Dire diary

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

Outsiders labour under a basic misapprehension about corporate hierarchies.  Their image is of poor drudges at the bottom engaged in the mindless repetition of boring, meaningless tasks, with no scope for initiative or independent action.  Top executives, so this wisdom goes, are epitomes of free-booting free will, deciding on a whim the fate of thousands as they lounge around in boardrooms of dark leather and darker mahogany, or glide silently and effortlessly in their chauffeur-driven tinted-window limousines.  Nothing could be further from reality.

It is true that the ordinary office worker has a circumscribed range of functions - but also a concomitant freedom of when and how to carry them out.  An essentially undifferentiated role has no natural time-scales, no unique, imperative pattern: jobs can be moved around, substituted, lost even, with little overall effect.  However pressurised the situation, repose can easily be found - and kept: for into the vacuums and interstices which are created between tasks, there is nothing to flow.

Middle managers enjoy no such luxury.  Theirs is a constant battle between running the business and organising others.  The latter involves meetings, time's weeds which sprout in every available diary gap.  Arranged by a secretary or personal assistant, they are huge milestones mapping out the manager's week, obstacles dumped on the road to real work.  Where office staff paddle docilely in a business's routine backwaters, middle managers must swim hard against buffeting waves of problems simply to remain where they are.  Meetings soon pass from milestones to millstones, threatening to drag them under.  But through them, managers have the first inkling of a truth that will blaze all the more brightly the higher they ascend: that it is the diary which rules them, not the other way round.

Top executives live and breathe this axiom.  All of the week is meetings, meetings involving so many other people, and so complex to set up, that the most senior managers find themselves totally impotent in the face of their day's hijacking.  Now, they can only flow with the overmastering tide, and join the corporate flotsam.  Because top bosses are meta-managers - they run a business not by managing it directly, but by managing those who do - they find themselves in thrall not only to the clashing diaries of their immediate juniors, but through the corporation's pyramidal structure to those of their underlings' underlings too.  

The enmeshing diary becomes a prescriptive book of their entire lives.  Such are the demands on their limited time that business appointments spill over into evenings and weekends - the company functions, the client outings, the overseas travel.  Far from being mighty corporate warriors cutting a swathe through the financial thickets, they are huge pin-striped puppets without a puppet-master, slaves of the system which they sustain and which sustains them.  Trapped as they are by the very power that they wield, many a senior executive must have snatched a precious moment during yet another meeting in those boring boardrooms of dark leather and darker mahogany to envy the simple, untrammelled life of the worker; just as kings and queens have ever envied the uncomplicated, idealised bucolic existence of shepherds and shepherdesses; and just as forlornly.

(1989)

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The new Jesuits

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

As an elite, the Jesuits have always been aloof and a mystery to outsiders.  Founded in 1534 by St Ignatius Loyola, the Society of Jesus was intended as a kind of spiritual SAS to help lead the fight against the heretical Protestants.  Soon the qualities of intelligence and ambition demanded of their members meant that they found themselves as confidants of kings and confessors to queens.  From these positions they were able to exercise an enormous influence by applying a tiny force to a mighty lever.  An intense dedication to their order was both their greatest strength and weakness: actions co-ordinated centrally by the Society gave them an unmatched global power; it also called into question their ultimate loyalties, and made them hated and despised by those whose influence they had eclipsed.

Now, the sites of authority have moved.  The baroque and classical palaces have become tourist attractions, while true power is wielded from the glistening post-modern castles of the giant multi-national corporations.  And there, just as in the state rooms of yore, you find latter-day Jesuits behind the ample leather thrones of the new royalty, the Managing Directors and Chief Executives.

They are the accountants.  Like the Jesuits, they are a breed apart from their peers, the other senior managers.  Usually brought in from outside rather than promoted internally, they follow their own track and destiny.  They are the company's father or mother confessor, but now it is economic rather than spiritual rigour that they apply.  Where before they would insist that you bared your soul to them, confessing every last heinous sin, now they will probe every last budget, every invoice, every forecast.

Like the stern priests, they are unmoved by sentiment: figures alone speak to them just as they seem to speak only in figures, their personal cabbalistic language.  And the absolution they offer is through figures, to be won by painful repentance in the form of the cut-back budget's abnegation, and through the public recantation of a scaled-down forecast.

As the Jesuits were, the accountants too are figures of fear in their kingdoms, hated for their disproportionate power, their incorruptibility, for their ambiguous loyalties, for their sober-garbed otherness, and for their indifference to all this hate.

Today's Jesuits represent a movement from the spiritual to the material, mirroring society's own shift in pre-occupations.  We are beginning to enter a third epoch, that of the mental, where information becomes the primary resource, and where the world, its contents and every experience within it are reduced to data.  As this shift continues we might expect to see the evolution of a third Jesuit class, one whose power is predicated on the audit of that information.  Perhaps they will be descendants of the present data processing managers; perhaps they will be the attendants of the mighty, thinking computers that one day may seize power; perhaps they will work alongside third millennium data barons who will control the world's population through its addiction to synthetic, digital experience.  One thing is for sure: the Jesuits will be there.

(1989)

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