In the film Sabrina, Humphrey Bogart, in the role of a hard-bitten, hard-driving tycoon of the deal-a-minute variety, is asked by his brother, a gay and good-looking but worthless wastrel, why he works so intensely. It can’t be for money, is it for power? “Power,” growls Bogart as nearly as I can paraphrase the dialogue, “power is a dirty word.” And goes back to work.

Power and its organizational cloak is the theme of these three books, The Art of Success, The Executive Life, and The Organization Man, the first two of which are drawn entirely, and the last in part, from Fortune. The nature of business power, the divided attitudes of executives toward authority (some agree with Bogart), the impact of power upon them, and, most important, the effects of business power on society as a whole are four central problems at least glimpsed in these books. Although none pretends to be formal sociology and none, perhaps, is the worse for that fact, each, and Whyte’s book especially, touches such sociological problems as bureaucracy, classes, ideology, and factory organization.

A certain unity of approach ties these books together, which is not unexpected in view of their more or less common origin. But this does not mean that the Fortune attitude toward power and the organizations which both execute it and conceal its nature is unambiguous. In concluding that it is not, I consciously reject C. Wright Mills’s analysis of Fortune¹ as a consistent, surefooted organ of sophisticated conservatism. Mills interpreted Fortune’s stand in favor of international aid as motivated by a desire to stave off the programs of social and economic reform at home which, in strengthening the power of labor, appeared to threaten the power of business. Even less tenable than the Marxist and Hobsonite echoes in this view is the unity of outlook and the degree of understanding of the problem that it implies on the part of Fortune’s editors.

My reading of these books and of Fortune itself persuades me that the magazine is deeply involved in the problems it discusses and deeply disturbed about their solutions. It too is an organization. Its writers and editors are themselves individuals faced with the need to succeed in a bureaucratic world. If in the end Fortune favors organizational necessities against individual claims (and, in my opinion, this conclusion is tenable), its writers are far too good organization men themselves to see organization only or even mainly as an instrument of domination, and they are too addicted to the pragmatic attitudes traditional in our society to develop neat, logical, fully explanatory theories. The men of Fortune are uncertain and divided of mind: they are not conspirators.

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The Art of Success is a series of profiles of highly successful businessmen, some like the Rockefeller brothers the beneficiaries of great inheritances, others like Clint Murchison, the Texas oilman, born with a golden touch and a green thumb, still others like Harlow Curtice adept enough in the arts of the great corporation to attain a salary of $750,000. As Horatio Alger and Samuel Smiles among many others proved, money and success are usually intriguing subjects. Why then are these profiles so dull that it is a genuine struggle to avoid mixing up two lives only a few minutes after reading them?

The answer lies partly in the nature of the individuals dealt with and partly in the nature of the book. Not financial necessity, but free choice, or perhaps neurotic compulsion, makes these men work. In the trite phrase, they live for their work. In their single-minded absorption, they read few books, listen to no music, and inspect no pictures. In some instances, they discovered their talents as boys and either dispensed with advanced education or bent it to their own ends. “Useless” knowledge is the proper goal of the liberal-arts curriculum: the capacity to lead a rich mental life is more prized than the ability to make many dollars. But everything that these men did and do is at least useful to themselves. Such an outlook can make men formidable but seldom interesting; variety inheres not in them but in the operations they control. Other people’s business can fascinate us when it happens to be our business too, or careful, patient exposition convinces us for the time being that we are involved enough almost to be in the business. But these sketches are too short really to differentiate one business from another any more than they differentiate one man from another.

Which brings us to the form of these essays. They are written in Luce style. That is to say the sentences are short, though not necessarily grammatical; colorful adjectives and incidents more or less judiciously flavor each account; and, toward these businessmen, the tone falls just short of reverence. The trouble with conscientiously colorful writing is that it rapidly palls. After a rain of “venerables,” “redoubtables,” “superbs,” “uncannys,” and similar exclamations (and these at least are good English words in contrast to “wheeler-dealers” and “real estate hotshots”), the reader is left inert. And the anecdotes, even when they are new to the reader, have a flavor that is as musty as though they had already been told thousands of times in hundreds of clubs in dozens of cities. Much too much in this book is the work of the conscientious confectioner who blends his ingredients to suit a market.

