the openness to full narratives, defined the culture that was dying. When people fear their co-workers as possible informants, they either do not talk to one another or do so in cryptic ways that only the trusted can understand. When no peer has power to harm, then it’s safe to talk. Whispered allusions no longer are needed, and a folk tradition expires.
Sources:
Last employer, see "Culture Consultants - Part 2 - Sociology," 26 March 2006 and "Takeover" series, 19 February 2006-5 March 2006.
Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle: Why Things Go Wrong, 1969.
Shatterproof Glass, see "Corporate Culture - Part 1 - Trickster Tales," 12 March 2006.
At the second company, the most egregious example was the manager caught with pornography on his computer who not only was not fired, but went to work for our customer. It was no mere rumor. I know people who were forced to see it, when the investigators who found it needed witnesses. I know the woman who was curious when everyone denied it existed and hacked into the computer to discover the pictures were girls the age of the man’s teenage daughters. What other explanation could they find for someone who broke every rule, violated every taboo, and was protected?
No one was particularly curious about what someone knew or how someone survived. "He must know someone" simply became the explanation for the inexplicable. When there’s no interest, there can be no tale. But that doesn’t mean a shared culture doesn’t exist signaled by a proverb without form, a moral without a story. Wisdom without explanation was distilled into a motif, the nub of the narrative tradition.
The ubiquity of the superstitious explanation for survival became apparent when peopled acted on the belief that blackmail and extortion were the ways to survive. The man, who reported the flawed bookkeeping at the end of the previous fiscal year, believed he could save his position because he knew what had been going on, and contacted higher up managers to remind them. The deputy general manager ignored him, and publicly gave his support to the transgressing CFO.
A few months later, the whistle blower began to say, his friends would take care of him. And, in the end, that’s what happened: one of the customers who was aware of the fiscal year-end shenanigans found him a job. Within a month of his transfer, our CFO laid off everyone he dared who knew what had happened. He later let people know he waited until the customer’s protégé was safe, that is, until there was no one left for the laid off to know.
A supplier demanded payment the same day his invoice was offered, even though the contract stipulated 30 days. When the purchasing and payables departments refused to do his bidding, he threatened to go higher. The message came down: pay the invoice the day it is received. When the manager who had responsibility for overseeing that supplier’s contract tried to exercise some authority, the message came down. Oversight was transferred to the deputy general manager, and the CFO was given notice. In this case, acting on the belief in veiled power worked; the supplier always hinted he had connections.
The underlying culture in this company may have arisen from doing construction for the government: each world is rife with rumors of power and kickbacks. More likely, it arose from its caste structure. In a normal bureaucracy, The Peter Principal tells us, people are promoted until they no longer are promotable. Caste societies have layers of permissible movement that tend to hinder promotions to levels of incompetence. When the normal bureaucratic dynamic appears in the caste world and someone rises who is incompetent, an explanation must be found.
Our local caste system also had very limited channels of communication between its layers. When I first worked for the company, the finance manager was a retired supply sargent who cultivated moles to keep him informed. In my department they happened to be members of the CEO’s church. The church provided an alternative, self-selective social group that crossed corporate castes, and provided an acceptable venue for identifying go-betweens.
The computer operations supervisor was seen as a timeserver who protected his position by consistently giving each of his employees a bad review. Those reviews allowed his manager to allocate the budget for raises to others. The good workers with the bad reviews told me, the supervisor must know something and he made his intercaste contacts through his lodge.
The source for tattletales varied with individual managers; but the perception that that was a means for favor continued. The most recent CEO and CFO each hired consultants to talk to employees. While some had initially been willing to talk to the new owners, the consultants were distrusted before they appeared. The fact that each round of consultants resulted in a round of demotions or layoffs reinforced the distrust between castes, and again the need to explain why less competent people were kept at the expense of the more competent.
The narrative tradition disintegrated when everything harmful that could possibly be known about someone was public, and men still kept their jobs. The CFO lied to the customer and his superiors about the financial health of the contract and kept his job. Men at the customers were accused by the media of severe derelictions of duty, and only a few tokens were punished. Alcoholics and womanizers were retained. Faith in blackmail cannot exist when there’s nothing to reveal.
