Bait and Switch (27 page)

"Irony is one of my favourite forms of humour." "She is not going in "teams," within which one's comportment and demeanor are at to be fired," the article reports, "but it has been made clear to least as important as one's knowledge and experience. Yet despite her that unless she seriously rethinks her sense of humour she the personality tests, which rest on the assumption that might fit better somewhere else."

personalities vary from person to person, only one kind of It is a strange team in which everyone is equally good-personality seems to be in demand, one that is relentlessly cheerful, natured, agreeable, and not too threateningly bright. In my enthusiastic, and obedient—the very qualities fostered by the own experience of group projects there is always at least one, and transition industry. Even at the higher levels of management, where possibly more, irascible or cynical team member. In fact, it is his or you might think there would be room for the occasional her presence that requires the others to possess the "people disagreeable person—as Enron's Jeffrey Skilling or AOL's Robert skills" that are so valued in the corporate world. Besides, at a time Pittman appear to have been--niceness is supposed to prevail. A when corporations are supposedly striving for "diversity"—forming recent article in the
Financial Times
points out that the requisite

"diversity committees" and hiring "diversity specialists"—it seems personality traits even trump intelligence, and do so at all levels of counterproductive to bar diversity in personality. It can only hinder the corporation.

the achievement of more familiar forms of diversity along the lines of Think what characterises the really intelligent person. They can think 70

for themselves. They love abstract ideas. They can look dispassionately at Lucy Kellaway, "Companies Don't Need Brainy People,"
Financial Times,
November 22, 2004.

race, gender, and ethnicity. The African-American who is deemed women (traditionally, anyway) rather than men. After advising his overly sensitive to racial slights, or the woman who speaks out readers to overcome the bitterness and negativity engendered by against sexist practices, may be just what the company needs if it is frequent job loss and to achieve a perpetually sunny outlook, ever to achieve true demographic diversity. But he or she risks being management guru Harvey Mackay notes cryptically that "the dismissed for failing to be a sufficiently compliant "team player."

nicest, most loyal, and most submissive employees are often the easiest Despite all my putative personality defects—sarcasm, impatience, people to fire." 13 Given the turmoil in the corporate world, the and possibly also intelligence—I did take the rhetoric of "team prescriptions of niceness ring of lambs-to-the-slaughter.

work" very seriously. The cover letters that accom panied my job And even as I write, the bar is being raised. Likability and applications always emphasized my desire to work

enthusiasm are no longer enough to make one's personality attractive; collaboratively, in a "dynamic team," and to enjoy the camaraderie just in the past few months, I've noticed more and more of working with others in a long-term effort "to advance the demands for
passion.
The advice-meister Stephen Covey, who wrote company brand and image." I had been "consulting" as an the 1979 best-seller
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,
has come individual, and now I was eager to come in from the cold. What I out with an "eighth habit," explaining that was failing to notice was that my fellow job seekers had been being

"team members" once themselves, meaning that these must be
effective . . .
is no longer optional in today's world—it's the price of entry to the playing field. But surviving, thriving, in novating, excelling and very fragile "teams" indeed.

leading in this new reality will require us to build on and reach beyond For all the talk about the need to be a likable "team player,"

effectiveness. The call and need of a new era is for
greatness.
It's for
fulfillment, passionate execution,
and
significant contribution.
71
[Covey's many people work in a fairly cutthroat environment that would italics.]

seem to be especially challenging to those who possess the recommended traits. Cheerfulness, upbeatness, and compliance: these are Increasingly, company web sites offer breathless claims of the qualities of subordinates—of servants rather than masters, 71 Stephen R. Covey,
The Eighth Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness
(New York: Free Press, 2004), p.4.

“passion" as one of their corporate attributes and require-want to wait until the market induces pain, so you have to induce ments for employment, as in, "If you are an enthusiastic, cre-it in other ways."
73

ative, passionate person looking for a place where your ideas The new insistence on "passion" marks a further expansion of will be valued, look no further than Delphi." Kevin Craine's the corporate empire into the time and the spirit of its minions.

online business commentary, "Weekly Insight," advises busi-Once, white-collar people were expected to have hobbies; in nesspeople to acquire ". . . passion. You must believe in your fact it would have been odd not to cite one in an interview, strategy and feel passionate about it."
USA Today
observes even if it were only reading or bridge. Today's "passionate"

that:

employees, however, are not expected to have the time or the energy for such extraneous pursuits; they are available at all hours;

. . . it's widely accepted that the winning companies during the next they forgo vacations; they pull all-nighters; they stretch to the generation will be those that have employees come to work and bring with them their hearts, minds, creativity and passion.
72

limits of their physical and mental endurance. Scientists, writers, and political campaign operatives sometimes do the same, Energy and commitment are so 1995; in the twenty-first but not for years on end, and not for ever-changing goals.

century one is required to feel, or at least evince, an emotional It is the insecurity of white-collar employment that makes the drive as consuming as romantic love. Before we swoon at the demand for passion so cruel and perverse. You may be able to possibilities, though, Covey reminds us that the appropriate simulate passion, or even feel it, for one job, but what about the level of passion sometimes needs to be whipped up by force.

next job, and the next? Not even prostitutes are expected to How do you achieve "a united, cohesive culture" in your cor-perform "passionately" time after time, and of course their poration? "Induce pain," he answers: "As long as people are encounters seldom end in rejection. Picking up after a firing and contented and happy, they're not going to do much. You don't regrouping in a mode of passionate engagement, and doing so 72

Del Jones, "Best Friends Good for Business,"
USA Today,
December 1, 2004.

