Tom Brown Author,  "The Anatomy of Fire" Principal, "Management General"

Bowen:     Is there anger in the workplace today and, if so, why?

Brown:     I think you'd have to call it that. You know, Henry David Thoreau, in the 19th century used to talk about people living lives of quiet desperation. Well, when you think about all the Dilbert comic strips that are around in the world, you look at the type of humor that he's moving to each day, it's, it's increasingly invective. It's invective about what's wrong in the workplace and why Dilbert has to deal with such idiocy. When you look at the fact that a column that I wrote, called "Sweat Shop of the '90s," got more response than just about all the other columns I've done combine. Look at the fact that a University of Southern California professor would actually go on the front page of a section of the Los Angeles Times and he would say that there's a demoralizing sense of powerlessness in jobholders today, that the workers are worried and that it's exactly the kind of thing that will not promote the kind of problem-solving that contemporary business requires. He even went so far as to say that a period of social unrest, unequaled in this century, with public expressions of rage and fear will be happening. Then it's no surprise that, that I get E-mails such as the one I got just yesterday that, from a person in California who produces motivational videos for the business world and her comment was that organizational life is feeling pretty bankrupt these days. Well, I'd say if we started with Thoreau talking about lives of quiet desperation, what we've got going into the 21st century are lives of very loud desperation that's coming out as anger.

Bowen:    But why?

Brown:     Well, I think, first, we thought those of us who are looking at the workplace and writing about it, making comments on it, I think first we thought it was going to be work conditions. We focused on quality of work life issues, lighting and ergonomics, the kind of chairs that people sit in. Well, you know, today, I think most folks are working in conditions that are pretty comfortable.

Then, we thought it was maybe ownership, and so we set up employee stock option plans. And Robert Samuelson was writing a cover story for Newsweek Magazine recently talking about we're a nation of stock junkies because so many people at work own some stake in their company or own mutual funds and, therefore, own a stake in a lot of companies. So, that plainly isn't it.

I think we also thought, maybe for a while, that it was participation. If we could just ask people and we set up quality circles. We had attitude surveys. We had total employee involvement. We did all those types of things and you still have this seething anger going on.

I think the last big movement that we saw was vision statements. I mean, every single company, you could go to gas stations and you'd see vision statements hanging on the wall. And what's curious about that is, you know, again, that it's one thing to have a vision statement. It's another thing to live the vision and apparently, that isn't happening for people who own companies or people that, who work in them as well.

So, I would say, out of all of this, my own particular take is I think the anger is coming from what I would call inversia. The larger and more successful an organization becomes, the less any one human being within that organization feels as a consequence. And so, revenues really start to soar for the company but people get more and more sour. Production really swells, I mean, there's all kinds of productivity marks being made. But, the pride, the individual pride in what people are doing shrinks. The profits are skyrocketing but the spirit and the soul of the workplace is really going down. So, it's really an inverted situation.

Bowen:    But, Tom, as you mentioned, profits are up, stocks are up, with all of the positive economic news, how can anybody take this inversia phenomenon seriously?

Brown:     Well, again, I'm of the school that making money and having a great life, or making money and being a great corporation, or making money and being, having a great economy and being a great nation are not, necessarily, one and the same. And, if you go back to as far as you want on the planet's history, anything that has been invented or tried as a creation, as a building, as a process, as a structure, any of that is really the human being, some human being some place, reaching out and saying, "Hey, I'm alive. I know how to make things better. Follow me." I mean, really, it's a form of leadership.

Bowen:    But, Tom, for the CEO who's making all of the bucks, who's getting all of the accolades from Wall Street, how is it possible for that individual to really find this believable?

Brown:     Well, because I think that the next step after inversia is implosion, is melt-down. I think we're starting to see it already. When I see, looking around my neighborhood, my city, as I travel to other cities, as I travel to other countries, society, I think, is rapidly becoming one where we see a lot of folks are into just consuming things. I mean, there is no rational reason, in my mind, why stores should be open 24 hours, maybe some stores, but increasingly all kinds of stores are open 24 hours. And, of course, I don't have any grudge against people buying things in the middle of the night. But, I'm just saying that if your life is just one of consumption, of consuming material items, then when do you get to express yourself in terms of what you're going to do with your life?

