When Managers Rebel

When managers rebel

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When managers rebel

David Courpasson Professor in Organizational Sociology EMLYON Business School

& Jean-Claude Thoenig Research Director, University Paris-Dauphine and CNRS, and former professor, INSEAD

Translated from the French by Matthew Cush

The publishers wish to thank The OCE Research Centre at EMLYON Business School and Eurl Thoenig for their gracious assistance in making this English translation possible. This work has been published with the aid of the French Ministry of Culture – Centre National du Livre. Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture – Centre National du Livre.

© David Courpasson & Jean-Claude Thoenig 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Originally published in French under the title Quand les cadres se rebellent. Copyright Vuibert Paris 2008. First published in English 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27786–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

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CONTENTS

Introduction: what on earth am I doing here? The road to rebellion An overlooked phenomenon A phenomenon unlike any other An outline of this book and its players Chapter 1 An offer I couldn’t refuse 1.1 Patrick and Scotland 1.2 Michael and the redundancy plan 1.3 Three observations for further discussion

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Chapter 2 Early signs of rebellion 2.1 The disarray of the rebel who dares 2.2 Bruno, shaken by his own boldness 2.3 A state of confusion 2.4 Private lives intervene 2.5 How Philip signed on to an existing rebellion 2.6 Whose fault is it?

9 10 11 14 15 18 21

Chapter 3 Management spaces 3.1 Prison principles 3.2 Like a playground 3.3 Fuel for rebellion 3.4 The spark that sets off the blaze 3.5 The force of the locker room

24 24 27 29 34 36

Chapter 4 The dynamics of rebellion 4.1 Getting others involved 4.2 The gestation of rebellion 4.3 Rebellion and change

40 40 53 58

Chapter 5 What happens tomorrow to today’s rebels? 5.1 Those who leave 5.2 Those who stay

70 70 77

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5.3 Those who move up 5.4 Those who change

83 88

Chapter 6 Creative rebellion 6.1 The different levels of creative rebellion 6.2 The drivers of creative rebellion 6.3 Different types of creative rebellion 6.4 Creative rebels’ resources

91 92 96 101 102

Chapter 7 When private lives fight back 7.1 Go-betweens with the other world 7.2 The forbidden zone 7.3 Qualitative and local stakes

109 109 116 122

Chapter 8 Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle 8.1 Never forget the people down below 8.2 This is no paper tiger 8.3 The ruses of power 8.4 Other generations, same lack of trust 8.5 Bureaucracy forever

125 125 127 130 133 137

Chapter 9 Polyarchy as an alternative 9.1 Dealing with divergent views in political terms 9.2 Adversaries, not enemies 9.3 Polyarchy, not anarchy

144 144 149 157

Conclusion: the future beckons A mixed picture Various possible outcomes

163 163 166

Notes Bibliography Index of names Index of rebels Index of subjects

170 174 177 179 180

INTRODUCTION: WHAT ON EARTH AM I DOING HERE?

The road to rebellion It’s 5:40 a.m. Dozens of people mill around on the platform waiting for the express train to pull into the station. Grey, black, coats, ties – central casting’s idea of businessmen. Their faces are weary even before the sun has risen. They’ve already turned on their mobile phones and picked up their financial, sports and satirical newspapers. Laptops are ready for action. Everything is ready. They had to get up without waking the children, drive to the station, find a space in the underground parking garage, ride up the escalators, find the right platform, stamp their tickets, and wait. All the time thinking that something’s got to give. “Sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m doing here, in this first-class compartment, why I’m turning on my computer, while outside my window the frost-covered rural landscape beckons. Why am I doing exactly the opposite of what I would be doing if I was something other than what I am? Why does the guy sitting behind me feel like me, but won’t admit it? In fact, he doesn’t even realize that he feels just like me. Why are we – the fifty or so men and a few women – why are we here, without wanting to be? None of us will ever own up that we’re all thinking more or less the same thing – about how silly it is to be on this express train at 5:40 a.m., and when we get off, it’s only to drag ourselves through the Tube. All of this just to go do something that, when all is said and done, doesn’t amount to much?” Something’s got to give... but probably not today. Any gnawing regrets they may have will melt away, suppressed as usual. And yet, one day, one of them may ask, in the train or at the office, vii

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Introduction “What am I doing here? Why am I doing these things for my company?” And on that day, the road to rebellion will open up before him.

An overlooked phenomenon This book is about rebellion, revolt, protest.1 The dictionary reveals some striking similarities between these three words. Rebellion means an act of disobedience, insubordination or opposition. Revolt means the rejection of an established social order, indignant opposition to rules or an authority. Protest suggests controversy, debate, denial or disavowal. This book will avail itself of the rich vocabulary surrounding the rejection of an established social order or rules imposed by an established authority. One day, out of the blue, when not even they are expecting it, employees, managers and supervisors rebel, revolt and protest. “That does it! I can’t go on like this. They’ve gone too far. They can’t make me toe the line any more! For what? I’ve had enough!” They refuse to maintain the pretense. And they are not afraid to say so out loud. What’s more, they refuse to back down. They who in many cases had been held up as models of success at their companies, they on whom the senior executives were counting, they for whom the path to the top seemed to beckon. Are such reactions, which on the surface seem irrational or irresponsible, worth writing about? After all, perhaps it’s just a rough spot to be endured, a blown fuse, a lost temper, a misplaced word. Too much accumulated fatigue, family stress, nerves frayed by the challenges to be met. A little rest and everything will be fine. Maybe a session with a counselor and everything will go back to normal. Rebellion and protest are to be taken seriously – precisely because they are not usually taken seriously, or at least not seriously enough. We see it coming without really seeing it. Or we ignore it altogether. And even when we do take notice, we don’t place much importance on it.

Introduction It was entirely by chance that, as sociologists, we took an interest in executive rebellion. Cases of this were occurring in companies where we were carrying out surveys and running training programmes. Even so, we initially overlooked them entirely, or ignored them, as if they just didn’t make sense. For several years now we have observed, especially in interviews, how power and managerial roles have been transformed in multinational chemicals, energy and building materials companies, as well as in regional companies (David Courpasson;2 Claude Michaud and Jean-Claude Thoenig3). We have also run training programmes for managers of these companies. In the thousands of pages of notes we took during several hundred interviews, we conscientiously noted down references to accounts of revolt and protest, accounts whose sources were either heroes or mere observers. We never thought of using these stories. We even forgot all about them. They did not fit in with what we were doing. They seemed isolated, tangents that didn’t lead anywhere. That is, until three events occurred within the span of a few weeks. The first event was one day when we were quite surprised as, out of the blue, a manager we had interviewed a year previously called us, saying “I have something to tell you that should really interest you as sociologists. Let’s have lunch.” So we got together over lunch. The manager wanted to tell us why and how he had headed a noisy protest at his company against a senior management decision regarding a certain research and development (R&D) project. He had evidently been shaken by the whole experience. The second event occurred when speaking at a colloquium on our research report based on staff interviews at a bank he directed, the CEO openly wondered why we had made no mention of the work stoppages and street demonstrations in which employees from several of the bank’s branches had taken part. These employees had balked at a modification of the company’s performance review practices that had been imposed unilaterally by the head office. He asked, “How could you not have included this in your report?” It’s true that we couldn’t remember it, even though we’d spent several weeks at the bank.

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Introduction The third event took place one Saturday morning at the supermarket, when one of us ran into someone whom he had interviewed a few years previously. The young man explained that he had voluntarily resigned his position as a supervisor and had become an associate professor at a vocational training school. In spite of a relative decline in social status and income, or because of it, he felt that he had escaped a world that he could not stand any more – the world of the large corporation. We soon decided that executive protest and rebellion are worthy topics in their own right. We looked again at the notes we had made since 1990. We undertook more systematic observations. We unravelled about forty unusual cases of protest, from start to finish. In short, we decided to take executive rebellion very seriously. Revolt and protest occur far more often than one might at first imagine. It is impossible to give an order of magnitude. There are no broad statistics or even approximations. Moreover, these are often quiet incidents that are not shared with the protagonists’ networks or communities. Even so, all we have to do is to look closely: there is a great deal of executive rebellion out there. To take one example, at a very large multinational company that otherwise is considered quite socially responsible and employee-friendly, we interviewed and trained more than 400 mid-level and upper-level executives – factory managers, sales managers and so on. Out of those 400-odd people, fourteen eventually said at some point, “No, I won’t play the game any longer.” Fourteen out of 400 is not insignificant. This book is a first. A bibliographical search shows that there are almost no books or articles that look at this issue head-on and in depth. What little attention had been paid to the phenomenon diluted it. Ready-made explanations are of common use. A typical justification might be “Isn’t this what companies are inevitably coming to at the start of the twenty-first century?”. Or “Life is tough for company employees, isn’t it?”. Reference is also made to individual pathologies such as stress, split personality syndromes, and so on. Medical treatment by psychologists is perceived as the appropriate solution. In any case and by definition rebellion is bad. It expresses a symptom of societal or mental disorganization. It is an outcome of modern capitalism, the counterpart of an iron law of globalization and greed governing

Introduction companies. This book will show just how hasty and facile are such conclusions. Executive rebellion is a unique phenomenon, unlike any other. It is not inevitable, and it is often for the worst, though it can also be for the best.

A phenomenon unlike any other Managers and supervisors do sometimes protest within companies in ways that are completely unlike labour movements, which fit within well-worn trade-union or political frameworks. Managers do not in general lead work stoppages or occupy factories. They march under no flag. No committee speaks up for them. Their demands don’t deal with salaries (we want more) or working hours (we want less). Nor are they driven by any sort of antiwhatever ideology. They don’t aim to transform society or sweep away neo-capitalism. They don’t make the front page. They lie low. Those who do protest keep it to themselves. At the same time, they are marked indelibly. Far from protesting over salaries or working hours, their rebellions deal with something of an entirely different order: how the company is managed. Talking about rebellion or protest is no easy task. It’s a real minefield. Everyone seems to have preconceived notions of it, however misguided. And the media are always ready to poison the debate with their clichés and buzz-words. Revolt, rebellion and protest have sometimes evoked a compassionate interpretation by specialists in this area, along with an apocalyptic vision of the working world. For example, executive burnout was one explanation broached in 1970s, and this gave way to the notion of executive apathy. Loss of social identity, loss of company status, general lack of interest; many explanations have been put forward to explain the process of unravelling. According to these explanations, rebellion ultimately leads to a destructive pathology. Executives are suffering. Burnout, which is a state of professional weariness that rest does nothing to cure, is lying in wait, claims the pioneering work of Robert Golembiewski and his associates.4 Closet alcoholism is said to be relatively widespread, and not just among lower-level employees. Executives commit

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Introduction suicide at their workplace, and so on. Such employees must therefore feel that the least bad thing that can still happen to them, before their fate is finally sealed, is for some of them to denounce the prison that their company has become, to decry the insatiable pressure of management. According to this line of thinking, rebellion is simply a warning sign or a distress signal from people who are sinking and can no longer pull themselves out. Others see revolt, rebellion and protest on another level, that of disobedience and, on top of that, disorder, disorganization and lack of discipline. These undermine the company’s prospects. The very people who are being relied on to make the company a success – its managers and supervisors – dare to set a bad example. Like a bunch of spoiled children, they are biting the hand that feeds them. It’s true that, nowadays, authority for authority’s sake is no longer credible. Having just one head honcho is so twentieth century. However – according to this line of thinking – it is considered heresy and sacrilege for managers to balk when their bosses put them through ordeals to test their loyalty and their potential – witness the 5:40 a.m. express train. The world has changed, after all. Managers are no longer willing to go all-out, to give everything to their jobs and their companies. The new generation has been brought up on flexitime and cocooning, to say nothing of channel-surfing. Nothing matters any more, least of all loyalty to one’s employer. This book deals with executive rebellion, revolt and protest as straightforwardly as possible, avoiding sentimentality and preconceived notions as much as possible, and, above all, by observing the facts, and nothing but the facts. Who are these rebels? What is driving them? What, and who, exactly are they protesting against? What is their ultimate aim, and what do they hope to change? How does a process of rebellion and protest unfold in concrete terms through time and space? How do companies interpret rebellion, and how do they react? What are the ultimate consequences for company stakeholders? We intend to add some shading to a picture so often painted in stark black and white, and to draw some conclusions that might seem paradoxical or counterintuitive. There might even be a

Introduction message in all this, a message that is in fact quite optimistic and positive. Rebellious managers are not necessarily those whom everyone has given up on, outcasts or non-conformists. Quite the contrary, in fact: sometimes it is those who had been recruited from the groups of tomorrow’s potential elites, who were placed on the lowest rung of the golden ladder to the top, and who then, for the next five or ten years, gave their all to their careers. And then, one day, they rebelled. Moreover, while rebels may question the way the top executives run things, they don’t turn their backs on their companies; rather the opposite, in fact. They pour their energy into finding solutions, into seeking other ways of doing things, ways that are often just as effective, or even more so. They continue to support their company. They don’t act against its interests; they propose alternatives. They are creative and responsible. Rebelling is no walk in the park. It’s a traumatic experience that leaves scars that often do not heal. For the rebel, the psychological burden of questioning one’s identity, career and job is traumatic. For the company, the risk of losing executives who, up to that point, had been deemed the most promising, is traumatic. At the same time, protest is a unique opportunity to bring about change – for the rebels themselves, whether they stay or leave, and for the company, which is the better for it, whether it admits it or not. Rebellion is ultimately less disruptive than constructive, as it serves two purposes. One of these is to reconcile corporate life with its executives’ private lives. The other is to allow the protesters to bring society at large and life outside work into the company and the business sphere. There’s something to be said for rebellion. At the same time, it is a cause for concern, particularly when current discussions of management practices, frankly, sound hollow, and when the gap between companies and society becomes a chasm.

An outline of this book and its players Rebellions don’t announce themselves to the world beforehand; they erupt suddenly and unexpectedly. Chapter 1 recounts two

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Introduction true stories; stories that could happen to any of us. They are of people who had toed the line perfectly until, one day, they were offered the kind of chance that one doesn’t usually turn down. Chapter 2 describes the circumstances that exist prior to protest. Amid psychological turmoil, the executive brings his/her private life into the corporation, the private life that the company persists in overlooking, or even trampling on. While managers usually shrug off the many demands and pressures from the company that encroach on their private lives, a day comes when something pushes them over the brink, when they say “Enough is enough”. Rebellion plays out in a certain setting. Chapter 3 pinpoints and describes that setting. Rebellion cannot be put down to the whims of a spoilt child, problems with one’s love life or mere bad moods that will get better eventually. Companies are neither prisons nor playgrounds. Rebellion is fuelled by failure at the top. How does a process of rebellion unfold? Chapter 4 shows that executive rebels don’t simply want to trash the place. They aren’t trying to destroy the company. Protesting or rebelling does not mean doing just anything, any way, and at any time – quite the reverse. Unwritten rules exist along a well-marked path. One of those rules is to provide alternative proposals for management. Successful rebellion requires a lot of know-how. What becomes of executive rebels? Chapter 5 looks at their lives once their rebellion has paused, or come to an end. Our stories suggest a wide variety of personal destinies. Some executive rebels lose and leave; others win and stay. All are marked by their experience for a long time afterward. What becomes of their rebellion? Chapter 6 provides an assessment from the point of view of company management. It turns out that there is a surprising and constructive side to rebellion for the company, because rebellion sparks creativity. Not only do the rebels themselves change the paths of their own lives; their rebellion brings new forms of culture, organization and empowerment to the company. Rebellion uncovers and builds on new ways of acting together, new ways of producing, and of interacting with society and serving its needs.

Introduction Is executive rebellion a harbinger of some sort of executive class struggle? Might executives begin to dabble in traditional tradeunion practices? Chapter 7 stresses the unique character and originality of executives’ ways of protesting. Their demands are not quantitative, but rather a blunt, outright rejection of companies’ encroachment on a forbidden zone – that of their private lives. Protests are an opportunity to bring society back into the company. Chapter 8 shows how rebellion is associated with, if not fed by, a single-minded conception and practice of management style. Subordinates are given just enough to keep them quiet. Managers are expected, first and foremost, to take orders from their superiors. At the same time, managerial control is subtle. Its reins are gentle and faceless, not brutal and personal. And it is able to deal with protest, if not absorb it, relatively successfully. Chapter 9 shows how protest and rebellion can be seen as normal antagonistic processes, and can even be made beneficial, constructive and effective in their collective impact – that is, as long as there is a change of mindset, a way of seeing and interpreting the world; in short, of adopting another way of governing the social and human fabric that constitutes a company. In our conclusion we sum up the main lessons we have drawn from our observations and discuss the growing interdependence within companies. In this new environment, it is more important than ever to provide meaning and to create identities. Seven accounts of rebellion will serve as our reference points. These are actual cases that we have observed. The identities of protagonists and companies have been disguised, for obvious reasons.5 Here are the rebels, in order of appearance: ●

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Patrick is a 33-year-old engineer. He also has an MBA and heads a regional subsidiary of Construct, a leading multinational construction and civil engineering company. Michael, also an engineer by training. At 32, he is the production manager of a plant that is part of Strand, a European company manufacturing fishing line. Bruno is 38 years old. He is in charge of setting up green-field building materials stores across China. Brick, the company

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which employees him, is a world leader in its field. He was born and educated in a European Union country. His parents were immigrants from China. Philip trained as a biochemist. At 40, he acts as an R&D project manager for Agro, a leader in the field of agrochemical products. Mark, 42 years old, has a PhD in microbiology, is a colleague of Philip’s, and a project manager at the same company, Agro. Charles serves as a branch manager at a mid-size bank called Bank. He is 38. He has an advanced degree in management studies. Martin is 32 years old. He graduated from a business school. He is a marketing manager at the headquarters of Bank. Julie is a 41-year-old production manager at a steel mill owned by Mill, a global industrial conglomerate. Trained as an engineer, she took part in a training programme in applied social sciences.

CHAPTER 1

An offer I couldn’t refuse Perfectly normal managers one day join the resistance. They at last speak out: “No way! I can’t stand it any more! I’m going to give them a piece of my mind!” They behave in a way that undermines the order and good manners that are generally the rule in the workplace. Nobody really knows why they do so, though everyone seems to have a theory. Rebels leave their colleagues agog and their superiors angry. Until then, they had given every appearance of being “normal”: they obeyed their superiors, were devoted to their work and accomplished seemingly impossible tasks. Nothing suggested that they would one day suddenly turn on their bosses, especially when those same bosses had just made them a generous offer of the sort that is not normally turned down when you’re the lucky recipient. The accounts of Patrick and Michael illustrate how managers become rebels. They had been noted by their companies as having a high potential. And here they are, turning down a generous, or even exceptional, offer.

1.1

Patrick and Scotland

Patrick is 33 years old. After earning an engineering degree from a prestigious university, he went on to obtain an MBA from a top-tier institution in England. He began his career as a consultant at a major auditing firm. He had worked for two years as head of the construction department at Construct, a French company that is part of a major international construction and civil engineering group. After three years of married life, 1

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When managers rebel he received the biggest promotion that an ambitious 30-year-old might dream of – he became the father of little Elodie, now two months old. The story begins on a Friday evening in February, at 10 p.m. After a tiring two-day business trip in south-west France, Patrick is relaxing at home with his wife, Helen, watching TV when the phone rings. It’s Louis, his boss. Louis, 40 years old, is an outspoken fan of Patrick. He thinks that Patrick has what it takes to go far in the company, and perhaps one day to take the top job. Louis is calling for one simple reason. He has just come out of a meeting with top management, and has great news for Patrick. He has managed to convince the entire management board that Patrick is the right man to take on a project that is strategic for the company – integrating a major testing lab in Scotland that Construct has just bought. The project entails some engineering skills, but, above all, labour relations acumen, as layoffs, both voluntary and involuntary, are planned. This will be the perfect test of Patrick’s managerial skills! The problem, if you can call it that, is that, if Patrick accepts, he will have to leave for Scotland the following Tuesday – just 72 hours later – for an undetermined length of time, probably six to nine months or more, “depending on how fast you can get things moving”, as Louis puts it. In the middle of his enthusiastic presentation, Louis gives Patrick 24 hours to think it over, adding “Of course, you’ll have to talk this over with Helen.” But quickly, as other candidates are straining at the leash. The potential rewards are great – nothing less than ultimately becoming head of the company’s North American business unit before he has even reached the age of 35! At least, that’s what Louis hints at. This dilemma happens all the time in companies. It’s usually called “the dilemma of obedience”. In the so-called liberal management model, the junior manager is perfectly free to say no even if he is under enormous pressure to say yes. But it’s easy to imagine the possible repercussions for Patrick’s career if he does say no. Patrick considers rejecting the offer on the spot, and not just rejecting it, but raising the whole issue of decency and respect: “Isn’t it unreasonable to play around with managers like that?”

An offer I couldn’t refuse He stays up late on Friday night, even though he has already made up his mind not to go. He can think of three main reasons. First, managers of a certain stature are not supposed to be faced with a done deal; and one, moreover, presented with a sugar-coating of apparent generosity. Things have to be clear in business: either the senior executives are going to be generous, or they are attempting to ensnare subordinates by putting them to the test. Patrick places his refusal on a moral plane, in protest at the way the company went about making the offer, using Louis to give the impression that he had a choice, and that the choice he made would be important for the company. What is more, the trap was clumsily set. Patrick felt he had been chosen because he had just become a father. From the choice he makes, it will be easy for the company to see how truly committed he is to being a key executive. Is he willing, like any future self-respecting leader, to set aside his private life? Patrick is thus contesting the underlying model of leadership that looms behind the dilemma. He doesn’t see his managerial life necessarily as being at odds with his personal life. He doesn’t see it as a choice between private and public. But Louis gives him an order, which Patrick finds unacceptable, basically to choose between company life and family life. Not only that, but Patrick doesn’t even like Scotland. Patrick calls Louis on Saturday at 10 p.m. Since Louis is having dinner with friends, he knows he would be expected to put his case quickly, as usual. But Patrick takes his time in explaining to Louis why he is refusing to go to Scotland. Louis hears this with a smile, without appearing surprised. He thanks Patrick for his prompt answer and adds: “See you Monday. We’ll talk about this more at the office.” As he hangs up and sits quietly for some minutes, taking in the consequences of what he has just done, Patrick knows that his days at the company are numbered. In fact, if he goes to the logical conclusion of his refusal to back down, he ought to be numbering them himself, to be consistent with the moral stance that underpinned his choice. He must leave the company.

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When managers rebel He did so three months later. In the office that Monday, he handed Louis his resignation, which Louis accepted without flinching. But without really smiling, either. The company has just missed a huge opportunity in this, ultimately mundane, story of a manager’s turning down an offer that the company thought he couldn’t refuse. Because Patrick’s revolt carried several implied or latent messages, which the company was unable to detect, and which it buried in the noncommital and purely administrative manner in which it handled Patrick’s resignation. In a word, this protest sent a clear criticism to top management about its way of handling labour relations. It suggested that Construct chooses its top managers not primarily for their skills or passion, but by putting them through private ordeals which, in addition, are camouflaged using superficial arguments. Patrick’s refusal suggests that Construct does not respect the lives of its managers, and that it even uses those lives for an ill-defined conception of the common good. Once word got out about Patrick’s decision, it triggered all kinds of conflicting feelings among his colleagues and presumed highpotential peers. Was he right to resign? Is he a coward, afraid of taking up a new challenge? What would I do in his shoes? Patrick’s colleagues take one of two stances. Some call his behavior proof of his extreme individualism: “He didn’t share the company’s strategic objectives. We’ve known that for a long time. This only confirms what we already guessed.” They keep their distance and no longer consider Patrick to be quite one of them. In fact, one of these colleagues later accepted the offer to take on the Scottish project. Three months later, he was back in France with a labour conflict on his hands, involving not only the local staff of the test lab, but also the local municipality. Which, of course, proves nothing. Other colleagues side with Patrick. They feel tied up in his fate and even go so far as to blame senior management for what happened. They rationalize Patrick’s decision in such terms as “They have no right to place someone so coldly and without warning before a personal dilemma”. Four of them will follow in Patrick’s footsteps and leave the company in the following

An offer I couldn’t refuse twelve months – a true talent drain. In other words, Patrick’s act of rebellion had knock-on effects. It triggered and fed an avalanche of discussion, debate and recrimination, over which the company management had no control. Rebellion sends out signals and establishes precedents. It might seem that the company would take notice and, above all, that it would learn to use it to avoid either miscasting – as ultimately it was clear that Patrick was the right candidate for the Scottish project that, in eighteen months, was to see five different heads – or the considerable mistrust generated among highpotential managers by the veiled, piecemeal information that always flows from this type of incident. That didn’t happen; in fact, nothing happened. As for Patrick, he very quickly found a position as a division head for one of the company’s competitors. Three years after the incident, he was being mentioned as a possible head of a major US-based project.

1.2

Michael and the redundancy plan

Michael is 32 years old. An engineer by training, he has worked for five years as production manager in a large factory making fishing line. One December evening, the managing director of the local subsidiary of this company, Strand, which is established on several continents, came to see him in his office. The MD was visiting Michael’s factory, considered to be the group’s showpiece. This was the first time that Michael had met him face to face. Michael detailed for us the message that the director had brought, after the two of them had made the customary small talk: I sensed that he was, at once, proud and embarrassed, which is a strange feeling ... I felt like telling him: “Come on, spit it out! Tell me what you have to say.” It’s true that my boss was not a warm person at all ... Of course he hadn’t come just to shoot the breeze. He told me about the

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When managers rebel shaky earnings of the group’s cassette business, that several sites had to be closed and that drastic decisions had been made. Then came the refrain about how appreciated I was by senior management … that’s when I started to twist and turn in my chair. He ended by telling me that he also came to try out the idea of my becoming the head of a facility in the Ardennes region on the Belgian border with 320 employees, with the clear assignment of shutting down the facility within six months. He said this was an exciting assignment, an emotionally rich one that wouldn’t leave me without battle scars. Then he asked me what I thought. I beat around the bush. I told him how surprised I was, that it was obviously a big deal and that I would have to think about it. I also asked him whether it was an offer or an order. He told me that it was an offer, but that I shouldn’t take too long to decide. I walked him out of my office. He seemed relieved, glad to have got that over with, and glad that the ball was now in the other court. My initial reflex was to call a buddy at work, since I couldn’t keep this to myself. I was torn between two feelings: • Pride, because I thought that maybe they just wanted to see me at work on a tough assignment. And closing a facility is not something that you entrust to just anybody, or at least that’s how I saw it. • Embarrassment, because closing a facility … well, I’m the son of a technician. My father worked in the garment industry and was laid off in the waves of shutdowns in the textile industry in the 1970s. So, as far as I was concerned, I would end up on the other side, on the side of the bastards. In short, it was tough. I had to talk to the HR manager before talking to my wife. The next day, Strand’s human resources director called Michael for a rapid phone interview. She was a career manager whom he had met a total of twice in three years. She drew him a picture of a fast-track career after the “Ardennes test”. This time, Michael was given no choice. Once the facility had been shut down, he would become the boss of another facility deemed to be strategic

An offer I couldn’t refuse by Strand, probably abroad, for three years, with a triumphant return to the Strand headquarters. Or something like that. Michael faced a real dilemma. He wanted to seize the opportunity but at the same time he felt that he couldn’t. He saw the labour relations and human impact of closing a facility. He also saw himself as the manager parachuted in to create upheaval in the lives of some families in Ardennes, lives that probably would not welcome that. And then he would leave six months later for greener pastures, once the “dirty work” had been done. Could he do it? That was exactly what the company was trying to find out about him. How would Michael cope, or not cope, with the moral compromise he would have to make to seize the chance the company was offering him? In fact, he made up his mind quickly: “You can’t be a manager and turn down this kind of job,” he said. “Well, I guess that means I’m not a manager. The company is, in effect, saying I’m not cut out for this business.” And if that’s how they feel … Michael was one of Strand’s best-performing and most appreciated production managers. He had revived a lackluster staff and working process. He had created team spirit in his 80-person unit. The human resources department had singled him out as an excellent manager. And yet, he passed up the offer, ultimately coming to believe that his decision was for the best. The company had pushed out one of its highest-potential managers by asking him to go through a test that was at odds with his personal values, in a way that he did not feel able to endorse. Michael disobeyed his company in declining the offer. At least that was how his superiors interpreted it; they who believe in sacrificial management; they who expect their managers to screen out their non-work lives. Another, more charitable, interpretation is that Michael showed a tremendous amount of character, and that his company was not socially or intellectually equipped to acknowledge that in this case disobedience was in fact an excellent sign, a sign of consistency, a behavioral trait revealing qualities that were essential to closing a site. His company didn’t see things that way. In fact, it was unable to see things in any other way than in black or white: submission or disobedience.

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It interpreted Michael’s attitude as a negative and disappointing act, along the lines of “too bad for him, he didn’t take the opportunity that we offered him … we’ll remember that”.

1.3 Three observations for further discussion The stories of Patrick and Michael suggest three observations that we shall return to in later chapters: ●

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senior management pressures junior managers by appearing flexible but, in fact, is rigid, respecting people in the abstract while ignoring them as individuals; its standards appear tolerant and easygoing, but in fact leave little room for the rest of managers’ lives – their married life, children, life projects, moral values and relations with close colleagues; and executives sometimes stand up to the unblinking, almost feudal domination exercised by companies who ride roughshod over modern management methods.

When a company spots a future manager, especially a highpotential one, it takes many precautions to make sure it has selected the right person. The path of the annointed one is then often like an obstacle course. The chosen ones are more or less aware of the reasons why they are being treated so well and being put through so many rites of passage leading toward a greater destiny, including training sessions, top-level meetings, sponsorship events and, in particular, “trials by fire”. Senior management gives them the sorts of tough assignments only given to fully trusted people. In these trials by fire, the chosen ones are constantly given stark choices: to say yes or no, to be available and cheerful, or to publicly refuse to play along. What is precisely the scope of the rebellions of Patrick and Michael? Their stories, which after all are rather mundane, suggest that being chosen by the firm is not necessarily a lucky break for everyone. It also sometimes has unexpected consequences, for both the chosen one and the firm.

CHAPTER 2

Early signs of rebellion Who becomes a rebel? Anyone can, and without any warning at all, without planning to, and without being predestined to do so. How do people become rebels? When they reject outright a certain fundamental aspect of the culture of the firm where they work every day – the soft constraints the company exerts on its employees; when management assumes an overbearing form of domination; or when people are told to give their all to the firm and end up working against it. The blend of these three ingredients opens the gate to reactions that even the rebels dared not imagine before they accomplished their bold gesture. The following scene was a real event. It was the moment everyone had been awaiting. The CEO of a Swiss multinational watchmaking concern, and a charismatic figure in the international media, walked on stage before an audience of 120 top managers and executives he had summoned to the ballroom of a luxury hotel. Or, rather, he ran, almost charged, on stage. The atmosphere was electric. He spoke: Tomorrow we will again be what we always should have remained: the best in the world. We will awaken the creative forces that are presently dormant in our R&D centres, in our factories and in our subsidiaries. We have no choice. You have no choice. I ask each of you to make a total commitment alongside me. Yes, total. That means no compromises. All your strength, all your time, all your thoughts will be given over to making us successful. There’s no room for anything else. You are to think of nothing else. Some of you may not accept the challenge I’m throwing your way, for whatever 9

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When managers rebel reasons: to spend your weekends playing golf, chasing women, and so on. You are free to choose, it’s up to you. But let’s be clear: if you’re not with us, there’s no point in expecting anything from us. You can always go elsewhere. We don’t look at the clock here. We don’t have time. It’s war out there, and we want to win that war. So don’t come to me and say you’re too busy or that you have other plans later in the evening. I have no patience with petty bourgeois managers who think only of their middle-class comforts, or with fat barons who are perfectly satisfied with their baronial lot, or, for that matter, with the fainthearted. We are movers, shakers and doers. That’s why I’m counting on managers’ total commitment. Your energy, your intelligence, your commitment, that’s what I’m expecting from each of you. One thought, one obsession, and just one. When you want to be a manager, you make no compromises and have no qualms. The room erupted in applause. One mesmerized participant burst out: “We’ll follow a boss like that to the ends of the earth!” His colleague sitting nearby was much more circumspect, however: “Is all this reasonable? Where are we going?” He seems a little hesitant, even skeptical, embarrassed. Are these the early signs of rebellion?

2.1 The disarray of the rebel who dares Why on earth did Patrick, in Chapter 1, refuse to accept the prestigious post that was offered him in Scotland? And why did Michael turn down a major promotion? Their colleagues admired their courage, even if it was a courage bordering on recklessness: “Wow! They went though with it!” At the same time, incomprehension is usually the prevailing sentiment among colleagues: “I certainly didn’t expect that, especially from him.” And there is some complaining about how this will affect everyone else’s responsibilities. The underlying reasons for taking such stands are far from obvious. Naysayers leave their colleagues dumbfounded. Nobody, in

Early signs of rebellion fact, understands what makes promising, pampered managers such as Patrick and Michael perform such actions, which at first glance look like professional suicide. Their colleagues, employees above and below them, and the naysayers themselves have their own off-the-cuff theories about the reasons behind the action. Some say that this professional suicide is a result, no doubt, of some sort of pathology, or fatigue, depression, stress, suffering or humiliation. Everyone has a theory, but all agree that something wasn’t quite right with the individuals involved. Patrick and Michael were considered irrational, abnormal or ill. Their personalities predestined them to be troublemakers. And they really did keep their game under wraps for a long time. So they say. The naysayers themselves are also confused. Michael and Patrick have a hard time explaining their brusque reactions to the dilemmas they encountered. They lost their bearings. Their emotions got the better of them. They didn’t know what was going on. They had doubts. In fact, they had no coherent explanation for their behaviour. So they withdrew and lay low. When they rebelled, did they know what was in store for them? Take Michael, for example. The human resources department offered him an assignment to close a plant in the Ardennes region, ostensibly so that he could realize his own potential. Ironically, Michael rationalized his refusal to accept this offer using the same logic that management uses in choosing its executives. He freely admits that he is not cut out to be a manager. So he is the one, not the human resources manager, who feels responsible for what happened. He frees the firm of its responsibility for not seeing his dilemma.

2.2

Bruno, shaken by his own boldness

Bruno’s story illustrates the rebel’s state of confusion and the aftermath of his actions. Nothing would have suggested that, one day, Bruno would deliberately contravene the rules of the game and, moreover,

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When managers rebel do so openly. At the relatively young age of 42 he ran the Chinese office of Brick, a multinational building materials retailer. The company’s store and service concept was revolutionary. The local market was huge and its needs were unlimited. Bruno was described by the head office of the company, Brick, as a highly talented and charismatic manager who knew how to lead his troops. He was determined, reliable to a fault, had no self-doubt, and had valued skills and great self-control. We met Bruno at Brick’s training session for the company’s high-potential managers. Surprisingly, the Bruno we met was nothing like the head office’s image of him. He behaved a little strangely, alternating phases of silent withdrawal and nervous agitation, speaking brusquely to passing colleagues and so on. He wandered into and out of the room where the seminar was being held. Two of his colleagues said that Bruno had changed a lot in recent weeks, because of stress or serious personal setbacks. One evening at the hotel bar we sat down to talk to him: Authors: “It must be exciting to have built up a business from scratch in such a huge country as China, right? So everything is working out well?” Bruno: “Oh, yeah. Although I sometimes wonder if it’s going as well as all that.” Authors: “Really? But everyone says that your first two stores are already a huge success. And that you have invented a one-of-a-kind retailing concept.” Bruno: “Well, I may not be cut out to be a manager, after all.” Bruno then launched into a rant against what he termed the stupidity and cowardice of his superiors. In his view, they didn’t keep their promises, including the promise one year earlier to budget for a rapid roll-out of seven new stores. Bruno thought that the two- or three-year postponement in budgeting these investments was a crucial error, by allowing competitors to take over the market in a major Chinese metropolitan area. When asked what he could do to get the new stores budgeted, he answered, “Not much”. His morose outlook might have been a result of his personality, of fear or jealousy, of his driven, activist side or his

Early signs of rebellion unshakeable faith that he was right, or of his superiors’ aversion to risk and innovation. Bruno had doubts, beginning with doubts about himself. He described a recent event that had summed up his frustrations, an event that he had been unable to talk about openly and objectively. Just a few days earlier, he had committed an act that he considered serious, an act that was at odds with the way things were done at the global group that owns his business: he went directly to Brick’s chairman and CEO, over the heads of two levels of management. The CEO had come to inspect Brick’s manufacturing and sales set-up in China. The day before the CEO was to return to Europe, a cocktail party was given in his honour, with 160 local managers, including Bruno, in attendance. During the cocktail party, Bruno made his way through the seven or eight upper-level managers standing around the CEO, to gain his attention for a minute: I had just enough time to tell him: “Sir, I just wanted to tell you that my projects are not budgeted for this year or next, contrary to what is stated in the multi-year strategic plan drawn up by your head office two and a half years ago. If I have to wait another two years, our leadership may be at stake on the market.” One of the senior managers pressured me to move on, saying, “My good man, the Chairman is very busy.” I went home shell-shocked. I knew that I had crossed the line. After all, the Chairman is a big shot! He doesn’t talk to little people, and I’m just one of the crowd, a nobody, pulled up by my bootstraps, a graduate of an average engineering school. In our company, you don’t get too chummy with the big-shot Chairman unless you’re from the same background as him. My naïve screw-up would be impossible to fix. Since then, I’ve been expecting any day now to be reprimanded by my manager, and to be forced out of the company. I should have kept my mouth shut. In fact, it might be a good idea to see a professional coach to learn how to control myself. It’s all my fault. Now I have to look for another job.

