When / how did the whole "Corporate America full of idiots" meme originate?

[pullin]

@leahcim

I blame (at least the more recent iteration of this) on two things:

[ol]
[li]In the 80s, the idea originated that there are management skills that are independent of the industry you are working in. E.g. at some level the work of a manager of a toilet paper company and that of a manager of an accounting firm have more in common with each other than they do with the work of either of their underlings. Hiring decisions for managers started to follow this logic and you ended up with a lot of managers who were completely inexperienced in the actual thing their company does. From the point of view of a peon, the boss was no longer someone who started where you are and worked his way up to where he is now, but someone with a completely separate career path.[/li][li]In the 90s a whole bunch of highly-skilled but low-level workers (basically computer people) entered the work force. Managers had no experience at all in the kind of work that was being done, and could not participate at all in the technical decision-making that is important to those lines of work.[/li][/ol]

I’d say this is the most likely explanation, along with us (drones) realizing a few things in that same era.

1. Management started trying to speak a clever, new language by taking a bunch of important sounding words and stringing them together. The upshot being they wanted us to think this actually meant something, and it was beyond our little worker-bee minds to comprehend. “Let’s leverage our synergies, going forward”. It became apparent to us it was total BS, and they were doing no more than following fads in the way that 12 year old girls dress like Hannah Montana.

2. After watching management replace each meaningless managerial fad with another, time after time over the last 25 years, I have noticed something interesting. Even though none of these clever ideas has lasted, management as a whole has never made a mistake. Ever. Not once in 25 years at many companies have I ever heard management admit it was wrong. Engineering makes mistakes. Accounting makes mistakes. Shipping makes mistakes. But management is either a) perfect down to the last wannabe BYE*, or b) terrified children pretending they know what they’re doing and frantically covering every failed idea with hand-waving and buzzwords. I’m pretty sure it’s option (b).

When I add these two together, I’m not left with picture of super-qualified geniuses running the company.

*Budding Young Executive

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@msmith537

Another possibility is that in the past several decades, technology has made the pace of business so much faster that it has become more obvious when people make bad decisions. And there are more decisions that need to be made more quickly. 40 years ago, when a VP wanted something done, he had to have his secretary type up a memo and circulate it to the group. Changes were slow to come and people had plenty of time to adjust to them. Now I get a hundred emails a day from my six boxess giving me conflicting demands.

I don’t know how you manage it. Even if you were a permanent hire at one of your clients’ companies it would be tough; I expect your role as a consultant requires you to be able weigh out all those conflicting instructions in short order and come up with the right decision.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@kunilou

It goes back long before that.

In the 1950’s there was a mindless, soulless boss in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and Al Capp’s merciless lampooning of business with General Bullmoose, J. Roaringham Fatback and J. Colossal McGenius.

Back in the 1930’s, in addition to TriPolar’s examples of the Marx Brothers and the Stooges, there was the incompetent Dagwood Bumstead and his petty tyrant boss J.C. Dithers (a storyline that has worked, unchanged, for 80 years!)

I’m sure I could find examples of buffoonish tycoons from the 1880’s if I looked long enough.

I loved TMITGFS and hope I get a chance to see the film adaptation someday.

I think it’s important to note that the buffoonish, soulless, or petty-tyrannical bosses of fiction and satire usually seem to be low- or mid-level managers. By contrast, top level managers and execs may even be characterized as benevolent dictators who display a caring, if paternalistic, attitude towards their workers. You’ll recall this was the case with regard to the network head in the novel, perhaps because he was going through family drama of his own. The heartless and soulless Ogden, by contrast, wouldn’t have known if his family was breaking up over his head.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Voyager

@msmith537

I think when you have a smarter, more technical workforce, it’s a lot easier to tell when your manager appears to do nothing besides try to report on and document work they don’t really understand.

What do you mean by understand? If you mean understand on a detailed level, I’d say a manager who does that is wasting his time and not really managing. If you mean at a high level either you have a really stupid manager (it happens) or you have workers unable to explain it. A good manager needs to trust his reports to do good coding, say, without him reading the code, even if he can.

