Dante's Cubicle: Paving the Road from Hell in Corporate America

By Carl L. Harshman and Ryan D. Harshman

This is a business fiction, but . . . the stories are based on real life events. Michael, a young, enthusiastic engineer in his first full-time job, narrates life with this worker bee colleagues in the world of cubicles. The colleagues are a diverse group of individuals one is likely to find in such a setting. Early in the book a mysterious character appears to engage Michael in dialogues about what is going on in the Archangel Corporation. This mysterious individual provides perspective and occasional advice to Michael on what he is experiencing and how he might engage it going forward. Everyone who has worked in an American corporation can identify with Michaels and the groups experiences and gain some perspective on the alternatives during the journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781496966230

Carl L. Harshman

Carl L. Harshman is a full-time organization and leadership consultant with a varied work history. During the last three decades, he has been a consultant to corporations such as Ford, Goodyear, General Dynamics, Boeing, and General Atomics as well as to a number of nonprofit and educational institutions. For the first two decades, his work focused on changing organizational cultures through joint efforts between labor and management. In the last decade, the focus shifted to leadership and leadership development. His work experience has included wide-ranging jobs, from hourly assembly-line worker and construction worker to insurance sales, nonprofit field executive, and professor/college dean. He has a deep regard for and interest in Native tradition both the spiritual and cultural aspects of the tribal cultures and the work of the medicine people. Dr. Harshman is a speaker and author with an interest in the performance of individuals, teams, and organizations. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where he consults, does research, writes, and teaches part-time at Saint Louis University.

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2015 Carl L. Harshman & Ryan D. Harshman. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 2/23/2015

ISBN: 978-1-4969-6624-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-6623-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015901598

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Prologue

1 Welcome to the Hive

2 Death by Dilbert

3 Guess Who’s Coming to RAM?

4 The Corporate Shaman

5 TCS Mystery Continues

6 Rules for the Unruly

7 Dialogue on Rules

8 Of Carrots and Sticks

9 Dialogue on Motivation

10 Worker Bees

11 Dialogue on Community

12 I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

13 Survey Says?

14 Golfing Gets You Executive Balls

15 Dialogue on Golf and Other Extravaganzas

16 The Spirituality of the Mundane: Recommended Eating

17 Dialogue on the Chaplain Plan

18 New Personnel Policy

19 Dialogue on Policy

20 They Ought to Call It Pain-Sharing

21 Dialogue on Pain and Sharing

22 Who Needs a Union Anyway?

23 Dialogue on Organized Labor

24 New HR Job Classification—Denied

25 Dialogue on Telling Stories

26 BS from All Directions

27 Dialogue on Truth in Working

28 Quality Cat Revisited

29 Dialogue on Quality and Other Big Things

30 Now You See It; Now You Don’t

31 You Are Getting Very Sleepy …

32 The Meeting

33 Dialogue on Meeting Monotony

34 New Kid on the Block

35 Dialogue on Onboarding (or Waterboarding)

36 The Wish List

37 Dialogue on Creating Your Life

38 The End Is Near

39 After the Fall

Epilogue

The Corporate Shaman

Acknowledgments

About the Contributors

PREFACE

Organizations are as old as humankind. In the evolution of human history, each era has had its paradigms for how organizations are structured, led, staffed, and run. That goes from the government of the ancient Roman Empire to the modern corporation with everything in between, including the various religions and European fiefdoms of the Middle Ages. The paradigm is what’s in question. It impacts each of the four elements of organizations just mentioned.

This book is about the paradigm of the modern organization and how it looks to the people at the bottom. Most of the views of organizations come from the media, consultants, top executives, or academics. This book does not question the truth of various claims; it addresses perspective.

My personal perspective comes from the wide-ranging paid work I’ve done in my life, including fixing cars, milking cows and baling hay, lifeguarding, putting together vehicles on an assembly line, working in construction, performing office work, cooking and waiting tables, selling insurance, being a field executive for a nonprofit, working in higher education (from teaching to planning to researching to serving as a dean of a college), and finally, spending thirty-plus years as a full-time consultant to American organizations.

Although I tried to believe Lily Tomlin’s claim that we’re all in this alone, Studs Terkel’s Working¹ gave voice to thousands who had experiences similar to mine. These collective experiences and perspectives influenced how I’ve chosen to spend my professional time since the early 1980s.

