Calling a manager brilliant is a good way to stall his career.
Suppose you are a middle manager and you find a problem your boss would rather not hear about: a cost that will land in two years, a product that doesn’t quite work, a number that was rounded the wrong way. At home or in church you would know what to do. At work you hesitate, and the hesitation isn’t only cowardice. You are consulting a different rulebook.
Robert Jackall spent years inside large corporations as an ethnographer, documenting how managers actually make moral decisions. One of them put the rulebook plainly: “What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That’s what morality is in the corporation.” Most of us assume corporate wrongdoing comes from bad people or an absence of ethics. Jackall found something stranger: a complete moral system, coherent and widely shared, that happens to have little to do with truth, competence or the common good.
Who you work for
When managers describe their work, they almost always first say “I work for [name]” and only then describe their function. That order is the structure of corporate life. Details are pushed down and credit is pulled up. Credit has to be given rather than claimed, and accepting it reaffirms fealty to whoever gave it.
The unwritten rules follow from that. You never go around your boss. You tell him what he wants to hear, even when he says he wants dissent. You anticipate what he wants so he never has to act as boss. And your job is not to report what he doesn’t want reported, but to cover it up. So the problem you found is now your problem, and the morally correct move, by the system’s lights, is to make it disappear. Loyalty runs to the person above you, not to the organization, which is why voice survives only when it serves the boss.
Outrunning mistakes
Why doesn’t the buried problem eventually catch the people who buried it? Because they have moved. People who are in high positions have never been in one place long enough for their problems to catch up with them. Some managers argue that outrunning mistakes is the real meaning of “being on the fast track.” Your boss will likely be promoted before the cost lands, and whoever inherits the role will inherit the blame. At the very top, one does not outrun mistakes but toughs them out with sheer brazenness. Bureaucracies are, in C. Wright Mills’s phrase, vast systems of organized irresponsibility.
The same logic shapes how decisions get made. Making a decision exposes a carefully nurtured image of competence to judgment, so the rule is to avoid deciding if at all possible, and when a decision must be made, to involve as many people as possible so blame can point in many directions. To make a decision ahead of the time it has to be made risks political catastrophe. Decisions get made when they are inevitable, because inevitability provides cover, the logic of CYA culture.
It also shapes who rises. Striking, distinctive characteristics of any sort are dangerous in the corporate world. One of the most damaging things that can be said about a manager is that he is brilliant, because it signals he has publicly asserted his intelligence and become a threat. A person can have any beliefs they want, as long as they leave them at home. Corporate language adapts to match. It is provisional, and managers who are “maze-bright” read the meaning between the lines and understand it can change when the context does. “Exceptionally well qualified” means “has committed no major blunders to date.” “Unusually loyal” means “wanted by no one else.”
A morality without a God
It would be comforting to call all this hypocrisy, but the people inside are rarely stupid or evil. They are rational actors in an irrational system, and the irrationality is stable because each person’s individual rationality sustains it. The system does select, though: it rewards an inexhaustible capacity for self-rationalization fueled by boundless ambition, and everyone else adapts, goes numb or leaves. As one voice in the book puts it: “We lie all the time, but if everyone knows that we’re lying, is a lie really a lie?”
Jackall’s diagnosis is that Bureaucracy creates a Calvinist world without a Calvinist God. It carries the same profound anxiety that marked the old Protestant ethic, but one’s sign of election now depends on the capriciousness of one’s superiors and the market rather than on an inscrutable God. Bureaucracy breaks apart ownership from control, substance from appearances, action from responsibility, and language from meaning.
That leaves you where you started, holding the problem nobody upstairs wants to see. Jackall’s question is not how to fix the corporation but something harder: how does one act in such a world and maintain a sense of personal integrity? The book offers no easy answer. It makes clear that, inside the maze, burying the problem will feel like the responsible thing to do.
References:
- Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers
- Quotes via Zvi Mowshowitz