Plato in the Totalitarian Corporate Boardroom

How the Business World is following the ideas of Plato    Simon van der Wiel (This article is also available from the Scroll website)

The face looms out of the decorated poster in a glorious celebration of importance. The eyes look with dream filled zealousness into the distant future, a patchwork of pixels proclaiming the visionary. Below, etched in professionally artistic fonts, are some of his sterling quotes, proudly propagated yet magnificently mundane. Side by side, his dreams and life story are strategically dispersed through meticulously compiled internal articles.

Simon van der Wiel is a fictonal character from Arunabha Sengupta's novel The Best Seller. Half Dutch, half Irish and brought up in the West Coast, he works for an Indian firm and interacts with Dutch clients. His blogs dealing with Corporate Circus, some from the novel and some extrapolated from the storyline, can be found at Blog of Simple Simon

Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution?

Not quite. We are referring to the modern day corporate leader. The organisation designated visionary entrepreneur.

One whose mug shots, borne by a barrage of company mailers, newsletters and affiliated business news publications, violate the more refined of our senses. Whose inane utterances are developed from
scratch through the magic of delegation, jotted down in tearing deadline-defying hurry, typeset in relentless review cycles and dished out in thousands of electronic mails which pop up in the innumerable inboxes till the discerning  employee develops distressed digits from continual clicks of shift-delete.

"Customer focus is the key for business in the next decade."... "Innovation and thought-leadership will define the new leaders of the industry."

Harping on unremarkable, universally acknowledged postulates, packaged as visionary proclamations of the all powerful and immensely knowledgeable Philosopher King. In that context, are these too different from "Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated " of Mao’s Little Red Book?

The striking similarities do not end with the image of an overhyped worshipped leader, zealously protected by internal police from criticism, with embargo on expression of honest thought. The likeness
stretches even beyond the inequality, injustice and deception of the policies that irk all rank and file behind the facade. It goes even beyond the axiomatic assumption of the state – in this case the organisation – being perpetually more important than the individual. Nor is the resemblance restricted to the most scarlet pigment of Red China. Today's large corporate organisations are more like any Totalitarian regime than can be contemplated without a shudder. 

The Philosopher King:  The marauding magic word of modern times is Innovation. Technology continues to evolve at the rate of mega-knots. Trillionaire tycoons –therefore accepted present day philosophers – vouch for business at the rate speed of thought. The focus is therefore on Innovation and Thought-Leadership. Hence, the different corporate organisations that conduct business in the time tested way of hiring out resources at lowest of low rates have to project themselves as factories doling out trendsetting ideas, packaging out of box thoughts in a moronic oxymoron.

As a corollary, people who have, often unthinkingly, climbed to their pinnacles of these organisations have the mantle of remarkable thinkers and visionaries thrust upon them. And through the propaganda machinery of newsletters, blogs, websites, information sharing portals, knowledge management
systems, podcasts, in house tweets, domestic electronic walls and external pandering to news agencies, the hastily donned manufactured greatness wraps itself tightly around them in the short term memory that rules the times.

 In a tailor made way, this fits the goal of the grand Corpocratic illusion. These companies essentially run on hordes who have to be fuelled by a vision of something more – or radically different – than the harsh

ground truth of being sold cheap. So, it is apt for the leaders to be projected as beings with knowledge and understanding that elude the common. The normal employee can only hope to gauge an imperfect approximation of their superior intelligence through the flickering shadows of reality and the reverberations of propaganda as they remain chained to their confining cubicles in the eerie
corporate equivalent of Plato's Cave.

The wisdom of the Philosopher King cannot be doubted, his words the unquestionable truth. Anything to the contrary can lead to public rebuke or banishment.

The maximisation of authority is linked to a great extent to supernatural mystical capacity to convert the massaged and mundane data from the floor, using the alchemy of positional power, into the gold dust that adorns the landscape of projected future.

The Tribal Society The world becomes flatter, contracted through the process of tying the ends together with fibre optic cables. Even as globalisation makes itself more and more apparent, the corporate organisations romping about in this world-wide arena remain undeniably tribal.

Anyone who has jumped through the hoops of corporate circus will identify with the last paragraph of the last section. In complete indifference to the stark actuality that is painted in unmistakable patterns by the ebbs and eddies of regular work, when facts bubble up to the stratospheric abode of the organisational demi gods, they are washed clean of the ugly smudges of reality.
They undergo a metamorphosis in keeping with the wishful thinking of privileged minds. There are certain norms that go with the dictates of the top management, certain elaborate vision and mission rolled out with singular purpose. Little things like truth cannot tamper with their unwavering, unquestionable vision. In fact, as we shall see later, the reality is not true. 

