Twins
In deciding whether to leave
my comfortable corporate VP job at Pillsbury to start over at Burger King, I
asked myself one question: Will this put me in a better position to become
president of a business? I did not
ask myself the wrong questions: How hard will my new job be? What will my friends think if they see
me making hamburgers in a quick service restaurant? What will I do if this new position does not work out
as planned? As a CEO of Self, I
knew that those questions were not the right ones to be asking. (The
‘CEO of Self’, by Michael
Tomasky)
And this is the reason some people want to vote for him... Of course, most worship his power and wealth. Weak people who jump on a strong man’s cavalcade to acquire their charisma; in order to bully people, if only vicariously. It is the ancient story of the demagogue who promises to overcome the eternal conflicts of the politicians, by offering a strong man who will satisfy the people’s needs (corporations, it seems, the source now of these new messiahs, by offering the magic of their commercial success). This is the kind of thing the weak love:
The CEO of Self? This is business management speak for
the ambitious bureaucrat. And like
most of its ilk it sounds clunky and stupid, overwhelming simple minded and
kitsch, to those outside the HR department and the senior management team. Inside, in the rarefied air pockets of
the company’s HQ, it is a different matter: always they have to acquire their
own language, to protect them from the world outside; and their own staff. Like most theology it contains an
enormous amount of nonsense; and some little sense; the sense the bait that
catches them. But the
nonsense? Oh, a sign of priestly
depth and profundity – essential materials for the management consultant, it
advertises their quality. Herman
Cain, Burger King and republican candidate, is an adept at both the bureaucracy
and the language game and proclaims loudly that he is a true believer; a sign
for most of us that he is unreflective and pathological; like a conman telling
us he is expert at fooling people.
And this is the reason some people want to vote for him... Of course, most worship his power and wealth. Weak people who jump on a strong man’s cavalcade to acquire their charisma; in order to bully people, if only vicariously. It is the ancient story of the demagogue who promises to overcome the eternal conflicts of the politicians, by offering a strong man who will satisfy the people’s needs (corporations, it seems, the source now of these new messiahs, by offering the magic of their commercial success). This is the kind of thing the weak love:
… I was not afraid to take charge, make decisions, and
focus on the critical things I needed to do in order to get the project
moving. Again, seeing myself as
CEO of Self, I was determined not to fall into a comfort zone of letting other
people, no matter how competent and well-meaning, make the decisions for me.
(Translate this into political terms and we have a Supreme Leader deciding
everything – odd that some Americans look to North Korean for their model of
democracy.)
Herman Cain appears to be a self-centred, and hard-hearted,
though not unintelligent, fool - perfect CEO material. He is the twin of Steve Jobs, as a
recent biography shows us only too clearly.
… he told talented people
that their work was shit until they came up with something good enough for him
to take credit for… Isaacson
records countless instances of Jobs’s ‘binary’ thinking: people were ‘gods’ or
‘bozos’ and their ideas were ‘amazing’ or ‘shit’.[i] These weren’t just things he said to to
his employees: he said them to waitresses, hotel clerks and shop
assistants. Despite his
sophisticated deal-making and relentless focus on the quality of his products,
Isaacson’s biography suggests that he spent most of his life behaving like a
three-year old. (Amazing
or Shit, by Mattathias Schwartz)
A selfish, arrogant and narcissistic personality, who
bullied a whole corporation of people into making his billions. There is only one difference between
them. Cain was a bureaucrat, and
therefore mildly useful. Jobs, a
mere salesman, was able to camouflage his lowly status by making himself into a
product, a consumer object d’art, and
selling it better than anyone else.
He had more style, and was clever enough to pick up Zen rather Feel
The Fear and Do It Anyway. He was also lucky in the industry… And so he became an internet icon, a
symbol of the new creative economy, made on the back, it has to be said, of the
Pentagon – both of his main products were developed by US government defence
spending; it was only later they became commercial propositions; for entrepreneurs
like him to sell. [ii] Never having made anything, unlike Cain
who at least learnt how to prepare burgers, Jobs is the ultimate American
dream; perhaps the reason he is so popular. You don’t have to make or create anything to be a success, is his message: other people do that. You
just sell. That is talk… Copy Steve Jobs and you too can
convince the world that you are the most important person in it.
[i] It’s difficult to know what to make of this. Do I detect some irony from the
biographer? Probably not. More likely he has succumbed to the
management speak; where the obvious is magically transformed into the
marvellous by a simple tweak of language.
Creativity,
or at least as I understand it, involves going beyond simple dualisms. But then Jobs is here acting like a consumer:
I like this, I don’t like that; like a teenager going through the racks at
Primark… The reason for his
success? Precisely because he
wasn’t creative? Steve Jobs just
another regular guy, who knew what the people wanted because he was one himself.
[ii] “In fact, financiers long been shy about funding risky
ventures. Henry Ford couldn’t get a dime out of them when he was
revolutionizing auto production. Financiers weren’t at all interested in
computers from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s—the Pentagon and Census
Bureau funded the industry in its early stages. Ditto the Internet, which was
initially a project of the military.”
(NPR
hack apologises for Wall Street,
Doug Henwood)
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