Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers

American culture claims to value individuality, risk-taking, team work, straight talk, and personal responsibility. American business culture pays lip service to these values, too, but it actually rewards conformity, sucking up, self-promotion, euphemism, cronyism, expediency, and, above all else, having the knack for never never never being associated with a bad decision or a failure. "Moral Mazes" explores and exposes these contradictions in lipsmacking detail. The author is a sociologist, and he did a great deal of field research for this book. He wraps his argument in the jargon of social science. But, in reality, he's a satirist and an acute observer of the human comedy, like a modern Veblen or Mills. His book is very good, but I suspect it's a bit unfair to corporate managers, who do, after all, make useful widgets and other things from time to time.Memory lane: I was the manager of a chain bookstore for eight months after I graduated from college. Our CEO visited one day, not long after he had summarily fired 30 percent of the managers in the Los Angeles area in order to terrorize the survivors. While inspecting my store, he paid close attention to the magazine racks. We had a normal assortment of periodicals: news magazines, sports mags, skin rags (Playboy and Penthouse, but not Hustler), womens' journals, biker mags, etc. After a long and careful scrutiny of the mix, the CEO pronounced his verdict: "This store needs more porn." So we put out Hustlers. The CEO had an MBA from Harvard. The chain went bankrupt about 10 years later. That made me glad.

Moral Mazes is a depressing book. It shares the hard reality of many organizations but manages to do in such a way that doesn't really give hope that it can be better, that it doesn't have to be like that. It is very good though at analyzing why people in organizations behave the way they behave and therefore I found it an exceptionally valuable book.The main theme of the book is that the ethics and morals inside an organization often are not the same as society as a whole. The way organizations are set-up, they create their own norms and people within organizations often are in conflict with the norms expected of them in society and that within in organization. The longer a person spends in the organization the more likely it is they'll start following the organizational norms and ethics. In a way, organizations are set up to award the ones who do and punish the ones who don't.The book explores relationships in organizations, the organizational ethics and the behavior that happens within these relationships. Different chapters have a slightly different focus. Relationships between subordinates and their superior. Peer relationships. And then relationships with society then the ethics of an organization is contradicting that of society (and people in the organization do something about that). Additionally the role of consultants and agencies within corporates.The book consists of eight chapters. The first and the last are provide a bit of sociology-historical context of ethics and norms. The other chapters mostly focus on different perspectives of relationships, morality and politics. The chapters are not well structures, they are just loads of text. The text is mostly stories and interpretations of these stories. It contains some sections, but these are simple numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. If I could propose one improvement in the future, it would be a better structure that makes it easier to browse and find things in the book.But even without the structure in the chapters, I would still rate this book as 5 stars. I cannot remember the last time I enjoyed a book as much as I enjoyed this book. The stories were so vivid that I think I'll remember them forever. The conclusions scary yet insightful. I found it very useful and it changes the way I look at behavior in organizations. Very much recommended for people who try to make sense of organizations. If you are not one of these, then this book is probably not for you though. Still, for me, five stars.

I am not sure whether to take this book as a valuable, accurate, revealing deep-dive into the hidden and protected world of corporate management, or as a broad generalizing from a few sources into some common folklore regarding the nature of that world.The beginning of the book establishes that is that it is hard to penetrate that very self-protective world. But, the author has managed to acquire appropriate bona fides to have obtained behind-the-scenes access to the players there, and thence to be able to elicit from them whatever genuine analysis and thoughts they might have had about the nature of their (social) environment.It is interesting reading, but a lot of work because the writing seems awfully heavy to get its points across. “In a world of collapsed theodicies, one denuded, therefore, of ultimate significance, the quest for inner-wordly salvation of a sort becomes intense. Such quests for salvation asume many different forms, often totally incongruous with the functionally rational, pragmatic positivism at the core of the bureaucratic ethos that dominates public life in our society.”The author seems to have spent too long living in that world, and seems to have adopted its styles and mannerisms in his communications back to us of the outside world. The style of the book's writing certainly seems congruent with the corporate management form of exposition.And in a world “where words are always provisonal, intentions always cloaked, and frankness simply one of many guises” was he told the “truth”? Or was he told what he wanted and needed to hear?Which brings us to the goal of this book. Was the author trying to deliver his content using the language in which his subjects were used to receiving information, so that they might be willing to read it and hear it?It is interesting reading, but I am not sure what to make of it overall: is it uncovering new ground, or retelling old stereotypes? I give it a 3-stars

A great read! This book, though originally published in 1998 will not go out of style. Its unbiased approach to the management hierarchy remains a relevant conversation that is often neglected to be addressed on today's Wall Street.

Everything was OK.

今、これを読み返すと、2008年のリーマンショックを引き起こすアメリカ大企業にいる「悪徳」重役たちの本性をあぶりだしており、面白い。日本でも、かつて優良とされていたトヨタ、東京電力、野村證券、メガバンク等の経団連企業での不祥事をみると、日本の大企業の重役も相当「悪徳」なんだろうなーと想像できる。