I see a lot of folks who were into really substituting. I find this fascination with, whether it's Bill Gates or anyone else, someone else's life who's doing terrific things and expressing themselves through enterprise, but I, myself, can't do it so I'll have to read about it. And I'll just have this, pet fascination in looking at other folks, sort of peering over the backyard wall.

I find a lot of folks who are really kind of living vicariously. It strikes me that a lot the, shall we call B and C and D grade movies and songs, etc., could, in my judgment, be just kind of vicarious thrills, cheap thrills to replace the real thrill of doing something with your life that's meaningful and making a contribution to society.

And I guess there's only one other alternative, and I guess if I were a CEO of a company, sensing that this were happening where I work, I guess I'd be most fearful of the fourth thing that could happen here if unattended, unaddressed, and that is ventilating. Because I think there's a very, very thin line between a worker having a grievance, to a worker moving toward anger, to a worker moving toward rage, to a worker moving toward violence and we have seen all levels of activity. But, increasingly, more and more activities, I think, in the rage and violence to untolerable levels. So, Mr. or Madame CEO, pay attention.

Bowen:    You mentioned implosion, what, describe that. What does that look like?

Brown:     Well, I think implosion looks like any type of meaningless, low-morale, don't really care, no attention to quality, no dedication to service, no drive, no spirit, no fire is the term that I use. I mean, the reason I came up with the anatomy of fire is, it has really struck me how few people I've been able to meet really seem to be driven and possessed by what they do. And I must tell you that, you know, I have seen this in board room situations with chief executives who seem blas® about what they're doing and they're in the "leadership spot." Whereas, on the other hand, you can find someone in a town like Anderson, Indiana who makes muffins and cakes for a living but really is driven by it and really has this fire that she's doing something for people that's going to help them.

You know, to me, implosion is the complete absence of fire. And however you would see that, and I think we see it every day as customers. I think we see it every day as employees and as workers, as we look at our peers and fellows and we look at the so-called leadership ranks in organizations. I think there's a lot of place-holding going on. People holding their place in life and people holding the place of where the company fundamentally is and not trying to move it into the future.

Bowen:    So, how do we get the spirit of enterprise today?

Brown:     Well, again, I think it really comes down to some pretty simple strokes. You know, any time you talk about values in an organization, or a vision in an organization, it, there's always the big V, the one that's hanging on the wall, the big V, vision and values. And then there's the little V, the value system.

And, again, I believe that if you start looking at examples of leadership. Whether it's New York or whether it's London, England or whether it's Tokyo or whether it's Jakarta, I think we, again, have to give people not answers, but stimulate people to start addressing problems and questions. And give them the task and do it on a wholesale basis. There's so many things that need to be done it seems to me, not just inside companies, but in the world as a whole.

I think you've got to let people shine, let their humanity come through. Well, you know, what is it that they want to do with their life? You know, let their work really be their tombstone upon retirement and upon death, not, you know, not some kind of rock, you know, on a grave. I think we've got to try to start building courses and thinking in creativity, way beyond the kind of courses we've been doing now. But give folks the chance to kind of open up and let their humanity come through.

Again, I think we've got to try to allow people to start facing challenges just like over the course of history have always existed for those who have really made a mark in terms of trying to express their humanness through their work. You know, it was not easy for Leonardo DeVinci and it wasn't easy, I suppose, for anyone of less talent, you know, to try to do all of the things that have been done over time.

But the kind of Charlie Chaplin world that we see right now, and I would challenge you to go ahead and get the 1930-some tape of "Modern Times" where Charlie Chaplin, 60, 70 years ago, showed himself, or that is The Tramp, his famous character, working in a factory, doing work that essentially was meaningless to him, had no element of discovery. He was not enthusiastic about what he was doing. There was no challenge there for him to be resourceful. He never had to bounce back. He was just a cog in a machine and he wasn't making any contribution and, on top of that, he had an over-inflated bureaucratic top of the organization watching him through cameras. I mean, this was his nightmare, Charlie Chaplin's nightmare in 1936, 37. Well, what are we living today in 1998, 1999? I refuse to believe that that is going to be the model for the 21st century organization and God help us if we let it be.

