The programmer’s skills are those of the hunter-gatherer and achieve maximum realization in process and the Zen moment. Psychologists call this highly alert state the 'seek mode,' and consider it the highest level of human awareness. Programmers have their own term for this productive trance: they call it flow—a supernatural cognitive event of such intense concentration that time itself seems to stand still. You are never more alive than at the moment of discovery, when disparate elements converge in a flash of intuition. Programming combines the Apollonian virtues with the Dionysian, the rigor of the scientist with the rapture of the visionary. Above all, it is an adventure of the mind: if Ulysses were alive today, he would probably be a programmer. After emerging from the trance-like state of flow, and the glow has faded from the the creative process, you survey your work, and you are amazed by its complexity, elegance and power, and you wonder how you could have wrought such a thing of beauty.

In so saying, I have only begun to describe the joys of programming. What, then, possessed me to strike my tent in the prime of life and trade gainful employment in my chosen occupation for the professional oblivion and financial insecurity of early retirement? It's time to introduce you to a few of my bosses.

 Bosses From Hell

My first job was teaching high school English, so I suppose technically my bosses were the parents of the kids. But I rarely saw them. They were like absentee landlords. It was the Age of Aquarius when the overworked mothers and fathers of two-income families abandoned parenting and left a generation of daycare orphans and latchkey kids on the doorstep of the educational system. 'Mentoring' became a familiar buzz word. A mentor was a teacher who also served as a surrogate parent. Many teachers embraced this duel role; it exempted them (and student) from the more strenuous discipline of education. In effect, secondary education became an extension of social services, excelling in baby-sitting and classroom control, at the expense of course content. It was a small comfort to know I wasn't the only one shocked by this development: in 1983 a bipartisan group of governors—the Governors' Commission on Excellence—said that the American education system was in such bad shape that if a foreign power imposed such a system upon us, we would consider it an act of war. Until parents resume the majesty parenting, and teachers are allowed teach again, education in American will remain a bad joke. Over half of the college graduates who choose teaching as a career burn out after two years and turn to other professions. Disillusioned with 'youth culture,' I joined the exodus of teachers and began to look for other work.

Wondrous things were happening in the business world, where a newfangled office machine called the personal computer was quickly gaining acceptance. At first PC technology seemed too good to be true: you could actually type and edit text displayed on a cathode ray tube, save it to a floppy disk, and output it to a printer. I still remember my amazement as I saw glowing letters shift magically across a green phosphorous screen. And this was only the beginning: the new digital technology, so protean and fertile in application, was to effect a sea change at every level of American society. Computer science was in its infancy, at about the same stage that astronomy was in the time of Kepler—which meant it was still possible for a liberal arts major to get a piece of the action.

I decided to take time off to master the arcana of computer programming. At first glance this might seem something of a gamble. After all, there was no guarantee I would pan out as a programmer, or that there would be a job waiting for me if I did. But the alternative, slow death by paper cuts in some back office job, was so disheartening, the risk seemed trivial. So I began to tutor myself in the mysteries of machine language, microprocessor design and programming logic. Since it was a young science, instructional materials were scarce to nonexistent. The best programmers weren't teaching in academe, they were writing code in their garages. The only available college texts were written by clueless pedagogues who did more to obfuscate than to illuminate the subject (justifiably fearful that if they made the material comprehensible, their own students would find out how little they knew). Teaching badly out of badly written textbooks is still a revered practice in academe, and these vampires still haunt university classrooms today, sucking the blood out of exciting subjects until they are bled white.

Then I discovered one of the great classics of the computer age: The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. Designers of an elegant and powerful computer language should be the last persons to describe it in comprehensible English. But Kernighan and Ritchie had done just that: their handbook was a masterpiece of brevity and exposition, and the popularity of their language probably owes as much to this marvelous book as to the language itself. I assimilated this slim volume with remarkable ease; C programming is an exacting discipline, but child's play compared to works in mathematical logic I had read in college. The two fields are, incidentally, closely related: in The Principles of Mathematics, and later in his monumental work, Principia Mathetmatica, Bertrand Russell proved that the whole of mathematics could be deduced from five Boolean operators (AND, OR, NAND, EXCLUSIVE OR, NOR) thus laying the foundation for transistorized logic gates and modern programming theory.

