Doppelgaenger: GE on Management

Management and Leadership are booming cargo-cult businesses.  Certifications in both can be had for a fee regardless of aptitude or ability.    Universities have created valuable profit-centers in this ‘market’ around their  charitable cocoons, touting their programs in airports, magazines, billboards, and online advertising.  Just about everyone in the modern workplace will either have to take a course in some aspect of this or be talked at by someone who has.  The material, to be charitable, is dumbed down to  irrelevance.  The examples are always shiftless or cantankerous employees not fully committed to the bottom line.   Orwell had it right

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

The old General Electric company recognized that developing managers means more than a handbook of HR-approved cliches.   This Capraesque short film does not solve but at least acknowledges the crushing bidirectional pressure aspiring and reluctant managers have faced and continue to face.   The protagonist is literally beside himself with stress and gets some medical help.  The ending is refreshingly ambiguous.  Sports fans of a certain age will recognize a young Heywood Hale Broun, long before his coat-of-many-colors phase.

Channel: Jeff Quitney at Vimeo
(New link added 2/2/20 following Jeff Quitney’s remastered upload to his Vimeo pages)

https://vimeo.com/388593822

Channel: Pathescope Productions at The Internet Archive
(Link updated 3/22/19 following Youtube’s deletion of Jeff Quitney’s channel)

 

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