Fight Club - a violent, visceral 1999 movie based on an equally violent and popular Chuck Palahniuk novel - was a vicious diatribe on a supposedly soul-sucking consumerism that deadens the heart of an entire generation by offering meaningless trinkets as a substitute for companionship and humanity, and visions of impending success and superstardom as a permanent diversion. It presented an exciting account of rebellion and vague, undirected retribution; and achieved instant cult status. It is currently ranked 23 in the IMDB Top 250 Movies of all time, a ranking that is mostly driven by popular votes. Another popular site that collates ratings of ‘top critics’, a euphemism for the most widely respected, intellectually demanding critics of cinema, rates the movie at a very average 65%. Rang De Basanti - an extremely successful 2006 Indian movie that was appreciated by audiences for its technical excellence and its liberal, revolutionary yearnings - was also panned by critics for its simplistic take on the problems faced by the Indian government and army. Both of these works are examples of a category could be rather loosely termed pulp, or fanboy entertainment. Such fiction normally present worlds that appear like the ones we live in, but are actually contextually stripped down into easily recognizable archetypes, problems that can be attributed to easily identifiable causes, and suggest simple and emotionally satisfying solutions.
When the fiction that we read and the movies we watch show us the ills of the world and then assign a face to these evils, we too begin to search for the face behind the injustices that we see around us, and very often, we either find one to point fingers at or persecute or destroy. Fight Club had capitalism and unbridled consumerism, Rang De Basanti had a crooked politician and a shady arms dealer; in the former, anarchy and terrorism offered the quick-fix, in the latter, it was as simple as killing the bad guys.
The flaw in the reasoning of the protagonists of RDB and the hosts of terrorists around the world is also the crucial insight that Organizational Behavior attempts to communicate to us and Mahatma Gandhi’s greatest insight (arguably): how an organization insulates the individual from the entirety of what it does by offering a tightly compartmentalized, controlled view of itself to any one of its constituents, and requires them to perform one small subset of tasks with little or no context. The Empire over time created a socio-cultural ethos that instilled into its young notions of racial superiority, duty and consequence; never exposing them to the true human costs of empire while requiring them to guard a railroad or storm a fort. Mahatma Gandhi recognized that killing an officer changed nothing, there would be more. Victory, if it ever did come, would require not only sustained genocide of waves of these outsiders, but would also require turning ourselves into a vicious, bloodthirsty mob, and when victory did come, there would be no way of switching the violence off. He believed that attacking the moral underpinnings of the notion of Empire would be more enlightened, more moral and ultimately more effective.
How is all this relevant to a manager? As a person who would constantly be required to get things done, a manager would have to deal with organizations, governments and people. A nuanced understanding of the incredible complexities underlying the world around us would tell us that there are no quick-fixes or easy answers. Everybody knows for sure what they would do if they attained a position of power, every coffee-table orator has the one word answer to all the problems of the world, but they rarely realize that regardless of whether you are a principled man or not, the act of getting to the position of power imposes costs upon you in the form of people or institutions that helped you, bankrolled you, and have a claim upon you; and these costs invariably constrict your options once you are in the position that you dreamed of. There would be a vaster array of interests that have to be mollified than you ever dreamed of.
At a more immediate level, corporations seek to exploit and perpetuate systemic weaknesses by seeking out the simple solutions like an illegal consideration offered to an influential bureaucrat or politician. This makes things easier, but also engenders an increasingly arbitrary allocation of rights and resources that would only harm the entire economy in the longer term.
Enron and WorldCom are the poster children of how corporations and organizations apportion guilt and submerge blame beneath torrents of paperwork and ennui. These debacles have led to stricter norms of fiduciary duty upon CEOs and MDs; but the dangers associated with corporations that pursue profit at any cost, or governments that push through religious and personal agendas regardless of its human consequences are still very real, and even immediate. This is where popular entertainment and even a large part of our education fails us, we are not trained enough to have the wisdom or patience to look deeper, innovate or resist our ingrained impulse to do the easy thing.
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