THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 3, 1996 TAG: 9601030045
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BARRETT R. RICHARDSON
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
``The traditional company man with his confidence in annual increments and a growing pension is as extinct as an eighteenth-century clergyman. His decline has taken nearly everyone by surprise, particularly politicians who preferred not to face up to it; yet it is causing one of the biggest social upheavals of the twentieth century, and its repercusions are still spreading.''
DEVELOPING THIS thesis in ``Company Man: The Rise and Fall of Corporate Life'' (Random House, 354 pp., $27.50), journalist Anthony Sampson paints a gloomy picture of current business realities. In his sweeping social history of the economic changes, Sampson makes clear that workers have become disposable commodities. ``Temps,'' the ``hired guns'' of employment, have become fixtures in the workplace.
Sampson documents the downsizing of corporations and the upsizing of corporate kings' compensation to obscene proportions, as well as the role headhunters play in fueling momentum for corporate chiefs' salary escalation. Sampson's fascination with the life and role of organization men began in the company town of Billingham in northeastern England where his father was a research scientist with the biggest British chemical corporation.
Sampson previously has penetrated business facades to write ``The Sovereign State of ITT,'' ``The Arms Bazaar'' and ``The Money Lenders.''
The author begins with a fast-forward glimpse into the future of the business organization, focusing on what he describes as the ``weird frontier of innovation in north-west America,'' where Microsoft employees epitomize a new species of company people.
After presenting a lively history of the forerunners of today's corporations and profiling many contemporary firms, Sampson describes how shocks from corporate raiders, computers and Asian competition ``battered the confidence of Western executives and forced them to rethink their theories of management and their role in society.''
In response to the challenge, many companies aped Japanese management methods by adopting ``organizational development'' programs for ``continuous improvement.'' Designed to increase productivity by giving workers a feeling of empowerment, and thus making them happier, in practice such programs allowed some senior managers to manipulate their subordinates to protect themselves. The system is further flawed by some managers' inflexibility and resistance to the changes that they impose on others.
Corporate purging of huge office bureaucracies and the resultant downsizing of employees to cut costs and increase profits to benefit shareholders, Sampson argues, have put thousands of middle-management workers on the street. Meanwhile vast hordes of blue-collar workers were put out to pasture by automation and cheap foreign labor.
Thus ``company men'' who had labored loyally for years expecting continued upward mobility and job security were abandoned.
Broader representation of both employees and shareholders in corporate governance will provide a needed counterforce to corporate tyranny, according to Sampson. In other words, ``The most effective pressure must come from the company people themselves. It is the managers, for all of their past mistakes and weakness, who remain the keys to production and prosperity; and they, more than anyone, suffer from the disruption and disintegration of corporate loyalty.''
As a crash course in current economics, ``Company Man'' is lively and thought-provoking reading. MEMO: Barrett R. Richardson is a retired staff editor who teaches English
part-time at Old Dominion University and Tidewater Community College. by CNB