On the whole, the Art of Success deals with executives who prefer an older style of corporate control. They are men who tend to work alone with a minimum of formal organization, and that minimum held close beneath the thumb. Trusting their own judgment, they defer little to committees and willingly claim as their own the fruits of their own astuteness. So conspicuous an apparent exception as Harlow Curtice manages to retain in his own hands far more authority than the formal organizational structure of General Motors appears to imply.

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The Executive Life is quite a different kind of book from The Art of Success—much more engaging and much more nearly successful because it tells a tale of two conflicts instead of a series of stories of men born to succeed. The first conflict is between the executives who share the attitudes of the heroes of the Art of Success and those younger ones who are graduated from leading business schools like Harvard and Wharton. The younger group has been taught a new set of doctrines. Within the organization they see the executive’s function as that of winning the cooperation of workers and colleagues. Diffusion of responsibility through committees is preferred to clear lines of authority emanating from the top. The ambition to excel that is perhaps natural to young men must be muted and, in any event, should take the acceptable shape of superior talent in cooperation. The emphasis of the managerial art shifts from the manipulation of things, the careful coordination of technical processes, to the manipulation of people.

The executive’s proper behavior toward individuals and groups outside his organization is a simple extension of this doctrine of human relations. The key aim is to win public acceptance and ultimately public support, not only for the organization’s product, but also for the organization’s personality and ethos. Hence the “institutional” flavor of so much recent business advertising, which, like that of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, puts less emphasis on the product sold than on the benevolence of the seller.

At its best, this desire to win prestige for a business enterprise is the effect, not of a wish to manipulate opinion in the interests of the manipulator, but rather of the sincere belief that cooperation advances the interests of both seller and buyer much as cooperation welds into fruitful harmony employer and employee. These younger executives, almost inevitably subordinate in the executive hierarchy to older men, do their best to convince, convert, and, if need be, circumvent the older executives. And the cold logic of the actuarial table promises them the future.

But even though the younger executives are fated to win out over the older ones, another, more subtle struggle rages within their own breasts whose outcome remains yet uncertain. As this book testifies, most executives when they start out set modest limits to their explicit objectives. Fed upon the fact and folklore of ulcers, coronary attacks, and tranquillizing pills, they seek security in the shape of a job which yields modest income for moderate effort. Evenings and weekends are to be free to spend with families and friends in the full flowering of the domestic and the social affections. The symbol of this kind of ambition is the barbecue pit. But the young partisans of limited liability in life soon encounter obstacles. The simplest is the discrepancy between their conception of a “modest” income and what “modest” incomes can really buy. If David Riesman’s illuminating report of an interview with a Princeton senior is as illustrative as it appears to be of the typical attitudes of novice executives, that senior will either enlarge his income objectives well above the stated $15,000, or else lop off those gracious homes, large families, private schools, European trips, and small power boats which now strike him as essential to a moderate scale of living. Under the consumption pressures of our society the chances are he will choose the first alternative—groups considerably larger than the senior class at Princeton do. But it is a choice that means hard work and, worse still, competition with fellow aspirants. Pyramids have the nasty habit of narrowing, their sides seem to grow ever more steep as the air around them thins; but the rewards of successful climbing come to be ever more alluring.

At some point in the climb, moderation vanishes and the not quite so young executive begins to take work home evenings, drop into the office on Saturday to tidy up and to be seen by his superiors, and, despite his vows, neglect his family. Then, truly, he is caught. And it is then, too, that the second, the internal, struggle begins. He has been taught and genuinely believes in the public relations, cooperation, and team play which he preaches. Yet, if he has executive talent, he also has faith in his own judgment, and a healthy attachment to his own ego. Because he knows what is right, he chafes at the time wasted in committee meetings—and chafes all the more because he is convinced that it would be wrong to complain. The old-style executive pounded desks if not subordinates. The new-style executive cannot, and no wholesome substitutes present themselves. Fortune, which admires the social arts and the civilized scruples of the new man, cannot repress its nostalgia for old-fashioned individualism. The scruples of the new man mean nervous tension, repressed emotion, and muffled conflict, for he cannot manifest ambition, hostility, or dominance. Is such a frustrating situation stable? Will not these new executives, in a desperate bid for freedom, revert to ancestral type and try to dominate their environment instead of adjust to it? These questions the Executive Life leaves open.

