Working

by Studs Terkel

  Corporations always have to be right. That’s their face to the public. When things go bad, they have to protect themselves and fire somebody. “We had nothing to do with it. We had an executive that just screwed everything up.” He’s never really ever been his own boss.

  The danger starts as soon as you become a district manager. You have men working for you and you have a boss above. You’re caught in a squeeze. The squeeze progresses from sation to station. I’ll tell you what a squeeze is. You have the guys working for you that are shooting for your job. The guy you’re working for is scared stiff you’re gonna shove him out of his job. Everybody goes around and says, “The test of the true executive is that you have men working for you that can replace you, so you can move up.” That’s a lot of boloney. The manager is afraid of the bright young guy coming up.

  Fear is always prevalent in the corporate structure. Even if you’re a top man, even if you’re hard, even if you do your job—by the slight flick of a finger, your boss can fire you. There’s always the insecurity. You bungle a job. You’re fearful of losing a big customer. You’re fearful so many things will appear on your record, stand against you. You’re always fearful of the big mistake. You’ve got to be careful when you go to corporation parties. Your wife, your children have to behave properly. You’ve got to fit in the mold. You’ve got to be on guard.

  When I was president of this big corporation, we lived in a small Ohio town, where the main plant was located. The corporation specified who you could socialize with, and on what level. (His wife interjects: “Who were the wives you could play bridge with.”) The president’s wife could do what she wants, as long as it’s with dignity and grace. In a small town they didn’t have to keep check on you. Everybody knew. There are certain sets of rules.

  Not every corporation has that. The older the corporation, the longer it’s been in a powerful position, the more rigid, the more conservative they are in their approach. Your swinging corporations are generally the new ones, the upstarts, the nouveau riche. But as they get older, like duPont, General Motors, General Electric, they became more rigid. I’d compare them to the old, old rich—the Rockefellers and the Mellons—that train their children how to handle money, how to conserve their money, and how to grow with their money. That’s what happened to the older corporations. It’s only when they get in trouble that they’ll have a young upstart of a president come in and try to shake things up.

  The executive is a lonely animal in the jungle who doesn’t have a friend. Business is related to life. I think in our everyday living we’re lonely. I have only a wife to talk to, but beyond that . . . When I talked business to her, I don’t know whether she understood me. But that was unimportant. What’s important is that I was able to talk out loud and hear myself—which is the function I serve as a consultant.

  The executive who calls me usually knows the answer to his problem. He just has to have somebody to talk to and hear his decision out loud. If it sounds good when he speaks it out loud, then it’s pretty good. As he’s talking, he may suddenly realize his errors and he corrects them out loud. That’s a great benefit wives provide for executives. She’s listening and you know she’s on your side. She’s not gonna hurt you.

  Gossip and rumor are always prevalent in a corporation. There’s absolutely no secrets. I have always felt every office was wired. You come out of the board meeting and people in the office already know what’s happened. I’ve tried many times to track down a rumor, but never could. I think people have been there so many years and have developed an ability to read reactions. From these reactions they make a good, educated guess. Gossip actually develops into fact.

  It used to be a ploy for many minor executives to gain some information. “I heard that the district manager of California is being transferred to Seattle.” He knows there’s been talk going on about changing district managers. By using this ploy—“I know something”—he’s making it clear to the person he’s talking to that he’s been in on it all along. So it’s all right to tell him. Gossip is another way of building up importance within a person who starts the rumor. He’s in, he’s part of the inner circle. Again, we’re back in the jungle. Every ploy, every trick is used to survive.

  When you’re gonna merge with a company or acquire another company, it’s supposed to be top secret. You have to do something to stem the rumors because it might screw up the deal. Talk of the merger, the whole place is in a turmoil. It’s like somebody saying there’s a bomb in the building and we don’t know where it is and when it’s going to go off. There’ve been so many mergers where top executives are laid off, the accounting department is cut by sixty percent, the manufacturing is cut by twenty percent. I have yet to find anybody in a corporation who was so secure to honestly believe it couldn’t happen to him.

