It feels like an observation that could be more easily made from the outside. On the inside of a company, we're wrapped up in everyone's immediate motivations f

It feels like an observation that could be more easily made from the outside. On the inside of a company, we're wrapped up in everyone's immediate motivations for every decision they make, and we can see at a micro level that everyone is doing their best in their own eyes to get from it what they can, but from the outside you could see a larger pattern of the attitudes and beliefs of people at different levels in corporate hierarchy. Personally, even if this is not from some deep intellectual tradition of management theory, it helped me see things that I'd been staring at my whole career without understanding. One way it changed my perspective is that it helped me realize that the loyalty of middle management strivers is real, the realest in the company. I used to assume that company rah-rah and loyalty rhetoric was meant to increase the performance and affordability of front-line workers, i.e., that the leaf node employees were the target, and middle management was the delivery mechanism. Middle management parroted loyalty rhetoric to their employees to show upper management that they were carrying out their plans in a capable way and could be perhaps trusted with a promotion. But that never quite made sense. Inspirational company rhetoric is actively irritating to most employees. It's an odd misfit in the front lines of a large company who feels inspired by company boosterism, and they either learn to keep their enthusiasm under wraps, or they are disliked by their fellow workers, who embrace the Loser mentality. Since all the company rah-rah stuff seemed stupid and unproductive, my theory about why companies did it was that it was a peculiar blindness of the otherwise smart people who run companies. But now I realize that if you see middle management as the target, and front-line workers as collateral damage, the cult of loyalty makes a lot of sense. Looking at managers now, I can see that a lot of them buy into it on an emotional and intellectual level, and they believe that it will contribute to their rise in the organization. It works on them! That's why companies do it! I know people who told their managers that they thought company morale campaigns were creating resentment and cynicism among their fellow employees. They did this in a spirit of openness, as something that management should be aware of, and they suffered real though unofficial consequences. From a cynical, utilitarian perspective, the retaliation they suffered was hard to make sense of. It was petty and ineffective. But it makes sense if you realize that they were attacking an intensely felt part of their managers' self-identity, and their managers' reaction reflected personal hurt, not rational calculation. I never understood those things until I read this blog post. I always assumed that the cynicism about company values started at the lowest level of management, that management was a tower of atheists acting out the company religion for the sake of the believing suckers at the bottom. But that was a poor fit for reality compared to the Sociopath/Clueless/Losers structure.