 Programming In The Real World

Nothing is more exhilarating than your first job in your chosen profession. You will never feel that heady mix of wonder, glamour and adventure again. This is especially true if your first job is with the programming department of a prestigious city magazine. I could hardly believe my good fortune: I had put the wrenching boredom of office work behind me forever! My chief duty in the department was maintenance of the magazine's accounting system. The accounting program was the brainchild of the Chief Information Officer who had installed it two years before. One morning, early in my orientation period, he asked me to make some minor changes to the accounts receivable module. I inserted the new code, but was puzzled, because it involved no change in functionality. Then that afternoon, before leaving town on a business trip, the CIO complimented me for the outstanding work I had done on accounts receivable module at a meeting of the entire staff.

Someone with more situational awareness would have smelled a rat, but I only assumed this was the CIO's way of making a new employee feel welcome. The next morning, October 1st, the first day of the fourth quarter, I got a blast from the assistant data processing officer. He said the A/R module I worked on the day before had gone haywire and was assessing astronomical penalty fees to the magazine's advertising clients. I explained that the changes I had made to the code could not have affected billing. He told me to drop everything and devote all my time to fixing the bug. I was baffled; I had no idea what could be causing such an error. Then during a conversation on my lunch break with an old hand in the accounting department, she mentioned in passing that the same problem had arisen the year before in the fourth quarter; it was an incident she remembered well, because the accounts receivable department had been asked to stay late and bill all the customers manually.

This explained why the CIO had left town—to escape the wrath of the chief accountant and the publisher. It also explained why he had gone to such lengths to associate me with the problematic module. Where there's high turnover, institutional memory is short: the last person to work on the A/R module would be blamed. I solved the problem that afternoon. The fix turned out to be obvious (bugs are always obvious after you find them) and was similar to the millennium 2000 bug: while the first three financial quarters use single digit months, all fourth quarter months have two digits, and the CIO had formatted the month field for only one digit. So the program worked fine until the fourth quarter, when a receivables aging of (say) 12/01/85 would be truncated to 2/01/85 and an advertising client would be assessed late penalty fees for ten additional months and the account declared delinquent. Obviously an accounting system that works only three out of four quarters is unsatisfactory, but why I should take the blame for this eluded me.

When the CIO sauntered into my cubicle the next morning I braced myself for the worst.

"I'm glad you fixed that bug you put into the accounting program," he said. You could actually hear the italics in his voice.

I replied that I couldn't possibly have put the bug in the accounting program. "The same error occurs in the date routine of 25 other program modules."

He glared at me for a half second, and I glared back. It never occurred to me to take a bullet for the boss: I was taught to admit my mistakes and expected the same of others. A department head is paid to accept responsibility, to take the hit. That's why he gets to drive the Mercedes. Our relations grew noticeably cooler after this and I sensed that my days at the magazine were numbered. My employer no longer complimented my work at staff meetings, but heaped generous praise a new hire. I was always amused by these love-fests between my co-worker and the CIO, for I knew something he did not: that whenever my colleague was stumped, which was often, he would come to me for help. The algorithms the boss was praising were my own.

I Try Teaching (Again)

I decided to try my hand at teaching again. There was an opening at the local technical college for a programming instructor, and presumably adult students would be more committed to learning than high school kids (this proved to be wildly optimistic). I never really knew who my boss was at the college, because everyone there, with the possible exception of the janitor, treated me as a subordinate. There was a general contempt for teachers at the college that percolated down from management. The Director and Assistant Director were ex-hotel managers, and I believe they thought of the teachers as service staff, like bellhops and room maids, and the students, with their generous Pell Grants and government loans, as paying hotel guests. The Assistant Director was an unprincipled egomaniac and insecure bully who insisted on being called 'Provost.' If there were a casting call for Heinrich Himmler, he would have been hired on the spot. He was in his element at faculty meetings when he was berating the teaching staff, educated men and women, for minor infractions in the dress code and deportment.

Riding herd on both the teachers and the students was the office staff—illiterate file clerks and secretaries, many of them high school dropouts. The lowliest clerks in the administrative office (one was an ex-student of mine) made more money than I did. Every Friday these file clerks and secretaries would meet in what the Director called his 'Executive Council' to evaluate the performance of the teachers. Because I had the highest student ratings in the college, they rarely bothered me; but my popularity brought me the unwelcome attention of the 'Provost,' who apparently viewed me as a threat of some kind, for I learned that he was conducting interviews with my students, and that it wasn’t to vet me for a teaching award.