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When managers rebel When Bruno’s colleagues at the seminar heard about the run-in, their reactions were something of the order of: “See? Bruno has lost it, he’s gone mad.” Even so, they admired his nerve: “This guy believes in what he’s doing”, while adding “Poor guy!”

2.3 A state of confusion Neither the stress of the moment nor Bruno’s psychological profile explains why he rebelled against his company’s top management. Rebels aren’t usually frustrated fringe players, lazy workers or troublemakers with too much time on their hands; quite the contrary, in fact. Bruno, Patrick and Michael are normal in every way, if not “normalized” to extreme conformism. This shows in their performance and behavior. They are not congenital troublemakers. Nothing in their previous behavior had suggested to their superiors and human resources managers that they might be unpredictable, uncontrollable or extravagant. They were under no romantic illusions about what it meant to cause a stir. Their personal lives were normal. They were not candidates for remedial coaching. On the contrary – they embodied the ideal manager in every way. They were respectful of management’s expectations and procedures, and had joined forces with their companies so much that they had melded with them. And then, one day, out of the blue, they crossed the line: they said no. They let it be known that they considered enough was enough. They took on personas that were at odds with their image and conformed no longer. Worse than that, they rebelled. They attacked the reigning powers. Patrick and Michael even refused the benefits the company offered them. What was happening, in fact, was that they were challenging the managerial domination and soft power that governed their workplace, and in doing so, they went through the gamut of emotional states: defeatism, doubt and self-doubt alternated with jubilation, exaltation and recklessness. They tilted at windmills while taking on some of the traits of self-destruction.

Early signs of rebellion 2.4 Private lives intervene An essential aspect of manager rebellion is a set of circumstances that cause him or her to stop “playing the game”. Put briefly, the manager’s private life spills over into the corporate universe, whereas the company had previously kept it at bay. Rebellion bursts on to the scene because a manager faces an irreconcilable dilemma. Non-work life, which had been kept separate from working life, suddenly invades it, and the two are irreconcilable. The accounts of Patrick, Michael and Bruno show how family, morality and social status can spill over into public and professional life. Rebellion brings management and employees to the realization that the firm reflects society at large. In other words, the radical decisions of Patrick, Michael and Bruno regarding their jobs and their companies were precipitated by lifting the barrier that up to that point had separated their working lives from their private, moral and emotional lives, so that there was nothing left to keep the two worlds apart. So many things that had been off-limits in the work environment now formed an integral part of it, and were going to count as much as, if not more than, a career, getting by and toeing the line at work. A few minutes before giving into what seemed like a clumsy whim, to say the least, Patrick, Bruno and Michael were still in full command of their senses. And then, suddenly, they were not. But this was not the reflex of a spoilt child throwing a tantrum. Rather, it was a rational response to a situation that could no longer be managed through normal channels. It is interesting to hear objectors speak of their experiences once their rebellion has ended one way or another. It remains an open wound, but, at the same time, they have feelings of relief, and even pride. “That was one of the best days of my life, when I said to hell with it,” said one. “There is something bracing about becoming someone else, someone apart, and to be seen as such,” said another. “Things started to make sense. I wasn’t just telling off the boss, I was telling him to his face what I thought of him and his hypocrisy,” said a third. As if rebellion

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When managers rebel was an opportunity to let off steam, to tell management what you thought of them, to set free repressed feelings and repressed words. But to suggest that their rebellion is merely a way of letting off steam would be to miss the point. Moreover, how is it that in some circumstances, but not in others, a given manager rebels? The stories in this book suggest that managers rebel when their private lives invade the corporate scene. Some things matter, and others don’t, say Patrick, Bruno, Michael and others like them. One day they start doing things they didn’t do before. They draw a line between what is essential – their own private lives, and what is secondary – the life of the firm. Their rebellion is their way of standing up for themselves. Just like that, the equation between the world outside the firm – of which their private lives are an essential component – and corporate life reverses itself. Their private lives become what is essential, and the firm becomes what is secondary. They bring the outside world – society at large – into the firm. This reversal is triggered in many ways – for example, by the threat that a professional career poses to home life. The things it took to succeed, which the young manager had shrugged off or even considered normal, such as frequent absences from home during the week, giving up leisure activities and so on – are suddenly refused. They are no longer tolerable. They rub him up the wrong way. Management in act tends to ignore or exclude any connection with private life issues of staff members. While executive and HR discourses emphasize the importance of corporate values such as moral respect for employees as human beings, it often happens that some harsh requests made to younger and middle-level managers are considered by their bosses as tests of their devotion to their careers and to the company, even at the expense of their private life. This is what happened in Patrick’s case. On Friday evening, when his boss, Louis, rang him to announce the honour of his having been chosen as the head of Construct’s Scottish subsidiary, his family life suddenly impinged on what until then had been his hermetically sealed working world. It’s true that the new post would only have made things slightly worse. Patrick

Early signs of rebellion was often away from home. And whenever he was at home, he spent most of his time catching up on his emails. The weekend after Louis’s offer, a kind of epiphany occurred within him, feeding his feeling that enough was enough and his painful realization of the firm’s cynicism, as channeled through Louis. Didn’t they realize that Patrick had a wife and child? Scotland was bad enough, but they were also giving him little time to think over the offer and asking him to go to Scotland right away to live there full-time. Patrick was a brilliant manager, but also a husband and father who wanted a happy home life. What if Louis, in fact, wanted him to place his allegiance to the company before all else? Rebellion often occurs on an ethical plane. Michael, for example, associated the post of factory manager that was offered to him, and in particular the redundancy plan that he would have to oversee, with his father’s experience of being laid off when the factory employing him closed. A long time ago, it was true, but it was a psychological trauma and social stigma that his family never recovered from. For Michael, this was much more than an unfortunate coincidence. It reopened a wound that had never fully healed, as if the firm was putting him into a trial by fire, dangling a leadership career in front of him in exchange for denying his father’s dignity. His prospects at the company were intertwined incompatibly with his family’s past and with his own ethical values. The firm’s offer stirred up the past, including Michael’s past experience with social upheaval. The reversal between what is essential and what is secondary is triggered by the feeling that deeply held values are being trampled on, and that the public life of the firm disrupts the private lives of employees when and how it sees fit. Bruno, for example, felt that Brick’s refusal to approve his budget was its way of reminding him of his ethnic background and skin colour. While his superiors were all European and did not speak Chinese, he was the only top manager of Chinese origin, and speaking Chinese in a fluent manner. Bruno’s immediate superiors mix work with non-work considerations. They scorn objective business judgment in favour of personal

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criticism – the social and national origins of their subordinates. He felt a pressure that became crude and intolerable: Before this latest thing, the fact that I’m Chinese must have already come into play, for or against me, depending on the circumstances. But that’s life … But this time, my bosses went too far … not because they think they’re better than me, not because unlike me they are European-born, not because they think that I’m unreliable, but because, as I was told by others, they wanted to keep a lid on my project and they were using unacceptable arguments. When they become aware of double standards and double-talk, when they witness injustices, rebels turn to their lives outside the company.

2.5

How Philip signed on to an existing rebellion

Philip’s story is interesting in that it differs in two ways from the accounts of Patrick, Michael and Bruno. On the one hand, Philip is a follower. He is 40 years old and a manager in the R&D department of Agro, an agro-chemical multinational. Philip did not unleash a rebellion or found a resistance movement. In fact, he joined the rebellion launched by Mark, his department colleague, in protest against management’s unusual step of cancelling an R&D project headed by another project manager. Together, they protested the decision, as well as how it was made. On the other hand, Philip carried a long-standing grudge which one might have thought was buried and even forgotten. Yet this seemed to be the moment he had been waiting for – to sign on as a supporter of a rebellion in order to air his long-standing grudge. Philip did not act on impulse. He was waiting for the moment. He decided to help Mark stir things up and joined Mark’s protest, alongside a group of peers. Philip, it should be noted, and unlike his colleague Mark, does not particularly fit the profile of a high-potential manager. He

Early signs of rebellion doesn’t match up to management’s criteria. Unlike the quiet, disciplined profile embodied by Mark, Philip is seen, even by himself, as a sort of permanent rebel. He even regrets that he wasn’t the initiator of the protest: “You don’t necessarily know when things like that are going to happen. When you don’t know the whys and hows of a decision, what are you supposed to do? You take note and that’s it, or you have no idea what’s going on.” In any case, Philip let loose with a rant: We’re asleep in this place. It must be like that everywhere. Mark’s email woke me up. I realized that overloading us with work is a way to blind us to things as simple as how your colleague is doing, or how the other managers do their jobs, in general what people are up to. We don’t have time to see people. It shook me to see how they were able to humiliate and demolish a guy like that by shutting down his project for no other reason than to set an example. I found that disgusting. Philip is driven more by passion than calculation. He thinks that “some things just aren’t right at this company”. To explain why he is committed, he tells us what he has been reading: I soon noticed that guys had bought into improving the company’s operations and all that, and I think they did that so they would be heard. But that’s not what interests me. I like to read books on labor and political issues. I read left-wing and satirical newspapers regularly. I take a great interest in what happens elsewhere. And I just happened on an article by someone – I can’t remember who – on suffering at the workplace, or something like that. There were some things that really shocked me and that were relevant to me. And then I got Mark’s email, and my blood ran cold. It sounds silly to say it like that, but I got the feeling that what was happening in this company was the same as what’s happening in other companies. You get it, this is not a company for Managers United and all. But, after all, we’re in the same boat. Some take drugs and go off the handle because of work. I saw something similar happening with us, with what the colleague got nailed with … so I sent Mark an angry

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When managers rebel email; something has to be done. The connection may have been tenuous, but it was really time for me! In spite of everything that separates him from Patrick, Bruno and Michael, Philip has been pushed into rebellion by what he has read and by a controversial managerial decision. He ends his silence, a silence he had maintained because he was “overtaken by events, with no time to talk. We’re so focused on our business that when we meet with our colleagues and all that, we tend to talk more about sports and the news than anything more serious. We talk to relax, and that means no office politics.” Philip has solid arguments ready – for example, the theme of suffering in the workplace – in favour of a sort of common cause with his colleagues in protesting the decision to shut down the project. Rebellion gives him unexpected opportunities for contact and discussion via the intranet with people he may never have actually met. And he has a vague feeling of taking part in a broader movement: From the very beginning it was strange, but I don’t know how to react just like that to an email. This was both a private matter and something that affected all of us. And beyond people within the company, this thing was definitely strange for me, it was an internal matter, ultimately a very personal stance, and yet it was a subject that concerned almost everybody. Philip justifies joining the protest because he is able to fit this up-close injustice involving a colleague into a broader, more theoretical matrix. He has the feeling that he is part of something rather more important than simply achieving the top performance on his department’s projects. But, in truth, this is not what interests him at all: I got that Mark wanted to bring the discussion around to the decision criteria for the last project phases, but I just didn’t give a damn. I just wanted to send a message to these bosses who think they can do anything they like, just because they’re the big shots and have big-shot degrees from their big-shot universities!

Early signs of rebellion To Philip, rebellion is almost a personal matter, “payback”, even, to what he sees as an “in-house mafia”. He wants to show this “mafia” that it isn’t always right – far from it. Incidentally, Philip did not get the career he had in mind when he signed a contract with the company with his engineering diploma in hand, as an assistant later promoted to chief technician, before moving up to project manager. He vents his frustrations, as well as a list of long-standing grievances: It was like double or nothing in my case. I was supposed to head up a major technical option on a big project. I had shown on several occasions that I had a few ideas and that, even though I didn’t have a Ph.D. or an agricultural engineering degree, I had real skills and abilities. I found out later that some people directly opposed naming me because my profile was no doubt not brilliant enough. I’ve never gotten over it. In fact, I had the feeling that I had been had, that I was punished not because I’m not qualified but because of in-house politics.

2.6 Whose fault is it? The experiences suggest that rebellions are related to failings at the company and not to individuals’ personal shortcomings. Certainly, who the rebels are and what they do are important factors. Even so, they rebel because the firm pushes them to rebel. The key element is company failings and how that affects the managers themselves. Business organizations that, by design or by accident, rub out, neglect, deny or expel any reference to the world outside the company are, sooner or later, faced with a rebellion that arises from the need to talk about something other than work. Management talks to employees about careers, accomplishment, patriotism, team spirit, dedication, conformity and investing themselves in their work. Curiously enough, this helps Patrick, Michael and others like them to begin to regard their private lives in terms of needs, aspirations and standards that are just as legitimate as their prospects at the company. In doing so, the rebel managers return to what each of them possesses as a person.

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When managers rebel They remind their superiors of what drives them as people, the private values each of them considers to be part of the reason they are the holders of a given post in a given company. People don’t become non-conformists at work just for the fun of it, out of selfishness or uncontrolled passion. They do so mainly for practical reasons. Rebellion is a way for them to deal with the eruption of their private lives into the public or managerial sphere of the firm. Rebellion is, in fact, driven by ordinary pragmatism. Patrick, Michael and Bruno were driven to the brink by the management methods applied at their respective companies. To cope, they rebelled. They stopped playing the game. Some rebel managers soon leave their companies. Patrick and Michael, for example, left their companies because they had been trapped by an arrangement imposed on them by those in a superior position. Others rebel managers resist. Bruno attempted the impossible and, instead of being shot down, in fact prevailed. Even he was surprised at that. Rebellion means saying no, fighting back so that you’re no longer trapped, and even leaving the company on your own initiative before being dismissed. Management failings do occur. They occur when a company no longer provides the ideological, cultural or moral resources for resolving conflicts between senior and middle management, regardless of who initiates the conflict. Rebellion brings management failings out into the open. A manager rebels because he is suddenly weary of taking orders from an unpleasant and less competent superior; because he is offended by an offer that can’t be refused but that traps him and makes him feel manipulated; because he feels taken for an idiot; or because he is denied a modicum of respect. He wonders what pushed him to the brink, and what solution he should be aiming at as a consequence. At the moment of crisis, things don’t look too clear to him: “Who did this? Whose fault is it that I had to put my foot down? Who do I complain to?” Nothing is truly certain at that moment, because rebellion most often operates against a backdrop of interpersonal aggression. Stories of rebellion at first seem to be accounts of people in

Early signs of rebellion conflict. Rebels are inclined to individualize the fate that is doled out to them, to seek a scapegoat, to talk about conspiracies or unforgivably incompetent acts. Did Louis abandon Patrick to his own devices in dealing with senior management? In his talk with Michael, did Strand’s human resources manager simply try to sugar-coat the pill of their need to fill a vacant post? Was Bruno subjected to a cheap shot by his immediate superior, a European, to pull him back into line, to retake control of a manager of Asian origin who, moreover, was more or less a superior executive? The imaginative possibilities are endless. A closer look at these experiences suggests that rebellion cannot be reduced purely to interpersonal motives. Blame can’t be assigned solely to how flesh-and-blood individuals get along with one another. The dynamics of rebellion are fed by context, a background that constitutes both the setting of aggression and its very reason for being. The logic of control and the exercise of managerial power are played out in this context, This is faceless, willful, arbitrary management that, in a way, is to blame even more than the senior manager who endorses the decision and serves as the messenger. Company management systems, specific organizational contexts in which executives and managers operate have major impacts. They favor submission and obedience. They ignore spillover effects on the private life of their managers. This is how the game should be played.

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CHAPTER 3

Management spaces Management practices give rise to a number of illusions and fantasies about how they relate to the real world. It inspires its diehard fans and its inventive gurus. It obsesses its weekend critics, who say that a company is either a prison or a playground. But neither of these metaphors stands up to a closer scrutiny of executive rebellion. We shall show that modern management methods exert true leadership when the firm does not leverage what we shall call the force of the locker-room to reinforce cohesiveness. On sports teams, players develop this force in the confines of the locker room, away from coaches, managers and team owners. Cohesiveness is the glue between what’s outside and what’s inside, between the sporting, or public, life and the players’ private, non-work lives.

3.1 Prison principles The contemporary firm is the backdrop for both submission and rebellion, where managerial domination and individual rebellion feed off each other. The backdrop is sometimes aggressive, ugly, faded or grey, with its colours shifting to fit the circumstances. While the circumstances that lay the foundation for rebellion are temporary and unique, managerial control is a constant. Nobody would think of contesting the principle that a small group of people should preside over the company’s fate. Elites are needed to govern, after all. Stories of subversion therefore usually come with tales and legends of how managerial hegemony has taken over companies. 24

Management spaces 3.1 Hegemony The notion of hegemony gained ground in both political science and public discourse after the Second World War, a result in particular of the work of the Italian political activist and philosopher, Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). During his long and tragic imprisonment under the Mussolini regime, he wrote more than 3,000 pages of his Prison Notebooks.1 In them, he explained why the so-called inevitable socialist revolution predicted by orthodox Marxists, Lenin included, had not happened in the early twentieth century. In his view, capitalism grabs power and holds on to it not just through violence and economic coercion, but also through an ideology – a “hegemonic culture” – in which Christian bourgeois values become the common shared lot. Hegemony allows a given regime, like capitalism, to fashion a consensus on values, with sometimes strange outcomes. Hegemony, for example, makes the working classes, even though they are subjugated, identify sufficiently with the dominant bourgeoisie to forestall revolts and ensure that the prevailing social order is maintained peacefully. Indeed, all power, in any form, must first exercise moral and intellectual leadership, from which economic and corporate power will flow. It lays the foundation of value-based consent, as this is the type of consent that forges sustained collective destinies.

One of the commonest metaphors for the firm is a prison. How can this be? As far back as 1914, Max Weber described modern organizations at the dawn of the twentieth century as a universe of rules and procedures,2 whose inhabitants lose their individual identities and are reduced to nothing more than a function and a role, like pawns on an intricate chessboard designed by faceless, faraway experts and policed by battalions of well-disciplined cadres.

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When managers rebel Under the prison metaphor there is no escape, since everything is codified and governed by rules and procedures. And new rules and procedures keep emerging – one, in fact, for each new problem. But all these rules end up crossing paths, even leading to deadends and contradictions. Literary works such as Franz Kafka’s The Castle show clearly how an individual cannot break free and find his or her own way through the endless, intertwining rules and mazes of office doors that open, close and change places, apparently uncontrollably. Of course, no one is suggesting that the firm is literally like a prison or a work camp. And it would be overstating matters to call it a total institution, as proposed by the Canadian sociologist, Erving Goffman,3 a place where a large number of individuals live and work in the same setting, cut off from the outside world for a relatively long time, under a regime whose procedures are painstakingly set out and regulated, and in which individual identities are obliterated. In our accounts of rebellion, the corporate sphere does not govern all aspects of its employees’ lives, as did the companies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which provided workers with housing, schooling for their children, in-house vocational training, and places of leisure and religious practice for their families, in cities and neighborhoods that were separated from society. The enterprise seen as a prison is not, strictly speaking, a physical space, guarded by watchtowers and barbed-wire fences, with a clearly demarcated territory and cut off from the rest of society. After all, you can go home in the evening. Nevertheless, there is confinement. Such confinement is subtle in the vast majority of accounts of rebellion. It is primarily psychological in nature. Its imprisonment is informal, and that makes it all the more powerful and invasive. For example, managers often take unfinished work home in the form of thick files and outstanding issues on their minds. The corporate sphere catches up with the individual at home, with his family, and with his leisure time, via the marvels of modern communication – mobile phones, PCs, telephones – which are always at hand and never get tired, and allow, for example, Louis to call Patrick, his subordinate, on a Friday evening at 10 p.m.

Management spaces This daily psychological confinement is a setting in which employees are both reluctant and consenting captives. After all, you can simply turn off your mobile phone if you do not wish to be disturbed. But it’s not that easy. You start to worry about missing a call, one, of course, of great urgency. Paradoxically, peace of mind means leaving the phone on and screening your calls, even if that makes you an accomplice to your own confinement. No need to describe further the general feeling of being tracked down or harassed. Harassment results mainly from this consensual confinement, this expectation of being reachable and available. There are adjoining doors leading from the firm to the home. This is nothing like a real prison, which is far from a person’s home. This prison is built jointly, with assenting inmates. They may think, “I can’t stand it when they bother me at home”, but they still know the rules of the game.

3.2

Like a playground

Other management theorists see the firm more as a playground than a prison; a place where games are played. “Games” here has a double meaning. On the one hand, the idea is to have fun, to enjoy oneself at work. But in the other, more strategic sense, games emerge from a political calculation, using tactics to satisfy a personal ambition or interest. The firm is not based on pure control, with a leadership class imposing an imperative and absolute order on everyone else. It is driven by power games between multiple interests that seek to impose their own visions. Either they oppose one another or they work together, forming loose, opportunistic and ambiguous coalitions. The firm operates on the basis of a political mechanism. Its internal order is that of a pluralistic arena from which no elites emerge, as demonstrated in a famous article by James March.4 Mitchell Koza and Jean-Claude Thoenig explained the basic principles.5 There are many visions of the firm as a playground and a place for fun. They are bandied about in a challenging manner in

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When managers rebel popular management books. They are espoused by larger than life CEOs and at companies that like to think of themselves as subversive. These visions are inspired by management gurus. Thomas J. Peters talks about a “liberating” type of management and even praises the virtues of chaos.6 Ricardo Semler, himself a CEO, speaks of workers as mavericks.7 In his view, control may be essential in a prison but is outdated in the firm, and exercising control is a sign of management incompetence. He adds this explicit message to his employees and cadres: you are now free. This liberationist vision goes hand-in-hand with the celebration of diversity and youth. “Go for it!” is the watchword. It suggests that minorities who play an eccentric and offbeat role be given a central role, in a similar way to gay activists or ethnic minorities in society at large. This view says that diversity and blending give rise to effective innovation. Game-playing at the playground-firm helps to get around conformist thinking and over the hurdles raised by pyramidal authority structures. Submission must give way to playfulness. Employees must express themselves freely, set loose their inner party-animals, even party while at work, donning subversive accoutrements instead of grey suits, and flying paper airplanes around the office. This dynamic of subversion even attributes a fun quotient to companies, as advocated by a consultant, Matt Weinstein,8 and two specialists in organizational management, Terrence Deal and M. K. Key.9 The goal is to motivate individuals so that they work more enthusiastically in the firm’s interests and generate profit. As a practical matter, of course, making work fun isn’t easy. Even so, examples of fun management abound, in particular in countries such as the UK and the USA, where some companies have even appointed a minister for fun and given him a real managerial position, and where newspapers, like the Sunday Times in 2005 and 2006, factored a fun coefficient into its ranking of its “100 Best Companies to Work For”. In short, the goal of fun management is to make workers like being at work, to make them enjoy themselves and find fulfillment while remaining at the company’s disposal, even if they do not necessarily like their company.

Management spaces These same gurus say that we are emerging from the collectivist period of corporate culture, whose objective was to stoke employees’ affection for and identification with the firm. Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, they say, management must meet another challenge: compensating or enriching workers who do uninteresting jobs, and helping people to emerge from submission to pure procedure. For example, call centres encourage their operators to use their own turns of phrase or accents, and to improvise marketing or service calls, as advocated by Stephen Frenkel, Marek Korcyznski, Karen Shire and May Tam.10 A fun company provides a setting for a party, while blurring the lines between private and professional lives. Friday may be dressdown, but Monday is fun. Why wouldn’t anyone want to have fun and find fulfillment at work, rather than staying at home, bored with the domestic routine, consumer goods, chasing women and playing golf ?

3.3

Fuel for rebellion

Let’s face it. The firm is neither a playground – a miniature Disneyland – nor some sort of minimum security prison. Even so, management sends out a diffuse fear that spreads a silent threat among employees. It is this fear and this threat that rebellion calls into question. In normal times, the firm operates on the basis of a postulate, a sort of underlying consensus that is buttressed by each management decision. This consensus can be stated as follows: employees don’t really understand why they are there and why they do what they do. They may moan, groan and complain. They may believe, justifiably, that decisions are wrong, or simply not take those decisions seriously, but they still apply them most of the time. That doesn’t mean that they will gladly accept a demotion, a transfer to another job or a change in the rules of the game without protest. Nor does it mean that they like their jobs or positions, or that they enjoy their work. What it does mean is that their position in the firm’s space is something they understand. It also means that no employee asks why s/he is there, why s/he is at work. That’s just the way it is, one of those things, a badge by which employees identify themselves.

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When managers rebel This is indeed a system based on management dominance. Propaganda works rather well, since nobody contests either the substance or the form of his/her task within the organization’s structure. And it’s a good thing, too, since the energy and creativity needed to understand the deep-down mechanisms of the corporate system and the role of each person within it would sidetrack people from focusing on all-important performance. Ordinary contestation, however, is composed of elements of another nature, as suggested in the stories we related earlier. People feel that managerial power is exercised in a dominating and self-serving manner, no matter how it is disguised and the values it espouses. Its constraints are tighter and more unheeding in proportion to how flexibly they are implemented. Power is not exercised with an intractable iron hand, in the way that a military corporal or petty sergeant might. Bosses often smile. They don’t bark and they don’t bite. They suggest solutions more than they decree them. Domination is civilized and even cordial. However, while control is constant and performance standards all-important, the boss isn’t constantly at the back of his subordinates. Performance metrics and other impersonal indicators do that job for him. And while to err is human, any error can none the less be fatal at any time. Meanwhile, an unspoken violence pervades working relationships. While management espouses the principles of the community, the pride of belonging and of identifying with the firm, in practice only individual performance counts. Affective indifference is common practice and is promoted by pitting individuals systematically against one another. A performance-driven culture prevails over group loyalty and recognition for services rendered. True solidarity is debased. What counts are individual reputations only. “Up or out” is the watchword. Managerial authority today operates in a much more heterogeneous context than it did over the assembly lines of the mid-twentieth century. What is sometimes called the post-bureaucratic universe has three fundamental features. First, companies are fluid universes. Bereft of useless central departments and burdensome hierarchies, these flat organizations

Management spaces engender agile elephants, huge multinationals that dance gracefully and lightly, as the Harvard Business School professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter11, writes. The contemporary concept of networks suggests that – and this is far from being the case for everybody – the firm’s people move in a fluid and mobile world; in other words, in a modern world. Second, companies are also competitive universes. Fluidity means that error is not an option, not just in the channels that are put down, but also in what is put into the channels – meaning people and skills. “The more often we transfer people around, the more careful we are in whom we take. We try to spot the troublemakers early on,” said a manager of one of the companies we observed. “We look more at how newcomers fit into the existing mould than how they will try to change the shape of the mould,” suggests a human resources manager. This world is conceptualized by management gurus under the concept of “resource theory”. A person is deemed to be competitive if s/he knows how to anticipate correctly the shape of the mould in which s/he will become an ingredient. Should s/he rigidify the mould, for example, so s/he can settle into it, or should s/he break it gently and then transform it? Third, companies tend to abhor change, despite the fact their leaders never stop talking about it. And that’s a management problem that has still not been resolved. A sometimes huge gap persists between management talk of opening up organizational dynamics, and managers’ actual experience. Managers sometimes talk about it ironically, even cynically: “You really have to knock heads to get things done”; “There’s inertia everywhere”; “To change is suicide”; or “When I hear the boss speak of change, I just laugh inside. We’re in perpetual gridlock and he knows it well.” Such gridlock is not caused by a lack of will or ideas. Nor is it a result of a culture of gratuitous confrontation. It is because of the competitive and restrictive mould people are forced into as soon as they arrive at the firm. This mould is competitive because, within it, people are constantly being compared and evaluated. You have to “do well” – meaning do better than everyone else. When you err you’d better hide it, if you’re lucky enough to have caught the mistake in

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When managers rebel time. When that’s impossible, an explanation must be found, and the exact cause of the blunder must be tracked down. Blame must be assigned, and damn the notion of collective responsibility. Companies have all-powerful machinery that keeps a record of mistakes filed away for later use, when it is looking for a reason to punish. And the firm’s people are well aware that they are in a system based on soft constraint, a system analyzed in detail by one of the authors.12 Somewhere in this universe are lurking, unknown to them, pretexts to punish them. This is how competition produces constraint, and how soft constraint is the ultimate consensual principle. “We know that we are in competition, especially at certain levels. We hush it up as long as we don’t need to talk about it,” said one 35-year-old middle manager. Such practices are both simple and sophisticated, and have become broadly accepted. To hold one’s place in the firm, one must embody its founding principles. And yet, on closer examination, these principles are hard to accept, above all for ethical reasons. Quite often, prejudices about persons have more influence than factual criteria about their actual performance and professional potential. Reputation, interpersonal repulsion or attraction feelings matter for those who review the behaviors of the persons they are in charge of. The educational background of the manager, the fact that he attended or not prestigious university programs, may also make a difference. So-called objective assessments are constantly watered down with subjective points of view. And subjectivity, of course, often carries the day in the huge diverse mixture of the fleet and light-footed firm that does not always have the time to devise objective reasons for a subjective choice. In other words, it is hard to understand the real reason for choices that affect people’s future at the firm, their careers, and their assignments. Moreover, top managers are sometimes not penalized for their own shortcomings and mistakes. This leads to considerable misunderstanding about the rules of the corporate game, as well as charges of double standards. These feelings undermine the system’s coherence. Certainly, social distance between the top

Management spaces managers and the others is often rationalized, and that keeps the lowest members in the hierarchy in their place. After all, in the words of a 34-year-old executive, “Those people are not from our world. They must operate on the basis of other modes and other mindsets.” What is most disheartening and unacceptable are inequitable management decisions that affect other people at the same level as oneself. Events then become quite incomprehensible, especially when a person doesn’t understand why “I escaped the electric chair”, in the words of a 40-year-old banking executive. A human resources manager told us: What was really frustrating and destabilizing was when I was given this list of people to lay off. I felt as though I was doing all the dirty work. It wasn’t necessarily that I was not asked for my opinion, but the fact that the list included people I knew, to whom I was going to have to give the bad news. I was going to be the bastard, even though it wasn’t me who put them on the list. I was going to be the bastard because I wasn’t even able to tell them why it was them and not someone else. Distance inevitable sets in. Not just the distance that sets upper management apart from everyone else, but the distance between the punished and the unpunished. Soft constraint paradoxically creates breakdowns in work communities, especially when it hands down incomprehensible verdicts that divide personnel instead of uniting them, sometimes irreversibly. Fluid firms shift people around who hardly know one another, and see each other more as competitive resources than as human beings. The person next to you becomes such an ephemeral presence that you don’t even think of getting to know him or her. Thus driven, soft constraint is based on vague threats. Without seeming to at first, it instills a latent feeling of fear. Remarkably, this feeling is considered normal. Nobody gives it a second thought, neither those who feel it directly, nor those who use it as an instrument. Middle managers, like Patrick, Michael and Bruno are caught between two worlds, at least until the day they

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When managers rebel rebel. As both superiors and subordinates, they make use of their employees’ fear while they themselves are living under a latent threat from those higher up. This is what makes the firm a social, emotional world that gives rise to both resistance and conformity. This is also what makes some barriers so porous. After all, a middle manager is pretty much like an assembly-line worker. De facto unconscious cohesiveness runs through the firm. Would I, as an immediate boss, share the fate of the workers I supervise? Would I, for example, be so understanding if my own job had been outsourced?

3.4 The spark that sets off the blaze Against such a backdrop, a rebel is one who will one day balk at soft constraint. His or her act of rebellion is driven by three factors. The first is the refusal on ethical grounds of the constant contradictions in which management operates, in particular those that concern the rebel personally. “What does management want from me in sending me to Scotland just like that?,” asks Patrick. “What is Brick’s European headquarters really asking for: to grow my business in Asia or for me to melt into the company’s mould of social conventions?,” asks Bruno. “Why am I only sent contradictory messages?,’’ wonders Michael. “What am I to make of the fact that Strand gives me an assignment consisting of making a list of people to be laid off ?” The second factor is the lack of stable, credible and sensible markers. How, for example, do I tie my personal experience, the things I live through every day, including in my private life, with the ever-present effects of globalization in my work as an executive? How do I find a community of like-minded people, to which I would like to contribute? How do I connect my experiences, including my painful experiences, and the big circus of globalization that fills our TV screens, newspapers and stores? The third factor is the manager’s difficulty in situating and retaining his own identity: What can change mean, the change

Management spaces that top management is always going on about, in a daily work environment that is loaded with double talk and contradictory messages – be creative and obey, and so on ? And why should I change? To help the firm change, to go somewhere, when I’m not sure even where we’ve been? How do we know when change has been successful? Is performance satisfactory and sustained? How can I be a manager in my company and not become de facto a tool of top management? All these thoughts make some people, at some point, begin to contemplate rebellion. They point out what is to be opposed; they help to stand up to power and to those who, rightly or wrongly, are perceived as embodying power. Rebellion is unleashed by a specific signal, by a particular managerial decision. It dresses itself in much larger values: justice, reward, solidarity, the infallibility of science. These are general values that are both impersonal and moral, and do not plead a personal cause, which makes rebellion a force to be reckoned with in the eyes of the manager’s superiors. Rebels are endowed with personal resources in their work environment; for example, in terms of social status, reputation or performance, and are able to make choices. As already noted, Patrick, Michael and Bruno are pampered executives of whom the firm expects much. Some of the resources needed to rebel are, paradoxically, supplied through career tools acquired inhouse. In a way, the firm itself teaches rebels how to rebel and to beat the system. Rebellion diverts organizational skills for its own purposes. Managers who start down the path of rebellion have often made a detailed diagnosis of the situation. Surprise is another key element in management space. Rebellious acts emerge when and where they are least expected. Rebellion is not spelt out and does not choose its time or place. After all, how could anyone expect pampered, promising and conformist managers to be the ones to say “enough is enough”? Rebellion is totally unexpected. It takes momentum from the precedent it established by questioning the unquestionable, in undermining previously accepted behaviour. At Patrick’s and Bruno’s companies, it goes without saying that, in ordinary times a young, high-potential manager must accept all the assignments he is offered. Turning down a post offered by one’s superiors is jarring,

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When managers rebel a dissident act against higher authority that threatens the very integrity of the accepted rules of the game. Rebellion jolts the world of shared assumptions. It is of an entirely different order than suicide, for example – that terrible act of violence that manifests powerlessness in a changing reality. Surprise is the prerequisite for credible resistance.

