WAR STORIES: CHAPTER TWELVE – “Corporate Nonsense and Office Shenanigans – Part I”

FEBRUARY 28, 2024 – What I found fascinating about working in large organizational settings were the endless lessons in applied psychology—or was it simply an endless loop of the seven deadly sins?[1] I’m certain that my work places weren’t exceptional in this regard. We humans are a baffling species, especially when we occur in combinations of two or more of us. My fascination was often coupled with amusement.

Take, for example, “casual day.” I’m not sure exactly when this phenomenon appeared on the corporate scene, but I’m guessing second half of the 1990s. Before that time, every weekday was dress-up day. I had half a dozen suits in my wardrobe, along with a couple of blazers. I treated all of them as if they were my pitching staff. Among them were two 20-game winners; aces that I’d pull out of the locker room. . . er, closet . . . for court appearances or on days when I really, truly had to look as if I knew what I was doing—a meeting with a new sophisticated business client, for example, or when I was working at the bank, a conclave (in which I had a speaking part) involving my boss’s boss’s boss. On more relaxed occasions, I could get by with a suit with a less impressive ERA or win-loss record. Wear a 20-game winner too often and you’d wear it out. Or people would soon notice that you had no bench strength. The blazers were strictly relievers from the bullpen; okay for days when I planned to be holed up in my office most of the time, cranking out loan document packages designed for insomniacs.

In any event, along came “casual day.” At first I didn’t know how to respond. Selecting from the true-and-tried pitching staff was easy, predictable. For casual day I’d have to rummage through the rest of my sartorial inventory, which, as my spouse could and would readily attest, was not exactly suitable, as it were, for public display. The more she exercised her veto power, the more my choices were forced to expand to the local mall. And the last way I wanted to spend evenings or weekends was picking through shirts and trying on trousers inside Marshall Fields. “Casual day,” I decided, was a pain in the butt.

If people who embraced casual day considered me snooty for not participating, they were wrong. I actually envied them for the ease with which they shed dress-up clothes for far less formal attire. Over time, of course, casual day wound up being every day, and even I eventually furloughed my entire pitching staff—calling up the veteran hurlers out of semi-retirement ever more rarely.

But before the whole work world transitioned to casual, it went through a phase that struck me as . . . well, for lack of a more elegant or charitable description . . . inescapably dumb. When Friday exclusively was still casual day, some genius in charge of United Way fundraising at the bank talked managers into permitting casual attire in consideration of contributing an extra $5 or $10 to United Way. To spread the word, each contributor would receive a sticker they could slap on a shirt pocket that would say, “I Gave to United Way and Get to Go Casual.” The crazy thing about it, however, was that this worked only on . . . Friday, which was the day everyone “got to go casual,” whether they donated to United Way or not.

Go figure.

*                      *                      *

The corporate world was fertile ground for . . . corporatespeak—of course. I stubbornly resisted the phrases that came into vogue and intruded on every conversation until all meaning was wrung out of the buzz words to make room for the next generation of vacuous word groups. The most cringe-worthy was “thinking outside the box.” No other phrase was so ironic, given that the people who uttered it most were the people who were “thinking” the least—inside or outside of a box.

Another phrase that I hated and never used was “value added.” For a time it seemed to infiltrate irrepressibly every business meeting at the bank. Even worse was its slightly abbreviated derivative as in, “The new measure will be a value add.” I refused to use it—ever—and was relieved when it was subtracted from the corporate lexicon.

Of course, there were a host of other buzz words and phrases that swept through the corporate ranks. No one knew where the empty language originated, but I suspected it was B-schools, which had an incentive to appear, anyway, to be on the cutting edge of things. It didn’t take much for the verbal virus to spread to corporate types, who also wanted to be recognized as front row sophisticates and worthy of accelerated advancement.

And then there were initiatives—corporate action that went a few empty steps ahead of the empty phrases. Take “diversity training,” for example, the precursor of today’s DEI.

When I joined, the banking world in Minnesota anyway was dominated by white men. In all fairness, the same held true for large law firms, not to mention many other corners of society. Little by little “diversity” made inroads—as a word, anyway.

My first real introduction to it as an organized concept was the day after I’d returned from a week-long business trip to New York, which, of course, was diversity on steroids in contrast to Minnesota. Anyway, my boss waltzed into my office to welcome me back and congratulate me on my appointment—by him—to the bank’s “diversity council.”

I was taken aback. “Why me?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “you have a beard, so you’re a liberal aren’t you?” His assumption sounded so off-key it hurt my ears.

For the next year I joined monthly meetings of this group of half a dozen people, only four of whom ever attended more than two consecutive sessions. They were led by the bank president’s chief assistant, a woman with a high-end English accent and far left political leanings. I have no idea how she’d landed her job as the president’s aide, but I suspected that she was a highly effective organizer and administrator, and the president had become wholly dependent on her ability to run his office, perhaps his life. He certainly didn’t share her politics, but he had no choice but to tolerate them, given her indispensability as his Chief of Administration. His dependence afforded her great power, and she was hellbent on leveraging it. Since diversity was front and center on her personal agenda, the president let her run with it—as long as he didn’t have to do anything about it.

But clearly she wanted more than a license to run her own diversity council. She wanted executive action. Eventually she succeeded, if a half-day “off-site” ending with a nice lunch counted as action. She’d goaded the president into calling a meeting of all his direct reports for the sole purpose of addressing diversity—with the diversity council. For me it was an interesting glimpse into how things work at the highest echelon of a large public company.

I say that with tongue in cheek. The meeting was a parody of itself—starting with the location of the confab: the venerable Minneapolis Club three blocks from the bank. Founded in 1883, the club was the quintessential bastion of old (white guys) power. Personally, I had nothing against the club. Though I wasn’t a member, I was a frequent lunch guest of people who were members, and the signature popovers served in the main dining room were to die for. But as the site of a meeting to discuss diversity? Are you kidding me? I thought, Does no one among these very white male executives not see their laughable blindness?

The president started off the meeting gratuitously by asking each of his direct reports to tell the group why diversity was so important to the mission of the bank. (Cleared of its window dressing, “mission,” of course, was a thinly veiled codeword for “profit.”) I’d never witnessed such enthusiastic sycophancy—even back among my own peers in meetings with our common boss. Each of the very white guys tried to outdo the others in proclaiming the importance of diversity. It was clear to me that none of them had given it much thought prior to the question having been put to them.

While they waxed not-so-eloquent, I was reminded of an anecdote I’d heard recently about one of the execs. One Saturday a whole crew of bank employee-volunteers were working on a Habitat for Humanity house. They’d been on the job from the crack of dawn, and most of the volunteers stayed with the work until late in the afternoon. At around noon, the big-shot exec pulled up in his brand new Porsche 911—for all to see. In his fashion casual attire he paraded himself around for a few minutes and for a photo op (with the caption, “S_______, EVP at ______, as Habitat for Humanity volunteer”).

The guy who told me the story expressed resentment. Bad form on the part of the exec, I thought, who was blind as a bat to the impressions left behind by his arrogance.

After the speeches followed by two more hours of wasted time, we were treated to an executive style lunch served, of course, by people among whom white men were in the slim minority.

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson

[1] Pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.

2 Comments

  1. Virginia Anne Housum says:

    “Now let’s unpack that.”

    1. Eric Nilsson says:

      Oh yeah!

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