Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (81 page)

When a top executive is let go, the king is dead, long live the king. Suddenly he’s a persona non grata. When it happens, the shock is tremendous. Overnight. He doesn’t know what hit him. Suddenly everybody in the organization walks away and shuns him because they don’t want to be associated with him. In corporations, if you back the wrong guy, you’re in his corner, and he’s fired, you’re guilty by association. So what a lot of corporations have done is when they call a guy in—sometimes they’ll call him in on a Friday night and say, “Go home now and come in tomorrow morning and clean out your desk and leave. We don’t want any farewells or anything. Just get up and get the hell out.” It’s done in nice language. We say, “Look, why cause any trouble? Why cause any unrest in the organization? It’s best that you just fade away.” Immediately his Cadillac is taken away from him. His phone extension on the WATS line is taken away from him.
⁶⁰
All these things are done quietly and—bingo! he’s dead. His phone at home stops ringing because the fear of association continues after the severance. The smell of death is there.

We hired a vice president. He came highly recommended. He was with us about six months and he was completely inadequate. A complete misfit. Called him in the office, told him he was gonna go, gave him a nice severance pay. He broke down and cried. “What did I do wrong? I’ve done a marvelous job. Please don’t do this to me. My daughter’s getting married next month. How am I going to face the people?” He cried and cried and cried. But we couldn’t keep him around. We just had to let him go.

I was just involved with a gigantic corporation. They had a shake-up two Thursdays ago. It’s now known as Black Thursday. Fifteen of twenty guys were let go overnight. The intelligent corporations say, “Clear, leave tonight, even if it’s midweek. Come in Saturday morning and clean your desk. That’s all. No good-bys or anything.” They could be guys that have been there anywhere from a year to thirty years. If it’s a successful operation, they’re very generous. But then again, the human element creeps in. The boss might be vindictive and cut him off without anything. It may depend what the corporation wants to maintain as its image.

And what it does to the ego! A guy in a key position, everybody wants to talk to him. All his subordinates are trying to get an audience with him to build up their own positions. Customers are calling him, everybody is calling him. Now his phone’s dead. He’s sitting at home and nobody calls him. He goes out and starts visiting his friends, who are busy with their own business, who haven’t got time for him. Suddenly he’s a failure. Regardless what the reason was—regardless of the press release that said he resigned —he was fired.

The only time the guy isn’t considered a failure is when he resigns and announces his new job. That’s the tipoff. “John Smith resigned, future plans unknown” means he was fired. “John Smith resigned to accept the position of president of X Company”—then you know he resigned. This little nuance you recognize immediately when you’re in corporate life.

Changes since ’42? Today the computer is taking over the world. The computer exposes all. There’s no more chance for shenanigans and phoniness. Generally the computer prints out the truth. Not a hundred percent, but enough. It’s eliminated a great deal of the jungle infighting. There’s more facts for the businessman to work from, if the computer gives him the right information. Sometimes it doesn’t. They have a saying at IBM: “If you put garbage in the computer, you’ll take garbage out.” Business is becoming more scientific with regard to marketing, finance, investsments. And much more impersonal.

But the warm personal touch
never
existed in corporations. That was just a sham. In the last analysis, you’ve got to make a profit. There’s a lot of family-held corporations that truly felt they were part of a legend. They had responsibilities to their people. They carried on as best they could. And then they went broke. The loyalty to their people, their patriarchy, dragged ‘em all down. Whatever few of ’em are left are being forced to sell, and are being taken over by the cold hand of the corporation.

My guess is that twenty corporations will control about forty percent of the consumer goods market. How much room is there left for the small guy? There’s the supermarket in the grocery business. In our time, there were little mama-and-papa stores, thousands and thousands throughout the country. How many are there today? Unless you’re National Tea or A & P, there’s just no room. The small chains will be taken over by the bigger chains and they themselves will be taken over . . . The fish swallows the smaller fish and he’s swallowed by a bigger one, until the biggest swallows’em all. I have a feeling there’ll always be room for the small entrepreneur, but he’ll be rare. It’ll be very difficult for him.

The top man is more of a general manager than he is an entrepreneur. There’s less gambling than there was. He won’t make as many mistakes as he did before in finance and marketing. It’s a cold science. But when it comes to dealing with people, he still has to have that feel and he still has to do his own thinking. The computer can’t do that for him.

When I broke in, no man could become an executive until he was thirty-five, thirty-six years old. During the past ten years there’ve been real top executives of twenty-six, twenty-seven. Lately there’s been a reversal. These young ones climbed to the top when things were good, but during the last couple of years we’ve had some rough times. Companies have been clobbered and some have gone back to older men. But that’s not gonna last.

Business is looking for the highly trained, highly skilled
young
executive, who has the knowledge and the education in a highly specialized field. It’s happened in all professions and it’s happening in business. You have your comptroller who’s highly specialized. You have your treasurer who has to know finance, a heavily involved thing because of the taxation and the SEC. You have the manufacturing area. He has to be highly specialized in warehouse and in shipping—the ability to move merchandise cheaply and quickly. Shipping has become a horrendous problem because costs have become tremendous. You have to know marketing, the studies, the effect of advertising. A world of specialists. The man at the top has to have a general knowledge. And he has to have the knack of finding the right man to head these divisions. That’s the difficulty.