Chairman Mao could never admit the atrocious failure of the steel industry during the Great Leap Forward. Idi Amin pampered his guests with Scottish accordion music while dressed in a kilt himself even as people
died in hordes across the Ugandan nation. In the more antiseptic air-conditioned corridors of a corporate organisation, the same delusion plays on the leaders when their grandiose plans show unmistakable signs of being derailed into the realms of the Quixotic.

This inability to understand the differences between normative and actual laws of the world uniquely characterises tribalism. The refined fanaticism that manifests itself in the corporate police in defending the
proclaimed norms against criticism shows glimpses of semi-religious fervour of demon worship.

Parallels with tribalism do not end with this. Ritualistic chants and dances exist in the form of regular meetings, status reports, dashboards, circulated metrics, process verification checks and power lunches.
All these are activities that hardly ever lead to any tangible benefit but create an esoteric tribal bonding in the name of company culture.

As in any tribal system, there is an inherent compulsion to invest heavily in forming a closed society. Corporations carelessly cross frontiers of professionalism and tolerance levels in the attempt to create mutual family feeling. Thus, company family is a much harped and hated concept, a continual effort to make the boundaries between the office and family life and feelings as fuzzy as possible.

We increasingly find attempts to create an enclosed microcosm which tries to replicate the attractive aspects of the external world within the organisational boundary. Musical events, sporting fests, internal
newsletters featuring interviews of bigwigs, mutual back scratching in blogs and other social networking platforms... It is an effort at creating self sufficient small world which breeds its own tribal allegiance.

It is a common enough trend to be unable to contemplate a change of workplace after organisational bonding creeps into the psyche of individuals for a considerable period. With time, there is an increased reluctance to accept the possibility of an external world beyond the boundaries of an organisation from professional as also social aspects. For people accustomed to this environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to break away from the ancient lures of comfort feel and mutual support. All these initiatives of
extending the family feeling in corporate organisations are but veiled attempts at promoting tribal affiliation. 

None of the corporations that become huge are quite planned that way. Companies more or less always rise by chance, retrofitting the happy turns of probabilistic coincidences into successful vision and strategy. The bigger they get, more is the risk of exposure of employees to open communities, the greater
the danger of esoteric policies being put under the scanner of an extended worldview and, hence, more is the resistance to change. So, the bigger they grow, we find increasing number of initiatives that try to lower the opaque canopy of tribalism around their widening walls.

A year or so earlier, I informed my boss about bagging another opportunity in Europe after being particularly pissed with the uncertainty that surrounded my job in Amsterdam. I could see the tribal king unravel in front of me, peeling off one layer of superficial sophistication after another, till the primordial headiness of unquestioned authority lay bare on his face. I had committed the unpardonable crime of deserting the clan and moving elsewhere. I was told that had I proved unwavering in my allegiance, I could
have been the Last Man Standing in Amsterdam.

 Be it mirroring the Wild West or the ethnic inhabitants of the Polynesian Islands, rule of the tribal lord is very rampant. 

Totalitarianism and tribalism indeed go hand in hand.

Plato's Idea of a Corporation?  I would go further and state that many of the Corporate policies, sometimes documented and more often unwritten, are strikingly similar to Plato's idea of a Republic. 

It is a good place to pause and dampen the jubilant exclamations that may emanate from the corpo-philic at the invocation of the name of an intellectual giant and his seminal work. In lines of the pop-management-philosophical lines of Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Confucian Analects, Plato's Republic should
in no way be mistaken as a guideline for ideal management. Compiled largely as a reaction to the major democratic changes of his times, it is, in more ways than one, a colossal propaganda for totalitarianism. Plato, according to respected schools of thought, was plagued by the strain of democracy and hankered after the bygone days of tribal certainty and steadiness of life.

Photo: Chiranthan

One of the many recommendations of the great Greek thinker that has become unmistakably mirrored in the industry is to destroy family values, lest it interfere with the duties to the state.

How many times have we come across neglected spouses and children, and sacrificed social occasions at the altar of deadlines and escalations? And how often have we witnessed the employees honoured as the
model worker – another term shockingly lifted from Maoist China – for carrying out such sacrifices, thus creating a company culture and competition in familial negligence? Family is a threat which has to be innovatively converted into opportunity. And one way out is for the word to be identified with the greater
company circle, as discussed in the earlier section.

One of the favoured reuses of a Plato masterpiece of manipulation in the corporate world is in the distinction between the individual and the team player. This is where we witness the great mind indulging in subtle artifice with words.

Plato defined the totalitarian morality by linking good with whatever is good for the state. Translated into the jargon of modern day corporations it is equivalent to value-adds or best practices which benefit the
organisation. 

 While this itself is not remotely as axiomatic as he made it sound, his genius was evident when he delicately denounced individualistic advancements by equating them with egoism while glorifying collaborative thought as altruism.  Thus to him, whatever is carried out for the benefit of the whole is by definition good, whereas individual goal is selfish and therefore harmful. Whoever cannot sacrifice himself and his desires for the benefit of the bigger picture is undesirable.

