Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall

2024-05-23

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/279812.Moral_Mazes
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/45mNHCMaZgsvfDXbw/quotes-from-moral-mazes
The difference is not technical skills. Control your image and make others comfortable.

• 30. Proper management of one’s external appearances simply signals to one’s peers and to one’s superiors that one is prepared to undertake other kinds of self-adaptation. Managers also stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to have the ability to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces.
• 32. [Style] is being able to talk easily and make presentations. To become credible easily and quickly. You can advance quickly even without technical experience if you have style. You get a lot of points for style.
• 34. More generally, there are several rules that apply here. First, no one in a line position—that is, with responsibility for profit and loss—who regularly “misses his numbers” will survive, let alone rise. Second, a person who always hits his numbers but who lacks some or all of the required social skills will not rise. Third, a person who sometimes misses his numbers but who has all the desirable social traits will rise.
• 41. Instead, success becomes contingent on others’ interpretations of one’s performance, leading to a break in the accepted moral economy between talent combined with effort and reward. This makes compulsive sociability an occupational virtue, as one attempts to discern and shape peers’ and superiors’ interpretations
• 51. If I tell someone what to do—like do A, B, or C—the inference and implication is that he will succeed in accomplishing the objective. Now, if he doesn’t succeed, that means that I have invested part of myself in his work and I lose any right I have to chew his ass out if he doesn’t succeed. If I tell you what to do, I can’t bawl you out if things don’t work. And this is why a lot of bosses don’t give explicit directions. They just give a statement of objectives, and then they can criticize subordinates who fail to make their goals.
• 53. One must remember, for instance, that in our litigious age the best rule in dealing with angry subordinates is to say nothing or as little as possible since whatever one says may be used against oneself and one’s organization.
• 54. Well, usually you don’t tell people the truth. I once knew a guy whom I knew was about to be fired and I asked if he had been told and he had never been told. I think you should tell people explicitly. Things like that shouldn’t have to be decoded. But you can understand how it happens. Suppose you have a guy and the consensus is that he isn’t promotable. You wouldn’t ever—or very seldom—tell him. He goes on to justify his silence: There are people who go through life thinking they can do a lot more than they really can do. And the reason is that losing or changing jobs is a very high stress situation and most people prefer to hang on to what they’ve got—to their routine. They’re not happy but they go through life like prisoners of war not recognizing their true situation.
• 60. Discreet suggestions, hints, and coded messages take the place of command; this, of course, places a premium on subordinates’ abilities to read correctly their bosses’ vaguely articulated or completely unstated wishes. One cannot even criticize one’s subordinates to one’s own superior without risking a negative evaluation of one’s own managerial judgment.
• 61. (Chart). Phrase / Probable Intended Meaning
      Exceptionally well qualified / Has committed no major blunders to date
      Tactful in dealing with superiors / Knows when to keep his mouth shut
      Quick thinking / Offers plausible excuses
      Meticulous attention to detail / A nitpicker
      Slightly below average / Stupid
      Unusually loyal / Wanted by no one else
      Indifferent to instruction / Knows more than one’s superior
      Strong adherence to principles / Stubborn
      Requires work-value attitudinal readjustment / Lazy and hardheaded
• 71. Now you see this at work with mistakes. You can make mistakes in the work you do and not suffer any consequences. For instance, I could negotiate a contract that might have a phrase that would trigger considerable harm to the company in the event of the occurrence of some set of circumstances. The chances are that no one would ever know. But if something did happen and the company got into trouble, and I had moved on from that job to another, it would never be traced to me. The problem would be that of the guy who presently has responsibility. And it would be his headache. There’s no tracking system in the corporation. Some managers argue that outrunning mistakes is the real meaning of “being on the fast track,” the real key to managerial success. The same lawyer continues: In fact, one way of looking at success patterns in the corporation is that the people who are in high positions have never been in one place long enough for their problems to catch up with them. They outrun their mistakes. That’s why to be successful in a business organization, you have to move quickly.
• 88. Striking, distinctive characteristics of any sort, in fact, are dangerous in the corporate world. One of the most damaging things, for instance, that can be said about a manager is that he is brilliant. This almost invariably signals a judgment that the person has publicly asserted his intelligence and is perceived as a threat to others. What good is a wizard who makes his colleagues and his customers uncomfortable?
• 89. Equally damaging is the judgment that a person cannot get along with others—he is “too pushy,” that is, he exhibits too much “persistence in getting to the right answers,” is “always asking why,” and does not know “when to back off.” Or he is “too abrasive,” or “too opinionated,” unable “to bend with the group.” Or he is a “wildman” or a “maverick,” that is, someone who is “outspoken.” Or he may be too aloof, too distant, “too professional.”
• 106. Team Play: One must appear to be interchangeable with other managers near one’s level. Corporations discourage narrow specialization more strongly as one goes higher. They also discourage the expression of moral or political qualms. Strong convictions of any sort are suspect.
• 107. Team play also means, as one manager in the chemical company puts it, “aligning oneself with the dominant ideology of the moment” or, as another says, “bowing to whichever god currently holds sway.” Such ideologies or gods may be thought of as official definitions of reality.
• 108. You can indict a person by saying that he’s not a team player. That doesn’t mean he won’t follow directions. It’s because he voices an objection, because he argues with you before doing something, especially if he’s right. That’s when we really get mad—when the other guy is right. If he’s wrong, we can be condescending and adopt the “you poor stupid bastard” tone…
• 109. A team player is a manager who does not “force his boss to go to the whip,” but, rather, amiably chooses the direction his boss points out. Managers who choose otherwise or who evince stubbornness are said to “have made a decision,” a phrase almost always used to describe a choice that will shorten a career.
• 110. Team players display a happy, upbeat, can-do approach to their work and to the organization.
• 111. Decision Making: A lot of people don’t want to make a commitment, at least publicly. They can’t make judgments. They stand around and wait for everybody else’s reaction. They rely on others, not because of inexperience, but because of fear of failure. They look up and look to others before they take any plunges.
• 112. The basic principles of decision making in this organization and probably any organization are: (1) avoid making any decision if at all possible; (2) if a decision has to be made, involve as many people as you can so that, if things go south, you’re able to point in as many directions as possible.
• 114. Making a decision, or standing by a decision once made, exposes carefully nurtured images of competence and know-how to the judgments of others, particularly of one’s superiors. As a result, many managers become extremely adept at sidestepping decisions altogether and shrugging off responsibility, all the while projecting an air of command, authority, and decisiveness, leaving those who actually do decide to carry the ball alone in the open field.
• 159. In short, bureaucracy creates for managers a Calvinist world without a Calvinist God, a world marked with the same profound anxiety that characterized the old Protestant ethic but one stripped of that ideology’s comforting illusions. Bureaucracy poses for managers an intricate set of moral mazes that are paradigmatic of the quandaries of public life in our social order. Within this framework, the puzzle for many individual managers becomes: How does one act in such a world and maintain a sense of personal integrity?

#book