The Illusion of Inclusion

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I usually like to pretend that I am talking with people who actually live in the real world.  Today I am going to make an exception, I am going to talk with the guys on the U.S. Supreme Court – and I use the word “guys” intentionally, because I really just want to talk with Chief Justice Roberts and his buddies in black, Justices Kennedy, Thomas, Scalia, and Alito.  My charge that these guys don’t live in the real world usually stems from the fact that they can never be fired, always have a parking place in DC, and spend most of their careers immersed in documents that few people in the world can read – let alone understand.  These five Justices just added another nail in that coffin.  They just clarified that companies and organizations are “people” whose right to express support for political candidates is the same as yours and mine.  And it is that notion that large organizations are “people” that intrigues me.
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So, Gentlemen, May I Speak Frankly?

Your Honors, or Honori, or whomever - may it please the court - having worked for, or studied at, large organizations for almost 40 years, I am fascinated by this notion of companies as “entities” with the right to freedom of expression.  I mean we all realize – I hope – that IBM and AIG and the AFL-CIO aren’t really people.  So I assume that you mean to declare that these collections of buildings, people and databases, these companies, are people in a purely legal sense – a sort of intellectual fantasy like much of the law.  I think it runs deeper than that, which is why most folks stand still for that kind of silliness.  I think that we really do allow ourselves to become part of the metaphor of the organization as organism, and to believe that we are meaningful parts of that organism.

In our early days with the organism we might see ourselves as a small but important element.  Maybe the thumb.  No, it’s not a terribly showy appendage but it does separate our company from others without that valuable, opposable digit.  After a successful decade we may see ourselves as an arm or a “good right hand.”  A couple more decades allow us to feel close to the heart of the organization, eventually even the brains or the soul; and we come to believe that others contemplating our departure or demise do so with fear and trembling.  It is a pleasant fairy tale.

The recent and hopefully receding recession proved the illusion in that feeling of inclusion.  We are neither the heart not the soul of the organizations we serve.  The people who make up an organization are far more analogous to hair or fingernails.  They may help the organization look good, but when the survival of the organization is in peril, they are easily trimmed away.  That does not deny the precious relationships we may craft with our workmates, but the organizations are not those people. Companies and organizations are entities with objectives that transcend, and usually outlive, the needs of the people who attain those organizational goals.  It doesn’t matter if you hawk the free samples at Sam’s Club or plan global strategy for Lehman Brothers – if you get in the way of the organization’s eternal, and inhuman, existence you are expendable.

These “corporate individuals,” your Honors, are the ones you have decided should have a louder voice in electing the individuals responsible for enacting the “will of the people.”  That is more than a tad creepy.  If you are elected to office through the intervention of a non-human entity, who or what is the constituency you are charged to represent?  Do we hope that John Connor shows up in time to prevent the non-humans from taking over, or have the political “machines” already won?

Well, you have made your decision gentleman, but it was hardly Supreme.
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