Corporate Life: The Novel

While the Enron trial slogged along and GM started offering its employees money – not to work, but to exit the premises – I was snuggling up with a brand new novel about corporate America: Max Barry’s Company. Great literature it’s not, just wickedly mean, dead-on satire – something we could use a whole lot of more of these days.

The story begins with young Stephen Jones, fresh from business school, landing a job at Zephyr Holdings, a company whose mission statement reads, in its entirety:

Zephyr Holdings aims to build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.

Got that? Of course, you’ve probably read it, in one form or another, at least 100 times.

Not too long into his tenure, Jones determines to find out what exactly it is that Zephyr does. The other people at his level aren’t much help, most of them being thoroughly preoccupied with minuscule perks like their parking places, coat hooks, and access to the morning doughnut supply. As for senior management, they’re literally invisible, located on an inaccessible floor, and no one has ever seen the CEO. When Jones reveals his curiosity about just what Zephyr is up to, he’s repeatedly warned to shut up and get back to work – selling vague “training packages” to other departments in the same company.

While the mid-level employees engage in their sexual intrigues and bitter recriminations over the doughnut distribution, the senior managers entertain themselves by picking them off through endless and apparently arbitrary lay-offs. The CEO, whose voice occasionally booms out of the intercom system, refers to his employees as “headcounts,” and Jones’s immediate boss has been overheard saying, “I’m sacking reps who earn too much commission.” Everyone seems to accept their disposability, although:

There are stories – legends, really – of the “steady job.” Old-timers gather graduates around the flickering light of a computer monitor and tell stories of how the company used to be, back when a job was for life, not just for the business cycle. In those days, there were dinners for employees who racked up twenty-five years – don’t laugh, you, yes, twenty-five years! – of service.

But the young B-school graduates know that long-term employment is “so last century:”

The truly flexible company – and the textbooks don’t come right out and say it, but the graduates can tell that they want to – doesn’t employ people at all. This is the siren song of outsourcing. The seductiveness of the sub-contract. Just try out the words: no employees. Feels good, doesn’t it? Strong. Healthy. Supple. Oh yes, a company without employees would be a wondrous thing.

When Jones finally breaks into senior management’s top secret lair, he learns that Zephyr is a company that doesn’t want customers either. “Customers are vermin, Mr. Jones,” the CEO tells him, “They infect companies with disease.” This, he explains, is because a company:

…is a system … built to perform a relatively small set of actions over and over, as efficiently as possible. The enemy of systems is variation, and customers produce variation. They want special products. They have unique circumstances. They try to place orders with after-sales support and they direct complaints to sales.

The goal is not just an employee-free, but a customer-free, company, free to function without the vexing inefficiencies of human involvement. In Company, in other words, the corporation is an empty shell – though I will not spoil the book by revealing what sinister purpose Zephyr ultimately serves.

All this is pretty funny, until you reflect on the fact that, in real life, corporations aren’t just sheltered workshops for sadists and the underlings they torment. Corporations produce things that our lives and our economy depend on, right? Lacking time to sew my own clothes or travel around the country on horseback, I rely on The Gap and USAirways, and I do so in full faith that someone in those companies is thinking about something other than “headcounts” or doughnuts.

Or are they? Barry dedicates his book to Hewlett-Packard, where he once worked, and it’s HP that made my printer, which specializes in paper jams and strange, ghostly fonts of its own invention. HP is heading toward employee-free status by laying off 14,000 people this year, and all you have to do to is call customer service to find out how determined it is to achieve customer-free status too.

Comments

[Jason Gooljar]

Sounds interesting. But for some reason I have a block on reading fiction. I'm a voracious reader I average a book a week sometimes two, and they are mostly about politics and governmentbut I can't get into fiction. LOL.

[David, from Canada]

The sentiments expressed are both hilarious and terrifying. I worked for a small tech firm here in Canada just around the time of the "tech bubble". We were fed all kinds of mindless pap like that found in the apocryphal mission statement quoted in the novel. Ditto for my approx. 6-7 yr. sojourn in the "temp limbo" of the casual/contract 'employee' for my local provincial government. We must all look beyond the propaganda, pap and lies we are fed by mission statements, annual reports, advertising, press releases, job creation announcements...and - o yes - don't forget election campaigns. Bllody hell, there's too many examples to continue. Thank you, merci beaucoup Madame Ehrenreich. You speak truth to power.