Then along came Scott Adams’s Dilbert. Dilbert appeared not long after I started consulting on changing the culture of some of the toughest American workplaces. What I realized about a decade later was that the more hostile and inhuman the workplace seemed, the more one could find humor posted on cubicles, bathroom stalls, and bulletin boards. Our company newsletter even included a section called Off the Wall, highlighting the best of what we’d seen in various places. One example was an incident in which a fire alarm went off on the fourth floor of a ten-floor professional building. The C-Suite was on the tenth floor. The entire building had to be evacuated while the fire department responded. It turned out that the fire had taken place in a microwave oven in an office kitchenette. Someone had put popcorn in the microwave, had set the timer too long, and hadn’t stayed to watch. The smoke from the bag had triggered the smoke alarm. The rest of the story was history and somewhat expensive.

This particular business was a government contractor. Government contractors make a lot, if not most, of their money from billable hours. If you’re an engineer, electrician, designer, supervisor, or manager, you bill as much as possible of your time to a specific contract. The government reimburses the company on the basis of jobs worked and hours recorded against the work in the contract. Some people (e.g., administrative assistants) are paid from overhead. Also, people who are on work time and not doing contract-related work are paid from overhead. This includes time standing in the street during a fire drill. Now you start to get the picture—there were ten floors of mostly contract-billable people standing in the street and parking lots while firefighters extinguished a bag of smoking popcorn. They were surely there an hour or more. That’s a lot of people standing around for a lot of time on the company’s tab, not the government’s. This is unacceptable in the modern corporation. Something had to be done. And it was.

Within a day or two, a notice was issued from the human resources department that there would be no more popping of corn in microwave ovens on the premises. Although the employees’ first response was to laugh or get mad (Are you #$&*@#^% me?), somewhere between came the humor. What form did it take? Within hours of the pronouncement, some of the following notes were printed and posted:

01DantesCubicleOrville.jpg

Oh my god! No popcorn? Man cannot live on Diet Coke alone!

Today popcorn; tomorrow Pop Tarts.

If we outlaw popcorn, only outlaws will have popcorn.

The best example, approximated from memory, was the poster at the right.

As outsiders, we thought the poster was hilarious. Not all members of the C-Suite shared our sense of humor.

We won’t debate whether something is funny or not. Like beauty, the beholder decides. We do know that the humor response was probably the mentally and emotionally healthiest of all the possibilities.

There is, by the way, a postscript to this story. It seems that the building in which the popcorn fire occurred housed some staff of the government agency that was this business’s primary customer. This particular group was housed on the fourth floor. You get where this is going?

Yep, it was the customer—a staffer of the government agency—who was popping the corn. Did that change anything? Nope. Even when the fact became known among the powers that be, the situation did not change. Several thousand employees took a popcorn hit for the error of an outsider. Ah, justice in corporate America.

We’ll stop with the chatter now and get on with the story.

This book began fifteen years ago as a series of vignettes that helped me put some clarity around situations I observed and in a humorous sort of way. At the same time, my interests in native traditions, nontraditional healing, consciousness, and other traditions began to coalesce at another level. As a result, the effects of many teachers and many lessons—oral and written—began to connect to the vignettes.

The result unfolds on the pages that follow.

PROLOGUE

Archibald McManus embodied the American dream. He supposed he cheated one fate to earn another by a matter of inches on dozens of occasions. He used to count thrice over on his remaining nine fingers the number of times a bullet came within inches of his head. A survivor of Utah Beach and dozens of strategic French townships with but a church and crossroads, Archie held as tightly to his mother’s cross around his neck as he did to his radio.

Archie was the radioman for the 1106th Engineering Combat Group, whose job was to help establish a beachhead for mechanized vehicles. Once the armored groups penetrated the beach defenses, he and his comrades spent the next eleven miserable months helping turn mud into roadways, rebuilding bridges, and navigating terrain for Patton’s time waits for no engineer advance. In his three years of service, Archie learned more about how to turn mud and grit into a yellow brick road than any stateside engineer could have discovered in ten years’ worth of corporate field tests.

When the war concluded in Europe, he and his comrades celebrated for six glorious days before it was revealed to them that any soldier with more than six months’ remaining active duty would be needed in the Pacific. So great was his regiment’s expertise that there was no way Uncle Sam would spare these young men and send them to their waiting families. Archie often said that the blessing God laid upon American scientists that ended that other war we were fighting is the only reason he made it home to his high school sweetheart and inspiration. Her name was Angel, and he believed it.