Narrative traditions, no matter how truncated, are comforting, for they provide explanations. When they are lost, they leave people defenseless; when the myth is gone, rituals cannot function.
As the situation at my last employer disintegrated, people stopped testing their belief in the value of extortion as a way to survive and turned to conspiracy’s handmaiden, paranoia. People began to exchange information on slights and strange comments that could foretell the next victim. The sudden willingness to talk, the openness to full narratives, defined the culture that was dying. When people fear their co-workers as possible informants, they either do not talk to one another or do so in cryptic ways that only the trusted can understand. When no peer has power to harm, then it’s safe to talk. Whispered allusions no longer are needed, and a folk tradition expires.
Sources:
Last employer, see "Culture Consultants - Part 2 - Sociology," 26 March 2006 and "Takeover" series, 19 February 2006-5 March 2006.
Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle: Why Things Go Wrong, 1969.
Shatterproof Glass, see "Corporate Culture - Part 1 - Trickster Tales," 12 March 2006.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Corporate Culture - Part 2 - Line Tales
"Ten Dilbert Managers" is currently making the rounds of email and internet graffiti. It’s a list of memorable quotations submitted for an unnamed magazine’s contest. Some are funny, some trite, and one from Delco Corporation is too painful to be anything but true.
Shared ideas sometimes pass to companies like Delco, a machine tool maker in Akron, when people migrate from one company to another. They may also diffuse through consultants who move from company to company, much like peddlers of the past who carried city ways to the countryside.
Often the most common mechanism for cultural integration is not personal experience or formal training, but stories retold in bars and over lunch. At work, I would hear them when the person directing a meeting would shift his position, signaling an informal break. Like many corporate folktales, their rendering depends on the story telling ability of the narrator and the recognition by the audience that the themes are important.
In the days before Ralph Nader and Unsafe at Any Speed, the sanctification of keeping the line running was the source of tales passed well beyond Detroit. I heard them from a salesman who sold material handling products to GM for the company where my father worked in the early 1960s. We didn’t consider ourselves an automotive town, and were more than 100 miles away, but we heard the stories.
Accountants had calculated the cost of stopping the assembly line, and no man’s job was worth halting production for poor quality, lack of parts or preventive maintenance. Anecdotes featured the ingenuity of men who saved the day. One tale I remember concerned how GM considered building an air fleet to deliver out-of-stock parts. Of course, the Japanese attacked the root problem with a new inventory system, and new relations with their suppliers.
One reason Nader and, later, Ross Perot could make their points so easily is they could draw on the local narrative tradition, and rebroadcast it to a national audience.
I had a friend who was having problems with her Oldsmobile in the 1980s. The dealer had her sign away her future litigation rights in return for one free repair. She later discovered her problems were known and came from line substitution. The dealer may have outsmarted her, may even have turned her into a tale he could retell, but I imagine she never bought another Oldsmobile.
Parenthetically, no one will ever buy a new Oldsmobile again. GM abandoned the brand as unsalvageable in 2004.
When I worked in a GM plant in the 1980s, it had new employee classes in quality management. The first day the instructor told us, if we learned nothing more, remember GIRTFT stood for "get it right the first time."
We were also told, in Japanese plants, anyone could stop work if there were problems, could actually stop the line. This was power that was tested, perhaps abused, but freedom, none the less, to upend hierarchy, to stand up to absurdity.
Still, twenty years later, a manager for an automotive supplier’s supplier, who can’t have been more than a child, may not even have been born, when line stories were evolving, is still trying to reconcile two competing messages within a failing industry: the mantra that caused the problem, and the koan that was the solution.
Delco’s home page repeats the quality training I had:
No wonder the quoted manager sounds confused. The sad thing is he is right: quality and production should not be incompatible. If things are done right, a schedule can be met.
When folktales deal with production, it is quality that’s the problem. For preproduction projects like Delco it could be the schedule that’s wrong, that wasn’t right the first time, or, more likely, wasn’t adjusted when problems occurred in earlier phases, leading to undue pressures for later phases to make up lost time and the impossibility of doing things right in half the time.
