by Dee Hock
Retirement on the job at the National Bank of Commerce was not all reflection. One day stands out. I had been sent to a suburban office to learn branch banking. The manager turned me over to a crusty woman who was to train me to be a teller. The very soul of courtesy to customers and a genius at the work, she was, nevertheless, of choleric disposition, not at all improved by tenuous relations with men. When she turned away from attending to a customer, she could be a veritable bear, and I was raw meat. At the close of a trying day she brought me to my knees.
The branch was closed for the day and empty of customers. The lady and I could not balance the day’s activities. More than an hour passed as we checked everything time and again without success. Clearly, this was not something to which she was accustomed. The likely source of the problem was standing at her side. She turned to me with an order, beneath which there appeared a glint of sadistic humor.
“It must be a lost deposit. Go down to the basement, look through the garbage, and see if you can find it.” Speechless, I descended to the basement visualizing a single can of crumpled paper. There, neatly in a row, were eleven fifty-five-gallon cans stuffed with far more than paper-cigarette butts, ashes, chewing gum, rotting remnants of leftover lunches, and other disgusting detritus.
My neck grew hot with anger. This ripped it! After managing businesses since the age of twenty, this was preposterous! Language learned working my sixteenth summer in a slaughterhouse poured out. Damned if I was going to spend the night grubbing though garbage for a lost deposit, and double-damned if a snotty bank teller was going to order me about, and tripledamned if I was going to spend another day at the #*X*X#* National Bank of Commerce. They could take this job and “put it where the sun don’t shine.”
At the worst and the best of times, the ridiculous has always tickled my funny bone. As anger and expletives diminished, in the dismal basement, laughter came pouring out. Sure, I’d been climbing the corporate ladder for sixteen years, but before that I’d done stoop labor, picked beans, thinned sugar beets, mucked out dairy barns, cleaned offal, and dumped slop. I’d been proud to be a boy able to do a man’s work, and never felt demeaned by a minute of it. Hell, I’d worked for sadistic bosses who made this woman look like the tooth fairy. Words spoken a thousand times to employees came swinging back to clout me in the back of the head. “There isn’t any poor work; there’s only work poorly done, poorly recognized, or poorly paid.”
Off came coat, tie, and shirt as I upended the first can. If there was a lost deposit I would find it if it took all night. Then, they’d learn what they could do with this job. The more I worked the more I laughed. Pride is pride. This work was not going to be poorly done. I dove into the garbage.
Within minutes, Old Monkey Mind took me happily into the magical forest of questions without answers, only more fascinating questions. What is pride? How can there be such a thing as pride without humility? How can there be such a thing as humility without pride? Humility would be impossible to conceive without the notion of pride. One defines the other. They are integral, one and the same, different faces of the same coin. Were not both pride and humility dancing simultaneously, seamlessly through me? What made me think of them as separate? What made me want to choose one and deny the other?
Was someone shuffling papers alone high up in a luxurious building at an expensive desk in a large room with a sign reading President a superior form of humanity to someone sorting trash in the basement? Whence came the craving for one rather than the other?
Where did all this superior, inferior nonsense come from? By what method could one possibly know—by what possible measurement and what standards could one judge the value of climbing a ladder of power, wealth, and fame, other than the pronouncements of those who lust after them? Could such desires amount to no more than a basement of trash? Isn’t all life a seamless blending of all opposites? If so, why do we think to separate one thing from another and elevate it to the status of a deity? On and on the questions whirled and swirled as time lost all dimension.
Two hours and ten cans later, my “boss” came down the stairs to take away my desired victory, smiling smugly as she said, “I found the error. We’re in balance. It wasn’t a lost deposit after all.” Had I been had by this diabolical woman? I could not know, but no matter, for if I’d been had, it was a masterful piece of work. The next day, equanimity restored, working frantically in the teller’s cage to keep up with a flood of customers, she casually turned. As though it were a rhetorical question, she sweetly said, “Would you run down to the drug store and pick up a prescription for me, and bring a cup of coffee on your way back?”
I gave it to her like a man. “Run your own #X*&#*X errands. I’m not your personal servant.”
She didn’t take it like a woman, but gave it back in kind. “And I’m not here to clean up your *X#*X# mistakes.” We stood nostril to nostril, eyeball to eyeball, breathing fire as we stared each other down. Later, in a slack half hour, both defeated and laughing, we went on the errands together.
It did not seem so then, but now it seems a matter of perspective whether sorting trash in the basement of the branch was the high or low point in my retirement on the job at the National Bank of Commerce. The year provided ample time for reading and reflection, along with days wandering forests, mountains, and ocean shores. Better yet was reconnection to the suppressed, yet incredible, spirit, will, and creativity of the managed-the many who day in, day out do the ordinary work of the world from which the wealth, power, and fame of the few is extracted. These were my people. It was where I belonged, although I denied it then, and longed to escape.
Years before, words by Emerson had leaped from the page to stick in my mind like a cockle burr in a long-haired dog. “Everywhere you go you take your giant with you.” He was writing about the insatiable desire to escape the present and seek paradise in the new and different-new places, new stations in life, new possessions—a futile quest to escape self. No matter how hard I had tried to escape my giant, he always returned-the country kid, the two-room house, manual labor, no university degree, estrangement—the raging sense of inferiority. It was then that I had the guts to turn, look my giant in the eye, and say, “You’re an ugly cuss and you scare the liver out of me, but if we’re going to be together forever we might as well get to know one another and live civilly together.” My giant and I are not yet buddies, but we’re working on it.
In a strange way, every institution is the same. Everywhere they go they take their giant with them. No matter how much we shuffle control and responsibility back and forth from one Industrial Age form of organization to another—government or private enterprise, democracy or socialism, monarchy or republic, planned economies or free markets, national or municipal government, nonprofit or for-profit—our social and environmental problems continue to escalate. Everywhere our institutions go they take their giant—mechanistic, Industrial Age organizational concept—with them.
No matter how we try to suppress our problems with Industrial Age techniques, they reemerge in different dress or form, more complex and virulent than ever. Something is deeply, fundamentally wrong. No matter how many technological miracles we perform, no matter how sophisticated the virtual worlds we create, no matter how many atoms we crack, no matter how much genetic code we splice, no matter how many space probes we launch, things will get progressively worse until we discern and deal with that fundamental institutional problem.
In truth, there are no problems “out there.” And there are no experts “out there” who could solve them if there were. The problem is “in here,” in the consciousness of writer and reader, of you and me. It is in the depths of the collective consciousness of the species. When that consciousness begins to understand and grapple with the false Industrial Age concepts of organization to which it clings; when it is willing to risk loosening the hold of those concepts and embrace new possibilities; when those possibilities engage enough minds, new patterns will emerge and we will find ourselves on the frontier of institutional alternatives ripe with hope and rich with possibilities.
At bottom, it is a wrong concept of organization and leadership based on a false metaphor with which we must deal. Until our consciousness of the relational aspect of the world and all life therein shall change, the problems that crush the young and make grown people cry will get progressively worse.
The above text is quoted from: Dee Hock’s Birth of the Chaortic Age, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 1999. You can buy his book in most bookstores or on the net. He is affiliated with a very interesting group of humans at: http://www.chaordic.org/