The Decline of the Baronial C.E.O. - The New York Times
War is the great leveler. You’ve either taken that hill or held that city, or you have tragically and perhaps catastrophically lost it. There was no room for positioning, prevaricating or PowerPoint. A culture of leadership, borne of such proximate encounters with an unyielding reality, readily elevates only those who produce concrete and evident results.
The post-war boom throughout North America and Europe was the predictable consequence of applying such an approach to peacetime affairs. The military’s novel techniques for planning, logistics, contingency and human organization were mapped directly to the construction, transportation, insurance and capital allocation sectors. A leader of that era would be today what we (sometimes derisively) call a technocrat. Sure they had authority, but they were perceived by themselves as much as anyone as a member of the production line just with a different job to do, not filling the bottles of ketchup but making sure the tomatoes showed up on time, the warehouses had free space and the bank account had enough money to cover everyone’s paychecks. They were administrators, and when they wanted to do better by their companies and their communities they studied still newer techniques in programs we seem to forget are actually called Masters of Business Administration.
But broad prosperity brings with it a unique challenge: it undermines the ability to attain through wealth alone the esteem of one’s peers that certain individuals require. By the late 1970s it was no longer enough to be dutifully minding the books at an established firm in one’s community, one had to be seen to engage with some higher purpose. The job of actually running a company, keeping the lights on–the job of efficacy itself–was delegated to CFOs and COOs. The new badge of the resident of the corner office became what Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous leisure,” reading lists and corporate retreats filled with manufactured intellectualism and earnest discussions on business process re-engineering, organizational delayering, six-sigma, Total Efficiency, knowledge management, and enterprise framework architectures.
The Professional Manager had emerged, a beautifully dressed show horse unsmirched by genuine physical or mental labor. To this chameleonic being it did not matter what was to be managed, only that there be something to manage. To insulate these delicate high-browed poseurs, the corporate headquarters of giants like IBM and GE were constructed alongside the country clubs and golf courses at which their leaders might find repose, and always far from the sales meetings, software scrums, foreign factories and shipyard docks that made their companies worth buying from or worth owning in the first place.
Food companies were run by people who never cooked, toy companies by people who had never played with their children, record labels by people who never held an instrument, and car companies by people who are chauffeured, culminating in a consumer era remembered for its unimaginative food, iterative superhero movies and rickety vehicles exhibiting soporific designs that blanketed the nation in a thick smog of suburban banality that chokes us still.
Yet in seeking management for its own sake, the Professional Manager got it exactly backwards. As the companies they managed and the problems they faced became unique, consequential, complex and increasingly fascinating, it was the Professional Manager, that generic low-grade facsimile of a once rigorous and diligent leadership culture, who found that he had made only himself interchangeable. As customers and investors demand better, he is finding himself increasingly disposable as well.