I had another friend who was working for a engineering subcontractor in the 1980s on a project to build a new plant. He said that at one meeting, every subcontractor in the room knew the schedule could not be met, but not one would say anything because they knew that whoever said the obvious would get the blame. Instead, each filed private minutes with his team leader reporting the true status of the project. There was no freedom to stop the line: everyone had to wait until GM said there was a problem.
We’re still waiting, because our freedom to stop the line, to stop buying does not oblige managers to pay attention. The retold anecdotes, polished into memorats, were the only way powerless workers and consumers could protest. Folklore does not arise in a vacuum. When motifs coalesce into a common narrative, anyone who respects local folk traditions knows something’s changed, knows there are serious troubles.
Doing it right is no excuse for not meeting the schedule.I happen to receive the email the same day The New York Times business section was running another article on the disintegration of General Motors. The quotation illustrates how widely the conflicts of central institutions percolate through their spheres of influence, and how difficult it is for companies and the managers it fosters to genuinely change.
Shared ideas sometimes pass to companies like Delco, a machine tool maker in Akron, when people migrate from one company to another. They may also diffuse through consultants who move from company to company, much like peddlers of the past who carried city ways to the countryside.
Often the most common mechanism for cultural integration is not personal experience or formal training, but stories retold in bars and over lunch. At work, I would hear them when the person directing a meeting would shift his position, signaling an informal break. Like many corporate folktales, their rendering depends on the story telling ability of the narrator and the recognition by the audience that the themes are important.
In the days before Ralph Nader and Unsafe at Any Speed, the sanctification of keeping the line running was the source of tales passed well beyond Detroit. I heard them from a salesman who sold material handling products to GM for the company where my father worked in the early 1960s. We didn’t consider ourselves an automotive town, and were more than 100 miles away, but we heard the stories.
Accountants had calculated the cost of stopping the assembly line, and no man’s job was worth halting production for poor quality, lack of parts or preventive maintenance. Anecdotes featured the ingenuity of men who saved the day. One tale I remember concerned how GM considered building an air fleet to deliver out-of-stock parts. Of course, the Japanese attacked the root problem with a new inventory system, and new relations with their suppliers.
One reason Nader and, later, Ross Perot could make their points so easily is they could draw on the local narrative tradition, and rebroadcast it to a national audience.
I had a friend who was having problems with her Oldsmobile in the 1980s. The dealer had her sign away her future litigation rights in return for one free repair. She later discovered her problems were known and came from line substitution. The dealer may have outsmarted her, may even have turned her into a tale he could retell, but I imagine she never bought another Oldsmobile.
Parenthetically, no one will ever buy a new Oldsmobile again. GM abandoned the brand as unsalvageable in 2004.
When I worked in a GM plant in the 1980s, it had new employee classes in quality management. The first day the instructor told us, if we learned nothing more, remember GIRTFT stood for "get it right the first time."
We were also told, in Japanese plants, anyone could stop work if there were problems, could actually stop the line. This was power that was tested, perhaps abused, but freedom, none the less, to upend hierarchy, to stand up to absurdity.
Still, twenty years later, a manager for an automotive supplier’s supplier, who can’t have been more than a child, may not even have been born, when line stories were evolving, is still trying to reconcile two competing messages within a failing industry: the mantra that caused the problem, and the koan that was the solution.
Delco’s home page repeats the quality training I had:
Our products are produced using the highest quality standard recognized by our industrial community to ensure your job is done right - the first time!But elsewhere the company tells us it is known for "offering quicker turn-around time in mold building production and for operating with greater production and cost efficiency."
No wonder the quoted manager sounds confused. The sad thing is he is right: quality and production should not be incompatible. If things are done right, a schedule can be met.
When folktales deal with production, it is quality that’s the problem. For preproduction projects like Delco it could be the schedule that’s wrong, that wasn’t right the first time, or, more likely, wasn’t adjusted when problems occurred in earlier phases, leading to undue pressures for later phases to make up lost time and the impossibility of doing things right in half the time.
I had another friend who was working for a engineering subcontractor in the 1980s on a project to build a new plant. He said that at one meeting, every subcontractor in the room knew the schedule could not be met, but not one would say anything because they knew that whoever said the obvious would get the blame. Instead, each filed private minutes with his team leader reporting the true status of the project. There was no freedom to stop the line: everyone had to wait until GM said there was a problem.
