After WWII, there was something of a recognition in western culture that the world had gotten a great deal more organized — administratively organized — than it had been before. Time Magazine called it “the widespread 20th century malady — galloping orgsmanship.” It was as if the vast mobilization for the war somehow convinced everyone that of course the way forward was a more military, hierarchical, bureaucratic model for entire societies. Exactly the kind of model Nazi Germany had pioneered. Strange.
The same tendency was described in a book as “the tendency of all administrative departments to increase the number of subordinate staff, irrespective of the work (if any) to be done.” The same author made a study of the changes in the signatures of businesspeople over time. His goal — only partly humorous — was to find the point in a business career when handwriting became meaningless, even to the person doing the writing.
The author was C. Northcote Parkinson, the formulator of “Parkinson’s Law.” That’s the law, of course, that says “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” Less well known are some of his other laws, including Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (the time spent spent on any agenda item is in inverse proportion to the sum involved), and Parkinson’s Law of the Multiplication of Subordinates (hiring more people into your department shows your department is doing more work).
Parkinson always had a mathematical formula to make his pronouncements seem more profound (he probably had a law about that too), and in the 60 (!!) books he published he used charts to illustrate why the British Royal Navy would end up with more admirals than ships, and why driving on the left side of the road (like in England) was more natural than driving on the right.
Besides all that, Parkinson, who was born on July 30, 1909, was a serious historian and history professor, who also wrote a series of novels. But his lampooning of modern organizational behavior is what he’s most remembered for.
Thorstein Veblen, who was also born on July 30, also had some things to say about modern organizations, business, and economics. He was an economist and sociologist, focused on “conspicuous consumption” (he came up with that term) and studied the effects of leisure on society. His most famous work is “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” published in 1899. That’s where he pointed out that social status can be based on what you buy and own, and doing actual productive work can be seen as a form of failure, since you don’t have enough financial capital to avoid it. The end result, he argued, is “consumerism”, which he thought was wasteful.
Henry Ford hated waste too — he’s another July 30 baby. His success building cars made him both rich and famous, and probably lent a lot of undue weight to his journalism (he owned the Dearborn Independent newspaper, which was wildly antisemitic), and his writing (he wrote a nasty antisemitic book called “The International Jew”). He also employed the “Ford Service Unit,” which was an actual private army — a paramilitary force that spied on Ford employees, assaulted them, shot protesters and marchers, and beat down any union activity they could find.
The Ford Service Unit was run by Harry Bennett. He’d been rescued from going to jail for a street brawl by one of Ford’s newspaper acquaintances, and Ford hired him in 1916 after a job interview with only one question: “can you shoot?” Bennett got more paranoid as his boss’s mental decline continued (Henry Ford had a series of strokes in the early 1930s); when he had a house built for himself, it had a moat full of sharpened logs. There was a bridge over the moat, but it was secretly loaded with dynamite so he could blow it up any time. There was also a secret escape from the house, and a secret room where all the ventilation shafts connected, so any conversation in the house could be heard. The house had a built-in guard station, which was manned by armed members of the Ford Service Unit 24 hours per day. Nobody ever attacked Bennett, though.
When the Ford family finally forced Henry Ford to step down from running the company in 1945, the first thing Henry Ford II did as the new president was to fire Bennett on the spot. Ousting Henry Ford wasn’t easy — the family had to threaten to sell all their stock (the company is still under family control). It was Bennett’s second-in-command, John Bugas, who told him he was fired. And in a scene that’s totally normal among executives in major corporations, they pulled guns on each other.
Bugas continued at Ford until resigning in 1968 when the company hired a new president — Bugas had apparently expected to get the job. He had been an FBI agent before joining Ford, and in 1973 he also missed out on being named the new director of the FBI (by Richard Nixon). He was probably lucky; it was just the following year (on July 30, in fact) that Nixon was ordered by the Supreme Court to release his “secret recordings” and everybody involved in Watergate — including the director of the FBI — found that their lives had gotten a lot more complicated. And it was the kind of complication even C. Northcote Parkinson didn’t make a law to explain.