Even in an era that supposedly thrives on innovation, this particular concept is almost axiomatic to the archetypical organisation. Radical thinking almost never makes it through the layers and layers of
bureaucratic approvals. There is an inherent compulsion to rein in individualistic thought, and if that is not possible, to obtain Intellectual Property Rights for the same. More often than not, free thinking individuals are branded with attitude problem, while the herd that follows the narrow path
of convention are hailed as team players. Thought-leadership, save a few exceptions, constitutes canned stale ideas packaged in new, glossy containers.  

All this makes sense to the Platonic ideal, where the yielding masses, lubricated by totalitarian morality, can act as the best cogs in the corporate machinery. To promote smooth operation, it is desirable for the nuts and bolts to change positions as rarely as possible. Hence it is made difficult for a normal employee to reach the level of the Philosopher King and his consorts.

Plato also engineered the prototype of the boorish manager – the watchdog defending corporate morality. According to his celebrated discussions, dogs can be ideally bred to keep sheep in order, snarl and attack strangers while being the soul of deference to the master. The people in Plato's ideal state – and therefore in the derived corporate world – are cattle who need skilled herdsman-ship.

Not too long ago did a modern day managerial guru of a major Indian corporation go on record bettering the Platonic benchmark, "Engineers are like vegetables. We can buy and sell them any time we want to." Plato at least dreamt of happy citizens, an unnecessary overhead that corporations can do without. Hence, we find preference for more subdued and stationary plant life.

What Plato’s laws presuppose is what the managements swear by – the organisation can judge the individual, but judgement cannot flow the other way without tipping the hierarchical balance. A fool-proof formula for the higher management to be elevated into god-players. 

The corporation is, therefore, always placed higher than the individual – something which is taken for granted by corporate drones and managers alike, without really waking up to the underlying naked fascism

indicated by the statement. However, such a conclusion is hardly earth shattering. Fascism in its turn is defined as the ideology to organise a nation according to corporatist values.

To drive home the totalitarian authority of the corporation, another Plato tenet becomes a favourite mission statement of corpocracy. Fitting the Republic-an directives into the corpocratic form, it can be
rephrased as: whether they manage by or without law, over willing or unwilling employees, whether they purge the company by laying off or transferring, as long as they proceed according to justice and preserve the organisation and make it better, this form of management must be declared the only one that is
right. 

Corporate Totalitarian Justice based on Plato's framework If we are buoyed by the reference to justice, let us take a closer look at the concept according to Plato's ideas. Doing so, we unearth untold wealth of wisdom which in fact powers the corporate value system.

Justice, as outlined in the Republic, is a surprisingly blatant argument against equality and freedom. And if we pause to consider the same concepts in the light of the current day, we find them taken for granted in the social fabric, yet ridiculously defiled under the juggernaut of corporations.

Republic works on the assumption that different individuals are by nature unequal. By corollary, equality for all begets inequality. Hence it makes sense for different privileges, including authority and education, for different classes. And in flourishing rhetoric, this was presented as the just course, because according to the Platonic theory of justice, the sole purpose of citizens is to maintain the stability of the state.

Again, transforming the argument into the totalitarian tenets of the corporation, we discover amazing congruence. Till around the turn of the century, when the obvious benefits of the internet made it absolutely ridiculous, in a lot of organisations web browsing had been the privilege of a chosen few. Till today, performance appraisals are carried out with preference for those who indulge in just that amount of self development that is optimal for the role he plays in the organisation. The desire to cut and trim individuals down to the size of the cogs which facilitate operations is evident in every policy and  procedure.

Additionally, there is the almost esoteric, mythical knowledge that remains in the highest echelons of the organisation, passed down to the favourites of the demi-gods on a strictly need to know basis. The tree of knowledge has always brought about the downfall of the mortal man who has not known better than to step into the territory of the God.

Transforming Plato’s Republic into the organisation, rules are designed to bring about welfare of the company, fitting the employees into one unit, by persuasion or force. Plato’s idea of justice was synonymous to whatever was best for the state – which in corporate terms can be rephrased as,
whatever suits the purpose of the organisation. 

Finally, we need to focus on how the life-blood, the prana, the sustaining chi of corporations owe its origin to the genius of Plato. We are referring to the global phenomenon of celebrated corporate bullshit.

If one is unfortunate enough to delve deep into colossal crap that passes for senior management propaganda, it becomes obvious that following the footsteps of the great Greek authoritarian, organisations too use the technique of dramatic devices, lulling the critical faculties of the employees
into stupor, even as they propagate their selfish agenda while ostensibly promoting justice for all. It is the ancient use of oratory to divert attention from the intellectual poverty of propagated piece of fluff.