  They put on a front: “Oh, it can’t happen to me. I’m too important.” But deep down, they’re scared stiff. The fear is there. You can smell it. You can see it on their faces. I’m not so sure you couldn’t see it on my face many, many times during my climb up.

  I always used to say—rough, tough Larry—I always said, “If you do a good job, I’ll give you a great reward. You’ll keep your job.” I’ll have a sales contest and the men who make their quota will win a prize—they’ll keep their jobs. I’m not saying there aren’t executives who instill fear in their people. He’s no different than anybody walking down the street. We’re all subject to the same damn insecurities and neuroses—at every level. Competitiveness, that’s the basis of it.

  Why didn’t I stay in the corporate structure? As a kid, living through the Depression, you always heard about the tycoons, the men of power, the men of industry. And you kind of dream that. Gee, these are supermen. These are the guys that have no feeling, aren’t subject to human emotions, the insecurities that everybody else has. You get in the corporate structure, you find they all button their pants the same way everybody else does. They all got the same fears.

  The corporation is made up of many, many people. I call ’em the gray people and the black—or white—people. Blacks and white are definite colors, solid. Gray isn’t. The gray people come there from nine to five, do their job, aren’t particularly ambitious. There’s no fear there, sure. But they’re not subject to great demands. They’re only subject to dismissal when business goes bad and they cut off people. They go from corporation to corporation and get jobs. Then you have the black—or white—people. The ambitious people, the leaders, the ones who want to get ahead.

  When the individual reaches the vice presidency or he’s general manager, you know he’s an ambitious, dedicated guy who wants to get to the top. He isn’t one of the gray people. He’s one of the black-and-white vicious people —the leaders, the ones who stick out in the crowd.

  As he struggles in this jungle, every position he’s in, he’s terribly lonely. He can’t confide and talk with the guy working under him. He can’t confide and talk to the man he’s working for. To give vent to his feelings, his fears, and his insecurities, he’d expose himself. This goes all the way up the line until he gets to be president. The president really doesn’t have anybody to talk to, because the vice presidents are waiting for him to die or make a mistake and get knocked off so they can get his job.

  He can’t talk to the board of directors, because to them he has to appear as a tower of strength, knowledge, and wisdom, and have the ability to walk on water. The board of directors, they’re cold, they’re hard. They don’t have any direct-line responsibilities. They sit in a staff capacity and they really play God. They’re interested in profits. They’re interested in progress. They’re interested in keeping a good face in the community—if it’s profitable. You have the tremendous infighting of man against man for survival and clawing to the top. Progress.

  We always saw signs of physical afflictions because of the stress and strain. Ulcers, violent headaches. I remember one of the giant corporations I was in, the chief executive officer ate Gelusil by the minute
. That’s for ulcers. Had a private dining room with his private chef. All he ever ate was well-done steak and well-done hamburgers.

  There’s one corporation chief I had who worked, conservatively, nineteen, twenty hours a day. His whole life was his business. And he demanded the same of his executives. There was nothing sacred in life except the business. Meetings might be called on Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve, Saturdays, Sundays. He was lonesome when he wasn’t involved with his business. He was always creating situations where he could be surrounded by his flunkies, regardless of what level they were, presidential, vice presidential . . . It was his life.

  In the corporate structure, the buck keeps passing up until it comes to the chief executive. Then there ain’t nobody to pass the buck to. You sit there in your lonely office and finally you have to make a decision. It could involve a million dollars or hundreds of jobs or moving people from Los Angeles, which they love, to Detroit or Winnipeg. So you’re sitting at the desk, playing God.

  You say, “Money isn’t important. You can make some bad decisions about money, that’s not important. What is important is the decisions you make about people working for you, their livelihood, their lives.” It isn’t true.