The only way to advance in the organization was to become a department head. The college had grown quickly and there were several new campuses. A position opened for programming department head and I applied, thinking my teaching background, programming expertise and favorable student reports would be a significant plus. But as I began to describe my programming experience in an interview with the personnel director, I was struck dumb by the sudden realization that she hadn't the slightest idea what I was talking about; in fact, she could barely operate a computer. Apparently she was one of those 'generalists' who based their decisions on 'gut-feeling.' My fears were confirmed when she hired a glib con artist with suspect qualifications. How, I wondered, could a computer-illiterate personnel director evaluate department heads at a technical college? Someone was asleep at the wheel, someone very high up in the organization.

The computer world is rife ‘wanna-be’ programmers; so whenever anyone claims proficiency in a language like C or Pascal or assembler, I make it my business to ask them a few carefully worded questions. If they clam up or change the subject, I know they are pretenders; if they warm to the subject, they're usually the real thing. The new department head immediately changed the subject. Typically, manque programmers have taken a course or two in college, but have never actually written a program. Hiring procedures are no better than the hiring organization, so I was prepared to be passed over for a less qualified candidate; but the new department head wasn’t simply mediocre, he was a brazen imposter. Nor was this the end of the story. It fell out that the programming department was not the only one ill served: so many of the other newly hired department heads turned out to be incompetent duds, the personnel director was sacked. (Officially she had gone on vacation, but it was one from which she never returned.)

My Hang-up With The Telemarketing Industry

By far the strangest place I ever worked was a firm that developed telemarketing software. The predictive dialer that summons you to the phone at dinnertime, is driven by a computer program. (This presented me with a moral dilemma: if the lowest life-forms are a telemarketers, what do you call someone who empowers them with software?) During the hiring process, my interviewer and future supervisor asked if I was prepared to work with people of alternate lifestyles. I replied that if I worried about the lifestyles of my professional colleagues, I'd never find work. But lifestyle was to take on new meaning in this job.

The project coordinator was another 'generalist' blissfully ignorant of computers and programming. This isn't necessarily a disqualification: an enlightened project manager who has an intuitive feel for what's best for the team can achieve miracles; but one that manages defensively and second-guesses programmers can add months to a project. I think she meant well, but hadn't have enough sense to stay out of the way. A friend of the owner, she was typical of the weak manager: completely at ease with marginal employees, but imperiled by competent, productive workers. I soldiered on, dutifully deferring to her 'expertise' as she made one blunder after another. But the absurdity of the pretense, the stark lunacy of the pantomime, must have worn me down, because one day I became so exasperated with the sheer effort it took to dissemble, I dared to explain some elementary programming concepts to her. I think at first she was hurt at my outburst, for she was not oblivious to her deficiencies, but I knew that her feeling of vulnerability could quickly turn to anger: this was not a company that took kindly to employees who advised their supervisors on how to do their jobs. Strike one!

Strike two came some time later. One of my co-workers at this company was going through an emotional crisis of some kind and I learned that my name had popped up during his counseling sessions with his psychotherapist. Apparently this person had developed intense personal conflicts centered on myself. I haven't a clue how this came about, because I rarely spoke to this individual on other than work-related topics in the office, and with the same civility I would treat any colleague. But it was the general consensus at the company that I was, in some mysterious way, involved in this poor devil's fragile emotional condition. Things couldn't be any weirder than this I told myself. But there was worse to come…

Unknown to the programming staff, the owner of the firm had recruited a waiter at the local eatery to eavesdrop on employees' conversations and report anything subversive (no, I'm not making this up). This was bizarre enough, but this particular waiter habitually garbled our orders, so there was no reason to assume he would be a reliable spy. One day I wondered out loud why the only time we ever saw the company owner was when he came into the lounge to filch our donuts. This prompted a chuckle or two from my colleagues, but when a garbled version of my comments reached the the owner he considered it nothing less than an act of lèse majesté. Strike three! As it turned out, I was well out of it; I was still collecting unemployment checks well after the project died a few months later.