Bowen:    Given the world of self-directed work teams and teamwork, and those more contemporary management constructs, how would a Charlie Chaplin view that today?

Brown:     Well, I don't know that there's any difference in The Tramp working by himself, doing meaningless work, and a committee of people pulling together to do meaningless work. I don't think there's any fundamental difference Charlie Chaplin being paid an hourly wage and Charlie Chaplin on an employee stock option plan, you know, being paid through stocks or funds, mutual funds, and getting richer. I mean, The Tramp, with voice mail and a mutual fund, is still The Tramp. And what's amazing to me, again, is to be able to show that video to just about anyone in any workplace and get a vigorous discussion going about what's wrong with work here, today, right now. That's a film from 1936. So, you know, even though it's a clich® when you say, "What's wrong with this picture..." show modern times and talk about it, that's what's wrong with the picture.

Bowen:    So, for the CEO who wants to make a difference, are you suggesting that self-directed work teams and teamwork and employee stock option plans, stock ownership plans, need to be thrown out or is there some way to ignite the fire, if you will, within these designs?

Brown:     Well, you know what's interesting is, we often position this challenge as something for the CEO. And having met and worked with people at all levels, from CEOs to secretaries, to people on the shop floor, to part-time maintenance workers, you know, what's interesting to me is sometimes, the anger. The most natural anger that you find is that anger because the CEO has just cashed in stock options and has made a bonus of $500,000,000, which, by the way, is based on truth. I mean, that's a true situation and it's not just a unique situation.

Well, you can get angry about something like that and you can start to point a finger at the CEOs chest and I think you should. But you know, I think a lot of the anger, in some ways, is positioned right back with fingers pointing at our own chest. Because, if you've allowed your life to get to be a point where you no longer are discovering and searching for new things, new ways, new ideas, you know, not just, you know, talk, change your calendar to the 21st century, become part of the 21st century. If you've allowed your life to just become routine and machinelike, if you've allowed your life to be one where you don't have to go out and be resourceful and you don't have to really scrounge and scramble, and if you've allowed your life to be such that all you're doing is taking money in and spending it on needless things and not making a contribution to society, well then who really should you be angry at?

And I suspect some of the rage today is self-inflected rage and it's self, really, assessed rage where people are saying, "What am I doing with my life?" And I think we're going to see a turn, my prayer, is that we're going to see a turn, not just by the limited few who hold the title of CEO, but by a broad scope of society. Because, I think that's what it's going to take to move us... You know, I'd love to see a world where Dilbert wouldn't be funny. And I think Scott Adams, who does that strip, deep down, would like to see the same thing as well.

Bowen:    So, what do you think we have to do to get the spirit of enterprise back in organizations?

Brown:     Well, I think, obviously, I think programs like this are contributing and I think there's a lot of comments about it, there's more discussions about it. But I suppose, maybe, there's four major points that, as a society or as a world, we maybe need to look at. First off, this anger in the workplace is symptomatic of larger conditions. Just the United States, as rich and as fruitful and as profitable and as terrific as the country is, you know, what does it say when we have four out of ten people who don't even have basic health insurance? Now, I don't know what the solution is, but I'm not sure that we've all given our best stab at trying to find out exactly how do we really address that problem. And so, one of the things, I think, we've got to do is put some urgency back into the situation. And realize that for every one person who's cashing in $500,000,000 in stock options, there's a lot of people who are trying to find out, "How do I get enough money for milk or bread?" And that, still, is the situation today.

I think the second thing is, we've got to start, seriously, asking people what do they aspire to do with their life. Because, if in fact, we've accepted a Charlie Chaplin Tramp scenario where all work and all workers are meaningless, then we're going backwards in terms of management, not forwards.

The third thing, I think, we've got to do is look at words like spirit and soul. And, as much as those sound like very soft, spongy words, all of us know how profound things are, when you are really tapping into a moment, when you are seeing yourself as a human being alive, making a difference in the world. And I think that's what spirit and soul is about. But it's so absent from the workplace.

