The two sides of Mr. Nice
As I listen to a book about Enron, I keep being struck over and over by how friendly everyone is acting. Everything is wonderful, they are the best people in the world, and they know it. Who can argue with success?
This resonates with my experience on my last job, where the officers were some of the nicest people I had ever met. But this niceness, I discovered to my surprise, was entirely superficial. It was just a survival skill for the corporate jungle.
This was typical of the company itself, which was just an impressive shell. I found all of this baffling, since I am basically a naive, honest person. I couldn’t believe people could be so duplicitous.
They can be, and in cultures like that, often are. This is one of the most prized traits in corporate life: putting on a good front. I noticed Americans are especially good at this. We had people from many places at this company, and the ones who excelled at this shell game were the slick Americans, although there were a few foreigners who had adapted quickly.
And there were the vast majority who simply went along with the game. I’m sure they knew what was going on at the unconscious level, but they ignored these feelings and were good little solders. They weren’t good at putting on a front, but they were good at going along with the front, and eliminating anyone who was not doing the same thing.
Everybody was in it for the money, and how they got the money was immaterial.
So that covers the nice side of those people, but what about the other side? Here I have to do some guessing, as you always do when assessing unconscious behavior, the dark side. But I have the strong feeling that this side of the equation is destructive. In Freudian terms, the death wish. The hidden objective is to destroy the world, and when you look at the big view, they seem to be doing it.
In the case of Enron, they destroyed Enron, but they also damaged the American Way of Doing Business, which is at the core of The American Dream.
Comment by Jane Hagan
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I have a little different take on it. I have been in many corporate jobs. I have also had therapy clients who were in very responsible positions in the corporate world; from NASA, to Apple, to Cisco, to HP, and on and on. So I have experience with folks on the job and at their most vulnerable.
There is no doubt that there are some bad folks out there. I doubt they were the ones I saw in my therapy practice. However, many management people are team players just trying to do a good job. If they don’t “win” at their job, the company is not going to be successful and many will be hurt, not just the manager. They are responsible for the jobs (and families) of lots of people and they care about that. They also care about their own jobs and their own families.
There is an elite corps in America (and other countries). They are the ones that operate at the top of the hierarchy, usually politically more than corporately, although both coincide from time to time. They are interested only in power and the money that comes with power. Not many tears are shed when they fall from grace.