Some time ago I began to suspect that I might be endowed with what are sometimes called 'supranormal' powers, but being cautious by nature, I exercised them only one time: the day I left the company, I put a curse on the telemarketing industry. In 2004 the national 'Do Not Call List' was made into law, effectively limiting cold call lists to charities.

My Encounter with 'Creative Chaos' — The Ghost of King Lear

"Maybe my mistake was looking for glamour organizations, like magazines," I told myself as I scanned the want ads. I decided to look for something poky and mundane, like the insurance or credit card industry, where the ‘normal’ people work, and signed on as computer specialist with a small company that provided liability and malpractice insurance to lawyers.

As usual, the first weeks on the job were filled with anticipation and excitement. There were ample opportunities to apply my expertise. To start with, the billing clerks were using an antediluvian system to process their yearly invoices. First they would calculate their percentages and totals using adding machines, then type the results into a word processing documents, using the tab key to align their columns. The process was tedious, error-prone, and none too tidy, and so I embedded a small spreadsheet within the word processing document that required the entry of only a few key numbers; the spreadsheet columns aligned the data neatly, and formulas embedded in the spreadsheet performed all the necessary calculations instantly. The head accountant was delighted, saying she hadn't known such a thing was possible, and trained her staff in the use the new format immediately. This compound spreadsheet-word processing document was a no-brainer: it reduced data entry errors to near zero and took a fraction of the time to process. So it came as something of a shock when, on arriving at work the next day, I found that the billing staff had reverted to the old labor-intensive system; the head accountant shrugged and pointed upstairs.

The owner and manager disapproved of my new-fangled system, claiming that the girls would become too dependent on it and lose touch with the mathematical operations concealed in the spreadsheet. At first I thought it was a case of NIH (not invented here), that old bugaboo, pride of authorship! But I later realized I was wrong. Since the embedded spreadsheet cut the workload in half, it meant a commensurate layoff of staff, something the owner found unthinkable. Apparently he saw himself as a hero to the girls in the billing department, a self-regard he was unwilling to yield to the efficiencies of productivity. As I got to know him better I noticed several other interesting quirks. He took me to lunch a few times where he was the soul of affability. But as soon as we returned to the office, he underwent a Jekyll and Hyde transformation, reverting to his role as the dominant lion guarding the pride. I valued my contact with this man, for I realized that he was a study in everything that was wrong with American management. You could write a book about his failings as an administrator; I shall try to be briefer.

Despite his touching concern for the girls in the billing department, he was the classic abusive boss. In the beginning, I wondered if there was something about my personality that antagonized those in positions of power. No doubt I had a few eccentricities of my own. I brooded over this for some time, until his true nature became obvious: the owner was a equal opportunity employer—he abused everyone, generously projecting his self-loathing on all those around him. Formerly a sales manager for a large travel firm, he had that bumptious extrovert personality found in a lot of pitchmen: he was long on swagger and short on organization, a fatal flaw he took out on his staff and employees.

His most conspicuous trait was his love of tension. He was addicted to the adrenaline rush he got while working against a deadline. This dovetailed nicely with his theory of management, the belief that all he had to do was enter a customer quotation in his PDA and the intricate ballet of follow-up and implementation would all fall neatly into place. It rarely did, but this didn't seem to deter him: it was his cue to make his dramatic entrance, to play hero for the day, charging around the office and barking orders like a drill instructor, as he pulled all the loose ends together. These last-minute theatrics were a poor foundation on which to expand a business. There was never any shortage of clients in the legal profession, but because of the owner's improvisational management style the company never grew beyond a fixed number of permanent employees of mediocre ability, and he was obliged to pass up several lucrative commercial contracts with major law firms for lack of technical expertise.

There is a human cost to anarchy: employees emotionally chewed up and exhausted by the high-jinx chaos, would throw up their hands in frustration and walk off the job. The owner enjoyed fomenting rivalries between his employees. He believed that interpersonal competition would keep his workers on their toes and increase productivity. One sure way to spark rivalries is to add hierarchy to the company organization chart. If you want to see real fireworks, tell two employees who have been working together in perfect harmony that one is taking orders from the other. The new organizational chart, which gave the illusion of order, actually created more disorder, awakening latent resentments and fueling chronic dissension. But the sight of his employees at each other's throats brought the owner unalloyed joy. An aggressive salesman who could only function under pressure, he had never experienced pride of craft, or understood the natural human affinity with quality. For him, rivalry and conflict validated commitment to him and his company—it was proof his people cared.

