(07-17-2020, 08:29 AM)sbarrera Wrote:(07-16-2020, 06:15 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Advice that has not become stale after 53 or more years:
The specific advice might still be true, but this film is so cancelled now.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is a cute musical with some catchy tunes... but it is now unwatchable (movie or stage musical) because it is now completely out of touch with economic reality. The American workplace has typically become a nightmare due to the inhumanity of the command-and-control system. The capitalist class has deputized an executive elite to make near-serfs out of employees because such is optimal for maximal profits. But this pattern is taking hold in the non-profit sector as well, as in academia where, as in many 'socialist' states the administrators have themselves become an exploitative and abusive elite much like the nomenklatura of the Soviet Union and its satellite states.
Charges of sexual harassment are of course to be avoided under all circumstances because they can result in costly lawsuits for an employer even if the employer wins. The cost of even a winning lawsuit is about the same as a significant embezzlement, which is just slightly more effective as a career-terminating event, and embezzlement is relatively easy to catch.
Today the glass ceilings are extremely low and rigid in practically all large corporations. Getting ahead in business without trying? Today it is more like "Barely surviving despite your effort and ability". Corporate America is now practically designed for the suffering of low-level workers, owned by shareholders who demand every penny possible as quickly as possible and run by administrators just slightly more ethical than the fictional Simon Legree and as cliquish and clannish as the old Soviet nomenklatura. The only freedom that a worker has in America is the freedom to quit for a lateral move elsewhere, which is quite welcome because that means two years before one gets any vacation time or even a pittance vested in a pension. Never has the American worker needed unions for protection but unions have never been weaker in a century.
Workers in American business are all too often livestock at best and vermin at worst. It may take another Great Depression to break the power of the oppressive elites of ownership and management.
In the meantime -- hey, smart kid with a good work ethic: go into the public sector, do something creative, or start a small business. For now nobody has a real chance in Corporate America except if one is born into the elite. We have the worst of aristocracy and Soviet-style bureaucracy at work today.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.