As the son of a Presbyterian farmer in Kansas born in the first baby boom in 1920, Archie often remarked in later days that Steinbeck’s description of God’s wrath on a Depression-era populace was kind. He said there was no hope until FDR made some men out of us when there was no more being a man without no work. He found a caravan and worked the Hoover Dam and other WPA projects until, ironically, mercifully he was able to enlist and saw his first steady pay in his lifetime.

His talents and experience led him into the engineering corps, and after the war, he was quick to marry and enroll in engineering school. By the time he graduated engineering school, he was sharp-witted enough to do graduate work in chemistry since his schooling was paid for, and the modest stipend he got was, to him, a gift upon a gift. He credited this time in his life to the engineers and marines who had saved him from another bullet in the Pacific theater that surely would not have missed by Japs for the hundreds that did from those damn Krauts and to his wife who, he said, gave me sons and held me until I found peace that the dreams never brought.

Though asphalt had been around since the late nineteenth century, it had been developed only minimally during wartime since the Allies needed roads to last only long enough for them to achieve victory. Archie was quick to recognize the need for more permanent road-building material to support Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway plan and saw asphalt as the future. His standing and education allowed him the loans he needed to form a company and develop the formula that would make his family rich beyond belief. Archie’s formula was simple: God, country, and family first, and profit would always come. He built a company that invoked God in its memos, and he led its employees to believe that somehow Satan was beaten back with every new contract. In honor of his wife and the Good Book, he named this company Archangel Inc.

Being a Great Plains resident, war hero, and natural leader, Archie knew how to get things done. He also had the good fortune of having a cousin who became a powerful representative in western Missouri, a key link in the Eisenhower plan. The federal highway legislation in 1956 led to feverish construction (and bidding wars) in the ensuing years. Archie had an inside track to mid-America’s highway 70 and won a good piece of the work with a loan that bought him pavers and Teamsters.

Ever the entrepreneur, he knew that though it was a national system, the locals would fight over each piece of the $175 million prize signed off in 1956. Innovation was the key, and by 1962, though you might get the contract to build the highway, you were going to use Archibald McManus’s Archangel NO-Phalt asphalt, which contained an additive that lasted two to four years longer than anyone else’s.

From there, it was easy pickings. He had the congressional juice to get the contracts, the money to fund research, and the vision to see the longevity of projects. By 1980, Archangel Inc. reigned supreme in domestic asphalt production, highway repair, and bridge maintenance and repair. It is said that a year before his death in 2005, Archie predicted there would be at least one major bridge collapse due to funds cut that would kill hundreds thanks to that Satan named Clinton.

Archie ran his company day-to-day deep into his seventies. Although Bill Clinton probably did some good in balancing the budget, it was a matter of little debate that he had cut some corners that proved to be lamentable. There was some shortsightedness in assessing the lifetime of the nation’s roads and bridges, to be sure. He would have been well served to expand the budget in this area because his eight-year presidency left a vacuum for the next administration to full. By the time the Oh sh** came down the pike from experts who had been largely ignored because they were in business (see Archangel) and scientists who were often viewed as doomsayers attempting to get published, potholes had become deathtraps and bridges had been condemned, and as Archie had predicted, a bridge even collapsed in Minnesota in 2007.

Once an NYSE stalwart, Archangel had declined in the nineties and was threatening to become an also-ran or has-been by 2000. Patents had expired, the state of technology was stagnant, and there were hundreds of companies with the line on repair and rebuild even before the federal funding arrived.

Survival mode kicked in, and Archie appointed his son and grandson as visionaries (and most powerful board members). Arch Jr. was old-school; he was educated to the nth degree but adaptable only to what he had seen. Great leaders don’t do what isn’t working; they see what might work and combine the lessons from the past with the unknown possibilities. Junior only knew how to micromanage expenses and lay off non-essential personnel.

Junior wasn’t the guy. Archie’s grandson, A-3 as they called him, though fresh out of graduate school, showed some promise and reassured stockholders and key internal employees that there was hope. He knew they weren’t contributing politically anymore because Clinton had pissed Grandpa off. Big mistake. Gotta grease the palms when there’s no private-sector money at stake.

A-3 also knew that municipal dollars often were gifted by the feds for pet projects and that these municipal yokels spent it like they were buying flowers for the annual big dance. In fact, over two administrations, half a billion dollars was given to needy or deserving communities to freshen up the dilapidation. Read: WPA all over again; clean your community up, please. Of course no one wanted to live there. What A-3 saw was a standard playbook: raze the housing that would never be renovated and build a park. And, he thought, if I have a cousin who does landscaping, he gets the mowing contract!

