The decline of management as a rational undertaking can be traced through the meteoric career of Peters, dubbed the “uber-guru” of management by the Los Angeles Times. He started as an analyst at the old-line, hyperrational McKinsey consulting firm, only to discover the “human element” in management in his 1982 best seller, In Search of Excellence. It was not enough to manage “by the numbers,” he and his coauthor argued, reasonably enough. Employees need to be motivated and rewarded for going the extra mile to satisfy customers, and this involved engaging their emotions. Corporations were made up of people, people are emotional beings, so management would just have to wade into this murky new territory. Peters, in other words, made a rational case for a new, less-than-rational approach to management based on motivation, mood boosting, and positive thinking.
But as the age of downsizing wore on, a menacingly nihilistic tone crept into his message. It was no longer enough to “thrive on chaos,” as his 1988 book advised—the forward-looking manager should actually generate it. “Destroy your corporation before a competitor does!” he wrote in his 1992 book, Liberation Management. “Disorganize! And keep disorganizing!” 25 He issued no statement without his trademark red exclamation marks; he posed for photos in his boxer shorts. A 2000 article on Peters in Fortune began: “If you know one thing about Tom Peters, you know about his first book, and if you know two things, the second is that he hasn’t written a book as good as that since, and if you know three things, the third is that sometime in the 18 years since that first precious book, he’s gone bonkers.” 26
Maybe it was the boxer shorts and Peters’s increasingly madcap speaking style that turned Fortune against him, because, no matter how bonkers, he had not in fact lost touch with corporate America. Downsize was his message for the 1990s—destroy the corporation as we know it—and this is exactly what the CEOs did. When Jack Welch retired from his chairmanship of GE in 2001, he ended his good-bye speech on a note every bit as nihilistic as Peters’s message, “by telling everyone to turn the organization upside down, shake it up, and go blow the roof off.” 27 Did layoffs strengthen or weaken the corporation? A mid-1990s study by the American Management Association found no positive impact on productivity. 28 But it hardly mattered, since layoffs clearly led to increased share prices, at least in the short term. If there was a deity at the center of corporate America’s new “business spirituality,” it was Shiva, the dancing god of destruction.
Managing Despair
Between 1981 and 2003, about thirty million full-time American workers lost their jobs in corporate downsizings. 29 American institutions—corporate and governmental—had little of concrete value to offer the victims of this massive social dislocation. Unemployment benefits generally run out after six months; health insurance ceases with employment. Many of the downsized white-collar workers bounced back, finding new jobs—although paying an average of 17 percent less than their former salaries—or adjusting to life as contract workers or “consultants” of one sort or another. 30 But without a safety net, formerly middle-class people often tumbled quickly into low-wage jobs and even destitution. I have met, and heard from, many of these downwardly mobile former managers and professionals: the IT marketing woman in Atlanta who worked six months as a janitor between marketing jobs; the Minneapolis car service driver who gives his passengers his old business card, from when he was a media executive, in case they might be interested in hiring one; the chemical engineer whose layoff resulted in a stint in homeless shelters. The once stable middle class of white-collar workers, who had been brought up to believe that their skills and education would guarantee security, was reduced to anxious scrambling.
Downsizing did not, of course, increase the number of salespeople, but it did increase the number of people who were encouraged to think of themselves as salespeople. In the hazardous new corporate workplace, everyone was encouraged to engage in a continual sales effort, selling him-or herself. As anthropologist Charles N. Darrah put it, the white-collar worker had become a “bundle of skills . . . who can move freely between [workplace] settings, carrying his or her skills like so much luggage.” 31 But he or she could hope to move “freely” only by constantly working on and burnishing what Tom Peters termed “the brand called you.” No longer were you to think of yourself as an “employee”; you were “a brand that shouts distinction, commitment, and passion!” 32 Everyone, from software writer to accountant, was now subject to the same insecurities as the “lonely salesman” once targeted by Norman Vincent Peale.
