The Executive Way: Conflict Management in Corporations
By Calvin Morrill
University of Chicago Press, 272 pages, $27.50
`What do they do up there?”
This from my daughter, long ago, as I held her hand and walked with her through streets of skyscrapers. She couldn’t imagine what people did in those high offices. After a quarter-century of work as a freelance writer of reference manuals, technical white papers, sales brochures, corporate speeches, video scripts, internal reports and other ad-hoc projects on behalf of hundreds of anxious, overstressed executives in dozens of big companies, I think I finally have an answer that any schoolchild would understand.
They fight.
How they fight is the subject of this carefully researched, surprisingly entertaining new study of executive conflict in corporate America at the end of the Reagan era. Based on extensive (and ingenious) fieldwork at 13 large corporations during 1984-86, “The Executive Way” examines the patterns of behavior displayed by top executives in 312 “extended trouble cases” that were described to author Calvin Morrill, then a Harvard graduate in his mid-to-late 20s, now an associate professor of sociology at the University of Arizona.
“Trouble cases” is a diagnostic phrase for the kind of corporate inflammation that breaks through the skin of bureaucratic routine, drawing combatants into hostilities that go beyond and even interfere with business as usual. Morrill got these war stories straight from source: the top executives who were victors, vanquished, survivors or bystanders. He gives us a rare and perhaps unprecedented look into the hidden world of executives whose social power generally isolates them from outside scrutiny.
What Morrill finds in these executive-suite skirmishes may not comfort those who assume that, in the power towers of advanced capitalism, top managers pursue their own and their corporate interests as rational individuals searching for optimum solutions–even solutions that optimize their personal power. Morrill’s fascinating case-histories reveal a different picture.
He identifies a range of grievance issues that trigger conflict–the five most common being promotion/compensation, management style, personal life, personalities and individual performance. The list suggests that subjective irritants outweigh substantive differences when executives go for each other’s throats.
Morrill examines corporate conflict in three distinct types of business organizations: “mechanistic,” “atomistic” and “matrix.” His explanation of the differences between them helps readers understand why corporate infighting takes on different characteristics in each one.
Mechanistic bureaucracies, represented by the firm disguised as “Old Financial,” “are formal in structure and clear in their lines of authority.” Most large companies today are mechanistic; so, perhaps, are government agencies, with the military chain of command as the mechanistic archetype. Conflicts with subordinates are solved by orders from the top down. Conflicts with superiors are handled by endurance, avoidance, griping, even sabotage. What is remarkable about the cases described by Morrill is how rarely either the problem or its solution has a direct, bottom-line effect on business.
I wish I could quote a few cases in full, because they make great stories: oddly familiar and at the same time plausibly surreal. “The Harsh Vice President” is coaxed away from yelling at subordinates by gentle pressure at a series of long lunches. An alcoholic senior vice president who protests continually about “getting organized” is kicked upstairs to a harmless administrative post. One executive sets up another by putting him in charge of an important task force, then secretly instructing a subordinate to gather hard evidence on his shortcomings.
In atomistic organizations, represented here by “Independent Accounting” (and possibly also including health-care facilities and academic faculties), professionals work independently in “silent hives,” and top-executive “partners” are loosely bound. Trouble is muted and conflict comes in restrained forms. One partner routinely cleans his pipe to express contempt when a wind-bag partner speaks at meetings. A failing partner is urged to take a three-month leave; his accounts are smoothly covered by other executives and he “slips into semiretirement.”
The real fireworks erupt in matrix organizations. These non-traditional management structures, in which executives from various departments are linked in project teams with unclear lines of authority, develop a ritualized culture of combat: lots of meetings, lots of “shootouts” and “moments of truth,” an active concern with “honor.” At “Playco,” management teams fight “duels” wearing “lucky ties.” The “Iron Man” head of operations mobilizes a months-long war against the “Princess of Power” senior vice president of marketing who is known to have the ear of the chairman of the board, which is ended only by two-day off-site “peace talks” attended by nearly 30 executives and managers. A vice president of sales actually dukes it out with his boss in the parking lot while other employees take bets on the winner.
These “vengeance games of negative reciprocity” are Morrill’s liveliest scenarios–in fact, one of the most entertaining sections of “The Executive Way” is Appendix C, a glossary of native terms used at Playco. Among them are: “Italian Lira Money Order” (“Worthless promise of an executive”), “Sleeping Beauties” (“Executives enamored with their own abiltiies but ignorant of their negative perception by other top managers”) and “Bozo” (“An executive who ineptly attempts to follow the code of honor to press his grievances against opponents”). A Playco official describes budget meetings this way: “It’s like the inner city in here. We don’t have central authority. The police have pulled back. It’s just the gangs banging each other for control.”
Vivid language is not restricted to a toy and entertainment company like Playco. In the Old Financial mechanistic bureaucracy, a special mahogany-paneled executive elevator skips the 33 floors known simply as “the chasm,” where middle managers and their staffs plug away at their jobs. And at the atomistic Independent Accounting organization, the old-pro partner Vega narrates:
“I open up the drapes in my office so I can see the city, and I think about what I’ve done over the past year. If my gut starts to ache, then I know I’ve had a bad year. If my gut feels good, then I might light up a cigar and enjoy the moment. The billable hours are the key. All the rest is just business school mumbo jumbo.”
Morrill’s concluding argument is worth a formal paraphrase. Executives are embedded in a highly insular world; the longer they work inside executive ranks, the more tenuous become their ties to parties outside this world. They develop schemes for understanding that may be appropriate to local executive contexts but don’t necessarily benefit the organization or reflect “the elusive big picture.” It’s wrong to “assume top managers act in ways that contribute to collectively rational problem-solving.” Executive decision-making is “quite often decoupled from substantive reality.” But despite this decoupling, and the “feeling of powerlessness” that executives often express, their decisions still have great impact in business and society at large.
Maybe there’s nothing amiss. Business management doesn’t have to be rational to be successful. Yet reading Morrill’s study, reviewing the sociological background he diligently provides and savoring the finely sketched trouble-cases as though they were Franz Kafka parables, I recognized a familiar emotional pattern: the anxiety of not knowing how to keep score, the voracious pursuit of executive-perk “goodies,” the feeling that real power lies somewhere up above, the “loneliness at the top” of executive life.
Historically, this life isn’t very old. It doesn’t seem to be tribal; perhaps its antecedent lies in the court society of European monarchies. And the executive life may be rapidly changing. The “overwhelmingly male, white, highly educated, middle-aged” rank of top executives is gradually being penetrated by outsiders: women, minorities, imports from overseas affiliates, aggressive young consultants. Gurus like John Wareham are urging managers to break corporate bonds and become “electronic-age executives without loyalty beyond immediate friends and family.”
Executive conflict may also be entering a new and more active era. Competition for slots is increasing. The management pyramid narrows near the top; the demographic numbers look bad for aging baby-boomers, who are already feeling the pressure of downsizing.
“The Executive Way” is the way of the warrior, driven by needs and desires yet determined by local social context–but tomorrow’s battlefields will be different. “It seems unlikely,” says Morrill, “that a single moral order will dominate executive contexts in the future.” Before we try to look too far ahead, this book provides a necessary and cautionary revelation of what’s really going on in those big, businesslike skyscrapers.