We’re still waiting, because our freedom to stop the line, to stop buying does not oblige managers to pay attention. The retold anecdotes, polished into memorats, were the only way powerless workers and consumers could protest. Folklore does not arise in a vacuum. When motifs coalesce into a common narrative, anyone who respects local folk traditions knows something’s changed, knows there are serious troubles.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Corporate Culture - Part 1 - Trickster Tales
Culture is one of those words loved by people whose only paradigm for beginning an essay or speech is tabulating the definitions they found in the dictionary. Far more interesting are the layers of meaning the concept has in reality
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The easiest corporate culture to identify is the one described by folklorists who work back from evidence to underlying causes. That is, they discover a collection of tales or anecdotes, sometimes called memorats, with shared themes or motifs, and then identify the characteristics of the people who’ve heard or repeated the stories.
The transformation of experience into art is rare, and I’ve only found one genuine folk narrative tradition. When I worked for a manufacturer of replacement windshields in the late 1970s, it was still run by the founder, then in his 80s, and simply called the old man. He was treated as a trickster.
During the annual physical inventory, I was told about the times he loaded everything into trucks and hid it in his barn to reduce the taxes he owed the state. When a strike was brewing, I heard about the time he laid everyone off the day before Christmas to exploit the contract clause that stipulates people don’t get paid for holidays if they don’t work the day before and the day after. When people complained he directed them to unemployment. The state was helpless and had to take over his payroll for two weeks.
I heard about his conflict with his daughter, whose husband thought he would inherit the company and worried her father’s erratic behavior would devalue the assets. During one confrontation, someone turned on the intercom and broadcast the family feud to the plant floor. It may sound like he was outsmarted, but the person telling the tale made clear who was still in charge and who had had to trim his ambitions.
The trickster didn’t just con the state, his family and employees. He turned his skills to compassionate acts. He didn’t like having to allow people the 15 minutes breaks mandated by the Department of Labor, so he hired a woman to walk through the halls with a trolley and coffee urn. The point wasn’t that people had no excuse to leave their desks, but that he found a way to pay Sophie, the widow of an old employee.
I was told the reason we had a chapel was to allow him to deduct the cost of his chauffeur cum chaplain. The point again wasn’t the tax scam, but that he found a way to support the Black driver.
Stories about the old man were widespread. Since it wasn’t the sort of company where a person could build a career, many people passed through. I not only heard tales in the office, but when I ran into people at professional meetings. The Detroit Free Press ran at least two long profiles of the old man in the 1980s, one when the business finally closed, and one when he died. They didn’t amplify the narrative tradition, but the length of their stories signified the man’s mythic status.
The reason these stories took form and were retold is they were part of a larger culture. I later worked for a company where the CEO cut everyone’s pay the amount of Ronald Reagan’s first tax cut, on the day the cut took effect. In effect, he left us where we were, and booked the gain. No stories came out of that plant. When others hear the story, it has no resonance. At best it’s an example of sharp practice, but not a folk tale.
The boss as trickster may be a fading tradition, but the place it survived was one conducive to the perpetuation of tradition. Shatterproof Glass existed on the outskirts of Detroit, near the border with Dearborn, close to an old Hungarian community. One can hazard guesses about the continuity of patriarchal society brought from the Austro-Hungarian and Romanov empires. However, by the 1970s, the young had abandoned the neighborhoods and any direct links would have been hard to establish.
Perhaps more important was the plant’s proximity to River Rouge where Harry Bennett used goons to intimidate Henry Ford’s work force. Before unions, many Detroit area plants were run by brutal superintendents, described as "ass kickers" by several I’ve talked to. Perhaps in the scheme of things, Shatterproof was a better place to work.
Moral ambiguities of industrial life are clearer when they appear in a single person like the old man, than in the Manichaean split between plant owners who found charities and their henchmen. Like most tales in the tradition of Br'er Rabbit, Shatterproof stories champion the use of intellect over force, and suggest ways to survive an irrational society.