And I think the last thing we need to do is, fundamentally, take that finger, instead of pointing it at someone else, point it at our own chest and say, "Fundamentally, what's my purpose? Why am I here? What am I working for? What am I trying to do?" And again, if it's to buy, you know, the next generation of VCRs, you know, if that's it, for a person's life, well all we can do is push back and challenge and say as Carter. But I suspect there's a lot of folks out there that, if given the chance to define their purpose in life, would come up with some terrific things that could help them, their companies, their organizations, and their communities. And that's the kind of world I think we ought to be pushing for in the 21st century.

Bowen:    It sounds, though, that much of your response is predicated on the notion that people are going to still have jobs in the workplace. I can't help but focus on the 2.2 million who have lost jobs between 1990 and '95 and the many more who seem to be continuing the trend as we go beyond that. What message to those who have been displaced, disenfranchised, if you will, out of the workplace?

Brown:     There's no question that for anyone listening right now, who's unemployed, that that's a tough spot to be in. My message is, it could be the best spot to be in. This could be the moment when you are most, in a most urgent situation, when you have to really check, what is it that you aspire to do because you don't have the routine job to go back to. It may be a moment where you can really put to your test what exactly is your own spirit and the condition of your own soul in terms of what you're trying to do in life. And, of course, fundamentally, it says, what is your purpose? You know, what is it that you can do well and what is it that you can bring to society that it needs? And I'm not saying that that's something that's going to be solved in one night or one week.

But I'm saying that people who are rigorously examine that, will find, I believe, a world where there's many, many more needs than we have capabilities and skills to fill them in right now. And I'm not talking about just getting another job, I'm talking about building a better life and building a better society at the same time.

And, if the conduit for that is going back into a corporation and building a better corporation, then so be it. If that's going to a nonprofit organization, then so be it. But I think we have, the evidence seems to me in the 1990s, especially in the United States where so much money has been earned by so many, that that plainly is not the answer. That has not bought happiness, that has not bought a better society. I don't know that people feel safer or necessarily healthier or necessarily more adjusted. And if they do, then why are we seeing such levels of rage and violence and anger by those who are employed, not by the unemployed?

Bowen:    Tom, companies exist to make products and to make profits, they're not emotional daycare centers. To what extent is this picture that you've painted realistic?

Brown:     The whole concept of democratic private enterprise is really put together, fundamentally, on people forming organizations, whether they're corporate or not, providing goods and services at a fair price that generates, not just the cost of doing business, but some profit beyond that. If you really get to the route of that model, then why do those organizations exist? Is it just to provide that profit? See, I think that's what's happened in the 1990s and the late 1980s. We've reconfigured that definition of what private enterprise is all about, and I'd say, even public enterprise, to wrench it to the point where what you've got is the extraction of great wealth or great power for the few coming out. And we've lost the fundamental driver that was true at the start. Go back to the 1400s, 1500s, to the very birth of a corporation, and it was to provide goods and services to fill social needs. And so, consequently, if we have organizations that have become absolutely tiptop at making a profit, but they haven't become tiptop at providing goods and services to fill needs, then what happens as society changes and as society grows and we don't have those products and services to fill those new needs?

If you want to put it in computer terms, what happens when we're trying to run a 1999 world and we're using a 1984 computer? Doesn't work. Well, I would say the same thing is true if what we're trying to do is take a 1980s and 1990s corporation that has become excellent at primarily doing one thing, generating profit, and now, address the tremendous needs we have as a society and as a planet in the 21st century. And the list is endless in terms of what problems we're trying to address.

And again, I think a lot of the rage and anger in the workplace today has to do with people who are cut off from really making a difference, from really making a contribution, and they certainly aren't seeing it, by and large, at the top of their organizational world. And so what we've got is a situation that is just an endless loop of making money and spending money but where's the better society, where's the better human beings, where's the better life? I believe that that's just as important as the profit stream coming out of a corporation. And I think, bit by bit, we're starting to see that. I'm really quite optimistic.