Deception Plato promotes deception as a favoured tool of the leader. In his vision, the philosopher king is a healer of the society – in our case the organisation. Just like the medical man, he is armed with the license to lie. At the same time, similar ruse, if detected in people not in the position of leaders, is a punishable offence. 

The corporate equivalents of totalitarian deception principles must be self evident. When it comes to fabrication on the part of senior management, the binding thread dangles clearly.

To cap it all, Plato pronounces three laws of deception that redefine the concept of truth – the echo of which reverberate till this day inside meeting rooms and corporate cubicles.

 One – Installation of rites and gods is the privilege of the great thinker. Down the ages, the adjective has frayed and decayed to fit the implied grandeur into the crammed corporate quarters. But when applied to
designation rather than faculties of reason, the manifesto rings as true as ever.

Two – Authority must suppress all doubts about any part of the politico-religious dogma. He advocates severest punishment for even honest, honourable people if their opinions concerning the (demi)gods vary from that of the state. Not recanting or repeating the offense is death – which can be translated variously into the termination, sack or the pink slip.

And finally the pivotal third – Anything that serves the interest of the authority is the truth. There is no other criterion. A remarkable sentence that strips truth of the virtue of universal unconditionality. It is in this defining clause that we find corporate organisations to be eerily similar to totalitarian regimes.

Lies, said the great philosopher, are necessary to carry the herd to its perfection. Plato may have been misguided in his pronouncements, but he did retain a modicum of Socratic ethics. Hence, he openly admitted that he was lying. Corporate leaders, sadly, remain blissfully ignorant of such and
other principles. Not too many of them are aware of the teachings of either Plato or Socrates anyway. These lessons have lived on, in the tribal tradition of comfort feel, as defence mechanism in the face of growing openness.

Why do Leaders Suck How is it that we always find ourselves in this kind of an unavoidable rut when we work for a big organisation? Why do corporations unwaveringly and systematically suck?

One of the reasons is the close circle of leadership and succession. The authoritarian will generally select those who obey, who believe in his lies or pretend to do so, and who respond favourably to his influence.
And, in doing so, he is almost bound to select mediocrities. He invariably excludes those who revolt, resist or doubt his influence. Never can totalitarian authority admit the intellectually courageous.

Authorities will claim to, and remain convinced of their ability to, detect initiative, proactiveness and innovation in people, but what they are quick to notice is the tendency of questioning authority and nothing more. 

Demands of corporate hierarchy enhance this vice. Those who dare to think for themselves are generally court-martialled and eliminated through charges of attitude problem and insubordination. Those who are good in following are seldom ones to be the harbingers of positive reform. The Man Friday of a party leader is seldom a capable successor. Institutional identification of leaders and emerging superstars are actually excellent for the purpose of arresting change and increasing the rule of the incompetent. An excellent process of filtering out actual innovation and ability to think for oneself.

Additionally there is the perennial problem of utopian engineering – that of the dictator’s successor. Even a true visionary cannot ensure that all his visions are implemented by his circle of command and his
successor. This is inevitable, since large numbers by definition imply mediocrity.

What lies ahead?  In the guise of consulting companies, we find the modern day equivalents of Plato’s political artist. Those jargon-chanting tribal priests who study the organisation and trim it down through rationalising recommendations in the alleged quest of guiding the company to its ideal performing form. Which is one more way of selling crap, selling short term benefits and ROIs packaged in sparkling jargon.
However, the livelihoods of human beings cannot be tampered with for the sake of artistically beautiful bullshit. One cannot clamour like Archimedes for a place to stand outside the world in order to lever it away to a better position. The organisational engineer has to do his bit by standing shoulder to
shoulder with the people who are the cogs that run the profit making machinery. 

Plato demanded rule of the wise or sophocracy. With the passage of time, it has degenerated into idiocracy or corpocracy. According to Immanuel Kant the king becoming philosopher or the philosopher king is not likely to happen, nor would it be desirable, since the possession of power invariably debases the free judgement of reason.

Karl Popper, the most brutal of all critics of Plato’s totalitarian arguments, goes a step further. He is candid in his statement that behind the sovereignty of the philosopher king lies naked quest for power, Plato’s own personal ambitions. The age old sham of professing love for freedom while nursing own dreams of power plays on in the so called visionary leadership of today’s corporate world.. .

 At the end of the day, corpocracy is nothing but totalitarian power. All power corrupts and absolute power is devastating in its corruption. This is a natural law that outlasts the make believe normative laws preached by the high priests of totalitarian propaganda. And, somehow, the insignificant cogs need to roll on without being crushed beyond recognition by the ever expanding corporate vehicle. How then does one survive? 

Not all can afford to get off the moving machinery without leaving means of livelihood in the sinister yet sustaining system. And one cannot change the machinery without getting sucked into the corrupting power - thus ending up resisting change, or arranging a corporate coup - which takes enormous amount of organisation time and energy, most of which can be better used if one does not lack a life.

