Tigers and pyschopaths and companies, oh my

Ain't irony great? In the post prior to this one I streamed a bit on Tigers as metaphor for ambitious people and letting them run in organizations. Then, I check out one of my favorite blogs, BusinessPundit, and the proprietor, Rob, has a piece on the new film, The Corporation.

I have a feeling I won't like this movie.

.... People on both sides of the globalisation debate should pay attention. Unlike much of the soggy thinking peddled by too many anti-globalisers, “The Corporation” is a surprisingly rational and coherent attack on capitalism's most important institution.

Its central premise is that Corporations are afforded the rights of "people," and that they then exercise their peoplehood in the form of the Pyschopath. There's even a checklist of red flag behaviors and, yep, Corps fit them all.

Rob's comments box is filling with the usual yeas and nays, from the expected points of view, predominantly business-person-centric, but sage. Commenter Jonathan had this:

The Wall Street Journal covered this as well, part of what they had to say:

.... Soon, all the boxes are checked off--from 'callous unconcern for the feelings of others' to 'an incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.' On screen, Robert Hare, a psychiatrist who consults on psychopaths for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, concludes: 'In many respects, corporations are the prototypical psychopath.'"

Back to the "irony." After reading Jonathan's snippet I realized that, viewed a certain way, Tigers are psychopaths too. "Callous unconcern for the feelings of others." "An incapacity to maintain enduring relationships." Tigers are eating, procreating Sharks of the land. They're biological machines whose prime directive is to survive. Since they're animals, we don't call them psychopaths though, yes? They just are. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. Tigers hafta hunt you down and kill you.

But we're animals too. I know this because I read it in a book somewhere. We eat, we procreate, we attack, we defend. And, like some animals, we use tools. But unlike the rock an otter uses to bash open a mussel--aah, psychopath! Murder!--our tools increasingly come with warning labels. Usually, the result of someone with the brain of an otter deciding that, oh, I dunno, blow drying your hair while still in the tub was smart time-management.

So remember: No otters, tigers or blow dryers while you're still in the tub.

How about corporations?

Seriously, the corporation is a device, a tool, a machine operated by sentient things called people, isn't it? I can take my tool, a hammer say, and build a chair with it. Nice service. That helps people. Or, I can take my tool, my hammer, and bash someone's kneecaps with it.

Now, I can say "a hammer is just a hammer, birds gotta sing, hammer's gotta swing." I can say "in the course of swinging my hammer to drive the final nail in my beautiful chair, I didn't see the gentleman behind me who's now wearing the tang of that hammer in his skull."

Ladies and gents (NRA members especially), tools don't kill people, careless people with tools kill people. Sure. We ask our kids to beware of the swing as they "help" us make their treehouse. We warily observe and cautiously guide as they try swinging themselves. To yield craft, not good-intended but negligent wreckage, tools require maturity, skill, foresight, knowledge and conscience.

These elements are not check boxes on any business licence I've seen posted lately. Nor any 10k. They require self-policing virtues like fortitude, justice, charity, hope, patience....


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They require effort. They require character. Since these things are not standard on your typical P&L alongside Cost of Goods Sold, it seems they require official encouragement. So we get prescriptives like Sarbox Governance (Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002). What we know about communities, that they need laws and cops because people cut corners when left to their own devices, somehow seems onerous to virtual people like Corporations. And so Sarbox is but another crude leash grudgingly submitted to and externally applied on a habitual bad actor who wants restraint for others, but free reign for itself. Anti-social people suffer this necessary indignity all the time. It keeps the streets safer. But a reckless and crazy man is not hard to define. A crazy company, however.... well, I refer you to the above table again.

Corporations are not psychopaths. They are schizophrenics. At once bullies and Florence Nightingale. They are collective personalities that, like humans under stress, revert to their shadow, baser personalities of self-preservation at any cost. (Remember R-Complex?) It's funny, but 100s of billions are spent on refinement of collective standards of excellence and reward for collective entities, virtual people, called corporations. But bring up a collective corporate conscience to your average business leader and you might as well suggest jump starting a car with a fish. That would be their take. Not because they don't "get" the import of humane behavior. Hell, they demand it of their spouse, their kids, their neigbor and their tailor. They may even mandate and enforce its liberal application towards their own customers. But what about those doing the applying, providing the human customer service face for the virtual person called "work"? More and more they're asked to check their personal conscience at the elevator. Their values still matter, they just have to visit them on weekends like the children of divorce.