3.5 The force of the locker room When the firm’s managers and other employees rebel, they do so in order to stand up to the domination of techno-bureaucratic management and soft constraint. This is not a fight against globalization or neoliberalism, but is situated rather on a cultural or personal plane, because unacceptable things are perceived as occurring in the workplace. But it is precisely because it’s here and now that something can be done: “The rest, whatever I read every day in the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal, is far, far away” (customer relationship manager, 40 years old). Let’s go back a bit to people’s lives at work. Managing circulation and fluidity within the company promotes general indifference, which, in turn, disseminates an unspoken violence. What’s striking in companies with rebellious managers is how little the rebels and their colleagues, deep down, care about one another. They focus unashamedly on their own lot. While they do not necessarily feel animosity toward their colleagues, they feel they share no common cause. It is striking to see how often they believe that solidarity is a value appropriate to life outside the firm: I like my colleagues. I mean that I’m happy to see them in the morning. We shoot the breeze, and so on, but we have nothing in common. What I mean is that I have no control over whatever happens to them. There’s nothing I can do about it, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual … I don’t have time to take an interest in what happens to them. I’m not dependent on them, like the soldier next to me in a trench when the order to attack is given, since if he does not come out of the trench with me, the entire effort collapses, it’s every man for

Management spaces himself and, in any case, he gets shot by the captain, right? But if I decide not to do what I must do, what business is that of the guy in the next office? (administrative manager, 38 years old) In such cases, the company has installed a regime of soft constraint, where employees are happy to spend some time together, but in relative indifference. No matter, ultimately, who you are with, and what you do. Understanding the ordinary domination that constitutes the fabric of the lives of working people involves “the force of the locker room” as much as the force of globalization. The locker room is a self-explanatory sports metaphor used in a management theory. In sports, money is necessary but not enough to win a championship. Buying the four best strikers in the world for your soccer team in no way guarantees ultimate victory. Being listed on the stock exchange or belonging to the Euroleague does not guarantee performance. Even with all the money in the world, a divided locker room is the team’s undoing. The locker room is generally understood to be the crucible of team spirit, inhabited by people who like one another, who want to play football together, or to work in the same department of a company. This is both true – interpersonal affinities are indeed important – and not true enough. The main issue is elsewhere, in how private lives fit in with public lives in the workplace. When the private and public spheres are too far out of step, when the athlete’s professional activity ignores, represses or pushes out the athlete’s non-working life, performance standards suffer. What goes for sports clubs also applies to companies. Many of the company’s leaders don’t want to hear about what’s going on outside the firm. In their view, a company is run in an entirely distinct and incompatible world. Top managers take care of important things such as buying players or marketing the club’s image, while the team’s locker room is another universe, with talk of how such and such a player lost it because he’d been fighting with his wife, or his young son was ill, or because he couldn’t get

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When managers rebel used to living in a different town – hey, he lives in a hotel room! He didn’t want to buy a home or even to rent one. The locker room metaphor says that performance is also built around the rituals of daily interactions between neighbors and partners. Such micro-interactions are said to be of a different order than macro-management and overall strategy. However, far from being regarded as an order in its own right, it is wrongly reduced to an isolated space that is ungovernable, or governed by individual whims, including rebellion or worse; to a governable space of human relations and personal crises, a space that is “coachable” in management speak. In fact, the locker room is a place of social dramas, and it is these dramas, depending on how deep they go, that can lay the foundation for rebellion as much as for performance. Rebellion taps into the force of the locker room, whether top management wants it to or not. It brings the outside back inside, the private sphere into the public arena, and tries to reestablish a direct interface between the two. In a way, while addressing things that are tangible, that have meaning in a work environment and whose direct consequences are palpable, rebellion enables proximity and undermines indifference. So resistance is not just refusal. It is also creation, or re-creation, because it can ultimately lead to the forging of new identities, and new relations between colleagues, and between employees and superiors. Rebellion is not revolution, but it is collective and therefore social, and can transform the space so that conditions improve and one can work better, or just continue to work. This is where creative resistance arises, which is a broader concept of resistance. It can generate discussion that increases understanding. That’s why the corporation is neither a prison nor a playground, because it constantly supplies opportunities for debate and confrontation; because it is a whole that is much less lucid and ordered than management manuals suggest. Nor is it a playground where productivity requires having fun and being subversive. Rebellion ultimately means standing up to the obvious. And there are a lot of obvious things in current management: the

Management spaces obvious need for flexibility, mobility and agility, for diversity and difference. This chapter has outlined the background to the experiences we are now going to relate. These are the testimonies of people who, whether they intended to or not, disrupted a familiar environment by either forcefully or silently skirting round its controlling barriers, to state something else that’s obvious: an employee can say no; he or she is free to disagree. This is momentarily disruptive, but its effects on the certainties of managerial power live on. In the next chapter we shall look at how this happens.

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CHAPTER 4

The dynamics of rebellion How do rebellions start? How do they spread? How do they end? What exactly do rebels have in mind at the outset, and what are their ultimate aims? Rebellions don’t just happen, with just anyone doing just anything at any time and in any way. In fact, they follow certain patterns, and avail themselves of the know-how and special skills of both the rebels and their targets. The issues of conflict help to lay the groundwork for alternatives, without the rebels even necessarily realizing it. In the cases we have observed, rebellions go through phases of rallying support, defying hierarchical authority and stating their claims. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. Rebellions produce outcomes that don’t have much to do with the initial situation or with the particular issue that gave rise to them. They therefore have consequences for the rebels, as well as for their companies.

4.1 Getting others involved Executive rebellion is not merely a cry for help from someone on a given day, a momentary need to unburden one’s soul. Nor is it a random and irrational act, a shot in the dark emboldened by some sort of overwrought fantasy, before a stark reversion to the status quo. In fact, rebellions sometimes generate groundswells of support, or even true collective movements, with crowds of followers lining up behind the rebel and running the risk of publicly taking sides. While it’s true that in some cases some of the rebel’s close colleagues withhold their support, look the other way, or 40

The dynamics of rebellion even openly break with him or her, while in other cases they rally behind the rebel, including some colleagues who might otherwise be shy, conservative or disorder-averse. They sign up for a cause because, in their gut, they feel it affects them. They come out of the woodwork and run significant risks. Two true stories will tell us more about how individual rebellions become collective movements, how they unfold over time, how they metamorphose while in progress, and what outcomes they produce.

Mark and the support of the R&D community Mark is project manager at a well-known agrochemical multinational, which we shall call Agro. He is 42 years old. An engineer by training, he holds a doctorate in microbiology. He is a colleague of Philip’s, whose story was told earlier, and who later joined Mark’s rebellion. Mark’s brilliance ensured him a successful career at Agro. He was passionate about his duties, which consist of heading a team of technicians and researchers. Three years before, his superiors had offered him a transfer to the USA to take charge of an applied R&D centre in North Carolina. He turned the offer down for family reasons. Even the prospect of an international career and a quick rise up the corporate ladder did not sway him. We had already met Mark a few years earlier, when we interviewed him for our survey on changes in managerial functions at his company. Many of these changes were being made during the preparations for Agro’s planned merger with one of its German competitors. After this interview, we stayed in touch by phone to discuss various matters, including what was happening in Agro’s R&D division: Mark: “I thought you might be interested in an incident that happened recently in the R&D department. Jack was the guy in charge of project AMX. He was working on a revolutionary compound that would enhance resistance in plants.

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When managers rebel He had been put in charge of this project eight years earlier. He must have been about 30 back then. The project went well for the first two or three years, and the trial results were remarkable at times. Six years later, the project team had expanded to about fifteen. But, one day, Agro’s R&D committee simply pulled the plug on project AMX! This happened after a raucous meeting about what the competition was doing in the same field and all that. They talked about financial stuff, whether to fund a new phase of AMX. This probably would have been the final phase, since Jack had said in his report that the project was in its final trials in southern Spain. No – the committee decided to shut down the project. You should have seen Jack’s face when he told me he’d got the news in a single-page memo left on his desk, summarizing the points that had been made at the meeting. He was floored …” Authors: “He called you just after reading the memo?” Mark: “No. In fact, we hardly knew each other. We had seen each other two or three months before the R&D committee meeting, at an executive seminar. We got along, but that’s was about it. We had some things in common, like our work, and I knew a little about his project, which was important in Agro’s plans. I didn’t find out from Jack, but through a lab friend. He had heard about it directly from a committee member, who is also the R&D head of Agro’s German subsidiary. It was a little by chance. We were talking on the phone about work and he mentioned in passing the decision to shut down AMX. I was floored, too. I didn’t get it. Why stop a project that big that was going on stream a few months later? Why do that to a devoted and brilliant guy like Jack via an impersonal memo and all that ... it wasn’t just the decision itself but how it was handled. That’s to say the least ... It was unacceptable! They are arrogant in how they deal with projects and people in this company. That’s not how you’re supposed to do things. The first thing I did was tell my wife, who’s an engineer. She was as upset as I was. So I figured I had to do something.

The dynamics of rebellion Two or three days later, I emailed about twenty R&D managers and project heads – I can find the list if you want – just to tell them how upset I was, to put it in writing, you know. I knew that Jack was on the email list but I deliberately left him out.” Mark showed us a copy of the email. Fifteen lines in all and sent to about twenty people dated December 15. The message did not deal with issues of fairness. Nor did it contest the decision to stop the project, as such. It merely suggested a “frank discussion among R&D professionals” about why this had happened. Here is an excerpt: In my view, it is extremely important that we all talk about the reasons why such an important project could, after more than seven years, be considered doomed to failure by a committee, while the project manager himself had said the exact opposite in his monthly report to this same committee. We have to talk about this because if there are people in this company who think that a lengthy scientific process has not, in the committee’s words, demonstrated within an acceptable timescale its ability to turn it into a profitable product, then we should know more what these concepts of “acceptable timescale” and “profitable” mean exactly, if only to avoid future misunderstandings. I trust that you agree that this will be a worthwhile discussion and I await your reactions. Best regards, Mark. The process of rebellion that Mark triggered with this email is framed in professional terms. It did not undermine the hierarchy or challenge the prerogative of the firm’s R&D committee. There was no apparent rejection of the decision itself. It was taken as the basis for further discussion. However, between the lines, there was criticism of the underlying reasons for the decision. Mark suggested that scientists, not the generalist managers who sit on Agro’s R&D committee, should be able to sit down and set the “go” or “no-go” criteria on projects, especially as these are their own projects, projects they oversee on a daily basis in labs and experimental crop fields. In other words, Mark was questioning the legitimacy of these decisions, and even the legitimacy of those who make them.

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When managers rebel Within a few days Mark had received numerous replies from his colleagues and was to receive two or three daily for about two months. He was struck by the fact that the vast majority were glad he sent the email and set about stating their views freely on the matter. However, while most of his colleagues welcomed his initiative, they seemed to be split on whether the committee’s decision itself was right. Some emails openly contested the committee’s decision, as in this one, which Mark received three days after his original email: “It’s simply unacceptable. We’re the experts and scientists, not them. I think we should not hesitate to tell these marketing guys who see nothing but sales figures and not the work that we do, to take a flying jump.” Its author is clearly contesting the legitimacy of another professional group – the marketing heads. Others approved of the decision. Some advised him to “take this experience on board for other projects”. For example: “Thanks for your email, Mark. I think you’re right, but the committee has its reasons that we don’t know enough about to take a stance. In fact, I think this is a good opportunity to find our more about how the committee works.” Mark gradually became the focal point of a burgeoning in-house debate and was be torn between two positions. At first he was clearly on the side of the first group, since he had rejected the roughshod manner of the decision. But as the debate snowballed he stifled his impulses and initial emotions, and pushed the rebellion into a more professional and less militant direction: I really felt that people were ready to react. By that, I mean to send a clear message to the chief of R&D and even higher up than that! So four months later I wrote a long report based on the ongoing conversations I had had with a group of five close colleagues, mostly by email. I also had several conversations with my own direct supervisor. Obviously, those higher up knew what was going on. There had been leaks … and, in any case, my boss had heard about it. We were out in the open, but I thought, after all, we haven’t divulged anything confidential, just discussed the issue in-depth

The dynamics of rebellion with our findings to be turned over to the bosses. That didn’t seem out of line to me. So I wrote this 15-page report and sent it to my five colleagues, who read it and suggested changes and additions – we were brainstorming like crazy on it – and then, in late May or thereabouts, I sent it to the vice-president in charge of R&D, number two in the company. I then saw Jack in Paris, but not until early January. He didn’t want to serve as an example. But he did have a lot on his mind. He was even thinking of leaving the company. I think he was looking for another job. When I saw him it struck me that this had been a way to test him, his cool and all that. If so, then what a dumb way to do things! Jack kept to himself. He didn’t join our discussion. And then, in March, there was a big twist in the plot. His boss decided to offer him some finance, from some slush fund or another, so he could finish his project. I mean, to obtain some end results! Jack went to Spain several times, a little on the sly, as I understand it. He wasn’t too busy on other projects, if you see what I mean. Another guy had already been appointed to shut down AMX. The team members had been moved here and there. In truth, they didn’t know much about what was going on: the technicians, the doctoral students, it was one big mess. So, as I was saying, Jack’s immediate superior gave him about 200,000 euros out of his own pocket – I mean out of his own budget – to save the project. Jack took up the challenge again, and the finance. Word got out; it would have been impossible to keep it a secret. All I noticed was that the upper management let things go on. Not until later did I find out that they had taken an interest in what was happening at AMX. They thought their decision might have been wrong, and that something could be made of AMX if approached differently … whatever, Jack was back on a project that had been officially shut down. That’s the sort of idiotic thing that happens at companies! June was busy for everybody. I had my regular annual meeting with the vice-president for R&D and with his staff; and meanwhile Jack presented them with a report showing good results. How’s that for a happy ending?

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When managers rebel In the end, we obtained two things. At a September committee meeting, Jack was renamed AMX project head, unceremoniously, with no excuses. A cold, calculated decision, you see, as if nothing had happened. But it was big. They had backtracked almost a year after their decision to shut down AMX. That called for champagne at the very least! The second thing is that they agreed to a list of clear criteria, in particular for final phases of projects … and we were told to come up with a draft list to serve as a basis for discussion! But was this really a happy ending? Mark ends his account on an emotional note. Between gritted teeth, he talks about how he felt about having in a way defied his company’s R&D committee: You know, the best part of it all was the final emails and conversations, when we knew that something had happened in this company. We showed that it was possible to stand up and be counted, that it was possible to act in everyone’s interests. That sounds a little pretentious but it’s true. It’s not just that we had come to the rescue of a deserving colleague, or that we had rectified a gross injustice. That’s not the most important thing. No, the most important thing is that we got something moving. We proved that you can put your foot down in this company! That gave me new energy in going all out to do my job. And since then I’ve continued to keep this door open to colleagues – admittedly on an irregular basis – and we’ve even become something like friends, even though I have never met all of them face to face, since some work in Agro labs in other countries. Can you believe that? There was more to come. One year later, Mark was appointed to head the firm’s US subsidiary, and Jack was named as head of an R&D unit in France.

Charles on when bankers revolt Another story deals with a conflict between Charles and some of his bank branch-manager colleagues on the one hand, and corporate headquarters on the other.

The dynamics of rebellion Charles was considered one of Bank’s best branch managers. That’s probably why the human resources manager urged us to meet him, in order to better understand how a branch is run in a wealthy and demanding region like his, located in eastern France near the Swiss border. Curiously, our conversation with him very quickly moved to more personal ground. Charles didn’t really feel like talking about managing a branch. He wanted to talk about how Bank sometimes treats its employees. He is 38 years old, tall and good-looking. He has an advanced degree and is very ambitious. His work at Bank is not his whole life, even though he says that he owes much to the company, which recruited him ten years ago. Charles: “The top managers of Bank are so proud of their accomplishments that they think everyone should be like them. But they sometimes talk rubbish when it comes to evaluating business performance and comparing branches with one another.” Authors: “Branch managers don’t like being compared with one another?” Charles: “Whether we like it or not, we know that we are. So we deal with it. No, what bothers us is something that happened a year or two ago that tainted the relationship between them and us. Well, maybe I shouldn’t put it in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’, since the top brass are themselves former branch managers, so you can’t say they’re that different from us, or that they would not react as we would. But this time they really screwed up, and one of us, if I can say ‘us’, paid for it. They were rolling out a new performance review process for local branches based on market share, customer profitability and all that. As if only short-term quantitative measurements such as key performance indicators (KPIs) mattered. And they saw big discrepancies between one branch and another. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember the memo we came across one Monday morning.” Charles showed us the two-page memo with brief comments on the recent results deemed to be below par, of two branches cited by name. More generally, the memo made a cardinal distinction between branches deemed to be “performing” and

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When managers rebel “nonperforming” – not just “underperforming”. The memo also asked for additional explanations from the nonperforming branches. Charles said, “What problem did I have with that? In retrospect, not much, I guess. But I had the feeling that the memo had been written by some sort of outsider, a consultant, some big bad external consulting firm!” At that, Charles laughed. He gently recounted the whole story. He set the scene, one of injustice, or rather of culture shock. What he described as an attack from top management is not at all the way Bank ordinarily deals with local failings or problems. Under Bank’s culture, branches are held to be collectively accountable for their results, which protects individuals. Bank doesn’t punish individuals, or might rarely – for example, in the case of embezzlement. Moreover, branch managers are masters of their own domains: Bank is a company where people take care of business informally. What I mean by that is, if there’s a problem somewhere, we talk about it. We share things. It’s a culture of sharing … That’s how I see it. We’re not really competing with one another. We try to find the right people for the right job, the right job for the right people. We don’t try to trap them. And when someone is accepted in a group – for example, the group of branch managers – he is rather well protected by his colleagues. That’s how it is here. But that also creates pressure, the pressure to be accepted, and, of course, you are accepted only if you show that you are a serious professional. In a community-based culture such as this one, the memo that Charles referred to was, as he put it, rather “like a missile”. It tested the community’s values of mutual protection. This missile from Bank’s head office, and the genuine shock it caused, left branch employees agog. Nobody could get over it. However, fatalism soon gave way to activism. A leader emerged almost immediately, a spokesman who would explain why branch employees were up in arms. This leader’s name was Charles: Authors: “So you were going to head up the revolt?” Charles: “Revolt? Sure, but not in the ordinary sense of the word. We had to tell them why we didn’t agree. I called two

The dynamics of rebellion or three branch manager colleagues. We talked about the memo and agreed that it was both completely at odds with our culture and unjust when looking at the branches’ local business conditions. We then decided to talk about it with other colleagues. I chose these colleagues because of personal affinity and, to tell you the truth, because they headed up the best branches. I didn’t want to include the managers of the ‘underperforming’ branches, so as not to give management an easy argument, something along the lines of the weakest circling the wagons to shield themselves from normal standards of operation. In fact, the message was that the best, which is what we were called, were saying no to what we thought was a personal attack!” Authors: “So you talked among yourselves, the managers of high-performing branches, and you concluded that management wanted to sack two managers of underperforming branches who were not present at your meeting?” Charles: “We based ourselves on the arguments presented in the memo. And we could see that something wasn’t right. Something told us that whoever wrote the memo didn’t know the business. Then we thought about the actual working conditions of a branch in different environments. Then we told management: ‘You can’t ignore the fact that working as a branch manager in an affluent region is different from working in a poor, rural area. You can’t apply the exact same performance criteria.’ So we told them that we didn’t agree with the memo. We were going to do two things. First we met up at a restaurant near my branch just four days later. Time was of the essence, and providing a sense of urgency was important. There were seven of us – we didn’t invite the two incriminated colleagues but kept them in the loop, and they knew that we were discussing the memo. So we talked, and came up with a memo to management expressing our shared disagreement. Our memo also proposed an alternative and better way to compare branches, because that was the issue, after all. The head office wanted to break up the branch manager clique because we didn’t care much about comparative

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When managers rebel performance and all that. All we wanted was to show that comparisons might entail pitting old friends against one another, allow divide and rule politics, or something along those lines … At least, that’s how we interpreted it, and we sure as heck didn’t want to go there! We just wanted to take care of business, and tell head office: ‘We can help you guys in the middle by providing you with good information on local markets and clients and all that stuff.’ Hey, if you want to take over the business, fine! But do it in the right way.” Authors: “What about the two colleagues?” Charles: “We made it clear that we disapproved of the way things had been handled, and told the head office that we would sign no performance reviews this year if they did not talk this over with us in a serious and professional manner, not in the way that had been done with their memo … Then, I was rather surprised to get a call from the chairman of Bank himself 24 hours later, as if he knew that I was the instigator.” Authors: “You think that one of the colleagues at the restaurant spilled the beans?” Charles: “I don’t know, but, one way or another, management figured out that I was the bad boy who had started this! In any case, the chairman told me he would like to talk things over. So we set up a meeting for the following Monday. When I got to his office, he was not alone. The new marketing director was also there. The marketing director had been with the bank for a little over a year, and I figured out immediately that he was the one who had written the memo! I’ll admit that I found this reassuring. In fact, I was almost glad. We weren’t wrong in our initial reaction in thinking it couldn’t have been one of us. At the meeting there was frank talk of misunderstandings and soon. And the chairman decided to set up a task force on performance-review criteria, under the auspices of the marketing department. I suggested that the human resources department should also be involved. Things went fine, and we agreed never again to mention the punishment meted out to the two colleagues.

The dynamics of rebellion I reported back to these colleagues and we thought it was all over, forgotten, for the moment at least, even though both colleagues were feeling a little unsure. But, at least the memo was buried … I think what convinced them was that the colleagues who wrote the reply memo knew what they were talking about, they were good, and the chairman knew very well how easily we could upset things in a little world where news spreads like wildfire.” Authors: “What has happened since then?” Charles: “It worked! We put together a new set of criteria that reflected local situations and treated people more fairly. We had rather spirited talks with marketing. In the midst of all this we found out that a merger with another bank was on the cards, and that generally means the company trying to get rid of certain branch managers. That caused lots of bad blood. My view is that we showed that the branches could contest head office decisions as long as we could show them those decisions were not right, and that there were people keeping a close eye on them, you might say!” Authors: “So the group of rebels faded away eventually?” Charles: “It wasn’t really a group. It wasn’t supposed to last. There was just a meeting where we agreed to put our collective foot down, and to do so convincingly! But we weren’t there to set up a trade union or anything like that. We wanted to tell management that they couldn’t just do whatever they wanted, that they have to respect people, not just throw them on the trash heap in that way.” This is how Charles tells the story of a fleeting rebellion, which was born and nourished by protest but that would not outlive the original issue. It dealt with a group of peer branch managers who would meet in small groups or talk often on the phone. They stopped meeting and speaking on this issue as soon an alternative solution or compromise had been agreed on with top management. Even so, the spirit of the movement would live on within Bank, leaving a lasting imprint on its members. This branch manager rebellion had two remarkable effects: (i) it forced management to tread very lightly on any issue involving branch staff (and not just branch managers), which

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When managers rebel was crucial when the setting might shift in the run-up to a likely merger with another retail bank; and (ii) it gave rise to a new, points-based system of comparison weighted for the branches’ local environments and markets. The rebel branch managers had made a thinly-veiled threat of boycotting performance reviews if no agreement could be found with top management on the use (or not) of procedures for measuring and comparing branches with one another and, above all, comparing branch managers with one another. The rebels did not focus specifically on the decision to punish two branch managers who were deemed by the central marketing office to be underperforming, but, rather, on management practices in general. By arguing their point of view as experts in the field, their reputations secured by both their status within their company and their individual reputations, the rebels forced top management to backtrack while also allowing it to save face, in this case by creating a task force. Let’s fast-forward now, as we did with Agro earlier. Eight months after this episode, Bank’s marketing director left to join another bank as a regional manager. He said he was leaving both because of this incident – saying he had the feeling that top management had been swayed by Charles, “a highly influential, very clever guy”, and because the task force had “overruled all the new practices he had wanted to implement in the company”. The conflict was not between the branches and top management, which, deep-down, shared a common culture, but rather between a splinter of this shared culture, the branch managers and an outside entity embodied by the marketing director and his staff. Indeed, Charles and his peers did not initially oppose a particular decision, but rather the way that making the decision violated shared cultural values. Their rebellion was constructive because it called attention not just to the issue at hand, but also to the underlying cultural context. Hence, the rebellion resulted in an even broader change, perhaps vague but none the less welcomed intuitively by those working in the field. Incidentally, Charles, the ringleader of the rebel branch managers, was to become Bank’s CEO a few years later.

The dynamics of rebellion 4.2 The gestation of rebellion The experiences of Mark and Charles are alike in some ways, as if they had both encountered some sort of invisible prerequisites for rebellion. Protests are serious and require work, a lot of work and specialized skills; and they proceed along a well-marked path. We shall now review this process of rebellion in depth and more systematically.

An emotional plane Rebellion involves emotions and feelings. It is acted out intensely, even passionately. Rebels feel they are investing their emotions in a worthy and specific cause. The scale of immediate emotions ranges from compassion to anger, and from indignation to exasperation. In the rebels’ view, a morally unjust and inhuman action has been taken either against oneself, or against a close friend or an office colleague. The powerful have attacked arbitrarily, striking down the powerless with ad hominem attacks against people who don’t deserve it or can’t do anything about it. Such attacks are arbitrary and therefore unacceptable or “disgusting”, in the words of some rebels. This is clearly the case at Bank, as Charles makes clear. And at Agro’s R&D department, Mark, and then Philip and the other researchers, were upset by the treatment meted out to Jack. Such treatment engenders a common cause. Men and women defend others who have been picked on unjustly. The rebels feel that there are moments when, regardless of their own personal situation, and regardless of the circumstances or demands of business life, they are no longer willing to play along, as if an unspoken pact had been breached. This emotional plane plays a big part. It invigorates and supports the rebel so much that it blinds him to the risks he may be running. It supplies energy and motivation. It also helps to dispel any ambiguity regarding the rebel’s motives; for example, by erasing any suspicion that he might be an exhibitionist – is the so-called rebel only in it for himself ? Or in a power game – he’ll change if management backs off. In other words, for a cause to be made

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credible, the rebel’s cause must be made honourable, and the rebel must be turned into a martyr or a hero. But while the emotional plane is crucial in unleashing a rebellion, it’s far from being enough.

A clique The process of rebellion is much more than merely expressing disapproval or complaining loudly. It requires more tangible actions, and the burden of those actions, ideally, is shared with others. The rebels close ranks with their colleagues, and not just in the heat of the moment. Rebellion draws its strength from a newly formed clique of colleagues bound together in their attitudes, skills and social status. The clique took on a life of its own at Agro. Jack was not the only one feeling unhappy and indignant. He was joined by others who supported him not only emotionally but also politically. These included Mark and other experts. When he heard what had happened to Jack’s project, an indignant Mark set off a chain-reaction that soon spread to an entire segment of Agro. It became a collective protest, not just over Jack’s cause, and eventually changed how Agro managed projects.

The ‘official’ line The group that comes together in support of one of its own does so on the basis of a simplified theory of their cause for rebellion. At Agro, the R&D project managers – or at least some of them – felt that their common identity was under severe attack from people who obviously had no understanding and experience of what successful R&D management implies. They came up with a scapegoat, in the form of the marketing people who sit on Agro’s R&D committee and are in charge of selling the lab’s new compounds. Even though the vice-president for R&D was a tough man in his own right, who had himself on several occasions stood up to the firm’s marketing people, the shutdown of project AMX stoked the R&D lab’s suspicion of a power play by

The dynamics of rebellion those in marketing, whom they felt were ignorant of how applied research actually works and were fixated on sales figures; and, generally, had the sole aim of making money. In the view of the R&D people, marketing people weren’t like researchers. They didn’t know what an innovative project was, or what conditions were required for high-performance scientific work. They became the villains, and the lab experts felt they had no choice but to take matters into their own hands to defend their ethos and identity, in the face of the cowardice of senior management.

A professional agenda Rebellion in its early stages goes beyond mere emotions, and is complemented with or ultimately replaced by more professional considerations. Rebels set an agenda in the early stages and then present it to their adversary; that is, senior management. They use the well-worn tactic of setting aside the isolated individual cause to avoid trying to make people feel sorry for the original victim. They rebase their arguments on objective factors such as efficiency or professional know-how. They aim to play senior management’s game by showing them the errors of their actions. This is what happened at Bank, where Charles accepted the task force option, and at Agro, where a new process was enacted for managing R&D projects. At Agro, the experts, beginning with Mark, quite quickly proposed in-depth discussions, even though that entailed stifling their objections and their common cause with Jack. The rebels didn’t debate morality. They were not there to gain sympathy. They showed that they could be just as cold, technocratic and determined as those who decided to shut down the project. They played by the rules of their adversaries and partners on Agro’s all-powerful R&D committee at headquarters.

Special skills Rebels skilfully exploit faults in the system by positioning themselves as experts. They use their skills to shield themselves against other forms of expertise that have become adversarial, and implicitly questions the legitimacy and the relevance of

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rebels’ know-how. For example they make critical analyses of the decision-making criteria and processes that they contest. At both Bank and Agro, the objectors targeted the marketing people’s criteria for evaluating the performances of branch managers and researchers, respectively. At Bank, the rebels took over the branch performance reviews to prevent the marketing people from skewing the realities gleaned from the field. As a branch manager himself, Charles had the skills and intuition to anticipate major subsequent changes: for example, the merger of his bank with a competitor. He sensed that the decisions on branch performance reviews had been made to lay the groundwork for the merger. Agro’s experts and project managers turned the element of surprise against their adversaries. The decision to shut down project AMX had been all the more difficult to grasp, since after more than seven years (a very reasonable amount of time in agrochemistry) it was on the verge of producing results. Similarly, the rebels turned to their advantage the unconvincing nature of the decision, which had proved to be arbitrary and unwise, and on which the committee had been far from unanimous – in particular because top management had allowed itself to be manipulated, and that a top manager later discreetly supported the continuation of project AMX. This view was reinforced when the decision was announced in a short memo that landed almost furtively on Jack’s desk. The rebels were thus able to operate on the very terrain on which the decision was made; namely, a project’s quality criteria. The experts guided the discussion by injecting substantive arguments, elaborating those arguments and making up new rules as they went along, which they would be able to test officially through the task force that was ultimately set up.

Leadership Rebellions are not guided by some sort of collective will that emerges spontaneously from the wisdom of the crowd and the bottom-up participation of ordinary employees. Wherever rebellion has been more collective and sustained – which is not so in all the cases we observed – a strong and active leader has emerged. This

The dynamics of rebellion person acts urgently and, crucially, makes everyone understand the situation requires it. Speed is of the essence. For example, in connecting the dots between marketing’s decisions on branch performance criteria and his bank’s coming merger with another financial establishment, Charles sounded the alarm: he felt that was the time to act, to resist marketing’s major irreversible changes, because later the branches would be powerless to act. Both Charles and Mark, the apparent ringleaders of rebellion, were renowned for success in their respective companies. True, they weren’t invulnerable, but they did have everyone’s ear at meetings. They were unofficial spokesmen, so much so that some of Mark’s colleagues expected him personally to assume the risk of doing something for Jack, and, more to the point, of protesting against the R&D committee’s decision. And this was precisely what Mark was to do spontaneously in December, as soon as he found out what had happened to Jack and his project. In his view, the decision to shut down AMX undermined his own reasons for enjoying his work. The decision loosened his ties to Agro. Mark’s future at the firm would depend more or less on how the rebellion turned out. He transformed the fight against the R&D’s committee’s decision into a matter of principle that was not negotiable.

A way out Rebellion also needs graceful exits. This means reconciling two aspects – using the new balance of power to have the decision rescinded while not trapping the adversary in a position from which he cannot escape. Rebellion requires diplomatic skills in easing the other side into an acceptable compromise. Graceful exits are needed, even if it’s not always obvious in cases where rebels, like Patrick at Bat and Michael at Strand, are not particularly looking for one. The stories at Bank and Agro suggest that when conflict remains at a professional or managerial level, rebels can – importantly – provide top management with a way of saving face; for example, top management showing its open-mindedness by agreeing to listen to the substantive arguments of Mark, Charles and their

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respective groups. In both cases, this is made easier by attaching collective movement and a personal matter. The adversaries are not in a fight to the death. Like the chairman of Bank, the Agro vice-president for R&D felt this intertwining keenly. It hadn’t been lost on him that the decision to shut down project AMX was indeed made hastily on the basis of the marketing manager’s arguments that day at the R&D committee meeting. He also realized that there was no consensus between the committee members at the meeting. And the top R&D officials knew their troops, as the vice-president would acknowledge later: “When project AMX was scrapped, I wondered how the researchers would react. I thought that we might be trampling on certain issues … I just didn’t know which ones! That said, a decision did have to be made during the meeting.” It is a little as if the bosses, expecting a research reprisal, deliberately provoked one, in order to produce the consensual, flexible stance that the committee had been unable to produce. Their seemingly harsh verdict was met with an equally harsh response from those under them. And yet, the encounter of that verdict and response sparked a debate that would ultimately produce new rules.

4.3

Rebellion and change

Indeed, it is often acts of rebellion against management that open the company’s doors to change. In such cases, rebellion does not merely fade away once it has been overtaken by events or once everyone has calmed down. Nor does rebellion simply wipe the slate clean, so that everyone can start over. Rebels propose alternative values and even alternative projects. The initial episode is followed almost inevitably by other interactions, against the backdrop of a much richer and more complex staff–management relationship. This phenomenon is worth a closer look.

The paradox of bureaucracy Ironically, it is management itself that supplies the means and opportunity for rebellion, simply because rebellion is always set

The dynamics of rebellion off by a managerial decision affecting a specific group, whom the rebel feels close to in terms of status or activity. Rebellion is not triggered by decisions with an impact diluted across a large group of subordinates, because management is constantly “on stage” and therefore runs the risk of being exposed to judgments and criticism with no safety net. Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Rebellion is not necessarily triggered by a decision from those higher-up and allowed to live on because of imperfect control over subordinates or by a crisis of the legitimacy of authority. Rebellion, in fact, arises, bottom-up, from individual situations and localized movements. Another recurring theme in the cases we have observed is that, in its initial phase, rebellion means resistance, refusal and rejection of change. At both Bank, in Charles’s case, and at Agro, in Mark’s, the original rebels did not set out to modify the rules of management, but rather to protest what they saw as head office’s aberrant practices. More broadly, the original rebels, the forerunners of rebellion, are not truly aware of the course their movement will take in ultimately changing the arbitrary or excessive management procedures they find unacceptable. They do not see themselves as reformers. Above all, they style themselves as the spokesmen of the little people, who bring their grievance before their leader. In their original form, few rebellions offer solutions or plans for change. The prevailing tone is critical, facing up to senior managers, denouncing their over-controlling behaviour and so on. Rebels undermine the legitimacy of a given order fairly easily, using humour or pity as tools. However, they do not readily suggest alternative ways of seeing and doing things. To do so is to risk being vulnerable, taking on the boss and assuming responsibility for anyone who might have joined the protest. Constructive rebellion has to go beyond cynicism and mean-spirited jokes to open a breach in management’s powerful shell. Otherwise it’s not fooling anyone. While the rebels’ tone is firm, their emotions fanciful and their assessments radical, their substantive criticism is often relatively conservative. They do not go so far as to tear down senior management or even openly to defy it. Even if they did, the battle

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When managers rebel would be too one-sided, and the rebels’ support base not sufficiently unified. What is more, rebels may actually find it works in their own interest to remain subjugated. This paradox is worth a closer look. The stories of rebellion that have been reported to us occurred in companies practicing so-called modern management methods. Such companies see themselves as internal markets, using instruments such as client–supplier contracts between the head office and profit centers, for example. They use KPIs, handle employee relations through so-called human resources management, and make short-term evaluations based exclusively on financial criteria. This form of modern management makes everyone submit to the same rules, from the lower levels of employees up to the executives, and all are extremely vulnerable to selective pressure from above. The personalized metrics enable detailed short-term control and pressure that it’s difficult to escape from. In contrast, a bureaucratic form of management provides some escape from individualized and detailed forms of control. The only means the hierarchy uses is procedural, invoking universally-applied written rules that lay down how each person should behave in undertaking specific tasks. Follow the law and employees are safe from any unexpected reproaches from above. When individual performance standards are enforced with unclear procedural rules there is much less protection against real or imagined arbitrariness, and rebellion is thus much more likely.

4.1 Bureaucratization protects The paradoxical effects of formalized work procedures and organizational structures are one of the most famous contributions to organization theory. Bureaucratization, counter-intuitively, tends to lead to breakdowns and unexpected side-effects.

The dynamics of rebellion The American sociologist, Robert Merton,1 has highlighted that the more strictly a subordinate applies a rule – the rule, the whole rule, and nothing but the rule – the more s/he protects himself from the discretionary authority of his/her superiors, and, as a corollary, the more s/he becomes autonomous vis-à-vis his/her superiors. Subordinates apply procedure scrupulously and in minute detail not as an effective way to resolve a given problem but, rather, just to keep the boss off their backs. Too many rules kill rules. In theory, detailed rules should make subordinates less autonomous, as they are no longer free to act except by adhering to the letter of their superiors’ instructions. In practice, however, such rules produce the opposite effect. They make subordinates more autonomous and make the top brass more dependent on how their subordinates do things, on their goodwill, and on their ability to improvise many solutions. It’s easy to see why. The more rules there are for when to do what, the greater the risk that such rules will be mutually contradictory and thus won’t facilitate action by subordinates. What can their superiors do then? The time comes when they must trust their executors, give them some leeway to interpret rules on the basis of realworld local circumstances; quite simply, to do as they see fit. The French sociologist, Michel Crozier, has pointed out the vicious circle in all this. The more a company is managed bureaucratically, the greater use it makes of solutions that are even more bureaucratic, in order to rectify the errors and malfunctions engendered by the original bureaucratization, that is, the formalization of procedures, centralization and specialization.2 Crozier has also observed that bureaucrats do not contest bureaucratic-type functioning and governance. On the contrary, they defend the system in place. Bureaucracy offers a haven of predictability while battles are being fought elsewhere.