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The most ambitious of the three books is W. H. Whyte’s The Organization Man. It is the only one whose author, a single individual, speaks apparently for himself and not for his periodical. It is a picture of the future, if we assume that the young executive described in the Executive Life will actually come into his birthright. Nor does Mr. Whyte intend his summary to apply only to businessmen, but also to civil servants, scientists, and teachers—to all occupations where organization and its new ethos have penetrated.

Mr. Whyte’s book is an interesting one, full of entertaining stories about the meaning of “belongingness” and “togetherness,” about the ways in which organizations hire and shape the personalities of their servants, and about the new suburbia in which that shaping is continued. Moreover, these details have more than anecdotal value: (hey really illustrate the author’s major themes. Mr. Whyte’s reading in sociology, industrial organization, and even in the wastelands of the educational journals has been wide. What he concentrates upon is the meaning of the new organization. And his own worries are those of a civilized, humane member, not of an organization, but of society; he is concerned about the substitution of the group for the individual, the growing sameness of life, the increasing conformity of behavior, the declining literacy of readers and writers, about “belongingness” and “groupiness” and the rise of a “social ethic” in place of the Protestant one. On every one of these points Whyte appears to stand with the critics of organization rather than with its defenders. Like a social scientist, he seeks to understand why the false god of diffused responsibility, which is the heart of the social ethic, has supplanted the truer ideal of individual responsibility contained in the Protestant Ethic. And finally, like a moralist, he sees the remedy as lying in change of individual conduct. In intent, this is a serious book by a man little willing to swallow contemporary stereotypes.

But it is a failure. What is wrong is a genuine ambiguity of moral vision that is reflected in the style and the tone of the book, and whose inevitable result is so to weaken its message as to render it meaningless. Two quotations will reveal Mr. Whyte’s confusion of values. Here is the first:

In further institutionalizing the great power of the majority, we are making the individual come to distrust himself. We are giving him a rationalization for the unconscious urging to find an authority that would resolve the burdens of free choice. We are tempting him to reinterpret the group pressures as a release, authority as freedom, and that this quest assumes a moral guise makes it only the more poignant. Of all forms of wanton self-destruction, the Englishman A. A. Bowman once observed, there is none more pathetic than that in which the human individual demands that in the vital relationships of life he be treated not as an individual but as a member of some organization.

Fair enough. If the style lacks elegance or grace, it possesses conviction. But listen to Mr. Whyte’s other voice:

How did he get that way? His elders taught him to be that way. In this chapter I am going to take up the content of his education and argue that a large part of the U. S. educational system is preparing people badly for the organization society—precisely because it is trying so very hard to do it. My charge rests on the premise that what the organization man needs most from education is the intellectual armor of the fundamental disciplines. It is indeed an age of group action, of specialization, but this is all the more reason the organization man does not need the emphases of a training “geared for modern man.” The pressures of organization life will teach that. But they will not teach him what the schools and the colleges can—some kind of foundation, some sense of where we came from, so that he can judge where he is, and where he is going and why.

The first passage is by a critic of organization who is horrified by its excesses. The second is by an organization man anxious to improve the quality of organization. If Mr. Whyte is both men, he is especially the second. What is that second man like? He is the worst sort of well-meaning practical man. “It is indeed an age of group action,” he says. The organization is here; we must accept it. Other values are important too, but in Mr. Whyte’s context they turn out to be utilitarian, useful from the organization’s special point of view. Thus he tells us that it is a mistake for college students to center their attention on engineering and business administration. It is more practical for them to take the fundamental disciplines.