Predictably he was susceptible to, and wallowed immoderately in, flattery. True professionals do not obsess over job security—it is a by-product of competence; so they tend to be indifferent to authority. It is the fakes and flakes who lie awake at night thinking of ways to ingratiate themselves with the boss. Malingerers and toadies found the company a congenial refuge, basking in the owner's favor, until their ineffectiveness became so obvious that even he could see it. Parasitism is not only a serious drain on the resources of a small company; it can lead to chronic morale problems. It is one of the great paradoxes of American business: the defensive manager who is only comfortable around flatterers and sycophants, but is intimidated by competent, self-confident workers; the boss who places blind trust in opportunists and cronies, but scapegoats key staff on whom the success of the business depends.

The owner was not a bad man, just a rather childish one. On the plus side, he was a dynamic, hardworking entrepreneur who bootstrapped a successful a insurance business. On the debit side, he was a narcissist and a tyrant who crippled his own company with amateurish and self-indulgent leadership; who worked out his personal conflicts and demons at the expense of his staff, insuring that the business would never rise above the level of a small family concern. His personalized, topsy-turvy management style is all too familiar to the American business scene.

A sergeant-major of the elite Scotch bagpiper regiment, the Blackwatch, once said that it took seven years to train a piper. It's about the same for programmers. I spent several years reading and writing code before I was allowed near a mission critical assignment. But the majority of managers go to work with little or no training. They learn, if they learn at all, by trial and error, and the field is littered with their victims. On-the-job-training may be cheap in the short run, but it is very expensive over the long term, because the mistakes managers make reverberate throughout an organization years after they have gone. An amazing number of managers have no skills at all: they have risen to their exalted positions by default, because abler men weren't interested in the job. The result is a generation executives with a King Lear complex, bosses who are uneasy around self-assertive, independent professionals, and only feel secure in a coterie of adoring sycophants. Like Lear's kingdom, which disintegrated into warring factions, the American workplace has become a place of perpetual strife and chronic dissension.

Mercifully I would be spared any more of this 'creative chaos.' I had landed a programming job with a prestigious home theater company in the Palm Springs area which I parleyed into a position with the premier manufacturer of audio-video control equipment.

My Problem with Body Language

This advancement confirmed my career philosophy: if at first you don't succeed, reach higher, for you are probably working with inferior people. For the first time I would be programming for a large multinational corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange. No more bush-league managers playing authority games, no more self-dramatizing bosses with delusions of grandeur, no more clueless project managers second-guessing me. The amateur hour was over. From now on I would be working for seasoned professionals who would evaluate me solely on my professional skills and know-how. At long last I would be able to put my talents to work in advanced programming projects. It was several weeks before I realized I had stumbled into an insane asylum.

If only foresight were 20/20! I realize in retrospect I overlooked several important clues, starting with my interview with the Division Manager.  Whenever there was a lull in talk, he would launch into a pre-rehearsed spiel about 'front-end' and 'back-end' operations. It came on him like a fit, as though he was the involuntary medium of a recorded message from beyond. Throughout the course of the interview he would revert to this prepared speech, reciting it word for word like a holy mantra. Most businesses have what are called 'front-end' and 'back-end' operations, and it is sometimes a useful distinction to keep in mind, but it is not one of the pillars of economic theory. Apparently it was something he read in Forbes or Business Week which he would trot out to impress others whenever he felt unsure of himself. Like many managers, he had risen from the ranks of sales, but it was saddening to think that after thirty years in the audio-video industry, this shallow, muddled glimpse into the world of business was all he had learned.

Another conspicuous clue was the expatriate Croatian programmer with Rasputin-like hypnotic powers. He had been with the company over a year. I was about to say he 'worked for' the company, but he did no work, except for three or four simple programs he cribbed from other projects in the archives. The Senior Programmer had made heroic efforts to train him, but he blithely resisted all instruction, preferring instead to play computer solitaire. How, I wondered, had he avoided professional review for so long? Was he a member of the Croatian royal family in exile? A CIA operative using the company as a commercial cover? An informant in the Federal Witness Protection Program? Or was it simply a case of misplaced compassion for a Slav refugee? And what was his game? He had no skills to speak of. Perhaps he thought he was being groomed for management.