The only way out of this problem, unfortunate as it is, seems to be to adjust expectations from corpocracy, preparing oneself to withstand the shocks and stutters of the worst possible leadership.

Deming's First Principle, the Red Light District and Management Truths

As I have often noted in the pages of this blog, I am the Dutch interface of the organization. (I have also voiced this same opinion in the now famed The Best Seller - which as of today ranks in Amazon as one of the leading Financial Crisis Best Sellers).

At least that was the intention with which I was hired - to provide the Indian firm a local liaison while dealing with the Dutch bankers, as well as an internal window with an excellent view into the culture and traditions of life in Netherlands. Ever since joining, however, I have been preparing dashboards and reports by the celebrated EOD, seldom venturing beyond a smile and a handshake with the important Dutch clients. And in spite of the new insights into the culture I have supposedly brought in, the company continues to prepare new employees from India for the surprises of Holland with the same seven slide power point presentation crammed with windmills, clogs, cycles, canals and tulips.

Well, one reason for this apparent discord between intent and eventuality can be detected in the perennially increasing number of status reports that always seem to be in demand accentuated with the self delusional refusal to acknowledge the need of hiring additional people.

For managers, Status Reports seem to be the be all and end all of management. The other day I ran into an Indian professional visiting Amsterdam on business who lamented, “Will the speed of the Earth ever change if we appoint somebody to monitor it and give regular status updates? ... Now who will explain that to the corporate managers, his managers and his up-lines?” Mr. Suman Dasgupta, if only we had more people with your worldly wisdom.

Once or twice, during the bilateral sessions with my line manager, I have brought this up, but my arguments have been brushed aside with a carefree wave of high positioned hand, softened by a smile of assurance.
“Simon, the Dutch speak very good English and we don’t feel your language skills are required in our interactions. But, we appreciate your suggestions and will look for opportunities to use your expertise. Right now, your presence itself is an asset – and we really need those reports you are preparing. You are good at it."

Well, if I continue to analyse the events leading to my joining the firm, I detect yet another reason for this strange derailment of my role. The manager who had conducted my interview and had processed the hiring formalities had been relocated to Zurich within a week of my joining. The Dutch connection related to my hiring had probably left the country with him. It demonstrates a definite lack of constancy of purpose in the management, in direct conflict with the first principle of Dr. Edward Deming. And in this industry that totters and survives by banking on knee jerk reactions, this principle is often kicked away with ignorant disdain.

Let me illustrate this with the point made by the Line Manager. The Dutch clients speak decent English, and hence the Indians can carry on the business without undesirable hiccups.

First of all, I don’t subscribe to this line of reasoning.  Not all the people working in the bank are that comfortable with English, especially some of the important people who are in their fifties.Even a stuttering dialogue in their mother tongue will definitely go a long way towards winning their heart and thereby encroaching into their pockets. If not the entire workforce of the firm working in the Netherlands, the few super important people known as the account managers, who are entrusted with growing business, would be much better off by working their way to simple Dutch, even mastering a pidgin variety.  However, I witness none of these eminent employees garnering the time or inclination to pick up even a few basic sentences of the language.

If I contrast this with the oldest profession, there are some striking contrasts. Girls from Bosnia, Slovenia, Chile, Thailand and other exotic and remote places who carry on their variety of body-shopping in the Red Light District of Amsterdam become reasonably fluent in Dutch and English within a very few days. Granted, they have the advantage of Dutch fluids passing into them for every successful business transaction, but looking at it with some twists and turns of angles, the account managers do come just as close to the local Nether-lands during their negotiations.

At the same time, in the time honoured traditions of the industry manure, apart from growing the account, it is the responsibility of the high and mighty members of the local branch of the company to come up with visionary strategy and innovations to enable smarter business with value-adds. While growth is taken care of by cramming in more people at cheaper rates, vintage old wine in jargon cloaked new bottles generally make up the innovative suggestions for improving synergy and continuous improvement. With headquarters in a country that considers bull-shit to be sacred, this ideas generated often constitute an omnibus of corporate crap. During the process, however, someone did point out the necessity of developing Dutch language skills to communicate with the clients. And this is where Deming was stopped ruthlessly in the middle of his first of fourteen principles.

The language development suggestion was indeed taken up as a management goal by the decision makes back home. A defining moment when Deming would have smiled if the purpose had been written down in large letters as follows – EFFECTIVE DUTCH COMMUNICATION SKILLS FOR EMPLOYEES IN AMSTERDAM.

However, when this was passed as a directive to the regional manager in Amsterdam, and he made a new version of the goal – People need to be trained in Dutch, but I can only spare a ridiculously small amount of money for this curious whim of powers that be. Let us call this Purpose version 2.

