208: Office Politics
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from W.B. E.C. Chicago. It's a American life distributed by Public Radio International, I remember a glass. Jacobs and the other guys did not like their boss Manwright. Manwright was full of himself. He took credit for things that they did. He was hard to deal with. And they said out to sabotage him. Sociologist named Calvin Morel watched how they did it. It's part of a study of office politics in different companies. These guys all worked for an old line banking firm that he calls old financial. All the names in this story have been changed. In traditional companies like this one, Morel says, "All the politics happen in secret. It's all subterfuge. Here's how Manwright was destroyed by Jacobs." Manwright used to rely on this fellow Jacobs to prepare him before he would go before the senior executive committee meeting. And Jacobs was very good, very smart guy. And he could anticipate some of the questions that his boss would be asked at these meetings. And so when he prepped him, he would just neglect to tell his boss about some of the key questions that he could anticipate being asked. And there his boss would stand at the committee meeting naked without the information that he needed. And eventually he was removed as a result of this. Now did Manwright understand that he had been sabotaged? He didn't. When he actually got back each time, this happened to him over the course of several meetings where he was misprepped, if you will. And each time he came back, he was firmly convinced that his subordinates were incompetent. Because how else could this have happened? It never dawned on him that they were so competent, that they might actually be intentionally engaged and sabotaged. Another multi-billion dollar company that Marrel studied is one that he calls Playco in the toy and education product business. Unlike all the financial, where bosses were bosses and underlings were underlings, and so all the scheming had to go on in secret, at Playco there was no real hierarchy. It wasn't clear who was in charge of whom. And while that might sound like a kind of nice place to work, with no big bosses, it turns out that with no one absolutely in charge to make decisions and keep people in line, all the fighting was right out in the open. At meetings people would try to humiliate and out argue each other, they'd form alliances. The executives at Playco would talk all the time about honor and respect, as if they were medieval knights, or maybe mob figures. Then I even witnessed the violence in this firm between executives. One of the incidents I talk about was about two executives actually getting into a fist fight in front of the world headquarters of this multinational firm. Yeah, just tell what happened between those two. Yeah, well, one guy was called, I call him Greer, and the other guy actually had a nickname called the Terminator. And he was called the Terminator because as this one guy said he liked to hunt big game, I liked to look for executives who he could best in arguments at meetings. And so these guys were parking their cars in the parking lot. And they called each other out essentially. Greer accused the Terminator of playing around with women and at a local health club and embarrassing the corporation. Meanwhile, the Terminator accused Greer of being a weak executive. This thing escalated and after a few minutes one of them had the other over his low to sports car. There's this idea in capitalism that companies are making decisions and products and strategy based on rational evaluation of the market and their customers. To what degree is that true? Based on what you saw and to what degree are decisions being made based on office politics and not a rational evaluation of where their company is in the market? There is some rationality, but thinking about the bottom line is sometimes a myth that outsiders tell each other about how decisions are made and it's not always about the bottom line. It's about politics with one another, maneuvering with one another. Given all that, given all the conflict that Calvin Morrell saw at all kinds of offices, what's surprising is not how many fistfights there are in offices, but how few? I know I've been in one. This happened years ago on a public radio show that was just starting up and I do not think of myself as much of a fighter, but here's how it went down. The guy who raised the money to start this show had this vision and what his vision was was he said, what if there were a radio show where you could turn on every day and you would hear something like Spike Lee and Philip Glass, the composer and Stephen Hawking, you know, the physicist sitting down together and, you know, just talking, talking about
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