Having worked mostly in IT myself, I have to wonder if working in a technical capacity makes it more difficult for the worker to understand how a good manager really does add value to the operation. Technical workers might also be more likely to recoil at the idea of moving up to management, themselves. All this may contribute to the “idiot manager” meme.

[astro]

The idiot boss/master and clever underling theme started with the “clever slave” comedies a few thousand years ago.

See Platus “the clever slave”

[Enkel]

Milton Berle (regularly made fun of bosses) from the dawn of TV in the US.
Dick Van Dyke Show (studio execs) ( '61 - '66 )
Bewitched (Daren’s Boss) ( '64 - '72 )

So corporate managers have been consistently as portrayed either stupid or money grubbing for as long as TV has been around in the US.

[msmith537]

@Voyager

What do you mean by understand? If you mean understand on a detailed level, I’d say a manager who does that is wasting his time and not really managing. If you mean at a high level either you have a really stupid manager (it happens) or you have workers unable to explain it. A good manager needs to trust his reports to do good coding, say, without him reading the code, even if he can.

I’ve had a lot of really bad managers.

IMHO, there are a number of components to management:
Business management - Understanding how your particular product or business unit works. IE managing the marketing department or the microwave oven division
Client management - Making sure your customers / primary stakeholder’s needs are met.
Project management - The ability to organize and execute on longer term project plans.
People management - Motivating your team and resolving interpersonal conflict.
Technical / operational management - Understanding how the systems, processes and technologies works.

In reality, it’s very hard for any manager to do all these well. That’s why they are often broken up into multiple roles. It becomes a problem when a manager doesn’t recognize areas where he is lacking and tries to hide or overcompensate.

[Voyager]

@pullin

1. Management started trying to speak a clever, new language by taking a bunch of important sounding words and stringing them together. The upshot being they wanted us to think this actually meant something, and it was beyond our little worker-bee minds to comprehend. “Let’s leverage our synergies, going forward”. It became apparent to us it was total BS, and they were doing no more than following fads in the way that 12 year old girls dress like Hannah Montana.

Used to be true, but a lot of top managers in IT companies invented the technologies or came up through the ranks.

2. After watching management replace each meaningless managerial fad with another, time after time over the last 25 years, I have noticed something interesting. Even though none of these clever ideas has lasted, management as a whole has never made a mistake. Ever. Not once in 25 years at many companies have I ever heard management admit it was wrong.

One of the best managers I ever had was a director who not only admitted he was wrong but came down to ground level to do it.

However, I’ve noted that when management gets into fads, it is because they have no clue about the direction of the company or their division. Where I am no, this is very clear, and we have not had to do one mission statement for as long as I’ve been here. Great relief. I actually accidentally introduced a fad at my old place. I got the best review and raise ever, since top management bought into it. But I observed how they didn’t really understand the subtleties of the concept, and immediately perverted it. So, I fell out of favor when I didn’t get behind their version of it.

[Voyager]

@msmith537

I’ve had a lot of really bad managers.
In reality, it’s very hard for any manager to do all these well. That’s why they are often broken up into multiple roles. It becomes a problem when a manager doesn’t recognize areas where he is lacking and tries to hide or overcompensate.

All these things take different skill sets. I’ve worked for companies way too big for any one person to do more than two of those, if that. Really high level guys set goals and general directions and delegate.

[msmith537]

@astorian

I think a LOT of this started in the mid-Seventies.

Prior to that, there were undoubtedly people who hated Big Business, but hardly any who thought the captains of the Fortune 500 were idiots who didn’t know what they were doing. When I was a kid, “MADE IN THE USA” was synonymous with quality, while “MADE IN JAPAN” meant “This is a cheap piece of junk.”

I tend to agree. I was just a little kid, but what I remember in the 70s was you had your typical workers vs management tensions, but big business was just a place where lots of people worked. You went to college because that led to better paying jobs in offices or even in management.

Then sometime around the early 80s, I feel like the idea of the “business superstar” came into being. That led to things like “fad” management, buzzwords, professional executives and so on. You know, basically hiring some really impressive outsider (like a Harvard MBA) to “shake things up”, who typically leaves before the pieces actually settle. Before that, I felt business was basically the fairly dry exercise of organizing people to profitably manufacture and sell some product.