Management as Comedy of Errors:
	Prologue for Global Theatre

The Executive As Dropout (by Marshall McLuhan and Barrington Nevitt, 
to be published by Harcourt, Brace, N.Y.) tells not of hangups but of 
resonant intervals.  The dropouts today are those determined to keep 
in touch with a fast-changing scene.  Touch, as the Japanese know best 
of all, is created by space between the wheel and axle where both 
action and "play" are one.  The executive who "steps down" is the one 
who is disembarrassed.  He recovers his autonomy and his flexibility.  
This strategy may well be the key to understanding our entire generation.

Looking to the function rather than to the individual, we can see that 
specialized jobs of managers are universal casualties of the age of 
electric information speed.

Until now management studies have, naturally, been concerned with 
improvement of performance in servicing the physical needs of 
nineteenth-century producers and consumers.  At electric speeds the 
consumer becomes producer as the public becomes participant 
role-player.  At the same time, the old "hardware" is etherealized by 
means of "design" or "software".  As we learn to do more with less, 
more is demanded of everybody.  As everybody is more and more involved 
in the creative process of discovery and innovation, the old divisions 
of work, play, and idleness disappear.  The creative worker is never 
more at leisure, never more the dropout from the specialist job, than 
when using all his faculties.  We are entering a time of dialogue and 
heightened human awareness which plagues many as the spector of 
"pollution".  The word is from "spoil", and is entirely applicable to 
the new society which rejects specialist and merely accidental 
effects.  Since satellites, there has come the awareness that nature 
itself has dropped out, and man must now assume responsibility for the 
programming of his planetary environment.

"Experience", said Erasmus, "is the schoolmaster of fools".  That is, 
the rates charged by this ruthless pedagogue are outrageous; and few 
have ever survived his instruction.  Today effects and causes merge 
because they almost coincide in time and space of the new information 
environment.  Change itself has become the main staple.

In this work there is no intent of endorsing or condemning what has 
happened.  Our concern is to explore and to reveal the process 
patterns of current happenings.  Since it is no longer safe to await 
the harsh judgement of results, we must discover how to anticipate 
effects with their causes, in order to "program" fate.


PASTIMES AND PAST TIMES

The new expert, along with the old executive, has been swept away in a 
flood of comedies.  New environments of information and enterprise 
have revealed the contours of these obsolescent types even as the 
satellite has created a sudden and universal awareness of "pollution".


HEROES AND VILLAINS MERGE AS GOALS DISAPPEAR

The John Wayne movie "True Grit" was one of many that announced the 
end of the American dream of the rugged individual of the Wild West.  
Earlier the indomitable colonizing Britisher with the stiff upper lip 
had disappeared in a flurry of comedies in the Shavian era.  Before 
their "funferals", Gilbert and Sullivan had laughed the amateur 
gentleman bureaucrats of the pre- Victorian Establishments into early 
graves.  Meanwhile, the new career bureaucrats of the Imperial Civil 
Service were making their beach-heads, which they still defend with 
growing panic.


AWEIGH TO THE TOP

It may seem strange that Gilbert and Sullivan were able to laugh at 
the new forms of administrative specialism arising from the needs of 
industrial production and marketing:  The Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter, 
K.C.B., (First Lord of the Admiralty) in H.M.S. Pinafore, explains his 
successful rise:

			When I was a lad I served a term
			As office boy to an Attorney's firm.
			I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
			And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
			I polished up the handle so carfullee
			That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

			Now landsman all, whoever you may be,
			If you want to rise to the top of the tree,
			If your soul isn't fettered to an office stool,
			Be careful to be guided by this golden rule--
			Stick close to your desks and never go to sea,
			And you all may be Rulers of the Queen's Navee!

The reason for their scorn for the career bureaucrats was the 
existence of a large audience of non- specialist gentry, for whom all 
the middle-class forms of trade and white-collar work seemed 
grotesque.  The gentry were themselves about to be absolved into the 
new bureaucracies of big industries.  The Gilbert and Sullivan ball 
lasted only during this transitional generation.  But Oscar Wilde and 
Bernard Shaw, arriving from the "aristocratic" world of tribal and 
agrarian Ireland, were able to ridicule the organization chart and the 
career goals of our industrial society.  Mark Twain and Thorstein 
Veblen played similar entrepreneurial roles by means of cultural 
detachment.