The fatal weakness of this argument is its conversion of ends into means. The best reason to study philosophy and literature is not the ultimate financial value of an acquaintance with them; commercial law and economic geography would promise larger returns. The best reason is the gratification they yield to the “instinct of idle curiosity,” as Veblen so aptly put it. But Mr. Whyte, following the good organization man’s instinct to meet organization on its own ground, discards all those stronger arguments with which he is familiar when he is away from the organization. How do we defend Lamb, Swift, and Shakespeare (the list is Mr. Whyte’s)?

If technicians of “business writing” and the psychologists have been able to denature English into a “communication” science, it is because the greater relevance of English has been left undrawn.

And this in the long run means a less useful English. Who has the most to teach us about any subject? The geniuses—or the also-rans? It is to such as Lamb and Swift and Shakespeare that we should look and not to the prose engineers. The great models of thought and expression can seem far removed from our own immediate problems, but almost for this detachment they are the greatest guide of all. It is the universals, not the particulars, that are important; only through them can we learn that simplicity is the product of thought, rather than the mechanics of chopping the number of sentences per hundred words. It is a long and tough discipline, yet in the long run what is more downright practical?

Moral? Read Shakespeare and learn how to write technical reports.

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Am I exaggerating to make my case? I think not. Mr. Whyte tells the story of a series of articles for Fortune written by himself and his colleagues on the role of the wives of executives. A lively enough group of articles, they described the growing tendency of management to interview the wives of prospective executives, the social pitfalls in wait for the maladroit wife, and the importance placed on a proper feminine attitude to the advancement of one’s husband. What did the authors mean? According to Whyte, they wished only to ridicule practices at best ridiculous and at worst oppressive. What happened? Mr. Whyte tells us:

Soon articles began to appear in trade journals and the women’s pages of newspapers on “the wife problem.” Congratulations to Fortune, they said, for breaking the ice and showing how wrong was the old hands-off policy. The rules of the game we had paraphrased tongue-in-cheek were reprinted verbatim as psychologically sound guides for peace of mind in corporate life; worse still, the examples of company wife programs we had described were stimulating other companies into devising even more stringently controlled programs.

This horror story is told with regret but also with pride in the large splash produced. Missing is the emotion of shame. The articles were a triumph of ambiguity. Mr. Whyte’s friends could read them and laugh with him, and possibly also at all the people who failed to get their point. And who were the latter? None other than the company presidents, vice-presidents, and other executives who were in a position to accept or reject the recommendations of a responsible trade periodical. That is to say: the key group of readers for which Fortune is designed. (The magazine is not aimed at the practicing ironists of college English departments.) Has Mr. Whyte escaped responsibility by retrospectively pointing to the tongue stuck in his cheek? I don’t think so. What I do think is that he made an ethically comprehensible but also ethically shaky effort to enjoy the best of two worlds. If he had explicitly preached the methods he mocked, the results would have been almost the same.

Another tale Mr. Whyte tells is a moral one addressed to candidates for jobs with those large corporations that subject applicants to personality tests designed to assess their compatibility with the organization. If they memorize the following catechism, Whyte advises them, their scores will be high and their offers many:

I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more.

I like things pretty much the way they are.

I never worry much about anything.

I don’t care for books or music much.

I love my wife and children.

I don’t let them get in the way of company work.

Your performance will be superlative if you carry with you into the examination room these additional cautions: “Be empathic to the values of the Test maker. Choose your neurosis. Don’t be too dominant. Incline to conservatism. Don’t split hairs.”

Is Mr. Whyte simply joking, merely parodying? Read in isolation, his discussion might just possibly produce this conclusion in a charitable soul. But the sour after-taste which his chapter on personality testing, and even more his appendix “How to Cheat on Personality Tests,” induce, suggests a good deal more than a moderately entertaining spoof. Once more Mr. Whyte has a message, and it can be fairly summarized in the following terms. The organization ultimately wishes us all well. In any event it is the source of the income which we all want in order to enjoy a sound middle-class standard of living. The organization also demands of its minions a certain kind of personality. It is wrong of the organization to demand this conformity, partly on ethical grounds (is not a man’s soul his own?), but most importantly because the conformist is in the end a poor executive. Therefore the intelligent student confronted with a personality test will cheat. With his mentor’s trot in his hand, he will give the proper answers because he wants the rewards of the organization, and because also he knows better than the organization what is good for the organization.