  To the board of directors, the dollars are as important as human lives. There’s only yourself sitting there making the decision, and you hope it’s right. You’re always on guard. Did you ever see a jungle animal that wasn’t on guard? You’re always looking over your shoulder. You don’t know who’s following you.

  The most stupid phrase anybody can use in business is loyalty. If a person is working for a corporation, he’s supposed to be loyal. This corporation is paying him less than he could get somewhere else at a comparable job. It’s stupid of him to hang around and say he’s loyal. The only loyal people are the people who can’t get a job anyplace else. Working in a corporation, in a business, isn’t a game. It isn’t a collegiate event. It’s a question of living or dying. It’s a question of eating or not eating. Who is he loyal to? It isn’t his country. It isn’t his religion. It isn’t his political party. He’s working for some company that’s paying him a salary for what he’s doing. The corporation is out to make money. The ambitious guy will say, “I’m doing my job. I’m not embarrassed taking my money. I’ve got to progress and when I won’t progress, I won’t be here.” The shnook is the loyal guy, because he can’t get a job anyplace else.

  Many corporations will hang on to a guy or promote him to a place where he doesn’t belong. Suddenly, after the man’s been there twenty-five years, he’s outlived his usefulness. And he’s too old to start all over again. That’s part of the cruelty. You can’t only condemn the corporation for that. The man himself should be smart enough and intuitive enough to know he isn’t getting anyplace, to get the hell out and start all over. It was much more difficult at first to lay off a guy. But if you live in a jungle, you become hard, unfortunately.

  When a top executive is let go, the king is dead, long live the king. Suddenly he’s a persona non grata. When it happens, the shock is tremendous. Overnight. He doesn’t know what hit him. Suddenly everybody in the organization walks away and shuns him because they don’t want to be associated with him. In corporations, if you back the wrong guy, you’re in his corner, and he’s fired, you’re guilty by association. So what a lot of corporations have done is when they call a guy in—sometimes they’ll call him in on a Friday night and say, “Go home now and come in tomorrow morning and clean out your desk and leave. We don’t want any farewells or anything. Just get up and get the hell out.” It’s done in nice language. We say, “Look, why cause any trouble? Why cause any unrest in the organization? It’s best that you just fade away.” Immediately his Cadillac is taken away from him. His phone extension on the WATS line is taken away from him.60 All these things are done quietly and—bingo! he’s dead. His phone at home stops ringing because the fear of association continues after the severance. The smell of death is there.

  We hired a vice president. He came highly recommended. He was with us about six months and he was completely inadequate. A complete misfit. Called him in the office, told him he was gonna go, gave him a nice severance pay. He broke down and cried. “What did I do wrong? I’ve done a marvelous job. Please don’t do this to me. My daughter’s getting married next month. How am I going to face the people?” He cried and cried and cried. But we couldn’t keep him around. We just had to let him go.

  I was just involved with a gigantic corporation. They had a shake-up two Thursdays ago. It’s now known as Black Thursday. Fifteen of twenty guys were let go overnight. The intelligent corporations say, “Clear, leave tonight, even if it’s midweek. Come in Saturday morning and clean your desk. That’s all. No good-bys or anything.” They could be guys that have been there anywhere from a year to thirty years. If it’s a successful operation, they’re very generous. But then again, the human element creeps in. The boss might be vindictive and cut him off without anything. It may depend what the corporation wants to maintain as its image.

  And what it does to the ego! A guy in a key position, everybody wants to talk to him. All his subordinates are trying to get an audience with him to build up their own positions. Customers are calling him, everybody is calling him. Now his phone’s dead. He’s sitting at home and nobody calls him. He goes out and starts visiting his friends, who are busy with their own business, who haven’t got time for him. Suddenly he’s a failure. Regardless what the reason was—regardless of the press release that said he resigned —he was fired.

  The only time the guy isn’t considered a failure is when he resigns and announces his new job. That’s the tipoff. “John Smith resigned, future plans unknown” means he was fired. “John Smith resigned to accept the position of president of X Company”—then you know he resigned. This little nuance you recognize immediately when you’re in corporate life.