HEROES AS DROPOUTS

James Garner's "Help Support Your Local Sheriff" was an amazing 
evaluation of the same funeral ritual, the dissolution of an American 
frontier dream.  "The Graduate" with Dustin Hoffman announced the end 
of the university in its present form and the return to the old tribal 
or corporate past from which King Oedipus struggled to escape.  It is 
the disappearance of any well-established pattern of human 
organization that prompts the new flood of tragi-comedies on all 
individual success and managerial virtuosity.

Tragedy and suffering herald the struggle for new goals and images 
even as comedy is the process of transforming social patterns.  The 
Mountbatten TV autobiography series could have been labelled "Death of 
a Salesman".

The three "P's" who conduct the funeral games connected with the 
interring of old-fashioned business with its organization chart, might 
be cited as Stephen Potter, Northcote Parkinson, and Laurence Peter.  
Stephen Potter's One-Upmanship was a great hit just at a time when the 
rugged individualist had begun to look a bit limp and lost.  The wily 
Machiavelli had again become a more promising candidate for success 
than the hard-driving, diligent, determined goal-seeker.


GLOOMY PRELUDE TO THE SPATE OF SPOOFS

This was the period when David Riesman's Lonely Crowd had begun to 
despond over the durability of "inner-directedness".  
"Other-directedness" had become dominant in that new TV time.  
Riesman, in fact, was typical of the transition.  It seemed likely 
that a whole way of life was about to disappear.  The hidden causes 
were not sought.  Gloom served instead of understanding.  Other 
expressions of concern heralding the disappearing image of the 
separate individual and his privately chosen goals, occurred in 
William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (Doubleday Anchor Book, 1956), 
Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Simon Shuster, 
1955).  Daniel Boorstin's The Image:  Or What Happened to the American 
Dream was another burst of dismay from a spectator in a world being 
swept up into the activity of P.R. image-making.  Boorstin deplores 
the spate of pseudo-events spawned by the media of an information 
world.  Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination was a nostalgic 
evocation of 19th century industrial hardware.  As electric 
information and software became the new service environment, we 
entered the post-literate world of what Peter Drucker calls The Age of 
Discontinuity (Harper and Row, 1968).

Jacques Ellul is an extreme example of the analyst who selects only 
dead and irrelevant issues as if they were crux problems.  He pays no 
attention to where the action is, or to where the interfaces between 
the new components in the new man-made environment now exist.  His 
gloom is justified to the extent that the rulers of the world are as 
blind as he to the new information world of software realities.  
Politicians still seem to use the old ballot system, but, in fact, 
they have shifted their stress to new image-making media.  As long as 
the Elluls pursue literal fidelity to the old rules of the former 
political game, they will bewail and denounce.  This has always been a 
popular career for those who haven't the understanding or energy to 
tackle completely that are creating new patterns.


DROPOUT PRINCE

			The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,
			That ever I was born to set it right.
					(Hamlet 1, v, 188-189)

Hamlet is a dutiful and conventional medieval figure adjusted to the 
world of feudal loyalties and corporate hierarchy that has dissolved 
like an insubstantial pageant.  His role is gone, and he faces a crown 
of Polonius-like fishmongers and itinerant Machiavellian adventurers 
such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  The final takeover by 
Fortinbras is strong-arm stuff.


THE RIGHT OF EVERY MAN TO DEFEND HIS OWN IGNORANCE

The onset of change breeds panic and indignation in the intellectual 
Establishment, and every man discovers his right to defend his own 
ignorance.  The current popularity of the word "Establishment" points 
to the rapid disappearance of established forms of organization.  Once 
the change has taken place and has become institutionalized, there 
occurs a flood of comic retrospective treatments (as it were, a new 
breed of Don Quixotes) such as Potter, Parkinson, and Peter provide at 
the present time.  The moralist is followed by the comedian who 
exploits the deflated image of the previously formidable.


"FUNFERAL AT FINNEGANS WAKE"

This phrase encapsulates the very idea of the present discussion, 
namely that festivity sets in when something is completed, like a 
Harvest Home of festival.  The Peter Principle by Laurence Peter and 
Raymond Hull (William Morrow & Co. Inc., New York, 1969) is not 
concerned with the present but is dedicated to a retrospect of the 
dissolving world of the organization chart.  As our new technologies 
surround the old hierarchy of bureaucratic organization, the 
strategies of survival become a comedy of errors:

			"A word to the sufficient is wise".

