The Organization Man

CHAPTER 10 The "Well-Rounded" Man

The "Well-Rounded" Man 129 cHAPTER 10 The "Well-Rounded" Man LET'S EXAMINE FIRST THE MODEL AS YOUNGER MEN SEE HIM. THEY ARE in remarkable agreement on the matter. There are dissenters, precious few that they may be, and no generalization can do justice to all the different shadings in the majority's view. On the fundamental premise of the new model executive, however, the young men who hope to be that vary little, and from company to company , region to region, you hear a litany increasingly standard. It goes something like this: Be loyal to the company and the company will be loyal to you. After all, if you do a good job for the organization, it is only good sense for the organization to be good to you, because that will be best for everybody. There are a bunch of real people around here. Tell them what you think and they will respect you for it. They don't want a man to fret and stew about his work. It won't happen to me. A man who gets ulcers probably shouldn't be in business anyway. This is more than the wishful thinking normal of youth. Wishful it may be, but it is founded on a well-articulated premise-and one that not so many years ago would have been regarded by the then young men with considerable skepticism. The premise is, simply, that the goals of the individual and the goals of the organization will work out to be one and the same. The young men have no cynicism about the "system," and very little skepticism-they don't see it as something to be bucked, but as something to be co-operated with. This view is more optimistic than fatalistic. If you were to draft an organization chart based on some junior-executive bull sessions, the chart wouldn't look too much like the usual hierarchical structure. Instead of converging toward a narrow apex, the lines on the chart would rise parallel, eventually disappearing into a sort of mist before they reached any embarrassing turning points. 130 THE ORGANIZATION MAN The prosperity of recent years has had a lot to do with the rosiness of the view. Corporations have been expanding at a great rate, and the effect has been a large-scale deferral of dead ends and pigeonholes for thousands of organization men. With so many new departments, divisions, and plants being opened up, many a young man of average ability has been propelled upward so early-and so pleasantly-that he can hardly be blamed if he thinks the momentum is a constant. The unity they see between themselves and The Organization has deeper roots, however, than current expediency. Let's take the matter of ambition as further illustration. They do not lack ambition . They seem to, but that is only because the nature of it has changed. It has become a passive ambition. Not so many years ago it was permissible for the ambitious young man to talk of setting his cap for a specific goal-like becoming president of a corporation , building a bridge, or making a million dollars. Today it is a very rare young man who will allow himself to talk in such a way, let alone think that way. He can argue, with good grounds, that if it was unrealistic in the past it is even more so today. The life that he looks ahead to will be a life in which he is only one of hundreds of similarly able people and in which they will all be moved hither and yon and subject to so many forces outside their control-not to mention the Bomb-that only a fool would expect to hew to a set course. But they see nothing wrong with this fluidity. They have an implicit faith that The Organization will be as interested in making use of their best qualities as they are themselves, and thus, with equanimity , they can entrust the resolution of their destiny to The Organization . No specific goal, then, is necessary to give them a sense of continuity. For the short term, perhaps-it would be nice to be head of the electronics branch. But after that, who knows? The young executive does not wish to get stuck in a particular field. The more he is shifted, the more broad-gauge will he become, and the more broad-gauge, the more successful. But not too successful. Somewhat...