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Entertaining Executives
Entertaining Executives
ROBERT SPILLANE
Copyright © 2015 Robert Spillane
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GOKO Publishing
PO Box 7109
McMahons Point 2060
Sydney. Australia
First Edition January 2015
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Spillane, Robert
Entertaining Executives
ISBN: 978-1613397374 Print Book
ISBN: 978-1613397398 eBook
1. BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Management
2. BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Organizational Behaviour
3. BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Humour
4. HUMOUR / Topic / Business & Professional
Book Designed by Katherine Owen
Printed in Australia
For James Owen
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: WHY ENTERTAINING EXECUTIVES?
I thank Michelle Anderson for permission to use material published, in modified form, in my book Questionable Behaviour: Psychology’s Undermining of Personal Responsibility, Michelle Anderson Publishing: Melbourne, 2009, pp. 133-136.
Books and authors referred to in the Introduction:
Ambrose Bierce, ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’, in The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce, Citadel Press: New York, 1963.
Karel Capek, R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots), Trans. P. Selver, Oxford University Press: London, 1925.
A.D. Hope’s comments on Patrick White’s The Tree of Man were published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 16 June 1956.
Benjamin Marks, Rodney Marks & Robert Spillane, The Management Contradictionary, Michelle Anderson Publishing: Melbourne, 2006.
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man, Simon & Schuster: New York, 1956.
I have borrowed, with permission, several lines from books written by my late friend, Thomas Szasz, especially:
Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin, Anchor Doubleday, Garden City: New York, 1974.
Thomas Szasz, Heresies, Doubleday Anchor: Garden City: New York, 1976.
Finally, I especially thank Linden Dyason, entrepreneur extraordinaire, who had the courage to stage a satirical play about management conferences at a management conference.
A few days before I decided to write this play I was invited by a human resource manager to an ‘interview’. In the halcyon days of my youth, those who were charged with the dubious responsibility of attending to the needs of managers, workers and themselves were called personnel managers. Around 1980 they were re-badged and timidly accepted the old Marxian term ‘human resources’ to designate themselves as managers of ambiguous activities. While many of their colleagues objected to being referred to as a mere ‘resource’, human or otherwise, a property to be converted into money, which is what the term means, the gods of management had spoken and the congregation bowed before them. When, a few years later, a senior god decreed that henceforth there would be ‘strategic human resource managers’, some of the lesser gods died laughing.
Sitting behind a very large desk, thus proving that Freud was right on some matters, the strategic human resource manager who had summoned me to his black and chrome postmodern office insisted that I was indeed fortunate to be there because my consulting income would be handsomely increased if he allowed me to perform for his troops. He was in the process of designing yet another conference for his middle managers, most of whom he detested, and was determined to delve into their personalities. And so this hungry psychologist found himself sipping muddy coffee while taking instructions on how to entertain executives.
As everyone knows, managers don’t actually do things, in the way in which pilots, pathologists and pastry-cooks do things. People who do things are trained to do what they do. Because they don’t do anything, managers are not trained. Obviously, they can be trained in accounting and statistics. But no-one knows how to train them to do management. This poses a problem for people who design conferences, a challenge for those who conduct them, and fun for those who attend them.
While managers can’t be trained in management, they can be educated. But with which subjects should they engage? Philosophy, history, psychology, sociology? All noble pursuits, no doubt, although difficult to develop in the five days allocated to management conferences. And given that managers are practical folk with short attention spans, impossible to penetrate within a week. Besides, managers don’t expect to be educated at conferences: they expect to be entertained.
Psychologists are indeed fortunate because their subject is seductively entertaining and so elastic that they can invent material as they talk. Human beings are forever in love with themselves and cannot resist stories about their personalities, motives, values,
