The Leader's Guide to Radical Management

Hollywood has yet to discover: management is being reinvented

Roger Ebert has an interesting review of the new movie, The Company, with a cast that includes some of my favorite actors: Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Kevin Costner and Tommy Lee Jones.

Ebert begins by saying that happiest people he meets are those with “real jobs”: a Mac tutor, a doctor, a set designer, a stagehand, a heating and air-conditioning man, a lawyer, a Web designer, my editor and an animator. All of these people work hard, know what they're doing, think it's worth doing, enjoy it and take pride in it.

He has a different take on the jobs of people in the movie who have been largely involved in “making money for the stockholders."

They focus on moving money around, hiring and firing, cutting costs, serving the bottom line. They are caregivers for corporations, which would be more satisfactory if corporations were not essentially balance sheets. I know the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are individuals, but when did one ever tell you a good joke?

“The Company Men" follows the stories of characters who have oriented their lives around a corporation once named General Transportation Systems. Years ago, this company involved two men who began building ships; small ones at first, and then big ones. Now it's called GTX, which is how we spell Acme these days. Caught in the economic downturn, GTX is downsizing, and some of its employees are discovering their primary occupation was making and spending a lot of money, and that without those jobs, there isn't much they really know how to do….

Employees of corporations are like free-ranging scavenger cells. When the corporation inhales in good times, they find themselves in a warm place with good nurture. When it exhales in bad times, they go spinning into the vast, indifferent world....

“The Company Men" offers no great elation or despair. Its world is what it is. We all live in it.

Read his full review here.

A different kind of organization

The movie--and the review--continue the Hollywood line that today's workplace is a spiritual desert, which was also explored in Up in the Air, with George Clooney. To be sure, most large organizations are still like this.

But there is little hint here that there are other organizations that are being run very differently. To find out about them, read my article:

•  The Death—and Reinvention—of Management: Part 1: Overview

Or read my book, The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century.

Women in High-Tech Startups: "The Social Network"

Yesterday, I wrote a post about the fact that while the number of women small business owners hovers around 50 percent, the number of women founders of hi-tech start-ups is in the low single digits. I suggested that angel investors needed to wise up and realize that  having women in the workplace is a key aspect of organizational performance.

As it happened, almost by accident, I saw the movie, The Social Network, last night. I was reluctant to go, as friends had already given me detailed accounts of every meaningful scene. I was thinking: “Do I really need to see this film? I already know the story.” Well, I was dragged along to see it and I was wrong. I did need to see the movie. Knowing the story is not enough. Experiencing it is something different. It is a terrifically well-done movie. Eye-opening.

Yet it’s an educational movie, rather than a likeable movie. Almost everyone in the film is either an a-hole or trying to become one. It’s a backstabbing frat-boy alpha-male ultra-jock culture. The computer-jocks are no different from the sports jocks—same moves, just a different ring of the circus.

As I suggested in yesterday’s post, the movie reflects the fact that the startup culture is an all-male workplace. The women that are there are there for diversionary purposes. They are not players in the real game.

In any event, what serious woman would want to work in such backstabbing frat-boy alpha-male ultra-jock culture?

The question asked by Vineet Nayar in 2005, when he began his transformational journey at HCL Technologies was ‘Is this the company that my children would want to work in?’ In his more recent thinking, It has evolved into ‘Is this the organization that my daughter will want to work in?’

Looking at the movie, The Social Network, the answer would be a resounding no.

For more on women and management:

It’s not diversity: women are the future

Busting the glass ceiling in high-tech startups

Women in High-Tech Startups: "The Social Network"

Team building: choose women ahead of the next Einstein

The Difference by Scott Page