The Peter Principle (the very title of the book resonates with 
"pumpkin eaters" and "Simple Simons") is stated thus:  "In a Hierarchy 
Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence".  Part of 
the fun in Messrs. Hull and Peter's book is the seeming innocence of 
how it all began.  They do not presume to know the origin of the 
business hierarchies or the structure of civilized specialist man.  
Like the maker of nursery rhymes about Simple Simon or Little Miss 
Muffet, the Peter story unfolds as a universal            :

			"My Principle is the key to an understanding of
			all hierarchal systems, and therefore to an
			understanding of the whole structure of civilization."

Since in this process all posts are swiftly occupied by persons 
incompetent to do their jobs, the real work gets done by those who 
have not been elevated.  In order to keep the eminent and incompetent 
functionaries out of the hair of the real workers, resort is made to 
the technique of "percussive sublimination" (or booting upstairs).

A second ploy for seeming to keep obsolete hierarchies in existence is 
"the lateral arabesque", by which the useless executive is provided 
with a more dignified label, and then moved aside.  A sufficient 
number of such personnel justifies the formation of a Head Office 
crammed with the latest equipment to keep them busy learning how to 
use the new technology to prop up the old procedure.  Thus they remain 
out of harm's way.


THE LIVING AND THE PARTLY LIVING

What Peter and Hull fail to see is that the latest equipment must 
always be given to the beginners, for whom it becomes a means of both 
learning and discovery.  Do they also fail to recognize that their 
principle applies to modes of hierarchical bureaucracy that had 
already ceased to be the means of decision-making?  Specialist 
bureaucracies and the organization chart were by-passed long ago in 
the interests of survival.  Residual institutions of this kind whether 
in business, church, education or defense, are museum pieces and, as 
such, rich resources for the comic writer.  We need not underestimate 
the comic writer as a man with a legitimate grievance and a powerful 
weapon for change.  The more dignified the person or institution, the 
less it can withstand ridicule.


POTTER'S FIELD FOR DEAD DUCKS

Stephen Potter, in One-Upmanship, considers another strategy of how to 
get along in such a scrapped world.  In Stephen Potter's works, 
Lifemanship, Gamesmanship, and One-Upmanship, the junked or obsolete 
world that affords the inexhaustible comic material of these books 
derives from the old ideals of goals.  In a world of ecological 
patterns or total field involvement, private goals become quite 
irrelevant and illusory.  "Jokes" tend to come out of grievance areas 
in any society, and an obsolete structure which is still asked to 
perform with contemporary efficiency is naturally a source of many 
grievances and frustrations.  Potter, like Peter and Parkinson, has 
hit on a very rich field in reminding us of the futility of 
Machiavellian means for the achievement of personal goals in our new 
electronic world where the goals and targets move even faster than a 
marksman can sight them.

"Marxmanship" is only one of Potter's examples of obsolete political 
objectives in a world whose service environments have already 
transcended the old targets.  The mere idea that anybody in our kind 
of all-at-once world could continue to pursue private benefit by means 
of public vices at the expense of everybody is an illusion.  In 
Potter's Correspondence College, "students are taught to cultivate 
that aristocratic and amusingly insular Don't-give-a-damnship".  The 
fun is in noting the arduous folly of trying to exploit one's fellows 
in a highly integrated world.


PLENARY INDULGENCES IN THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY

C. Northgate Parkinson stated his law about the nature of 
administrations to the effect that any task, however insignificant, 
will automatically expand to use all the available time and resources 
of all the available personnel of any operation whatever.

What the Raffles Professor of History (University of Malays) was 
describing at length was that "the medium is the message".  Spiro 
Agnew became entangled in the same conundrum concerning "news" and 
"the silent majority".  Neither of these men understands the process 
in question.  What happens with any new service or configured and 
transformed by the unified interaction of all the technologies 
comprising that service environment.  Whether it is the alphabet, or 
the postal service, or the broadcasting system, or a business, or any 
other organization, it acts as a transforming process on all inputs 
and contents whatever.


LOCK-IN SYNDROME

All of these are then remade in the image of the particular service 
process itself.  An entire language or culture acts in this way.  
Every human perception is reshaped in the style of Greek, or Chinese, 
or English, Eastern or Western culture.  Every news item today 
involves the entire technology of news-gathering and distribution to 
the point where the process greatly exceeds in scope the news events 
themselves.  This point is more obvious where entire social cultures 
are brought into play to shape the perceptions of an individual infant 
or a whole population alike.