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When managers rebel A major distinction between “traditional” bureaucracies and managerial bureaucracies is in the nature of the rules and procedures, particularly those that concern middle managers. Traditional bureaucracies, which the above-mentioned sociologists and organizations have studied, make use of rules and procedures that trace very narrow corridors in how employees work. These rules and procedures are “how-to” tools, and they restrict discretionary power significantly. “How-to” rules are certainly confining for the employee, but at least they limit his or her boss’s direct intervention in his/her work and allow him/her to carve out a little autonomy, as long as s/he is disciplined and adheres to the rules by the letter. The boss, whether a senior or middle manager, also has his/her hands tied, given that s/he is both a subordinate to his/her own boss and a superior to his/her subordinates. S/he can’t really ask his/her subordinates to do one thing and then tell them to do the exact opposite. Managerial bureaucracies, which arise from modern management methods, differ from traditional bureaucracies in several ways. Managers are subjected to performance standards handed down from on high – achieve at least such and such a sales volume in such and such a month, and at such and such financial margin. This is goal-oriented management, as opposed to the process-oriented management of traditional bureaucracies. At the same time, managerial bureaucracies operate in a less certain universe. Performance-based objectives come with a relative diffusion of authority on what resources are to be called upon. Goal-oriented management has fewer rules on how to achieve these objectives. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it does away with bureaucracy – witness the ubiquitous reporting procedures at management’s disposal. Moreover, and this is a key point, superiors have a broad authority for making decisions and evaluating subordinate managers, notably in areas such as promotion, remuneration and mobility. In other words, middle managers in a company using modern management tools are subject to restrictions more indirectly and less perceptibly, at least on the surface. On the other hand, they are more dependent on their superiors and it’s harder for them to protect themselves against their superiors’ discretionary style.

The dynamics of rebellion Alchemy for change For rebellion to be a source of change, it must go beyond jokes, foot-dragging and covert forms of cynical resistance. It must become visible, but without necessarily becoming an “official” and institutionalized movement, handing out tracts, demonstrating in the streets and so on. This middle way is complex and multiform. It is driven by the myriad reasons people give for protesting when they are not sure why they’re doing so. The middle way is nourished deep in the heart of clans and in the dynamics of cliques, the informal, everyday relations with colleagues that are played out at the gathering places where one tells one’s version of the world: the cafeteria, the coffee machine, nearby bars or in the privacy of one’s own office.3 Rebellions are developed and nurtured by two forces: first, clique members share a few secrets among themselves, because it takes several people to change the game, and they have to be in on the secret before they can agree to assume the risk of rebelling; and second, clique members have to share a common view of the aggression of which they believe they are victims. Protest is an intense process, and that’s the very reason it must reveal itself in one way or another. However, for the clique to be cohesive, its members must be bound by that initial secret, must designate a place to meet out of earshot of management, and must set a clear and credible agenda in order to produce a sort of clique mythology, a way of identifying with one another and interpreting the outside world. The accounts of Mark and Charles show clearly how three aspects of rebellion unfold simultaneously: a tragedy engendered by fierce passion is created, implying also that the broader profession is seriously threatened; specialists deliberate coolly and objectively together, referring only to professional expediency and management practices; and finally and in parallel, the dark destinies of the main targets of the managerial decision – Jack at Agro and the two “non-performing” branch managers at Bank – are played down or hushed up entirely, and they are no longer in the frame.

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When managers rebel We were told of these rebellions by individuals, but not as selfcentered accounts featuring a conquering hero or the romantic bravura of a group. Rather, they were spontaneously delivered in the privacy of an office, in a throwaway line or a meaningful glance between colleagues. The initial event involving an individual opens into a more collective engagement that takes shape and progressively energizes a whole group of people. It combines common cause with peers with an occasionally ostentatious demonstration of knowledge of the underpinnings of the system, along the lines of: “We know what’s afoot and we won’t be had!” Rebellion is based on values and interests that are shared with the adversary, and not on opposing world views arising from differing experiences and social levels, such as a laid-off worker might feel regarding a distant functionary in another city or country, or a labour relations expert at the company’s global headquarters. In sharp contrast, the two sides are similar and meet each other on common ground. The conflict requires that the rules of the game be respected, rules that the rebels did not necessarily help to make, but that they none the less play by every day – for example, when facing the competition, meeting constant challenges, and accepting performance goals and rankings. So it is the ethical side of rebellion – along the lines of “there are things that just aren’t done” – that stands out in the disagreement. Of course, these stories are tainted by corporatism. After all, rebels defend themselves against much more than just the usual messengers of managerial practices. Our rebels’ accounts suggest that they fear their guild is under attack: by shutting down a scientific process that was well under way, and by denying that each local market is unique. The spirit of the guild is important within a company in conferring status and prestige to branch managers at Bank, and to researchers at Agro. This is why microconflicts blow up to dramatic proportions. Agro’s researchers accused its marketers of wanting to silence their guild for “wasting precious time”. Bank’s branch managers saw marketers as wanting to restrict their control over local clients because of “excessive familiarity with them”. The marketing technocrats are blamed because they are deemed to be the carriers of the disembodied ideology of the market, an ideology that collides head-on with the guild-like cultures of R&D and local bank branch management.

The dynamics of rebellion The marketing people serve as scapegoats, convenient when like-minded managers sit down with senior executives to settle their conflicts gracefully without outside interference.

Constructive ambivalence Guilds focus on contested decisions and name a spokesperson who is often their “best” candidate, the person least likely to give way in the looming power struggle. Why Mark or Charles, and not someone else? How did it happen at Bank or Agro that one of their best people took on an issue, verbalized disagreement and sought group support? There are three reasons for this. When you are considered the best, you thoroughly understand the rules of the game. When you are considered the best, you also fully understand senior management’s expectations, and are therefore least tolerant of the slightest deviation from them. And when you are considered the best, you’re probably at a time in your career when you’re thinking about what comes next – stay at the company or leave. The best need a stimulus to find reasons to stay. The rebellions of Mark and Charles became productive when they helped to develop new management tools – in one case a list of criteria, and in the other a formalized work process. It’s the world turned on its head somewhat, with senior managers making decisions that are weak technically and based on barely objective reasons and, hence, easily opposable. And that’s precisely what these managers contest – that the actions of those higher-up are not objective enough, that they are too arbitrary or summary. It is through the rebellion of labs and bank branches – bottom-up and middle-up protests – that new tools and new processes are initiated which will serve for later decisions that may be less questionable: “I resist so that I can better serve.” At the same time, that’s the price to pay when you object by the book: for the rebellion to have legitimacy you need to request and accept the rules handed down by superiors. Rebellion is weaker when it does not focus on the rules, or the lack of them. Rebellion gives one the freedom to

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When managers rebel demand new rules, or even to devise them oneself if those higher up allow it. As they swing between sharing personal confidences and unleashing a broader movement, rebellions are telling in a more general way. It would be naïve and fallacious to suggest that these are two worlds, that of resistance at the base and power enthroned on high, the former authentic and providential, and the latter diabolical. In our accounts, there are no angels or demons, no emancipated laborers free to act as they wish and to protest for the common good, no senior managers going grimly about the business of picking out less deserving employees randomly for the trapdoor. It’s all much more complex than a world of brave freedom fighters pitted against an entrenched, self-perpetuating elite. Senior managers are almost as vulnerable and unsure of themselves as the people rebelling against them. They are not the haughty overlords of globalization battling everyone in their path. Senior managers are, in fact, weaker than is generally believed, and that is often the very reason why they are sometimes so arbitrary in their exercise of power. Meanwhile, resisting is an act of power in itself, with its own manipulations and expedients. To protest against management at Agro or Bank is not to change the world, but to unleash a less asymmetric battle that enlightens management in specific ways, while avoiding a head-on collision between subordinates fighting for their survival and dignity, and senior managers beating down the upstarts. It is therefore clear that rebellion is a natural, social act, and that the constant battles that occur within a company actually nourish it. For there cannot be sympathy without hostility. Even so, none of the rebels we interviewed expressed unbridled hostility or a fight-to-the-death mentality. They showed neither rage nor anger, but, rather, a cold indignation and a contained aggressiveness, disappointment and resentment over what they termed senior management’s betrayals and two-facedness. These accounts show that rebellion is not about sabotage, footdragging, mockery and cynical jokes about top brass. Rebels’

The dynamics of rebellion skilful analysis traps managers in their own so-called rational system. More generally, as suggested by most of the stories we researched, the people below are stronger, for one major reason. They are better at diagnosing the situation from a political angle. They contest the infallibility of a senior management decision because they know where it went wrong. No need for an explosion of rage when you know you’re right. Meanwhile senior management’s reaction often goes off at a tangent that leads nowhere. It treats rebels like children. It overstates their emotional need to let off steam. Such condescension can keep management from envisioning a realistic response, from lending a sympathetic ear and from grasping the rebels’ message, so much so that it can become the political inferior. How far do the work colleagues, the other managers, support a rebel? Observation suggests some forms of empathy or understanding with his or her cause. Some concern is expressed, some emotions are shared: what happens to you is unfair, your boss really did not behave properly with you, you can rely upon our support, etc. Nevertheless, and in most cases, not much occurs beyond words of compassion. Rebels face a fundamental dilemma: how and why to get an active support from their peers. In other terms, at one end of the spectrum, there is not much solidarity a rebel may expect from his colleagues. Managers do not actively support a mistreated colleague. They may seem to support but not too much, not for too long, and not in a manner visible by the outside. Collective protest and other forms of mobilization are not familiar to them. No common cause at all exists. Loneliness is the name of the game, as if it would be every man for himself. At the other end, in cases such as Bank, where Charles takes the lead of a activist group of peers, and at Agro, with Philip and Mark, protest and mobilization are more lasting and more collective. At the same time, this support also protects the rebels: here the leaders are neither fired nor “punished” – marginalized – by the company.

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When managers rebel 4.2 How to succeed at rebellion Rebels must possess a certain astuteness. Whether they are successful or not will depend on how well they mobilize available resources, which, in turn, will depend on the circumstances of the moment. Here are ten statements describing a successful rebellion: 1. A rebellion arises from a set of circumstances that generates sympathy among immediate colleagues. 2. Rebel leaders enjoy both respect and recognition within the company. 3. Rebellion focuses on constructive criticism. 4. Rebellious acts pinpoint sensitive areas and draw attention to aggression by senior management. 5. Rebellion takes senior management by surprise. 6. Rebellion transforms the defence of an individual and the circumstances of the case into a more general critique of management’s ability to manage and act in real-world conditions. It challenges senior management on its own terms. 7. Rebels give forthright notice that they are available for discussion with their superiors. They propose serious alternatives to prevailing management rules and practices. 8. Rebellion reverses the balance of power, albeit temporarily. This creates opportunities for constructive negotiation that senior management can then take up. 9. Rebels and management negotiate while considering the other side not as an enemy to be eliminated but as an adversary to be respected. 10. Rebels establish from the outset that a resolution is possible and desirable. A successful rebellion, meanwhile, avoids committing certain venal, or even mortal, sins that might prevent a graceful resolution. Here are six traps to avoid: 1. Rebels don’t trap themselves in emotional and psychological arguments such as “I can’t go on any longer”.

The dynamics of rebellion

2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

They don’t entrench themselves in a dynamic of confrontation, designating scapegoats and culprits along the lines of “Such and such a boss is a bastard. We’re going to get him.” They don’t make use of warmed-over ideologies such as “dump neo-liberalism and globalization”. And management doesn’t stoke resentment, doesn’t treat the rebels like children, and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. Compulsive complainers should not be allowed to grab the spotlight or to set the agenda with their own demands. Above all, rebels don’t allow the mob to run things. Rebels don’t place senior managers in a situation in which they lose face publicly. Rebels don’t strive to place the adversary in a position from which his or her only possible response is to say no. Rebels don’t settle for rectifying the initial grievance, but do try to draw broader lessons from it. Rebels don’t allow ethical protest to keep them from agreeing to a pragmatic agenda. Rebels, above all, don’t try to crush the adversary, but do try to negotiate with him or her on an equal footing.

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CHAPTER 5

What happens tomorrow to today’s rebels? What becomes of rebels? What practical repercussions do their acts have for them? Do they pay dearly for their transgressions, or does their boldness confer all kinds of benefits in terms of their career, psychological and moral comfort, and social status? To gain some perspective on the matter, this chapter shows how rebels deal with their respective fates – those who leave their companies, and those who stay. Rebels have many and varied destinies but have one thing in common: they have not been left unscathed by their rebellion. They are different than they were before becoming rebels; they have been transformed by their ordeal, because rebellion is not some sort of game without consequences that time, for better or worse, will easily erase.

5.1 Those who leave Rebels don’t always win. Nor do they always lose. But more often than one might expect, rebellions simply get bogged down when no rebellious dynamic takes hold. There are many reasons for this. For example, there may be no real adversaries to fight, or senior management may simply turn a deaf ear. Perhaps the rebellion didn’t catch on, or not enough skill was brought to bear to turn an individual cause into a broader debate on managerial practices. The movement may fade away with time or break up as a result of misunderstandings and lack of interest. Or it could be that the rebels haven’t taken the time or put in enough effort to move the agenda to a more objective plane with negotiable arguments. 70

What happens tomorrow? Their pain and indignation are too obtrusive. They quit the game. They swallow the medicine. They hole up. They leave the company, perhaps with the reputation of a loser. Do they carry the stigma for a long time, or did the ordeal mature them? Let’s look again at the accounts of Patrick and Michael. Until their day of rebellion, these two managers had been shaped seamlessly in their company’s mould. And then they found themselves resigning, almost overnight, over a profound disagreement with a managerial decision involving their promotions, even though the promotions were meant to move them faster up the ladder, with a big fat reward waiting at the top. Even so, they turned them down feeling that the promotions reflected a morally unacceptable way of regarding career success and the world at large. They also cited an ethical divide, and insurmountable value differences. Each gave his own specific reasons. Patrick said his private life was being sacrificed or deliberately crushed by his superiors (or worse, used for their own purposes). Michael’s memories of a painful family trauma were revived and trampled on by the human resources department. In both cases, and for the first time in their careers, they felt compelled to defend their private lives from the incursion of corporate life. They dared to express their discord openly. Patrick did so aggressively, vengefully and even cynically, disturbing his boss by telephoning him on a Saturday evening, a sacred non-work period. Each had his own way of staging his revolt, of expressing his point of view to the person who put him on the spot. Unlike Mark and Charles, discussed in Chapter 3, Patrick and Michael were relatively isolated at their respective companies. They had no visible allies or any proclaimed enemies, apart from the direct supervisor who passed on the order. They couldn’t clearly foresee the consequences of their unprecedented behaviour, and they didn’t know how their work environment would react. Would their bosses listen? Would their peers support them? They expected the worst, in any case, and they readied themselves for it by making a second major decision: they resigned from their companies. In resigning their positions they felt they were going for double or nothing, just as their dual rejections – of promotion and of

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When managers rebel remaining with the company – made perfect sense. A few years later, Patrick and Michael savor the knowledge that they were masters of part of their own fate. After all, they had done everything the company had asked of them since they were hired. They had plotted out their career paths, and if that meant resigning on the spot, so be it. To better understand these moments of resistance requires an interpretation of them from the inside, while avoiding a descent into pop psychology. Patrick and Michael explained how they went about keeping themselves from being caught in the company’s control machinery: Patrick: “It became clear very soon that I wasn’t going to be able to stay. The next Monday [after turning down the promotion] everyone seemed to look at me differently. Of course, I was looking at them, and things in general, differently … but it was still a funny feeling. Friday evening, you leave the office as usual, still motivated, thinking about the projects you have pending, and maybe bored just a bit by the routine. By Monday morning everything has changed. The office isn’t the same, or the people. It’s as if you were watching a movie starring yourself, and it’s unbearable. The nice part of the job – the personal contact with people – is not so nice any more. Suddenly, you don’t dare talk with anyone, or conversation is awkward, and, little by little, people stop talking to you, or at least talking to you in the same way …” Authors: “You didn’t see anyone on Monday?” Patrick: “Yes, I did, and everyone knew everything. It was amazing, or maybe they didn’t know … I’m not sure. My colleagues asked me how I could be so stupid … well, they didn’t say that in so many words, of course. In any case, our relations had changed, except with one or two guys who for some reason, I never knew why, wore smiles. It was either ‘Way to go!’ or maybe something nobody said to my face like: ‘That makes one less on the list …’. In any case, I couldn’t stand the doubt. So I submitted my resignation that evening, and I don’t think it was on impulse. I would say the manager didn’t look very surprised. Maybe he just thought that it happened faster than he expected …”.

What happens tomorrow? Resistance leaves the surroundings of both rebels and non-rebels in shreds. For something unusual, a kind of transgression, has just occurred. People don’t just turn down promotions in this up-and-up world. To do so is bad form, deviant even. So Patrick turned into a deviant. He had spun off the standard trajectory, and, regardless of what his reasons might be, you couldn’t do that here, not in this company. Substantive reasons didn’t matter. It’s the very fact that the trajectory has been breached. The deviant becomes a pariah. It’s not appearances that count, but what Patrick did, and as a result he was cast out from the group. Patrick is well aware of this, because he had always stayed on the right trajectory at the company, and at school before that. He knew that he had crossed a line on Saturday evening when he turned down the promotion. So he became a deviant, and felt he might as well own up to it and turn in his resignation right away. He didn’t see himself becoming the advocate of his own cause. In fact, on that Monday, he didn’t really think that his cause was worth defending. The stage machinery had broken down, but perhaps he felt that way because he was no longer on stage. It wasn’t until later that ex-colleagues suggested to him that his case might provide fodder for a broader cause, negotiating what was and was not acceptable behavior from an executive at the company. That discussion did not happen, because Patrick left. So it’s too late, at least for him. Or perhaps it isn’t … Several of Patrick’s colleagues were to leave the firm within the year, in a way following him out of the door. Were they friends of Patrick’s? Not especially. Did they feel common cause with him? Not really. However, they were troubled by the resignation of such a well-regarded manager. They realized that something wasn’t right if the company allowed one of the company’s best managers, or at least one of its most promising, to walk out of the door, almost scorning him, without making any effort to hold him back. What wasn’t right for these managers, for these future rebels, wasn’t that the company had set an official line to which it expected its top people to adhere. They had no problem with that. After all, an official line has to be set so that everyone is working together towards the same goal. To govern, an organization must create mental frameworks to be inculcated by its

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When managers rebel most outstanding members, as this is a prerequisite for being considered outstanding in the first place. No, what wasn’t right in their view was that the company refused to talk things over with Patrick. A company like theirs claims to be pluralistic and open to initiatives, “ready to listen to lots of points of view” as its CEO repeated to its executives, but when one of them turns down a promotion, it coldly and cynically equates this to a refusal of mobility. It didn’t want to hear what good reasons Patrick might have had. In general, a promotion means many things. From the company’s point of view, it’s a way of recognizing a person’s willingness to toe the line: he met our expectations and the objectives that we set him. He is rewarded for his obedience in achieving objectives, and the firm decides to keep playing this card and even to increase the importance of the stake. It pushes him further up the ladder, for his own good and that of the collective, of course, because he does toe the line. And the executive is expected to do this even more assiduously as he moves up. In fact, in general, the higher one rises in a company, the more one conforms. From the manager’s point of view, accepting a promotion is like saying: I’m taking it because deep down inside this is fun, and as long as I’m doing well, I’m going to go on. Or, I’m taking it because if I stop, I drop. There’s a third, much simpler way of seeing it, however: I’m taking it because that’s how it is. When you do well, you move up, you become a better person, at least by the standards of the modern ideology of success and advancement. Accepting a promotion means accepting its underlying ideology and becoming an example for others. Few executives, of course, are quite so philosophical, as they do not see the firm first and foremost as a political world. However, when the demands of sacrifice and high performance they accept in their working lives are incompatible with their personal lives, with the outside, a choice has to be made between the two. The deciding factor may come from the outside – for example, from a relative, a friend or a coach. If not, people decide on their own, in which case they have to cope with the reactions and judgments of those for whom the ideology of performance and promotion is unquestionably a good thing.

What happens tomorrow? Patrick thought first about his baby daughter. He was living in the bubble of his family circle, and the offer of a promotion burst this bubble. And he said no. The prospect of promotion helped him to sort out what was essential in his life and what was secondary. It wasn’t until much later, looking back at his experience through a political prism, that he connected it with a hypocritical ideology he didn’t feel ready to endorse yet again. And yet he will indeed endorse it again in the future, in another context, as a senior manager at another company that gives him a new start. What about Michael, who turned down a promotion for slightly different reasons than Patrick? Michael: “Why I left … is heart-breaking. On the one hand, they asked me to do something I couldn’t do, close a facility. I had long known that this is something that you have to do in a so-called normal career, at least that’s what we pick up. That’s when I realized there was something missing, that I was not willing to do the things you have to do to move ahead. So I decided to look elsewhere. That’s all. I don’t like screwed-up situations … It’s as if I had realized that for years I’d been doing things that I shouldn’t have been doing. It was a shock …” Authors: “No regrets now?” Michael: “No, I even think that I did the right thing. In fact, I hated the fact that people were asking me to do what I couldn’t do. They aren’t expected to know my values or convictions – well, maybe they are a little – and I said as much to the HR gal. She concluded stupidly that I was throwing in the towel. Now I realize that she could have analyzed things a little differently … It was the fact that I was saying no … and that’s not allowed…” Authors: “The company didn’t try to get you to stay?” Michael: “Not for one second! They must have thought that I was out of it, that I lacked courage, because to close a facility, of course, you have to have guts!” The split seemed final. One senses the bitterness in Michael’s words. It was over values, of course, but, above all, over what you have to do to prove your value to your company. Michael

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When managers rebel thought that the test the company subjected him to was silly and even a little humiliating. Why force people to do what they are unwilling or unable to do? He thinks a manager is effective when he does what he likes doing, in a setting in which he’s happy. So he left after explaining to the company’s representatives that he would have a hard time doing what was expected of him. The company stuck to its guns and concluded that his refusal was an act of cowardice, and that it was clear that Michael was not up to the post. Well, it was about time the company realized it! The split can also be interpreted as a personnel-management error. The company’s representatives were blinded by a narrow, misguided definition of what a high-performance manager is supposed to be, and by their conviction that he must prove his valour through an obstacle course of specific tests and trials. So they were unable to see in Michael’s refusal anything other than a sign of ineptitude, a lack of guts and the spirit of sacrifice. He was not really up to the test to which he had been subjected, rather similar to Patrick’s situation. The firm was so entrenched in its quasi-ideological model of individual value and performance that it was blind to other possible mechanisms. It even forgot the reputation for excellence that Michael had achieved in the past in handling difficult tasks. The firm literally pushed Michael out, since he had disappointed them deeply. Worse, he had even betrayed their confidence in him. For all that, Michael has more-or-less come to terms with things. As he said, “Working at odds with your values turns you into a split personality … and, in fact, I have lots of colleagues who became torn between two lifestyles, who also were turned into split personalities!” Even so, ironically, he ends up blaming himself and himself alone for the rift between him and the company. He doesn’t even hold a grudge against his former employers, with the possible exception of the “HR gal” whose job should have been to lift the veil of customary managerial authority – in this case, to interpret Michael’s reluctance as an exceptional creative opportunity. Michael thinks that, ultimately, he just wasn’t up to scratch, not because of his professional skills, but because of his social background. A few months after leaving, both Michael and Patrick don’t have many regrets at having rebelled against decisions that affected

What happens tomorrow? them personally and for having broken rank with their employers. Since then, they have both found better matches, at least until they run into a new conflict. Michael says: “I now have what I have wanted for years. That’s how I look at it. I do my best and if my best is not good enough, then I’ll leave. You can’t live a lie.” Patrick, meanwhile, has moved to the top. Has he learned as much from his experience as Michael seems to have?

5.2 Those who stay What about the colleagues and superiors who do stay with the company? How are they affected by the resignations? Are they on the whole indifferent – “it was his choice, after all, he has to live with it”, or fatalistic – “they did tell him that from the start; he should have known he had no chance”? Does any good come of the resignations of major players such as Patrick and Michael? It’s interesting to listen to what some of Patrick’s and Michael’s closest colleagues, who stayed with the company, had to say about the rebels who left: There are people you forget and people you don’t forget. When Michael decided to resign, we were afraid because he was a big player here. We were upset at the company because we thought it was to blame. Maybe he was just in the way? The firm showered us with messages on why Patrick left. We know why. He wasn’t in phase with the boss on a project. These kinds of things happen all the time in companies. Patrick was forced out, that’s obvious. I think his boss, who is also my boss, couldn’t stand his success … even though, when Patrick looked good my boss looked good. It’s a private matter between two powerful egos. We’re in the same boat, Michael and me. I know that what happened to him could happen to me one day. It’s strange … because, in fact, it’s reassuring. When you’re faced with this type of decision, it means that you matter to the company. There’s something wrong when people like that leave. They’re hard to replace. Sometimes they’re never replaced.

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When managers rebel Generally speaking, the feelings of those who stay can be summed up in the words of a human resources manager regarding a redundancy plan in the works at a major bank. “Companies are like life itself. There are people you choose to remember and others you choose not to remember. What I mean is that some people count and others don’t.” If you can ignore the dry, technocratic style of this pronouncement, it actually makes the firm seem like a relatively ordinary place, where losing a close colleague is like losing a friend. So what happens when someone whom you choose to remember has resigned? Those whom you don’t remember may slip quietly and rapidly into oblivion, but the resignation of someone who counts leaves a trail. Because ordinary doesn’t mean unimportant. While some resignations can go unnoticed, others leave traces because they follow a deliberate decision. In one way, resignations make a bigger impression than layoffs. They are better remembered, more surprising and more out of the ordinary. Those who stay are marked by three types of feelings: hope, jealousy and disappointment. Resignations give hope to those who stay. They show that some people have succeeded in finding the keys to the cage, to escape on their own terms. Yet fate is never neatly ordered, since people who were among the most respected and high-performing can leave, without even saying goodbye. Hope is palpable in the words of a 41-year-old marketing executive at a construction firm: “What strikes me when a colleague resigns is that he is saying something like: ‘we’re parting ways on my terms’. This shows that it isn’t always the company that makes those decisions.” The balance of power is reversed. The rules are set by the employee who leaves the company, and not by management. It is this possibility of suspending the company’s domination for a time that gives hope to those who stay, to those who haven’t yet dared leave or haven’t yet had the opportunity to do so, and who may begin to question their courage. Such soul-searching does not necessarily go as far as trying to find out what became of the rebels, whether they did the right thing. No, it’s the fact that they left that counts and gives food for thought to those who stay.

What happens tomorrow? Resignations sometimes bring on jealously in those who stay, along the lines of “I wonder if I would have had the guts to do that myself ?” Rebellions bring on soul-searching that might otherwise have not occurred. For example, a close colleague of Michael comments: “Michael gave us a slap in the face. I don’t know if he did us a favour … but I sometimes envy him. He had the courage to say no. At the same time, it may have been easy for him, since he had good reasons.” This is an ambiguous appraisal, along the lines of “Michael and I are too different, so comparisons are difficult, and yet – would I do the same thing?” The rebel’s resignation makes others think about doing the same thing themselves. In addition to hope and jealousy, those who stay experience disappointment. Some are disappointed when a colleague resigns, either because they got on well with him and feel a little hurt by the separation, or because the company may become tougher and less trusting because of the colleague’s resignation. The act of rebellion does not necessarily make the company more accommodating, quite the contrary in fact: “I’m not afraid of saying that Patrick put us in a real bind. Our working conditions were fine, and just like that it was over … and we’re the ones paying the price because the bosses are upset.” The issue in the latter case is that rebels alter the balance of a situation without first talking things over with colleagues. They feel they are dealing with a personal matter and therefore take the liberty of cutting ties with colleagues, which virtually all rebels do without explaining why and without anticipating the potential consequences for their closest colleagues. Perhaps they were even incapable of doing so. The initial grievance was between the company and the individual rebel, and therefore did not involve other managers when first broached. Regardless of whether or not resignations are expected, they all tend to be triggered by disruption, such as a phone call during a quiet evening at home, an irrevocable letter of resignation, by people who feel they are in a no-holds-barred combat in which they lie to each other and decisions become rapidly irreversible. However, even though in opposite camps, adversaries still share common ground. Each side knows what the other is talking

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When managers rebel about, because the same language is being used. This makes closure possible among people who ultimately resemble one another quite closely, even if they don’t deal with the situation in the same way. It’s as if the goal was to create discord. What’s striking about individual rebellions is that the immediate protagonists are in a way more alike than others in the vicinity. One link is broken only to strengthen another elsewhere in finding a solution, an agreement, even if it’s through a resignation. Resignations are allowed by consensus. The return to this consensus is inextricably linked to the initial disruption. A world is disrupted and the victim of the disruption returns the favour by protesting and resigning. Processes of collective rebellion can hardly occur without certain pre-existing social conditions, such as an informal communication network, inherent practices of exchange and covering for each other, tacit forms of mutual understanding, or shared references to peer groups and professional identity. The existence of some minimal form of social tissue engenders two kinds of dynamic: first, the propagation of protest; making sense of protest. Others join the protest and mobilize themselves as actors. Joining collective action is nevertheless not just sheer, passive imitation. Individuals also need to make sense out of a rebellious form of behavior. Such is the case with the dilemma between leaving or staying. Second, some types of organizational management practices isolate individuals to an extraordinary degree. Top management swamps them with work and responsibilities. Employees and managers change jobs, tasks and task environments frequently inside the same company. This mobility means that people may be assigned to a work unit for not more than two months, and not report to their new superior for more than two months either, before leaving for a different position and local chain of command. An employee’s superior does not remain for long in a given position either. S/he is in command of more than twenty subordinates s/he hardly meets and gets to know. Colleagues also rotate jobs at a dizzying rate. Time is therefore too short for socializing newcomers. Learning specific primary identity frameworks, sharing stable norms and common references, making sense of what we as individuals are doing in our current position, are difficult to

What happens tomorrow? achieve over a short period of time. When individuals are loosely embedded in social contexts, when not enough social integration and control is provided by primary groups and by wider environments, they become exposed to anomic disruptions.

5.1 Anomia Anomia characterizes situations in which the social rules that guide the behaviors and aspirations of individuals have much less influence than in normal situations, become incompatible or lose ground to other rules. This is the case in particular in periods when major social changes occur. The more the social rules imposed on individuals by society or by an organization weaken, the more the level of individual dissatisfaction increases. Demoralization of individuals paves the way for suicide, as suggested by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, in his landmark study of the causes and forms of suicide.1 The absence of processes of local social integration and control induces some tragic consequences. In such extreme types of organizational management, individuals do not rebel or join rebellions, and do not make sense of collective action. Worse, they adopt individual reactions such as suicide, the abuse of alcohol, or being overcome by stress. Instead of using strategies such as vocal or collective protest, and leaving the company, they adopt a strategy of withdrawing via self-destruction.2

Each company has its own way of reacting; for example, by punishing rebels. One major retailer goes so far as to close down a store if it thinks that middle managers have gone too far in questioning management practices. Another way of reacting, in the company Construct’s case, was to accept the resignation of Patrick without any visible reaction, and to appoint a carbon-copy employee in Patrick’s place. Unsurprisingly, Patrick’s replacement failed within a few years. There were many reasons for this; for example, the haste

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When managers rebel with which the carbon copy was put in place. The employee may have been flawed, or may have become acquainted only belatedly with the challenge that management had placed before him. He may have had a hard time grasping that the challenge was not so much to succeed but to show that the resignation of the original manager, Patrick, was of no real consequence. A third way of reacting is for the company to change certain practices. Once Mark had resigned, for example, Agro tried to come up with new tools and processes to choose which R&D projects to invest in. Bank, meanwhile, backtracked on its apparent plan to “break” the branches’ local autonomy, when it realized how important that autonomy was in business terms. Brick, meanwhile, folded Bruno’s business directly into the global headquarters and ringfenced its investment budget from its Asian officials to whom Bruno reports. What differentiates these three types of reaction is, of course, the company’s interpretation of rebellion. Some think that it’s selfishness or simple disobedience by hotheads, even when rebels eventually re-enter the fold, as happened at Bank. In spite of the negotiated outcome in which senior management managed to save face, the head office still believed that the rebellion was not for the best. Bank’s CEO at the time would later admit that “in spite of everything, we knew that Charles was a hothead, that he took things personally; that has actually helped his career”. Interestingly, Charles was appointed CEO of Bank shortly after the merger. It is not clear that the previous CEO, who retired at the same time, truly pleaded his cause. But that doesn’t explain everything. How companies react also depends on how flexible the modern management methods are that have been put in place. The most entrenched hegemonies allow senior managers to be flexible at times. The bigger the stick, the more those who wield it can speak softly – like human beings, you’d almost say. In other words, companies that take a softer line and listen to rebels, paradoxically end up stronger, while those that don’t, end up weaker. By allowing Patrick to decline the Scottish promotion, by trying to understand his reasons or even seeking out an alternative solution with him, the company could have taken advantage

What happens tomorrow? of an exceptional opportunity for creativity and commitment. But it didn’t do so. It refused to listen and even went out of its way not to listen. Patrick remembers: “I thought that it was a pity, especially for the company and for those who were left to take the grief. Because everything was done in a rush. Because it was absolutely necessary to show that this was only a minor incident, regrettable to be sure, but minor.” As long as companies see, or pretend to see, rebellion as a series of momentary and minor incidents, trifles to be forgotten immediately, they won’t be able to deal properly with employee relations or find solutions to the managers’ daily dilemmas, or help those who stay to understand why they should remain with the company.

5.3 Those who move up The accounts of Charles and Mark are alike in that the two rebel leaders went on to brilliant promotions as a result of their rebellions. Charles became CEO of Bank, while Mark was named as head of one of Agro’s major research centers. A similar thing happened to Bruno, one month after his act of rebellion. His boss called him in to announce that his budget had been unblocked, on the CEO’s orders. Bruno was incredulous and not until weeks later did he feel confident that this wasn’t a trap set by his local bosses as some sort of payback or to appease their own guilt. “I still can’t understand exactly what got into me on that evening of the cocktail party,” Bruno said. In any case, his business is now a big player in Asia, with numerous stores, comfortable financial margins and a dominant market share. Even so, emotion can still be heard in his voice years later when he when remembers the incident: “I was lucky they didn’t cut my head off.” What would have become of Charles or Mark had they not provoked a successful in-house rebellion? Where would they be now had they not assumed the role of conquering hero? It is well known that companies love winners and reject losers, so there’s no adequate way to answer such questions.