The ball was passed to the Academy department in Continental Europe, who promptly framed their version of the purpose as – Dutch Language Certifications needed for 20 employees this quarter with the approved budget which is an atrociously stingy budget. Purpose version 3.
Hence, the next step for the Academy was to find out a suitably cheap institute who would teach 20 people at this atrociously small amount – with the added caveat of generating certifications within 3 months. Most of the prominent language schools laughed off the suggestion in the traditional straightforward Dutch way that the Windmill and Clog oriented Academy personnel had been entirely unprepared for. Finally, they zeroed in on a seedy outfit with little or no proven track record, who haggled and asked for more if they were to go with the sham. Hence, the Academy racked their brains to come up with a multiple brownie point winning innovation. The reimbursement rule was modified. The company would now pay 80% of the course including the cost of the books.

A mailer was thus drafted, announcing Dutch lessons for a very economic price which would be largely reimbursed by the Academy Department. Seats were limited, so could managers nominate people as fast as possible?  The mailer was distributed across mailboxes of managers in various accounts of Amsterdam and Utrecht, with graphics and passionate vision statements hinting at commitment to relentless quest of business enhancing knowledge.

The managers had also received the directive which designated Dutch language skill development of their resources as one of their Key Responsibility Areas. They rushed to fill in the seats with the employees reporting to them before seats ran out.
However, who could they spare for two evenings every week? With programs to be written and dashboards to be painted green with metronomic regularity? They handpicked some of the not so important reportees, mostly junior programmers with minimum interaction with the client, many of whom were not fully utilised, on the verge of going back to India. Their goal? Try to send as many guys for the training from my group as possible while not impacting business because of these peculiar directives from some senior manager sitting far far away. Purpose version 4.

Now what about the blokes who were nominated? Most of them would rather spend the evenings sipping beer in a bar, walking along the windows decorated with girls from Bosnia, Slovenia, Chile and Thailand in the Red Light District, a few engaging their services, while a lot would rather be sitting at home surfing porn. Most of them, with an exception here and there, had absolutely no intention of learning a language which was not spoken anywhere outside the Netherlands and some weird places like Surinam and Aruba. Their goal? Try to stay awake and attend just the requisite number of classes to ensure that the certificate is not withheld.  Besides, put the Dutch diploma in the year end appraisal form to gain some brownie points. Purpose version 5. The efficient Academy had already ensured that an exit test was not required for the diploma.

Well, in the end, twenty guys attended two classes a week for three months and nineteen of them got the certificates.

Academy proudly announced that they had met 95% of their goal by making 19 people trained in Dutch Language skills.

 The Project Managers could now balance their goals by toting up the number of diplomas won by their respective lionhearted reportees.

The unfortunate attendees, ears ringing with the intricacies of the guttural Dutch g, could now fill their appraisal sheets, proudly showcasing screenshots of their diplomas.

The Regional Manager came to know that 19 people had been trained in Dutch, and patted himself on the back for his enforcement skills which would probably go miles in developing the Netherlands business centre.

The Senior Management sat back in their offshore offices with relaxed smiles, looking proudly at the announcement bearing mail  that popped up, amazed at their own vision and foresight at making this happen. They were the trailblazing innovators who could turn the fortunes of the company and the industry yardsticks on their heads with supreme thought leadership from thousands of miles away. They would soon be visiting the Dutch-land to admire the outcome of their landmark brainchild.

Knowledge of Dutch would soon enter the portfolio of capabilities advertised by the company, the appropriate description of the same changing from 'rudimentary' to 'excellent' in the course of review and approval cycle.

A sizeable representative sample of the nineteen, however, were equally at sea when I asked them, “Hoe gaat het?” or “Hoe is je Nederlands?”


So, obviously the question is what will happen when new customers are swayed into engaging our services based on our excellent Dutch communication skills?

Well, as far as I see it, someone like me will be recruited ASAP ... By the time the new person would join the firm, the customer focus would change rapidly, with visionary synergies quickly traded for penny cringing and fire fighting. Hence, I will soon have a Dutch colleague filling up reports and creating dashboards.

W. Edward Deming talked of his 14 principles and lent his name to the Plan Do Check Act cycle. But the industry has succeeded in tackling him right at the first principle, endorsing its versatility by ignoring the tenet of constancy of purpose, and has created its own vicious cycle.

Schopenhauer and Vedanta to explain Meetings and Innovation

Our company is back to doing excellent business now that the credit crisis has blown itself away. By that I mean it is again stepping back into the excellent mode of plugging in manpower at the lowest of low costs to take over the most mundane of client activities. And hence it is that period of time when one can hardly open one’s mailbox without being hit between the hapless eyes by mailers of numerous nasty innovative initiatives.

From the HR, to the administration, to the COE groups pathologically steeped in collective Narcissism, everyone is expected to bring in often Quixotic measures that squander hefty amounts in the name of instant innovation. As Plato had observed even in those ancient days, “Most changes arise from abundance, from an accumulation of wealth which makes dangerous experiments possible.”