The motivation industry could not repair this new reality. All it could do was offer to change how one thought about it, insisting that corporate restructuring was an exhilaratingly progressive “change” to be embraced, that job loss presented an opportunity for self-transformation, that a new batch of “winners” would emerge from the turmoil. And this is what corporations were paying the motivation industry to do. As the Washington Post reported in a 1994 article on motivational products, “Large corporations are looking for innovative and cheap ways to boost employees demoralized by massive layoffs.” 33 According to a “history of coaching” on the Internet, the coaching industry owed its huge growth in the 1990s to “the loss of ‘careers for life.’ ” 34 AT&T sent its San Francisco staff to a big-tent motivational event called “Success 1994” on the same day the company announced that it would lay off fifteen thousand workers in the coming two years. As Time’s Richard Reeves reported, the message of the featured speaker—the frenetic Christian motivator Zig Ziglar—was, “It’s your own fault; don’t blame the system; don’t blame the boss—work harder and pray more.” 35
Products like motivational posters and calendars also owed their market to what a Successories spokeswoman described, in a tactfully abstract fashion, as “a lot of negativity in the world.” “We need [Successories products] because there’s a lot of companies downsizing and companies that can’t afford to give their employees the raises they were expecting,” she said, and her company’s offerings are “one of the ways to smooth that over.” 36 As Ralph Whitehead, a University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor of journalism, observed, “Corporate downsizers fire every third person and then put up inspirational posters in the halls to cover the psychic wounds.” 37
Think of it as a massive experiment in mind control. “Reality sucks,” a computer scientist with a master’s degree who can find only short-term, benefit-free contract jobs told me. But you can’t change reality, at least not in any easy and obvious way. You could join a social movement working to create an adequate safety net or to bring about more humane corporate policies, but those efforts might take a lifetime. For now, you can only change your perception of reality, from negative and bitter to positive and accepting. This was the corporate world’s great gift to its laid-off employees and the overworked survivors—positive thinking.
Companies brought in motivational speakers for an ever-growing number of corporate meetings. 38 Whatever else goes on at these meetings—the presentation of awards, the introduction of new executives—the “entertainment” is usually provided by motivational speakers. As Vicki Sullivan, who follows the market for such speakers, said at the National Speakers Association conference in 2007, corporations are the “sugar daddies” of the motivational speaking industry. “At some point,” she told me in an interview, employers realized it was not enough to expose people to familiar positive-thinking nostrums like “Don’t read newspapers or talk to negative people.” Instead, she said, “What they’ve learned is that you have to go beyond that, as change happens faster and faster. You have to use motivational speakers to help people hang in there.”
Motivational speakers and coaches promoted themselves as a tool for managing “change,” meaning layoffs and the extra workload imposed on layoff survivors. A coaching company, for example, promised to cure the toxic atmosphere left by downsizing: “This program is perfect for organizations and corporations that are going through change such as downsizing, mergers or acquisiti
ons. If the people in your organization are reacting with resistance to change, coffee room gossip, decreased performance, declining communication, or increased stress, this change management training teaches how to stay positively motivated and focused.” 39 One unusually forthcoming motivational speaker expressed some discomfort with her role, telling me that employers use people like her in part “to beat up employees” if they don’t achieve the goals that have been set for them. “They can say, ‘Didn’t you listen to the speaker we brought in?’ ”
The burgeoning genre of business self-help books provided another way to get white-collar workers to adapt to downsizing. Of these, the classic of downsizing propaganda was Who Moved My Cheese?, which has sold ten million copies, in no small part due to companies that bought it in bulk for their employees. Perhaps in recognition of the fact that it would fall into the hands of many reluctant readers, it’s a tiny volume, only ninety-four pages of large print, offering the kind of fable appropriate to a children’s book. Two little maze-dwelling, cheese-eating people named Hem and Haw—for the human tendency to think and reflect—arrive at their “Cheese Station” one day to find that the cheese is gone. The “Littlepeople” waste time ranting and raving “at the injustice of it all,” as the book’s title suggests. But there are also two mice in the maze, who scurry off without hesitation to locate an alternative cheese source, because, being rodents, they “kept life simple. They didn’t overanalyze or overcomplicate things.” 40
Finally the little humans learn from the mice that they may have to adapt to a new cheese. Haw uses what amounts to the law of attraction to find it: he starts to “paint a picture in his mind . . . in great realistic detail, [of himself] sitting in the middle of a pile of all his favorite cheeses—from Cheddar to Brie!” 41 Instead of resenting the loss of his old cheese, he realizes, more positively, that “change could lead to something better” and is soon snacking on a “delicious” new cheese. Lesson for victims of layoffs: the dangerous human tendencies to “overanalyze” and complain must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one.
Companies employed a variety of positive-sounding euphemisms for layoffs, describing them as “releases of resources” or “career-change opportunities,” but the actual process was swift and brutal. 42 By the 1990s, managing the actual layoffs had become a specialized art in itself, often practiced by restructuring experts brought in from outside. For one thing, the layoffs had to be announced suddenly and all at once, so there would be no time for the grumblings of the victims to infect the surviving work-force. Typically it was the company’s security force that managed the actual people-removing process and ensured that the discarded workers left without making a fuss. In the usual scenario, a person would be told of his or her layoff and quickly escorted by a security guard to the door. Sometimes discarded employees would be given a chance to pack up any personal effects they had in their offices—family photographs, for example—and sometimes these things would just be shipped to them later.