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When managers rebel Incidentally, Charles, Bruno and Mark all moved up the corporate ladder rather nicely. Their challenge to senior management in fact became an effective career move. They said, in effect: “We can do better. We’ll show that we can find better solutions.” Their rebellion was not directed against the company and its senior managers, but rather was intended to protect their community by pinpointing a specific target. For example, at Bank and Agro, the target was embodied by the marketing people. Mark and Charles demonstrated that they were able to read a tense situation accurately and to lead a serious discussion by a group of professionals on topics rarely dealt with outside head office: respectively, the shutdown of a key R&D project, and the punishment of two branch managers. The Agro rebels, for example, rewrote the script, taking on the initial managerial decisions without attacking the management head-on. Their aim was to revise the criteria for the success of a project, not necessarily to reverse the R&D committee’s decision to shut down a project it had deemed to be too slow in producing results. The Bank rebels aimed to properly define the vision of comparative performance of branches in different coverage areas, and to avoid punishing the managers of the two branches deemed to be underperforming by head office. The Bank and Agro rebels lowered the stakes while politicizing them, and broadening their scope. Rebellion shifted the focus to general strategic considerations. There was a remarkable inversion of roles, which explains both why the rebellions were successful and why the company sought to retake control over its leaders. As Charles says, “My appointment was the culmination of a slow process. I mean that the deal with the branch managers did nothing more, in my view, than trigger a decision that would have been made in any case … it speeded things up, I think.” However, the former CEO, Charles’s predecessor, has a different interpretation: “Charles was good, no doubt about that … But that was a real power play. Lots of people at LC [the bank that Bank was planning to merge with] were impressed by that story. I don’t know how it was told, embellished no doubt, but it did end up carrying Charles to power.” While opinions diverge and it’s hard to make sense of what really happened, it’s still worth asking the question: Why are some

What happens tomorrow? rebels helped up the corporate ladder, while others are forced into resigning? One reason is that they have different reasons for rebelling. Patrick and Michael had moral and personal objections to the ordeal they were being put through. They were the designated targets, which was not the case among those who stay and rise up through the ranks. Bruno wasn’t a target. Charles and Mark reacted to the treatment meted out against a colleague. They themselves weren’t the targets. Charles was regarded as a highperforming branch manager who toed the line and served as an example. He couldn’t be accused of being opportunistic when he decided to lead the rebel movement. Mark, meanwhile, was far from happy with the project committee’s decision, because he thought the same thing might happen to him one day. His personal interests were at stake, against a backdrop of fear and perceived threat. Charles and Mark made a cost–benefit analysis before deciding to rebel. And their real motivation may have been to take charge, rather than to change things. By rebelling, they showed their leadership qualities and that they were able to understand the situation perhaps even better than the top management itself. They weren’t the victims: the researchers and branch managers were. But, unlike the researchers and branch managers, Mark and Charles were both in a position of strength and were therefore not taking a major personal risk. At the very least, they felt they were acting in the company’s interest. At least, that’s the message they were sending, particularly to senior management, when they decided to lead the rebellions. Another reason that some are forced out while others are promoted is that the initial grievances are different. Patrick’s and Michael’s rebellions touched on the very core of company governance: selecting managers, handling promotions. Their refusal was a direct critique of the “regime” and its representatives. What might have been a routine turning down of a promotion immediately took on political overtones. Nothing of this sort occurred in the cases of Charles, Bruno or Mark, however. They weren’t rebelling against the head office but only against the middlemen responsible for making recommendations, or, in Bruno’s case, against the local supervisors. With pinpoint precision, they launched surgical strikes against the bureaucracy,

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When managers rebel not the top brass. They could not afford to miss their targets, because, if they had, their missiles might have caused collateral damage to people who count. Their strategy was quite clear. They targeted the marketing people despised by field staff; or, in Bruno’s case, the people with a hold over the purse strings. Mark and Charles felt that their adversaries not only had no real-world knowledge, but also wilfully antagonized those who did, while Bruno was indignant over the refusal of the money-handlers to take calculated risks when they modeled their investment allocation criteria. It might seem that, in conclusion, senior management should almost thank rebels like Mark, Bruno and Charles for having saved them from the mistakes that they, via their representatives and co-conspirators at the head office, were about to commit. Rebellion is a service provided free of charge by the people in the field – the bank branches and research labs. These rebels are in fact benefactors, in a way. All levity aside, this interpretation may seem extreme. But is it really? In retrospect yes, in part. But the answer would have been less clear while the rebellion was unfolding. For nothing guaranteed that things would turn out as well as they did. The rebels clearly took on risks on unfavorable ground in transgressing management’s behavior norms. While their rebellion was certainly tactical in part, they still had to improvise and brave the uncertain course that events would take, and the unpredictable reactions of other participants. The sense of duty and sacrifice to the collective upheld their legitimacy and helped them to bear their internal emotional and moral conflict. Mark, for example, was aware from the outset of what was at stake: I wasn’t sure I was taking a big risk. I already had a reputation as a big mouth back then. And I was at a fairly good point at work, meaning that I was probably starting to go round in circles, and this email changed that. Something had to be done to change things. When I say change things, I also mean that I was starting to get fed up with work in general. So there you have it. Mark’s rebellion shed a little light on his world. He had a successful career, but he was in something of

What happens tomorrow? a rut. It was time to change something. Why not “shake things up”, as he himself says? Charles’s point of view was a little different. His reasoning was much more corporatist. He’s a sales type at heart. He likes markets, fieldwork, meetings clients out across the country and at factories in isolated areas. He can’t stand what he calls “central office people”. So the memo from central marketing set him off, almost like a personal insult. He saw that it was his time: “This empty suit, as we called him, was attacking the group. Of course, some branch managers are better than others, but it’s not his place to make that assessment. He’s never seen a client anywhere but on a diagram!” Just like that, Charles’s strong dislike for the clueless expert further convinced him of the justice of his stance. The problem is that, as the process moves along, doubts creep in. What if this works? What should we think of this company if it admits it made a mistake? The doubts of Mark and Charles, as well as Bruno, are polar opposites of the convictions of Patrick and Michael that the company would never own up to its error. So some meaning has to be attributed to the rebellion, one reason being that it might possibly confer some benefits later. Mark realizes that: “I don’t know if seeing the project committee screw up was reassuring, funny or a cause for concern. I just couldn’t bear the thought of these guys sticking their noses in our business. They felt that we had to move fast, because the business unit had to generate cash and all that. Isn’t that the world we live in? So that got me really thinking … what on earth am I doing here?” Mark was very soon able to answer that question, when he was offered a promotion a few months later, a promotion that he would not want to turn down. These managers are alike in certain ways: high-performance, well-educated, well-versed in the rules of the game, aged between 30 and 45, and rebelling against a decision by their superiors. Some resign and eventually land nicely elsewhere. Others hang in there in hopes of climbing the corporate ladder. In their new positions, will they reinforce the managerial authority they once contested? Or will they remember their own rebellion on the day that their own subordinates decide to rebel?

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When managers rebel 5.4 Those who change Rebellion can be creative for both the rebels and the company. We shall focus in this section on the creative forces unleashed in the rebels’ lives, and leave the companies for the next chapter. Stories of rebellion, as illustrated by Charles and Mark, show that corporations can provide grounds for democratic action. Rebels do this by opening up the channels of information and rallying their colleagues in the defence and promotion of their guilds, culture and skills. A guild consciousness is born. Are companies able to tolerate this? Can they allow employees to go beyond merely defending their specific values and skills? How do they react, for example, when even the most unlikely suspects of all, the marketing people, take their cue from the rebels. Yet that’s what happened to Martin. And he’s not the only one. We often hear of managers who decide to give up their jobs to become winemakers or teachers, restore old manors, run luxury bed-and-breakfasts and so on. Television and the press often relate such stories, which reassure with their message of individual freedom. What is reported on less is that these ruptures are sometimes brought on by something other than the simple desire to take on a new challenge. In some cases, they flow directly from someone else’s act of rebellion. This underscores the significance of Martin’s story. Martin was an executive in Bank’s marketing department at the time of the branch manager affair. He was shaken by the rebellion of Charles and his friends. He was 32 when it happened: “I went to business school to some extent to make my parents happy. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do in life. Management is a jack-of-all-trades profession, and having a management degree does open doors. I had good grades, so I thought, why not? To tell you the truth, I didn’t think about it too much.” Companies are full of managers who became managers because they couldn’t find their real calling in life. They find a substitute in embracing the culture of business results. Employers know this well. They invest huge sums in holding conferences and seminars to nourish the idea that management is coming into

What happens tomorrow? its own as a true vocation. Of course, they do this for the good of the company and society at large. Yet, some managers still have doubts, which can be transformed into revolt by a specific stimulus. That’s what happened to Martin, who witnessed the rebellion at Bank up close: I had been working in the marketing department for about two years. I just did my job and didn’t ask too many questions. A review of branch profitability had been launched and I was put in charge of it. I gave several reports to my boss, who presented the reports’ findings a number of times to the management committee. I think that’s how it began, when they singled out the problem branches, the thing that shocked Charles so much. When I heard about what was happening [the rebellion], I really wondered if it was true. When you don’t know where the truth lies, you can’t stand it any more and it’s time to take off. Martin was, in fact, one of the faceless authors of the infamous memo. That’s why he wanted to “take off ” – when he realized that he wasn’t up to defending a project he had been working on for more than a year: “Deep down, the project didn’t interest me.” Moreover, he was up against some highly motivated managers who controlled the agenda since they knew the issues very well, and who were defending a profession that they appeared to love: “It was a little like the guys in the suits show up and start telling branch managers, this is how things are going to be now. I couldn’t see myself doing that, so I got out. I resigned without too many explanations … which no one asked me for, anyway …” Martin then worked for a time as an independent consultant using his network of contacts. He went back to university and earned a master’s degree in international affairs, and then started to work on a doctoral dissertation. A few years later, he became an associate professor at a university. Since then, he has given up any idea of working for a company again: “I wouldn’t say that a dream has come true, because I didn’t really have any dreams. But I thank the guys who took action, because they pushed me out and made me understand that I was wasting my time. Now, at least, I have time to do what I like …”

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When managers rebel Something clicked, and Martin feels he is better off for it. Similar triggers occur every day that push accomplished executives into trying out life outside the prison/playground that is the company. Each follows his or her own path in getting out of the managerial rut. They become teachers, consultants, humanitarian workers and so on. While teaching, consultancy or helping the less fortunate are demanding callings in their own right, they do offer a respite from the cold calculation of the market, from the pressure to conform, from the quiet desperation of daily life at the company. To some, these new callings are more compatible with their view of themselves, their work and their place in society. To sum up, rebellion is not some mere inconsequential phase that some go through without any traces remaining, a sort of safety valve that has to be opened from time to time to relieve pent-up aggression and reduce some of the daily pressure of work. Rebellion leaves an imprint, often a lasting one. It is a moment of rupture, whether immediate or delayed. It occurs unexpectedly and spreads surreptitiously, or can be diluted over time. The river in which the company and its people bathe downstream is not the same as the river upstream. Nothing stays the same, even if it seems that nothing has really changed.

CHAPTER 6

Creative rebellion Executive rebellion unleashes a dynamic of protest to which the company must respond, whether the decision it ultimately arrives at is right or wrong. Rebellion, in fact, gives the company an opportunity to implement new management principles that it had previously been unable or unwilling to adopt. Rejecting current work rules and the decisions based on those rules can even liberate the company from the latest fads that consultants spend their days dreaming up and selling as quickly as possible before everyone else is aware of their game. It is true that rebellion also carries a significant cost. It gives rise to a climate of confrontation and conflict among stakeholders. Misunderstanding and suspicion become rife. Support is fleeting. People are put on the spot. The issues are at times hard to pin down and painful to deal with. Rebellion features refusal, criticism, mutual exclusion and hostility – in short, nothing that seems truly constructive or fosters the sort of brainstorming that is usually associated with the creative process. Even so, rebellion and its forms of protest leave an aftermath that nourishes the dynamic of change. Such change is produced in pain, but is also exhilarating. In some cases the changes that are ultimately made are those that were desired from the start, but in most cases they are not. In all cases, even if the rebel fails, s/he at least (feels as though s/he) has helped to change something. Rebellion unleashes creative forces. Gary Hamel, a professor in strategy, studied how a gang of rebels transformed IBM, then a has-been company, into an e-business powerhouse.1 Rebels are creators, often in spite of themselves. Activists who defy authority and convention are a real force behind the success or failure of radical innovations, as is the case, for example, in consumer issues, 91

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When managers rebel as noted by Rao Hayagreeva, a Stanford Business School professor of human resources.2 This chapter deals with managers who rebel, who challenge the relevance and fairness of managerial methods. It discusses what creation means and describes its nature. Rebellions within firms involving managers as activists are remarkable phenomena, the usual corporate mindset being somewhat conservative, as suggested by an American sociologist, Robert Jackall, who studied managerial ethics and the particular conception of right and wrong, proper and improper, that underpins management’s rules for action.3 His explains how the structure of corporations work to promote greed, credit-stealing and problem-hiding, dishonesty, fear and confusion. Based on intensive fieldwork inside several large corporations, we see exactly how the greedy and dishonest are promoted while conscientious employees are forcibly silenced, ensuring that all vestiges of personal morality are shorn away.

6.1 The different levels of creative rebellion To create means to bring about change. A broader, more systematic look at such change yields some interesting observations on the impact of rebellion. Rebellion-generated creation is both rich and extensive, and exists on several levels or in a number of contexts. Individual life projects and professional identities may be challenged when left unchanged. Work contexts and organizational structures may evolve dramatically. Let’s start with the individuals whose lives are significantly affected by acts of rebellion, whether they played direct or indirect roles in those acts. How rebellion affects individuals is the tip of the iceberg of creation. Lives are redefined and transformed by the realization that other opportunities lie ahead. It is true that such realizations can come about rather suddenly, as if a crucial decision on career and values had been rushed into almost overnight. However, even then, these realizations stem from a solid and long-standing belief system often built up during a person’s whole career and educational background. It is as if an objective and a subjective determinism of rebellion were at work.

Creative rebellion For example, Patrick has a strong sense of free will that he exercises all the more easily as his family circle supports him in other areas. Michael thinks of his father, whose moral legacy he does not wish to betray. Memories like these come rushing back to help rebels understand what is happening at a crucial moment for them, and for those close to them. Such realizations trigger others that are not as dramatic, for these rebels belong to a professional community. They take part in seminars alongside their colleagues. Sharing identical definitions of what is good and what is bad, what is and isn’t efficient, they understand and interpret speeches and the message they carry without recognizing that they themselves are the main subjects. Rebel awareness can develop either slowly or on the spur of the moment, and occasionally in a radical manner: “I’m changing jobs or lifestyle or my way of looking at the world.” Rebels suddenly realize that they should make such a choice right now, and not tomorrow. They experience a strong moral pressure to act, because they feel accountable to themselves. At the same time they also feel free, all radical options being open and accessible to them. They assume both. Regarding the second plane, that of organizational structures, rebellions produce a new range of action and decision-making criteria, leading to new possibilities for finding solutions. This area of creation involves how the company is managed. The organization’s contours shift, its instruments of power evolve, its decision-making methods are transformed, it repositions itself on the market and looks at the consumer in a new way. Agro, Brick and Bank provide telling examples. Managerial solutions emerge from acts of rebellion. Senior management, perhaps reluctantly and yet well aware of what it is doing, probes the rebellion for its message to try to turn it to the company’s advantage. It identifies the rebellion’s leaders and pushes them to go further, the better to get them on board again, for example, by “kicking them upstairs” with a promotion. Such promotions are meant to illustrate the prevailing “official” line. See how we are true to our word? When you say no in a productive, valid and constructive way, we shall reward you. The rebel is then swallowed up in the corporate embrace of

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When managers rebel empowerment. Meanwhile, the organization gets the message of empowerment across to its more ambitious employees, while seizing on the rebels’ messages to improve its own practices – at Bank by modifying the system for evaluating branch office performance, at Agro by ultimately deciding to push on with an R&D project already in an advanced phase, and in Brick’s case, to release funds that had already been budgeted. Quite a few activists also use this official line for their own purposes. If senior management wants middle managers to be autonomous and entrepreneurial, and to manage their own careers, fine! Let’s take them at their word! And since that’s how it is, we hereby serve notice that we oppose what has just been decided or done by those reporting to senior management, and we’re going to tell them why! In protesting against the slow pace of investment, as Bruno did, in rejecting branch-evaluation criteria, as Charles did, or in opposing the way in which R&D projects are followed up on, as Mark did, rebels are entrepreneurial. They play the game they’re told to play. They are not knee-jerk protestors. It isn’t the rebels’ fault if management is wrong-footed. And the rebels are, after all, doing this for the well-being of the organization, for the “partnership”. This partnership is sometimes known as affectio societatis (a Roman law concept) and constituted a social pact around which a new equilibrium was built at Agro, Bank and Brick, one that doesn’t weaken managerial power but makes it multicentric, in that it can even be based on individuals and groups – middle managers or those further downstream in terms of responsibility. Managerial power can be reinforced by such surprises, as long as it is prepared to deal with surprises in general; as long as it is truly what it says it is, and truly wants to be what it says it wants to be – agile, attentive and responsive, nothing less. Would such conditions mean an end to rebellion and protest by middle managers? Are ordinary activists, in fact, pro-managerial? In a way they are, as rebels will also obtain significant concessions for themselves and for the groups they represent. Let’s look now at the third plane of creative rebellion, that of pure politics, the roots making authority legitimate, and the power and influence games that are at work.

Creative rebellion Creative rebellion at this level is generated through protest. Rebels place their protest on a political plane, in other words in direct confrontation over legitimacy and in particular how they are to do their jobs and do them well. They oppose the methods that are forced on them by senior management. At Bank, hands-on proximity to the market and the client is the issue. This is the central tenet on which the very essence of local business is based. Being responsible for revenue means, above all, knowing the customer. All the rest – knowing how to add up numbers and keeping customers loyal – flow naturally out of that. Reducing a branch’s job to bean-counting for catchment areas and faceless market segments, as marketing people sometimes do, violates standards of excellence and denies local skills. It also undermines the branch’s primacy and autonomy. At Agro, letting the R&D experts handle a project all the way through – right up to the moment when it was about to pass into the hands of the marketing department – shows trust. Not doing so and allowing marketing to take over before that final stage indicates mistrust. At both Bank and Agro – and these cases don’t claim to review the struggles exhaustively – different professional groups and communities far from one another are fighting for legitimacy. Rebellions are more credible when led by executives that senior management has already identified as having a high potential. The status and prestige of the professional groups and communities depend on the fates meted out to its leaders, as occurred with Mark. The middle managers’ world, as a homogenous community, faces disruptive centrifugal dynamics. A series of specific enclaves behave like selfish and defensive fortresses withstanding enemy attacks for a long time. And the less use that professionals make of political arguments, the more they prove their commitment by showing that they are the real experts and want to remain so. They know better than senior management what needs to be known on a given topic, such as the bank branch clients in a given city, the scientific and technical follow-up of the agrochemical project, or the growth drivers of the Asian market. Above all, and far from filing away

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When managers rebel all this expertise for future use if current circumstances are not right, they decide to place it in plain view and to make it available for senior management, the very people who are resisting or ignoring it. Senior management then has no choice but to use it without losing face, as to do otherwise would be construed as a despotic and anti-managerial act. Rebellion thus gradually provides a way to rebuild a new social pact that seems equitable. Guilds are reassured, their leaders are promoted, organizational structures are improved for a time – such is the ideal outcome of creative rebellion.

6.2 The drivers of creative rebellion The political plane outlined above brings something else to light. In addition to the contexts we have discussed, there is another way of understanding and highlighting the creative nature of rebellion, through the emergence of new actors of reform within the company, when circumstances lend themselves. What happens is that lasting changes are made to the professional groups and the ways that barriers are erected around certain groups within the company. Power is reconstructed and its source redistributed among stakeholders, with three new types of actors emerging through rebellions: the neo-professional, the communitarian, and the equilibrist.

The neo-professional Neo-professionals are highly qualified, highly educated managers who thrive on challenge. To meet those challenges, they call on their skills and aptitudes to adjust decisions and work processes. An almost perfect illustration is provided by the heads of new R&D projects at Agro, including Mark, for example. Neo-professionals wage collegial jousts, the essence of which is that the players have mutually recognized skills. These usually involve lively confrontations occurring as much within the brotherhood of managers itself as between all participants of the

Creative rebellion brotherhood and other neo-professionals, such as the marketing people. Such jousts – sometimes called the “tournament” at Agro – are important in that they set new rules for career competition. These jousts are not inconsequential or rhetorical. They are the basis on which major decisions on investment and strategy will be made, such as the compounds that Agro’s R&D department will work on. Moreover, Agro’s future managers are chosen in part on the basis of how they react to managerial decisions. It’s as if the company had organized these face-offs of neo-professional experts in order to come up with criteria for promotion and rewards that are more legitimate than impersonal performance evaluations. In Agro’s case, the jousting occurred between the brotherhood of scientific project-managers who led the rebellion, and the “marketing people”.

The communitarian A second type of creative player is someone we all thought companies had got rid of during the sweeping changes since the 1980s: the communitarian. A communitarian niche is a group of young managers bound by shared values and ways to define the contours of a profession and to practice that profession. This is what happened at Brick. Bruno makes reference to colleagues who, like him, manage profit centres and are management fundamentalists – meaning that they base their judgments solely on criteria such as economic value added (EVA), principal–agent relations between the local profit centre and the head office and so on, which their immediate superiors regard with measured mistrust as they prefer to control things through top-down hierarchy and promotion via length-of-service criteria. This is also, as we noted above, what happened at Bank, through the almost emblematic example of branch managers and the customer relations people working under them. While the managers are above the customer service agents in the hierarchy, they are all part of the same culture and this erases hierarchical barriers. Together, they are caught up in a titanic turf war over two world views and two universes of values involving the physical proximity

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of front-office personnel with one another, but in particular the proximity between front-office personnel and customers. What is most at issue is the relative legitimacy of specific value systems on sales performance: who performs better, he who knows his customers personally, such as a provincial notary or a priest who hears confessions, or he who knows only the broader cookie-cutter market segment statistics and thus sees only account numbers, rather than real customers? Here again, senior management can look back on the experience of the last twenty or thirty years in deciding which path to take. This a period during which strategy has oscillated between having front-office employees specialize by segment or by geographical area. It seems as if this has all been decided through a battle between communitarian niches, a battle that has sometimes been visible and sometimes not. The constant shifts in customer relationship management (CRM) strategy by Western banks since the1980s are telling. We have gone most recently from remote banking to up-close-and-personal banking. In addition to providing a constant supply of advertising themes, this shift has been the result of innumerable local turf battles between these two worlds.

The equilibrist The third type of creative middle manager is the one who possesses the resources to bounce back. Patrick, Michael and Phillip are illustrations. Each is especially well equipped to lead a rebellion that will become creative. In some cases, even though they are relatively isolated within the company on a daily basis, equilibrists are able to say whether a decision made by others or whether an incident that they are faced with or have merely witnessed is, in their view, acceptable or not, and why. They are also willing to offer up a clear, independent opinion and base it on a categorical line of reasoning about which they are fully convinced. In other cases, equilibrists undertake a cognitive struggle over how the rules of the game within the company are to be interpreted.

Creative rebellion “Cognition” here refers to ways of reasoning, to bodies of knowledge and to ways of doing things that are accessible on a daily basis. Here, the equilibrist feels that he is on solid ground in judging the value of what the company and its senior management have done in a particular case, and to express that view publicly to management. Equilibrists sometimes decide to transform tacit disapproval into an explicit act of rebellion. They build up pockets of resistance that they keep in reserve, an invisible coalition of potential rebels, colleagues who have come to believe they are entitled to different interpretations and diverging opinions on a given situation or decision, even though they realize that they are ultimately just employees of their company and agents to their principal. This observation is worth a closer look than might at first seem justified, because it runs counter to a view that may be long in the tooth but is still very much alive; that of the link between the manager’s status and the chain of command. As a legacy of Taylorism and Fordism, it sees the middle manager as a supervisor who is expected in the main to be utterly loyal to senior management and whose tasks are generally to ensure command and control within his jurisdiction. It also runs counter to more contemporary recruitment and evaluation practices. While utter and silent allegiance are no longer the sole basis on which the company judges its middle managers (other skills are also recognized as being crucial, such as knowledge and a spirit of initiative), such allegiance is still an important factor in varying degrees, albeit less so than in past management models. It is not that resisting a managerial decision, including turning down a promotion, is a display of disloyalty in the executive’s mind, quite the contrary, because a major cognitive shift is now under way. It is now seen as disloyal to consider that not rebelling and not protesting is ultimately the safe way out for the middle manager; in other words, maintaining a sort of hypocritical relationship with his company. Many managers now feel that to be loyal is to point out to senior management what is wrong and why, and that to be disloyal is to keep quiet when things are running far off track. To be loyal, then, is to take the company at its word and see if it lives up to it.

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When managers rebel For senior management, meanwhile, to fail to point out when things have gone off track would be to fail to make proper use of the company’s resources. Tolerating debate on underlying business practices and treating outspoken employees seriously requires senior management to demonstrate a little modesty. It requires those who occupy a dominant or higher status to come down from their pedestals and take seriously what their subordinates are saying, people who can be just as serious and devoted as they are. Nobody has a monopoly on the affectio societatis. Moreover, in the midst of the current global economic battle, what the

6.1 Quitting, speaking out, remaining loyal (exit, voice, loyalty) Albert Hirschman, an American professor of economics, has suggested4 that when a consumer is not happy with a product or a service he has bought, he has three options: He can quit and go to another company; he can speak out and tell everyone how unhappy he is; or he can remain loyal, in which case he accepts the decline in product quality. This economic model can be used for social, organizational and political behaviour. The facts show that the most vulnerable individuals and groups and the ones who are dominated the most; that is, those who would most seem to have good reasons to rebel against an unhappy situation, are those who rebel the least. Taking a stand is hard as it requires resources, including an ability to read the situation, interpersonal skills and access to alternatives. Exits can be interpreted as a signal to the organization that it is in decline. Speaking out, when combined with quitting, allows the individual to tell why he thinks the organization is in decline, and to provide criticism that the organization may take on in order to limit the number of exits.

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evolutionary economists Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter call “hypercompetition”,5 the possession and refining of an invisible asset such as broad cognitive capital, which is shared by the entire organization, provides the leverage a company needs for its survival and continued success, and helps to renew sources of steady income. But for that to happen, the internal guild, beginning with the middle managers, must take part.

6.3

Different types of creative rebellion

Not all rebellions are alike in their creative capacity. In fact, they play out in many different ways and are based on mindsets that vary from one setting to another. A simplified picture of different types of creative rebellion is provided in the chart shown in Table 6.1, outlining the characteristics of each type.

Table 6.1 Types of creative rebellion Collegial rebellion

Territorial rebellion

Cognitive rebellion

The rebellion is about …

The legitimacy of skill sets

The legitimacy of values

The legitimacy of interpretations

The rebels are …

Highly qualified neoprofessionals

Individuals Individuals belonging to equipped with communitarian resources to niches bounce back

Senior management can take away …

New decisionArguments for Updated backup making criteria major strategic for talk on produced in decisions emancipation the field in the workplace and on diversity

Rebels can take away …

Permanent or temporary modifications in collective status

Ways of anticipating and adapting to expected changes

Arguments to support or explain tough individual decisions to others

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Table 6.1 shows three main categories: collegial rebellion, territorial rebellion and cognitive rebellion. Each is different from the others in four ways: what the rebellion is about; who the rebels are; the lessons or benefits that senior management can draw from the rebellions; and the lessons or benefits that the rebels themselves can acquire. Of course, this is an over-simplification. Actual rebellions rarely fall into a single category and usually overlap into others. The accounts of rebellion in this book can be classified as: ●

●

●

a relatively pure example of collegial rebellion, even if it also has elements of the other two types, as led by Phillip and Mark at Agro; the accounts of Bruno at Brick and Charles at Bank are broadly representative of the territorial type; and a rather clear example of cognitive rebellion as provided by the accounts of Patrick at Construct, Michael at Strand, and Julie at Mill (you will read more about her in the following section).

6.4 Creative rebels’ resources Can any middle manager turn into a creative rebel overnight? Or is this only a possibility for rebels having special gender-based resources or who belong to a given generational culture?

Julie in a man’s world Julie is a female manager plunged into a universe dominated socially, culturally and professionally by men. She is 41, married and has two children. She is a graduate of an engineering school. Unusually for her field, she once undertook an organizational sociology training programme. She has worked for eleven years at a steel mill that is part of the Mill group. She is the only female manager at the mill and oversees about seventy highly qualified workers on the production line, including supervisors and technicians, all but two of whom are men.

Creative rebellion Julie has proved that she can do what is traditionally considered men’s work, while systematically staking her claim to be different. Her superiors think so highly of her that they have classified her as a high-potential manager. She is accepted and respected. Her colleagues treat her both as a little sister to be protected and an exception to the commonly expressed rule that “this is no work for women, only men, meaning real men, of course!” Making steel is hard work, and is done in a hot and noisy environment. It requires stamina. Occupational accidents are relatively frequent and at times serious. They are sometimes hushed up by the workers who live through them. Over several years, Mill management has launched an aggressive campaign to eliminate all accidents, fatal, serious or even relatively minor. One morning, much to her surprise, Julie was offered a new post by her factory manager, to oversee safety, health and the environment (SHE) for the entire factory. She was to replace the current SHE head, who was being transferred to another position after just four months. Julie’s first reflex was to ask why she was being offered the post: “Because I’m a woman? Because they’re giving me a responsibility that will hide me in a corner, away from the path to the top, which in this company means a manufacturing position? Cause I’m going to be a good scapegoat in case something goes wrong?” It’s true that the SHE head is the first one blamed in the event of a major accident. It is also true that Mill’s head office is targeting occupational hazards at all its mills. After each fatal accident, the middle managers are the ones who are punished. But at the same time, Julie takes the SHE problem to heart: “Something has to be done at mills where work accidents are considered by both middle managers and workers alike as a part of life, as a basic part of a real man’s work.” Julie asked for some time to think it over before giving her answer. She wanted to redefine the SHE head’s responsibilities so that she could intervene directly on the production line and with the workers when safety measures were being violated and, if need be, to take suitable measures directly, without the prior consent of the foremen and engineers in charge of production. Her predecessor had only formal authority, with no hierarchical

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When managers rebel authority to intervene in daily operations. He handled training sessions and communication, and that was all. Julie is aware that this change in the SHE head’s responsibilities might not be very popular, as it would violate the tacit and universally understood rule that each production head, from foreman to engineer, was the unchallenged master of his or her jurisdiction. Ten days later, Julie asked to see the factory manager again. He sent her instead to the human resources director, to whom she had submitted her proposal. The factory manager’s response, relayed by the HR director, was a resounding no. He did not think he could accept Julie’s demands, even suggesting that she had gone too far and was acting like “a bighead who’s pushing too far”. Julie turned down the promotion and was then sure that she would have to find a new employer. She was bitter: “the bastards, they’re just trying to trap me”. A sort of mute anger came over her: “In fact, the factory managers don’t give a damn about safety and fatal accidents. They’re all cynics. All they want is to find some mug so they can tell everyone that a middle manager has been put in charge of SHE. Too bad if he or she is kept at a distance, just so long as they don’t get on anyone’s back during worktime.” She was angry but also feeling rather good about herself: “I won’t be able to say later that I didn’t stick to my guns in trying to help guys out there avoid accidents.” With no great hopes, she requested a transfer to another factory, about 20 kilometres away. To her great surprise, she was soon assigned by Mill’s head office to a new post, in charge of quality control. Was she being pushed upstairs, eased out the door, or given one last chance? Julie didn’t know. A little more than three months after her transfer, another serious accident occurred at her former mill. In reaction, the mill manager, the very one who had refused Julie’s demands, decided to apply to the letter her recommendations for the SHE post. There would be no other serious accidents at the mill over the next 24 months. But this didn’t keep the mill manager from continuing to speak of Julie as “out of control” and “a rather atypical woman”.

Creative rebellion Julie, meanwhile, got involved in trade unionism. She was no longer classified as “high potential” by the head office’s human resources department, but didn’t really care. When we asked the head office HR manager about her, he said he regretted what had happened, acknowledged that Julie’s recommendations were on the mark, but that in the culture of business, it is the operating superior who always has the last word. Julie lost the battle in that she was pushed to the sidelines and cast out. She violated the rules on how to behave, which senior management couldn’t tolerate. Her once promising career suffered for it. Julie may have lost the battle, but she won the war, as her recommendations ultimately prevailed. Serious accidents vanished because she helped to come up with a new way of organizing mill work – by giving real power to the SHE head – and helped to create a new awareness by linking manufacturing safety not just to operator training, but to the questioning of the excessive autonomy and impunity that the operators and their foremen enjoyed. In short, she prevailed by thinking outside the box. All the same, she was wrong in being right too soon. The last accident, which could have encouraged Mill to adopt her recommendations – given the pressure then being put on the factory manager by head office and the human resources department to do something – happened just a little too late for Julie. The circumstances at the time of her response to senior management’s offer were not favourable to her.

Gender and generation The context of rebellion goes a long way towards determining which of the rebels’ resources are useful and which are not. For resources, natural advantages and other cards up one’s sleeve are not necessarily applicable to all sets of circumstances. Hence, being a woman in a man’s world was a major constraint, an insurmountable handicap. Sooner or later, Julie was going to hit the glass ceiling. And yet, before being offered the SHE post, Julie had come close to breaking through that glass ceiling since she had already been classified as “high potential” – a first for a

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When managers rebel woman in this business and something that head office was publicly proud of. Moreover, she was high potential on the company’s highest track, manufacturing. This might suggest that Julie’s gender was a resource. It might also be suggested that being a woman made her a better organizer and better able to diagnose serious lapses in safety caused by workers’ demonstrated behaviour and the power plays occurring in the workshops. Her gender would become a resource after the fatal accident. Setting Julie’s case against the other accounts of rebellion we have seen, we are struck by some recurrences. Rebels are not deprived of social capital, far from it. They are between 30 and 45 years old, well-trained, from good universities and management and engineering schools. They have well-established and proven reputations for success and total commitment. They are considered and acknowledged as such by their peers. They have little else to prove. They have a network of contacts in their respective companies. And yet, while some emerge victorious from their rebellions in that their companies ultimately reward them with promotions and recognize their spirit of initiative, as occurred in the cases of Charles and Bruno, others end up leaving, as was the case with Michael and Patrick, or are side-tracked, like Julie. The social capital built up by an individual or a small group of individuals is far from being a negligible factor. It can even help to start and sustain rebellions, and have them taken seriously at the highest levels of the hierarchy, Rebels considered to be of high-potential who debate issues perceived at headquarters as constituting a significant problem not easily discounted or portrayable as arising from pathological symptoms. Nevertheless, social capital in and of itself is no guarantee of ultimate success. No rebellion is legitimate per se. But some rebels attract more attention than others. In any case, it does make available to the company a pool of creative rebels and a dynamic of creation that is likely to bear fruit later, even if senior management finds it distasteful or pretends to turn a deaf ear to it. Are particular generations more likely to head up creative rebellions? Something about rebel managers is very striking. As seen in our various examples, they tend to be between 30 and 45 years old and show some striking similarities in the more general

Creative rebellion observations they made. This is also true of many other rebels we interviewed during our survey. Managers don’t rebel before they are in their 30s, and we have observed only one case of a manager who rebelled after hitting his mid-40s. Two explanations are possible, in terms of life cycles and the broader shifts in society’s values, from one generation to another. People in their late fifties and early sixties who are still active in companies at the start of the twenty-first century are generally from the generation that was about 20 years old in the mid-1960s. These children of the 1960s experienced and even led civil and cultural protests against what they thought were outmoded ways of authority in both family and political spheres. Thirty years later, here they are running the show, enjoying status within the company and, for those who occupy managerial functions, power as well. In any case, whether they have been tremendous successes or more modest ones, the game is mostly over for them. The youngest generation, meanwhile, those under 30, are part of the “channel-surfing” generation, unwilling to tie themselves down, and with little overall experience whether in their romantic or work lives. And then there are those in the middle, the “me generation” that came of age in the 1980s, when utilitarian individualism was the watchword, embodied by the figure of the yuppie. This generation of kamikazes sacrificed themselves to work. They are true believers, fanatics and fundamentalists who stubbornly believe, in the face of all obstacles, in the virtues of challenge and rapid success, so much so that they were blinded by it. Rebels are arguably exceptions to this culture, failures in a way, defrocked monks who have burned the gods they once worshiped. Such explanations only go so far when they run into accounts of rebellion and their protagonists. Why are managers aged 30 to 45 more inclined to rebel than other managers? Because they are going through a transitional period in their lives, that of self-actualization. It’s between their early 30s and mid-40s, fully established in both their careers and personal lives, that they run head-on into dilemmas between their corporate and their private lives (family, personal values and so on). They’ve worked like dogs in their corporations, while investing less of themselves in their private lives, hardly seeing their children grow up, repressing

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When managers rebel their personal aspirations and demands, and so on. A time then comes when their private and public lives become intertwined and, in some cases, run head-on into one another. They are then motivated to rebel. And yet motive is not enough to unleash an act of rebellion. Opportunity must be there as well, circumstances that lend themselves more than others to a collision between public and private lives. Another essential prerequisite is that the people concerned become aware of what’s happening. Creative rebellion is exacerbated by a special moment in life, by a special setting, by a straw that breaks the camel’s back. There may be a rebel hiding in each one of us, but not all of us take the step into active rebellion. First, the company and the way it is managed, have to fuel the process, by providing the spark that sets off the blaze.

CHAPTER 7

When private lives fight back This chapter explores in greater detail an issue discussed above. Managers rebel when their private lives become intertwined with their public lives at their companies, as if society at large had stepped into the workplace. Rebel managers play the role of go-between with this other world, the private sphere outside the company that hegemonic senior management ignores or violates. This private sphere can be seen as a sort of forbidden zone. Why does senior management ignore or intrude into this forbidden zone? Because it is bureaucratic by nature. To be more precise, it replaces the command and control methods that in the generallyheld view are the hallmark of bureaucracy, with ex-post methods of control based on objectives. At first glance, this gives the middle manager a measure of flexibility in how he is to achieve his performance goals. Even so, he faces similar constraints, albeit in a more implicit, internalized manner. While these are less harsh, they are still confining. Middle managers have a unique relationship with authority. To meet performance-based criteria they allow corporate demands and challenges to intrude on the forbidden zone of their private lives. Controls based on performance metrics erode more of their freedom than process-driven controls. As we shall see, the latter allow subordinates to carve out a greater measure of autonomy vis-à-vis their boss than goal-driven controls.

