08-19-2016, 09:28 PM
(08-19-2016, 12:09 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: GI executive leaders were no better; they drove the American economy into the ground with their top-down style and lack of innovation.
GIs can be faulted for :
heavy use of leveraging
crass indifference to the environment
male chauvinism
bland culture
rigid conformity
If one had talent and showed it one could advance in a GI firm. If one had talent and had a mundane clerical job in a Boomer firm, one was told to use that talent to become more proficient at the mundane clerical job, and forget about getting ahead. The opportunities do not exist. Boomer executives remind me of a Soviet-style nomenklatura, an administrative class that practically became hereditary. After all, the spoiled-brat kids of executives and trophy wives will need opportunities to live somewhere near as well as they lived as kids, and they rarely are well prepared for the professions, academia, or starting businesses.
But unlike Boomers they never established such low, rigid ceilings to opportunity for the unconnected. Membership in managerial elites in Boomer organizations became (except for go-go tech companies just getting out of the start-up phase) much more limited to a few and far better rewarded.
It is hardly surprising that Generation X has been the most entrepreneurial generation since the Lost. Most recognize that they have no chance at getting out of poverty as employees of giant corporations. But owning and operating a successful business... one can lose everything, or one can do anything from struggling like a worker to getting fantastically rich.
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.