One of his projects had been backlogged so long, its anniversary date was lost in the mists of time. Whenever the project manager asked him for a progress report at staff meetings, he would grumble indignantly, in his thick Slavic accent, that the hardware on site had not been properly configured, or some such nonsense. It was hard not to admire this outrageous chutzpah: his sonorous voice resonated with centuries of European absolutism and carried the day. No one dared to challenge him, not even the Division Manager. I think he saw something of himself in the Croatian, i.e. how far gravitas, a gruff exterior and forbidding demeanor, and the mere appearance of competence could carry you. Nor is such chutpah to be lightly dismissed: the ability to bark orders at persons of superior intelligence and greater ability than oneself, without feeling stupid, is an under-appreciated gift.

I think my attempt to conceal my astonishment at these proceedings may not have succeeded, for a short time later the Division Manager reprimanded me for my body language at meetings. He chose to do this at a company party. I had always thought of these functions as an opportunity interact with my co-workers in a convivial setting, far from the oppressive tensions of the workplace. He took me aside and berated me for my posture at the weekly staff meetings. I was too stiff, he complained testily. I seemed edgy. This was new: in addition to productivity, competence and initiative, there was a new job performance category—body language!

Obviously the Division Head did not possess a subtle mind. For example, he thought all programming projects should take exactly two weeks (except, of course, those of the Croatian exile, who lived in a timeless universe). I don't know how he arrived at this rule of thumb, but all job quotations were based on this one-size-fits-all formula and he enforced it with Draconian severity. There was no appeal: if you finished a project ahead of the two-week deadline you were a hero, if you finished after the deadline you would be publicly pilloried at the next staff meeting.

Tweny years of experience have taught me you do not take computer programming at a gallop; programs have a life of their own and rushing them only compounds development time. Unrealistic completion dates can also be a demotivating factor. Programmers respond negatively to schedules and pressures, and are far more productive when left to their own devices. This is only logical: since the self-esteem of programmers depends upon the quality of their work product, they tend to impose high quality standards of their own. The last thing they need is pressure.

This became an issue when I was assigned the control program for the War Room of the U.S. Pacific Fleet (CINCPACFLT). This was a major installation at the U.S. Naval Base on Oahu, Hawaii, consisting of video walls, elaborate telecommunications equipment, and an extensive array of security and encryption devices. Think of all the audio-video gear you have seen in the Pentagon control room of a typical Hollywood disaster movie, then multiply by a factor of ten. After reading the hardware specification I explained to the project manager that the control program would be a Herculean task that would take two programmers the better part of a month to complete. The Division Manager scoffed at this, and outsourced the job to a 'heavyweight' contract programmer. The contract programmer promptly made a shambles of it and returned from Oahu two weeks later in a state of nervous exhaustion (leaving instructions with the project manager never to call him for such an assignment again). The project fell by default to the Senior Programmer, who later admitted that several components of the project could not be implemented because they were beyond the state of the art. He was still struggling with the program when I left the company a few weeks later.

Techno-Envy

When I submitted my resignation, the Division Manager asked me to reconsider; he thought we should talk things over. What was there to talk over, I wondered? This was the Neanderthal bully who reprimanded me at a company party for my body language; who phoned me after midnight in a hotel room far from home to gloat over a bug found in one of my programs; who 'forgot' to enroll me in an important company training course and reassigned a project of mine to an unqualified contract programmer. He did not see himself as an enabler, but as a taskmaster charged with keeping the rowers at their oars. For him software engineers were not intellectual assets to be nurtured and developed, but a threat to his authority and self-esteem who must be cowed into abject submission. A self-promoting careerist, he understood neither process nor product, but was concerned only with his status in the company. He played the role of the dynamic take-charge executive with convincing gusto, and the corporation was pleased to grant him a free hand; the damage he was doing would not show up for years.

It is said that man's biological evolution ended, and his social evolution began, when tribal chieftains and warriors began to understand their dependence on the specialist talents of the lame blacksmith and the blind poet. That must have been a humanizing revelation for the warrior class. Something very similar happened to the management class in the computer age. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: in the era of instantaneous communication, the chain-of-command pyramids of delegated authority have crumbled and yielded to automation and the authority of knowledge. It was a humbling day for the corporate manager, accustomed to the preogatives of the the convict gang boss, to admit to himself that his success depended on the skills of the information worker.