7.1

Go-betweens with the other world

Manager rebellion is a unique phenomenon involving a temporary inversion of power. Middle managers move up a notch 109

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When managers rebel by taking on issues that are normally none of their business. They break senior management’s stranglehold on power. Rebel managers become go-betweens with society at large. Rebellion plays out against a backdrop of two opposing visions of the company’s well-being. Rebels believe that they can add value to the corporate “partnership” or affectio societatis, in a manner perfectly compatible with fully cultivating their private lives. Senior management, on the other hand, sees the company’s well-being best served by overworking its middle managers. They consider this a given, part of the normal duties of an executive who has been anointed by the company, a reality that is neither negotiated nor negotiable. Private lives do not enter into the equation. Creative rebellion forces the company to face up to the transformations that have occurred in society at large. This leads to a number of uncertain outcomes and suggests that ordinary instances of rebellion reflect the fact that employees, middle managers in particular, are reacting without necessarily realizing it to outside influences and transformations occurring in society. Moreover, middle managers, under this way of thinking, are the very reflection of these transformations, be they moral, cultural or interpersonal. The influences of society at large, which have been suppressed or ignored by senior management’s hegemonic practices, burst back on to the scene during rebellions. As seen in our interviews, middle managers, who are too often taken summarily for drones of globalization or for fanatics in thrall to their company, are, in fact, aware of the divergences, contradictions and injustices occurring within their working world. Such awareness comes to the fore when career paths are set out, for example. Some managers, like Patrick and Michael, face dilemmas in this area – a quick move up the corporate ladder in exchange for denying their moral values – while others do not. Such injustices are sometimes apparent in deciding what role local factors should play in evaluating performance, as at Bank, Agro and Mill. They are also apparent when personal backgrounds affect the respective career prospects of, say, two project managers, one a graduate of a prestigious university and the other a graduate of a city college, or when ethnic criteria come into play, as

When private lives fight back in the case of Bruno, who is Asian and has been trained in establishments that rank simply as decent, in contrast to the top European managers who run Brick and who happen all to be alumni of elitist universities, engineering and business schools. These phenomena parallel the differences, contradictions and injustices experienced by society at large. Rebel executives are aware of their risk exposure, which is heightened by modern management practices. At the same time, the rebels we interviewed said they were appalled by the diverging outcomes that global companies produce and even exacerbate. Of course, their concern is sometimes self-serving and resolutely utilitarian. They focus on what affects them directly, and only when they feel they are first in line as victims. After all, the instinct for self-preservation or to win the jackpot tends to erase any altruistic leanings. And yet these differences and injustices also reveal a sort of class consciousness. This is worth a closer look, as it is a relatively recent phenomenon among middle managers. This awareness arises in part from the growing chasm between senior managers and middle managers, between the various professional groups, and between head office and the business units. The rebels we interviewed were aware of this chasm, which became a sore point even if the individuals involved were chronic overworkers. The more they go all out-for the company, the more they work like religious zealots – for example, by putting in untold hours – the more they bury their own private, non-work lives and even their personal values and aspirations. At the same time they tend to be increasingly sensitive to the slightest deviation from fairness and begin to question the least inequality of treatment. They increasingly see such injustices as unbearable. Middle managers show their awareness in certain ways. They see among their colleagues and friends people so committed that they are burned out, as well as individuals who have been sidelined or punished, in some cases in spite of their loyalty and devotion to the company. Day after day, they see the gap between the effort made and the treatment meted out. From the bank manager located in a less wealthy region to the hardworking Agro project manager who was not quite fast enough or perhaps

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When managers rebel lacked contacts within his company’s internal power network, rebellion targets what is regarded by the rebels as social injustices. Situations that are unclear, because they arise from management practices deemed to be arbitrary, inspire compassion and sow the seeds of rebellion. Intriguingly, what happens in companies is rather like what is happening in the rest of society. Managers, whether rebels or not, are perfectly informed and aware of the unemployment and job insecurity that exist outside the walls of the company. Nevertheless, that doesn’t explain everything, and in particular why groups or individuals rally behind a cause, and why a certain class consciousness emerges, albeit one that takes on hybrid, unstable and temporary forms. Indignation, a key driver of rebellion, reflects converging values in society at large, such as respect and tolerance. These values and social norms are inculcated outside the company, notably through family members, socialization at school, friends and associations, the media, and much less rarely, if at all, through the companies for whom they work. These values and norms provide the fuel of indignation, and these sensitive issues spread inside the workplace because they touch on matters that middle managers are aware of in other ways, in society in general and in their private sphere. Furthermore, sociologists say that a second phase of modernity is emerging, featuring a decline in traditional forms of belonging, and a questioning of traditional social and institutional roles. Individuals are reinventing themselves in terms of who they are and which group they belong to. New freedoms are tearing the social fabric, as individuals want to choose and decide who they are, notably in scaling back their public commitments; for example, at the companies where they work. As data comparing various European countries suggest,1 their individualism is morally-based. More precisely it is considered as being fair and normal that everyone should decide what is right for him/herself as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Repeatedly, the people who were interviewed refer back to their private lives, providing reasons and arguments against the corporate sphere, which is considered profoundly individualistic (every

When private lives fight back man for himself, nobody for the others), viscerally utilitarian (look out for number one) and implacable (simply put, merciless). The tension between the two is strong and is made stronger by the gap between society’s rather tolerant spirit and the rigidity or outright intolerance that sometimes characterizes the world within the company. The right to be different and the recognition of minority status are just two illustrations of this phenomenon. What society once condemned as unacceptable deviance – homosexuality, feminism, euthanasia, divorce – is now denigrated less and tolerated more. In contrast, a climate of rigidity and a backdrop of intolerance reigns in companies with regard to other ways of believing and behaving, as when an executive turns down a promotion, or when a promise is made to an executive that is not immediately followed up. An executive who turns down a promotion becomes suspect in the eyes of the HR manager. Middle managers are irritated when promises are made and then not met until much later. Neither senior managers nor middle managers truly want to make the effort to analyze the reasons that lead the other party to behave as it does. Amicable settlements become the exception. No one shares an identical definition of what truth means. A company that remains stubbornly intolerant in a society that has become much more forgiving, regardless of the material benefits it bestows on its devoted employees, sooner or later becomes a real problem for its managers. It can no longer function, especially when senior management invokes arguments, as it often does and sometimes ingenuously, of the company’s commitment to social responsibility or sustainable development, in order to circumscribe, explain or justify some of its decisions. Ethical arguments ring hollow. Worse, they seem hypocritical and tend to set off rebellions. Appealing to ethical considerations can be a fearsome weapon. It isn’t that such appeals are tinged with suspicion, or that elites are Machiavellian manipulators. Many companies are, in fact, true to their word when they talk about sustainable development and respect for employees. At Mill, global headquarters punished managers severely and immediately after a fatal accident at a mill. Brick, meanwhile, is a global company acknowledged

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When managers rebel as a forerunner for the quality of its trade-union relations and its diligence at finding other posts within the company for staff whose positions have been eliminated. A manager of a factory in a remote province of China who resorts to physical violence and calls in a private police force to get employees to resign voluntarily, is totally unacceptable to Brick’s senior management. Of course, it has to hear about it first, through the filter of three or four layers of management. More than the duplicity or hypocrisy of individuals, beginning with senior managers who look the other way when expedient, it is the management methods used, the unreliability of their mechanisms – pressure on short-term performance, overwork and so on. – and the long reporting lines between the field and the head office that undermine confidence and engender intolerance. Rebellion is more likely to occur when middle managers believe that the ethical and social conditions of their working lives have worsened, and when they blame this directly on senior management. Such disillusionment is directly proportional to the degree to which rebels concur with the business values of the company as a venue of wealth production, and to the degree to which they take pride in the company’s performance. By the same token, paradoxically, they see a worsening in their own lot. Such assessments are relatively detached from remunerations and other material benefits. Meanwhile, failure to receive recognition from an aloof immediate superior, falling victim to his or her authoritarian behaviour, may come into play, but only to a certain extent. Psycho-affective and interpersonal experiences are not the main issue with rebels. There are two other major factors that turn the manager into a “disbeliever”. The first of these is that senior managers do not always provide the best examples themselves, either ethically or professionally. In fact, they often act ineptly while enjoying shocking impunity, even as middle managers’ performances are scrutinized closely with an immediate impact on how they are evaluated and treated. Such impunity, on top of the perceived arbitrariness of managerial decisions, robs middle managers of faith in their

When private lives fight back company as an institution. It feeds cynicism and disillusionment. The second factor is that executives have no real idea of their futures within the company regarding their jobs, careers and positions. The combination of these two factors stokes a virulent form of pessimism that emerges in ordinary rebellion, which is intended to send a message to head office regarding its hegemonic practices, and the abuse of power by senior executives. Rebellion thus taps, among other things, into the parallels between what executives see at work and what society at large experiences. The firm is embedded into society at the same time as it contributes to the making of society. Those who live in it experience the same injustices and fears as the unemployed, the homeless and other economic, social and cultural outcasts who make the evening news. The fact that even a successful middle manager can, almost overnight, become a social outcast gives pause, and generates rebellion in companies. For it isn’t just others, those who do not enjoy the same level of social capital, who are cast out. It can also happen to people like you and me. Middle managers succeed in building micro-rebellions involving not just their colleague managers but also employees and workers further down the hierarchy. This is worth a closer look. Middle managers show a capacity for collective action that is circumscribed, localized and most often sporadic or ephemeral. It can none the less serve as a constant at a time when collective action among employees and shop-floor workers is experiencing upheaval. These employees are no longer stirred by ideologies. Conversely, competition between colleagues, which until now had been more characteristic of middle managers’ working conditions, is gaining ground on factory floors and in office cubicles, Rebel managers are clearly endowed with more social capital than non-rebel managers. Their superiors have greater hopes for them than for their colleagues. While many of them are classified as high potential, they do not feel better protected than their colleagues. They experience profound anxiety when they see job insecurity increasing, particularly as the years go by and they approach their fifties. “Is it my turn next?,” they wonder.

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When managers rebel 7.2 The forbidden zone The forbidden zone is the core of values, aspirations, roles and activities that an executive defines as his or her private life, which s/he regards as untouchable – but which can also shift over time depending on circumstances – and that s/he protects from any external doubts or threat. The forbidden zone creates an inner sanctum that is socially and culturally marked “no trespassing”. When this inner sanctum is invaded by the public sphere of work, the middle manager reacts to defend it. A line has been crossed, and a process of rebellion is unleashed. Modern management practices structure the relationship between middle manager and first-level employees through forms of subordination that are enshrined and accepted in contracts, particularly in “advanced” Western economies and in new sectors of activity. This type of subordination is quite different from others. For example, it is not based first and foremost on the employee’s utter loyalty, which is constructed on a foundation of moral values handed down from generation to generation, for example. The boss is no longer a paternalistic character who is loved for the protection he offers. In a community relationship, mutual obligations and what is acceptable behavior by individuals are framed largely by ties of blood, proximity and mutual familiarity. Many of the rebels we interviewed reported that sacrifice, communitarian obligations and honor don’t count for much. Rebel managers, like their more conformist colleagues, base their subordination on a short-term, individualistic cost–benefit analysis. Strategy and tactics carry the day. Medals and honours are not necessarily turned down. Our accounts of rebellion reveal a different, if not novel, chapter on individual experiences in the workplace and in relationships with colleagues. One reason that Patrick, Michael, Bruno, Charles, Julie and others rebel was because they all considered that their superiors had left their zone of indifference and moved into the individual’s forbidden zone. They could not countenance such an intrusion.

When private lives fight back 7.1 Zones of indifference and zones of acceptability The concept of zone of indifference was put forward by the American business executive and public administrator Chester Barnard in a book regarded as a founding text of management,2 in which he develops a theory of managerial authority which created a sensation. Why is hierarchical authority accepted by employees on a daily basis? Authority in and of itself – that is, what the boss wields merely because he is the boss, is far from being enough. His subordinates must accept that authority as legitimate. And to do so, they must believe, among other things, that instructions handed down by authority are not contrary to their personal goals or interests. This acceptability of authority is a result of, in practice, the fact that each person possesses a zone of indifference. Within it, s/he accepts instructions without complaint, and without consciously doubting the authority of those who hand them down, but also without necessarily being in favour of the instructions. This zone varies with the individual. Indifference doesn’t just mean that the subordinate doesn’t care or that he has turned a deaf ear. It may also mean that he has accepted the instructions implicitly. Hence the concept of zone of acceptability formulated by the economist Ronald Coase, a Nobel Prize winner, in a text also regarded as seminal3 in the theory of intra-firm relations.

The intrusion of the firm’s hierarchy into this forbidden zone is seen as a transgression, a violation, and a breach of moral contract. This forbidden zone is one that in the broader community is built and bounded by a sharing of common values. A group of peers, having identical professional status and specialization, who were in the same recruiting class and are now under the same

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When managers rebel administrative framework, feel that they belong to the same team. Even when previously they didn’t know one another personally and probably never met face to face, they share an identity and solidarity of standards and outlook, At the same time, inside the firm, other identities and solidarities arise around common values and regroup individuals coming from common geographical origins, or who were educated and trained by the same schools and professions, or who share similar influences. These peer networks, though quite invisible to outsiders, play an important role: they protect their members from external arbitrary intrusions from senior management and any other influential bodies. Reciprocity between peers, solidarity and mutual respect are moral and imperative, and define a set of appropriate ways to behave. Of what does a forbidden zone consist? It outlines a territory that has to be dissociated from that of the firm. Our accounts of rebellion show various territories. They are bounded by private values that, depending on the case, touch on family cohesion, freedom of association, or beliefs in science. And these values were not always respected or even acknowledged by senior managers at the rebels’ companies, particularly in their management methods. Modern management ignores and even combats middle managers’ integration into society at large. It effaces the values of the communities to which these managers belong. It stigmatizes them as hindrances and archaisms. That’s why it’s unaware of the role trust plays in maintaining the social fabric. Lending a hand to a colleague who has fallen behind or who is having other difficulties on a project is not regarded as one of those thousand acts of kindness that moves the company forward. By the way in which they run the company, senior management contests the fundamental nature of community membership. Through its practices it goes as far as discouraging managers from settling in and combats any attachment to surroundings and social groups. For example, factory manager turnover has accelerated. Until the late 1990s, Brick saw to it that factory managers stayed at least six years in each posting. Now the benchmark used by Brick’s human resources managers is to move factory managers around

When private lives fight back much more frequently. Two or three years is now the maximum, including the two- to four-month period during which the manager familiarizes him/herself with his/her new working environment at the factory and with the factory’s local municipality or region. In the very recent past, a factory manager’s involvement in the local community was regarded as a decisive advantage, but this is no longer the case. Rapid turnover is the watchword nowadays. Moving frequently into and out of factories is considered to be the sign of a quality manager, a sort of mercenary who is able to adapt quickly to any new surroundings, to demonstrate fealty to his superiors and to deliver short-term quantitative performance objectives. So much for building a relationship with the factory’s trade-union officials, with key public authorities, and with the families of employees. And so much for the company’s involvement in society at large. Factories are expected to ignore the local territory and community where they are based, or the practices, cultures, political and dynamics of its social network, Ignoring the area where they set up shop, operate and thrive is viewed as a resource, not a constraint. Many management policies and practices are, in fact, based on an overextended concept of modernity. They aim to secularize working relationships and render them more technology-driven. They use power relationships to their advantage. They remove the factory from the community and territory in which it is located. Their objective is to standardize competitive relationships between people and departments. Modern management takes it as a maxim that individuals are easier to manage when they are mobile and interchangeable rather than stable and close-knit. The stories analyzed in this book restore a little sense of community and of family into those situations and companies that yield to the most rigid, blinkered interpretations and applications of modern management practices. They restore something of the sacred and unassailable character of private territory, and aim to set up a clear demarcation between the managers’ private space and the company’s public space. Society at large moves into the firm through acts of rebellion when personal values are transgressed by managerial decisions, by making senior managers realize that public and private spaces can be in competition and even incompatible.

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When managers rebel Hegemonic management promotes discourse that underlines the irrelevance of extensively and exhaustively mapping out everything that can happen to people and systems. Managers and even their subordinates should be responsible and accountable to themselves, thus deciding on their individual destinies. But in presenting people with “take it or leave it” options regarding their future at the company, they introduce ambiguity into how they best manage their managerial staff. On the one hand, it’s up to the manager to choose between “up or out”. When an opportunity presents itself, you don’t want to miss out, even though you never know when or how it will arise from a private decision of senior management, and keeping in mind that if you don’t seize the opportunity, regardless of what that might mean for your private life, you will disappoint and thereafter be suspect in the eyes of that same senior management. Meanwhile, the manager also faces a risky and uncertain fate if s/he says no, a fate that s/he will share with the noncommissioned people who are in an even more precarious situation than s/he is. Senior management thus asks middle managers to make fundamental and largely irreversible choices, especially if they want to be counted among the chosen. And they reward such managers for this far more handsomely than an ordinary employee. In exchange, implicitly they expect absolute conformity. In practical terms, this means that the company’s well-being will take precedence over the manager’s private well-being. As a corollary, the manager buys into the idea that conformity in and of itself is good for the group. An illustration of such conformity is provided by the preeminent role played by the culture of “winning”. Winning has come to overshadow all else. Violating standards of restraint and moderation carries no negative consequences. Conversely, showing modesty and refraining from shouting out one’s accomplishments are a losing proposition for a middle manager. S/he even runs the risk of being accused of cowardice and emotional detachment vis-à-vis the company. Overall, the culture of individual success is thought to make sense for all as it is presumed to benefit everyone in economic terms, as well as to enhance the pride of belonging and of togetherness.

When private lives fight back The tension between rebelling and conforming forces managers to choose between polar opposite positions: take it or leave it. It’s a package deal involving career, money, status and conformity. No compromise is possible. Indeed, to seek to reconcile, for example, success at home with success at the workplace or personal ethical criteria with senior management decisions; in short, wanting to safeguard both the public and private spheres, is interpreted as an act of betrayal and defiance. Managers soon realize that the real job contract is not the one drawn up by the administrative services but rather the unwritten contract that is executed on a daily basis in their relations with their superiors. It is clear that hegemonic management does not void contracts of legal and other clauses of subordination. Quite the contrary, it supplements, twists and alters them, and expects the middle manager to acquiesce. In most countries, legal rulings on dismissal, or new employee contracts do not spell out all the details between the parties. Moreover, as it is impossible to predict all the situations that might occur, the contract deals with future activity, the reality of which can only be evaluated well after the contract is signed. This is how senior management bestows on itself a discretionary right to intrude into the private lives of middle managers, many of whom consent to such invasions, consciously or otherwise. Some none the less end up rebelling, particularly those among the anointed, those very people whom their superiors believed most likely to subordinate their private lives to their public ones. In a labour market that places a high value on management skills, young executives can switch companies more easily by terminating their contract on grounds of irreconcilable differences with their employer and of excessive demands. They can also make their opinions clear. These reactions, which Albert Hirchman, an economist, calls voice and exit strategies,4 give them weight. It happens that the rebels we interviewed were rather highly thought of by their superiors and had, until they rebelled, been conformists – the loyalty strategy – and competent, and seemed to have a bright future ahead of them. If they suddenly undertake extreme acts, going so far as to destroy their social capital, they hardly do so on the basis of calculating their opportunities

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elsewhere, or of supposing the grass to being greener somewhere else. They take all the risks in making their private life a priority: loss of employment, a downgrade in social status and the renunciation of substantial economic benefits.

7.3

Qualitative and local stakes

Managers do not rebel in a social vacuum. Their immediate job context involves intricate combinations between the option to react and show disagreement and the need, in spite of everything, to comply with prevailing hegemonic demands. They move within a multifaceted social landscape, consisting of unconditional loyalty and daily struggles. They mix individualism with solidarity. They marry heady emotions with cold pragmatism. When executive rebellions are triggered, individualism and activism go hand in hand, albeit to different degrees depending on the situation. This combination ensures that managers will be able to speak freely. Individualism and activism also combine into a sort of pragmatism in the defence of a cause. Manager rebellion is almost nothing like a conventional labour movement, at least in the generally-held understanding of the term. It does not usually set quantitative objectives – for example, the sharing of wealth. It mainly sets qualitative, managerial and cultural objectives. Rebels do not truly seek to transform society and the company as a whole, to break with entrenched elites or to foment revolution. They don’t call for a new regime. Rebellions aim to keep or reconfigure their autonomy in their private social zones. Deep down, they seek to maintain, preserve and win the esteem of others, and to build an identity that the company, through its senior managers, is refusing them. The rebellion can then spread and coalesce through forums that spring up and generally short-circuit the traditional links of trade unions through a type of activism that has no need for official affiliation. Moreover, rebels seize on issues that are traditionally reserved for elites, for senior management, including management decisions

When private lives fight back and practices such as performance evaluation criteria, strategic investment opportunities and so on. A forum opens the debate to anyone who feels it involves them, a debate that gradually shifts from managerial technocracy to a more political arena, touching on power and legitimacy. Why, after all, do leaders decide this, or don’t undertake that? As such, for a manager to turn down a promotion because of who he is or what his background is, while every argument of self-interest should push him to accept it, is a political act. He is contesting the legitimacy of decision-makers and questioning a largely subjective or even arbitrary exercise of their power. More generally, executives realize that they have no particular status within free-market globalization. They are as much its actors as its victims. Hence the convergence with other social groupings – sexual and ethnic minorities whose members feel neglected – and that is likely to justify protests and resistance on a microsocial scale. Middle managers are ultimately just pawns. What makes them feel different from their subordinates, employees or blue collar workers, is harder and harder to establish. They too are now considered and treated as ordinary and anonymous staff members, exposed to firing and humiliation practices. This realization comes as a major shock for a group whose identity and daily existence is based on the idea that it is legitimate to privilege its members, as noted by the French sociologist Luc Boltanski.5 Manager rebellions, at least those we have observed, doe not give birth to social movements, as defined by scholars studying contentious politics and the dynamics of social movements in industrialized countries.6 Contention is not institutionalized – for example, through the channels of trade union action and platforms. Its agenda is very local, specific to small networks, and quite invisible, when not totally underground. No mass movement occurs. No organizers come forward from pre-existing associations to create focal points for movement. The community, and the values it mobilizes, is narrow. Its platforms lack perspectives, alternatives, even hope. How far do the rebellions of Patrick and Michael produce what may be called solutions? And to what problems are they the solutions, when you get right down to it? Aren’t these just

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When managers rebel their personal problems? We don’t think so. We think they are exemplary for other reasons. Patrick turns down what looks like a brilliant promotion for what he sees as a lack of respect. He believes his superiors have not granted him an opinion on a major decision in his own life. When a company decides that it will test the commitment of a promising young manager it does so in the name of its image of what a “good manager” should be. And yet there are ways of doing things, ways that respect the people who inhabit the territories, just as there are ways that scorn these people. Powerful rebellions are powerful because they are inspired by a desire for acknowledgement that not everything is allowed in the kingdom of consumerism or of performance and careers. Again, there is such a thing as a forbidden zone. Such is the backdrop of rebellion within companies. First, senior managers possess the greatest strengths, and those lower down the hierarchy know why they accept their hegemony. However, senior managers must at all times exert their strength properly, sparingly and with justice. Second, not all values are compatible with one another. It is also with a different life plan in mind that managers such as Julie and others decide to turn down what looks like an attractive promotion. They do so because they refuse to subjugate their private values to the managerial decisions and processes that rebels reject. Remarkably, they do so with no apparent fear of reprisals. Perhaps they thought it was worth the risk.

CHAPTER 8

Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle What are companies’ strengths and weaknesses in dealing with rebellion? As the twenty-first century gets under way, selfproclaimed performance-based management possesses three traits: arrogant claims to leadership; a refusal to allow open discussion allied to the professed infallibility of an elite with broad managerial impunity; and disdain for those lower down the scale. This is all the more surprising as it is generally thought that the page had long since been turned on the era of bureaucracy. Companies that are managed from a power base – those displaying these three traits – are fertile ground for rebellion.

8.1

Never forget the people down below

Middle managers become hostile to managerial power when it loses touch with them, disregards them or relegates them to a hybrid and residual category of people who are low down on the totem pole. This is old news. “Higher-ups” in many companies tend to lose sight of the importance, and even the existence, of those who are not part of their world. This is not an outcome of the haughty manner and arrogant judgement of some elitists, nor to their incompetence manifested in wrong decisions, nor to their deepdown dishonesty and greed. The cause lies entirely elsewhere and is both disturbing and harder to document. It’s quite simply their lack of interest in the people down below: At our company there are managers and managers. Some count more than others. There are those who, let’s say, run business units of 850 people or so. We keep a close eye on 125

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When managers rebel them. And then there is a bunch of others, maybe tens of thousands, and that’s another world, a world of local matters. Just like the clerks and shop-floor people. I admit I don’t have much of a handle on them, but it’s not such a big deal. As long as there are no incidents, or, if there are, as long as I don’t hear about them at my level. This is the human resources manager of a multinational company speaking, who also sits on the board of a business school. At that school, one of the authors heard him criticize the use of case studies on how factories and sales networks truly operate: “I don’t mind, but is it really worthwhile? You professors shouldn’t waste too much time going on about worker–supervisor relations and trade-union issues. Cut out that part and focus on what’s essential.” What’s essential, in his view, is the world of higher-ups, and the dividing line between higher-ups and everyone else lies just below senior management. “Everyone else” includes managers occupying intermediate operational posts. They, along with factory managers and workers, are regulated to this nebulous “third world”. Management students as a group tend to lack interest in the hands-on dimension of running a company. In fact, the lack of social and intellectual curiosity from so many current and future senior managers is astonishing. Their view of the base, which includes first-level supervisors, has remained frozen in the era of early-twentieth-century Taylorism. They see it as a dangerous milieu, to be kept at bay, one that survives on subterfuge and trickery, petty stratagems and false arguments dreamed up by bitter, frustrated people who have been deprived in life of the unequivocal signs of success. What little they do know about the base is limited to raw numbers. Business elites are, in fact, obsessed with detailed numbers, readymade recipes and automatic decisions. The quasi-mechanization of management policies is a widespread trend that senior management conceals from others, and from itself. For one thing, the trend towards robot-like management runs counter to the constant advance of creative interaction that takes place within companies. As a result, the protesting and foot-dragging from lower down is often interpreted by higher-ups as illicit opposition and not as a source of extraordinarily diverse institutional creation.

Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle The difficulty that so many senior managers have in taking an interest in anything apart from conformity and economic value added is not without consequence. It can even take a dangerous turn, stoking disappointment and disillusion among staff, and in particular middle managers, which becomes directed against corporations, a core institution in society. This can have fearsome results, with workers taking refuge in indifference, radicalism, compulsive behaviour, or conversely, in extreme obedience, which pushes them to be unseeing and cynical, but which doesn’t stop them from fulminating to a point where they hate their superiors even while obeying them servilely.

8.2 This is no paper tiger Obviously, a distinction needs to be made between passive and active resistance. Passive resistance does nothing but criticize, denigrate, mock, pilfer, sabotage and misinterpret. Active resistance, on the other hand, carries the seeds of considered alternatives, of better solutions, of powerful revolt, and why not, of permanently undermining a power structure based on modern management practices. Active resistance is more consequential and dangerous for the company’s established power structure. The rebels we interviewed told us how hard it was for ordinary activists, once they had taken on the company’s key issues and tried to create new forms of power and alternative management processes, to nudge technocratic and bureaucratic forces into action. Activists are driven by both a rebellious spirit and managerial prowess, and their struggle is unusual as it seeks to exercise authority in unconventional ways. Ordinary protest, even in discrete steps, is sometimes enough to undermine managerial authority. In doing so, rebellion turns management into a paper tiger. It is this same sentiment of powerlessness among those who had previously been the most accepting and disciplined, that appears to make them early converters to shaking up the system. The managerial regime is upended by those very individuals it had promoted and to whom it hoped perhaps to open its doors one day.

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When managers rebel Yes, rebellions are often, and ironically, triggered when middle managers feel they are powerless to act in any other way. This powerlessness manifests itself on several levels. For example, they feel it in trying to meet the requests or demands of their superiors. They have a hard time telling the difference between orders and mere suggestions. Management as a power structure is formidable and cunning in that it can call upon an extensive panoply of cases and other references to justify its decisions. Its arguments can go so far as to mobilize principles which contradict its initial refusal. As an example, it can cite managers’ cultural or character differences to justify a promotion or a candidate’s selection. It conceals crude, blatant practices beneath a politically correct exterior which promotes notions of social responsibility, respect for the individual and personal development: the proverbial iron hand in a velvet glove. Under the pretext of “doing good” its respective bosses and HR directors overnight decide to send Patrick to take up a position 2,000 km from where he lives, and Michael to close down a factory. Management-speak is not crass or subversive. It knows just how to draw on cases and use a soft, humanistic approach to impose its power and brutality. Managers are no fools, however. The more cynical close their eyes and fit in. Others are destabilized, depending on the circumstances. Such corporate double-talk, and the highly uncomfortable dilemmas in which they find themselves trapped, make them feel powerless and fooled. They turn towards other criteria, towards other trusted resources, towards milieus other than work ones – colleagues with shared values, open-minded bosses – and go to their families, to associations, to groups they trust. Remarkably, it is precisely when nothing works any longer, when old standbys prove to be useless, that powerlessness can paradoxically lead to greater things, actions that the individual simply never thought s/he would be capable of doing just like that. While such actions may not mean much against the backdrop of history, they are huge when measured against the work collective, family and individual destinies. They shake the foundations of the command-and-control approach to managing companies, in

Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle which hard-working and deserving managers become entangled despite themselves. Years of school and university, and of indoctrination at festive company seminars and conferences drive certain home truths into the minds of the battalions of managers who then serve as cannon fodder for hegemonic thinking. These home truths often become absolute truths and dogmas. When a manager is 30 years old, he accepts the company’s challenges and adheres to its dogmas. That is what he was hired for. It goes without saying that if he is ambitious he puts his private life on hold, at least for a time. It also goes without saying that the executive board has its reasons for what it does and must be right, because it is, after all, the executive board. Later, say, in his forties, the middle manager often looks back wistfully at the opportunities s/he should have seized but did not dare to. Even when s/he is in his/her thirties, doubts occasionally enter his/her mind. S/he sometimes believes that his/her superiors take him/her and colleagues for idiots. Who are these clowns up there talking on behalf of the entire company, on my behalf ? How much are these Rolex-wearing consultants being paid to shovel out this rubbish, with cartoons and jokes for sweeteners? Why are they so cynical about companies? What makes me think that I won’t be included in the next round of layoffs? All these doubts and uncertainties are one reason that middle managers and so many others overwork themselves. After all, when you keep your nose to the grindstone, you manage to forget about almost everything else. The middle manager focuses on performing and conforming, which in itself is rather costly and hard to do. At the same time, s/he stays as alert as possible to the silent threat s/he lives under, a threat that ebbs and flows, in random fashion. The powerlessness felt by the isolated, driven middle manager sometimes comes to the fore when a managerial decision is inexplicably refused. By what alchemy are certain decisions suddenly no longer credible or acceptable, while others, that seem much more controversial, go off without a hitch and are not even thought of as presenting a problem?

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When managers rebel 8.3 The ruses of power How exactly does managerial hegemony manifest itself on a day-to-day basis? How does it weigh on middle managers? It manifests itself in the belief that certain decisions and the reasons given for them are simply to be handed down, without discussion, and incumbent on everyone, like it or not. It feeds off a thousand reluctantly accepted agreements, usually accompanied by a sigh or a shrug of the shoulders. It is felt rather than seen. Nobody truly knows anything about it except that it comes from elsewhere, from an inner circle that exercises real power, from a space that is hard to determine and therefore, to challenge. This is what happened to Bruno, until the day he dared – on a suicidal impulse and an act of lèse-majesté – to approach Brick’s CEO. This was a case of a middle manager far from the centres of power rebelling against an managerial decision made by the flesh-and-blood individuals who represent hegemony. In Bruno’s view, power was embodied less in the far-off supreme leader, whom he looked up to as a great man, and much more in his own immediate bosses, whom he regarded as arrogant, petty and two-faced. It is ultimately easier to rebel against an ideology than against authority. An ideology proposes a relatively clear set of values and beliefs that can be challenged in one way or another in the real world. It is much harder to challenge something that is invisible, something that goes without saying, something that is such a given that it vanishes into the sea of daily activity. Many middle managers and other staff are like soldiers who don’t want to know. They accept their own ignorance. Rebellion occurs when circumstances are right and is triggered by controversial decisions that shake consciences. It is then time to wake up, as Phillip says – that is, to follow your conscience when something has at last happened that pierces the indifference of everyday life and challenges its small cowardly acts. In fact, it is the servants of the power structure, themselves managers, who spark rebellion by making controversial decisions in the name of senior management. Their choices may ultimately prove to be mistaken, as in Patrick’s case. In other words, power

Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle itself through its actions offers many opportunities for rebellion by people who are perhaps better attuned, or who are simply going through a period of their lives and careers that makes them more receptive. Setbacks for the power structure, however, are not ultimately irreversible. The tiger of techno-bureaucratic management has extraordinary capacities to rebound. For example, Patrick’s resignation was a problem in itself for Construct. But senior management turned it to its advantage, offering it up as proof that it was ultimately right all along, or by burying it in the flurry of successive replacements for the post. They only belatedly became aware of the mistake they had made leading up to Patrick’s resignation. Construct, in fact, lost twice when it took the risk of playing double or nothing. It lost major players, executives who had been symbols of its hegemonic approach. And it lost a second time when it became ensnared in its own contradictions without noticing the ground slipping out from under its elaborate constructs. The management tiger loses only temporarily, if at all. It blows the whistle to let everyone know that the recreational period is over. In fact, this is not a paper tiger at all, but an armoured one, with a metal shell that withstands any ordeal. In almost all companies whose managers we interviewed, the power structure ultimately prevailed. Rebellion ends up being a sort of fleeting carnival, after which order is re-established. Techno-bureaucratic management had, for just an instant, agreed to listen and even to change, but mainly with a view to cutting its losses and regrouping. Once things had settled down, it regirded for battle, even if it continued to make some colossal errors. At Brick, Bruno’s funds were ultimately released and given special treatment on the basis of ad hoc criteria. But for how long? No formal commitment was made. What’s more, it so happens that one month after the final decision, a head office circular was sent out to remind everyone of the criteria that were already in force for allocating and disbursing investment budgets in Asia, the very criteria that Bruno had challenged, as if to let everyone know that the play period was over and it was time to get serious again. Bruno was just an exception.

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When managers rebel To be sure, Julie’s ideas were ultimately adopted and recognized by Mill. Even so, she was punished and continued more or less to be defined as a sinner, for having been right three months too early, when circumstances were not appropriate. In both cases, it was the head office in charge of human resource management that was behind the maneuver. It demoted Julie, and at a time of its own choosing imposed her recommendation on the mill manager whose refusal it had upheld three months previously. The executives and their headquarters act in a discretionary manner. They also send contradictory signals to the operational units. Julie had good reason to interpret their decision simultaneously as a way to emphasize the value of the solution she had argued for, and to punish her rebel behavior. At Agro and Bank, senior management ultimately ended up stronger, even if it had previously given in to pressure and protest, and blamed the marketing people it had once held in great esteem. In exchange for this about-face and for lending a patient ear, it ensured for itself once again the neutrality if not the goodwill of those branch managers who were key to its success. So, in exchange for one painless concession, it managed to bring rebel leaders back into the fold and to save its legitimacy in the area of supervision and evaluation of branch managers. So it was no defeat for senior management to admit that the juniors were right. It did not lose face or jeopardize its standing, far from it. By co-opting the rebels it was able to perpetuate the current order while incorporating accounts of successful subversion into its own legend. It was a win–win situation. Senior management showed that it could be taken to task, while the weekend activists were promoted or even handsomely rewarded. Management hierarchy is built and reinforced by variety and by contradiction. At the same time it won’t give in unless it is sure to retain exclusive control over three of its core principles. The first principle is that the higher-ups say what subjects are open for discussion or disagreement. They continue to set the agenda and retain their monopoly on authority in this area. They decide what is, and what is not, debatable. They choose the subjects of deliberation.

Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle The second principle is that these same higher-ups are able ultimately to appropriate the outcomes of rebellion and contestation, and if possible to use them for their propaganda, even though they might appear initially to place management in a bad light. The political rationale of such a maneuver is to avoid at all costs being overtaken by events. In fact, any decision taken at a given moment should anticipate an exit strategy, regardless of the effects produced by the decision. Power thus takes precedence over content. The third principle is that higher-ups must be able to identify the rebels, to recognize and label them as such, and then to acknowledge their local leadership. The most important thing is that rebellions must not drag on, with the risk of entering the sphere of the higher-ups. In other words, hegemonic management accepts as adversaries only those rebels offering the following guarantees: a non-threatening profile; a strong likelihood that that they will carry their rebellion to its logical conclusion; and that that they will be grateful to their superiors for letting them take on a cause and champion it. A subtle dose of openness and control is therefore required from the company. It decides on what exactly constitutes legitimate subjects for controversy. Are the criteria for the promotion of executives like Patrick and Michael a legitimate subject for controversy? What about who is selected to run a key R&D project at Agro, and the commercial performance criteria at Bank? This is where senior management risks everything on the basis of its ability to suspend briefly its hegemonic regime and to open up negotiations.

8.4 Other generations, same lack of trust Managers rebel not just because they are, above all else, individuals living in a society in constant flux in which new movements and mindsets are constantly being produced. Besides, just because they are instruments of globalization doesn’t mean they are permanently shielded from its effects. We have examined real-life cases of managers who have come face to face with situations or people who forced them to make choices. Each of us, manager or

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When managers rebel not, has buried in us something of these personalities, which rises to the surface when the situation demands it. It did for Patrick, Julie and Bruno. But these experiences are relevant because we are, quite simply, in the process of moving gradually into a new organizational model and a new form of organizational governance. This may seem improbable when you consider all the books and research over the past several decades that have tried to bring about change, without any notable success. This is a model which has proved to be extremely resilient and which ultimately is nothing more than sheer bureaucracy, despite being firmly fixed in the sights of modern management orthodoxy. The rebellions discussed in this book sketch out the outlines of this new world order. Not that of emancipation or self-management, nor that of self-expression and profit-sharing, nor even, strictly speaking, that of empowerment. Many models have already been tested in management practices and processes, including quality circles, suggestion boxes, “semi-autonomous” groups, intrapreneurship, matrix organization, lean management, 360degree evaluation, and so on. They have been tested as a way of keeping bureaucratization – which makes extensive use of formal procedures, ignores local situations, and places its faith in the virtues of impersonal methods or centralizing authority – from devouring everything in its path. These models have produced some surprising outcomes in organizations. Companies are seeming contradictions. They appear to be complex, inscrutable blends of both ultra-centralization and autonomy, entrenched bosses and footloose employees. They are constantly merging with other companies and closing down facilities, eliminating jobs in one place only to recreate them in another. Some manage to put down roots even as globalization proceeds at a dizzying pace. People are free to speak out, while being kept under constant surveillance and even police control. This overlapping of styles and eras found in the exotic, multifaceted corporate bazaar is one factor behind rebel behaviour. Companies have, in a way, become too complex, too unstable, too ephemeral and too uncontrollable, like an airplane careening out of control with its pilots as helpless

Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle as its passengers. They have become so amorphous that multiple interpretations are possible. Is the fuzzy image of the enterprise and the double or quits nature of daily managerial life encouraging, and even leading to the emergence of, a new organizational model? It’s highly likely. In any case, companies face a phenomenon they are very familiar with, which they usually classify as resistance to change. It has been established that employees, whether or not they hold supervisory positions, are not eager to be locked into rigid schemas and roles. These are the same people whom Frederick Taylor described early in the twentieth century as being lazy by nature, and whom Max Weber thought were wily and calculating. There is said to be a widespread predisposition to resist any organizational change. True, such resistance is not the same as manager rebellion, even if we do see some of it in our accounts. Even so, the notion of resistance to organizational change that management practitioners are always talking about is worth a closer look, because it does share some traits with manager rebellion. Both are stigmatized as irrational behavior, and both are regarded as pathologies that require therapy, so that their victims can get back on track. Based on a literal reading of the experiences in this book, notably those in Chapter 6, resistance to change, like rebellion, is a positive act for the well-being of resisters, as well as companies and society at large, a creative act that manages to pull some individuals out of a rut they were unaware that they were in. It also offers a solution to serious breakdowns in company management. Neither the resister nor the rebel is a dangerous deviant, a vicious saboteur or, worse, the trade-union organizer who’s out to get the bosses. The resister is almost like an entrepreneur, and, in any case, a heroic figure. And yet organizations are not generally fond of rebellion, and even less so of resistance to change. Management sciences were created to contain, if not to break, resisters, to urge conformity and standardize initiatives. This idea is inseparable from scientific management. This is one of the ideas expressed by Max Weber in a posthumous work published in 1921, in which he defined rational–legal domination as a source of productive efficiency arising from primacy of the authority of rational rules and arrangements that

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When managers rebel 8.1 Resistance to change: from imbeciles to dangerous sociopaths The concept of resistance to organizational change includes a range of interpretations and approaches that associate nonconformity by staff, both supervisory staff and others, with irrational motivations to be treated with a dose of reeducation. Workers provide a rich field for observation; in particular, those subjected to the so-called scientific management of labour. Labour psychology research and industrial sociology have labelled employees who do not comply with scientific management guidelines as anti-productive. The seminal article in this area is still that of Lester Coch and John French, two leading scholars in organizational behaviour.1 In this view, such employees are at best imbeciles, and at worst, sociopaths. For doesn’t increased productivity provide an employee with a job and a salary? The role of management is therefore to train the recalcitrant employee and, if need be, to bring him or her back into the fold. Their message is this: what’s good for the company is good for you, can’t you see? Imbeciles who turn a deaf ear to these good words and still refuse to rally to the company’s cause are deemed to be sociopaths. Their supervisors then accuse the employee of deliberate sabotage, and even aggression, and are then left with no choice but to ostracize the rebel or punish him or her even more severely. In other words, from this point of view, resistance to organizational change is irrational.

engender specialization of function and the objective recognition of merit through action.2 This organizational model reflects the heady times of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which contrast with the diverging interests and fragmented egos that are part of modernity. Groupings must be sufficiently centralized,

Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle homogenous and cohesive for individuals not to enter into conflict, given that they are all subject to the same impersonal rules. Protected within their cubicles and by their narrow expertise – a concept that the film Brazil took to its logical extreme – the only way to enter into conflict being to break down the wall; the individuals concerned do not fear competition from the other cube-dwellers. Through a system of rules that are known to everyone, or should be known to everyone, rational authority alone has the legitimacy to function in the face of resistance and rebellion. And yet, there is nothing mechanical in obedience, far from it. Obedience by definition is a political act in which someone agrees to subject him/herself to the authority of someone else. Acceptance of subordination must be renewed constantly, as modern individuals do not slide seamlessly into management’s authoritative mould. They must be persuaded or forced to do so. They must be kept from resisting, and given real reasons for obeying authority.

8.5

Bureaucracy forever

Management can be understood as a concept in so far as it deals with a way to handle organized action. Such a theory was born of the need to coordinate employees and hence also the need to prevent rebellions and alternative power sources – always possible and always ambitious – from taking hold. Many followers of this concept feel that individuals cannot and must not be trusted; that, contrary to what one might think, they are capable of reacting, contradicting and cheating. They are intelligent, especially when defending their own interests. They are not like the famous Schmidt, that strapping all-time champion coal shoveler and a mythic figure of Taylorism. Under this line of thinking, productivity and efficiency do not depend on the creative abilities of individuals and groups, but rather on the extent to which the system’s rules are abided by. And thus we have come full circle. For the more a system indoctrinates individuals, the more it is thought to be efficient. The many criticisms of the bureaucratic model made by social scientists in recent years shows that this approach, which combines

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When managers rebel conformity and efficiency, does not long stand up to market demands or that the bureaucratic practitioner is not aware of the cost of conformity. Many new paradigms have been proposed by academic reviews and organizational theory experts to oppose bureaucracy. These include adhocratic organization by Henry Mintzberg,3 post-bureaucracies described by Charles Heckscher and Anne Donnellon,4 and heterarchies as defined by Helmut Reihlen.5 Not to mention the better known forms, such as network organization and flexible organizations. The imagination of management researchers knows no limits. It seeks to describe innovations borne out of practice and to express, for all that, the true transformations occurring in certain organizations.

8.2 New organizational forms Adhocracy is a relatively informal structure found in particular in project-based companies and that avails itself of the special skills of qualified professionals. Tasks are mainly non-specific. Small-scale work units are set up on a functional basis, around a small team. Coordination is flexible and horizontal, with mutual adjustment at various levels. Experts and other operating staff receive quasi-formal authority, in any case at least as much as line supervisors. The matrix structure helps to put together project-ready and decentralized structures that break with the chain of command. Post-bureaucracy refers to an organization in which each person is held accountable for the success of the group. Interpersonal relations are problem-oriented and not predetermined by a formal structure. A sense of a common, easy-to-understand mission bonds the team. Shared principles that are made clear to workers replace imposed rules. Organizational charts are thrown aside, and control is exercised by managing relations rather than managing tasks. Such relations are based on mutual trust. At the

Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle

same time, the premises upon which this trust is based are reviewed and debated on a regular basis. Post-bureaucracy replaces top-down communication and commands using institutionalized discussion and interactivity among stakeholders. The stated objective is to establish an informed consensus. The processes of power and compromise – often called “political processes” – accordingly enjoy legitimacy and are a normal part of procedure for the manager. A heterarchy is a formal structure usually depicted in the form of a diagram of inter-connected parts, with no single part dominant. In organizational theory it refers, for example, to companies working in a competitive environment that produces and recycles knowledge. Heterarchies are mainly self-managed by their members, use expert-based decisional democracy and base their social fabric on culture. Conflicts and debates are considered normal and positive. The group is bound by shared information. Aptitudes for cooperation and collective learning are recognized and rewarded as such. No function is considered permanent, and it is normal that individuals switch into and out of jobs frequently and on an ad hoc basis.

In spite of all this, the top-down management model is still widely used. Senior management remains focused on the concepts of a powerful centre, control, steering tools, constant measuring, cautious and limited delegation, and career paths. The model is adjusted, renewed and tweaked when it falls short. Innovations are made to it. In any case, it continues to serve as an underlying benchmark and helps to reign in resistance. The challenge is still to manage groups of people who must be given justification for submitting to authority. A new dynamic has emerged since the 1980s in productive organizations, related to resistance to change, and more generally to the fact that the slightest change is time-consuming and must be painstakingly managed, even as changes of all sorts are occurring with

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When managers rebel increasingly speed on global markets. Organizational theorists now agree that unorthodox behavioral traits can be effective and, hence, desirable. Some organizations seem even to have based their functioning on the very notion of surprise. One example of this is Intel and its use of “surprising” initiatives, as studied by the Stanford Business School professor Robert Burgelman.6 The idea behind this is to institute an “internal ecology” of the organization, which allows initiatives to develop into opportunities to experiment with new markets, with the objective of keeping the company from being locked into just one. It’s up to the internal ecology to lay the foundation for the future, one that might diverge widely from current trends; and up to senior management to build a strategy on that foundation. This is the “shoot first, ask questions later” strategy. Other organizations cultivate ambiguity and fuzziness. This the case, for example, of US federal agencies which make deliberate use of bureaucratic fuzziness, which Allan Lerner and John Wanat7 have shown to be relevant to organizational efficiency. An example of fuzziness is when companies deliberately send out unclear messages to employees, with the objective of encouraging reactions and exploring diverging interpretations, or of assigning vague mandates to middle managers while deliberately overlapping jurisdictions, in order to encourage cooperation and provide a role for the force of the locker-room. We have thus entered an era of interpretation and subjectivity. Management researchers hasten to deliver the intellectual resources and organizational solutions for dealing with diverging interpretations and diverging situations, cognitions and employee backgrounds. The work of Karl Weick,8 an organizational psychologist, occupies a preeminent place in this field. The organization may be the ultimate bureaucracy but, at the same time, it is composed of individuals who are too different for absolute conformity to be the rule. Companies are changing, alongside the world around them. This is not always easy. Grandiose plans, strategic revolutions and clear breaks with the past don’t help much, as they very quickly run into powerful coalitions of special interests. It is more reasonable to move forward in incremental baby steps that seize opportunities wherever they arise, even if that entails occasionally taking shortcuts and making compromises with rebels.

Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle This is the two steps forward, one step back approach suggested by Charles Lindblom, a political scientist.9 So, yes, let’s change the world without necessarily buying into the post-modernist illusions of randomness and constant flux. A minimum of order and of hierarchical reference-points are prerequisites for individuals to be allowed to express their own visions of the world, even if later it becomes necessary to refute those visions. A spectre is haunting this new, seemingly emancipated universe. That spectre is performance, or, more exactly, ultra-performance. This is what leads young market-floor traders to take unreasoned and uncontrolled risks, hoping to be the best and hoping not to be picked up by the watchdogs. This is what leads technicians at Renault, managers and employees at France Telecom to commit suicide. Ultra-performance is a common phenomenon, found within the bizarre structure of emancipated bureaucracy. It urges individuals to take outsize risks in order to achieve collective performance. Performance is different from efficiency as seen in the techno-bureaucratic management model. It puts pressure and restrictions back on people individually, in a universe that claims to be open to initiatives, outspokenness and surprises. Herein lies the hiatus. For the culture of individual performance makes emancipative and innovative behavior an obligation for middle managers, who achieve status by being the best performers, the view being that to outperform your co-worker is to contribute to the whole. The culture of individual performance is thus opposed to the objectives of community, and replaces community with another collective vision. The firm is reduced to a fleeting aggregate of temporary and ill-defined wills. Does this of itself mean being the best? Not necessarily, but it does mean being better than the person with whom you will inevitably be compared one day or another. Given that everyone has apparently bought into the “Be yourself!” and “Be better than yourself!” exhortations, have we quite simply swept away the notion of rebellion? For resisting is to express, with or without making a great fuss, disagreement with a given authority, in particular with those who send out solemn

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When managers rebel messages on glossy paper or through video-conferences. It is action when you don’t see the world in the same way as someone else, whether an adversary in authority or not. Current organizational structures allow individuals to make the case for a divergent opinion. Therefore, in theory, this should designate companies where resistance is expressed more often and in broad daylight, far from the usual shadowy politicking. This should free individuals to disagree, but that has not proved to be the case. Because resistance and rebellion are countered discreetly by orthodox management’s tendency to urge individuals to express their points of view constantly, and to voice any disagreement they might feel. Resistance and rebellion thus lose their weighty and political character. They are contained, included and melded into the politics of the organtion, which co-opts them by turning them into participation and expression. They are ingested into management policies, those of the hierarchy in particular, which remains wary of anything that is not easily controlable and predictable. Resistance and rebellion, and, more generally, anything consisting of refusing to play the game of tacit consensus, are included in social and personal development strategies that exhort one to “Simply be yourself ” or to “Break free from your habits”, used to coach middle managers to take responsibility for themselves without depending on their colleagues or their boss. So be it. Entry-level and on-the-job training contributes, at times without being aware of it, to narrowing the window of possibilities by presenting themselves as a box of tools that, once mastered, will ensure its user a decent position in life, like that of a financial market trader, an accountant or a product manager. Continuing education, meanwhile, particularly for new postings, is not completely against the idea of indoctrinating entry-level managers to the standards approved by senior management, in order to avoid deviant and substandard behavior. In this way, modern management follows a long tradition. Back in his time, the famous potter, Josiah Wedgwood, called any form of resistance a vice, as noted by the management historian, Sidney Pollard.10

Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle Two decades of modern management should at least in theory have been enough to transform indifferent managers into complicit ones. Or merely into profoundly cynical ones, as seen in the many studies on the subject, such as those of management researchers like Steven Ackroyd and Paul Thompson11 or Peter Fleming and André Spicer.12 This is an important issue. Ambiguous impressions cannot be taken as solid proof. Modern management is an intelligent and weighty practice in its day-to-day dealings with manager skepticism or mere manager fatigue, as well as in the attitudes on which it is predicated and which it instills into the minds of senior executives as well as a vast majority of managers.

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CHAPTER 9

Polyarchy as an alternative Manager rebellion can be seen in another light by analyzing the company in terms of a political regime, in which power is held temporarily, is contingent on issues that are debated, decisions that are made and consequences of actions that have been taken, and which is a scarce resource distributed unequally between individuals, groups and units who compete with one another.1 When seen in this light, management authority is not necessarily stable and eternal. The certainties that companies are moulded from are neither inevitable nor off-limits to discussion. Alternatives are possible, but first the political regime must be changed. The political regime that underpins management power is called oligarchy. In such a regime power is held by a small number of individuals, groups and networks that are organized more or less on formal lines. These groups specialize in different areas (sales, finance, technology and so on) and exercise power on a discrete and discretionary basis. They resist divergence and debate. Whoever stands up to them is a potential enemy. Barely concealed arrogance drives oligarchs to expect conformity to its authority. This chapter discusses polyarchy as an alternative political regime for exercising managerial power, dealing with diverging points of view, and generating a collective discipline. Modesty is one of the virtues it promotes, but it goes well beyond merely lending a sympathetic ear to middle managers.

9.1 Dealing with divergent views in political terms As we have noted several times, none of the rebellions described in this book sought to overthrow their companies’ current regimes. 144

Polyarchy as an alternative This is what makes such rebellions remarkable. They did, however, seek to deal with a precise issue or challenge, while refusing to conform to the decisions that emanate from the political regime in place, a regime that makes those decisions and seeks to justify them. Oligarchies, through their hegemonic hold on power, ignore views on managing the company that are different from their own, and even condemn the expression of those views. Workers and managers who do not agree are considered moral sinners. To suggest alternatives equals mismanagement. And when oligarchies refuse to listen to anything that threatens their infallibility, how else is one to act except through open and head-to-head rebellion? Of course, there are alternatives to rebellion, those that many people choose: passivity, selfishness, not being available, cynicism. Ultimately, it is up to each person to decide whether to lead or to agree to be led. But if companies are to be transformed, a key issue must be resolved: can an entrenched and authoritative management, like that in place in many companies that use modern management methods, be temporarily challenged, even on the basis of daily project-based procedures? Can company management tolerate debate and even allow others to challenge it on the basis of its own arguments? Can the fact that there are constantly diverging projects and pockets of so-called resistance to compliance and change help to produce a more political approach, an approach that companies desperately need if they are to move beyond the unproductive social and management practices that crush groups and their identities, as well as individuals and their lives? Such a political approach would consist, simply stated, in viewing the firm as a human community, and its organizational structure as a social and political system, as noted by James March in a seminal text of organization theory.2 Looked at, through a purely political prism, an eternal issue comes to the fore: how does one integrate the elite into a democracy? How are top senior managers to be retained while allowing middle managers to be more than just a guileless group under discreet surveillance, thinking of nothing other than earning its daily bread by devoting all its energy and know-how to the firm and then going

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When managers rebel quietly home? How are diverging views to be acknowledged in a universe that spends its days downplaying the value of debate and negotiation? We don’t think that companies can neglect these issues for ever. Some of the rebellions we have seen lack clarity and elegance, are local and small-scale affairs, and are led by middle managers who do not match top management’s idealized profile, such as the “underperforming” branch managers at Bank or the project manager with insufficient connections at Brick. Other rebellions are more surprising. They were started by managers who on paper did indeed match senior management’s winner profile but who one day balked at what they saw as senior management’s blackmail in pressuring them to sacrifice their private lives, especially when these faraway and faceless senior managers are “lining their pockets”. The managers under pressure discussed at length in this book are at the same time apparently well-compensated, with both money and recognition. They drive fancy cars, spend their holidays at exclusive resorts, live in comfortable houses and flats, and send their children to good schools – a stereotype of what we occasionally call the upper middle class. But material rewards are not enough for them. Hence the rebellions, hence the resignations, and hence the new life paths they take, even at the risk of regretting their decision. It is impossible define the thresholds at which their sacrifices seem almost a fair price to pay – those of pay, of working hours, of degree of responsibility. Who sets those thresholds? Who says what is the right income level? Is it $100,000 or $200,000? Are these figures indecent, and, while we’re on the subject, what does indecent mean exactly? These are the kinds of questions you hear at the local pub. A firm is a political entity in that its first task is to handle diverging points of view and interests, power, recognition, and so on. The more companies listen to the messages of rebellion, the stronger they will be socially and, hence, economically. Listening takes place on three key levels: sacrifice thresholds you can’t exceed; rewards thresholds you must exceed; and political mistakes to avoid when dealing with individuals, where their lives and those of their loved ones are involved.

Polyarchy as an alternative Moral and political issues are organizational in nature; namely. how can a company work better by accepting temporary inversions of roles, by allowing the best to speak up and lead even when they do not necessarily hold formal authority or when their ideas diverge from senior management’s canons? How can roles be reversed temporarily without calling on naïve arguments in the name of democracy, and above all in the name of maximum ability? Answer: by turning the firm into a politically flexible organization. This is not exactly a novel idea. In political theory it is called polyarchy. Freedom of expression and access to power by stakeholders are hallmarks of democracies. They can also be the hallmarks of organizations such as firms, by subjecting decisionmaking to debate.

9.1

Polyarchy as a political regime

Polyarchy is a notion defined in the 1950s by the American organizational sociologist, Arnold Tannenbaum3, to describe control by the largest number, with the term “control” being understood as social, not procedural or hierarchical control. It was later taken up and developed by Robert Dahl, one of the fathers of modern American political science, in the mid-twentieth century.4 Polyarchy refers to the pluralistic political governance that is the closest approximation of the democratic ideal. Sources of power are dispersed among multiple and competing elites. The elites negotiate decisions among themselves. While they remain united as a group throughout the political system, that group is relatively open to newcomers. Divergences and conflicts are settled peacefully through negotiation and through dedicated and autonomous organizations. Individuals are allowed to challenge and participate as much as possible in decisions that bind the collective. Forms of control and legitimacy exist to allow individuals to weigh in on the collective choices made by the elites.

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When managers rebel Polyarchy makes sense in governing the affairs of both local municipalities and the modern company. Like a municipality, a company is a plurality of groups with varied and diverging interests that must be reconciled. Polyarchy also allows individuals and groups to express grievances within a regime that is otherwise centralized. It gives them the freedom to reflect, to talk things over and to compare notes, in a collegial setting that is familiar to and acknowledged by all. Polyarchy is therefore defined by the fact that it encourages and channels protest within recognized forms of organization. Obviously, polyarchy is not to be confused with egalitarian democracy. Because, even within a polyarchy, not everyone can and should hope to be the master of the regime one day. Nor does polyarchy suggest that everyone should govern everyone else, under some sort of revolutionary vision of the firm. Polyarchy, rather, encompasses ambivalence, diversity of situations, polyphony, in short all the normal things that occur in life that bureaucracy has spent decades countering, without managing to eradicate them. For it is not possible to ignore individuals’ experiences outside the company, except by producing generations of split personality employees. Polyarchy is a form of political organization that allows the firm and its representatives to lend an eager ear to rebels, to take their grievances on board without losing face, and to make use of protest rather than immediately trying to counter it. However, in the reality of corporate life, any real form of polyarchy runs into three pitfalls. The first is that individuals simply are not on call. They lack the time and attention to take part. Companies are fluid spaces that compress individual and collective time so much that middle managers may simply not have the resources and motivation to participate actively in debate. Joining the debate requires precious time for reflection. How can a middle manager become a political actor within his/her company if s/he has to keep his/her nose constantly to the grindstone? The second pitfall is that specific know-how, leadership and motivational skills and a good dose of self-confidence and trust

Polyarchy as an alternative in others are required by senior managers to open the doors of debate and negotiation on projects and issues that affect middle managers directly in their daily lives and their local managerial setting. Mere technocrats are unlikely to meet these requirements. A third pitfall follows on from the obvious. No precedent exists to force the various stakeholders, beginning with those who count the most on the ground, to negotiate compromises that are both harmonious and effective. Setting up talk shops here and there, and including a multitude of stakeholders in the discussion is unlikely to create healthy exchanges and agreements, but, rather, simply to generate even more cacophony, controversy and footdragging, especially when stakeholders do not know the rules of play for discussion and negotiation. This third pitfall touches on a broader issue. The viability of a polyarchy, especially within a company, depends closely on who sets the rules of how to debate and argue, and on how those rules are followed by stakeholders. Rebellion occurs when middle managers are subject to rules of control imposed beyond range generally by those higher up, rules that allow for no autonomy base or negotiation resource on either the substantive decision at hand or the process leading to that decision. A polyarchy is viable and effective when stakeholders’ right to negotiate, and their right to negotiate how to negotiate, are recognized.

9.2

Adversaries, not enemies

Polyarchic management requires a certain state of mind, a new way of seeing the firm and how it is governed on a daily basis. Through its everyday decisions, the firm constantly involves itself in society at large. In return, society can get inside the firm through its reactions and interpretations, and overall perception. Middle managers’ forbidden zone de facto comes into conflict with senior management when the latter intrudes and forces them to conform to its prescribed lines of conduct. Polyarchy provides a way for senior management to deal with such conflict through constructive relationships and not exclusively antagonistic ones.

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Obviously, companies can be based on cooperation. They are not by nature antagonistic, places where conflict is inevitable. They aren’t necessarily split into higher-ups and lower-downs, who are unable to communicate except as master and servants. Not all companies are run on the basis of management principles handed down by elites, who possess the exclusive power to guide, coach, channel and force. They are not all governed by arrogant leaders who cultivate their arrogance in institutions that claim to instil these virtues, from business schools to specialized periodicals.

9.2

Agonism

Agonism in political theory is an alternative to deliberation and to aggregation, the two prevailing models of pluralistic democracy. These two models refuse to recognize the profoundly antagonistic nature of politics, whereas governance based on agonism, says the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe,5 takes into account the crucial role played by passions in political action and their effect in constructing political identities. Agonism refers to the give-and-take that occurs between actors or stakeholders who consider each other as adversaries, not enemies. An enemy defines his/her stance in violent terms involving the death of the other party. The conflict is a zero-sum game. One actor takes it all or loses it all. An adversary bases his/her stance on a dynamic of conflict, which is not at all the same thing. Conflicts between adversaries are resolved through a compromise or a synthesis. Unlike enemies, adversaries share enough values and objectives to make negotiations possible in which neither party wins or loses. Agonism means respect for the adversary, whereas enemies do not respect one another.

Polyarchy as an alternative Polyarchic or political management is based on agonism rather than antagonism. As seen above, oligarchic management seeks to overcome resistance, or at least spot it early and mitigate its effects. Oligarchic management considers resistance to be, by nature, illegitimate and ineffective, and relegates it to the sphere of illicit behavior. It believes, or says it believes, that resistance comes from frustrated individuals who have been poorly indoctrinated or are too wily to cooperate on the basis of the guidelines and rules of the game stipulated in modern management methods. Switching to polyarchic management means doing away with the master–servant relationship, without slipping, ipso facto, into the facile rhetoric of participative management. A polyarchic company is neither angel nor demon. It turns aside systematic mistrust and prejudices. It projects cooperative agonism. Its main approach is to define dissension as an official political project, and not as either systematic opposition driven by bad manners or genetic flaws, or as a subversive joke meant to turn the firm into a recreational area, which it is not. Agonism aims to do better with and by individuals. Polyarchy restores the principle of the firm around what we can call a community of adversaries. This concept of community is the operational cornerstone of polyarchy. As far as companies and their management are concerned, the fit is not obvious, and the concept tends to be present more in the telling than in the doing. Corporate management has long been based on denying notions of community while cherry-picking its ideas – such as common projects and shared culture – applying those notions at its discretion and only at moments of its choosing. When the powerful select values when and only when it suits them, that does not constitute a social pact. On the contrary, a community is a political unit that allows a shared principle of corporate revenue growth with a productive defence of stakeholder interests. Middle managers need some protection, in the same way as other workers. Nevertheless, protection is not just an altruistic concession by the company that amounts to flat expense – money thrown out of the window. It is also a form of investment for the

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When managers rebel future it creates. Composed of people who trust one another and are bound together in a common cause, the firm becomes more cohesive and efficient in the medium term than when employees are either frightened of their bosses or in constant competition with them. Integration and mobilization are easier to achieve when common cause is intertwined with a spirit of conquest. Not, of course, the type of conquest that risks lives, the way soldiers do. People are not fighting to defend their company as they might their country, at the risk of never returning from the front alive or in one piece. Polyarchy takes forbidden zones into account in constantly analyzing the limits of its own legitimacy. Top management has to take on board temporary legitimacy and temporary control of the reins of power. Of course, while it has its virtues, this is no easy task. Relocating the centres of power and reorganizing stakeholders based on the issues to be addressed, increasing the number of paths to power, diversifying the possible sources of legitimacy – these are ways to meet the tough challenge of installing multicentric management. One way to achieve this is to recruit from a more diverse pool of talent to produce leaders who are more open-minded and less arrogant than those who currently inhabit the lecture halls of the top business schools and universities around the world. Google provides an interesting example of multicentric management. This early-twenty-first-century success story employs what is called the 80/20 rule, which at first sight might not sound very original. Yet each engineer is entitled to devote one fifth of his working time to personal projects that aren’t necessarily linked directly to a profit-making undertaking or even to any of the firm’s projects. The outcome of encouraging autonomy does produce innovations, such as the Indian engineer who was seeking to help his grandfather in a remote village get news about the USA after the 9/11 attacks and invented Google News. At Google, there are also Friday discussion committees, at which peers openly and frankly measure themselves against one another and judge the quality and value of their new ideas and projects. Deliberation is at the heart of this system, which draws from it a communitarian form of evaluation of each person’s contribution. Transparency

Polyarchy as an alternative and mutual checks and balances generate open participation. Each employee may offer up ideas and challenge ideas submitted by others. Quite an achievement. If we were naïve, we would call it participative democracy. And yet, this is not the objective of Google’s leaders. What they expect and hope to achieve, rather, is to be seen to encourage employees to do things differently, to think outside the box, invent new forms of work and imagine new technologies. In Google’s polyarchy, engineers don’t have to constantly keep one eye on the quarterly earnings. Even short-term contributions to earnings are not mandatory. The tyranny of share prices and the cult of performance are debatable, not sacred cows. There are no taboo subjects. Everything is up for discussion, challenged by action, and by new, even subversive, ideas. Another example, but in another style, is the Italian firm Olivetti during the 1990s.6 Olivetti wanted its engineers and middle managers to engage within a universe composed of a handful of messages – on strategy, basic rules, procedures and so on – that were not necessarily unequivocal or specific, so that informal procedures could arise spontaneously and on a collegial basis. This idea coincides with a social science discovery, that people certainly need to be inducted, organized, guided and channelled within a work organization, but when they are not, they themselves make up the rules and channels that the firm needs. And the made-up and improvised rules are often much better than those handed down by senior management. For they are more suited to situations that only the workforce faces in reality. The idea isn’t to allow anyone do anything, anyhow, anywhere. Rather, it’s a way of leading from afar based on fuzzy messages, named by James March as the technology of foolishness,7 as opposed to a technology of reason and pure rationality. When bureaucracy becomes truly fuzzy, it takes the path of polyarchy in that it openly asks people to become temporary experts in rule-making. In their ways of organizing action and weaving social links throughout the firm, polyarchies differ markedly from the oligarchies that are the rule rather than the exception for middle

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When managers rebel 9.3 Joint regulation, control rules and self-made rules Jean-Daniel Reynaud,8 a leading French expert in labor relations and sociology of work, stresses the importance of the arrangements employees make with their supervisors relative to the “control rules” laid down for doing their jobs. Such arrangements are the result of neither trickery nor human shortcomings, nor defence mechanisms. They are merely ways of meeting the company’s efficiency dictates when its formal organizational set-up comes up short. They are generally informal, if not actually secret, and are tolerated or even encouraged by immediate supervisors, and enjoy a certain legitimacy for those who formulate and apply them. These informal standards, or “self-made rules”, which reinterpret the formal order imposed by an outside party, constitute reserves of productivity. For example, in high-risk industries such as process industries, producing self-made rules close to the field of action makes the workplace safer, decreases the number of accidents and increases the quality level of production.9 Such rules are sanctioned by the hierarchy, who sometimes even incorporate them gradually into the “control rules”. When employees and their supervisors cooperate in the dynamic production of rules it is called “joint regulation”. Social order is negotiated. It is not governed by norms imposed from the outside, but by rules the actors themselves invent, maintain and eventually destroy. Rules about how to behave, how to debate and how to encourage consent are produced in an endogenous manner by the stakeholders themselves.

managers. Polyarchy emancipates them in what is at first glance an unusual fashion, by forcing them to come up with their own ways of working with people and then later deciding whether these ways are right or wrong.

Polyarchy as an alternative This is what Semco, a Brazilian family-run ship-making equipment maker in São Paulo, has understood. Semco was run by an autocratic and controlling personality until the early 1980s, when he was succeeded by his 23-three-old son, Ricardo Semler.10 In little more than twenty years the firm has diversified, expanded its staff thirty-fold and its revenues fifty-three-fold, in spite of the obstacles posed by a depressed economic and financial environment, including galloping inflation and foreign exchange controls. Ricardo’s ambition was to reconcile its employees’ working lives with their non-working lives, to develop an intense in-house participative democracy, and to eliminate all forms of bureaucracy through aggressive decentralization by doing away with useless procedures and forcefully flattening the stratification between categories of employees. Semco cut the size of business units or departments to no more than 150 people in each. Hierarchical organization was abolished and replaced by a formal structure of just three concentric circles: five “advisors” who set broad objectives, eight “partners” in charge of divisions and of ensuring that these operate within the framework of the broad objectives, and associates, meaning all other employees including department coordinators. In addition to these three levels of management, there are only four different job classifications. This simplicity led to a drastic decline in the number of control tools. The department coordinators are evaluated on their ability to delegate and are not hired unless they are first accepted by their future subordinates. Employees participate closely in the life of the company. For example, before the company buys a competing factory, employees vote yes or no after visiting the factory during their working hours. If the employees vote yes, the factory will be acquired even if the advisors say no. And after the factory is acquired, the employees assume responsibility for equipping it with new machinery. Meanwhile, Semco has no name badges, no fixed working hours and no anti-theft inspections. Each unit decides how to use its profits and how to split them up among its employees. Similarly, aggressive transparency is the rule in each department on costs, sales and taxes. As a result, each employee is intimately acquainted with the bottom line. Finally, managers spend most of their time resolving disagreements and disputes, rather than

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When managers rebel checking up on employees and making decisions. In short, Semco functions according to the “joint regulation” model and places its trust in the dynamics of self-made rules. A common feature of the examples given above is heavy peer pressure. Such pressure is hard to withstand, especially when both peers and bosses behave according to the same standards. Failure to participate, playing stowaway in the community, using behavior and norms that are different from those of one’s colleagues; in a word, not playing the game, is an ultimately untenable stance. But such communitarian peer pressure does not necessarily force individuals to give up their forbidden zones. In some cases, the zone of indifference is broader, with managers’ private lives being not only respected and recognized, but also made an integral part of the relationship with the company. Let us go on to Royal Canin to see how this is done. Royal Canin, originally a French mid-sized company now owned by the American global conglomerate, Mars, is world leader in dog and cat food. Up to the early 2000s it had developed a model combining two main facets.11 One is based on positioning that was revolutionary in its sector, targeting pets by breed, age and living conditions, and distributing its products mainly through the recommendations of veterinarians, instead of in supermarkets. The other facet involves its in-house set-up and is based on a model they call missionary communitarianism, in which all employees, from simple workers to the chairman, share the same values. Royal Canin has a flat hierarchy, with just four levels. Specialized departments are kept to a minimum, whether in logistics, operating and strategic marketing, or human resources. Quality control, brand management and new product development are co-managed, and no monopolistic annexation by self-appointed experts is possible. Risks of drifting toward increased procedures, of benchmarking and of recruiting marketing people from outside the company, are resisted. Trust is based much more on people’s devotion to the company than on outside consultants’ methods or managers’ university degrees. For example, the company has deliberately avoided hiring MBAs. Shared values are implemented consistently, including strategic courage, communitarian solidarity, respect, humility, the virtues of being small in

Polyarchy as an alternative a world of giants, and of standing up to oversized competitors. “Higher-ups” set behavioral and moral references, by travelling coach like their subordinates, for example. Even with more than 3,500 employees in some twenty-five countries, the head office pays close attention to individuals. For example, being a pet owner and, in general, taking an interest in pets, counts in hiring decisions. Middle managers’ private lives – their roles within their families and the community – are a factor in managing their careers. Genuine signs of respect are shown in daily interactions. Local languages are accepted as working and meeting languages. Decision-making is shared, and points of view of employees at all levels are factored into those decisions. Social distance is kept to a minimum, and everyone is expected to respect each other. Hence, and without using the spectacular methods of Google, Olivetti or Semco, Royal Canin has managed to set up a polyarchic regime. In spite of the heavy moral and communitarian pressures exerted by the collective, employees and their private lives and concerns are respected on a day-to-day basis. Royal Canin’s business model and operational structure have been for many years unlike those of the pet food giants Masterfoods (Mars Group) and Purina (Nestlé). They have contributed to its exceptional development, with an average annual growth rate of 13 per cent over a period of thirteen years, the loyalty of its middle managers and more generally of all its employees, with staff turnover at just 1.4 per cent annually over the same period. Table 9.1 illustrates the quantum leap that oligarchic companies must make in their governance practices in order to become polyarchic.