73 Covey,
The Eighth Habit,
p.4.

time after time—this is a job for a professional actor or for a physicians—have banded together, much like steelworkers or miners, person who has lost the capacity for spontaneous feeling.

to defend themselves against arbitrary and autocratic employers.

The "business professions," on the other hand, are so called mainly as a matter of courtesy. Management, for example, made a relatively late entry into the college curriculum; and OTHER WHITE-COLLAR occupational groups—doctors, lawyers, even today, although the MBA has been the fastest-growing teachers, and college professors—have done better at carving out graduate degree for the past two decades, it is by no means a some autonomy and security for themselves. Their principal requirement for a management job.
75
A current TV commer-strategy, undertaken in the early twentieth century, was cial even mocks MBAs as snotty young know-it-alls who are professionalization: the erection of steep barriers to the occu-helpless in the face of a copying machine. Among the business pation, backed up by the force of law and the power of profes-

“professions,” only accounting has the traditional hallmarks of a sional organizations like the AMA.
74
No one can practice profession: legally enforced educational requirements, li-medicine, for example, without a thorough education and a licensing, and a recognized body of knowledge. In the case of cense, nor can a physician—or a professor, for that matter—be management, human relations, marketing, and PR, anyone with fired without cause. To the strategy of professionalization, a college degree—myself, for example—can present themselves as some occupations added the further protection afforded by a potential practitioner. And with this openness comes a huge unions: teachers, college professors, journalists—even some vulnerability for the veterans in the field: there is no transparent way to judge their performance, and no protection from capricious firings.

74 Professionalization was not entirely a progressive development. As I argued in
Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class
(New York: Pantheon, 1989), the educational requirements for entry into medicine, the "model profession," were created in no small part to exclude women, minorities, and people from the lower classes.

75 Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria, and Daniel Penrice, "Is Business Management a Profession?" SearchClO.com, February 22, 2005.

But there is something even more central than job security journalists, and even many blue-collar workers are no less likely to that white-collar corporate workers lack—and that is dignity. A be individualistic believers in meritocracy. What sets the white-physician sells his or her skills and labor; so, in fact, does the collar corporate workers apart and leaves them so vulnerable is the blue- or pink-collar worker. Both the warehouse worker un-requirement that they identify, absolutely and unreservedly, with loading trucks and the engineer designing a bridge can reason-their employers. While the physician or scientist identifies with ably expect their jobs to involve a straightforward exchange of his or her profession, rather than with the hospital or laboratory labor for wages. As the young temp worker I met at the New that currently employs them, the white-collar functionary is expected Jersey job fair put it, "Just give me a job, and I'll get it done."

to express total fealty to the current occupants of the "C-suites."

Not so for the white-collar corporate employee, who must As my "crisis management" instructor, Jim Lukaszewski, made sell—not just his skill and hard work—but
himself.
He may clear: the CEO may be a fool; the company's behavior may be wear a "power suit" and look down on the army of more menial borderline criminal—and still you are required to serve unstint-workers below him, but he—or she—faces far more intrusive ingly and without the slightest question. Unfortunately, as the psychological demands than a laborer or clerk would likely large numbers of laid-off white-collar workers show, this loyalty is countenance. His is a world of intrigue and ill-defined not reliably reciprocated.

expectations, of manipulation and mind games, where self-

presentation—as in "personality" and "attitude"—regularly outweighs performance.

The failure of white-collar corporate workers to band together SO THE UNEMPLOYED continue to drift through their shadowy world and defend their jobs and their professional autonomy is usually of Internet job searches, lonely networking events, and costly attributed to their individualism—or to an unwarranted faith in coaching sessions. The tragedy is that they could be doing so much the meritocratic claims of our culture. But physicians, more. They could, most obviously, be lobbying for concrete improvements in the lives of the unemployed and anxiously

"contract workers" than take on the burden of providing employed. Topping the list would have to be an expansion of insurance for new hires. There are eight million unemployed current unemployment benefits to a level more like that in the people, of all occupational levels, in America; imagine the effect they northern European countries, which offer a variety of benefits might have if they launched a concerted campaign for publicly extending potentially for years. The entire debate about sponsored universal health insurance.

outsourcing, for example, would take a dramatically different and If an expansion of benefits seems unlikely or even utopian in perhaps less nativist tone if American workers had an adequate the current political climate, there is still the immediate safety net to fall back on. As it is, the IT person who is challenge of self-defense. On many fronts, the American middle required to train her Indian replacement—a not uncommon class is under attack as never before. For example, the 2005 federal indignity—might as well be digging her own grave.

bankruptcy bill, which eliminates the possibility of a fresh start Almost as urgent is the need for a system of universal health for debt-ridden individuals, will condemn more and more of the insurance that is not tied in any way to your job. When people unemployed and underemployed to a life of debt peonage.

were likely to have three or four jobs in a lifetime, it might have Meanwhile, escalating college costs threaten to bar their own made more sense to leave health insurance to the employers.

children from white-collar careers. And as company pensions But as the number of jobs per lifetime rises into the double digits, disappear, the president is campaigning vigorously to eviscerate employer-provided insurance leads to long periods without Social Security. No group is better situated, or perhaps better coverage—with the chance, especially among the middle-aged, motivated, to lead the defense of the middle class than the that a "prior condition" could come along and disqualify you from unemployed—assuming they could recognize their common further individual coverage, or even from a job. Furthermore, the interests and begin to act as a political force.

cost of health insurance has become a major disincentive to job They have the time, for one thing—not endless hours, since job creation; companies would rather outsource or hire benefit-less searching does require some sustained effort, but far more than their counterparts in the workplace, many of whom put in overwhelming odds.