You have a nice, plush lovely office to go to. You have a private secretary. You walk down the corridor and everybody bows and says, “Good morning, Mr. Ross. How are you today?” As you go up the line, the executives will say, “How is Mrs. Ross?” Until you get to the higher executives. They’ll say, “How is Nancy?” Here you socialize, you know each other. Everybody plays the game.

A man wants to get to the top of the corporation, not for the money involved. After a certain point, how much more money can you make? In my climb, I’ll be honest, money was secondary. Unless you have tremendous demands, yachts, private airplanes—you get to a certain point, money isn’t that important. It’s the power, the status, the prestige. Frankly, it’s delightful to be on top and have everybody calling you Mr. Ross and have a plane at your disposal and a car and a driver at your disposal. When you come to town, there’s people to take care of you. When you walk into a board meeting, everybody gets up and says hello. I don’t think there’s any human being that doesn’t love that. It’s a nice feeling. But the ultimate power is in the board of directors. I don’t know anybody who’s free. You read in the paper about stockholders’ meetings, the annual report. It all sounds so glowing. But behind the scenes, a jungle.

I work on a yearly retainer with a corporation. I spend, oh, two, three days a month in various corporate structures. The key executives can talk to me and bounce things off me. The president may have a specific problem that I will investigate and come back to him with my ideas. The reason I came into this work is that all my corporate life I was looking for somebody like me, somebody who’s been there. Because there’s no new problems in business today. There’s just a different name for different problems that have been going on for years and years and years. Nobody’s come up yet with a problem that isn’t familiar. I’ve been there.

Example. The chief executive isn’t happy with the marketing structure. He raises many questions which I may not know specifically. I’ll find out, and come back with a proposal. He might be thinking of promoting one of his executives. It’s narrowed down to two or three. Let’s say two young guys who’ve been moved to a new city. It’s a tossup. I notice one has bought a new house, invested heavily in it. The other rented. I’d recommend the second. He’s more realistic.

If he comes before his board of directors, there’s always the vise. The poor sonofabitch is caught in the squeeze from the people below and the people above. When he comes to the board, he’s got to come with a firm hand. I can help him because I’m completely objective. I’m out of the jungle. I don’t have the trauma that I used to have when I had to fire somebody. What is it gonna do to this guy? I can give it to him cold and hard and logical. I’m not involved.

I left that world because suddenly the power and the status were empty. I’d been there, and when I got there it was nothing. Suddenly you have a feeling of little boys playing at business. Suddenly you have a feeling—so what? It started to happen to me, this feeling, oh, in ’67, ’68. So when the corporation was sold, my share of the sale was such . . . I didn’t have to go back into the jungle. I don’t have to fight to the top. I’ve been to the mountain top. (Laughs.) It isn’t worth it.

It was very difficult, the transition of retiring from the status position, where there’s people on the phone all day trying to talk to you. Suddenly nobody calls you. This is a psychological . . . (Halts, a long pause.) I don’t want to get into that. Why didn’t I retire completely? I really don’t know. In the last four, five years, people have come to me with tempting offers. Suddenly I realized what I’m doing is much more fun than going into that jungle again. So I turned them down.

I’ve always wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to give back the knowledge I gained in corporate life. People have always told me I’d always been a great sales manager. In every sales group you always have two or three young men with stars in their eyes. They always sat at the edge of the chair. I knew they were comers. I always felt I could take ‘em, develop ’em, and build ’em. A lot of old fogies like me—I can point out this guy, that guy who worked for me, and now he’s the head of this, the head of that.

Yeah, I always wanted to teach. But I had no formal education and no university would touch me. I was willing to teach for nothing. But there also, they have their jungle. They don’t want a businessman. They only want people in the academic world, who have a formalized and, I think, empty training. This is what I’d really like to do. I’d like to get involved with the young people and give my knowledge to them before it’s buried with me. Not that what I have is so great, but there’s a certain understanding, a certain feeling . . .

During the Thirty Years’ War, Anna Fierling, known as “Mother Courage,” survives as a small entrepeneur, following the army. She sells beer, shoes, and sundries to the soldiers. She speaks:

“If there is too much virtue somewhere, it is a sure sign that there is something wrong. Why, if a general or a king is stupid and lands his people in a mess, they need desperate courage, a virtue. And if he is slovenly and pays no attention, they must be as clever as snakes, or else they are done for.”

—Bertolt Brecht,
Mother Courage and Her Children

 

IRENE: We used to know ninety-five percent of our customers by name. Now it’s hardly anyone we know by name any more. You could walk down the street at six in the morning and you’d see these Polish women out with their brooms and they’d be washin’ the concrete down, fixin’ the alleys. You don’t see too much of this any more.