9.3

Polyarchy, not anarchy

While polyarchy may seem to be the polar opposite of oligarchy, both agree that some form of leadership is necessary. Oligarchies certainly make room for deliberation and discussion. However, they seek at all times to frame the discussion and reject

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158 Table 9.1 Corporate oligarchy and polyarchy The oligarchic regime There is only one legitimate hierarchy of authority. Its direction is top-down. It is positional, and will fight to defend this. Middle manager rebellion is a symptom of breakdown. It results from a refusal to accept rules. It reflects a conflict that is by nature disruptive.

The polyarchic regime

Legitimate authority is contingent on issues to be resolved and projects to be launched. It also runs horizontally. It is temporary by definition. Manager rebellion must be listened to and encouraged. It fosters diversity and innovation, even if that takes up time and energy. Rebellion results from a confrontation of points of view that can be profitable for the firm. Manager rebellions are obstacles Rebellions are legitimate ways to which undermine the organization improve the firm’s performance of the firm. and must be acknowledged. They They must be eliminated, and even provide a breeding ground for punished. future leaders. Decisions and the political agenda are Decisions and the political agenda are set at the top. Middle managers set at the top by distant, faceless are none the less able to question bodies, such as boards of directors them through organized channels and executive committees. and with supporting arguments. The head office is the main forum of The organization splits political power political power: the organization into numerous territories, such as has just one centre, constitutes business units and key projects. a single territory controlled by Organization is multicentric, its a homogenous elite and uses middle managers have differing benchmarks produced mainly profiles and are in constant outside the organization competition for access to resources. A clear division must be drawn Society at large has its place within between the organization and the organization. society at large. Its principles and rules compete with The public life of the firm ignores the those of the organization. private lives of its middle managers. Polyarchic management seeks Their zone of indifference is almost to better combine these two unlimited. competing systems of values. Middle managers knows exactly what Polyarchic managers deal with they must do and stay within the matters that have not been confines of their skill set. assigned to them formally. They are undemonstrative and They are also critical when need be. submissive.

Polyarchy as an alternative behavior that it deems to be disobedience and that breaches the implicit contract of allegiance to rules. Polyarchy, meanwhile, is not to be confused with a certain form of adhocracy, whose only rule is to react spontaneously to market forces and trends, a phenomenon that is sometimes called velocity. Polyarchy requires an identifiable system of decisionmaking and values that are shared broadly. This allows leaders to cut off debate when it has gone on too long. Polyarchy accepts improvisation while abhorring disorder. Its multicentrism fosters multiple, self-starting initiatives and contradictory interpretations of strategy as long as this results in worthwhile innovations. Discussion must come to some sort of conclusion, and not just be a bull session given over to fast talkers and other demagogues. At Agro, rebels share their belief that research has value in and of itself, and must be allowed to proceed at its own pace. At Bank, rebels argue that there is special value in relating to clients as individuals rather than as account numbers. Polyarchy allows for competing benchmarks, which are not handed down in a totalitarian fashion. The polyarchic firm is not first and foremost centred on functional orthodoxies such as financial controls and marketing. It takes in interest in its clients, in market and social trends, and in its medium-term vision. It uses these core values as yardsticks in listening to heterodoxies from within. It even seeks to accommodate the latter, to use them and to acknowledge them. This is what makes polyarchic organizations different from those that try to forestall protest because they believe it undermines the firm’s performance. This is also what makes it different from organizations that, while claiming to function on the basis of cultural purity or institutional cloistering, produce other forms of radical constraint – clans, totalitarian institutions, and so on – and end up erasing individual will, making people submissive and blindly obedient. Can everyone live and prosper in a polyarchy, a blend of emancipation and shared values? Behavior that is encouraged in a polyarchic community may seem, if not intolerable, then at least difficult to understand from an oligarchic point of view. This is not the case of the “tempered radical” described by two organizational study scholars, Debra Meyerson and Maureen Scully.12 Here we have the prototype of an individual confronting

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When managers rebel the bizarre beings that are polyarchic organizations. Tempered radicals are torn between their convictions and personal values and those that their position requires them to stand up for. They must constantly deal with the gap between what they fundamentally are and what they must be professionally. They must constantly struggle to transform underlying tension into creative acts that both they and their employers can accept. Otherwise their only alternative is to resign themselves to that tension, to enter into conflict with their superiors or to leave the firm. Among the cases we have observed is that of a young lesbian manager who was invited by the chairman to the Christmas party, at which spouses were also invited. However, the chairman wouldn’t allow her to bring her partner. In response, she pulled out some of the company’s internal speeches on diversity and discrimination to get her point across to the chairman that she would either come with her girlfriend or wouldn’t come at all. The chairman ultimately gave in and greeted the homosexual couple at the party. This event would later help to alter the collective view of homosexuality within this company. Another example is the manager of a European multinational, sent to China to launch a major industrial project and who, in doing so, helped local engineers to acquire the know-how that would allow China to continue its rise to the peak of global capitalism. The manager was also active within an association that wanted to boycott the Beijing Olympics in 2008 to protest against the Chinese government’s totalitarian practices. Patrick, Michael, Bruno, Julie and the others are, each in his or her own way, tempered radicals. Their protests expose their deep inner contradictions, which for years they had stifled because of the oligarchic management practices of their companies. They are radicals or extremists in that they openly defy the organization’s status quo through their acts of protest or simply by being themselves – meaning people who have not found their exact station in life and who do not realize it until ten or twenty years after they have joined the system. Suddenly, they abandon everything, including the system that made them and that they seemed to have served so well, and of which they were model members.

Polyarchy as an alternative They are tempered in several other ways. They are hot and cold in their professional lives, oscillating between moments of excitement and commitment and moments of doubt and even radical self-doubt. They are also tempered because they show temperament. They don’t back down. They stand up for their convictions. Based on their internal yardstick of values or life stories, they feel that certain management practices are unacceptable. And these values and life stories sometimes push them into openly criticizing the company’s practices. At the end of the day, they do not see the world in terms of current emancipated bureaucratic management. At times they can push their companies towards ambivalence. This type of behavior can create thorny issues, because, in any situation of ambivalence, there is a large part of uncertainty and ignorance. Which way will the balance shift? When will it do so, and with what effect? Can authoritative management know its high-potential managers well enough to detect tempered radicals, and if so, what should it do about it? The answer is that it cannot. All-powerful management does not know how to handle individuals who show “detached concern”, which, according to the definition given by the American sociologist, Robert Merton,13 is a combination of emotional distance and real sensitivity. Middle managers who practice detached concern are closely involved in both their companies and in society at large, and this gives them a critical outlook, which can lead their right hand to undo what their left hand has done. This was the case with Patrick. In turning down a promotion that he was not expected to turn down, he challenged management practices even while sending a positive message to the organization. His message was positive in that it shook up the accepted image of the thirty-something middle manager, while offering the company an opportunity for creativity. He also offered an alternative proposal, which his superiors chose to ignore. Such reactions can seriously unbalance both advocates of dusty bureaucratic conservatism or technocratic management and wild-eyed militants of subversion and chaos. The ambivalences of creative rebellion oppose the two visions of artificial subversion and of lifeless status quo. Advocates of conservatism quickly accuse the rebels of not being team-players, and of being in it only for themselves, while militants of chaos management accuse

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When managers rebel such rebels of being overly cautious, cowardly or insufficiently resourceful. Between these two extremes lies polyarchy, and a form of tolerance to which modern management should open up, so it can learn the creative value of rebel ambivalence. Failing that, such rebellions will continue to occur, with the exasperation that middle managers feel in wanting to have both a promising career and to defend altruistic values or moral principles. Pressure on them comes from senior managers, as seen in accounts of the Bank branch managers and Agro project managers. It can also come from friends at work, as in the case of Michael, who heard so-called sympathetic friends express their incomprehension, a view he would have immediately interpreted as quiet disapproval. In any case, such ambivalence is looked down on by companies that are trapped in the tenets of managerial hegemony. People at the top have a hard time sharing power, even on a temporary basis, and of thereby appearing fallible. Such ambivalence bumps into the glass ceiling that separates senior managers from middle managers. Management continues to place too much hope on exogenous devices that serve as magic tools, and give short shrift to any thoughts about the company’s political regime and governance practices. If only one could deal with middle managers who had practically no forbidden zones …

Conclusion: the future beckons Are junior or senior, first-line or top executives, managers increasingly exposed to soft constraints they cannot avoid, and to expectations of total conformity to decisions they must not challenge? Are rebellions going to expand even more? Might this weaken the roots from which the companies grow? How sustainable are their governance practices? As suggested by the data we have collected over many years of study of a multitude of European and American companies operating in very different business sectors or markets, rebellions should be taken seriously. They are hardly visible from the outside and not made public in 99 per cent of cases. They are consequences of all-powerful management approaches and mindsets. They generate costs and pain for the individuals involved as well as for the company as a whole. Nevertheless there are good reasons to believe that no irreversible trend is in place and that the picture remains quite unfinished. The future will depend on those who have the winning cards in their hands: the companies, their owners and their bosses.

A mixed picture Manager rebellions often fly under the radar or are deliberately hushed up. In any case, they occur more often than is commonly believed. They are of interest not just to human resources experts but also to managers and employees, and to their loved ones. Rebellions tend to occur mainly in large and mid-sized companies and in departments such as manufacturing. We could also study forms of rebellion occurring in banks and insurance businesses, in hypermarkets, in press and television companies. But not all companies potentially generate rebellion among their middle 163

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When managers rebel managers. It depends on their internal governance, as we shall illustrate below. Our observations suggest, meanwhile, that the propensity to rebellion is almost the same in American, British, French and German companies. It does not seem to depend on the national culture of its protagonists, be they individuals or companies. Sometimes we were astonished to see how silent and passive managers remained when handling dramatic events such as closing their plant and/or destroying several hundred jobs, including their own. Instructions sent by e-mail from a very distant headquarters may not very rational – to say the least – and not negotiable locally either. Most of the time, local managers not only enforce the instructions and remain silent, they even continue to express a level of optimism about the future as if they were sitting in some sort of denial room. Their zone of indifference is quite wide. Manager rebellion is not the mirror image of other forms of labour protest within companies, such as trade union activity, for example. Its original forms, localized causes and qualitative demands deal above all with how the company and its personnel are managed, in broad terms. As such, it is disorienting not just for senior management and human resources managers but also for other employees and for trade unions. Rebellions are most often started by high-potential managers. Rebels are more often elite figures than company castoffs. Rebels are usually managers in their early thirties, who are getting settled in life, starting a home and family. After managers hit the age of 45 their propensity to rebellion tends to fade. Either they have reached the doors of the executive suite or have accepted their lot in its peripheral offices. Rebellion is triggered by the company’s intrusion into the forbidden zone of middle managers’ private lives, where managerial authority is not allowed to intrude. It is unleashed by what the company does and how it does it, rather than by ideological issues, such as anti-capitalism, anti-globalization or trade union matters. Rebels are often gung-ho company men and women whom senior management had singled out as models until the day

Conclusion they challenged their superiors over issues that might appear minor or very circumstantial, but become eventually the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The more the company is run along what we have called “hegemonic” lines – with management methods based on the absolute primacy of unquestioned impersonal procedures, and control based on quantitative performance metrics handed down by a senior management elite – the more rebellion is likely to occur. All rebellions leave traces on both the managers who lead them and the companies that confront them. One major lesson from the stories in this book is that, while rebellion leaves scars, particularly on the rebels themselves, and while even the companies do not emerge completely unscathed, the outcome is not wholly negative. The picture is more mixed than is often believed. Rebels are not out to undermine authority and bring down their companies. They merely refuse certain ways of doing things and propose acceptable alternatives. In this sense, rebellion becomes a creative process likely to engender benefits for the firm. So rebellions are worth paying attention to even if, or precisely because, they challenge the infallibility of managerial authority. This book tells how normal people react in different ways when their company impinges on the core of their private lives and displays a lack of respect for their identities. Managers rebel and protest when they find no other way of making their voices heard, while facing the dilemma over the realization that no job is safe, particularly in a context of rampant globalization and all-powerful management practices. The ideal middle manager is one who is presumed to be resourceful and free to take action. And it is precisely these qualities s/he calls upon in dealing with impossible challenges and irresolvable dilemmas. This book provides a glimpse into the lives of people who refuse conventional ways of thinking about performance and individual ambition. They turn down opportunities, speak up and start anew – in short, they behave in a way that is at odds with the company’s image of the ideal manager–conformist. Companies obviously don’t seek to provoke their middle managers but nevertheless do so, through the way they are set up and operate.

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When managers rebel Various possible outcomes Has the last word been said? What fate awaits the middle managers and companies of tomorrow? We are neither Cassandras nor Polyannas, given neither to extreme pessimism nor to witless naivety. We think anything is possible but it’s the companies who will decide, not their middle managers. This book traces a path, from leveraging the force of the lockerroom (Chapter 3) to adopting polyarchic management based on agonism (Chapter 9). So there do exist ways of achieving performance other than technocratic management and the violation of employees’ forbidden zones. Beyond the singular, almost romantic stories told here, and regardless of how those stories turned out, rebellion and protest raise important issues on how far such movements go and what their real impact is for thousands of middle managers and other employees, starting with those who are caught up in globalization. In short, what place do such rebellions have in the history of management? Executive rebellion can generate butterfly effects, but not necessarily every time. Ripples are inevitably created but stay within a relatively limited and circumscribed space. Polyarchic management is not an immediately effective cure-all for the technocratic, hegemonic management described in this book. Furthermore, the scenario of a radical break, of a sudden collapse and massive street protests looks unlikely. Such sensational imagery is overdone by some observers. The executive rebellions we observed find little or no resonance in protest or other examples of institutionalized mass activism, such as those generated by trade union.1 If the “revolution” comes, it will be a quiet, local affair, with intensity and forms that will vary over time and space. More realistically, there are two possible ways of seeing the role that executive rebellion might play in the history of managing people. The first suggests that these experiences of refusal and of seeking alternatives change nothing in the way the business world is

Conclusion imagined and governed by its leaders; that they serve merely as safety valves in dealing with tough competition and strict performance standards. After all, every war produces its share of mutinies, deserters and cheats, and economic war is no exception. At critical moments, rebels are shot in order to frighten others from joining the rebellion. However, when hegemony is well entrenched and sure of itself, rebels are allowed to leave with nary a regret. Another reading suggests that these mundane and discrete experiences of rebellion in fact revive an awareness that years of indoctrination to technocratic, hegemonic management and conformism had buried, without completely annihilating it. From this point of view, humankind stubbornly resists efforts to be governed by an absolute authority. Accounts of rebellions are not just the simple adventures of tragic heroes. They can also serve as examples, or even benchmarks, to others who hear about them through the company grapevine. Invisible coalitions, which include middle managers in their ranks, free themselves of the organizational yokes they had laboured under. These coalitions help to reinvent the role of the middle manager, with new ways of relating to work and defining allegiance to the hierarchy. Yet this is not to suggest that middle managers should become professional protestors against the legitimacy or necessity of the company and work. This second reading of rebellion is more plausible than the first, and the stories of trauma and stress told from the rebel victims’ points of view lay the foundation for changing management’s view of their companies. Senior managers and their management methods then face a choice. They can hire stress-management experts, psychologists, trainers or dieticians – a bureaucratic response that would be perfectly compatible with the way they run the company through instruments and devices. This would amount to a refusal to take a stand and would be tantamount to dealing with managerial trauma as nothing more than an illness to be treated. Or they can shift the internal regime of power and legitimacy towards greater agonism and less hegemony, whereby they undertake to examine alternative visions and antagonistic values on

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When managers rebel how to do business on a daily basis and achieve performance, without destroying careers and lives. To return to the war metaphor, this second option would mean taking the next hill from the enemy without sacrificing hundreds of soldiers, while speeding the army’s advance. This second option would take companies down another path of management, another regime of internal governance, one that is more politically based and that we have called polyarchic. The key to success in this second option is to give the person – the middle manager, for example – the option to say no or to do things in other ways, to recognize his or her creative spark, and hence his/her accountability. This should also increase each person’s sense of belonging by allowing them to be a little like everyone else. Combining these two elements in building middle managers’ identities helps to restore some hope to each one of them. This objective is all the more crucial as, at the beginnings of the twenty-first century, companies are very socially vulnerable, whether they like it or not, and whether they admit it or not. This is one of the basic arguments underlying our book, and it is the inevitable conclusion of our observations of rebel managers. The firm is open to society not just in being sensitive to issues of sustainable development and corporate responsibility. Yes, these concerns do seem to be very much on people’s minds. But society enters the firm’s public sphere in a completely different way. Companies are porous because they restructure, because they move around, because they constantly shuffle their staff, activities, bosses, and operating and management rules. They are in the throes of the relentless maelstrom of globalization, but this can act as be a formidable opportunity to encourage confrontation, debate and deliberation on various subjects, including those that, strictly speaking, have nothing to do with the company’s business. Companies dealing with a world in full flux often take on the shape of an amorphous and uncontrollable community inhabited by people who spend a good part of their days together without knowing or recognizing one another. And it is precisely individual experiences that can provide alternative footholds for management’s stereotyped generic views. In the company

Conclusion designed as a communitarian space, both middle managers and other employees are searching for these footholds, and are therefore particularly concerned by these stories, which they find reassuring. Above all, the stories make sense of what one is doing and what one is, individually and as a community. They show that we have things in common in how we think, in how we see and experience the world and that, moreover, this similarity matters. For it provides a little of this warmth that is nowhere to be found at the train station, on the platform, waiting for the express train to pull in and take you off to another day of combat.

169

NOTES

Introduction: what on earth am I doing here? 1. Catherine Paradeise, a professor at Université Paris Est-Marne la Vallée, provided invaluable editing assistance. Michel Coster, a professor at EMLYON, reread the manuscript. We extend our thanks to both of them. Our thinking was also made the richer by discussions at the EMLYON “organizations, careers and new elites” research center. 2. D. Courpasson, Soft constraint. liberal organizations and domination, Paris, Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, 2006. 3. C. Michaud and J. C. Thoenig, Making strategy and organization compatible, London, Palgrave, 2003. 4. R. T. Golembiewski, R. F. Munzenrider and J. G. Stevenson, Stress in organizations. Toward a phase model of burnout, New York, Praeger, 1986. 5. What they told us is marked indelibly in our memories. We hope that we have not betrayed their trust.

Chapter 3 Management spaces 1. A. Gramsci, Selection from the prison notebooks, New York, International Publishers, 1971. 2. M. Weber, Economy and society, (G. Roth and C. Wittich, eds), Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1995. 3. E. Goffman, Asylums, Oxford, Doubleday, 1961. 4. J. G. March, The business firm as a political coalition, Journal of Politics, 24: 662–78, 1962. 5. M. Koza and J. C. Thoenig, Rethinking the firm: organizational approaches, Organization Studies, 24(8): 1219–29, 2003. 6. T. Peters, Thriving on chaos: Handbook for a management revolution, Harper paperbacks, 1988. 7. Semler, R., Maverick: The success story behind the world’s most unusual workplace, New York, Warner Books, 1993. 8. M. Weinstein, Managing to have fun, New York, Freeside, 1996. 9. T. E. Deal and M. K. Key, Corporate celebration. play, purpose, and profit at work, San Francisco, Berret-Koehler, 1998.

170

Notes 10. S. Frenkel, M. Korcyznski, K. Shire and M. Tam, On the front line: Organization of work in the information society, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1999. 11. R. M. Kanter, When giants learn to dance: Mastering the challenges of strategy, management and careers in the 1990s, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1989. 12. D. Courpasson, Soft constraint. liberal organizations and domination, Paris, Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, 2006.

Chapter 4 The dynamics of rebellion 1. R. K. Merton, Bureaucratic structure and personality, Social Forces, 10(4): 560–8, 1940. 2. M. Crozier, The bureaucratic phenomenon, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1963. 3. A.-L. Fayard and J. Weeks, Photocopiers and water-coolers: The affordances of informal interaction, Organization Studies, 28(5): 605–34, 2007.

Chapter 5 What happens tomorrow to today’s rebels? 1. E. Durkheim, Suicide, New York, The Free Press, 1897; reprinted 1997. 2. In some countries, such events have become matters of public opinion and government issues by the late 2000s. To give an example from among French companies such as France Telecom, a telecommunications giant, and Renault, an auto manufacturer, serial suicides of employees and managers have been registered – more than forty between 2008 and 2010, on and off site.

Chapter 6 Creative rebellion 1. G. Hamel, Waking up IBM: How a gang of unlikely rebels transformed Big Blue, Harvard Business Review, July–August 2000. 2. R. Hayagreeva, Market rebels: How activists make or break radical innovations, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2009. 3. R. Jackall, Moral mazes: The world of corporate managers, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.

171

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Notes 4. A. O. Hirschman, Exit, voice and loyalty. Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1970. 5. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter, An evolutionary theory of economic change, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1982.

Chapter 7 When private lives fight back 1. P. Bréchon, O. Galland and J.-F. Tchernia, La dynamique des valeurs en Europe, Futuribles, July–August, 2002. 2. C. I. Barnard, The functions of the executive, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1938. 3. R. Coase, The nature of the firm, Economica, 4(16), November 1937. 4. A. O. Hirschman, Exit, voice and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1970. 5. L. Boltanski, The making of a class: Cadres in French society, Cambridge University Press, 1987. 6. See, for example, S. Tarrow, Power in movement, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Chapter 8 Exiting rebellion’s vicious circle 1. L. Coch and J. R. P. French, Jr., Overcoming resistance to change, Human relations, 1: 512–32 1947–8. 2. M. Weber, Economy and society, Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1978. 3. H. Mintzberg, The structuring of organization: A synthesis of the research, New York, Prentice Hall, 1979. 4. C. Heckscher and A. Donnellon (eds), The post-bureaucratic organization: New perspectives on organizational change, Newbury Park, Calif., Sage, 1994. 5. H. Reihlen, The logics of heterarchies: Making organizations competitive for knowledge-based competition, University of Cologne, Seminar für Allgemeine Betriebswirtschaftlehre, Working paper no. 91, 1996. 6. R. A. Burgelman, Strategy is destiny. How strategy-making shapes a company’s future, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2002. 7. A. W. Lerner and J. Wanat, Fuzziness and bureaucracy, Public administration review, 43(6): 500–9, 1983. 8. K. Weick, Sensemaking in organisations, London, Sage, 1995. 9. C. Lindblom, The science of muddling through, Public administration review, 19: 79–88, 1959.

Notes 10. S. Pollard, The genesis of modern management. A study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1965. 11. S. Ackroyd and P. Thompson, Organizational misbehaviours, London, Sage, 1999. 12. P. Fleming and A. Spicer, Contesting the corporation: Struggle, power and resistance in organizations, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Chapter 9 Polyarchy as an alternative 1. S. R. Clegg, D. Courpasson and N. Philips, Power and organization, London, Sage, 2006. 2. J. G. March, The business firm as a political coalition, Journal of politics, 24: 662–78, 1962. 3. A.S. Tannenbaum, Control and effectiveness in a voluntary organization, American journal of sociology, (67) 1, July 1961. 4. R. A. Dahl, A preface to democratic theory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1956. 5. C. Mouffe, The democratic paradox, London, Verso, 2009. 6. C. Ciborra, The knowledge creating company, Oxford University Press, 1996. 7. J. G. March, Decisions and organizations, Oxford, Blackwell, 1988. 8. J. D. Reynaud, Les Règles du jeu: L’action collective et la régulation sociale, Paris, Armand Colin, 1997. 9. G. De Terssac, L’autonomie au travail, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1992. 10. R. Semler, Maverick: The success story behind the world’s most unusual workplace, New York, Warner Books, 1995. 11. J. C. Thoenig and C. Waldman, The marking enterprise: Business success and societal impact, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 12. D. E. Meyerson and M. A. Scully, Tempered radicalism and the politics of ambivalence and change, Organization science, 6(5): 585–600, 1995. 13. R. K. Merton, Sociological ambivalence and other essays, New York, Free Press, 1976.

Conclusion: the future beckons 1. In recent years, in countries such as France, trade union membership increased quite noticeably among middle managers of private-sector companies. Nevertheless, it remains very low on the whole (between 7.5 percent and 8 percent), compared with other European countries.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKROYD Steven and Paul THOMPSON, Organizational misbehaviours, London, Sage, 1999. BARNARD Chester, The functions of the executive, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1938. BOLTANSKI Luc, The making of a class: Cadres in French society, Cambridge University Press, 1987. BRÉCHON Pierre, Olivier GALLAND and Jean-François TCHERNIA, “La dynamique des valeurs en Europe”, Futuribles, July–August, 2002. BURGELMAN Robert A., Strategy is destiny: How strategy-making shapes a company’s future, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2002. CIBORRA Claudio, The knowledge creating company, Oxford University Press, 1996. CLEGG Stewart R., David COURPASSON and Nelson PHILIPS, Power and organization, London, Sage, 2006. COASE Ronald, “The nature of the firm”, Economica, 4(16), November 1937. COCH Lester and John R. P. FRENCH, Jr., “Overcoming resistance to change”, Human Relations, 1: 512–32 1947–8. COURPASSON David, Soft constraint, liberal organizations, and domination, Paris, Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press, 2006. CROZIER Michel, The bureaucratic phenomenon, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1963. DAHL Robert Alan, A preface to democratic theory, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1956. DEAL Terrence E. and M. K. KEY, Corporate celebration: Play, purpose, and profit at work, San Francisco, Berret-Koehler, 1998. De TERSSAC Gilbert, L’autonomie au travail, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1992. DURKHEIM Emile, Suicide, New York, The Free Press, 1897 ; reprinted 1997. FAYARD Anne-Laure and John WEEKS, “Photocopiers and watercoolers: The affordances of informal interaction”, Organization Studies, 28(5): 605–34, 2007. FLEMING Peter and André SPICER, Contesting the corporation: Struggle, power and resistance in Organizations, Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Bibliography FRENKEL Stephen, Marek KORCYZNSKI, Karen SHIRE and May TAM, On the front line: Organization of work in the information society, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999. GOFFMAN Ervin, Asylums, Oxford, Doubleday, 1961. GOLEMBIEVSKI Robert, Robert F. MUNZENRIDER and J. G. Stevenson, Stress in organizations: Toward a phase model of burnout, New York, Praeger, 1986. GRAMSCI Antonio, Selection from the prison notebooks, New York, International Publishers, 1971. HAYAGREEV Rao, Market rebels: How activists make or break radical innovations, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2009. HAMEL Gary, “Waking up IBM: How a gang of unlikely rebels transformed Big Blue”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2000. HECKSHER Charles and Anne DONNELLON (eds), The post-bureaucratic organization: New perspectives on organizational change. Newbury Park, Calif., Sage, 1994. HIRSCHMAN Albert O., Exit, voice and loyalty. Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1970. JACKALL Robert, Moral mazes: The world of corporate managers, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988. KANTER Rosabeth Moss, When giants learn to dance: Mastering the challenges of strategy, management and careers in the 1990s, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1989. KOZA Mitchell and Jean-Claude THOENIG, “Rethinking the firm: Organizational approaches”, Organization Studies, 24(8): 1219–29, 2003. LERNER Allan and John WANAT, “Fuzziness and bureaucracy”, Public Administration Review, 43(6): 500–9, 1983. LINBLOM Charles, “The science of muddling through”, Public Administration Review, 19: 79–88, 1959. MARCH James G., “The business firm as a political coalition”, Journal of Politics (24): 662–78, 1962. MARCH James G., Decisions and organizations, Oxford, Blackwell, 1988. MERTON Robert K., “Bureaucratic structure and personality”, Social Forces 10(4): 560–8, 1940. MERTON Robert K., Sociological ambivalence and other essays, New York, Free Press, 1976. MEYERSON Debra and Maureen A. SCULLY, “Tempered radicalism and the politics of ambivalence and change”, Organization Science, 6(5): 585–600, 1995. MICHAUD Claude and Jean-Claude THOENIG, Making strategy and organization compatible, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. MINTZBERG Henry, The structuring of organization. A synthesis of the research, New York, Prentice-Hall, 1979.

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Bibliography MOUFFE Chantal, The democratic paradox, London, Verso, 2009. NELSON Richard and Sidney G. Winter, An evolutionary theory of economic change, Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1982. PETERS Thomas. J., Thriving on chaos: Handbook for a management revolution, Harper paperbacks, 1988. POLLARD Sidney. The genesis of modern management: A study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1965. REIHLEN Helmut, The logics of heterarchies: Making organizations competitive for knowledge-based competition, University of Cologne, Seminar für Allgemeine Betriebswirtschaftlehre, Working paper no. 91, 1996. REYNAUD Jean-Daniel, Les règles du jeu: L’action collective et la régulation sociale, Paris, Armand Colin, 1997. SEMLER Ricardo, Maverick: The success story behind the world’s most unusual workplace, New York, Warner Books, 1993. TANNENBAUM Arnold S., “Control and effectiveness in a voluntary organization”, American Journal of Sociology, (67) 1, July 1961. TARROW Sidney, Power in movement. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008. THOENIG Jean-Claude and Charles WALDMAN, The marking enterprise: Business success and societal impact, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. WEBER Max, Economy and society, Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 1995. WEICK Karl, Sensemaking in organizations, London, Sage, 1995. WEINSTEIN Matt, Managing to have fun, New York, Freeside, 1996.

INDEX OF NAMES

A Ackroyd, Steven

143

B Barnard, Chester 117 Boltanski, Luc 123 Bréchon, Pierre 112 Burgelman, Robert 140 C Ciborra, Claudio 153 Clegg, Stewart 144 Coase, Ronald 117 Coch, Lester 136 Courpasson, David ix, 32, 144 Crozier, Michel 61 D Dahl, Robert 147 De Terssac, Gilbert 154 Deal, Terrence 28 Donnellon, Anne 138 Durkheim, Emile 81 F Fayard, Anne-Laure 63 Fleming, Peter 143 French, John 136 Frenkel, Stephen 29 G Galland, Olivier 112 Goffman, Erving 26 Golembieski, Robert xi Gramsci, Antonio 25

H Hamel, Gary 91 Hayagreeva, Rao 92 Heckscher, Charles 138 Hirschman, Albert 100, 121 J Jacquall, Robert

92

K Kafka, Franz 26 Kanter, Rosabeth Moss Key, M.K. 28 Korcynsky, Marek 29 Koza, Mitchell 26

31

L Lerner, Allan 140 Lindblom, Charles 141 M March, James G. 22, 145, 153 Merton, Robert K. 61, 160 Meyerson, Debra 159 Michaud, Claude ix Mintzberg, Henry 138 Mouffe, Chantal 150 N Nelson, Richard

101

P Peters, Thomas 28 Philips, Nelson 144 Pollard, Sidney 142

177

Index of names

178 R Reihlen, Helmut 138 Reynaud, Jean-Daniel 154 S Scully, Maureen 159 Semler, Ricardo 28, 155–6 Shire, Karen 29 Spicer, André 143 T Tam, May 29 Tannenbaum, Arnold Tarrow, Sidney 123

147

Taylor, Frederick 135 Tchernia, Jean-François 112 Thoenig, Jean-Claude ix, 27, 156 Thompson, Paul 143 W Waldman, Charles 156 Wanat, John 140 Weber, Max 25, 135–6 Weeks, John 63 Weick, Karl 140 Weinstein, Matt 28 Winter, Sidney 101

INDEX OF REBELS

B Bruno (at Brick) xv, 11–18, 21–3, 34–6, 82–7, 93–4, 97, 102, 106, 111, 130, 131, 134, 160 C Charles (at Bank) xvi, 46–58, 63–8, 82–7, 93–7, 102, 106 J Julie (at Mill ) 134, 160

xvi, 102–6, 123, 132,

M Mark (at Agro) xvi, 18–20, 41–6, 53–8, 63–8, 82–7, 93–6, 102

Martin (at Bank) xvi, 88–90, 93–7 Michael (at Strand ) xv, 5–8, 10–11, 15–17, 21–3, 34–6, 71–2, 75–7, 93–8, 102, 106, 110, 123, 128, 160, 162 P Patrick (at Construct) xv, 1–5, 8, 10–11, 15–17, 21–3, 34–6, 71–7, 81–3, 93–8, 102, 106, 110, 123, 128, 130, 131, 134, 160 Philip (at Agro) xvi, 18–21, 67, 93–8, 102

179

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

A adhocracy 138, 159 affectio societatis 94, 100, 110 agonism 150–1, 166–7 anarchy 157 anomia 81 antagonism 150–1, 167 B bureaucracy 36, 58–62, 104, 125–44, 153–5, 161, 167 burnout xii, 107, 111 C chaos 28, 161 class consciousness 111–12 clique 49, 54, 63 cognition 30, 68, 98–102 cognitive rebellion 102 conformism 14, 22, 28, 116–21, 165–7 confusion 11–15, 92 creative rebellion 91–108 cynicism 17, 59, 115 D detached concern 161 disarray 10–15 disobedience 5–8, 159 domination 8–9, 14, 24, 36–7, 78, 135–7 double talk 35 E emotions 11–14, 44, 53–5, 59, 67, 122

180

F fates of rebels 70–90 Fordism 99 fun management 28, 113 G gender 102–6, 133 generation 102–7, 116, 133, 148 glass ceiling 105, 162 H harassment 27 hegemony 24–6, 82, 109–24, 129–33, 145, 162–7 heterarchy 138–9 high potential 1, 94–6, 105–6, 115 higher-ups 157 homosexuality 113,160 human resources 6, 7, 11, 16, 23, 31–3, 47, 50, 60, 75–6, 78, 92, 104–5, 113, 118, 126, 128, 156, 163–4 humiliation 11–13, 19, 123–4 hypercompetition 101 I individualism 4, 112, 122 injustice 18–20, 46–8, 110–12, 115 L leadership 3, 13, 17, 24–7, 56, 85, 125, 133, 148, 157 legitimacy 21, 43–4, 55, 59, 94–101, 106, 117, 123, 132–3, 137–9, 147, 151–8 locker room 24, 35–9

Index of subjects M managerial power 23, 30, 39, 94, 125, 144 minority status 113 modernity 112, 119–20, 133–6 O obedience 2–8, 22–3, 82, 127–37, 159 oligarchy 144–5, 157–8 organization as a playground 27–9 as a prison 24–7 P pathology 11, 106, 135 performance indicators 47, 60 polyarchy 148–62 post-bureaucracy 30, 138–9 private life 3, 15–17, 23, 34–5, 116–22 promotion 21, 30, 83–7, 92, 96, 127, 132 psychological confinement 27

181

social capital 106, 115, 121 social movement and labor protest 19, 64–6, 121–3, 164 soft constraint 9, 29–34, 163 sphere (public and private) 38, 109–12, 116–21 split personality 76, 148 stress viii, x, 11–14, 81, 154, 167 subversion 24–8, 132, 161 successful rebellion 58–69, 91–108 suicide xii, 11, 31, 36, 81, 141, 171 T Taylorism 99, 126, 135–7 tempered radical 159–61 top management 2, 14, 35, 48, 52, 56–7, 80, 146, 152 total institution 24–6 trade union 51, 105, 122–3, 164, 166 trauma 16–17, 71–2, 167 trial by fire 8 trust 5–8, 43, 61, 79, 118, 128, 133, 137–9, 148, 151–6

R resignation 72–82, 146 resistance 18, 34–9, 59–66, 72–3, 127–8, 135–42 resource theory 31–2 ruses of power 130–2, 163

U ultra-performance

S safety, health, environment (SHE) 103–5 self-actualization 10 sense-making 15, 80–4, 120, 138, 148, 165–8

Z zone forbidden 109, 116–21, 124, 149–56, 162, 166 of acceptability 117 of indifference 116–18, 164

141–2

W workers 14, 26, 28–9, 34, 102–6, 115, 123, 126–7, 136, 138, 145