Bowen:     We hear a lot about displaced workers becoming consultants, we hear a lot about people needing to become free agents, and it sounds good on the surface but doesn't that have inherent problems?

Brown:     I don't know that it has any more inherent problems than people being locked in a routine job that has become drone-like and, personally, meaningless, and lacking a sense of the fire of discovery.

In a way, go back, not just 10 years or 20 years, go back 100 years, 200 years. Go back when vast parts of the United States were unpaved, go back to a time when there were more trees than buildings, go back to a time when rivers, etc., were unpolluted. I don't deny that there were people at that moment who looked at all of that potential out there in the world and said, "Let's go make some money." But what do we really know occurred in terms of a society at the time? They talked about things like manifest destiny. Well, where's the manifest destiny for our corporations today? Where's the manifest destiny for our cities today? What's the manifest destiny of the United States today? You see, whether you're talking about a society, a civilization, or corporation, or a family unit, I think the dynamics are the same.

And so, what I would say is it was that willingness to go out and see what society needed and how can we express ourselves as human beings, that created the kind of things that we all study in school, but those countless other points of enterprise where human beings express themselves through their work and made a better planet because of it. That is so far now from the corporate model and from the organizational model that we haven't just lost something, I think we've lost everything.

Bowen:    You know, I can't help but think that there were a lot of people who were employed doing drudge work. I can't image that they had the feelings of building a better life for themselves or a better world in a real sense. So, I'm not quite sure that we've been responsive to the notion of free agent.

Brown:     Brayton, absolutely. A lot of folks were doing drudge work in the 19th century. Well, we've had the 20th century to make progress on that. We're going, shortly, into the 21st century. What do we get when we do attitude surveys? "Hey, I do drudge work." Again, very little difference between Charlie Chaplin's film in 1936 and where we are today in 1998. There's a big problem with that.

And so, consequently, even though you hear stories about the cathedrals being built in the middle ages and you could find one person when asked what they are doing, they're saying, well, they're moving a brick. It's a classic tale. "I'm moving a brick from here to there." You ask another worker, "What are you doing?" "Well, I'm helping to build a wall." You ask another worker, "What are you doing?" They say, "I am trying to build the greatest cathedral on earth." Well, that's an old story that goes back a long time.

My point is, we've had hundreds of years since the building of those cathedrals to move human enterprise, meaningful work, into the new frontiers of the 21st century. I don't think anyone feels we're ready to go at this point. And that's why we need to talk about this.

Bowen:    Tom, in the midst of this, I have this picture that we're creating an economy here in the United States of the free agent and it's almost as if we're creating a workforce, again, of migrant workers. We're telling people, "Go out there, get incorporated for yourself, build your own corporation..." and in the midst of this, what's happened to loyalty, what's happened to the notion of community spirit, company pride? Everybody's in business for themselves. It's almost as if we're returning to the era of the rugged individualist.

Brown:     Well, I think that, you know, that's definitely the downside of free agency if it's taken to its extreme. But I'm not as worried about that as you seem to be. And the reason for that is that I think that the rugged individualist may have been a good mode at its time. I mean, we needed a Daniel Boone to kind of cross through the wilderness by himself. At that moment in history, that would have been a good mode and we needed as many Daniel Boones as we could. And there were many Daniel Boones besides the ones we read about.

But a rugged individualist, or a single or a solo free agent, is not in my judgment, you know, going to work in the 21st century. Instead, what's going to work is if you start focusing on the needs of society, that what we've really got is a multi-agent world. The question is, you know, do all those people have to be employed in jobs inside large corporations? Well, large corporations have said no because by removing head count, they can generate more profits. But society is not going to take that as an answer. Society is going to say, "We need this to be done." And increasingly, in the 21st century, those are going to be needs that can only be filled by people pulling together.

And so, when you read about it, the next time you read about, Brayton, strategic alliances or you read about partnerships. I mean a lot of those are happening with small s and small a and small p being written to them because they're free agents, individual free agents teaming up with other free agents, pulling together, to do something that, jointly, they feel is meaningful and profitable, not just for themselves but for the community that they're part of. So, all and all, I'm optimistic.