THE NEW EXECUTIVES

Whicluratiirace?

MICHAEL IVENS

`But what about the rat-race?' I was dressing a lecture room of Cambridge undergraduates and the question came red peatedly to brush aside preambles on profit, management, trade unions and other irrela. vancies. The emotional stir each time the question was asked indicated the power of feeling.- Under such circumstances, square corm pany directors like me are inclined to hand out hypocritical pieces of silver as appease- ment to the younger generation. V.44,11nly, the rat race is everywhere.'

But on this occasion I had just changed roles. A dabbler with one of the few literary magazines that have not (regrettably) been financed by the CIA or other charities, I had just been exposed to the full blast of literary egoism and aggression. It had suddenly dawned on me that businessmen were gentle innocents compared to tough characters like poets, journalists and politicians.

And why this was so also became sluds denly clear. The communicators (and this included the politicians) were involved with their message: I speak; you hear me; there4 fore I am. But most businessmen are hum.' bier. They cannot identify in this messianic way with their wares: connecting rods, lavatory paper, shoe factories. Their, ego cannot reach to its full heights in their work.

I pressed my theory of the non rat-race in business; it was received by the under graduates unenthusiastically. They wanted to believe in it. They liad been corrupted by the Librarian's (John Braine's) view of business; a harsh, jungle-like existence in which the weak go to the wall and the strong rise on their ability to lay the manag4 ing director's daughter. If only it were so ...

For, with certain exceptions, businessmen are a shy, unformidable species When I look back to my encounters with them, I think always of the last words of Blanche as she is led away mad at the end of Ten- nessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire —'How kind people have always been to me' For that has been my experience and, I believe, that of the other hybrid centaurs —one half managers, one half wilful egoists —whose hoofs have galloped along indus4 trial corridors. The one certain thing about most managers is that they will put up with almost anything.

My first job was with Lord Brown's bear-1 ing company and I look back with grief and guilt at the forbearance it showed me. Every morning I glanced up at the words of William Morris on the factory frontage:' 'Life without industry is guilt; industry without art is brutality'. And every evening, to show the independence of youth, I left by vaulting through the window. At the time, I thought I was an advanced liber- tarian. The Glacier demurred, but they did not (as they should have) fire me.

Much larger organisations have gulped, and accepted their individualists. My old friend Henry Maxwell, unasked, produced his own newsletter which he circulated through the ranks of to. It dealt with his views on art, literature, and his conversa4 tions with his charwoman.

Ics managers were vaguely embarrassed when you discussed the Maxwell newsletter with them. Finally one all-powerful director instructed Henry Maxwell to stop it. Henry promptly produced yet one more—and last —issue and announced that this was the end 'by instruction of Mr X'.

If managers are gentle with each other, they are butter to the churn when it comes to dealing with politicians. There was the distinguished head of the electricity industry who came in to meet his new Minister, one Richard Marsh.

Unfortunately Richard Marsh had been given the wrong brief—that for the gas industry. And so the puzzled electricity mandarin was questioned on high policy issues relating to North Sea gas. He was too courteous to say a word. Just imagine a politician (say Lord G.B. or Quintin) sitting it out in this way.

Now why do most people—even bush nessmen themselves—see industry in this harsh romantic glare? It comes, I think, from comparing the manager with the send sitive artist. The comparison is apt but the conclusions are nonsense. There is no tougher person (as Shaw argued in The Doctor's Dilemma) than the artist on the make. Poets seeking places in an anthology can give businssmen ninety yards' start in the hundred yards rat-race and still break the tape well ahead.

There are, of course, other reasons for this romantic view of the businessman. The rosy view of the Marxist, that the capitalist seeks profits at all times. How our balance of payments would benefit if this were sot1 One of the most difficult tasks in British business is to persuade managers to fix a reasonable price for their products. They tend to be embarrassed by excessive profit, Another reason surely, is the virgin's deg ere to be raped, In the 'fifties, the sensitive undergraduate prepared for the coarse as- sault of business upon his person by read- ing The Outsider, in the 'sixties by Room at the Top, and the 'seventies, with Marcuse. And, alas, the experience doesn't measure up to the desired fear.

Hell hath no fury like a paranoiac scorned. How maddening to find that the company isn't manipulating you into an Organisation Man. It wouldn't know how to do so if it wished.

And yet, as David Riesman found in his investigation into undergraduate attitudes, many bright American students decide that —like stoical virgins condemned to an un- attractive shot-gun wedding—their lives are doomed to an uncreative sentence with a large organisation. Pluralistic ignorance en- sures that they enact their predicted futures.

For here again we are in the land of myth—the Whyte-coloured glasses that make us see business as full of obedient organisa- tion men. The truth, at least in Britain, is different, as that business myth breaker, Ken Corfield, once pointed out to me. . Corfield's theory: that many British mana- gers are bubbling with entrepreneurship and will rush off and manufacture a vacuum cleaner on the side when the organisation is supposed to be producing boot brushes is, in my experience, nearer the truth than Whyte's romantic 'Organisation Man' myth. Napoleon is still right; Britain is a nation of actual and potential small businessmen. The problem is to convert some of them into managers.

Moreover, as the French sociologist Michel Crozier has shown, business organi- sations in the last century have moved from paternalistic, bureaucratic phenomena, in which the director could demand chastity, sobriety and church attendance of his workers, into relatively, liberal, 'open' affairs. And managers have become, accordingly, gentle. The Attilas and Bill Sikeses of in- dustry generally have more than a touch of the artist or politician about them. Or journalist for that matter. For when it comes to a brawl in a dark alley, let me take on a gentle chairman of ICI any time —and keep your thuggish newspaper prop- rietor, poet or politician,