Asylum for Cads

I just finished an excellent history book, King Leopold's Ghost. It's the story of how King Leopold II of Belgium "colonized" the Congo, under the fig leaf of Christian enlightenment. In fact, his reign of terror resulted in the enslavement, mutilation, and death of perhaps 10 million Congolese over 23 years.

I couldn't help reflect on this revolting enterprise of cruelty and greed - Joseph Conrad couldn't help it either; it inspired Heart of Darkness.

But what struck me is that Leopold was both head of state and the head of a vast, state monopoly. I began to consider the great scoundrels of history, and is it just coincidence that so many of them either were in Government or in Giant Corporations? Why are these institutions the natural asylum for cads?

I'm an Adam-Smith free enterpriser, so I totally believe in business - but small, growing business that fills a real need, not mammoth businesses that live on the wilted laurels of long-forgotten entrepreneurship or state support.

If you have a small, growing business, as I do, you care about the quality of your products, your reputation, and how well you serve your clients. You know your success depends on really making the world a better place, because that's the only reason anyone's going to pay for what you do.

But if you're in government, or in a Fortune 500 mafia (as I think such hierarchies are properly described), you care about doing the least possible work, getting away with the least expensive quality of service, and covering the tracks of your incompetent superiors so that they will feel it's too risky to sack you before you manage to crawl through a few decades of pure lassitude over the finish line of retirement to an alcohol-induced death.

Harsh? I wish, but my experience with major corporations has been exactly that. Here's the typical work pattern of management in a Fortune 500 company...

You spend Thursday frantically dashing off emails to schedule everything for next Tuesday, so you can take off all or most of Friday.

Monday you reserve for the weekly teleconference with your boss, which is designed to let his work group strategize how to put out the fires that broke out because nobody worked on Friday.

Tuesday you focus on sorting out what really must be done this week and what really could be put off until next Tuesday.

Wednesday is the only day you actually work. That's why it's called hump day. But it's usually spent in meetings with other managers, who join you in awfulizing about why nothing ever gets done.

The inevitable outcome of such meetings is a resolution that "Something should be done. Someone should appoint someone to figure out what should be done. And then someone should appoint someone to do it. Someday."

The real value of these meetings is that they assuage what might otherwise be the gnawing, collective guilt of the work group. It's comforting to see that nobody else is really doing anything to earn a paycheck, either. So it's OK.

Thursday, you're back to gathering up everything that didn't get done this week and scheduling to worry about it next Tuesday, since only a dupe would work tomorrow, because - thank God it's Friday!

What makes this grueling schedule even tougher is that you carry a Blackberry or pda everywhere to give the impression that you're "in the field" and "on top of it." Of course, emails in the field, just like emails from your desktop, are only designed to deflect problems to other people and disguise your actual lack of productivity.

The result of all this is that workaholics feel guilty and sluggards feel lucky; both relieve their symptoms by getting drunk or drugged, but nobody gets anything done.

I remember the Founder/Chairman of one of the Fortune 500s I worked for saying to a group, "If I could just get 20% more work out of the 200,000 people who work for me...imagine that!" I replied, "Yep. You'd have a 21% output!"

If you're a stupid, incompetent, lazy, adulterous, addict, you need hardly apply for work at a Fortune 500. They're overstocked. If you're looking for a stupid, incompetent, lazy, adulterous, addict, most Fortune 500s could start an agency.

If you're a talented, hard-working, moral, clean-living maverick, you're what Fortune 500 managers always say they're looking for, but in truth you're the last thing they want to find. All you'd do is make them look bad.

I was speaking to a fellow small-business owner a few weeks ago, who told me how, when he worked for a company that sold services to Fortune 500s, he and his sales team had to supply all sorts of favors - some lurid, some purely monetary, but all illicit - to secure sales contracts. After weeks of pitching a buyer, he'd ask, "What's it going to take for us to get some of your business?" And he'd get a straight answer, like, "I really like the new Mercedes," or "I'm a ladies man."

He said it was, back then, simply the way business was done. If you were an earnest young salesman pitching the features and benefits of your company to a VP of Purchasing who was driving a car leased for him by your rival or had a bevy of professional girl friends, compliments of the competition, you were just a naive joke.

"What I learned," said my friend, "is that in those big companies real talent never survives. All the low-lifes find and hire each other in an endless cycle. It's proof of how far a drunk can go."

And of course Government is infinitely worse. In Plato's Republic, Socrates observes that really capable people would never serve in Government unless prevailed upon, because capable people have so much going on in their lives that only the fear of worse people ruling the state would compel them to enter public service. And then they never would stay in politics for life; they would put their hands to the plow until they got some specific objectives done, and then they would return to the rewards of private life.

So we can say that a career politician, by definition, is someone who could accomplish nothing worthwhile in real life. Notice how few politicians retire voluntarily! And those who do make their livings giving speeches or being appointed to some pointless civic post or think tank by other politicians! How few of them open a business and gainfully employ others or create a useful product!

And the mainstream media - what are they but a mixture of what's worst about both Fortune 500 companies and Government? They are Fortune 500s, and they make their living packaging the junk that Fortune 500s and Government sell!

So when you think about it, if you draw a line around Government and major corporations, you draw a line around almost everything that's bad about our country and our culture.

Of course, not everything about Government and major corporations is bad. We don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But we should throw out the bathwater. Presumably, there's still a baby in there somewhere!

I hope that new generations of Americans will not squander their start-up capital in life getting useless college degrees so that some brainless robot in a Fortune 500 can put a check by their resume and hire them to waste whole lifetimes pushing paper in a cubicle and protecting the embarrassing idiocy of their bosses.

And I hope they won't go into politics or journalism, earnestly and forever opining about what should be done without ever lifting a finger to do it.

I hope they will dare to dream and come up with businesses of their own, so they will pay less taxes, support less Government, and give Fortune 500 companies a much-needed run for their money.

The spine and inspiration of America are her people and their faith and their dreams. These ordinary folk are her entrepreneurs, her patriots, her artists, and her heroes. The more of them we have, and the less we depend on Government and mega-corporations, the greater, richer, more giving, more creative, and freer we shall be.