The Bigot's Two-Fer

Anne McGill Gorsuch [1942 - 2004] was an outstanding example of the Bigot's Two-Fer.

Ms. Gorsuch [Burford] was the first Reagan-appointed administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, established under Nixon in 1970 and first headed by William D. Ruckelshaus. At a time when few women headed corporate or political organizations, she was a highly visible exception.

She was also a slash-and burn manager, using the powers of her office to do as much harm as possible to the organization she was appointed to head; while reducing her agency's budget by more than one fifth, undermining its enforcement powers, and openly expressing contempt for its basic mission, she populated the upper echelons of her management structure with political appointees drawn directly from the industries her Agency was charged with regulating. Her death of cancer at age 62, three years before the legal retirement age of 65, may be the most ironic result of her successful opposition to environmental protections.

A great admirer of the Reagan philosophy, Ms. Gorsuch [Burford] was undoubtedly surprised to find herself accorded the same treatment from Mr. Reagan, with regard to her own career, that she had so enthusiastically meted out to the organization in her charge. Appointed in May 1981, she was forced to resign in March of 1983 as a direct consequence of refusing to provide Superfund records for Congressional review -- under Reagan's orders. Not long thereafter, Reagan also withdrew all governmental legal support from her, in effect throwing her to the wolves he had encouraged her to enrage.

She subsequently commented: "When congressional criticism about the EPA began to touch the presidency, Mr. Reagan solved his problem by jettisoning me and my people, people whose only 'crime' was loyal service, following orders. I was not the first to receive his special brand of benevolent neglect, a form of conveniently looking the other way, while his staff continues to do some very dirty work."

This cluelessness is entirely characteristic of a Bigot's Two-Fer.

The Bigot's Two-Fer is a high-ranking organizational scapegoat with a twist, and he or she can be found in both the private and public sectors.

Ms. Gorsuch was appointed to her job precisely because she was a woman, a Washington outsider, insecure and sycophantic. This combination of factors made her perfectly willing to destroy her own organization in order to curry favor with political power. What she failed to foresee - what every Bigot's Two-Fer always fails to foresee - was that when the desired degree of destruction was attained, and she became a political liability, she would immediately be sacrificed - as in fact she was. And full advantage could also be taken of the fact that she was female. Look; we hired one of them; we even put it in charge of an entire agency. See what it did?

If you have doubts, consider this: Ms. Gorsuch demoralized her agency so traumatically that Ruckelshaus himself was ultimately called back from retirement to replace her [May 1983 - January 1985]. It would be ten years before another woman [Carol Browner] was appointed to head that organization.

Look; we hired one of them; we even put it in charge of an entire agency. See what it did?

In Search of Excellent One Minute Cheese: The Gospel of Corporate Happythink

A Quick and Easy Recipe for Business Book Success.

1. Always oversimplify. Organizations are complicated places and running them both efficiently and humanely is a hugely daunting task. Never admit or discuss this. Instead, write as though everything is simple, layoffs are happy things, and the Market is an omnipotent, omniscient, personal and benevolent God.

Reduce all significant issues to formulas and clichés, or dismiss them as insignificant by glossing over their potential impact. Always take the position that if a corporate drone has negative experiences, the drone caused them; the corporation is wholly and only nurturing and benign.

2. Idealize and oversimplify human nature. Write as though everyone is honest, nobody is greedy, decisions are always made for rational reasons, from lofty motives, and in the best interest of the organization, and serious personnel problems can be solved in one quick conversation if the right buzzwords are used.

Write as though nobody ever holds a grudge, is irrationally threatened by competence, or conducts a vendetta. If you must admit the existence of prejudice [whether related to age, sex, race / nationality, faith, competence, or sexual orientation], deplore it in theory, and minimize its prevalence and impact in practice.

You can't be accused of failing your audience if your advice only works in a perfect world - as long as you write as though your audience actually inhabited that perfect world, and their failures result only from their imperfection and lack of insight into just how truly fortunate they are.

3. Push magical thinking as the formula for success, always. Talk a lot about concepts such as 'reframing' and the need to be 'flexible' and 'positive'. Magical thinking is far quicker and cheaper than real thinking; whereas some form of effort is required to bring about genuine change, no effort beyond self-deception is required to bring about superficial 'change'.

If a company makes lousy widgets, it's much faster for them to designate one factory as a Widget Center of Excellence, and make no other substantive changes, than to invest time and money actually figuring out why the widgets are lousy, and what to do about it, and then doing what needs to be done. Call garbage excellent, and voilà! You now have an excellent product.

In addition to magical thinking, tout the benefits of consultants and new logos and slogans whenever possible. Call it a 'mission' or 'vision' statement; don't call it a slogan, although that's really all it is.

A new slogan or logo ideally should cost thousands of dollars minimum and do nothing whatsoever to alter the realities on the ground [except for the incomes of the sloganeers and logo generators]. This taps into the 'investment fallacy' - people will defend any foolishness they've been suckered into investing time and money in, no matter how blatant, if they're sufficiently obsessed by image and appearances. Such people would rather spend a lifetime trapped by folly than admit to being fooled.

4. Never show the underbelly. Never, ever let readers know, for example, that there is an actual monetary value placed on human life, and that corporate legal departments sometimes work with accounting departments to determine how many people a company can afford to maim or kill before the associated liability exceeds the profits to be gained from doing a particular kind of harm. And definitely never let on that business schools teach MBA students how to do exactly this.

5. Never show the real world consequences of corporate 'happythink'. Nobody wants to hear about over-50s who are laid off to 'shed fat', lose their health insurance, spend their retirement savings on career counseling and job search scams, end up homeless and flipping burgers, and ultimately commit suicide as a result of untreated depression, while the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay hits 431:1. Nobody wants to see how mismanagement and empire-building and poor product development result in layoffs, but so do major successes... nobody wants to see how a company's stock price is directly tied to the economic misfortunes of its labor force [they lose their jobs, the stock gains value].

And nobody wants to hear about this less than the people who are most likely to experience it directly. Always encourage the prey to keep its head firmly buried in the sand.

6. Last but not least, never think about the people you are duping when you write these things. Shut their lives out of your mind. Don't think about the time and effort they will waste at abusive places of employment, convinced that if they just magically did everything perfectly, they'd be rewarded instead of abused, because you've told them so. Don't think about the near certainty that such people will be milked and exploited until they're on the verge of physical or emotional collapse, then 'let go' so that the company won't be liable for their pensions or health insurance. And don't think about the consequences for their marriages, families, lifetime plans, of being deceived and used in this crass manner.

7. Remember: your mission is to keep the prey in its place. When in doubt, refer to the Maxims of Orwell:

War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.