All this could have passed me by as the idle wind which bothers me not, but for the compulsion of the Senior Managers and Vice Presidents to come galloping in to the various locations and try to mould a motivating dough by sprinkling news-nuggets of innovation-initiatives over the time which lies heavy on their exalted hands.  These lead to meetings, meetings and more meetings, mandatory presence required, making the process of earning one’s daily bread more painful than one cares it to be.

Luckily, I have countered this into an answer to the age old question of finding time to stand and stare. Meetings are those periods which, with a suitably modified  point of view, can be retrofitted into a gift of time. A hour or two to do the much needed thinking that is increasingly difficult as life rushes us by in the modern manic speed.  It is a forum that can be tweaked as meditation, where the sole distraction is the painful inanity mouthed by the ridiculously high-positioned imbeciles who herd us in to the conference room. And using a technique taught by master Subramanium, I can get over the painful discomfort by concentrating on the very words of the speaker as if they are some ritualistic, repeated mantra for the mind to rest -  as indeed, thinking about it from some angles, they indeed are.

Subramanium is a master of tai chi, karate and yoga. And while my formal lessons with him have always been exhilarating sessions of tai chi chuan, time and again, he has passed on some excellent concepts of yoga.  There are people, many of them like me heralding from the Western way of life, who find it difficult to assume the sitting posture needed for Indian yogic meditation.  Whether cross legged in the lotus position or folded knees in the diamond or thunderbolt form, there is often painful discomfort which tend to get in the way of the calm mind. And this is where Subramanium taught me the method of concentrating on the pain to make it bearable, and also thus transforming it into a mind calming technique.

Today, the Senior Manager waxed eloquent on the numbers that showed growth in productivity like never before –  making him bullish about the future. He displayed some excellent charts and graphs on the whiteboard, beamed in by divine light of the overhead projector. All the figures had been accumulated by the new cutting edge tool – a novel landmark in the innovation culture of the organisation – which almost sniffed out the effort and output figures of the employees as they went about their daily job. This sort of tool made us the pioneers of thought-leadership, the forerunners among idea mongers who would eventually rewrite the industrial history in near future and lend a new proactive twist to the global thought-scape  with their futuristic brainwaves ... Well, judging by the extenuating excrement that was the man’s speech,  I had no doubt that he was indeed feeling bullish.

Well, a couple of weeks back, the team got the innovative shock that it had to install this cutting edge tool and fill up the time recording system before the proverbial Friday EOD. The catch was that the tool was a monstrous patchwork created in tearing hurry for the comfort feel of layers and layers of senior, regular and assistant managers, coded by a bunch of fresh, green, disinterested out of college developers eager to get away to the multiplex and disco bar, who were nevertheless the only ones cheap enough to indulge in unbilled in-house work.  As a result, it could not be installed on any machine without bringing notebooks, desktops and sometimes entire networks to a coma. If by heaven’s grace they managed to pop up as an executable icon on a fortunate machine, it refused to run - often necessitating the age old remedy of Ctrl, Alt and Del to enable normal services to resume reluctantly.

So, it was the time for quick workarounds, something our firm genuinely excels at. An office application was created in a hurry which directly plugged the data into the backend database of the tool. A spreadsheet was hastily drawn up which stated how many hours each employee had worked in the past month. This file contained ideal data, created in a secluded cubicle in an IT Park of Bangalore, with no input from or connection to what was actually being done in faraway Amsterdam.  All the employees shared their network password to an unfortunate soul who had drawn the short straw and was to spend a full day typing in the figures for everyone to ensure individual data ended up being submitted. Several security policies of the company were carelessly ignored and rampantly trampled upon, but the data was in place, showed improvement, made the senior manager bullish, and now was being presented to us as a remarkable demonstration of innovation.

 Painful, if you see through the facade. Our innovative attempt at confabulated crap thrown back at us as processed nuggets of senior management bull shit. Yet, by concentrating on this pain, I gained many insights that are possible only through contemplation and meditation.

The Senior Manager worked following the principles of Schopenhauer. The World for him was nothing but Will and Representation.  Reality was but a series of perceptions. These perceptions were not borrowed from the results of experience, but, au contraire, reality as represented depended on the will or desire or wishful thinking of the great man. The representation was the mental image of reality that he liked to believe in and had convinced himself of. Having reached that level of satori when the duality between truth and lies become fuzzy and non-existent.

The great Schopenhauer acknowledged the ancient Indian wisdom which called it Maya, the veil of deception which covers the eyes of the mortals, and causes them to see a world of which one cannot say either that it is or that it is not. It is like a dream, like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller from a distance takes to be water.

Schopenhauer does warn that if in the representation of perception illusion distorts reality, then the abstract error can reign for thousands of years, impose its iron yoke on nations, stifle the noblest impulses of mankind, through its slaves and dupes it can enchain even the man it cannot deceive. Replacing nation by industry and thousand by the short term corporate equivalent of ten, five or even one, we shudder at the resonance with which the words ring true in the cubicular world.