All over the country, urban America was going to be saved by using tax dollars to knock down buildings and make vegetable gardens and parks for single moms with four kids to play in rather than buy day care they couldn’t afford. A-3 simply followed the money. When a grant was given, he formed a local company specializing in community development and public property design.

It worked. However, a huge, inflexible corporate office still operated all of the prior businesses (some unprofitable) and retained all of the executives and managers. And Archie Jr. was making seven figures. So what was the problem?

Join us in poking our nose under the Archangel corporate tent.

Everything will be all right in the end …

if it’s not all right, then it’s not yet the end.

—Sonny, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

02DantesCubicleCourtJester.jpg

Corporate Court Jester

1

WELCOME TO THE HIVE

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

I ’m Michael, a staff professional in the technology development division at Archangel Incorporated. This is my first full-time job since graduating from college.

My first day of work was Monday, December 16. I spent that whole day filling out forms and sitting through the new employee orientation. The second day I had to take care of moving in, going to the medical service, and so on. Wednesday was the annual company holiday gathering. I decided to go to get a feel for the people.

The affair reminded me of high school dances with the addition of a fancy buffet plus open bar. Almost no one was dancing, even though they had what must have been an expensive band for the affair. Everyone was gathered in small groups—many blocking easy access to the bar. The women were mostly talking to women, and the men were mostly talking only to men. Wives of male employees talked to other wives. Female employees talked to female employees. Young people talked to young people. Husbands of female employees talked to no one. They were the exiles in a foreign land.

The question was where to begin. I really didn’t know anybody, and I don’t care how often I do this sort of thing—it’s still a little scary. I guess what makes me edgy is the fact that it seems like I am putting myself on the line. Questions like What if they don’t like me? and What if I say the wrong thing? buzz through my head whenever I enter rooms like this one. I thought that as I got older, this would change. It hasn’t. So here I went again—jumping in the human deep water when I wasn’t sure how to swim.

I did a quick scan, looking for a safe haven. There was none save the bathroom, and I sure wasn’t going to spend the whole night in there.

I saw a face I recognized. I had passed him as I was leaving the building that afternoon. Heading his way, I stuck out my hand and said, Hi, I’m Michael. I’m new here. Saw you today when I was moving in.

Welcome to Dance Party, he said. I’m Arty. Some call me the class clown or, perhaps more appropriately, the corporate jester.

That stumped me a little bit. I was not prepared for that kind of introduction. But always quick of mind, I said, Oh, pleased to meet you. Mr. Smooth.

And this is Fred. He’s a little serious for his age, said Arty.

Hi, Michael. Welcome to Archangel, said Fred with a smile. Where Arty felt light and full of chuckles, Fred had a serious, firm air about him.

What do you guys do? I asked.

I’m a designer, said Arty. Once engineering has a concept, I put style and functionality to it.

I’m an analyst, offered Fred. I compute materials, load, cost, and price of schedule. And you?

I was hired as a liaison between the group and our customers, I said, hoping the job had enough status to get me by.

Boy, we sure need you, said Fred as he patted me on the arm. We’ve got all kinds of issues with the people we serve inside and outside of this place.

So, interjected Arty, what made you choose Archangel over unemployment? It can’t be the money.

Well, I responded, it was a bit of a lark. In college, I was dating a girl who went to work here as an auditor in the finance department. She called me during my last semester and said Archangel was looking for some professional staff with my background. One thing led to another, and here I am.

Great! said Fred. Let’s go meet some of the other members of the Bee Hive.

Of what?

The Bee Hive. It’s what we call our work area. Some human resource manager from California referred to us as the worker bees, and the name stuck, he explained. "You’ll get your real employee orientation next week. Arty will see to that. Here’s Linda and Jennifer."

We approached two young women who were engaged in a serious conversation about something. Fred waited a moment and then stepped in.

Excuse me, ladies, he said. I want to introduce you to the newest member of the Hive. This is Michael. He’s the new customer relations person. Michael, Linda and Jennifer.

My pleasure, I said, in honor of my mother’s best coaching. What do the two of you do?

Arty walked up and struck a pose, feigning interest in the response.

Jennifer said, I’m an engineer, and Linda is a tech writer. I help create it, and Linda makes sense out of it on paper.

Frankly, little of what these two say or do makes sense, but after all, they’re women, proclaimed Arty. The women gave each other a look as though they had heard this before and were willing to let it go because it didn’t matter.

Do you come by this endearing quality naturally, or does the company offer special training for it? I asked Arty.

Whoa, score one for the new guy!