Listics

I’m reading two books right now in an effort to keep up my end of the bidness conversation: “Who really Matters,” by Art Kleiner, and “Moral Mazes - The World of Corporate Managers,” by Robert Jackall.

I’m a consultant and a serial contractor. Kleiner’s “core group theory” rings ever so true to me. Perhaps the advantage of finding this material in print is that the books legitimize discussion of some awkward truths. The customer doesn’t come first, no matter what the corporate rhetoric tells you. If the customer is lucky she comes second to a strong CEO who mandates the subtle lie that she comes first. Then there’s the matter of these subtle - and not so subtle - lies. Jackall begins with an examination of the bracketing of personal values in a bureaucratic context. He quotes a corporate vice president thusly: “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.” And while this may be a great unspoken truth, it’s not possible to acknowledge it as true simply because the acknowledgement would be unrespectable; hence the bracketing of morals between home and workplace and compromised behavior in the latter.

So, as I said, the value of the books I’m reading is to legitimize discussion of these otherwise unspeakable truths. There’s a lot here for a project manager who is faced with the spaghetti code of Byzantine corporate cultures and practices.