Do not rebel, Mr. Whyte seems to say; it will cost you money if you enter those few areas of economic endeavor where the organization is not yet overwhelmingly powerful. Rather manipulate your superiors within the organization for their and your own good, as they think they are manipulating you. Manipulate others as you would have them manipulate you, but do it first. In implying all this Whyte accepts the standards of the organization, which exclude the criteria of truth and relevance because they lie outside the context of immediate advantage. Truth becomes sheerly instrumental (the Marxist analogy is inescapable), and in fighting the organization we become indistinguishable from its servants. It makes little difference in such a world whether the student of Whyte bends the organization to his will, or the organization triumphs over the apprentice manipulator. They are birds of a feather.

Once more Mr. Whyte is surprised because some of his readers took him seriously enough to read his article on personality testing, which originally appeared in Fortune, as a serious endorsement of personality tests. Why should they not? The moral ambiguity from which the piece suffers is heightened by uncertainties of style. To put the matter kindly, Mr. Whyte’s writing is careless. To put it more properly, he lacks feeling alike for the word, the sentence, and the paragraph. To take stray items from what could be an extensive list, he writes phrases or words like “the glamor one’; “as I will take up later’; “contemporaryism’; and “yen.” When, therefore, in speaking of the errors and fallacies of the organization mind he writes “concretized,” even the sophisticated reader must wonder whether he is satirizing the language of his presumed opponents or whether he means this word in the same good earnest as he means other no less horrible words. Where there is so little precision in language and so much uncertainty of purpose, no reader can be blamed for accepting what he reads at face value.

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Mr. Whyte’s book is the clearest expression of Fortune’s view of the world, and Fortune is a force in the making of American business ideology. The Fortune view of man in the organization can be summarized in six propositions: (1) Not alone business, but also education, science, publishing, and religion are organized in larger and larger units administered necessarily according to bureaucratic principles. (2) The organization produces a mixture for good and evil like everything else human. The good includes security of tenure, humanity in the treatment of its instruments, and the increasing provision of the important goods and services coveted by most of us. The evil is in the pressure toward conformity and the erosion of individuality. The danger is sameness, the gray flannel personality within the gray flannel suit. (3) The organization tends to seek men who conform to its own image, not because its leaders wish others evil, but only because they conceive that men of this stamp will be happiest in the organization, work best in and for it. (4) The organization is wrong about (3). Progress depends upon originality. The organization which stifles originality within its own ranks fails in the end to achieve its own potential. (5) The wise-individual bores from within, actually subverting the organization for the organization’s own good, by the secret practice of individualism. (6) The result can only be happier individuals and more productive organizations.

A book, not an essay, would be necessary to display the full implications of this view of the world. Some of the most important are also the plainest. Individuals are urged to practice the very techniques of manipulation, indirection, and—to be blunt—untruth which are deplored when practiced by the organization itself. Mr. Whyte’s and Fortune’s attitude toward society reflects the old human tendency to have one’s cake and eat it too. Indeed, it erects this tendency into a moral imperative.

Another liability of this view of the world is that it is too ready to swallow commonplaces whole. It has not been demonstrated, for example, that large organizations are always more efficient than small ones. Bureaucracy implies dysfunctions as well as functions, and the advantages of the small organization in flexibility and freedom from red tape are very real. Allied to this illusion is another, the belief in the irreversibility of all present social tendencies. There are anti-bureaucratic as well as pro-bureaucratic tendencies at work in our society. The apparent conversion of the young to the splendors of the large organization may not survive our next severe economic setback. Only organization men believe that organization has outlawed depressions.

Mr. Whyte and his colleagues have done a real service by disclosing some of the reasoning, and some of the confusions in that reasoning, of the more enlightened proponents of the case for organization. But a full critique of organization will never come from its own employees, not because they fear the hand that feeds them, but because they are part of that hand’s operations. We must await the best accounts from truly disinterested observers, or from refugees from organization.

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¹ See his New Men of Power.

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