Of all today's information workers, the computer programmer is perhaps the most mysterious, because he creates his magic with the most unsubstantial and ephemeral of materials—logical bits and bytes, electronic scintilla whizzing around inside silicon chips and across the logic gates of circuit boards, electronic spume in an electromagnetic force field. His algorithms, intricate skeins of logic that mimic the cognitive activity of the human mind itself, run the world we live in. Speaking of the fungibility of materials and the power of information in a digital world, Marshall McLuhan said:

Skakespeare speaks of a world into which, by programming, as it were, one can play back the materials of the natural world in a variety of levels and intensities of style. We are close to doing just this on a massive scale at the present time electronically. Here is the image of the golden age as one of complete metamorphoses or translations of nature into human art, that stands ready of access to our electric age.

The masters of this technology inspire both awe and fear in the management class. Engineers find power-obsessed managers faintly ridiculous and their narcissistic self-regard childish; conversely, managers are secretly appalled by digital wizardry, for in it they sense the erosion of their status and authority by an autonomous technology they neither comprehend or control. Corporate executives can read the writing on the wall: in the new age of plenary retrieval, it is the authority of knowledge that determines status, and the information worker, not the straw boss, who is king.

Dilbert Revisited—The Cost of Abusive Bosses

Peter Drucker, universally regarded as the father of modern American management, held that the art of management consisted in bringing out the best in people; he considered workers a resource, not a cost. But despite his fame, his vision of a humane collaborative workplace with respect for the dignity of each individual employee, never took root in the American corporation. The dynamic, two-fisted, hard-charging manager is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. A talented manager can save a dying business. Lee Iacocca resuscitated Ford, Lou Gerstner revived IBM and Jack Welch made GE one of the greatest corporations in the world. These men are rightly regarded as visionaries and miracle workers.

But for every Lee Iacocca there is a Kenneth Lay, for every Lou Gerstner there is a Bernie Ebbers, for every Jack Welch there is a John Rigas, i.e. men who would loot and destroy their own companies for personal gain. The pendulum of trust in marquee stars has obviously swung too far in the wrong direction. But it will not be easy for corporate boards to renounce their love of celebrity CEOs, and for two reasons: (1) hiring stars relieves them of their duty to conduct due diligence and vet CEO candidates thoroughly, and (2) if anything goes wrong, they can always claim they hired the very best man available, for who could come better recommended than a candidate universally acclaimed by the business community?

At the turn of the century America was a fertile environment for inventor-entrepreneurs, like George Eastman, Thomas Edison and George Pullman. The genius of Amercian capitalism, as opposed to the bureaucratic European model, was that it concentrated decision-making power in the hands of a single executive who could respond instantly and decisively to technological innovation and changing market conditions. But as technical expertise flattens organization charts and dilutes centralized executive authority, this managerial paradigm has become quaintly dated. Today American companies are the most productive in the world because in the 1990s, during the information revolution, business leaders invested boldly in information technology. The result has been a 25 percent increase in productivity since 1995—the envy of the world. After information technologies and statistical methods brought transparency and science to the marketplace, the CEO was no longer a royal personage endowed with papal infallibility and absolute authority. While he still exercised considerable central control, it became necessary for him to share his power with knowledge workers, who possessed highly specialized skills comparable to, and as crucial as, his own, and who must be treated with civility and respect. In the best companies they are, but old attitudes die hard.

In a Newsweek interview (March 21, 2005), Howard Stringer, the first gaijin to head the Sony corporation, was asked what had gone wrong with the troubled company. (The once proud electronics powerhouse and flagship of the Japanese economy had lost 75 percent of its stock price and its electronics division was underperforming so badly that the corporation was in danger of becoming the target of a hostile takeover.) Stringer replied that the problem was too much management: the company had been taken over by bureaucratic mandarins who no longer listened to the engineers, and who had driven one of the world's greatest corporations into the ground. Said Stringer: "The business of Sony had become management, not making products. Engineers are the stars. Point them in the right direction and let them go."