[David, from Canada]

Addendum:
For an excellent fictional approach to corporate satire, please see the novel "KINGS OF INFINITE SPACE" by James Hynes. It's hilarious and skewers so many issues with a razor-honed satiric lance. I highly recommend it.

[Barbara E]

Any more suggested novels/movies about corporate life?

[Ted]

David: "Thank you, merci beaucoup Madame Ehrenreich. You speak truth to power."

But cf:

Chomsky on ’speaking truth to power’ from the book ‘Power and Terror’: “First of all, power already knows the truth. They don’t need to hear it from us. Secondly, it’s a waste of time. Furthermore, it’s the wrong audience. You have to speak truth to the people who will dismantle and overthrow and contain power.”

This is especially true in the US where the corporate propaganda has been so massive for so long that, to many Americans, it is now just seen as common sense, what is supposedly obvious. See some comments on this site for example - where some assume that it's just obvious the French are wrong. The French have been attacked in the US media - which usually ignores other countries unless the US is invading them.

William Pfaff (worth quoting again) is almost a lone voice in providing an alternative view for a mass audience(those in power know what a threat the French example is):

"Actually, French youth unemployment is not what it is usually made out to be, since free baccalaureate- and university-level education keeps young people out of the job market much longer than in most countries. As a result, as The Financial Times reported last weekend, the official figures are misleading. The newspaper calculates that 7.8 percent of French under-25s are actually out of work, as compared with 7.4 percent in Britain and 6.5 percent in Germany.

Similarly, it seems to me that the current unrest in France signals wider popular resistance in Europe to the most important element in the new model of market economics, its undermining of the place of the employee in the corporate order, deliberately rendering the life of the employee precarious.

The model's principal characteristic in the United States has been the transfer of wealth to stockholders and managers, and away from public interests (by tax cuts) and employees (through wage-depression and elimination of employee benefits).

In this perspective, what in France seems to be a sterile defense of an obsolete social and economic order might be interpreted as a premonitory appeal for a new but humane model to replace it. It could be Europe's opportunity.

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/03/22/news/edpfaff.php

[Ted]

Barabara: "Any more suggested novels/movies about corporate life?"

Obviously there's "Wall Street", and for Jason, who prefers non-fiction, if he hasn't already seen/read it, there's the film/DVD/book "The Corporation":

'"From the point of view of the corporation," adds philosopher Mark Kingwell, "the ideal citizen is a kind of insanely rapacious consumer," driven by a "kind of psychopathic version of self-interest." A century and a half after its birt, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in ITS image.' p. 135

[superdestroyer]

Your nostalgia for “life-time” employment would be much stronger if you backed it up with some data. Exactly how many graduates of college in 1950 had just one employer until they retired? My guess is that it was much lower than you imply.

[MrPiskie]

This thread seems kind of dead, but I'd feel amiss in my duties if I didn't mention Bentley Little, who has made a cottage industry out of writing novels that satirize various institutions, especially corporate life. His books tend to be bizarre, surreal, and Kafkaesque, although read back to back they can get a bit repetitive. Probably the best dealing with topics relating to this site are "The Ignored", about a man who gets a job at a large corporation only to find that people pay less and less attention to him until he is almost literally invisible, and "The Store", which is about a thinly disguised Wal-Mart parody that opens a store in a small town, ruins the competition, subjects employees to hellish conditions, and compromises the scruples of customers.

As a word of warning, though, I should mention that these are horror novels and contain scenes of graphic violence and weird sex, and therefore may not be for the easily offended or those who consider the horror genre an intellectual ghetto. Nonetheless, everyone I know who’s read a book by Bentley Little swears by it. (Does that say more about the books or the people I know?)

[AF]

I happen to be about half-way through The Company.

"Any more suggested novels/movies about corporate life?"
1. Well you MUST see that 1990s hilarious cult classic "Office Space".
2. And for a Japanese slant, someone just recommended "A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer." Its pretty short, too.

[Thom Quinn]

I also suggest this sleeper movie about corporate life in Canada: Waydowntown.