The Four Hundred

Hardly a week passes that a new book or article isn't published purporting to tell the business world what skills and behaviors will be required to succeed in the new millennium. How often have we been solemnly informed that change is accelerating, knowledge is power, and business must become more competitive in order to survive in the global economy. I suppose these would qualify as penetrating insights to someone who had been in a coma for the past twenty years.

The recipes for success served up in management how-to books are comprised of theories (often vague) wrapped in optimism (often delirious), and always peppered with probity. There's principle-centered leadership, and primal leadership, and the leadership secrets of Colin Powell and Rudolph Giuliani (ironically, men whose careers were publicly funded and thus were never required to show a profit). There are books that urge managers to first break all the rules, and books that forswear classic intelligence in favor of emotional intelligence. There's even the improbable notion of Jesus as CEO.

Invariably, these books reflect the writer's desire to improve business practices and are sure to be full of noble and uplifting abstractions like employee empowerment. Can't-miss management concepts all share certain characteristics: they feel good, are unconditionally acknowledged to be desirable, and are seldom practiced. Empowerment, for example, is largely a cosmetic concept. Power is rarely shared, and then only in careful allotments. What management consultants pretend not to grasp about this issue, but hirelings certainly appreciate, is that true empowerment is having enough money not to need a job, and as long as you serve at someone else's pleasure, your empowerment is likely to be limited to whatever best serves their interests.

But of all the hopeful remedies for prospering in what he dutifully describes as our "increasingly complex, challenging, and competitive world," the cure offered by Nathaniel Branden, psychologist and corporate consultant, is among the most novel. In an article published in The Navigator, Branden wades through the predictable shoals of complexity and competition to reach an unexpected foreign shore.

"A modern business can no longer be run by a few people who think and many people who merely do what they are told. . . ," writes Branden. "Today, organizations require not only a higher level of knowledge and skill among all those who participate in the process of production, but also a higher level of independence, self-reliance, self-trust, and capacity to exercise initiative. In a word, self-esteem."

Well, actually that's two words, but let's not quibble. Branden no doubt sees self-esteem as the linchpin of the global economy because, by happy coincidence, he has written a book on the subject, called Self-Esteem at Work. Branden defines self-esteem as "the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness. This means trust in your ability to think, learn, make appropriate decisions, and respond effectively to new conditions. It also means confidence in your right to experience success and personal fulfillment, the conviction that happiness is appropriate to you." Sounds like a life's work in and of itself. Some of the other virtues he believes to be crucial in an Information Age economy are rationality, realism, respect for facts, independence, autonomy, initiative, creativity, innovativeness, self-responsibility, and personal integrity.

Alas, Branden hasn't been paying attention. In the mind millennium, as he calls it, success can and is achieved in ways quite inimical to self-esteem--externalizing costs, creative accounting, and the use of off-shore tax havens, just to name three. By inference, if the skills described by Branden are "crucial," then successful companies must already be practicing them. But even companies that are wildly successful and relatively free of scandal don't necessarily rate high on the self-esteem index.

In spite of recently announcing a very rosy profit picture, Microsoft, for one, still appears to be suffering from an integrity deficiency. Perhaps emboldened by a sympathetic Justice Department, or simply as a reflection of its usual elevated business practices, the software giant felt it necessary to deceive prospective customers in a recent television ad.

Microsoft wanted to respond to the clever and effective ads run by rival Apple, which presented testimony by frustrated Windows users about the ease and advantages of switching to the Macintosh. The spots always end with the grinning Mac enthusiasts stating their name and occupation.

Microsoft wanted to prove that the customer flow went in both directions, so it screened an ad that showed a picture of a woman and claimed that she had switched to Windows after years of Mac use. And what's more, it was easy and she was happy about it. Her name, however, was strategically omitted, and she was vaguely described as a "five-foot-three-inch freelance writer who once rented a Lexus and is married to a man who is 6 feet tall."

Well, Microsoft, as we know, has its skeptics, and some of them were suspicious that anyone would actually switch to Windows without threat or inducement. They became even more suspicious when they discovered that the image used by Microsoft was a stock image available on the Internet. A bit of investigation uncovered the fact that the mysterious writer actually worked for a public relations firm hired by Microsoft. Apparently Microsoft couldn't find anybody who had actually switched, and it chose, instead, to change a few of the pertinent facts. The company quickly pulled the ad, not because the self-esteem of its members asserted itself, but because the truth was so embarrassing.

From this, we may conclude that while a high level of self-esteem among individual employees may help a company achieve success, success will not necessarily result in a flowering of self-esteem.

The problem with the whole spate of management-improvement books is that they address people and ignore the system. The behavior of people will, to a large degree, be dictated by the demands of the system in which they work. Change the system, and the behavior changes.

Our current economic valuation system is self-limiting because it only adds and never subtracts. Anything that generates economic activity is good for the GDP. Thus, cancer patients, hurricanes, and toxic spills are all good because they incite economic activity and contribute to the national economy. But they are clearly not desirable. Likewise, strip mining, drift-net fishing, and cutting ancient forests are economically profitable but may have long-term harmful effects that are never calculated.

Consequently, values like health and a clean environment are of little significance to the economic system, unless they begin to infringe on profitability. And when profitability is the dominant value, cost/benefit analysis replaces moral, legal, and ethical considerations.

To the degree that the system is blind to its impacts, it encourages behaviors that support the model and devalues behaviors that do not. If the primary value of the economic system were ethics or conservation or collaboration, the behaviors required to succeed in such a system would be quite different. Under the current system, self-restraint, which is prized in individuals, is an anathema to corporations caught in a cycle of competitive escalation. Thus, in the fishing industry, the need to show quarterly profitability trumps the certainty that over-fishing will eventually severely limit the catch for everyone.

As currently constituted, the system rewards businesses for pushing the legal, moral, and ethical envelope. Books won't change that. Unless the wider systemic problem is addressed, management how-to books simply end up helping companies do harmful things better.

If the noble concepts espoused by Branden and others are seldom practiced or quickly abandoned, it is because the system doesn't reward their practice. Getting away with it is more valuable financially than championing an abstract concept like self-esteem.

And as for self-esteem, it is not a destination but a journey, during which our true intentions are repeatedly tested and revealed through the daily choices we make. For the fallible among us, the best we can hope for is a variation of H.L. Mencken's quip about self-respect, which he described as "having the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious."