Entertaining Executives. Robert Spillane
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a study of ghosts in the machine; popular with managers who use it to manipulate others, but are its first victim. The study of such psychological ghosts as motives, attitudes and values is difficult enough. Asking psychologists to measure them at conferences is a sure sign that all is not well in management ranks.
Personality tests put the litmus paper of the psyche into the snake oil of tyrants. They are widely used by HR managers to control other managers. But those who live by the sword of psychology are soon impaled thereon. Those managers for whom the ultimate test of management is the achievement of actual results are understandably suspicious of what an American psychologist called ‘mental viruses’. As management conferences are ideal places to measure mental viruses, they are wary of them too. When the mental viruses are used to determine their ‘fit’ with the corporate culture, their suspicions are validated.
Nearly sixty years ago, William Whyte in The Organization Man criticised this abuse of psychology and hoped it would be laughed out of court. To level the playing field somewhat, he kindly included an appendix, called ‘How to Cheat on Personality Tests’, which countless managers have used to make fools of testers who naively believe that they can measure one’s ‘true personality’. Sadly, Whyte was forced to admit that each year the number of managers subjected to personality tests has grown while criticism has served mainly to make managers more adept in disguising their purpose. These value-laden loyalty tests reward management robots at the expense of the few rebels who argue with, rather than acquiesce to, those who would control them. When rebels ‘upset’ robots, it is lack of fit that is the culprit. Managers thus become keys that are supposed to fit the corporate lock. And HR managers, with the help of psychologists, hold the keys to the kingdom.
Czech writer, Karel Capek, seems to have been the first playwright to have used ‘robot’ to describe a human as an automaton. In his 1920 play R.U.R. his robots are machine-made pseudo-human beings deprived of such ‘unnecessary’ qualities as feelings and creativity. A character in the play, Domin, says that robots learn to speak and write and have phenomenal memories. They can read and recite the contents of a large encyclopaedia but their thinking is never original. They would make good university professors.
If my use of ‘robot’ is eccentric, it is because I can think of no other way to describe managers who unhesitatingly toe the party line. Today’s management robots are not without feelings, however. On the contrary, they talk about them ad nauseam. They learn to speak and write in deplorable jargon, going forward, of course. They don’t have phenomenal memories and cannot remember anything from an encyclopaedia because they haven’t opened one – Wikipedia is the way they travel. They would not make good university professors if we assume, somewhat rashly, that academics as seekers after truth argue constantly with students, colleagues, and administrators. We should not forget, however, Ambrose Bierce’s distinction, in The Devil’s Dictionary, between academe (an ancient school where philosophy was taught), and academy (a modern school where football is taught).
As management is what managers do until they, allegedly, become leaders, leadership is a popular topic at conferences. Managers love to hear that leadership is a subjective quality of gifted individuals, like themselves, who have special powers to persuade gullible people to do what rational individuals would never dream of doing. Leaders bewitch people. Knowing this, managers queue to attend courses on leadership and INTRODUCTION hope thereby to learn about their ‘leadership qualities’, if any. For decades psychologists have profited from this fascination with power by dreaming up lists of leadership traits, including emotional stability, integrity, compassion and forgiveness.Yet research going back to the 1930s has shown, and general observation confirms, that many successful executives have bad tempers, do not like their colleagues, and do not care about their anxieties or aspirations.
Like most of us, managers prefer to be respected as persons rather than powers. They want to believe that people obey their orders because they are leaders and not because they have the power to enforce obedience. This comforting thought has not yet occurred to police officers or motor mechanics who tell ordinary folk what to do but don’t describe themselves as leaders. And as much as we love police officers and mechanics, I have never heard anyone refer to them as leaders. Idiots apart, we don’t follow their directions or expert advice because of their exemplary personalities. Why should anyone follow managers because of their personalities?
As I inexorably argued my way out of the job for which I was being interviewed, it occurred to me as a slow learner that debate would not be tolerated at the conference. In fact, the HR manager emphasised with his stubby finger that management entertainers should under no circumstance argue with their audiences. His managers were not to question the agenda of the conference or the authority of the psychologist. His aim was to focus on his managers’ ‘soft skills’ since their hard skills took insufficient account of their ability to get on with each other. He believed that arguing with colleagues is a sure sign that they are not getting on with each other, or with him.
Arguing is nowadays widely regarded as offensive because, if valid, it forces people to accept conclusions they don’t feel good about. But, as I foolishly argued, teachers cannot educate if they believe that arguing is offensive. If teachers take seriously the view that civilised, rational argument offends delicate souls, education disappears and is replaced by entertainment. That, of course, is what management conferences are all about.
A management conference allows a teacher to train, educate and entertain executives. Some consultants try to do all three, and they inevitably fail. The greatest challenge is to educate executives and this can be attempted, without a guarantee of success, in diverse ways: in classrooms, conferences, through textbooks, novels and, rarely, plays. The form which I have chosen for discussing what goes on in management conferences is that of the disputation in the form of a two-act play.
After presenting the original, larger manuscript to several expert readers, I was informed that the play was unperformable. Because there was no sex, violence or rock and roll, it was considered too ‘wordy’ and, with respect to management, unrealistic. This reaction shows how little readers of plays know about the arcane world of management. Fortunately, an entrepreneur who understood that world only too well offered to produce the play for an audience of management consultants in London on the condition that I cut two of the four acts. Thankfully, this was not an act of censorship but his recognition that performing a play is an expensive business and other entertainers, and even educators, need an opportunity to establish their place in the sun.
Now, playwrights feel that cutting material is akin to self-castration and they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the editing table. Their normal reaction, after removing a few commas, is to refuse further cuts and cross their arms. Sanity generally prevails, however, when they realise that their chances of having a play performed, especially if they are virgins, is close to zero. And so they agonise about which body part to amputate.
When writing a play, authors know that they have to mix content with ‘filler’. Characters in plays deliver lines that are profound, INTRODUCTION witty or trivial. Content is needed to keep the play moving and if it purports to be educational, disputation is essential. But if argument is to be educational, it has to involve valid reasoning which makes special demands on audiences. Most theatre-goers want to be entertained and so they have more tolerance for ‘filler’ than for serious intellectual debates. Also, actors and audiences need breathing spaces; actors need spaces in the script to ad lib and audiences need spaces to relax and cough. Importantly, if the play contains lines which authors pray will generate hysterical laughter they have to write trivial dialogue after the humorous lines to ensure that the audience’s howls of delight do not drown out important content. ‘Filler’, therefore, serves a special purpose and explains why so many people find reading a play intolerably boring, even if they enjoy its performance on stage.
Faced with the sad task of cutting material, this reluctant play- abuser cut much of the ‘filler’ and retained the content in the knowledge that the actors would struggle to learn and deliver their lines. And so it turned out: the excellent professional actors who kindly agreed to play the characters I created had insufficient time to learn their lines which were, subsequently and wonderfully, read.
The management consultants in the audience barely