I subtitled these recollections as a Dilbert memoir. Scott Adams has mined a rich vein of whimsical humor and irony, sending up the duplicity and skullduggery of the entrenched creeps and megalomaniacs who manage our corporations. All life is a comedy Adams tells us, and we must roll with the punches. But there's nothing funny about mismanagement: bad bosses inhibit productivity and cause companies to underperform dramatically. In addition to the obvious human toll, abusive bosses cost companies billions in employee turnover. That a large number of U.S. businesses are run along the lines of third-rate banana republics is well known; but that this is accepted without indignation, as something inherent in the natural order of things, by persons of wit and intelligence, like Scott Adams, is an alarming sign that the abusive boss is still a powerful mythic figure and a permanent fixture of the work environment.

Another whimsical 'humorist' who fancies himself as an expert on the subject of bad bosses is Stanley Bing, author of best-selling Crazy Bosses. According to Bing 'the crazy boss is aided by his insanity, not hampered by it':

His bullying, paranoia, selfishness, ruthlessness, perfectionism, and addiction to drugs, booze, or work are the only tools he has to achieve all the things expected of him.

This is the rogue theory of management, according to which a boss has to be a son of a bitch to get anything out of his workers. But more often than not, these personality disorders and Gestapo tactics are simply a mask to divert attention from the boss's incompetence. Workers respond to leadership, not psychosis. Bad bosses are essentially psychopaths who self-medicate themselves with rage and feed their spite on the humiliation and degradation of their employees. But here is Bing again:

Bullies are everywhere. From the gorges of Africa to the boardrooms of New York, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles, management by terror has been a time-honored technique because it works. The most mediocre man or woman can suddenly seem dynamic, forceful, and decisive if he or she is mean enough.

We could charitably interpret this as tongue in cheek, amusing irony but pernicious psychology, except that Bing is peddling pure poison; he is not interested in serious analysis, nor in offering us solutions. A world-weary cynic posing as a humorist, he, like Scott Adams, is entertaining the masses at the expense of a serious social issue. His motivation is best sellerdom.

The purpose of humor is to help us cope with the inescapable vicissitudes of life; whimsy should never be used to evade unpleasant truths, yield to defeatism and embrace failure; most managerial problems are remediable, and only appear to be intractable because we have not had the boldness and imagination to confront them. There's nothing inevitable about the mistreatment of employees. It is not in the natural order of things for tyrannical and incompetent bosses to meddle with the work of gifted and highly-trained workers. Nowhere is it engraved in stone that managers need manipulate their subordinates with intimidation tactics. American business will only rise to its true potential when its management class becomes the moral and professional equal of its technicians, engineers and scientists.

Free At Last!

I must not leave you with the impression that I haven't had a few good bosses, but they have been the exception. Ironically one of the most affable and fair-minded employers I worked for was just a step ahead of the law. Roger didn't believe in paying taxes or FICA. The IRS and human resources agency hounded him mercilessly and made several visits to the company, threatening to confiscate his worthless office equipment. He was also beset by health problems and family calamities rivaling the House of Atreus; but despite his ordeals, he was never rude or disrespectful to his employees.

I often think about the workers who stayed, especially those who were supporting families and were unable to escape chain-gang servitude. I wondered how they endured it for so long. I have only the highest respect for those who see it through. More power to you—and God forgive you any uncharitable thoughts you might harbor for the organization. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to work under continuous abuse, year in year out, without relief. But corporate managers better not try any of this high-jinx on the new generation of professionals, because they will not be 'managed.' They'll move on to greener pastures, because they are the new stars, the new aristocracy. The 'authority of knowledge' has ended forever the hierarchies of delegated authority. The days of the straw boss are over.

And so is my term of indentured servitude. I now live on a modest pension and I have to watch my money carefully. I miss the flush times and generous business perks, the company travel, hotels, and per diem; the camaraderie and professional milieu, along with the excitement and stimulation of new technology, and the challenges of problem-solving. Oddly enough I even feel a passing nostalgia for some of my old bosses (yes, you can even become nostalgic about your adversaries). Would I ever go back to work for another American company? Sure, I guess—if someone offered me a salary of a million dollars and another million in backdated stock options. In the words of that stirring Negro spiritual quoted by Dr. King:

"Free at last, thank God Almighty… free at last!"

Now, to install that exhaust fan in the bathroom…

Wm. B. Fankboner © 2004
Indio, California
williefank@aol.com