The other side of the corporation - part II

There is one type of major US corporation that I have  talked about and that was presented in the  o3 Canadian documentary.     This type of corporation was  clinically diagnosed according to the DSM-IV symptoms of a psychopathic personality disorder, including:

1) a callous disregard for the feeling of other people

2) the incapacity to maintain human relationships

3) deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit)

4)the incapacity to experience guilt

5) the failure to conform to the social norms and respect for the law

It is not that the real individual who make up the corporation actually manifests all these qualities, but that the creation of the corporation itself as an entity becomes something bigger than the people who created it, and its very being is predicated on these antisocial features- that have to do with making money at all costs.  Thus the corporation takes on this Frankenstein like quality.  Moral people start doing things they would never normally do.  

Perhaps this was something my scientist  father who worked in research and development in the rubber industry was talking about more than thirty years ago when the freshly minted MBA's starting taking over the management,but didn't really know anything about the business they were running. Maybe the  financial industry epitomized this as every year  more and more of the best and brightest kids were recruited right out of Stanford and Harvard, promised huge salaries as financial analysts making  nothing. Perhaps this was the picture that shocked a friend of mine when she saw the face of a man on the news who was being charged with criminal acts during the beginning of the financial crisis.  She remembered babysitting for him as a child, his parents were some of the most ethical people she knew.

The real people who are doing the lay offs at  the real companies are something else:

An English man recently told me the story of his layoff after 20 years as a senior engineer for a large manufacturing company.  The manager who laid him off followed him out to his car and was  crying as he drove off. More than his own loss of a job, this man talked about what it felt like for those who were in the role of having to severe so abruptly these real relationships that had been so valued .

I heard this again about the managers in my husbands company.  The CEO of this corporation was a truly caring guy, who would open his heart and cry at meetings, a parent whose daughter just happened to go to college with our daughter.  He ran a company where layoffs had seldom happened before.  And suddenly everything changed.  

I take a walk with my friend every Friday morning and she tells me about running her  company. Not a publically traded corporation  but a substantial special effects film studio with 300 plus employees.   She shoulders the weight.  Lives in  fear about when the next job  is coming in, and the next layoffs she may have to make if it doesn't.  My friend was trained as an artist, raised by socialists and thinks like a business woman.  We have walked together, raised children together, for 21 years.  She never takes lightly her responsibility as an employer, which for her is so much like being a mother, where so many are depending upon her for their livelihood. 

That is the other side of the corporation, the side of  incredibly hard working,  caring and visionary people, people who are raising children, and want those children to have a future,  and that we  must count on so that we will be able  to get back to work again.