The wisdom of this great eighteenth century philosopher makes itself evident in the warped world of corporate existence full of Senior Management meetings in many other ways.
While these may be the subject of future blogs, I would like to leave the readers with a few striking thoughts.

Once my meditations ended with the ritual dance of meetings coming to an end (the shimmer of complying laughter, the rhythmic nods, the combined burst of laughter, the same earmarked virtuoso dancers getting into step, raising their hands, mouthing their stereotypical questions – and then the final words, the smiles in unison, the synchronised rise from the seats, the shake of important and privileged hands and then the departure followed by harmonious relaxation of postures)  I looked up some of the works of the thinker.

So many of them make sense when thought of in context of the Senior Manager.

“It is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do”
“The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence (operations) seem to him”
“Will minus intellect constitutes vulgarity.”

And finally, I wonder how farsighted must have been a man to have penned this line without having had to endure any one of the Innovation Pandering Corporate Meetings

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom”

Looking at Corpocracy with Eyes Wide Shut

My famed buddy, with his convoluted consulting techniques, had introduced me to the parallel between classic movies and the corporate world. His idea of a corporate presentation on teamwork, as now famously documented in The Best Seller, was to screen the episode What goes on in the Body during an Orgasm from Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex.

A few days back, as I watched Blow Up, the 60s classic movie by Michelangelo Antonioni, I was moved enough by the eerie similarity of the superficial swinging sixties and our office world to write a full fledged blog post on it. As noted in it, when consulted, my buddy responded saying that it was almost always classic cinema or multiple x-rated ones which reflected the corporate world to perfection on the flickering screens.

And now, as I watched Stanley Kubrick’s not so glorious effort Eyes Wide Shut, I realised that I had been bitten by this bug. The parallels that I stumbled upon were almost eerie and incredible. And as on so many occasions, my curious friend’s strangest aphorisms found their mark in the most bizarre of ways.

Corporate Truth

Perhaps in no other movie in the history of film making have the two genres of classic and carnal been so inseparably intertwined.
While there obviously is more than a hint of an underlying message, the entire movie is a celebration of fascinating female forms with some of the most beautiful breasts ever captured on camera. If there is one readily recognisable genius in Kubrick’s movie making, it is in the astonishing capacity of weaving some sort of a storyline around the abundance of vital statistics, and managing to sneak in a measure of meaningfulness without getting distracted by the fabulous flesh-fare on display.

The title of the movie itself brings out the essence of our industry. In Blow Up, I had been riveted by the tennis match between the clowns where the audience followed the non-existent ball as the artists pantomimed their way through the game. Here the name Eyes Wide Shut suggested the perpetual state in which we go through the motions, refusing to see through the most glaring of falsehoods, sitting through senior management meetings, vision and mission statements, goal setting and projections, metrics and measurements, sales presentations and appraisal meetings, strategies and innovations ...

However, as Tom Cruise walked through the film, from one almost sexual encounter to another, and sauntered into the much discussed and written about orgy in the country mansion, my subconscious fishing for a concrete parallel finally felt the jerk of the plot biting the bait.

In a prolonged scene which has been interpreted as symbolic depiction of decadence, the rich and powerful are shown indulging themselves in an elaborate ritual while hiding behind Venetian masks. Pseudo religious chants play in the background, as the high priest leads the brotherhood with ornate, predefined and accepted gestures. Women, of excellent assets and hidden faces, accompany the masked men and it all ends up in simultaneous tumults of uncensored promiscuity. Cruise moves from room to room to find more and more debauchery going on with fabulous faceless female figures engaged in various stages of fornication with the men of the cult.

When it is discovered that Tom Cruise has got there without requisite rights, broken ranks and hobnobbed with the screwing society by somehow getting wrongful access to the password, he is brought under trial and tried by the masked high priest of the orgy.

Hiding true selves, elaborate ritualistic sham of sacred rites, cloaking the prostitution of souls and truth under the embellishments of sacramental rules, fooling around with figures under the cloak of ornate importance while achieving nothing other than fustian fucks.  Finally, zealously holding on to the exclusivity of decadence, slapping the charges of trespassing on an outsider for daring to step into an area cordoned off as the corridors of power.

As my brain continues to die from the friction and suffocation of cubicular existence, my entire corporate life seems to be run through my mind. And the just described scene seems to mirror the events in graphic parallel. Board rooms, vision and mission formulae, management talk, motivational speeches, policy and process, defilement of actual facts and figures, hauling people up for attitude problems when the mask seems to slip to reveal the decadent demeanour underneath.  The fulsome nakedness of the truth staring at our faces while we focus on the facade of organisational self deception, eyes wide shut and gleefully so.