Survival is the unifying theme beneath many stories, not just of the old man, but of the company itself. It’s plant building may have had most of its windows broken, but I was told it once housed the assembly line of Eddie Rickenbacker back when he experimented with automobiles. It may have been degraded as a pickle factory, but Shatterproof always bent a good piece of glass. The old man may have moved the plant to North Carolina, may have run it to the ground, but it was his to the end. Who could hope for more?
.
The easiest corporate culture to identify is the one described by folklorists who work back from evidence to underlying causes. That is, they discover a collection of tales or anecdotes, sometimes called memorats, with shared themes or motifs, and then identify the characteristics of the people who’ve heard or repeated the stories.
The transformation of experience into art is rare, and I’ve only found one genuine folk narrative tradition. When I worked for a manufacturer of replacement windshields in the late 1970s, it was still run by the founder, then in his 80s, and simply called the old man. He was treated as a trickster.
During the annual physical inventory, I was told about the times he loaded everything into trucks and hid it in his barn to reduce the taxes he owed the state. When a strike was brewing, I heard about the time he laid everyone off the day before Christmas to exploit the contract clause that stipulates people don’t get paid for holidays if they don’t work the day before and the day after. When people complained he directed them to unemployment. The state was helpless and had to take over his payroll for two weeks.
I heard about his conflict with his daughter, whose husband thought he would inherit the company and worried her father’s erratic behavior would devalue the assets. During one confrontation, someone turned on the intercom and broadcast the family feud to the plant floor. It may sound like he was outsmarted, but the person telling the tale made clear who was still in charge and who had had to trim his ambitions.
The trickster didn’t just con the state, his family and employees. He turned his skills to compassionate acts. He didn’t like having to allow people the 15 minutes breaks mandated by the Department of Labor, so he hired a woman to walk through the halls with a trolley and coffee urn. The point wasn’t that people had no excuse to leave their desks, but that he found a way to pay Sophie, the widow of an old employee.
I was told the reason we had a chapel was to allow him to deduct the cost of his chauffeur cum chaplain. The point again wasn’t the tax scam, but that he found a way to support the Black driver.
Stories about the old man were widespread. Since it wasn’t the sort of company where a person could build a career, many people passed through. I not only heard tales in the office, but when I ran into people at professional meetings. The Detroit Free Press ran at least two long profiles of the old man in the 1980s, one when the business finally closed, and one when he died. They didn’t amplify the narrative tradition, but the length of their stories signified the man’s mythic status.
The reason these stories took form and were retold is they were part of a larger culture. I later worked for a company where the CEO cut everyone’s pay the amount of Ronald Reagan’s first tax cut, on the day the cut took effect. In effect, he left us where we were, and booked the gain. No stories came out of that plant. When others hear the story, it has no resonance. At best it’s an example of sharp practice, but not a folk tale.
The boss as trickster may be a fading tradition, but the place it survived was one conducive to the perpetuation of tradition. Shatterproof Glass existed on the outskirts of Detroit, near the border with Dearborn, close to an old Hungarian community. One can hazard guesses about the continuity of patriarchal society brought from the Austro-Hungarian and Romanov empires. However, by the 1970s, the young had abandoned the neighborhoods and any direct links would have been hard to establish.
Perhaps more important was the plant’s proximity to River Rouge where Harry Bennett used goons to intimidate Henry Ford’s work force. Before unions, many Detroit area plants were run by brutal superintendents, described as "ass kickers" by several I’ve talked to. Perhaps in the scheme of things, Shatterproof was a better place to work.
Moral ambiguities of industrial life are clearer when they appear in a single person like the old man, than in the Manichaean split between plant owners who found charities and their henchmen. Like most tales in the tradition of Br'er Rabbit, Shatterproof stories champion the use of intellect over force, and suggest ways to survive an irrational society.
Survival is the unifying theme beneath many stories, not just of the old man, but of the company itself. It’s plant building may have had most of its windows broken, but I was told it once housed the assembly line of Eddie Rickenbacker back when he experimented with automobiles. It may have been degraded as a pickle factory, but Shatterproof always bent a good piece of glass. The old man may have moved the plant to North Carolina, may have run it to the ground, but it was his to the end. Who could hope for more?
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