  Changes since ’42? Today the computer is taking over the world. The computer exposes all. There’s no more chance for shenanigans and phoniness. Generally the computer prints out the truth. Not a hundred percent, but enough. It’s eliminated a great deal of the jungle infighting. There’s more facts for the businessman to work from, if the computer gives him the right information. Sometimes it doesn’t. They have a saying at IBM: “If you put garbage in the computer, you’ll take garbage out.” Business is becoming more scientific with regard to marketing, finance, investsments. And much more impersonal.

  But the warm personal touch never existed in corporations. That was just a sham. In the last analysis, you’ve got to make a profit. There’s a lot of family-held corporations that truly felt they were part of a legend. They had responsibilities to their people. They carried on as best they could. And then they went broke. The loyalty to their people, their patriarchy, dragged ‘em all down. Whatever few of ’em are left are being forced to sell, and are being taken over by the cold hand of the corporation.

  My guess is that twenty corporations will control about forty percent of the consumer goods market. How much room is there left for the small guy? There’s the supermarket in the grocery business. In our time, there were little mama-and-papa stores, thousands and thousands throughout the country. How many are there today? Unless you’re National Tea or A & P, there’s just no room. The small chains will be taken over by the bigger chains and they themselves will be taken over . . . The fish swallows the smaller fish and he’s swallowed by a bigger one, until the biggest swallows’em all. I have a feeling there’ll always be room for the small entrepreneur, but he’ll be rare. It’ll be very difficult for him.

  The top man is more of a general manager than he is an entrepreneur. There’s less gambling than there was. He won’t make as many mistakes as he did before in finance and marketing. It’s a cold science. But when it comes to dealing with people, he still has to have that feel and he still has to do his own thinking. The computer can’t do that for him.

  When I broke in, no man could become an executive until he was th
irty-five, thirty-six years old. During the past ten years there’ve been real top executives of twenty-six, twenty-seven. Lately there’s been a reversal. These young ones climbed to the top when things were good, but during the last couple of years we’ve had some rough times. Companies have been clobbered and some have gone back to older men. But that’s not gonna last.

  Business is looking for the highly trained, highly skilled young executive, who has the knowledge and the education in a highly specialized field. It’s happened in all professions and it’s happening in business. You have your comptroller who’s highly specialized. You have your treasurer who has to know finance, a heavily involved thing because of the taxation and the SEC. You have the manufacturing area. He has to be highly specialized in warehouse and in shipping—the ability to move merchandise cheaply and quickly. Shipping has become a horrendous problem because costs have become tremendous. You have to know marketing, the studies, the effect of advertising. A world of specialists. The man at the top has to have a general knowledge. And he has to have the knack of finding the right man to head these divisions. That’s the difficulty.

  You have a nice, plush lovely office to go to. You have a private secretary. You walk down the corridor and everybody bows and says, “Good morning, Mr. Ross. How are you today?” As you go up the line, the executives will say, “How is Mrs. Ross?” Until you get to the higher executives. They’ll say, “How is Nancy?” Here you socialize, you know each other. Everybody plays the game.

  A man wants to get to the top of the corporation, not for the money involved. After a certain point, how much more money can you make? In my climb, I’ll be honest, money was secondary. Unless you have tremendous demands, yachts, private airplanes—you get to a certain point, money isn’t that important. It’s the power, the status, the prestige. Frankly, it’s delightful to be on top and have everybody calling you Mr. Ross and have a plane at your disposal and a car and a driver at your disposal. When you come to town, there’s people to take care of you. When you walk into a board meeting, everybody gets up and says hello. I don’t think there’s any human being that doesn’t love that. It’s a nice feeling. But the ultimate power is in the board of directors. I don’t know anybody who’s free. You read in the paper about stockholders’ meetings, the annual report. It all sounds so glowing. But behind the scenes, a jungle.