Big trouble. Because, in an era of accelerating fluidity, our hunger for humanity, for something--anything--that's not subject to drastic revision or obsolescence next week, or next year will be the only differentiator of sustainable business models or engines of profit. I know this because I feel it in my gut, hear it in mail rooms and board rooms, and because Rolf Jensen, Director of the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies told me so:

We are in the twilight of a society based on data. As information and intelligence become the domain of computers, society will place a new value on the one human ability that can't be automated: Emotion

That is the problem. As-built, companies are amoral tools amongst moral beings. This is not news. But the frequency, reach and signal-to-noise of corporations trumpeting their virtue while failing at the internal act is now deafening within business. It puts their modus operandi at odds with those it needs, and from whom it needs favor. That IS news. Our great-great grandparents interacted with, in a whole year, the number of people we now bump into in a single day. Those added people, being fallible people, are no more polite or perfect in their execution, just more polished in their presentation. But they and their official mistakes and oversights, excused by systemic, inert officialdom and firewalls of deniability feel like a hailstorm. The insults to psyche and the resulting overload stands to soon tilt things on their axis. It must. Turbocharged entropy will do that to systems. They get manic. They generate shrapnel.

Corporations are collective entities that through branding and PR try to appear like, and accrue, the trust, feeling, grace and goodwill accorded between fellow human beings. But, these branded entities, the false selves with factual rights, insist on claiming their ad-hoc need to freely wield dangerous implements in the presence of unarmed others. I know this because I have eyes and ears, and hang out in places with "Inc" and "Co" after their names.

In exalting the frontier, and the gold piece, while leaving the compass of empathy back East with Grandma, we get lost. We turn into the wrong kind of tigers. We get frontier injustice. We get tigers who, just like the real thing, sometimes eat their young.

Let's face it: free markets, like tigers, are not known for their humanity. Nor should they be. They wouldn't be free or be tigers otherwise. In the free-market wild, where the tigers like to play, we never leave home without our American Express card. And our gun. Amongst polite company, alongside our fellow zoo-goers, we still have the credit card, but a cage substitutes for the gun. Either-or. But definitely, something.

Oddly, the suggestion that Tigers are Nature's eating machine-tools, doesn't get people pondering your liberalness or conservatism. Warnings about tiger-safety and healthy, vigorous suspicion don't elicit yelps of "Kitty Hater!" or "Anti-animal."

We don't feel the urge to debate the need or logic of a cage or a gun in the precence of stripey carnivores, animals whose biological mission statement is "Hey, it's not personal, it's Tiger business." Perhaps most interestingly, Tiger handlers (they laugh at "tamer") have no illusions about the creatures they steward. And brave folks they are, no "paper tigers" there.

Aha. "Paper Tiger." that's a term for ineffectualness, like "All hat no cattle," "All show, no go."

Not any more. Corporations, as amoral, virtual and legal pad entities, are paper tigers of a different sort. They have all the tools--virtual teeth, claws, and far more killing weight--than the real thing. Unlike the real thing, they more and more invasively populate our daily lives and previously safe, off-limits, private areas. And, unlike the real thing, they get a voice, the loudest and most arresting roar, on the makeup of their restraints.

They usually opt for a paper cage or a pop gun.

Remember Schizophrenia? Bullies who think they're Florence Nightingale? They opt for quixotic: Idealistic without regard to practicality.

But "hope is not a plan."

As a parent, I wouldn't take my children to a zoo that demonstrates that lack of seriousness and care for its patrons' safety and comfort. I would be delusional if I did. Wouldn't I? As workers in the zoo, as builders of Paper Cages, as confiscators of guns, pop or otherwise, we'd be criminally negligent. Wouldn't we?

And, as the zookeeper, if I hushed you to hear the wonders of Nature at work as my animals mowed down the visitors, well, now that would be Pyschopathic. Wouldn't it?