To limit ill will, if only to head off wrongful-termination suits and bad-mouthing by former employees, employers turned to outplacement firms, which, in addition to training in résumé writing, offered to console the laid-off with motivational services. The owner of an outplacement company in Portland, Oregon, asserted in 1994 that, with his help, people came to see “that losing a job was a step forward in their lives, . . . a growth experience, self-retreat, a needed time out.” The Los Angeles Times reported on the case of Primalde Lodhia, an Indian-born MBA, computer scientist, and mechanical engineer who was laid off in 1991 with no explanation other than “We are very happy with your work, but we have to let you go. You don’t fit in our management.” The company offered him outplacement services; he asked for cash instead, but the company insisted. In the motivational halfway house of outplacement, Lodhia was advised not to talk to anyone about his job loss for a month. He complied, later telling the Times, “It was good advice. I was so bitter, I would have said things that would have been bad for me.” 43
Not all companies rely on outplacement firms, which often charge over $10,000 per layoff victim, instead expecting their discarded employees to seek out and pay for their own motivational services. I attended about a dozen of these networking events and “boot camps” for white-collar job seekers in 2005 and found that the core message was positive thinking: whatever happens to you is a result of your attitude; by overcoming bitterness and converting to a positive or “winning” attitude, you could attract the job of your dreams. In her research on laid-off tech workers in the early 2000s, Carrie Lane, a professor of American studies, found the same thing. Events targeting laid-off workers “subtly urged [them] to snap out of it and start acting like a good (optimistic and industrious) jobseeker.” 44
After the layoff victims had been winnowed out and perhaps further isolated, like Lodhia, with advice not to communicate with others, there were the shocked and anxious survivors to deal with, and here again management turned to the motivation industry. Business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser calls the motivational effort “internal public relations,” used to create “pumped-up, motivated converts who would be ready to thrive under the most grueling and even hostile of business conditions.” For example, in the midst of downsizing in the mid-1990s, NYNEX subjected its employees to mandatory exercises, such as one in which you had to show how many ways you could jump around a room: “So [the employees] jumped—on one leg, on both legs, with their hands in the air, with one hand covering an eye. They jumped and they jumped and they jumped some more. . . . Then the leaders would say things like, “ ‘Look at how creative you are, how many different ways you can manage to jump around the room.’ ” 45
But the most popular technique for motivating the survivors of downsizing was “team building”—an effort so massive that it has spawned a “team-building industry” overlapping the motivation industry. Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the “team.” And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continued downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units. “Rather than eliminate or postpone teams, organizations should consider the benefits teams can offer in a downsizing phase,” a management consultant and “organizational change” expert wrote. “The team system offers a form of camaraderie that helps promote teamwork around getting the job done and enables people to feel connected to something smaller and safer than a large organization. People generally have an innate need to feel connected to a small group of people. . . . Teams offer this in the work environment.” 46
In search of team spirit, team-building companies offered dozens of “fun” bonding exercises, indoor and outdoor—simple ones involving balloons, blindfolds, or buckets of water and more intensive ones such as weeklong wilderness excursions. The idea was to whip up a fervent devotion to the firm even as it threatened to eliminate you. As a downsized AT&T worker told the PBS Evening News Hour in 1996: “We went to Outward Bound, the phone center people, for a week, and you bonded with everybody in the country. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever been through. You were a family. You were the most dedicated people in the world. I mean, if your kids didn’t stand up and do the Pledge of Allegiance to an AT&T commercial, you know—” 47
Team building is, in other words, another form of motivation, with the difference being that, in the desolate environment of the downsized corporation, this motivation was supposed to be generated from within the work group or “team.” One group offering both motivational and team-building services makes this clear on its Web site—though not too clear, given the garbled English that is another characteristic of the postrational corporate world: “In this team building workshop, you will learn both the team building skills and motivation skills guaranteed to make your team more cohesive, incr
ease employee morale, and motivated. You’ll learn how to build a team that grumbles less and works more, discipline less and reward more, create more focused and productive meetings and get recognized by the organization.” 48
As for the connection to old-fashioned, Peale-style positive thinking, the literature and coaches emphasize that a good “team player” is by definition a “positive person.” He or she smiles frequently, does not complain, is not overly critical, and gracefully submits to whatever the boss demands.
Sometimes the motivational effort backfired, especially when combined with ongoing layoffs. In the mid-1990s, while shedding 20 percent of its workforce, NYNEX initiated a “Winning Ways” program aimed at instilling employees with “the mentality of a winner,” but the employees sneeringly relabeled it “Whining Ways.” 49 When E. L. Kersten was working for a Dallas Internet service provider, he took note of the motivational products the company president favored and got the brilliant idea of going into business selling parodies of them. One of the “demotivational” posters available at Kersten’s [http://despair.com] despair.com site shows a bear about to snap up a salmon swimming upstream. The caption reads: “The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.” Another one shows a beautiful shoreline at sunset, with the caption “If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.”
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