THE FOX AND THE GRIPES

Today this long-hidden cultural process of making and shaping all 
content by the processes of the cultural medium itself becomes 
manifest at electric speeds that bring pattern recognition.  The fun 
principle in Parkinson, as in Peter and Potter, is of studying dead 
forms of administration as if they were still alive.  Henri Bergson 
saw laughter as the result of watching people behave as things.  
Motivation studies are thus hilarious because of the efforts to make 
employees behave as machinery.

				BUSINESS BRED TO SPEAK WITH A STIFF UPPER
				LIP TO ALL MEN:  ENTER THE GENERAL, TALL,
				DIGNIFIED AND UNIFORMED.

					Multiple error land

			"...Until the scientist has learned to see 
			nature in a different way, the new fact is
			not quite a scientific fact at all!"
			Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
			 Revolutions
			(Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1962)

>From the opening of Robert Sommer's Expertland one wanders as if with 
Dante through a purgatory of the living and partly living.  Today, the 
mere description of an expert causes "a burst of nervpis emergu to 
attack the muscles of the face".  Sommer begins his "Bestiary" by 
presenting the "most dangerous of the non-scientists", namely the 
Processors of research and the Method- Men -- the "higher apes" that 
swing through the golden boughs of the Foundation dollar-trees.  The 
lower apes plod along below them in the academic jungle.

The big Method-Men, the real swingers, know how to let go of their 
golden boughs, content to let their PR men make opulently printed 
inventories of their untouched projects.  Naturally, no evaluation of 
their activities is possible save by their fellow grant-grabbers, who 
authenticate their results by their mastery of the current swinging 
style.  All that can be asked of them is evidence that they maintain 
methods and appearances approved by their fellows.

So far as results and advances in knowledge are concerned, nobody has 
checked whether a Ph.D. produced more than an M.A., or an M.A. more 
than a B.A.  One thing is certain:  anyone who made a significant 
breakthrough in "expertland" would upset the entire decorum of the 
operation.


PROOF OF SANITY AVAILABLE ONLY TO THOSE DISCHARGED FROM MENTAL INSTITUTION

In a world of instant information-retrieval, there are neither 
geographical nor intellectual barriers.  The boundary between penal 
and mental institutions is becoming as blurred as is the division 
between child and adult.  It is precisely this instant-access to all 
past and present knowledge that renders the locked-in specialist a 
comic figure.  In expertland, funds and talents alike are misallocated 
to the point of stimulating the more fatuous features of societies 
structured by hereditary wealth and titles.


I'LL STICK TO YOU, BY GUM

The coherent and integrating factor in all this ballet of research 
categories is the invisible and adhesive secretary.  She is the 
resonant and resourceful bridge between the lab and the big 
Foundations.  She transfers the dollars to the lab and translates the 
cryptic lab-jargon to the bureaucrats.


SEX UNDONE BY EXPERTLAND

The great biologist Samuel Butler observed:  "it is better to have 
loved and lost than never to have lost at all".  Now that sex has 
fallen into the hands of specialists in departments of elementary 
education, it cannot avoid the fate of classification as a subject.  
It will become compulsory, or, even worse, optional.


KEYS TO GIVEN

The keys to comprehending the data in any given headache are also the 
"keys to heaven":  when the hangup is recognized as comic, it opens 
doors of perception that can transform all previous relationships and 
release tensions.  Thus, a random inventory of gripes and jokes, 
culled from the irritant problems of any form of human organization 
whatever, will serve as structural clue or pattern illuminator.


REASON WITHOUT RHYME

Difficulty in pattern recognition proceeds from the inability to play 
with problems.  In our Western world with its fixed points of view, it 
is difficult to scan a whole field.  People fear to bridge from the 
logical to the reasonable, from the map and blueprint of hindsight to 
the playful probes that produce insights and breakthroughs.


REASON HAS LOST ITS RESOUND

The logical approach is one of direct visual connection that shuns the 
resonance of verbal play.  Logic is a one-way street that avoids the 
reversal patterns that imply "reaction".  People used to heap scorn on 
those who wished to "return to the Middle Ages", thereby blinding 
themselves to the mini and maxi-costume that revealed medieval mental 
postures or perceptual preference in the shaggy youngsters of today.

The same logic of the one-way street is unable to cope with the 
essential "absurdity" of the forms of organization resulting from 
electric speeds.  All one-way streets and with electro-techniques.  
The single paths of conventional stimulus-response mechanisms of 
thought and analysis have been superseded by the radiational 
structures of our information environment.  We now live in a Global 
Theatre of the Absurd where only the unexpected happens.